Barbell Shrugged - Gutcheck: w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #545

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

In addition to successful stints as a competitive powerlifter, bodybuilder and amateur boxer, Dustin wrestled in high school and was always drawn to training athletes in the worlds oldest and toughest sport.   In 2012, Coach Myers accepted the position of Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Ohio Regional Training Center for Olympic wrestling at The Ohio State University.  During his tenure, Coach Myers helped the Ohio State Wrestling team win its first NCAA Championship in school history, a pair of runner up NCAA finishes and 3 team Big10 titles.   In addition to the Buckeyes, some of the athletes he has worked with include 2x NCAA Champ Tommy Rowlands, 3x World Team member Reece Humphrey, Olympic Champion Kyle Snyder, and top MMA prospect Lance Palmer. He has also worked extensively with UFC welterweight contender Matt Brown and former Ohio State football stars Chris “Beanie” Wells, Antonio Pittman, Maurice Clarett, and Dan “Boom” Herron.   Coach Myers is also a founding partner of the supplement company Max Effort Muscle.  He has appeared on the cover of Natural Muscle Magazine (June 2016) and is a regular content contributor to Flowrestling and the Muscle & Strength website.   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: How a high school wrestler began coaching Olympians Training collegiate wrestlers How to periodize training for weekly peaks Relationship of volume and intensity on athletic performance What is the Gutcheck and why does it exist   Dustin Myers on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   PowerDot - Save 20% using code BBS at http://PowerDot.com/BBS    Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.masszymes.com/shruggedfree  - for FREE bottle of BiOptimizers Masszymes   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

This week on Barbell Shrug, Coach Dustin Myers. Honestly, this is one dude that when the world opens back up and things like the Arnold happen again, and he's already in Ohio, I can't wait to go lift weights. Super ass early in the morning with him and Corey G at Old School Gym. That's like what I really, really, really want to do. Yo team, today though, your boys are back on the road. Doug Larson is in North Carolina. Travis mash is in North Carolina. He's

always in North Carolina, but we're headed out to mash's house. We're headed down to South Carolina. We're going to head to Sorenix. We're going to interview three people down there. We're going to get a tour of the gym. They got a museum of all the old strength training stuff. And I'm super, super stoked. We used to do this every single month. And now we're doing it like once every six months. And a small piece of my soul dies every time I don't get to hang out with my boys and lift weights and do the thing that we do, which is talking about strength in person and meeting everybody in the strength world. But week, we get to do it, and life is good. So we're headed down to Sorenex. Make sure you hang out with me at Anders Varner on Instagram.

We'll be having all the stories, showing you all the stuff, all the training that's going on. It's going to be super radical. Before we get into the show, of course, I've got to thank our friends over at Bioptimizers. Have you had bad gas lately? I know this may be an uncomfortable topic. The only reason I bring it up is because bad gas is a sign that you have undigested food fermenting in your gut. This is occasionally a problem for all of us. Just ask my wife. It says

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The green GoPacks. You know why? Because I'm going to be eating out at almost every single meal. That's three and a half days on the road times potentially three meals, probably more, maybe even swinging an IPA in there just to hang out with the bros and relax a little bit. And guess what that means? That's at least nine meals and at least one IPA going down.

And that means I'm not going to be getting the at home delicious cooking that the first lady of fitness is usually slanging on the table. That means no delicious salads. That means significantly less vitamins and minerals. That means all the micronutrients that I'm typically getting in my day are not going to be there. And that is why we love this four year long partnership with Organifi. You love them. We love them. They love us. That's why we've been doing this for four years, keeping people healthy when things are not optimal and you don't have a big-ass salad in front of you. So if you would like high-quality, superfood greens, reds, and golds, the green one, of course, it's got all the greens in it.

The red one, that's a beet-based juice as well as the turmeric-based gold. Go over to Organifi.com forward slash shrugged use the coupon code shrugged save 20 it's radical organifi.com forward slash shrug green red gold juices get them welcome to barbell shrug i'm anders varner doug larson dustin myers from the i can't join a real gym it's old school strength. That's the name of the gym, right? Old school gym. The old school gym. Yeah. Um, dude, you're the wrestling guru, strength conditioning guru hanging out with Corey G. He's been on shrugged a couple of times. As soon as his show pops up, the whole world starts tagging me and doing a bunch of lunges.

But, um, dude, I know, you know, when there's like the little tiny thing where you go, oh, that dude's legit. When I see you train with your sweatpants tucked into your socks and the hoodie tucked into the sweatpants, I go, that dude knows how to cut weight and his shit is legit. I mean, you got to keep the heat in, right? Dude, don't let anything breathe. And I'll tell you, once you start tucking your sweats into your socks, you'll do it even when you go to the grocery store because it just feels so much better. It feels like you're ready for action.

That is the number one sign to go, wrestling coach. Yep. It's either that or cauliflower ear. Luckily, I don't got the cauliflower ear. Yeah, the cauliflower ear is just a dead giveaway. Like, don't mess with that, dude. Just be friendly. Shake hands.

But I know that when I see the sweatpants tucked into the socks, that guy lives in the gym and on a wrestling mat. Guaranteed. Dude, tell me about the strength and conditioning thing. I wanted to get you on here because you posted the raddest video of you and Corey when you were like 14 years old just being bros, lifting weights because lifting weights is cool. And now all of a sudden you guys own a gym together. You guys own Max Effort Muscle together. Man, when did this whole thing start for you? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, man. I mean, this could easily be a five hour episode, but I'll try to chop it down to like 40 seconds for you. I got nothing to do. Yeah. So me and Corey G, we met when we were probably 15 years old. We were from the same

school, but different junior highs. And you got to remember, you know, this is the mid nineties. So if you went to a different school, you didn't have Facebook, you didn't have Snapchat, you didn't know the kids, you know what I mean yeah I kind of knew who he was just because of sports and I kind of heard that you know my school I was like kind of the small non-football playing guy that liked to lift weights and I kind of knew that he kind of had that reputation too so as luck would have it you know in 10th grade we ended up in weight training class together of course so yeah right away you know we kind of hit it off but it was almost like a little bit of a rivalry, you know what I mean? Cause I was like, well, you know, fuck this guy. I'm the small,

strong guy, you know? And that was how he felt too. So, you know, that was kind of how we kind of, you know, bonded at first in the, in the weight room at the high school. And then I think, you know, I had wrestling in the, in the winter and he had basketball. So in the spring, once that was over, I was like, Hey man, why don't you start lifting weights out of my house? We would go, you know, my dad had this nice setup in our old, you know, detached unheated garage and a bunch of free weights. A lot of it was homemade that he made in a steel mill and stuff like that. And so Corey and a couple other guys would come after school and that was kind of like our afterschool hangout, you know, we'd lift weights and that's, that's really where it started. Um, so we've been lifting weights together a long

time. We've owned the gym since 2003. And there's been a lot of, you know, kind of history in between there. Yeah. Was that the reason that you started lifting weights? Was it you were just naturally a smaller kid and you just didn't want to be a smaller kid? Or just you wanted to lift weights specifically for wrestling? Or what was the initial motivation? Yeah.

