Barbell Shrugged - How To Pursue Mastery

Episode Date: January 25, 2017

This week we’re back with the crew and have a fun episode to share with you.    We had Kenny Kane and Andy Galpin join us at our local outdoor training spot in Encinitas. We wanted to bring Kenny on to talk about his ideas on coaching and this concept we all have heard about called mastery. Kenny has been in the coaching game for as long as CrossFit has been around, and started CrossFit Los Angeles in 2004. He has worked with 1000s of athletes and now is most passionate about working on helping coaches get better at coaching.    Kenny shares with us the evolution of his coaching experience and dives into concepts such as how he sets up his programming at CFLA and how to plan out specific styles of training days, to some deeper ideas like "the difference between doing athletic things and being an athlete, and how to find purpose in your training.    Give this show a listen to hear our thoughts on the topic. Then I want hear what this means to you.    You might reach enlightenment, or just get a few laughs and some new knowledge at the least.   Maybe this will motivate you to choose something a little more specific, put a deadline on it, so it will get your @$$ in gear.   If you’re feeling bored with your current program, tired of training without purpose, and want to have a blast working toward a common goal with a bunch of other super motivated people, come join us and see what is possible.   This week, the doors open for the Muscle Gain Challenge. We built this program for those who want to get stronger, build more muscle, and lift heavy. We are now accepting new athletes into the program. If you want to add some serious muscle mass, get stronger and boost your confidence with heavy barbells, then we are looking forward to having you in our program! To learn more and register, head over to musclegainchallenge.com

Front and backside. Oh, I want to be there for that. Dude, I'll break dance like a mother out of that cake. Just be like, what's up? What are you going to wear? A leopard thong. Oh, yes. A leopard thong.

I'm in. I'm in. And I'll be the ringmaster. Edible. That'll be my nickname, the ringmaster, and I'll pop out of a cake. If you're wearing that, then it makes sense that I would have a whip. Totally. And you could be Lucene Man.

The missing amino acid Welcome to Barbell... Shrugged. Business. Welcome to Barbell... Action. Welcome to Barbell... Action. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Blitzer here with Doug Larson, Andy Galpin, and Kenny Kane. And we're going to be talking to Kenny today about coaching. He is a master coach.

You can see on his shirt right there. Mastery. All three of us know where it's at. Like a bunch of two-year-olds like where's the ice cream cone we're all right there you do run the school of mastery in los angeles california do you not yes i do yes you do yes you do how do you think of that name i mean no one else got that before you. It's just fucking brilliant. No, there is a couple of different online things that are more about meditation,

that are about mastery. But the whole idea came from just this sort of evolution in movement. And I don't think any time before have we seen such an acceleration of people's learning how to move as we have really the last 10 15 years and people are learning at very accelerated rates that's what's exciting about fitness in general absolutely is it is it went from how do i just look like that guy on tv to how do i move better right yeah and then within that like if you look at things that are that have sort of withstood the test of time between like yoga and martial arts. So yoga has been around 5,000 years. Most of the martial arts or some of them have been around for a couple thousand. And the thing

that's congruent with both of them is that they have these evergreen principles of mastery. And there's a couple of base elements to those systems, but then throughout it, the people practicing it are endeavoring towards mastery. So at first it's this like, sort of doing this thing. And then the sort of the ultimate sort of experience is the being of it. And so that's, what's really cool about like this, like physical fitness, really. I mean, if you, most of the movements can be broken down into a few basic elements. And so if you just look at, if you slow things down a little bit and go,

man, there's an opportunity to do this stuff for a lifetime and never quite be a master of it and therefore always be interested in its practice, execution, an ideal of perfection that will never happen. Yeah, I think. And to me, that's very compelling because it takes you out of that sort of place

where the modern person can be, which is get bored with stuff very easily and rather replace that with like, you know what, there's still more to work on. You know what, there's still more to work on. And it's compelling. Yeah, I like kind of how you were, in the very beginning, just kind of caught my ear

