Barbell Shrugged - Functional Body Building w/ Marcus Filly, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash — Barbell Shrugged #402

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, the crew talks to Marcus Filly about his history from MD to finding CrossFit and his mentor James Fitzgerald and OPEX. Through  multiple trips to the CrossFit games and a team and individual, a season in GRID, and how he began the functional bodybuilding revolution.   Marcus grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He played multiple sports as a child including soccer, baseball and golf, which eventually led to a collegiate career in soccer at the University of California, Berkeley. There he earned his degree in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Nutrition and Physiology. After Berkeley he complete a year of graduate work at the Ohio State University School of Medicine.   His interest in both athletics and human health and performance eventually led him to CrossFit in 2007. He has gone on to compete at the CrossFit Games 6 times, three times as an individual (2016 12th fittest) and three times as a team member (2012 6th fittest team). Marcus is also the captain and member of the Phoenix Rise in the NPGL. For two years he has been voted to the all GRID league team, in 2016 earning 1st team honors, and in 2015 earning the award for leadership excellence.   Marcus has been a health and fitness coach for 8 years since leaving Medical School in 2009. He was formerly a CrossFit facility owner for 5 years, has completed all 5 of the OPEX CCP courses, and has coached clients remotely from all over the world. He has coached athletes at the CrossFit Games as well as several Regionals athletes.   Minute Breakdown:   0-10 - The early days of being a competitive CrossFit athlete   11-20 - Finding CrossFit at San Francisco CrossFit with Kelly Starrett   21-30 - Finding the next step after CrossFit   31-40 - Eliminating ego from workouts   41-50 - Quitting competitive CrossFit and recovering from injury   51 -60 - Can you be a world class coach and athlete?   61 -70 - Functional Bodybuilding the birth   71 -80 - Creating a mind muscle connection through bodybuilding   81 -90 - Working with athletes online   91 -100 - The birth of Revival Strength   Find Revival Strength at https://revival-strength.com   Marcus Filly on Instagram   Functional Bodybuilding   Join the One Ton Challenge Leaderboard, record your PR’s and track your progress.   “What is the One Ton Challenge”   “How Strong is Strong Enough”   “How do I Start the One Ton Challenge”   Use code “SHRUGGED” to save 15% on the best recovery tracking tool in strength with Whoop.   Visit www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% for you green, red, and gold micronutrient juices   Visit www.vuoriclothing.com/shrugged to save 25% for all athleisure clothing wear ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-filly -----------------------------------------------------------------------   ► 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

The One Ton Challenge training plan is rolling strong. Monday kicked off an eight-week squat cycle. And it's so much fun watching all the videos roll in on the socials. Shrug family, if you missed the first launch, it's all good. We got you. There are more coming, and you can be strong too. Step one, get over to theonetonchallenge.com. Theonetonchallenge.com.

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Learn from the best coaches in the country and have a killer weekend lifting weights with your friends. Today's show with Marcus Fili is cool not only because he's so awesome, him and his functional bodybuilding, but because we share a sponsor called Whoop, and he's going to be lifting at the One Ton Challenge live this summer. Whoop has just released Strap 3.0, which includes new upgrades to hardware and unlocks a suite of new software features to their app. The Whoop Strap 3.0 now has a five-day battery life, an improved strap, and live heart rate monitoring in addition to a handful of new in-app features that help optimize the way you train. I've been using mine for the last six months. I've got a sweet tan line on my left wrist because I never take it off.

I love the way that I'm able to tailor my intensity and my workouts to my recovery, track my sleep, how much I need, and the idea of a daily strain versus just how good my workout is is a really, really awesome thing to me. Whoop has provided an offer to shrug listeners for listeners for $30 off a 12 or 18-month membership using the coupon code SHRUGGED. Just go to whoop.com, W-H-O-O-P.com and use the code SHRUGGED at checkout to save $30 on a 12 or 18 month membership. On top of that, friends, when you get in, make sure you go into your settings and you're going to find the group that is titled Shrugged, S-H-R-U-G-G-E-D. So that, you go into settings, then you go to join team and you type in Shrugged.

That code is going to put you in a specific Barbell Shrugged group where my stuff is in there. Doug's in there. We're crushing it. All the cool things. We're going to track each other's HRV. Who knows what kind of fun stuff we'll get into. Possibly even have some fun challenges in the front. See who can max out to 21. But get over to whoop.com. Use the coupon code shrugged saving 30 bucks on a 12 or 18 month membership. And our good friends over at Viore, keeping me looking fresh.

Make sure you're buying the KORE shorts. K-O-R-E. KORE shorts are so savage. You're going to save 25% going to vioreclothing.com forward slash shrugged. Marcus Philly is on the show today. Thank you to everybody that signed up for the One Ton Challenge training plan. We love you. We can't wait to get you strong, get you into the Oneton club the one-ton challenge.com let's get into the show

welcome to barbell shrugged i'm andrews varna doug larson we are at revival strength what part of town is this marcus philly is in the house today dude this is super cool the first time i ever met you we're in marin is that right marin county marin county first time I ever met you, we're in Marin. Is that right? Marin County. Marin County. First time I ever met you. This is going to go way back. OC Throwdown. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

That's a long time ago, right? Some madness down there. But even when I met you in, oh, my God, it was like 2012. Dude, you always had this, like, really cool vibe about you. Oh, thank you. That you were operating. It was kind of like when you walked in the room, you were observing all the people that were doing this madness, like trying to kill themselves, and you always seemed like you were one step out of the conversation,

like really watching the people kind of like, how do I really beat all of them at this fitness game instead of just being wrapped into the manic madness that everybody is putting forth on the floor here. I know you did the programming for OC Throwdown for a period of time. Were you competing back then? I did. I think 2013 was the one year I competed at OC Throwdown. I had a big phone call

to call Marcus Philly to invite him to our competition. Oh yeah? Yeah, it was big. It felt special. invite him to our competition. Oh, yeah? You got the personal invite? Yeah, it was big. I mean, it felt special. It was the biggest competition. There was that in Wadapalooza. I didn't even know Wadapalooza was going on back then, was it? Yeah.

And I remember when they started it, and I was like, we are fucked. That is what a real competition looks like. This thing is child's play out here right now. I mean, it definitely wasn't child's play to me. It felt like, like you said, I walked into that. It was my first individual, like, relatively big stage competition I had done because I had done team CrossFit stuff before that. And I think what you observed is, like, me kind of, like, sitting back

and sort of taking it all in was just me being, like, terrified and just, you know, about to shit myself heading out onto the floor with all these, like, people I looked up to. Yeah. Yeah. That was, like, it was a – there was very few competitions that got all those people together that weren't the games. Yeah. No. Now it happens all the time.

It's so crazy. What was your training background before CrossFit? Was CrossFit your entryway into fitness things, or were you lifting weights well before? Well before that. Yeah. I was doing, um, let's see, it kind of started in like just high school, like just had like this love for going to the gym and, and hitting bodybuilding kind of, you know, flex magazine, muscle and fitness, whatever was out there. Um, but at a, at a somewhat early age, I got exposed to like Charles Pollack and then testosterone.net. And then I just kind of like opened up, you know, my like Charles Pollock and then testosterone.net. And then I just kind

of like opened up, you know, my world to all these strength conditioning coaches. So I was doing sort of some like bodybuilding with some principles that I was learning there and, um, and also playing like competitive sports. So played soccer in college at UC Berkeley. Um, so got like a dose of the, you know, traditional collegiate strength conditioning approach to, you know, building college level athletes, which is essentially bench, squat, deadlift, power clean, power snatch, and, you know, do some plyometrics, which was great. But all of that kind of was like my foundation. And then someone's like, Hey, you should try CrossFit. And once I got into a situation where I could put it all together,

like some of the things I'd done for years, I had a good base of training from all the years of just doing repetitions in the gym, and I kind of was a natural at it. Your academic background is probably a little bit different, too, than the majority of gym owners, coaches. Yeah, definitely not the typical. I mean, I look back on my, on my college and my education years. I was like, I did a lot of stuff that I was, I didn't need to do in order to be in the position I'm in now, but it served, you know, a really, uh,

served to build my foundation in like understanding physiology, understanding molecular science, which isn't essential to coach people in fitness, but it does help me to be able to break things down, you know, to a very granular level for people that want to understand it. And it also gives me the confidence to know, like, okay, I know this system's all the way down to like a very, very cellular level. What is the degree in? Yeah, I was going to say, is it exercise phys or do you graduate pre-med? Molecular cell biology and pre-med from Berkeley.

Yeah. And then went through application process to medical school and did one year of medical school at ohio state university what why didn't you follow through with that follow that sounds so bad why did why'd you quit why'd you quit what do your parents school come on yeah how many people are you letting down right now? Actually, I'm sure there's probably some medical students that are going to hear this, and they're going to be like, oh, man, I kind of want to get out too.

Can you teach me how to open a gym? A lot of people wish they weren't doctors after they go through all the schooling. I know a lot of lawyers that feel like that too. They're like, I get paid well, but I'm in a fucking prison. I've got all this debt, and I don't really actually enjoy my profession. They see the stuff that we do, and they're like, you guys have fun all fucking day. I want to do what you do. Making less money sounds great, but they're trapped. Yeah.