So weightlifting came before wrestling for me. You know, I mean, it's funny because a lot of the wrestlers I work with now, you know, they start, you know, at four and five years old. Their parents are already, you know, traveling the country with them and stuff. But, no, for me, you know, I didn't play any sports growing up. But my dad, you know, he had the weight set up in the garage. You know, you think, you know, back to when I was young, this would have been like early to mid-80s. He was almost like essentially the de facto strength coach

for the football team that he helped out with. You know, they didn't call it that back then. It was just, you know, in the summertime, he had weights in the garage and the kids on the team would come down and lift weights with him. And, you know, and he worked in the steel mill. He'd come home from work and it didn't matter, you know, summertime, winter, whatever, he'd go out to the garage and lift. That's just what he did. And, you know, so when I was a kid, that was what I grew up around. My earliest memories are walking around out there in the garage, watching my dad work out with these high school kids. And so I kept thinking, man, I can't wait to lift weights. Some kids grow up thinking, I want to play basketball. I want to

be the next Jordan. I want to be the next Joe Montana and play football, whatever. I really grew up saying, I want to be a weightlifter. And my dad would always just say, oh, do some pushups. When you're 12, you can start lifting weights. And so by the time I was 12, you know, it was time for me to start lifting that also, you know, I was kind of a late bloomer and very small. I was that type of kid that was like the smallest kid in the grade every year. I think when I was 12, I probably weighed 75, 80 pounds. So there was also too, that kind of desire to not be small and weak. You know, I've seen my other kids hit, you know, hit puberty and grow and get stronger. And, you know, I was like, man, I don't, I don't want to be small like this. I want to be, I want to be strong. I want to be confident. So it was kind of both those things kind of

wound together. So weightlifting was really my first sport. Wrestling kind of came later. Dude, weightlifting, uh, and wrestling actually were exactly where I started. I'd never been on the mat ever in my life, but my dad was friends with the strength coach at, at the times, Great Bridge High School. And they, they were pretty, pretty legit. I don't know if you know the, the Martin family from that, like he coaches at Old Dominion now, Old Dominion University, but they, they were like state champion after state champion after state champion. And my dad knew the strength coach and asked if I could come lift when I was 13 in there and I walked in and I had never seen so many aggressive ass people in one tiny little dungeon

with just dusty old weights and everybody was just getting after it like my introduction to lifting weights was probably so much more aggressive because I went from like 13 years old to hanging out with 18-year-olds that were moving in. I remember like day one, it was like this kid moved in from this high school, this kid moved in from this high school. They weigh the same and it was just game on. Before they even touched the mat, it was just we're out for blood on day one and it was so aggressive. I'm so happy that I got to train with them whenever i wanted but as like a 13 year old it was terrifying going in that room because i didn't know that people lifted weight so seriously or had that much like aggression and just a bunch of men getting to work

well i think that that early experience probably shaped you in a much different way than if you would have been introduced to weightlifting in a different environment. So, you know, wrestlers are kind of a different breed anyway. And then for you to be kind of, yeah, for you to be introduced to strength training through a grungy wrestling weight room, I mean, that's a recipe for turning into a psycho yourself. It totally is. You don't know anything else. Right. I was planting the seeds for the diesel dad very early on. What drew you into coaching wrestling, though? I mean, or getting into running strength and conditioning for wrestling?

Were there any resources really out there when you started to look into it? No, I mean, I think it's one of the areas, I mean, and obviously it's evolved, you know, in the last 10 years, especially since I've been, you know, kind of involved with the sport. But if you go back 10 years, there was not a lot of resources for wrestling coaches or for wrestlers. There's not, you know, it was kind of a very misunderstood area. You know, like in my day growing up, you know, the high school wrestling team was like, everything we did was circuit training. It was like, well, we got to build endurance. We use weightlifting for endurance. Obviously, you know, like if we want to maintain our strength while we're bringing our

weight down, that's really not the right way to train. There's other ways you can build your endurance than, you know, doing, you know, 30 reps on your deadlifts or whatever. So yeah, there was definitely not a lot of knowledge about it. And, you know, as a gym owner and slash personal trainer, you know, a decade ago, I think just because I had a wrestling background and, you know, I worked with athletes of all type and, you know, general population, weight loss, whatever. But I kind of gravitated towards training high school wrestlers because, you know, just having that background and I think I understood the energy and strength demands of it a little bit better now as I, and as I learned more about strength training, started dabbling in Westside and all these different things,

I started to kind of see, hey, you know, the way wrestlers have been training for years and years is not right, you know? So I initially just started out, you know, kind of working with a lot of the high school kids in my area. And I ended up meeting through a mutual business contact, Tommy Rollins. This would have been 2010. Now, Tommy Rollins is like an Ohio State University wrestling legend. He was our first four-time All-American, two-time national champ. He's like maybe a year or two younger than me. So he was from my era. I remember him like even from high school and stuff. Did you wrestle in college? No, no. I was, I was a late starter. So very average high school wrestler. Cool. Yeah. Um, but anyway, so I met Tommy Rollins this time's 2010.

He was two years removed from retiring from the sport. He was the runner up in the Olympic trials in 2008. And when I met him, you know, he came out to the gym. He's like, man, this gym is awesome. You know, it reminds me of lifting growing up, but I'm thinking about making a comeback and trying to make the Olympic team in 2012. But, you know, and he was a heavyweight, so big dude, you know, 6'3", 6'4", athletic specimen. I think even after, even though he never played football, when he graduated from Ohio State, he got a tryout at a linebacker with the Jets because they were just like, we got to try to figure out a way to teach this guy to play football, you know? But anyway, so he, you know, he's like, man,

I've been on the couch for two years. I'm in the business world. I'm a dad. And you know, I did everything I had to do growing up strength and strength, strength training wise, but I never really liked it. I just did what my coaches told me to do. I don't understand it. And so I just kind of saw that I was like, man, this is my chance to work with a truly world-class elite athlete. And so I just told him, I say, man, why don't you let me help you? And he was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Well, what do you charge? I said, no, no, no. I don't want to charge you anything. Like you come here to old school gym. You tell me when you'll be here and I'm going to work with you. So for the next two years, you know, Tommy lives clear on the West side of Columbus. We're clear on the East side. It's about

45 minutes away. Tommy started driving to old school gym three days a week. And we, you know, Tommy lives clear on the West side of Columbus. We're clear on the East side. It's about 45 minutes away. Tommy started driving to old school gym three days a week. And we, you know, at that time for me, it was a lot of experimentation. You know, it's one thing to take a high school wrestler and try to take him from JV and try to put them on the varsity team. That's easy. But how do you take someone that's already fifth in the world and a two-time national champ? And now how do you make that guy a little bit better? It's a lot tougher, right? So, you know, I spent the next two years working with him. You know, we had the Olympic trials in 2012 and he made it to the finals of the trials again, lost a tight one to Jake Varner, who then went on to win the Olympic gold medal in London. So we were, you know, a hair away from doing it, but, you know, obviously

very heartbreaking, but a great experience. And then Tommy reached out to me a couple months after the Olympics was over. I was like, Hey man, I know we fell short, but I couldn't have been more prepared. I mean, I was, you, you helped me tremendously. And we have some other guys down here at our Olympic regional training center at Ohio state that I think could really benefit from you. They're still doing, you know, strength training wise, they're just on their own. They just do their own thing. Yeah. He was like, would you be interested in volunteering?

And I was like, at Ohio State, like in the wrestling room, like, fuck yeah, like twist my arm a little bit harder, you know? I mean, I'm an alumni. I went to Ohio State. I'm a huge fan of the program. You know, I've been to the dual meets and watched the team. Like, I don't like, I've never even seen the inside of the wrestling room. So initially I just started as a volunteer with the Olympic regional training center. What, what a lot of people don't understand is our

Olympic arm, the, the regional training center and the college team, they basically are overlapped. They're in the same room. They have the same coaches. They're just really different on paper because it's a nonprofit that allows the guys who have Olympic team potential to then get funding and continue to train post graduate. So I started volunteering with, you know, we had Reese Humphrey, Angel Escobedo, and a couple other guys down there. And I, you know, the first year and a half, it was just, I would go down there three days a week, work with them. We started to kind of get some momentum. We put five guys on the USA Wrestling World team that next year,

which has never happened and probably will never happen again from a single regional training center. Yeah. And, you know, me and Coach Ryan, Tom Ryan, the head coach of the Buckeyes, started to kind of, you know, develop a little bit of rapport. We worked out together a few times. And then he kind of said, hey, you know, I got this guy that's redshirted. Do you think you could work with him a little bit?