because it's something I've been studying, which is yoga. And talking about how it's 5,000 years old and in the very beginning it was based on breath and sitting posture and then that was it that's all yoga was until maybe 2,000 years ago and then he started blending in more poses right and then it was can you hold this position in a very particular way right and so there's been an evolution of that and just something as like the oldest movement practice started with breath and posture right and it's funny we're arriving right back at that exactly yeah yeah so but you

started with with crossfit right yeah i mean it's it's Los Angeles. So the School of Mastery is a moniker that we use. And CrossFit LA has been around since 2004. So there's been so many iterations. And that was one of the reasons why we sort of moved the conversation to this place. Because CrossFit itself is something that we're completely still in love with. But it's evolved. I mean, since the gym's been open, shoot, now we're on our 13th year. And so, you know, a gym is going to go through that. Coaches are going to go through a lot of things during that time. CrossFit itself, functional fitness itself has drastically changed

in the last decade. And so it, like, if we didn't evolve the conversation, then we'd still sort of be repeating the things that we were doing. A good chunk of it was successful and worked for, you know, most of the people. But at the same time, you have to continue to evolve. And if you kind of, you know, put yourself in a framework of like this is a never-ending evolution and just think of it like constantly that way, then you're in sort of a growth mindset just by simplifying the ideas, if that makes sense. I think that's one of the things you've done really well. I think one thing we're going to dig into today is having three different types of training days.

And then I also think we go through these phases, these waves, where we get all this complex information, and it takes a really good coach like yourself to simplify it so it's applicable to the average person. And so just the last show we did with Andy last week, we got into all these things that would be very complex things that we all need to be considering. And then at the end, we started tying it together.

It was like, oh, these are the basic principles. These are the very simple things we need to be looking at. And one of the things you've done is and as we go through these cycles of okay, we accumulate all these complex ideas, now we simplify them. And you just kind of go through those waves over time and that's that evolution.

Mike touched on this a second ago with the kind of three different types of training days you have and having context around your training. When I came to your mastery method workshop or seminar, that was a big part of what you touched on. I thought that was really interesting. So at some point, I definitely want to dig into those three different contexts. Sure. Easy. I would like to actually know what made that happen or why did you do that? I'm sure when you first started your gym in 2004, it was really hard into perfect programming and

how are we setting up our classes. And I'm sure that was a focus for a long time. And now you have this whole other piece that you call context. How did you get from there? What is the context stuff? And how did you get from there to here? Well, I think a big part of it was, like, look, if you look at one of the things that CrossFit did for everybody that does it, is it's a really good unifier of people

because despite backgrounds, there's that sort of commonality. So we're all sort of dropped into the moment by doing something really hard. And so that's universal. You don't have to speak the same language to sort of understand that. Camaraderie, brotherhood.

Camaraderie, connection, sense of, you're very raw, you're very authentically you in those moments of hurt and so that's a beautiful thing again it's universal so people's pain thresholds might be different but their interface with it is very similar if that makes sense that shared emotional experience

is very powerful for bringing people together and that's like I think the most brilliant thing that CrossFit as a whole has done is it brings people together in this sort of unifying experience, which is the fundamental thing that we all get about being human is pain. So, you know, Dallas had been working on that for thousands of years. Aristotle, Plato talked a lot about that. Like, Western and Eastern thought have all talked about that for millennia. And that conversation shouldn't and will not, I don't assume assume go away onto the evolution of humanity as long as we go so with the evolution

of like our experience with programming workouts is that it started to become this thing where it's just like it became about the workout itself which is is a matter of, at some point, varying opinions. So you get this thing that brings everybody together, and then the group stops agreeing on the value of the workout. So you get enough experience, enough practice, and then you get some people go, well, I like the two-minute version of this. And then you get another person going, I like the 45-minute version of this. And then you get another person who doesn't like to breathe heavily, and they go, I like the two-minute version of this. And then you get another person going, I like the 45-minute version of this. And then you get another person who doesn't like to breathe heavily, and they go, I like to just lift,

and you guys can go sweat. And then there's shades and permutation. Why'd you touch my arm when you said that? It was directed. So with that sort of understanding, and just by being around long enough, we started to experience that. We said, well, look, what if we were to sort of deepen the sort of experience a little bit or actually just make it so that's available to people if they choose to experience that?