Well, I didn't want to be trapped, but it wasn't even about being trapped. It was just that I was staring down this of, of education. I mean, it's, it's essentially eight years from start till you, from the starting point till you get to anywhere where you're actually useful as a physician, you know, four years, you're not useful. You just put in a ton of work, a couple more years of residency. You're still not that useful. It's like, you got to make a lot of, you know, sacrifices. And I wanted to be in healthcare. I wanted to help people, you know, fix problems that were in their lives, like chronic disease, that kind of stuff. But in the, when I got into the system, it was like very clear, like, this is about turning out specialists that understand how to fix disease with, you know, symptom kind of

masking in a sense. And I'm not, I don't want to like and i'm not i don't want to like you know i don't want to say that the medical system is completely broken because it's not and there's some amazing people doing amazing work but for what i wanted to do i was like man there's i have more access to helping people get healthy through you know holistic nutrition lifestyle training programs and um so as an, are you going through the school and you're just questioning everything? Well, not everything, but you're just looking at like, wait a second, unhealthy people are telling me this is healthy?

Every time I go to the doctor? You want to see the most unhealthy people go to medical school and hang out with medical students for the first two years, first three years? It is atrocious. And I'm like, how can you guys be the model or like the ambassadors of health care? And you're so unhealthy. I mean, at the school, the library where we all studied, at the basement level of the library, the food option was Wendy's. I was like, really?

And then across the street was Jimmy John's. I was like, really? And then across the street was Jimmy John's, and then there was like, you know, an organic piece of produce was nowhere in sight. They're all sleep-deprived from studying all day long? Yeah. Adderall and all that's like a big problem in that world? You experience any of that? There's definitely like, it's like, I mean,

it's like college on steroids. Like these kids party harder on the weekends. My classmates were drinking a ton, and then they were studying way more hours during the week. And it was just this endless cycle, and I was like, man, I didn't resonate with that at all. Granted, my dream was to go to medical school on the West Coast. I wanted to go to UCSF. I wanted to go to San Diego. I wanted to go to one of the schools in an environment that like I could connect

with. Um, I ended up in central Ohio, which is just a different culture. It wasn't something I was really used to. Um, there was not like a health conscious culture around the university. Um, so that, that probably played into it a little bit while i was like man i just feel so out of place i shouldn't be here i feel like hospital food is stereotyped as like sloppy joes and jelly and they're not jelly jello things like that like has any of that changed over the years do you know like is it are they giving healthier food options to patients at

hospitals anyone come in and try to like disrupt that industry in any particular way definitely around here i I mean, we've, in the last two years, my wife's delivered two babies, which means like staying in the hospital for three days.

Yeah. And, you know, we actually had some pretty good food. Yeah. We could work. Ashley's food was

pretty good when she, when she had a little one. I kind of looked at it, I was like, acceptable. Yeah. I'm going to head out and not eat.

Like, I think that the women get a better meal selection than we did sure sure i had to i had to roll out i couldn't couldn't smells bad smells terrible when they bring the when they bring the husband's food servings and you're like okay we're gonna go find some beef jerky somewhere but down in the food down in like the food court or the food like i don't know

cafeteria area they have uh at the hospital that we were at they have one of those refrigerators where it's got all like healthy options it's got all your various perfect bars epic bars it's got little salads it's got gluten-free options whatever and it's like you open the the refrigerator and you pull it out and then you close it and it knows how much to charge you based upon the exact weight of the item I was so confused as to so confused as to, like, is this going to charge me the right thing? What if I pick something up and put it back and then pick something else up? I'm like, get charged $20 for, like, gluten-free sandwich or something like that. But it was actually – it worked really well. It actually knew that I got the peanut butter perfect bar out.

There you go. Which is basically like a candy bar. So transitioning back onto the training side of things, you went through college. You did the college strength conditioning thing. How did you get introduced to CrossFit and get into competing? Yeah, it started with maybe a year after college through some poor training of my own, you know, putting myself through some, like, endless German volume training cycles

on, like, a calorie deficit, I injured myself and had a bad back injury. So I took a lot of time off from training, did some traveling, and then when I came back to Marin, I was like, I need to get connected with somebody that knows something about training. So I was at Gold's Gym, and there was one trainer who clearly knew more than other people. And I was like, hey, will you help me? And he helped me a lot. He was like a Czech, you know, Czechie, right?

Czech-certified guy. Those guys are different. Totally. But I learned a ton. And I was getting – Czech as in Paul Czech or like Czech Republic? You're talking about Paul Cech. Paul Cech, yeah.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I was getting – I was healing myself for sure. I was getting healthy, strong, and nourishing myself like properly. Did you hire him or you were just friends with him? Yeah, I did hire him. I hired him initially, but I think as in with most coaches that I've had in the past, like they recognize like my potential and then they kind of like took me in as like a mentee in a way. So soon enough, I was like kind of just we were training together and going golfing on the weekends and stuff like that.

Anyhow, he taught me a lot. But within the little circle of, you know, people we were training with, there was this one gal who lived, you know, down the block from San Francisco CrossFit. And she was dabbling on the weekends in their classes with Kelly. And she was like, you should try this CrossFit thing with me. And I was like, bring it on. Whatever I can do fitness. I was kind of out of school. I was like not in medical school yet.

I had this transition period. And so training was like all I wanted to do. What year is this? This was 2009. Okay. training was like all I wanted to do. What year is this? This was 2009. Okay. It was like the fall. Kelly was like the only person around basically running classes. Yeah, there was one CrossFit gym up here in Marin called CrossFit Marin,

and it was run out of a gymnastics studio, a bunch of gymnasts. Yeah. Anyhow, it was so I just went and i hung out with them and adrian bosman was like one of the coaches there um when you called kelly picked up the phone or he'd call you right back personally that doesn't happen anymore nobody he's busier i showed up i showed up and uh he was the coach of the class you know and he circled us up and i think there was a pvc pipe involved and i was like man this guy's super charismatic he's got energy for days and in the first workout we grabbed barbells and we went down to the there's a beach about like three four hundred yards from their from their old

outdoor gym chrissy field right yeah and we just did like deadlifts and sprints in the sand and i was like totally hooked this is exactly what i need yeah uh when did it become like a competitive thing for you or was that after opening your gym there's kind of a big transition from sprints on the on the beach to where i guess you took started taking this thing very seriously yeah it um the transition happened actually pretty quickly because um well i got into that with Kelly, and then I did my one-year medical school stint. Okay.

So, matter of fact. What was he telling you at the time? Were you talking to him about going to med school? I don't think I was. I'm not really. I don't know if that conversation happened. I think I did allude to it. He was like he had just finished PT school, so he was like you know in this you know

total cerebral like i've just consumed all this he's like it telling me it was going to be hard but they had also just had some kids i think so he was in his own world but um yeah i did medical school came back and then at that point there was a local gym that had already popped up pretty close by so i was like while i figure out my next steps I'm going to join this gym and I'm just going to be part of the community. So now we're in 2000. Yeah. Kelly was 2007. This is now 2009. I joined TJ's gym and we just, you know, I start working out with the classes and then they had just sent a team to the games in Aromas at 2009 that took like ninth and they were like all excited about it. And they're like oh this you know fresh young kid who's you know pretty good why don't you join our team and then so within a

couple months i was training with their team and then that was 2010 games and and on tj's gym had a really good following up here were you were you coaching there i was coaching that was the gym i owned so we opened up the they had three had three – at one point four locations. I was like a co-owner of one of them. And, yeah, we had a pretty solid team. We did three years in a row of games appearances with, you know, good finishes. We got to, you know, sixth place in the last year when Hacks Pack was kind of crushing everything. They were the first people to make a bunch of money doing the fitness.

I remember thinking, like, Tommy Ackerbrook's going going team and then they won three years in a row. Yeah. Now they're the most paid CrossFitters in the world. Yeah. There you go. They did it. I was like, that's genius. Everyone should go team. Um, that was, did you always have a, an entrepreneurial side to, to you? Was that always something you thought about or how did, how did owning a gym become part of, mean in 2010 there weren't many gyms around so the opportunity becomes much much easier yeah to understand like where you can go with it but was that always a part of your brain to no it really hadn't i don't think i would say that that really settled in until this last couple years i mean when i first

started in coaching it was literally like i just want to you know i mean i was i was young and just like i just want to help people so let me just go and coach i'll just do whatever i can do i'll take this class i'll take that client i'll do whatever i'll work in crazy hours um and at some point i realized i realized pretty quickly like wow there's a limit to how much i can do uh with my hours in order to help more people yeah and yeah i do want to like grow financially i come from this relatively affluent area you know i my parents were physicians like i i grew up with a specific lifestyle that i'm like i i can't support that in marin with you know thirty thousand dollars a year i got to figure

out how to make some more money um and i was like a kind of a natural leader in the gym and so knowing like okay maybe the next step is to become an owner so that i can you know have more people coming in here and i can create but i didn't think of it like oh i'm gonna start a great business and i have had no sense of business about me yeah um so that was just always what kind of kept propelling me to like take on more responsibility and try and grow was how do I make, how do I make a bigger impact on more people? How do I put myself in positions of like leadership and, and, and help? Yeah. Yeah.