And, hey, this guy's injured, so he's off the roster for a month. Can you maybe work with him? And, you know, just kind of started snowballing from there. And then, you know, so that was 2012. By 2014, they had me running the whole college program. We ended up winning. Yeah, we ended up winning the first and only team national title in school history in 2014.

We won three Big Ten titles and had a lot of success. So I ran the college team for four years and now I'm still down there running the Olympic level guys. Beautiful. Dude, I know nothing about wrestling strength conditioning. What does that program look like? Anytime I think about wrestling training, I just think about a bunch of guys just doing burpees like until they throw up. Like it's just they just try and drain people. But I never really hear about like strength training. And it just sounds like some gruesome workout.

Go until you almost pass out and then come back tomorrow. Well, that's kind of perception of it. And the conditioning portion of it is like that. And I think what a lot of people, and kind of just the way you're thinking, a lot of people don't really separate the strength from the conditioning. So we still do tons of conditioning work, but it's very structured and it's also separate from our strength work. Now, at the base of it, at its most basic, we lift heavy year round. And that's something that I think until I kind of took over to Ohio state was not common, even in the collegiate

strength condition world for wrestling. So we, we lift heavy year round. We use a lot of, you know, West side periodization. We use triphasic periodization from Caldeets. You know, they deadlift heavy every week. You know, obviously it just depends on where we're at in the year, whether we're bands or pulling off blocks, whatever. Um, maybe one other thing that's different from other sports is I don't do a lot of back squat. Our squat movements are more, you know, unilateral, you know, so split squats, you know, reverse lunges, things like that. Uh, just because most of their work is done in a, in a split stance, you know, as far as when they're actually wrestling. Uh, so we keep the one barbell movement we keep here around is the deadlift.

And we still do heavy presses, but, you know, we bench – if we bench once a week, we're pulling – you know, we're doing pulling movements twice a week. Yeah. So that's kind of – How much – Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, when you start to get into those, like, super –

you know, you're training somebody that's that's at trials to go to the olympics are those guys i mean i assume if you're in the high school level like top end strength gives you just such a massive advantage over whoever you're wrestling like strength it between a 14 and 18 year old is just completely different but when when you get into those super high levels, Olympic trials, is there any strength differentials in those guys? Or are they all just so dialed in that they're just freaks? No, it definitely is still a factor, but not as big of a factor as it is at the high school level.

You're absolutely right. I have high school kids that I've worked with for years that they're as strong as grown men so they can dominate kids that may be better technical wrestlers at the high school level just because they're a ninth grader that deadlifts 455 and they're you know wrestling kids that are the same weight as them that can't even deadlift half that so at that age yes i mean it's a dominating factor. At the college level, it becomes less so. And at the senior level, even less so. But it is still a factor. And I would say more so than absolute strength is strength endurance, you know, for them to be able

to hold up and be able to be strong and fresh throughout the mat. So part of that is the way we train strength training wise. And the other part of it is, you know, our sprint work and making sure the aerobic base is kind of wide enough to support all these scrambles and hard positions they get in so that they're able to recover when they have, you know, 10 seconds to breathe in the middle of the match. How much is their body able to recover and how strong do they feel at the end? So it's definitely still a factor.

Do you guys use any of the dynamic effort method stuff for strength endurance development? We do some, I mean, a lot of the stuff that I do for strength endurance is more almost kind of strongman type type stuff, you know, sled work, you know, heavy carries, lots of stuff with ropes. That's kind of the more of the stuff because I, I also feel when we're doing strength endurance stuff, you need a little bit of room for error, you know what I mean, kind of form-wise. So a sled is going to give you, when we're doing a lot of sled work, there's a lot more room for error and fatigue within the body, you know, as opposed to maybe, you know, barbell type movements.

Yeah. And once you get fatigued, there's basically, the risk of injury is almost nothing. If you're pushing or pulling a sled. You can get as tired as you want to. Correct. Has any of this transferred over to the MMA world? Do you coach any MMA guys? I mean, I've worked with some guys here and there off and on. You know, Matt Brown, good friends with him.

UFC guy that's been around for a long time. Lance Palmer, I've worked with him in the past. I don't – I wouldn't say that's really my my niche but I've worked with some guys here and there but I do know Matt Brown goes to west side a good bit so he's a big believer in in west side and everything they do there so that's an example of an elite fighter that kind of trains like a hybrid power lifter slash fighter power lifting is kind of the base of his strength work and then he does a lot of kind of fighter specific stuff on top of that. Yeah. What does your training look like? Are you still doing a lot of the same stuff just experimentally to be in the wrestling world? Or are you kind of switching things up? Yeah. So I think that's kind of what separates me from most of these other,

you know, strength gurus in the, at least in the in the wrestling space, is that I still train with the guys. And that was kind of my thing when I first started down at Ohio State. I thought, here I am, just some personal trainer that owns a gym out on the east side. I was a very average high school wrestler. These other coaches in here were all national champions and Olympic team members. They have these big accolades. I'm like, the only way I can really gain these D1 college athletes' respect is to show that I'm willing to do whatever they do. So if we go and run the stadium and run sprints, I'm going to race them. I'm going to, you know, make them bleed to beat me. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of my thing is that, you know, I mean, I'm 41 years old and I'm still

training with Olympic hopefuls and yeah, they might, they might beat me most of the time, but not unless they bring their A game because I'm there battling with them day in and yeah, they might, they might beat me most of the time, but not unless they bring their a game because I'm there battling with them day in and day out. So my training, my main lifting days, you know, kind of mirror what they're doing or what I should say, whatever I'm doing with them. And you know, that's how I'm able to kind of work a lot of the experimental stuff in there. And then on the days in between, you know, I do a lot of conditioning work, you know, whether it's a long steady state stuff, you know, I mean, I like, I like to ride the bike. I like to ride the echo bike and the assault bike. I box a couple of days a week, you know, do a lot of body weight

stuff, a little bit of everything. I'm a, I'm a workout junkie for sure. Yeah. I've actually gotten super into the longer conditioning piece, not like a Metcon hard, hard and high intensity stuff, but just the long steady state stuff lately. It's super awesome. I just, I've always dreaded that so much, but I feel like there's just such a massive benefit now. Um, mainly just enjoying getting on an erg or going for a run when usually you're like, I just want to lift everything. But I've, I've noticed a massive, uh, massive improvements in a lot of things just because doing that steady state aerobic work has been really beneficial. Well, I'll tell you,

I mean, there definitely is a meditative benefit to it as well, especially if you're going out on the road, whether it's running or biking. But I think something I didn't really understand even earlier in my career, I thought it was all about those MedCon workouts and those hard circuits. But if you build your aerobic base to one that steady stays up, you get better at the sprint work. You get better at the MedCon stuff. So it really is kind of the underpinning of it all. And if you don't have that element in your training, you're definitely going to be lacking for sure. You mentioned that you actually saw you hitting the bag.