Meaning that it's not just about the workout that they see on the, or just making it a coachless experience. So there's a couple of things that I wanted to sort of accomplish with the development of these ideas. One was make the role of the coach much more significant in the experience that participants and practitioners were having. Cause you know, to me, that's a valuable role. Like, like coaches, whether functional fitness or CrossFit or any of this stuff exists, I always think coaches or teachers will always exist. It's, again, another evergreen role. What I was seeing in the market of CrossFit was becoming about the workout. Do the workout, and you just do whatever you're going to do within that.

Then what I saw is there's this, there's this gap, like there's the workout itself and people all having this sort of increasingly more disparate experiences. So rather than making different meanings from the same. Yeah. And rather than bringing people together, it started unintentionally dividing people. And so what I realized is like, look, one of the things that like my old martial arts instructors were great at any i did yoga a lot of yoga and you know the things that they taught me and all my great instructors in both yoga and martial arts were always able to make the simple movements become something bigger than just the movements themselves yes Yes, they can exist onto just, you know, it's a punch

or a kick or a block, but then it's also, it's a greater expression of yourself if you allow it to be. And that, that, just that idea to me is like brilliant because it's an opportunity for somebody to go, cool, I got to get my workout in. But then also this might be an opportunity to thoughtfully create a mindset around it. And then if the mindset's available to growing, then maybe like the emotional experience can deepen a little bit more. And I was just really interested in creating some sort of platform where you could create coaching language around that and for students to kind of go, okay, I've got space. Like I want this to be a deeper thing. I want my coaches to talk to me in a deeper way. I want my coaches to talk to me and look me in the eyes and go, yeah,

here's the workout you're doing it and you're going to get more fit. And that's that number one physicality check. And I wanted to create a programming model that supported consistent longevity practice. Like the big goal with all this is improving quality of life over time via fitness and human connection. But to do that, you've got to have some very deliberate sort of parameters to give those guidances. So with the context that Doug and Mike were referring to is that we divide up our programming into sort of three different sort of mind and emotional sets. You got your practice days, you got your competition days,

and you got your mental toughness days. And look, we got a variety of people that come to our gym and a good handful of gyms that have come to our mastery method workshop and they're going to teach their students like this but daily what we're after is on the practice days treating it like a practice like you show up like you would on a team so everybody anybody that's played team sports or even an individual sport understands that like you got to work on the nuances, on the details on those days. Yeah.

You practice Monday through Friday, so you play once on Saturday. Yeah. And it supports that. And so, like, you're still getting intensity. You're still getting good workouts. But the idea is that you're also developing skill during these practice days. So the competition days are largely about, hey, we're going to throw some stuff that you might not have seen. So how do you adapt in the moment when stuff is really tricky or you might not be ready for it? Like this is an opponent

that's really challenging, or this is the stuff that we've been working on. So your neurology, your physiology, all that's going to understand how to sort of do it. So we divide up our competition days a little bit, like basically 50-50. So some of the stuff that we haven't been practicing and then some of the stuff that we have. But the intensity is intended to be much more elevated. And then the mental toughness days, if I were to describe it in one sentence, it's about developing grit and character. So who are you when things are getting shitty? So game day, who are you when things get tough? And hey, on a daily, do you have the mindset to just practice? Do the daily, weekly, monthly work to get better at these things over time,