I think everybody should open a gym. It is like, it is the hardest way to, it's like a kick in the teeth. You're like, I'm going to open this great gym and everyone's going to love it. And then no one shows up. Oh, man. And you've got to figure everything out from like nothing. It's just this warehouse space. Yeah.

It's a great learning curve. Yeah. Well, I feel like this recent iteration of this gym is like my real first experience in like doing everything on my own. Yeah. Whereas I had these partners before. I was like their brand was just expanding, and I was just kind of this extension of it. I helped grow the brand, but I wasn't the person.

Yeah. I wasn't TJ. Yeah. So, yeah, this has been kind of my exposure to that. And when you started Jim, you guys opened your specific one in what, 2010? 2011 is when I opened up my first. You kind of aren't responsible for a lot of the growth that goes on in 2011 at CrossFit. No, no, it was easy.

People were showing up all over the place. You think you're really smart. You're like, look what I'm doing. Yeah, I'm killing it. This is great. This must be my Instagram account. They love it. Was there even Instagram? I don't even know. Facebook. i didn't have it in 2011 no no no i think it was the 2012

regionals where uh paul from progenics was like you guys got to have instagram and i was just like why i already have facebook it's the same damn thing yeah ish and i so i got on anyway and i'm totally happy that i did back then I because I didn't want to yeah I thought I was like I was just doubling up it was twice as much work for no payoff and now Instagram obviously just trumps Facebook crushes um yeah so when uh when did you start to have the the big breakup the big breakup with CrossFit or just when did you start to see yourself moving in a different direction than maybe the CrossFit culture and training methodology. Yeah, that's funny.

It actually started, the hints of it started. The day you opened your gym. Before I opened my gym. Before the gym was open, you know, I don't think it's no secret, like I've been an OPEX guy forever. You know, I think in 2010, shortly after I started CrossFit coaching I aligned with James and his CCP yeah you know program and started education and so and then I was coached by by them from an early early point in my competitive career so here I am like really learning and embracing the individual coaching model and experiencing it myself and seeing how, you know,

James was talking about this from an early point on. It was like you're going to break people by trying to, like, put them all into the same workout. And I'm like, how could he be right? We're over here, like, making people. We went to the games. That and just feeling like people are making progress. You know, you're seeing people have their first milestones in the gym.

They're having light bulb moments. They're doing well on nutrition challenges. Like there's just positive stuff happening, yet he's over here kind of like saying, hey, keep an eye out for these problems that are going to come your way. And so as the years went on, I started to see those problems start to arise. I'm like, okay, we've got all these people coming in the door, and we're churning people out of the door just as fast almost because they're getting pushed too hard.

They're not getting the right dose. They're not actually feeling like their needs are being listened to. They're just like, oh, you want to lose weight? Oh, you've got a bad knee? Oh, jump into my group class. It's going to fix everything. Let's go fast. Yeah, let's go.

And we'll scale it. But then you're going to go fast. So that was sort of where I started to see things happening. So I'm like, okay, doing the best job that I can with the knowledge that I have of fitness and program design to change the look of how we offer group fitness you know so in the early days when people were just starting to like experiment of like getting out of the typical crossfit wad you know programming at the box introducing strength training concepts you know pulling dumbbells out for unilateral training like I was doing that stuff in 2012 with my gym because I just was like we need to i can't

just put people into high speed high intensity situations from the get-go every day um and that was like you know i pushed it i pushed the limit of how we could improve the group model as much as i felt like i could to a point where i was like, gosh, there's, I just can't take it the next step. There's no way I can, I can make individual changes to the design for all of these different people. So I want to put myself into a situation where I can do that. And that's when I kind of moved on from owning the CrossFit gym. Yeah. Is that a tough decision to leave a, I mean, I know from my experience, but were you very confident in the next step of where you wanted to take it?

I know when I left, it was a, I knew there was something else, and I knew where I was going, but I definitely didn't have, like, a system designed and know exactly what that thing was. In fact, we were, you were talking about kind of that year gap of figuring it out. Like that year for me was a whole lot of just experimenting on ideas that I had of flaws that we had in our gym. Yeah. And out of that, you start to develop a new story of what fitness is, but did you go through that process? did i mean the process started a little bit before i left the gym because i started to to develop an individual design model

within the group fitness gym so we had super friendly by the way she's the best yeah that's brianna we need a co-host let's go oh man um yeah we we you know, let's say we had like 125 group members. We had about 20 individual design clients, 15 to 20 individual design clients that kind of used the facility like what you see now here. So I was kind of experimenting with it then. I knew that I wanted to kind of branch into that. It was hard to leave that community because I put so much, you know, growing a CrossFit gym was as much more about the people, the leadership, the coaching than it was about the methodology, the CrossFit name, the brand. Like people didn't even, they didn't say, oh, I go to CrossFit. They're like, I go to TJ's and Marcus is my coach yeah and so to feel like i put in a lot of time and growing those the trust the

reputation um because i feel like that group would have listened to me and would have trusted me to usher them into a new phase of of training i mean they were my ideal client and then i had to kind of walk away from all of that and yeah i went through that same thing in the frustration of as as cross crossfit really started to grow and there started to be gyms all around, you put your whole life into learning how to help people. And then you walk out and then they lose 30 pounds. They look fantastic. They're sleeping better.

The relationships are better. And they walk outside and they tell their, but like, what have you been doing? You look great. CrossFit. You're like, right?

No, I spent my whole life trying to help you and now like every gym has the same same name on there um where when did you start to put the pieces together of like what that next system is or getting into the the program design because now it's it's led to this idea of functional bodybuilding, but are there some steps along the way of recreating like that model and the program design model into where you are now? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's been this combination of my own personal experience through competitive fitness, as well as what I saw happening with the clients that I worked with for so many years in the CrossFit model and the group fitness model where there was, where people were just, you know, they got kind of addicted to like the high of the intensity.

So seeing how six, seven years of competing at a high level, what that did to me from like a physical standpoint, health wise, body breaking down, energy's like, you know, it's totally zapped after every single season and that's compounding year after year seeing that happen with clients like the three four year burnout where they're just like i just don't think i can keep doing this thing where i just push the threshold because they've gotten better and they can actually really push themselves harder they can lift heavier weights so seeing all that being like okay there has to be like a way to approach this from a, whether it's like a design model, a whole fitness, you know, delivery system. But we got to, there's got to be a way to approach this differently.

So going through my own experience of recovering after the 2016 game season through basically a combination of bodybuilding and like functional training. Yeah. building and like functional training yeah um through coaching you know a number of clients who were former competitive athletes through that same kind of you know rebuilding regeneration how do we get you to slow down and actually still you know love what you're doing in the gym um but not wanting to venture too far from it because at the end of the day people like they're they're drawn to this idea of like i want to move my body in you know air quotes functional ways but not like not just doing doing machine based training in a global gym. They want to pick up free weights. They want to swing kettlebells.

They want to grab a barbell, you know, from time to time and jump. And so it's that whole kind of combination of things that had happened really right around the 2016, 2017 time, which really got me to say okay we're gonna we're gonna take this in a different direction and um we're gonna open up revival strength we're gonna start individual coaching as our core business you know very much influenced by my years of being part of the opex system and on top of that my training has changed dramatically i am now posting on social media this hybrid training, so to speak. It's what I'm doing that was different than what other competitive athletes in the scene were doing.

People are like, that's cool. I want to try that. What is that? I'm like, well, I call it functional bodybuilding. And here's a training program that you can try to just experiment with it. And now that training methodology, that program design philosophy, how we use that with our clients after they've been properly assessed, it just permeates the whole business. So all of our coaches, we have seven coaches on staff.

That's how they're delivering, you know, fitness. And people are really drawn to this idea of, you know, one of our, we have two kind of like mantras. It's like look good, move well, and built not burn. So like we're not going to burn people out. Like we're tired of being, you know, attached to a brand that's known for burning people out and injuring people. That sucks. And we're also, you know, appealing to this group of people that are like, I want to look good.

I mean, like at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, I want to be strong, but I don i want to look good i mean like at the end of the day it's like yeah i want to be strong but i don't want to look like crap and if you're just beating intensity into people's faces over and over and over again they tend to not really look that good they just don't they don't look yeah i think people understand like the general crossfit model they go to any crossfit gym the general structure is like you do a heavy lift and then you met con and then you go home that's the easy idea what what's an example of what functional bodybuilding looks like for someone that's never seen any programming like for like what's one day's workout is it just straight sets you super setting stuff is there conditioning is there is there met con like things or just just lifting weights like what's it look like um i would say okay so there's i would say there's

four four elements to it um i really spent a lot of time thinking about how to take the the form like the portion of training which is called warm-up which most people just like they walk through and they don't even put a lot of purpose behind and actually most mindless part yeah like i have to do this and it's like uh what when are we gonna squat come on like i'm tired of this these like pass-throughs that i'm doing with this pvc pipe so um it's very intentional warm-ups that get people to like do prehab stuff i mean a lot of the stuff that you guys know very well it's like this is what you do before you go squat heavy but making it like accessible fun and like very clearly directed for people so that they can get you know something done quickly that's purposeful.