It's freaking terrifying, Doug. People that know how to hit the bag, I just know, I just, I'm like, I'm out. I'm done. There's no way I'm going to make it look that pretty. Have you dabbled in the boxing world? Or is that just from training? No. So I kind of grew up doing a little bit. My dad, you know, had some heavy bags out there in the garage and he had a little bit of boxing experience. So he kind of taught me early on and then I just always used it in my workouts. And then kind of in my, um, maybe like my late twenties, we ended up kind of randomly hiring a boxing trainer, like an actual boxing trainer or gym, not like a Thai bow trainer. And I thought,

well, shit, if I got a guy working here, I might as well at least kind of take a stab at it for real. I've been playing around with it my whole life. So I started working with him. And let me tell you, at the time, I could have made an awesome MySpace video hitting the bag, but I really didn't know how to box. I thought I did, but I didn't. And when I first started working with him, he's like, yeah, he's like, yeah, you can hit hard and you're fast, but you don't understand how to step. You have no footwork. You've been standing in front of a bag for 20 years. So it was the first time I sparred, my coach was very humbling. I couldn't hit him. I was like lunging after him and man, he just hit me up. So I started working with him, trained with him for about two years. I started competing. My first fight was actually

at the Arnold Sports Festival, the Arnold Classic. So I won. Yeah. So I won my weight class there. I won the tri-state Golden gloves a couple weeks after that. You know, so I had a nice little run, had a couple fights. It was fun. After my last fight was just at a solo boxing show in Cincinnati. And I actually was a guy that I was tearing this guy up. He actually sucked, but he caught me on the button, like in a flurry and knocked me out. So my last, I went out on a loss. That was last fight and I yeah broke my hand in it I mean it's a terrible fight yeah but um but the week after was my wife learned she was pregnant with our first child and she's like you're done no more yeah I was gonna say how do you even justify having like kids and being a dad you're like I gotta go fight this guy for what uh I don't know

just yeah I have no reason but but I got to go fight him. Yeah, I think it's different if you're making a living at it. But for me, just fighting in the amateur ranks and the wear and tear it takes on your body. I mean, people think of the fights themselves, but they don't understand. If you've got a fight coming up in eight weeks, you might be sparring two or three days a week leading up to it. So you're taking a lot of punishment. And even me being a, you know, I love boxing. It's my favorite form of conditioning. I'll always love the sport, but anyone who thinks it's safe for your brain is lying to themselves. It's not, you know,

That actually brings up a really interesting question. How do you kind of manage the wear and tear of somebody that's competing in wrestling at such a high level where they're just getting banged up all day long? And you got to look, look at this thing over like a four year quad really to get, getting them to trials and then to the Olympics, um, and, and setting it up so that the strength conditioning piece is still getting them strong, still getting them in shape, but also not beating the crap out of them because they're already getting beat down on the mat all day long. Yeah, I think, you know, something that I had to learn kind of early on when I took over the college team at Ohio State is, you know, I was so ambitious at first and then I had to kind of realize like

the strength conditioning part, even though it's very important, as the season progresses, its importance is very less. It's still an important piece, but it should not take up a big portion of their attention and their energy every day. If I totally waste them in their 6 a.m. workout and they have practice at 2.30 and they are not fully recovered by the time they take the mat at 2.30, then really I'm hindering their performance. So I think- Is that especially true when they're cutting weight? Do you know which guys have calories that are just like, you know, far too low than they would be in any normal setting. And so, you know, to back down their training volume.

Yeah, absolutely. You got to look at the heavyweights different than you look at the guy that is wrestling 149, he cuts from 160 every week. So I think, you know, definitely you've got to take into, you've got to take into account kind of the individual. Also, the timing of the year, you know, as we get later in the year and we're kind of more power focused, the volume drops dramatically. We might still lift heavy, but we're not doing a ton of sets. We warm up, we get up to a heavy weight, they pull a couple heavy singles, and then they're trying to move the bar fast. And then once their bar speed looks slow, then we cut it, you know? So you also kind of have to be ready to say when you can, and as a coach, when you can look at an athlete and you can tell because the weight cut or whatever, their body is

not feeling, you know, it doesn't look right. Maybe they're, you know, you can just tell their, their hip extension, slow, whatever you got to say, Hey, you know what? Just finish getting your weight off, get on the bike, do some low level. Like at that point, you can't let your ego be so invested in the lifting program. You need to understand like the lifting program can hurt them at that point. Yeah. It seems so much more difficult with wrestling too. Like I came out of the MMA world. I wrestled in high school and whatnot also, but, um, and MMA, I mean, you're only going to fight every couple of months, usually, you know, three, four or five times a

year, depending on how often you choose to fight, but you don't have to cut weight every single week. You just cut weight every eight weeks or every 12 weeks. And that's way more manageable than weekly. Weekly seems tough. Yeah. I mean, there's lots of times during the season where they might compete twice a week. They might have a door, a tournament on the weekend, and they have a dual meet during the week at some point. So they're making, you know, in a two week span, they might wait, make weight three or four times. So yeah, it becomes much, much less factor in MMA as far as with the, when the training is involved. I think that's also why you can see guys in MMA make much more drastic weight cuts. You know, the weight cuts that you see in MMA, that would not be sustainable over a four month period in wrestling. Yeah. Our standard for weight cuts in MMA was that

you walk around right, right before you would do your water weight cut. You should be walking around about 10%, eight to 10% we'll say above, above your weight class. So if you're fighting 170, like you can walk around at 187, you know, the week of the fight and then cut it down. You got 30 hours to rehydrate. Uh, it's a totally different game than doing it twice a week where you're, you're weighing in and then you're, you wrestling that day yeah with with our guys you know kind of in season now that this is the ideal scenario and it doesn't happen with everyone but what we like to see is that and this takes some work obviously they don't start out here at the beginning of the season but once we get in the

thick of the season we like to see them kind of come into the practice week you know maybe six seven pounds over so that by the time they're at, you know, Thursday or Friday and they got to make weight on Friday, there may be only are one workout away from getting that extra weight off, whether it's five or six pounds. So if we can kind of keep them where then they might float back up a little bit over the weekend, they kind of take a lot off on Monday and then they're kind of within striking distance by the time Friday gets there. Cause if they need more than one, especially a lot off on Monday and then they're kind of within striking distance by the time Friday gets there because if they need more than one especially a lot of times it's it's not day before weigh-ins like pro MMA it might be an hour weigh-in for a dual meet so they need to be you

know one workout away from it then they can rehydrate and then get out there and compete an hour hour and a half later so it's definitely definitely takes a tough toll on them when I was I did a a season with the Colorado Rockies and, and for the starting pitchers that only threw every five days, they would go throw, and then while the game's still playing, they would go inside and they would go do their hardest session of the week, basically. That way they had maximum time to recover before they threw again in the next five days.

Do you guys ever do anything similar to that where they compete and then you do a hard training session as soon as possible possible that way they have maximum time to recover before they compete again um typically not with the college guys although i that's really interesting that the uh that the rockies did that and it makes total sense uh with my high school guys i do something kind of similar to that in that when they're in season they typically have their tournaments on saturdays So I bring them in for their heavy lift on Sunday. So even though they're kind of fatigued from that workout, usually they pig out or not from the workout, but from that wrestling tournament all day Saturday, they usually pig out Saturday night, they come in all bloated. And then that's the day when we don't do any conditioning. They get their heavy deadlifts in,

you know, their heavy rows. That's kind of our real strictly weightlifting day for the week. And then Tuesday, you know, maybe it's a day or two out from their dual meet or whatever. It's kind of more of a conditioning style lift, maybe a little bit of heavy stuff, but it's more conditioning based. So I would say we do it more like that with the high school guys. Yeah. How long are – yeah, go ahead, Doug. Sorry. Do you take any time to perfect Olympic lifts with any of them? Or is it you know, Olympic lifting, the benefits are great,

but it's just another speed and power modality. There's other ways to be build speed and power. And I think you have to know your limitations as a coach. I've, I was never good at Olympic lifting. I used to do it a little bit, but I, I always say that my hand cleans turned into like power reverse curls, you know? So I think not being a great Olympic lifter myself, the time it would take for me to get these college athletes to perfect the movements is not worth the trade-off. So we do, you know, to train our triple extension, we do med ball work, we do weighted box jumps, we do lots of sled work. That is kind of what we use for our power-based stuff.