not with a rushed sort of mindset. And all of our exposures are done very deliberately. So we're extremely mindful of like, okay, what sort of stimulus we're trying to create with our exposure lists. When you have a new person walk into your facility and how do you introduce this idea? Because I come in, I just want to lose some weight. Usually a long eye gaze and a kiss. But like, you know, it's like, is there, I mean, you're explaining to us really well right now, but at what point is that introduced? Is it like, is it, you're doing like a, we're in fundamentals and you're just learning what CrossFit is and now I'm going to like lay this concept on you or, and who's ready for

this message? Is it something that someone who's already been training for a while? That's such a great question, Mike. And I think it varies person to person. So you've got, so let's, we can divide up the populations, right? So you've got an already existing population. I think a lot of people who are, have been doing this thing are really open to this sort of like basic structure, right? Oh, you can actually slow this thing down and work on stuff. Well, that kind of makes sense. Like fundamentally, without getting into specifics, like, yeah, you should.

And then, you know, also, so should competition. There's a place for that. But I think doing that every day gets people into like my experience with that and watching the market do that. I feel like it kind of burnt people out. So I'd see populations not really stay doing the thing for a long time. And that's the thing that I'm particularly proud of, of our gym is that we've got people that have been crossfitting for the entirety of our gym's existence. So we've got 12, 13 year crossfitters, you know what I mean? And it's just sort of like, and they're average everyday people.

And they're, you know, at this point, mid-40s, mid-50s. What's that? They're not mutants. No. I mean, they live in Santa Monica, but – No, but they're people who – I mean, they're average everyday people who are using this to just simply optimize their health, which is, you know, if you look at – if you take two steps back. We talked about this when the four of us got together for the first episode. There's like, if you take the big macro picture,

you've got a box of health and wellness and fitness should be a big giant circle filling that inside. If you start pushing outside those boundaries, you're going to get sick or one of your biomarkers is, is going to exceed your, your, your box of health and wellness. And the point is to expand your fitness within that and to optimize your health and wellness. And these are the people who are doing that. And that's what we're striving for. That's what we're intending to do for our population. Now, the second part to answer your question is the people, so the already existing CrossFitters,

and then the people who aren't CrossFitting, who call us and go, what's this thing we want to CrossFit? And the conversations go one of two ways. And ideally, whoever's answering the call or inquiry, you know, we find out what the person's interested in. And at some point, we try to have the conversation of like, you know, multiple, there's multiple elements to it. Like, cool, you want to CrossFit? We do that here.

What are you looking to do okay cool now does that make sense for you to do or just to try to get what you want here and the the conversation matures at that point where we say hey this is kind of how we do it yeah and are you open to that and if people are not open to it um you know and they go you know what i just need something that's just i need something that's just physically intense. And that's where my mind is at. That's where my head's at. And then we go, cool, there's a lot of places to go do that.

I think because we live in Santa Monica, it does help that we're there and that these kind of conversations are very much sort of an everyday thing. It's like, oh, cool. You're, you're, you're trying to do this thing with a lot of, of, of awareness, you know? And, and, and that is, that really is what we're trying to do. Like increase the awareness within it. And so with the yoga and martial arts background, I felt like a lot of crossfitting population was sort of, there was this weird sort of intensity without awareness, if that makes sense. I don't know if you guys experienced that, but meaning that like people would just like, like to bury themselves, but out without actually taking two steps back and going, what battle am I going to fight? You know, rather than just going, there's a, there's a fight. I'm going to go pick up a barbell and go. It's like, okay, good. Like there's times where that's like totally appropriate. Sometimes you going to go pick up a barbell and go. It's like, yeah, okay, good. Like there's times where that's like totally appropriate.