There's core lifts that we do in functional bodybuilding programs, just like, you know, going back squatting. It's just that we're putting a lot more intention around like, what's the intent of that day's squatting session? Are we doing a high time under tension squat training cycle? Are we actually lifting for max effort where are we putting in control points for for for our clients because a lot of our clients they just don't have great motor control yet and we're putting them into situations where you're like trying to lift heavy on top of like a poor foundation so we utilize a lot of like slow uh lifts time under tension high time under tension to help people develop better motor control through different training programs. So, you know, our back squats would be very, you know, specific, like, 3-3-1-1 tempo for four to six reps, which is still, like, new to a lot of people, even though it's been

around for a long time, and that's, like, basic strength conditioning principles. That's still, like, one of the main questions we get on our programs actually. It's like, what does this 3-0-X-1 mean? Yeah. And it looks weird. No one thinks about it. Right. And then I call it structural balance,

but what many people call accessory work. But it's structural balance movements, which I kind of developed like a whole Instagram page functional dot bodybuilding which showcases just a really wide variety of of accessory movements so to speak ways of approaching typical movement patterns

and you know basic strength couplets or you know supersets or trisets that allow people to kind of take whatever the pattern of the day is that we're working on and create some more joint stability, create unilateral balance, and get out of the typical movement patterns of a CrossFit gym, which I think is really profound for people when they try it

because when you go and back squat without a tempo, just back squat, it's like I've got numbers that I'm comparing to. I have ego attached to that. When I grab a single-arm kettlebell rack split squat, I have no ego attached to that. I'm just doing movement, and I'm following the reps, and I'm getting a little pump, and I'm feeling good. And when they detach, they can actually train and get some effective work done. And then the final part is just conditioning, conditioning in the, I just call it like

thoughtful, purposeful conditioning. You know, it's not just like get the work done as fast as you can. It's, you know, percentage based effort stuff. It's, uh, you know, work sets that, you know, 10 to that, you know, 10 to 15-minute work sets where people are just kind of grinding through, you know, slow tempo movements, things that can't get their heart rate super high and jacked up. And that's a typical functional bodybuilding session. So we really are just implementing lots of control points to keep people out of

that red zone, which they just gravitate towards without more direction. If you didn't know exactly kind of the framework of what you just laid out, and someone just walked in here with a couple years of training experience and saw the person snatching, the person doing bar muscle-ups, they would probably walk in and go, oh, you do CrossFit. Totally. How do we or how do you kind of separate that conversation with them of no one likes to be negative, but saying like, no, we don't do that.

This is the actual function of what we're trying to get at. Is that a tricky conversation for you now, especially coming from the CrossFit world? Not really at all. I mean, I welcome those people that are, like, looking for CrossFit, but they want a more individualized approach. I welcome anybody to come in and really see, like, in a room, how there is such diversity of what's happening. You know, I got someone doing, you know, landmine push presses

next to the person doing bar muscle-ups next to the person who's doing, you know, dead bugs, right? And that's kind of how our our facility looks most of the time um but really we're not even getting into you know most people are coming in and they're having this consultation with me where i am for the first time maybe they're having a fitness professional listen to them be like yeah wait what do you what are you looking for and just just, I don't say anything else. Like, you got 10 minutes to just keep filling the space and tell me more about what you need. And when they've had a chance to say all that, then you say, oh, well, let me paint a picture

for what it could look like. They've basically gotten in better shape just by talking to you and relieving some stress of like, it's all out there now. Yeah. I feel so much better. Yeah. And then of course, we're, you know, people see it immediately when they get, when they do a proper assessment, you know, when a coach does a proper assessment on them. Yeah. They may see somebody out of the corner of their eye doing some weightlifting, but they're over there testing their single leg balance. They're testing, you know, their side plank. They're doing, you know, level uh fitness stuff to see if they're ready for anything that's more advanced and in most cases people are not so the the training

layout that i just kind of described as a functional bodybuilding layout works fantastic for somebody who's just general fitness like wanting to get in here and just make some healthy changes. And is like a power clean in their future? Maybe, totally, if they want that. You know, I mean, we've got plenty of clients at this point in our model that have come in here and they've been on, you know, goblet squats and RDLs and, you know, GHD work for, you know, six months. And then they developed some strength and some muscle endurance and good motor patterns and we taught them how to kettlebell swing and then they're like hey i want to try some power cleans and it's like cool you know i mean the term like minimum

effective dose gets thrown around a lot and i always think in my own training like i have enough in the savings bank how much do i really need to be doing in the gym to just maintain general structural integrity of joints muscles and and keep this for a very long time and you see some of the approaches kind of in the crossfit side of things of let's hit it as hard as we can and that's the minimum dose like we're going to go balls to the walls for eight minutes and that's all we need to do. But the longer I think I'm in this game and I think about just goblet squats, if we can back that load down

and just do the movement really well or standing on one leg and working on balance, how do you think about that minimum effective dose of somebody that's coming in and looking for a health and longevity program or just to lose some weight and look better naked as you talked about as like one of the functions of the program? Totally. Yeah. I mean, it definitely comes back to each person that walks in the door and sort of evaluating like what is their starting point? Yeah.

This person does nothing, then you're right. I'm going to give them very little on top of what they had done before, which was nothing, and that's going to move the needle a little bit. Yeah. And if you really want to be a great practitioner of minimal effective dose with your clients, like prescribing that, then it becomes a matter of how good are you at coaching lifestyle and nutrition changes? Cause people can make, they can get everything they want basically essentially out of their

health and fitness just by changing how they eat and how they, you know, structure their lifestyle. And, and then you can really just give them like 30 minutes sessions, like two or three times a week and they can be doing really well. Yeah. Yeah. So is that a common component to everyone that you do one-on-one training with? That there's just assumed to be a nutrition component to it? Or is that like a separate service?

No, it's all part of the same service. We don't approach it maybe like some other nutrition coaching companies do where, you know, we're going to dive in and then relatively soon give you a prescription of some sort, like a food plan or some macronutrient template. We really think about this just in the same way we think about building somebody in a squat. It's like we've got to make sure you have the fundamentals down. So let me just kind of test your food IQ or test your nutrition IQ. Do you understand how to shop for yourself? Do you even know how to cook anything? Because, I mean, give somebody a macro plan and they don't know how to fry an egg. They don't even know what a protein is.

Yeah, I think it's, yeah, it doesn't go, I mean, it can go well for them for a certain period of time. For like six months, they just follow it and they like, you know, they grab their palm and they measure the piece of chicken and they're buying, you know, all pre-cooked stuff. And then eventually they fall off the plan. Yeah. And then they're still like, I don't know how to cook a vegetable. They didn't learn anything.

Yeah, they didn't learn anything. So once we get, you know, so we incorporate that in and, you know, we're not trying to fix people in a's, we're not trying to fix people in a month. We're not trying to fix people in three months. We're fixing people over long periods of time. So if, if somebody in their third month consultation has just nailed drinking half their body weight in fluid ounces a day of water, I'm like, great, dude, check, check that box. Now you're like, you know, you're hydrated. Now let's move on to protein at breakfast. And that's our next thing. And then a month goes by and they're

like, yeah, I've been, you know, for five days in a row, I've had protein at breakfast. Cool. That's, and I'm sure they're feeling better at that point too. And, and in those four months, their squat got better and they're doing more pushups and they're actually feeling like they're strong. And so at year one, you know, maybe they've, maybe they're actually feeling like they're strong and so at year one you know maybe they've maybe they've graduated to like cooking you know two meals a day for themselves and bringing it with them to work and and that's progress for sure that they're going to have tools now that can last them for a long time and we never even talked about you know how many grams of protein they need to have yeah so you give people one achievable goal at a time. It's

like you just focus on the water and everything else. Don't worry about it. That's your one focus until you got that, that box checked, as you said, and then you move on to the next thing. That way, it's easy to know what the goal is. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, three is kind of the limit as how many like achievable goals I'll give somebody, but I have to kind of determine like what's their ability to like take on that one task. If somebody's, like, really, you know, a train wreck nutritionally, then, yeah, it might just be one thing. It's like, hey, this is what I want you to focus on. This is going to give you the most bang for your buck. Have all of your coaches in here gone through the OPEX program?

Yes. Nice. So that's, like, the main system that is the background to all of the coaching? Absolutely, yeah. Going back to your CrossFit career, you mentioned that you were just really burnt out, recovering from just the beat down of four years of competing. Was there any, like, large injuries that happened, or was it just everything was just beat up? All my injuries were just, like, you know, overuse, stress injuries that just repeated, you know, beat down kind of stuff. But at the end of 2016, that was like I finished 12th of the games and then we had a month off and then it was grid league season.

Oh, that killed people. Yeah, it killed. Kenny Leverts is still in the hospital, I think, from five years ago when he did the open Regionals, the Games, Grid, Open Regionals, Games, Grid. Yeah. It's like, dude, what are you doing? It never stopped. So, yeah, after the 2016 Grid season, which was the end of it, you know, it stopped after that.