So I think there's great value in Olympic movements. I just personally, myself as a coach, I think there's a kind of a lower, you know, kind of threshold as far as, you know, skill-wise for these guys. And when you only have them for, you know, certain hours per week, for me, it wasn't really worth kind of devoting the time to try to perfect. And, you know, one of you guys had talked earlier about, you know, what savages these wrestlers are in the weight room. Try to take a group of D1 college wrestlers that have never done hand cleans before and try to teach them.

They're all going to get hurt because they're going to try to keep pouring, you know, more weight on the bar, more weight on the bar because they want to compete with each other. Their strength is way too big for their technique. Correct, correct. What do those conditioning sessions actually look like? I mean, we had a wrestler come in. I don't even remember what year it was, but he had just graduated college.

He wrestled in Minnesota, and he came in, and on day one, he was the fastest, most in shape, ready to go to the darkest place ever, and I just looked at him, and he was like 170 pounds. I was like, if you just give me one year and you eat everything that you see, you're going to be one of the best CrossFitters in the world. And he literally turned into one of the best CrossFitters in the world after he ate a jar of peanut butter almost every day. Why are wrestlers so just – I feel like it's one of the most athletic and hardest sports to be good at, and it just transfers over to so many things. What is that training as far as – I mean, the strength side, but what does the conditioning piece look like to be able to get through

freaking wrestling, Matt? Right. Well, I think, you know, at the basic level, obviously we have our steady state stuff, which we talked about. We have our sprint work. So whether we're running actual sprints on the track or on the road or on a hill, we like, you know, lots of hill sprints and bleachers and stuff like that. But I think from what you're talking about, kind of a functional conditioning standpoint, stuff that we kind of use late in the year to almost simulate a match. I'll kind of give you a kind of an overview of one of my favorite workouts. We call this the Lou Roselli special. He was the associate head coach when I was first there. And now he's the head coach at Oklahoma. So when you think about wrestling and you think about all the different

strength demands and all the different energy systems that are involved, you know, it's very diverse. And that's why you have to be kind of good in every area. Just like the guy you talked about that came in your gym, he probably had no weak links. He was strong. He was fast, had great endurance. You know, that's why he was good at wrestling. That's why he became very good at CrossFit. So you think, you know, you have to be able to sprint, you have to be able to squeeze and you have to be able to do dynamic movements. So this circuit is set up and we do it in a team-based setting. I do with my college guys. I do with my high school guys. It's the classic. Our sprint setting is typically an assault bike or an echo bike. Our squeeze station is typically either what we call weight

hold. So we would have, you know, if I weigh 180 right now, I got to use 90 pound dumbbells. And then our dynamic station is either like med ball slams or sledgehammers or something where you're exploding. And we do minute rounds with a strict 15 second rest in between. And you got to go through that three to five times. So on your assault bike, the first round, it might be, you know, a 10 second all out sprint, 20 seconds easy. So you only have two sprints. Then you, after those two sprints, you go immediately to your weight holds and you go immediately to the slams or the sledgehammers. Then on the second round, we up the sprints to 20 on 20 off.

Then on the third round, that minute is just a minute go, straight anaerobic, you know, max calories in one minute. So you're sprinting, you're squeezing, you're exploding. One minute rounds. Yeah. Do you find, especially kind of in a sport like wrestling, where it's very, the personality type is a little bit probably more difficult to handle because they're not afraid to be very aggressive and go a little too far. Do you find that pulling them back is a big part of the job to just make sure,

hey, realizing like we're just in the gym right now. You have to go compete and I need you to settle down a little bit. Definitely with some of the guys. I mean, I can think of one in particular, my guy Nathan Tomasello, who was a four-time All-American for Ohio State. He was a guy that he didn't feel satisfied with his day unless he completely broke himself multiple times. And guys like that, injuries start to pile up and you would have to tell them like,

Hey man, like we don't have to be in top shape right now. It's July. Like you got to dial it back just a little bit. So you definitely run into that because there is kind of a thing in the culture of like more is better. And I think in some ways that's true, but in other ways that can be detrimental.

But I think what, one of the other things that you just made, you actually just made me think of that I think was an adjustment when I started working with definitely wrestlers at the elite level was that they're a lot used to – they're maybe more used to internal motivation than other athletes. So, for example, when I used to – I used to work with some different high school football teams. And in the high school football weight room, it's like a pack mentality.

You know, they want the raw, raw, you get them barking. They're all, you know, they're headbutting each other. They're all hyping each other up. They love that shit. It's like, you know, they, they want to DMX and you're in there barking in their face. Well, when I first started, you know, and I'd kind of done that. So with my high school wrestlers and they kind of adapted to whatever I did in the gym, or I got down to Ohio state, you know, I'd be in a hood. These guys would look at me like, what the fuck's this guy barking for? And I started to realize, wait a minute, like these dudes are way tougher than me. And they're used to it being like mano y mano out there on the mat.

They don't need someone barking in their ear. They don't want that. You know, they don't need someone trying to like, you know, talk smack to them. And kind of another funny story along those lines. We had a guy a few years back. He just graduated maybe two years ago. Keyshawn Hayes was a top recruit in the country came in from Kansas City. And right away, I like this kid, he had a CrossFit background actually in high school. So he's a real good Olympic lifter, a great functional strength. I was like, man, this kid knows how to he's already coming in knows how to lift weights. Yeah, you know,

kind of quiet, you know, whatever. But I was like, this is gonna be my guy, I could see it. So we're in the summer, you know, kind of preseason lifts, you know, in August or whatever. And we got through like our first four weeks and I'm all over this kid. I'm like, this is going to be my guy. Well, we're, we're, we're maxing out on, um, I think it might've been the front squat and I'm getting them all hyped up. I'm in his ear. I'm yelling. I'm like, blah, blah, blah. I'm smacking stuff. And he, he hits depth and he's coming up and he kind of lose control and steps forward I mean luckily I was in you know good position kind of caught the weight and racked and it was really uncharacteristic of him because this is a kid that got great form you know and he would get it back in the rack luckily he didn't get hurt I looked I said what

the what the fuck was that and he looks at me goes it's you I can't stand your voice I don't I don't I don't need you yelling in my ear. It's distracting. It makes me want to leave. It doesn't make me want to lift. And he said it so matter of fact, my heart like shriveled up in my chest. Like here, I thought I'm being this motivating coach and I'm like the laughing stock, you know? And I was like, oh, I was like, Keyshawn, I'm sorry, man. I won't yell at you anymore. Back it up. I'm going to leave the gym. Do you know, ask guys ahead of time, like, hey, what motivates you? Like, what kind of style works for you? Do you want me to be rah-rah in your face? You want me to be quiet and reserved

and just give you like one or two points, you know, each day? I think I've just kind of gotten better about kind of seeing what they respond to, you know? So, I'm always on them about technique and, you know, kind of, you know, motivational in a way that's not maybe overkill like I was in that scenario. And then the guys that I can tell, you can usually see if they feed off of it because then you see them kind of maybe amping up their partners or whatever, or maybe, you know, they get the weight and they drop it down after they lock out that deadlift. They're like, let's go, you know, and then you can say, okay, all right, maybe this guy, I can work at him a little bit. So I think I've just gotten better,

maybe reading the room instead of thinking like my way is the way to do it. I need to kind of adapt to these personalities. Yeah. Uh, you brought a bunch of online training programs too, as well for, for wrestlers, right? Correct. When did that start in the whole process? Let's see. This was probably in like 2016. And this was, you know, we'd won the national title. Then we, you know, won the Big Ten the following year and were national runners up. So now I'm starting to get some kind of notoriety in the wrestling world. I remember it was in the fall and I just spoke at the Ohio state university coaches, um, uh, clinic or whatever, you know? And so there's like 500 high school wrestling coaches there from all

over the country. And I, I still remember I came out to the office here at max effort. I was telling Corey about, I'm like, gee, like these high school coaches were like, basically like asked me to like get pictures of my autograph stuff. He's like, dude, he's like, you don't understand. Like you're the guy in this space. And I still like, it hadn't even really sunk in yet. And he was like, you don't have anything to sell these guys or to really help them directly other than like your technique videos. He's like, you need to give them the keys to everything, you know, instead of the pieces. And I was like, ah, yeah, but I don't know. You know, it's kind of just, G's always been one of those guys that he always sees the big picture of everything.