Sometimes you got to go, but also having the wherewithal and the ability to make those choices, like is something that we're trying to advance. It's usually the person who's three days into a new training program, who's complaining about the program, not making them sore. That's the person that might lack making them sore that's the person that might lack the awareness piece or the opposite right the other end of the spectrum

right where they're burying themselves every time and that is where they think that that that's the productivity that they're looking for they think anyways right but that's not what they're actually they should be after right so it could be on either end of the spectrum right someone who doesn't think they're working hard enough or someone that's working too hard. Well, that's what I'm saying. They may not have the – like they're three days into a new program and they're already kind of complaining, not knowing that there's like a bigger structure and there needs to be days where you're slowing it down.

Right. So I suppose that all begs the question, if the practice days are kind of like the easier days and then the competition days are the hard days and the mental toughness days are like the really hard days. Like how do you with those three different types of training days, how do you break that down kind of percentage wise? Like how many easy days, how many hard days, how many really hard days? Yeah, real simple question, but a great one. The practice days. So what we wanted to do in creating this model is have it look like what sort of sports training and life looks like. So two

sort of examples, like there's our existence as humans, and then there's what's worked in the history of athletics. For the most part, we divide it into 60% practice days, 30% competition days, and 10% practice or mental toughness days. So 60-30-10 split. And so most of the time, it's about maintenance or fine-tuning or learning a particular skill or increasing your strength just a little bit. And then 30% of the time, it's game time. And then 10% of the time, it's just like,

oh shit, hit the fan. Now, who are you when things get really, really gnarly? And that to me reflects a lot of, it's a combination of life and sport. Yeah. Can you, I want to, I want you to clarify what you mean by practice days, because you're not saying 60% of the time you go to the gym, it's PVC pipe only. And you're just practicing dry reps. Like that's not what you're talking about at all. So can you go into exactly what you mean by those 60% of your practice days? So what we do is we break up our training cycles into three macro cycles per year. And what we're trying to think about is the longevity of the entirety of the gym.

So we get together with our 12 coaches and we say, what are you seeing, Doug? What are you seeing, Mike? What are you seeing, Andy? And we get that feedback and go, okay, where can we take the bulk of the gym and try to move them all forward? And so we're like sort of forward thinking, like, here are some of the movements that seem to be lacking or the strength qualities or range of motion qualities or whatever it may be. And then we go, okay, over the next year, we're going to sort of prioritize one or two things and start to move the gym in that direction. And then within each macro cycle, we say, okay, we're going to do five different tests. And they're basically

based on energy systems. So you've got a glycolytic test on Monday, phosphagenic power test on Tuesday, oxidative energy system test on Wednesday, and a lactate shuttle one on Thursday. And then we have a kind of a combination one on Friday based on whatever we've missed. And so from that, that creates a basic dropdown menu of all the movements that you've tested. And then you're going, okay, we've got three months to expose and dose people enough so that they get more competent and increase their ability, whether it's skill, power, strength, speed, endurance, whatever type of things are needed and expose them in very intentional doses across those three months.

Does that make sense? Perfect. Okay. So then, sometimes I don't know with your glasses and you can speak, Mike. I don't like, are we thinking about unicorns right now? I don't know what's your glasses, and you just be Mike. I'm like, are we thinking about unicorns right now? That's always kind of running in the background. So we test unicorns also as part of our programming methodology. It's really cool.

Mike's thinking about Ashley's Christmas present. So that creates a drop down menu you break down all the all the things that you're looking at training and then you try to dose the population as balanced as possible over those 90 days and then you retest them just to see if you're moving

the bulk of the people forward. So on the practice day, you'd show up. And let's use all three of us as an example. So we walk in and it's a practice day. Maybe all three of us are doing different workouts. We're all doing the same workout. And is it all just barbell only? Are we going to go really heavy?