And we were like we had a good team. We had a good organization. We were like coached by Opex basically you know like uh we had we had as good a system in place to like make us successful um and i had great coaching all the way through all that but you just couldn't like get over the fact that it was just a lot in a short amount of time and i I think I finished that year. Like I went into the grid season with my shoulder being all jacked up from the games and then from the games training, it wasn't the games itself. I felt fine at the games,

but, um, yeah, just that. And then like a left hip low back. That was my like college injury was just talking to me, but, but mostly it was like October time.

And I was just so unexcited about anything in the gym and just you know energy is super low um knowing that i wasn't going to be able to get back to any type of like real training for probably months yeah and then that that cycle of like it's october it's almost time to start thinking about the Open again. I'm like, oh, my God. Like I can't do this. And I had a baby, our first child on the way in January. It was like, okay, this is too much.

Life gets in the way. Yeah. Life gets in the way of fitness, elite fitness. But the injury was a shoulder and just like an emotional and psychological hormonal injury I had going on too. Do you feel like a lot of the CrossFit thing, I mean, clearly their target for a very long time, and we can talk about where it's going now later, but the majority of the people that find a similar story with what you're kind of going through, we're all in our mid to late 20s, and this new sport arrives,

and we can all be relatively decent at it. And do you ever think that maybe CrossFit wasn't the problem, but the fact that you were 28 years old was the problem, and that no matter what you were handed at 28 years old, you're going to run through the brick wall as hard as you can, no matter what? Granted, it leads to what is now functional bodybuilding learning how to heal yourself and a lot of the things but do you think that if you had had if you had picked olympic weightlifting it would have been the same story probably although i don't know that i mean well i first

let me i'll just say that i don't I don't actually think it was a problem. I think it was like the, I feel extremely fortunate that it all fell into my life and all the ups and the downs were welcome. Those years of learning, just business aside, like where I'm at right now in life, just on a personal level was the biggest growth phase of my life. Yeah, having, you know, being a father now is a was the biggest growth phase of my life. Yeah. Having, you know, being a father now is a different type of growth phase,

but it's, they're kind of in different categories. I don't think I would have sunk my teeth into anything as deeply as I did CrossFit. I just think that there was something so special about. I totally agree with you. I just, I think that that, I mean, I was, I was so deep into it, but I always wonder like if there was another thing that I felt like I could have been good at, would I have tried to kill myself every day for that thing? Grid League basically was kind of starting to be that for me.

I was like, I could do this, but man, it kills every day. Yeah. What was the training for that? Like how did, how did you guys try to do that intelligently? There are actually maybe a bunch of people that don't even know what the grid league is. So they created a new sport, in a way, a spinoff. Totally.

In which you didn't have to be good at everything. You only had to be good at the things that you were great at. Yeah, it was team-based, high-speed, super high-speed CrossFit movements where you could have specialists. Every team did have an all-around category, which meant you had to kind of do everything, and it was me. So I was like, they basically just took the best CrossFitters

that had really good mechanics. So it's like somebody, I'm trying to think of it, like Tommy Hackenbrook was in Grid League for a minute, okay? Tommy Hackenbrook's a great individual CrossFit athlete, but his, like, limb length and his mechanics, he just wasn't good for grid. It's just you have to move too fast. And so, you know, he wasn't, like, the person for the sport, whereas my mechanics and my limb lengths and my turnover speed for movements was was perfect for it i mean it would help to be like an inch or two shorter but i was doing really well in the sport and i could do all the skills and i could i was a fast learner so i

could pick up the backward roll to support and the freestanding handstand push-ups but um there was a lot of circus tricks involved in that so many circus tricks yeah all the weights were heavier the gymnastics moves more advanced. They were trying to add this entertaining component to it that CrossFit has, but they were trying to take it to the next level. Totally. It was meant to be like, how can we make this more spectator-friendly? That was exactly the thought process in putting the lead together.

It wasn't like, is this a great physical expression of how the body is supposed to, like, are we trying to find the fittest person? No, it was like, what looks cool? And how can we make people, and what looks cool is people going fast and people lifting heavy stuff and people doing circus tricks

on the rings and the ropes and whatnot. And that's essentially what we did. Yeah, because they were trying to make their money by putting it on TV. And if you're going to have an event every weekend, you know, just like a basketball season, like they play constantly. It's not like a one event a year type of thing. It's got to be sexy.

It's got to be entertaining. Which the hard part about that whole thing was that the people that did get to go see those, like, let's say not year one, because it was like kind of a we were just figuring stuff out and it was kind of sloppy but year three the matches were exciting like i would like when i would sit i would actually i don't go and watch crossfit events but i would go and watch the other teams play and i would be glued to it and like oh my gosh did you see what just happened that was you know like and like well the coaches really started to figure it out, too. Like you could have Klokov and then you and then Danny Nichols,

that giant, all on the same team, and it would, like, flow well together. And then, like, a little gymnast person that could, like, dance around on the rings. Klokov didn't flow well. He was in and out. He had a short stint. He was not – his cycle time was not good no but yeah training smart for that was uh i mean it was it was just understanding that this was a

a different sport than crossfit yeah you know there's a lot of teams that were trying to just train a bunch of crossfit and then get on the floor and be good at grid and it's like you can't train a marathon runner to go out and win the 100-meter dash. I'm sorry. It's just a different game. Did you ever struggle being Marcus Filly the athlete versus Marcus Filly the coach? Like in what sense? Like being on a team and being like, I know what we should be doing?

In order to be great, it helps to be fully focused in a specific area. And if you're doing the open, the regional, the games, turning around and doing the grid season, and then turning around in October and running the whole CrossFit season again, and there's multiple years in a row, and you've got a gym and hundreds of clients, like it's really challenging to even create the space to create what you've done with functional bodybuilding. And then you throw being a kid or having a child on top of that.

The strains of life just start to pull you in a way. Were you more pulled towards being an athlete or a coach, or how was that balanced with you? Yeah, thanks for that context because because the answer is yes that was definitely challenging um i started out as a coach and that was what i that's what i left medical school for was to change my career path and to figure out how to be the best professional i could be competitive crossfit sort of happened by accident in a way you know i didn I didn't, I mean, I was drawn to it. I was like, Oh, that's very cool. Like, look at these guys at Aromas doing this thing,

but I didn't see it as like a, an option for me as like a professional by any means. And so every time I was engaged in the fitness process, I knew it was like in like the competitive fitness process. I knew it was like a selfish thing. I was doing this for me. Like this wasn't to set me up for business success. This wasn't like helping me grow my reputation in Mill Valley, California, where the average member that walked in didn't know who the heck I was. I'm famous. I'm the 27th fittest person in CrossFit.

No, they didn't care, and that didn't sell the membership. Yeah. But I always kept this, like, coaching kind of hat on, even as an athlete. I was like, how is what I'm doing, what am I learning from the process of doing this that I can distill down to like the very, you know, fundamental pieces and deliver to the population around me. I wasn't like,

oh, I'm doing these regionals workouts. That's what we're doing in the gym. No, I was like, what about this whole evolution of me as an athlete and the process of training does make sense for my clients um and that maybe is back to like the molecular cell biology uh degree it's like i under i learned how to take physiology concepts like how does the body work as a unit and then understand all the way down it's like very granular pieces beneath that like what is happening at a cellular level and that's kind of how i would break down my experience as an athlete was like yeah i'm doing this high level fitness thing that most people should never and will never touch um but if i break down all the layers of it come back to fundamental strength like you know the the

intensity adaptation uh you know methods that I'm using here, how can I, what can I learn from this, and then bring it down to a level that works for my clients. So I found great synergy in that process up to a point, and that was right around like 2015, 2016, where the landscape of the games really started to change guys were putting in a lot more time thanks to rich froning putting in a lot more time to training and really dedicating all of their life and setting up their life so that they could just be athletes and i was like gosh this is not going in the direction that's gonna that's gonna favor somebody like me who really wants to continue to grow as a professional in the career of coaching and the

business because i you know i i didn't believe at for any at any point that i was going to be able to support myself and my family financially as an athlete that was off the table for me so i was like i got to keep working business and growing as a coach and when i started to see that conflict happening which i think a lot of guys felt around the same time as me some tried to push through it and extend their athletic career like even further in crossfit um it just can it got in the way of being a coach and being a good business owner you couldn't be the best in both anymore and there's nobody that's doing that now that's the best at the games and is the best coach, gym owner, business. You know, it just doesn't happen.

And the people that you see that are kind of making it happen have very big support teams around them that are helping to allow that to unfold. We're going to take a quick break. I actually want to talk about that a lot because there aren't that many of the athletes that are able to transition that stuff into business. I want to know a little bit of the process of kind of leveraging your athletic career to build the trust and respect and then moving that into the business side of things.

Cool. We'll be back. Taking a time out to thank our friends at Organifi for all the green, the red, and the gold. Delicious juices to get your micronutrients they are so fantastic I put them in the shaker bottle with the Organifi protein it's a vegan protein which I don't even know the difference but if you like the vegan protein more than the whey protein because you got the stomach issues I highly recommend using that uh two scoops of the gold chocolate right now is what I'm on. And it's just delicious.

The green also, love it. Red's my least favorite. But if you like the red, people love the red. It's not like a kind of sort of buy-in. You either love it or you don't like it at all. I'm in the don't like it camp. I like the green. I like the gold.