He's very good at kind of seeing the vision down the road. I'm kind of like, I'm in the weeds right now and I can figure out what's going on right here and I can kill it, but I might not be able to see what's down the road. So he said, man, he said, you need to write an ebook. You need to write an ebook and tell them exactly how you train Ohio State.

So that way you can tell a coach like, hey, you want to know what the Buckeyes do? Here's what we do from August all the way to the national tournament. And I was like, yeah, that's a good idea. He's like, dude, you got your English degree from Ohio state. Like, why are you not using it to write? So I kind of, I listened to him, but you know, I'm busy and we got other stuff going on. And I just kind of kept putting it off. So for like the next month, Corey would text me every day. D did you start your ebook. D, did you start your ebook yet? D, did you start your ebook? And this is what good friends and mentors will do to you,

right? When they know something's good for you, they'll stay on you about it. So finally, I think I started that first ebook just to shut him up. I was like, all right, I'm going to get him off my back. I'm going to write this ebook. Well, anyway, my first one was Strength and Conditioning for Wrestling in Season Edition Volume 1, you know, kind of released it a month or two after that. And, you know, fast forward, you know, four years, five years, whatever, my ebooks are used, not just here in the States by, you know, high school coaches and even, you know, big D1 universities, D2 strength coaches and everything, but wrestling clubs and coaches around the world. I think, you know, 20, maybe 25 different countries, even just last year that bought

in and started using my program. So there's, there's some club in Russia right now, the Mecca of wrestling that is using the coach Myers plan. So it's really a cool thing to see. Yeah, I, it's awesome. I feel like when you, you're able to niche things down, I mean, I can't imagine we, we just had a strength coach on from my high school and he got hired like six years ago. And it's a private high school that makes a lot of their marketing through

bringing in athletes to play sports. And then school for most of those kids is like the secondary thing. I could not believe that from the time I graduated to the time he got hired, like 17 years went by or something like that. It's like, man, why aren't high school kids on training programs that make sense? And I feel like it's just catching on. Have you noticed a spike kind of like in your programs? You're kind of leading the charge in the wrestling world. But like, have you noticed an uptick in just the education level specifically for wrestlers? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know there's other guys and other coaches that are doing in the space as well. But yeah, I mean, I get, I feel so many questions, not just from the coaches, but even from parents, it'll say, hey, like, you know, my kid, like, they got no strength resource

at their school, like, you know, they'll buy the eBooks or, you know, I got some athletes that I, you know, high level high school athletes that I work one-on-one with remote, you know, things like that. So I think just them, the, the parents and the athletes knowing that there's resources out there. Yeah. It's definitely changing and it's really just going to benefit all the athletes in the long run. Yeah. I, I felt like I was so lucky to be able to train. It just going to benefit all the athletes in the long run. Yeah. I, I felt like I was so lucky to be able to train. It just happened to be with the wrestling team, but, and, and the fact that my dad trained at the strength coaches gym and was able to like walk in and have a legitimate coach from the time I was 13, all the way through high school. And then obviously like kind of learning

how to do the thing on my own. But even, even at the time when you were training in high school, uh, to be, were you really geeked out on a lot of the kind of intricacies of training or was it just going in banging weights and cause it was fun to hang out with your friends. So, you know, my dad had been kind of raised on like the Arnold encyclopedia of bodybuilding. You know, he came from, you know, he graduated high school in 72 and he was big into weightlifting then, him and his buddies. They were, when it wasn't very popular back then. And they had all the Arnold books, all the Arnold magazines and stuff. So that was kind of where my base of knowledge came from. So when we started lifting, you know, with my dad and, you know, me and Corey in the garage, it was all about bodybuilding. It

was all the old Arnold style workouts. I mean, now it's kind of funny to look back, you know, as a high school wrestler myself, I hardly ever did legs. You know, I thought leg extensions and leg curls was like a good leg workout. You know, because we were all about like, I want to bench a lot. I want to do these crazy, you know, arm supersets and stuff. So really, it's funny because now like I have high school kids that I've trained for a couple years and their base of knowledge far surpasses what mine was even when I started you know personal training clients as a job so it's really amazing the way the internet has changed the game and the resources that are out there it's incredible yeah how much like just pure hypertrophy training are you doing with with the high school kids I mean the the speed and the

power stuff running sprints but do you focus a lot on just putting on size on the kids so that they're kind of building that base? Oh yeah, absolutely with the high school kids, you know, from the time the state tournaments over in March up until their preseason starts kind of in September, October. I mean, we still, you know, do kind of a conjugate method on the main lifts, but all of our accessory work is kind of geared around hypertrophy because if you can take a high school kid and not just make them stronger but also put you know 10-15 pounds of muscle on them during the off season they're going to be a new kid on the mat next year there's no way around it so yeah I've had great success

with you know moving kids up in weight class each year and kind of the the culture in wrestling is obviously lose as much weight as possible keep your weight down. And at the college level, I understand you get recruited for a certain weight class and you have to kind of stick to that. But I've really been leading the charge to change the perception in the sport at the high school and at the youth level that you should cut weight. I have kids that, you know, they move up year after year. By the time they're a senior in high school, they're not cutting any weight and they're ranked nationally and winning state titles. And they're walking around feeling good and enjoying themselves. So that's kind of what I really stress to the parents.

Like, hey, we don't have to try to be the biggest guy in the weight class. We just got to be the strongest, have the most energy and be the healthiest. Yeah. Do you even talk to the parents much about that? I feel like we have like Travis Mash on. It's like, well, just get strong And then we'll figure weight classes out later. Is it the same way in wrestling? Yeah, because you have, you know, the coaches, or actually not the coaches, the parents,

a lot of them already have kind of a preconceived thing in their head of like, hey, my kid's going to be at this weight or my kid's going to be that weight next year. Now, I'll give you an example. I had a kid that I worked with all through junior high and high school. His name was Jaden Maddox. He ended up, he was the number one kid in the country as a senior, ended up going to Ohio State on scholarship. Things didn't work out there, yada, yada, yada. But when his dad brought him to me in eighth grade, his dad was kind of a small guy. And at the time, Jaden weighed about 90 pounds. And he said, all right. He said, next

year, he said, I want him at 106. He said, we're not going to take him up to 113 until he's a junior or senior because he's going to be a 125 lifetimer in college. And I looked at him, I said, Mark, he don't even got hair on his dick yet. How are you picking his weight class in college? You know what I mean? The kid is going to grow. Right, exactly. And he was like, well, you know, I'm only 5'3". I'm like, yeah, yeah, I get it. You're a little dude, but let's just see what happens. And sure enough, his freshman year, he was one 13. I remember he was cutting from one 20 to one 13. His dad still wanted to go one Oh six. I had to like basically arm wrestle the dad. Like, no, we're not going to one Oh six. He went one 13, one 32, one 52, one 60 as a senior and was the high school national champ flow national champ as a senior So, yeah, I mean, it was amazing to kind of see when we allowed his body to grow.