Is it hard? Is it all just not going to break a sweat? What's that practice day look like? So on a practice day, it can be a variety of things. Usually we have an algorithm that kicks out specific movements. So on each of the practice days over the sort of three-month block, you'll know, okay, I got front squats today, a strict pull-up, double unders, and some sort of rotational movement. So you've got four movements. And so the head programmer, Chip, at our gym will then say,

okay, look, since we're knowing that we're going to be on a strength progression, and we're testing a 1, a 2, a 10 rep max, depending on what it is we're doing, we've got sort of a systematic approach throughout those 12 weeks of the sort of strength stimulus, just to sort of clarify that. So then all three of you would be doing the strength squat. And then the second or third and fourth movements may be put together as a triplet, as some sort of conditioning piece. Or based on what we're trying to do with each of those things, they might live as individual pieces. But we try to integrate it throughout the cycle as thoughtfully as possible. So sometimes it looks like a conditioning piece.

Sometimes it looks like a skill development piece. And sometimes it's a combination of both of those. So your practice days are still hard. Yeah. They just have a purpose. They could be heavy. They could be conditioning-based. You're just practicing being better because strength is a skill, right?

Totally. Right. Totally. So that's the skill you're practicing. Yeah. And so sometimes that's what goes missing because the perception can be, oh, this is not hard when, like you said in last week's episode, sometimes that isn't necessarily a requisite for development. And so we understand that physiologically, but then the consumer experience is very different. So the consumer is often saying, well, I want something that's harder.

So this is the coach's dilemma, right? This is the programmer's dilemma. It's what people want versus what people need. And so if you know that people need something that is going to unequivocally make them stronger, faster, more powerful, more skilled, you have to be clever enough to do that in a way that keeps them stimulated. And that's like, look, we did this, like we're in the fourth year, we just completed the fourth year of doing this thing. So we've completed 12 cycles and we're going into our 13th cycle in January. So we've seen largely just massive, sustainable development with a population who has by and large been retained and stayed with us that's really incredible just to be kind of keeping in mind the same population for that long time well yeah i've

never done that i've never i've never said i've had this athlete for four years and and uh we've been planning this thing out thinking about you know 20 years right well what i was usually like where we're going to try to get this person? Where were they last year? And where do we want to be next year? Well, what's funny is that we are now going through what I would say is our first growing pain, which is that we finally got the population.

Like the population is really, and again, we're everyday people. So we're not like a, we're not a competitive gym. Like we intentionally chose. We're not training people for the Olympics. No, and we're not. We're the games now. Yeah, no, we're not a competitive gym. We intentionally chose... You're not training people for the Olympics. No, and we're not... Or the games.

Yeah, no, we chose not to do that. We made that decision five years ago, and we've stuck with that. So it's a very intentional play. However, we've also realized that we've kept people moving in the right direction. And these people have advanced to a certain level that our programming model is going to have to advance with them to keep them engaged because they were fully engaged for about three, three and a half years. Some of the older population still, for the most part, everybody's like bought in, but we have this like five, 10% of the population. It's like, okay, we love this

basic methodology. We've seen that we're able to sustain this, come in day in, day out, and we're not like a lot of members at a lot of gyms that are there for 14 months and then gone and broken and burnout and doing something else. They stay with us. And so now it's like, okay, what do we do to advance this? So what we're going to be introducing in January is a new layer, which is the idea that I got from a buddy of mine who has been following our programming. He has his own program, but he owns a gym in London, in Dublin. And what they do is they do same thing, 60-30-10, practice, competition, mental toughness. But then within each practice day and some of the competition days, they have base and peak. So what that allows is because we've trained our people now

to not just throw themselves at the walls. We've trained them to go, hey, where are you at today? Where's this whole thing? It's not just the ego wanting to go get a workout and beat the person next to you. Like we've deconditioned the mindset of only attack, only compete. Compete when it's appropriate is sort of the more mindful approach. And so now that's cultivated. So at this point, we're going to introduce the base and peak thing. So the students are going to be able to go cool. Like if we're looking for some sort of squat adaptation, we're going to have the, um, the more advanced people or the people who can sustain it. And, and the coaches know, and they know as a practitioner, look, I can go a little