I like the gold with chocolate. I love the gold with pumpkin spice. But I don't like it camp. I like the green. I like the gold. I like the gold with chocolate. I love the gold with pumpkin spice, but I don't even know if they have that one anymore. They haven't sent that one to me in a while. Organifi.com forward slash shrug. Save 20%. Make sure you do it. And as always, the one-ton challenge dot com. Seminars, programs

to get you strong. Live events coming. Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks to FitAid, our friends over there. Best partnership in the world. High fives, bro hugs, everything. All the love to FitAid. Lots of cool stuff coming up with them. Back to the show.

He is just at a stage in his career right now where it's just boom. He's got the physical products the online products he's coaching sounds like he coaches like thousands of people yeah it seems it seems like the guy doesn't sleep ever no when you when you send him a message he always gets back to you which is really nice but you'll get a you'll like see the time stamp on it's like 4 a.m was that on today or was that yesterday like i don't what what side of sleep were you on but he's like a 4 a.m. Was that on today or was that yesterday? Like I don't, what side of sleep were you on? But he's like a 4 a.m.

He trains at 9 o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night all the time. Right. And is in there by himself. With like strange films. Yeah. But his seminar thing is killing. He's got the product side of things. Like when you're inventing the products, I think that that's like a.

That's a good move. That's a really next step to taking your fitness career to – Yeah. Like I don't have a product, like a physical – I don't understand the supply chain. You've got to work on that. I'm on it. Tell me how to run the supply chain.

Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged. Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Marcus Philly at Revival Strength. Dude, before the break, we were talking about kind of how you maybe leveraged – is a good word, maybe it's not – but talking about kind of how you maybe leveraged is a good word. Maybe it's not, but to leverage kind of the, the athletic career in CrossFit and in the grid and, um, turn that into what is a very cool business that you're running. We have the brick and mortar that we're in right now, but also online. And I'm always interested because not many athletes, well, that I have seen are really able to take that next step.

They're very focused in the athletic side of things or being a professional athlete and maybe aren't thinking about, what the hell am I going to do when this is over? And you seem to have done it better than most. Well, kind of what we were also saying was, like, to do it well, you kind of can't do the other part really well. So I had to sort of make a choice, and I think it just happened at the right time for me. I was like, look, I need to take a break to be with my daughter and to, like, you know, be a father for a year, which gave me some space away from competitive fitness to

actually work on growing a business and thinking about a business and how to position this business so that it wasn't just a replica of something else that was out there. Um, and one of the things that I, I did from an early stage, which also, I don't know if it happened by accident, but it wasn't really like premeditated, was even as an athlete in like the 2013, like, I want to show people what I'm doing and I want to tell them why it's, you know, the thought behind it. So yeah, I had coaches, but when I first signed up with like James Fitzgerald to be my individual coach, you know, his requirement was you need to start a training blog and then you need to write down all your training results on there and that way i can go and see what you're doing that was our form of communication this is you know before true coach and all the online fitness apps that could

you know program for clients with it was like he sent me an email with a workout i did it posted it on my blog well i had blog followers people that saw oh mar Marcus Philly's training oh he's talking about his training oh he's giving he's actually kind of giving away free training advice on there and that blog went for a couple years and a decent number of followers on there and it kind of helped me to like understand my own voice as a coach in the fitness world yeah which then translated perfectly to social media for me. I was like, oh wow, this Instagram thing is so much easier. I don't have to like post a blog and get on the WordPress and do all this nonsense. I can just take a video of what I'm

doing in the gym. And then I can kind of in a, in a brief description, I can explain to people what's happening. And I put a lot of, a lot of energy into that. Why? Not because I wanted to grow this big following and I wanted to like get clients, of energy into that why not because I wanted to grow this big following and I wanted to like get clients but because that was my way of learning about what I was doing it was like I had a I learned more about my own fitness evolution and getting better as an athlete by dissecting it and by kind of writing about it journaling about about it for years. And that sort of just became my social media platform and the business platform for marketing. It was like Marcus Philly giving training advice and education

and really just diving into the why behind what I'm doing, whether it be from a nutrition standpoint, training methodology, lifestyle, or the combination of it all. And I've been refining my voice as a coach for all that time. And so now in a world that is driven, we have a virtual business, an online business, where we're reaching people all over the world. Well, we reach people all over the world through email through social media and I'm it's it helps that I can sound like I know what I'm talking about because I've been practicing that for years so I just kind

of gravitated towards something that felt very natural and organic to me was to write about my process write about what I was going through for years and how that could impact the person reading it in some way. And that literally opened up every door that is in front of me now. Are you currently experimenting with new training ideas that you're kind of testing on yourself in your own personal laboratory, so to speak, and then applying that to your coaches? Or do you just kind of have like your standard workouts that you write for yourself and you kind of have like an established way of doing things?

Like how much experimenting are you doing? I would say the last two years i've done a tremendous amount of experimenting i mean uh some on myself like a fair amount on myself i mean everything i do it's again it's always through that lens of like okay how does this apply to a general population maybe not like a high level competitor um through the training programs that i've been writing for the past couple years so we have um functional bodybuilding the the main functional bodybuilding training program that i've released over the last two years is called awaken training series and we've had a lot of participants go through it that year-long program that i wrote was a huge experiment into looking at different ways of getting people to train who mostly came from a CrossFit background, but now some people that are like in the bodybuilding

world are like, I want to try some of this too. Um, and then with our clients and with my clients that I, I still coach about 20 individual, individual clients myself. Um, you know, I, I still like to experiment with them too. so I definitely try to put myself in a position where I can I can think a little bit outside the box and you know I would say that in 2017 when I started really exploring functional bodybuilding it was the most creative and the most like things had been shook shook up in my training world since CrossFit started in my life. So you're sucking people in from both sides, so to speak, like the CrossFitters that are beat up. They like the functional training, but they want to focus on aesthetics or coming into the functional bodybuilding thing.

And then bodybuilders as well, they're doing pure bodybuilding and they want to do more functional fitness but not really get out of bodybuilding. They're kind of coming in from both directions. Totally, yeah. bodybuilding they're kind of coming in from both directions totally yeah i mean i would say that definitely more from the crossfit burnt out person coming like to need to like reconnect with their health and fitness in a positive way but yeah a lot of people like globo gyms around that are like they're they're nervous to step into a crossfit gym it's intimidating and they've seen some functional bodybuilding stuff they've seen they've seen my physique on social media and like oh man i i started following you you look pretty jacked like i had a consultation for an individual client yesterday who's going to work remotely with

one of my one of my coaches and i was like so how did you hear about me he's like well i saw you on instagram and i saw you said something about unilateral training it really resonated with me i'm like oh so where have you been training and he's like i just train at like a mom and pop on Instagram and I saw you said something about unilateral training. It really resonated with me. I'm like, Oh, so where have you been training? And he's like, I just trained at like a, a mom and pop, you know, little gym down the street and just do my thing. I'm like, so you don't do cross. He's like, Nope, never done that. Like had no idea. And I'm like, okay, we're, we're reaching definitely different audiences. And, and, and I think that there is a huge market out there of, of people, you know, doing bodybuilding workouts at the Globo Gym that are either, whether they're effective or not, there's something that those folks are missing.

Where they're like, gosh, like, I feel like I'm not functional. You know, I feel like I'm not getting to do. So, yeah, experimented with some training programs for that audience as well. There's only so many machine tricep extensions you can do before you're like, man, I want to do something more fun than this. Anytime I see somebody doing tricep pushdowns, I'm like, what are you doing over there? You can do them.

They're great. They're fantastic. But when I see them really not connected, or you can tell that they're on a program and they're just pushing, and I'm like, man, we should talk about what you're actually doing there or how we can add some context to this conversation because just looking at it on a piece of paper and then pushing the rope down is not especially if they do their set and then they check their phone and check the phone like that fucking dude is bored but i'll tell you what's pretty awesome is that we did get a cable machine at this gym about like six months ago.

And to go away from doing cable tricep extensions for like eight years and to like have access to that again now. I think the cable machine is something that needs to be in every single gym. And when we go to Boyle's, he's got like 15 of them lined up in a row. He's the only place on earth where you can do group fitness with cable machines, where he's got enough of them. Yeah. He's got all the Kaiser ones, too. They're all pneumatic.

Oh, man. Those are dope. Yeah. When I got out of just getting back to being healthy and getting all your joints moving, dude, the cable machine, doing seated rows, I hadn't done that stuff in a decade. Right. And they're so good for you. Or the T-bar row.

How many T-bars do you have in a group class? You can't have? We've got three over there. 15. That's three more than most. Yeah. Dude, we had two big cable machines at our gym five or six years ago,

and it was like me and the power lifters that would use it. Crossers wouldn't touch it. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. I'm on it all the time. You can get different. I don't know. You've got to get into that part.

If somebody comes to you now and says, I'd like to go to whatever regionals or sectionals, whatever the hell they call them now, and go to the games, do you take those people on? We don't get very many of those people. I'm not in the competitive limelight anymore. Those typically go into companies like, you know, companies like Big Dogs and so forth.