Now, if we would have cut a massive amount of weight, maybe he would have been smaller like his dad. We don't know. But we allowed his body to grow. So when he was wrestling 160 as a senior, he probably weighed 158. His friends were over there suffering in the corner after weigh-ins or before weigh-ins. He's eating Subway like, I got this, you know.

So it took a lot of convincing, though, and it was a constant fight. But I think once the parents started to see like, okay, this guy's not just your local yokel personal trainer. He actually knows what he's talking about. And I've kind of, you know, I think now just because of my experience and relationship with Ohio State, I bring a lot more credibility to the conversation where the parents, even if they fight against it, they tend to give me the benefit of the doubt because even though you're the dad, you can't really argue with me on this one, I know. You're talking about talking to the parents.

Do you talk to them just as much about nutrition as you do the actual wrestling part since high school kids especially don't have full control over the meals that they eat and the food that's available? Yeah, I do. But usually the high school kids are the problem because most of the parents at least have a concept of how, at least for the kids that are serious, they have a concept of how their kids should be eating. The problem is when the kids are not with the parents, when they're out with their friends, when they're hanging out after school, when they're with their girlfriend, you know, whatever it is. So, I mean, I, it's usually the parents coming to me like, will you please talk to him? And then after I talked to little Jimmy or whatever, you know, the dad will come and be like,

I've been telling little Jimmy this for five years. You tell him once he listened to me. I said, yeah, because I'm not his dad. I'm not telling him to do his homework and to pick up his clothes and do the dishes, all this other shit. You know what I mean? I'm not his dad. I'm not telling him to do his homework and to pick up his clothes and do the dishes, all this other shit. You know what I mean? I'm in his ear about training, and he'll listen to me even if I'm telling him the exact same thing you've been telling him. What I think about wrestlers and what they go through on the mat, there's a ton of mobility and just flexibility,

crazy end range of motion that these guys have to be strong in, and they're just getting twisted up in all kinds of crazy positions. Do you do a lot of like partial rep type things, just focusing on kind of tightening things up instead of full range of motion, you know, ass to grass squats and just being at that end range where I would imagine a lot of injury could happen just because they're so mobile. Yeah. I mean, we do some stuff like, yeah, I don't really stress, you know, dropping your ass to the ground when we do squats. For the most part, we use a good range of motion on most stuff. But as far as the mobility aspect of it, a it a lot of that they build you know kind of just through years of wrestling and being in these

positions but the main thing that i try to focus on is the prehab and the activation stuff so that they don't get hurt when they're in those positions so the example i'll give you is you know wrestling so everything's in front of you so they end up with their shoulders kind of rolled forward they end up you know they're very strong right here. They're not very strong overhead. And a lot of wrestlers, especially a high level wrestler, if you tell them put their hands over their head, they can't even straighten their arms out

because their body is programmed to become elite in this position with their hands forward and their shoulders rolled forward. So we make sure not only are we doing mobility work with bands, we're doing lots of, you know, lat activation and like kind of lat stability doing lots of, you know, lat activation and kind of lat stability stuff, like, you know, overhead, kettlebell walks, things so that they get strong in that position

so that when they are, you know, maybe stretched way out on a single leg, their body understands how to use their lats to stabilize and doesn't panic because that's when you see the shoulder injuries and stuff like that. Is the Olympics still half wrestling? Yes. Yeah, we had the youngest Olympic champion in USA wrestling history in 2016 from Ohio State, Kyle Snyder.

Gotcha. I thought for some reason wrestling got taken out from steroids or something. No, so there was a push leading up to the 2016 Olympics where the International Olympic Committee was going to cut wrestling along with some other sports. And then there was a big, you know, kind of campaign, grassroots campaign through the wrestling community to keep it. And then it succeeded.

But yeah, it was on the chopping block at one time. Yeah, I remember some of that. Dude, do you get to bring a lot of the kids into old school gym and be a part of that environment, or are you doing all the training at their schools? Oh, yeah, absolutely. In the off season, the summertime, a lot of those guys kind of live at old school gym.

Sick. Yeah, yeah, they love it, man. So there's never been a wrestler that has walked in old school gym and hasn't had that instant look of a kid on Christmas like, oh god like you know you would feel the same way if you walked in just like yes this this brings you I'm not even there I got a big smile on my face yeah it brings you back to that weight room that grimy weight room where you learn how to lift weights around all those wrestlers so if there's a nostalgia to it there's a realness to it and you to see it on Instagram is one thing but then to come experience it to to smell the grime and the dust in the air

and the loud music, it's just really something special. So yeah, a lot of my guys that I'm close with come out in the summertime and then my senior level guys, you know, guys are trying to make the Olympic team currently, Colin Moore, Miles Martin, Amar Deshi,

who just made the Canadian Olympic team. Those guys are out at Old School Gym three days a week. Can you tell us more about the gym? Like what makes it so unique? So I always say, you know, without, you know, Corey and I and without the people that are in there, it's just a big old building with rusty weights. You know, it's really nothing special. So I think part of it is the people and the knowledge and the experience all the time we put in there. But, you know, it's just there's something to it.

It's this old Kwanzaa hut. So it looks like an airplane hangar. You know, there's a block wall in the back. I mean, the ceiling leaks. It's cold as hell in there in the wintertime. You know, we always have, you know, Tupac Blaren on the radio. And, you know, the weights are, you know, rusty and old. And there's just a feeling to it when you walk in

that's really hard to describe. I'm sure you guys have probably been to places that are similar, but it's just a very special place. Yeah, we're trying to get out there. Tell Arnold to make sure he's having the Arnold this year coming up. Then we can go on a big tour. We're going to go to Westside. We're going to go to an old-school gym.

We're going to hang out with everybody. We'll be there at 4 a.m. We'll be there at 6 a.m. when you get at 6 a.m when you get there right now they got us on lockdown yeah that sucks man you know with the arnold getting canceled last year we missed out on a lot it might be the last event ever in strength conditioning the history of the world what are we gonna do i don't know man i hope they bring it back on because i'll tell you what this is something you guys would love we this is the one day of the year actually two days of the year, that I actually come in and work out at 4 a.m. is during the Arnold because we do this event called Beats and Barbells. We start at 4 a.m. and it's to kick off the Arnold Classic. So it's that Friday or whatever day the Classic starts. And we sell tickets from people. There's been people that have come from Dubai, you know, people from all over the world that are out in town from the Arnold. And we have live hip hop DJs. And I'm not talking to DJ with a Mac or an iPod. I'm talking spinning records, vinyl records,

bumping old school, you know, Wu Tang and Biggie. And we get in there and we get after it's a ton of fun. There's been a lot of really cool guys that have come through and I hope to see you guys there this year. Things are back to somewhat normal. Dude, I'm ready. We were hoping to get out there, but we just have so many people. I mean, Louie's right down the street. You guys obviously going to the Arnold. I can't believe that he, like his event, is just was the last one.