bit harder at this point at a higher intensity. We might see them doing, you know, uh, three by eights at 70% on a front or a back squat. And then their conditioning piece be a little bit more sophisticated, maybe bar muscle ups and a couple of other, you know, pieces, double unders, et cetera, versus somebody else working at a reduced percentage, working for quality specifically. And then it could be a combination of single unders and ring pulls. So you're still getting the same pull jumping stimulus with a conditioning piece, but it adds in a level of complexity for the people who have been showing up, turning up and adding to their overall skill level and simultaneously developing their ability to check in with

themselves and their coaches day in and day out go ahead sorry uh with um with the user experience that you're coming in on those uh the practice days yeah uh you you can easily convince them to stay at a moderate level because when they know they've got 30 competition days days and 10% mental toughness days, it's not hard for you to convince someone to back off today because they know, hey, the reason we're going on a practice day today is because next Monday we've got this hell and a mental toughness day.

And they go, oh, okay. As opposed to you saying, hey, I need you to back off. Why? Well, because you're over-trained. Back off. I need you to slow down. There's no like, no, I'm going. I'm going.

But now since it's so structured the way you have it laid out, it's like, look, Tuesday, it's going to be a really hard competition day. And then next Friday, and then guess what? In three weeks, we got this really tough mental toughness day. Yep. And I think that's going to make it much easier for them to listen to you with those other days where you say, hey, we need to practice your double under skills. Yep.

Why? Because in three weeks, we got this competition day coming. Oh, now I see why I have to practice that movement. Right. As opposed to you saying, you need to get better at it. Why? Because in three weeks we got this competition day coming. Oh, now I see why I have to practice that movement. Right. As opposed to you saying you need to get better at it. Why? Because you'll get hurt less. Well, I'm not really hurt now.

Right. Okay, we'll go. Yeah. Well, like, but I need to practice. But I'm not really hurt. Yeah. No, no. We need to get better at this so we can beat this score because last time it's, you know,

et cetera. Right. So I think when I was at that same seminar with Doug, that's when I was like, oh, I think this is how you make these CrossFit or other systems usable to the entire population where you can build in these different things because now we understand the goal of all of our days as opposed to the goal being work hard.

Like that's not our goal. Our goal is longevity and this is how we do it and now I understand why I'm practicing this skill today and I'm not just doing it for 10 reps because coach said 10 reps yeah i i think that's where like unintentionally like the some of the market missed like like i i fundamentally believe in crossfit like i really do think it's an amazing training system that that changes people's health but that also assumes that it's being done in a way that's, for the most part, sustainable. Right. Like, and there's certain risks, like you're doing movements that will,

I mean, if you're under load, if you're not, like, whatever, like you could lock out and it might not be locked out under a very heavy jerk or snatch or, you know, you could be racking, you could be unloading a sandbag and just get something in your spine. Look, there's risk in this stuff. But the overall idea is to create Wait, time out. So Andy just broke and I'm going to show you why I just broke too. And I don't know if it's hard to break me or not, but Hunter was just going like this.

While holding the camera. And so, yeah. I don't know what the fuck I was talking about, but just fucking with kind of a lazy eye too. Just one sort of like, ah. Yeah, so it's a mix of like. I think he got bored and started thinking about last night. Totally.

At the Bledsoe house. Totally. Camp Bledsoe. I'm like 60, 30, 10. He's like, night and night. What the hell's going on in here? All right, with that, I think we should take a break. We'll come back and talk about stimulation.