What we get is. Does it even interest you if somebody came and you're like, maybe you have a chance? No, not as a coach. It doesn't. I love watching people develop, and I love seeing that. You know, i love seeing somebody with talent grow in the sport but i don't think i'm the best person for them nor do i think my

team is the best person if someone's like got a real shot of being like a games hopeful now there's a massive group of people out there that love to be hobby crossfit athletes like they just want to throw down in a local event, do an online qualifier twice a year, maybe do the Open. I think they really need guidance, and I think we're a great organization to help them because what do

they need most of the year? They need solid, well-rounded, functional bodybuilding with little peaks of intensity around their competitions so that they don't get trashed by, you know, the super high competitor program that's out there that's really built for like somebody who's making this their job. Yeah. Did you think or when was the first time that you put some stuff out on the functional bodybuilding and you were like, holy shit, I'm on to something here? Yeah.

It was like it was it was like october of 2016 i was like um some of my social media posts like were of me doing um kneeling landmine presses um some ring body saws some band walks, um, some like rotational core stuff and some like tempo split squats. And it got like 150,000 views when that was like unheard of. It was like tons of comments. Like, what is this you're doing? Um,

are you still elite? Yeah. Oh, they, they knew I was elite. No, I just had to take my shirt off. Yeah.

No, it was like this. It was like one of the, one of, and then that, that, that month, They knew I was elite. I just had to take my shirt off for that. No, it was like this. It was like one of the – and then that month, like, I had a workout in particular that got me, like, super pumped. Like, there was like a push-pull kind of session where I was doing a lot of time under tension, doing some face pulls. I was just feeling pumped. and so I made the caption. I was like, man, this workout took me back to my bodybuilding days, but it wasn't like I used to do. It was different movements, and so I was like,

and I did hashtag functional bodybuilding, and just like people were like, this is so cool, functional body. That's really when it kind of i would say took off and then from from then that point forward um it just became how i yeah how i connected with like the work that i was doing and yeah how do you uh communicate i guess the idea of intensity and training to to your clients now hmm Hmm. Yeah, it's... I guess we don't communicate it a lot. You know what I mean?

The way I do... I guess it is the conversation so dialed in with the people that you're working with or who your coaches are working with that you don't have to worry about them coming down and, like, going crazy. Like, if you write it on the board, they know this is supposed to be like an RPE 6, 7,

wherever you're at versus 3, 2, 1, go. Yeah, with our individual design clients, totally. You know, if the person's coming from a CrossFit background or a competitive CrossFit background, or, you know, occasionally you just get that person that's just a hard charger. Like we've got one client that comes to mind on site who has a history of just like pushing themselves, you know, to the max in everything. And he burns

out every, you know, six months, like hurts his back. It's like, Oh, I was out of shape. So I started riding my bike. I was doing 50 miles a day and I was, you know, and I was pushing it super hard and my back blew out and I'm like, okay, you know, so that person, we have to have more of the conversation. Um, but yeah, when i talk about intensity nowadays it's really more of just like trying to educate people on what what that looks like and what does it mean to do like intensive training versus skill-based training or how do you how do you approach the gym thinking with the mentality of like i don't have to actually push to my maximum to get results. And that reeducation process is, is really, I mean, I'm surprised at how long it's taken and it's going to continue to take to really help the core audience, which I have, which is a lot of

people that are seeing the competitive fitness world. And they're like, that's how you get, that's how you get sexy. That's how you get strong. You just go hard all the time. Yeah. When you put together kind of like a hierarchy of your system, is that structural integrity or structural balance, the baseline moving into strength and then kind of how do you, how do you build that into, into the program over time is. Yeah. I would say, I would say i would say yeah it's

it's more like teach good motor control to clients and remarkably like you walk into a uh sorry walk into any functional fitness gym or walk into a place where people are just getting workouts thrown at them and they're not actually getting coached and trained most of those people they've been there maybe a year or two and you actually assess them and evaluate them like they've really poor you know brain mind muscle connections they can't they can't tell their muscles to fire and in the ways that you know somebody who's actually done the the things in the right order can so um i guess one of the benefits of starting in the bodybuilding world before you move into the functional fitness world, you get that mind muscle connection.

You know what it's like to activate every single muscle in your body. You do enough single joint training where you can feel like your delts contract, your lats contract and like your lower traps contract, like some of the muscles that are harder to feel if you don't have that experience. I completely agree. I mean, I think back to my my bodybuilding days and I just consider bodybuilding days when I did single joint stuff and was, you know, doing muscle and fitness templates and whatnot. And on top of that, it was, like, flexing in the mirror or, like, posing. Those two things taught me how to actually, like, connect with my body. Like, someone's like, where are your traps? Like, I don't even know.

I'm like, dude, it's like this. You, like, are your traps like i don't even know i'm like dude it's like this you like pull your shoulders back like you can like i flex my traps in the mirror enough times to know what they feel like and then that actually makes a difference when i'm doing a snatch or a clean and they're like pull your shoulders down pull your shoulders back they're like what do you mean i don't know what you're talking about be like well you mean you didn't do the rear lat spread uh you know pose in the mirror a million times? Do you ever prescribe those things to people? Like you need to just go in the mirror, flex whatever needs to be flexed, and like just feel that contraction.

No, but I should. I mean, what I do a lot of in my programs and our programming is a ton of isometric contractions in a lot of different places, like pulling, pushing, squatting, hinging. That's a big part of our prep sessions or our warm-ups, getting people to just, like, hold positions. And then we even love, I love incorporating that stuff into conditioning work for our clients and programs. It's like you're going to push this sled, you're going to ride the bike, and then you're going to hold a side plank for 45 seconds in the middle of that. So we're going to like manage your intensity by getting you to slow down a little bit.

And now with breathing, you're learning how to engage muscles and contract your soft tissue. It's like it's cool. It sounds like there's a bit of a mindfulness piece and awareness that comes along with the program, whether you're building that in or not. And when you add that mindfulness piece or some mind muscle connection stuff, and you're telling people to really focus on what they're doing, it in a way becomes very unsexy because you have to get people to like really slow down and connect with their body before they start to feel results or feel muscles contracting.

Have you struggled with that at all with people? Yeah. I mean, it's certainly in the early days of launching some of my functional bodybuilding programs. There were people that were like, whoa, like when's this going to,

when are we going to snatch? Like, when are we going to start doing like the crazy hard Metcons? I'm like, that's not what this is about. Like we're doing something different. But it got enough kind of social proof by having so many people do it and having the name kind of trickle through the community that now people come in with more of like trust in the program and they just they just kind of go through it um so they start to feel it you know

week two week three they're like oh wow i'm feeling something different like this is totally totally different. And that was kind of like one of my missions with functional bodybuilding is like, how do we make the simple stuff sexy? And yeah, I'll take my shirt off and post some really good pictures and use whatever I can to make it look sexy. But at the end of the day, we're doing star planks, band walks, landmine presses and then some you know some back squats yeah it kind of goes back to earlier like what is the actual minimum effective dose and it's really little yeah it's a very small

amount of unsexy things if you can just sit down properly with a little bit of weight to to challenge your muscles yeah for the people that like really want to breathe heavy they really want to feel like that insane heart rate that like you know your fran lung and you get addicted to crossfit and that's kind of like your entry point for a certain personality type like how much do you do really conservative high intensity stuff like 30 second max effort airdyne sprints and whatnot where they're probably not going to injure themselves but they can get that like fuck i'm so tired right now feeling oh yeah with with our individual design clients like that's totally on the table you know it's uh it's one of those things where it's, like, unless you know what somebody's bringing to the table in terms of their, you know, mechanics and their base of fitness, it's hard to prescribe that stuff safely.

Like, yeah, put somebody on a bike for 30 seconds, go hard, go all out. They're probably not going to injure themselves unless that person is under, like, massive stress and they have they have like totally shot adrenals and you give them this like lactic session on the assault bike once a week and it's like driving them into like a you know they're taking naps all day afterwards but but yeah i mean we i i like to say like look we i like to talk about this base of fit like base of foundational fitness like how do you build these you know good motor control into like structural balance strength training into like absolute strength training into anything dynamic afterwards like how do you build that and you know in the right circumstances in the right setting apply some intensity and some doses for people that give them that like that feeling that we know actually

can create some great adaptation if it's in the right place at the right time yeah when you talk about i mean and getting back into your academic background of understanding what's going on at the cellular level so many people come at it from let's get huge and lift weights what up dog jim dog showed up and ever shows over um you're most people come at it from this very high level of like i need to lift weights to get jacked and look good and then that leads into the nutrition conversation and then that leads into maybe learning about their nervous system and then it kind of gets into maybe a more cellular level of understanding did that gap get a lot smaller to close because you had that basic level of like understanding what's going on at

the cellular level so drawing the connections of like the two end points um was that was that process a relatively quick thing of finding like some basic stuff that you can do just to maintain health and then understanding what's going on at the top level? I think actually most of the things that help people maintain good health, they actually end up being very surface level, like basic lifestyle changes and things that need to happen. I think where the understanding of like the underlying cellular science behind stuff comes in is it helps in if you're really smart in something, and I'm not saying that I'm like super smart in any one thing, but what really gains respect from people is like you're super brilliant but you could talk to my level in a way that really makes me feel like i can understand you and that i think has helped me a lot in my coaching career is yeah i can like somebody comes in they want to like nerd out and i'm like okay

let's nerd out let's talk about it you know on let me talk to you on your level and then everything in between to somebody who's just like i need need to just have a conversation about, you know, hey, like, I see you're drinking three sodas a day. You know, how's that working for you? How do you feel after you drink those? And, you know, have you thought about maybe having some soda water or a diet soda instead of that? You know, or like, so there's very different conversations. But being able to have a range is, is so important as a coach. And I see certain coaches that struggle.