The Arnold was the last one where everything just shut down like two days before, but it still went off. Are they even talking about doing it again yeah i don't know so the arnold was canceled last year you know i mean so well yeah it was canceled for vendors oh but they did the show yeah yeah you're right you're right i totally forgot about that i think there was like an a large number of people that found out it got canceled while they were in on the plane right flying out it was like oh where are we going then I guess we're just going to Ohio we'll figure this

out yeah I totally forgot about that part of because we ended up we had to close our gym a week or two later but there was a lot of people that had come in town and like we got nowhere to go so they were coming out and lifting the gym and stuff like that but yeah it was a really weird time man um you know that happened and the big 10 stuff like that. But yeah, it was a really weird time, man. You know, that happened. And the Big Ten Championships were that weekend, they went on. But then two weeks later was the national tournament. And it was canceled, you know, so, you know, my guys that, you know, had qualified for the national tournament didn't get a shot. My guy Colin Moore was undefeated, ranked number one, didn't get to win his first national title, you know, so it was a really weird and strange time i mean we're living in strange times anyway but yeah that was really really odd how has that actually affected you guys

because obviously wrestling is pretty hand-to-hand we're in uh we're in some close quarters and all over each other how is i mean what what's like the state of the sport? Is it still happening? I mean, kind of in theory, yeah. I mean, Flow Wrestling has still been holding events. They've been doing a good job of bringing guys in and keeping everything distanced and stuff like that, obviously except for when you actually wrestle the other person. But they haven't had any spread or any cases have been linked to these events.

They're having a big one, the RTC Cup this weekend. As far as for the college wrestling season, as of right now, they're saying full speed ahead. Now I know like at Ohio state, the guys, they have mandatory testing. They get tested twice a week.

They're very segregated as far as who they even practice with. Like you have the same practice partner for two weeks at a time. So if you and I are partners and you test positive, then they don't have to quarantine the whole team. But I do know they have like the big 10 has safeguards in place where if there's a certain percentage of your team that test positive, then you've got to shut the whole program down. So I want to be optimistic and say they're going to have a season, but I don't see it happening. I hate to, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I wish they would do what some of the high school states are doing, like New Jersey has delayed the start of their high school wrestling

season until March with the thinking being that the vaccine will be available by then. So I wish they would do that here in Ohio because already I see kids, I train high school kids, different teams are quarantined or there was an outbreak here, outbreak there. They're trying to have a season, but what's going to happen is it's going to spiral out of control. They're going to end up shutting it down. And then these kids are going to miss their senior year because they tried to do it now instead of just waiting. So what do you think the chances are that they, they wait till March and then they just go, Oh, well, not enough people are vaccinated. And then they just push it back again and they

just miss it altogether. Who knows, man. I mean, nothing would surprise me at this point. You know, it's really, it's really hard to tell. Have you ever been able to travel with any of your Olympians to the Olympics and go through that whole process? No. So I've went to the U S open quite a few times, possibly because they have it in Las Vegas. So, you know, it's a nice little, you know, fun trip to go out there as well. But you know so i didn't go to the rio olympics in 2016 uh but if i'm able to put one of my guys on the team in which is now 21 because they canceled this year and put it to 21 then i'm going to think about going to tokyo we're going to kind of see what the travel situation is like and if it even goes off in 21 i've really it really kind of see what the travel situation is like. And if it even goes off in 21, I've really,

it really kind of, even in 16, kind of the reason I was looking forward to Tokyo in 2020 is my father was an orphan from Japan, was adopted and brought to the U.S. He's from Tokyo originally. He's never been back, you know, so he's 66 years old. And I thought, man, what an experience, you know, after he was adopted at 18 months, brought to the U.S. for now me, you know, 40 years, you know, when I'm 42 years old, to take my old man back to Japan for the first time to watch some of my athletes compete in the Olympics. So that's possibly the plan. So not to put any pressure on you, Colin Moore, but you need to make the team for me. Totally. Dude, do that. That would be rad.

It would be sweet, right? Yeah. Rad, man. Well, we got to get the world open back up. We got a trip to make to Ohio, Doug. For sure. We've been talking about it for a year or more now. At least nine months since the Arnold when we realized we couldn't go.

That we weren't going to risk it. It's craziness. Dude, I appreciate you coming on. This has been rad. I've been, every time I get to meet someone in the Corey G circle here, how rad, isn't it so rad that you get to run a business, multiple of them with your bro that you've been lifting weights with your whole life? Dude, it's one of those things, and this is going to like like i'm a dickhead but you know someone will come in the gym and i'll say well how you doing man oh living the dream i want to say nah dude i'm living the dream yeah no you're not look at me i'm lifting weights

and running shit with my best friend all right i'm living like yeah you can't beat it no the fact that you just ate ice cream cone you ain't living the dream buddy so yeah no all jokes aside though yeah it really is, man. And I think there's a lot of situations where they always say, you know, blood and money doesn't mix and, you know, friends and business doesn't mix. But me and Corey, man, we've always had such a great relationship and we've always put not just our friendship first, but you know, I want Corey G to win. I want him to be the man. I don't feel the need to compete with him and he don't feel the need to compete with him and he don't feel the need to compete with me. He knows if I'm winning and I'm doing good, that's good

for him and vice versa. So I think that's probably some business advice I would give anyone out there that's listening. If you're in business with your friends, your family or whatever, just remember if it's going to be a successful partnership, there can't be any type of internal competition. You got to root for them just as hard as you root for yourself. Word. I dig that. I'm not even going to say anything. I was just going to talk about how awesome it is running shit with your best friend.

In fact, we get to lift weights the same way we did when we were 13. We just do it for real now. Right, right. Where can people find you? All right. So the easiest way is on instagram at coach myers underscore gut check um i'm actually in the process of launching my membership based site so it'll be coach myers.com that's not gonna be up till january 1 but in the meantime

instagram at coach myers underscore gut check up with tons of training knowledge thing outside of obvious is this where when did that mean, I see it all the time when you're putting stuff up. What is the gut check? Just hard work asking to make you throw up like a wrestler? Yeah, kind of. I just kind of a long time ago when I thought, all right, if I'm going to try to put a title or a quote-unquote brand on my training or on my style of training or the way I think it's, it's, it's the moment, what I call the gut check moment. And it's that moment that everyone gets, whether it's in, whether it's in a train, you know, training, a physical confrontation, whatever it is, where your mind and your body becomes scared and tries to tell you to quit. You know, our, our bodies are

survival mechanisms first and foremost. So when you're in that intense conditioning, you get into that deep water, your mind will try to trick you into quitting. It will try to tell you that you have to for your own self-preservation. And that's the gut check moment where you have to recognize that it's trying to pull the wool over your eyes and that, no, I have control over my body, you know, not my subconscious. I can consciously control my effort, and I'm not going to drown. I'm going to keep swimming. So that's really the gut check moment, and I think that the more you can face those gut check moments in training,

then when you face them on the mat or in the cage or in the business world or whatever it is, you don't shrink down and get scared because you know what, you're used to that feeling and you understand how to overcome that fear. Every man gets scared when prepared for confrontation, right? It's natural. That fight or flight, but are you going to run or are you going to fight? That's the gut check. There it is. Doug Larson. I might need a clip of that because I got some fire I might have to put up on my channel. That might be the best I've ever explained it there it is Doug Larson you bet find me on Instagram Douglas C Larson I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner we are barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged barbell shrugged.com forward slash diesel dad next class is starting

soon I don't know when what what date, but it's coming. And then everybody in Palm Springs, San Diego, L.A., and Vegas, get over to Walmart. We're on the shelves. End Performance Nutrition, three programs on the shelves at Walmart. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap, friends. That is a wrap.

That's a pretty rad segment there at the end, the gut check. Pretty cool. Next week, Intermittent Fasting Challenge is starting, which is really, really cool. We're really excited about it. Also, get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrug to save 20% and BuyOptimizers.com forward slash shrug to save 10% using the coupon GoTrug.

Friends, we will see you on Monday.