They're super, they're super scientific and that's the only conversation they can have with a client. And they're going to totally miss like 80% of the people, 90% of the people out there versus somebody else who's very relational and they just love to be your buddy and they want to like connect with you and then when it comes to like the training science they don't have tools to talk about it well a client's going to want to know that stuff at some point they're going to ask questions and you're going to you're going to feel that lack of confidence as a coach when you can't tell them why they're doing the aerobic power session that you have them doing yeah they're going to beobic power session that you have them doing. They're going to be like, because that's what we do. We just do like, you know, you get on there and you, right?

It's like, wait, no, I don't. Well, and that's tough when you're doing it online, though. Like having those conversations and the communication of what you're actually expecting. Do you run into, have trouble with that dealing with remote clients? I think with remote clients, yeah, it is a little bit harder because the touch points are fewer than an onsite client. But we make a point with our remote clients that we see them face-to-face for a Zoom call once a month for 30 minutes. And, you know, it's better than, it's certainly better than nothing. It's a great opportunity to like connect on some of those questions that come

up, deeper training concepts or relationship building that needs to happen to evolve a coaching relationship. But also I think people that seek out remote coaching are people that are a little bit better equipped with their own, you know, tools of like, I can, I know how to look for answers or ask the right questions. They're not, you know, starting from total zero. you know, tools of like, I can, I know how to look for answers or ask the right questions. They're not, you know, starting from total zero. You know, the people that start from total zero belong in a gym like this where they can get hand, hand, you know, handheld coaching a little bit more at the beginning. Are you taking on clients right now remotely? Or is that just

you're coaching your staff and your staff is taking on most of the clients? Yeah, correct. Like my staff is taking on remote clients right now. I don't take on any more or haven't for about eight months. And that's just the direction that my business had to go. And I had to make that commitment to sort of myself and to my family, too, because I could have, I could have taken on a lot of individual clients, but my responsibilities in other areas are really important to me too. So I don't do that right now. I still have a handful that I work with, and I enjoy it.

I work with several on-site athletes, so people that are in the area that come in and work with us here, I will take on a client here and there that's local. That seems to be the pattern that I've noticed with anyone that has their physical facility and they have the online component where they were training a whole lot of people. Eventually, they get a staff. They delegate all that away. They have a few key clients in person that they do either for free, just for fun, just to keep their finger on the pulse, so to speak, and just because they enjoy it. But it's just not a scalable thing to coach a million clients and to be able to grow a big business, especially if you're in a high affluent area like around San Francisco where

everything's so expensive like you are. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I think that the path to 100 to 150 individual clients is there if you are just doing that. It is not there if you are, if you want to coach a hundred clients and you want to build up coaches around you and grow a business, um, you know, and potentially train, you know, yourself and have a family. It was, it's hard. Uh, so yeah, I kind of made that, I think I kind of fell into that too. Um, having come from owning a group fitness business and knowing that I wanted to start

another business and another big reason why I fell in love with this model. Um, and I was dedicated to like making this model work is because I always felt a huge sense of obligation to the coaches that work for me at my former gym. Like I had this gym, it was successful. There were a good number of members. I got to pay myself pretty well, but my coaches were not really growing. There wasn't like a growth path for them. They were coaching 30 classes a week. They were maybe doing some personal training, but it was like, if they weren't working, they weren't getting paid. And there was no there's no growth model for them.

And they were just churning out CrossFit coaches do it for two or three years, move on to the next thing. And whereas here, it's like these coaches that are dedicating to individual design and working with clients individually, like they get into the 50, 60 client range and they're making a competitive salary. And so I was like, I want to see that happen for these coaches. And when I that was like a mission, I was like, I almost felt like a chip on my shoulder. I was like, I churned out too many good coaches and too many good people that helped me and help my members. And ultimately, like they didn't get to succeed in something that they love doing we're going to make it happen here and so when i saw this conflict of like i can't coach these 50 60 clients that i have right now and help these coaches develop i was like i got to make a choice yeah and so the choice

kind of was yeah it just i it was clear for me what I needed. Yeah. When you take this thing online and everything that you were kind of talking about is this individual design idea, do you sell templated training programs? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. How do you write a templated training program and make it, or is there an individual design piece to that? No, no, no. Or just like, hey, go do this. Yeah, no.

This is going to work. They're very different parts of the business. And that was a big conflict I had when I first wrote one. I was like, oh, like, I'm not like, I got approached by someone who was like, hey, well, there was a large demand. Hey, how do I train like you?

I'm like, well, you could sign up for individual coaching. Like, ah, it's too expensive. I can't do that. I'm like, okay. Or yeah, I want to individual coach with you. I'm like, well, you could sign up for individual coaching. Like, ah, it's too expensive. I can't do that. Like, okay. Or yeah, I want an individual coach with you. I'm like, oh, I already have 70 clients. I can't take on any more people right now. So there was kind of like this thing like, okay, I want to, I want to provide something, but I don't want to, I just want to stay true to what, what, what matters to me. And like, and the individual coaching process was really important that I kind of

upheld that as kind of like the gold standard of our business and I was like okay functional bodybuilding is getting a lot of attention and people want to experience it more so I'm like okay I'm gonna I'm gonna create like an experience for people, a 12-week experience to sort of awaken some different aspects of their fitness and awaken parts of their body and create some more mind-muscle connection and let them feel something different. I really wanted it to serve as an example of like you can get results. You can feel great. You can even progress within CrossFit by not doing CrossFit hard every day. And that was what Awaken training series was. It was a 12 week online program. Well, it was successful. People were like, what's next? Can I do, can we do it again?

I was like, okay, sure. Yeah. And I wrote a second 12 week series and then it grew and I, and I shut it off at a year. I wrote four series back to back. It was, you know, 12 months of training. And I just let that sit for a while. And people, a lot of people did it. And so a lot of like the time we spend, you know, marketing and promoting, we promote that product. And it's been hugely successful for us as a company, as a business. It's helped fund turning this physical space that you see into what it is today. It has been a huge portal for individual design clients to come into our business.

They get done with Awaken Training Series. Like, okay, I want to go to the next, what's the next level of this look like? So my coaches are reaping the benefits from it. And in the end, it's taught me so much over the last two years that's setting me up for what I think my next chapter is, which is creating functional bodybuilding education and certification kind of system where there's definitely a unique methodology that is entrenched within this package of what is functional bodybuilding. And hundreds of coaches, not just athletes, but coaches that coach fitness and own gyms,

they have done a wake and training series and they use those principles in their gym and they have bought our you know our starter education package on our website and they're like okay how do i how do i want to be a functional bodybuilding certified coach um so by continuing to have people be exposed to our the training methods by not necessarily being clients, but just getting exposed to it through a program. Um, I, I, I do feel like it's elevating the, you know, the, the level of coaching that's out there in some way. And I want to keep feeding that, uh, by providing good education content and, and a way for a coach who wants to help prescribe better exercises to their clients, but like doesn't necessarily know what to do, give them tools for that. Where can they find all that? Right now, just revivalstrength.com.

And all of our current products that we have out are available for purchase there. So there's several different, you know, templated training programs. Our individual design, you know, coaching services are available there. And then we've got three education courses that are up right now. One is kind of an overview of functional bodybuilding. It's our functional bodybuilding 101 course.

And then there's two movement pattern specific courses so single leg knee flexion the functional bodybuilding kind of progression so like a 30 movement progression taking people from like a basic box step down all the way up to an advanced you know split squat showing people how to progress

you know step by step sequentially with good tempo prescriptions good example training templates that they can use so wanting to how to progress step-by-step, sequentially, with good tempo prescriptions, good example training templates that they can use. So wanting to kind of expand that library of tools for coaches. And then, yeah, if they go to the website, just signing up for our email list is sort of how we reach people on a weekly basis with training concepts and workout ideas and things like that. Very cool.

And you're at Marcus Philly on all the places. At Marcus Philly and then at functional.bodybuilding. Yeah. Dude, all that sounds really cool. I'm super pumped to see all the new stuff you're coming out with. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Yeah, yeah.

Doug Larson. Check me out on Instagram, DouglasyLarson. Yeah. Dude, this is super cool. I've been a big fan since the OC Throwdown, and I always thought you you brought a really elevated mindset to what could be meathead strength and conditioning. It's very cool to see how you're really shaping the industry

into a more healthy, better conversation than many of the conversations that are happening out there. I really appreciate your time today. Cool. Thanks, guys. This has been a long time coming. I appreciate you guys making the trip out here.'m anders varner at anders varner make sure you get into the shrug collective at shrug collective and all the places youtube itunes like subscribe leave us a nice comment and we will see you guys next wednesday that's a wrap friends the one ton challenge.com get your prs loaded six lifts one year one ton snatch clean jerk squat deadlift

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