Most of my life, I was considered a hard gainer. Through years of trial and error I found what worked for me. We use what my team and I have learned over the years to create a program for building muscle just for you. Thousands of athletes have already completed it with astounding results. Go to MuscleGainChallenge.com right now to join the team that's committed to developing a bigger, stronger you. And we're back. Talking to Kenny Kane. Which leads us to

mental toughness days. How do you break the will of your athlete? I'm not sure if that's actually what we're talking about because I cut Mike off. He was going somewhere with something. I'm sure of it. We were talking about the three different types of training days and a little bit of practice days, and that was more. I think we probably ended up leading with that as the first thing

because that's probably the most challenging thing for a lot of people where safety comes in because so many people associate CrossFit with the mental toughness and the competition pieces. And so it's almost unnecessary to lead with competition because it's so ingrained already. And so we'll leave that last. I'm curious about the mental toughness days because what I've seen about how you program mental toughness sometimes isn't necessarily metabolically tough. And so I think a lot of times people think about, oh, mental toughness.

I'm going to do a million deadlifts, run really hard, row. It's going to burn a lot. That's not necessarily what mental toughness means what is that uh when you're programming mental toughness what are some ways that you're doing it that isn't necessarily uh breaking the the person physically well there's that's a really good question and volume has become right volume and load has become a very challenging piece to programming good mental toughness days. But there are so many ways around creating a mental toughness experience. And you could do three really hard glycolytic intervals. And that's one of the things that Dr. Galpin, after he took the seminar, he went home and did one of our workouts with his wife.

Oh yeah. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Can you actually, I want to just tell him that cause that's really, really cool. It's, it's, it's an example that we use in the, in the workshop. Um, I think I've mentioned it here on one of the podcasts that we had done a few years ago, but really it's, it's just three rowing pieces. So, and it's like, I like to look at mental toughness as an opportunity to go meet yourself when things are really, really tough.

So it doesn't have to be Murph, let's say, or, you know, Eva, or, you know, 100 deadlifts at 225, followed by a five-mile run, followed by a four-mile rock, followed by 700 pull-ups. It doesn't have to be that. I like a game of Scrabble. We could do that. We could turn it into a drinking game and make it really difficult. I thought it was going to be like that boxing thing where you box around and you play chess for a round and you box for a round. We have done that as well.

That's mental toughness, Ken. We've derailed him. No, we have, but it's funny because I work with Don Rosso. Some people might follow him online. Very interesting guy from SEAL Team 6 and he brought in some of his guys. And so I had him doing word puzzles and shooting baskets.

And these guys are used to grinding on workouts. And to see these, I mean, if you know who Don Rosso is, he is a very accomplished SEAL Team guy, very well-known Team 6 guy. And, you know, watching him and some of his buddies shoot baskets and then solve word puzzles on top of this other sort of workout piece, it was mentally tough for him. Right. That's not normally what you're talking about. I know.

So the example that we were going to use is one mic that we can also use as a practice day and as a competition day. But let's just use it as a mental toughness day. So here's the workout. You're going to row. You're going to row 500 meters as fast as possible. How long does that normally take? Anywhere from really, really fast people, low 120s. So it's a minute, two minutes.

Yeah, a minute and a half, two minutes for the bulk of people. 145 is probably a good collective average in our population. So you're going to row it as fast as you can, and then you get exactly three minutes rest. At three minutes, you're going to row the time that it took and row as many meters as possible in, let's say it took 145. So you're going to row as far as you can in that minute and 45 seconds. That's going to yield a result. Let's say it's 460 meters. So you probably won't get nearly almost as far as you the first time because you set the 500 the first time, which will be a little bit shorter. You're an exercise physiologist. You know what's going to happen. Three minutes. If somebody did a hard

glycolytic piece at a minute and 45 seconds, you're just not going to recover. But done in the mental toughness context, you go as hard as you can knowing what's ahead. Like something really ridiculously horrible is ahead. If you've tried to match your 500 meter row time and you come back three minutes later,

you get a result. Most people are going to row somewhere between, some people are like 430 and some people are going to be, you know, 460, 470. Every once in a while, you see somebody in 480, 433. Yeah. But if somebody hits 520, they sandbagged it.

So that would be a practice day sort of example, which I can go into in just a minute. Yeah, but if somebody did that, then they screwed up the mental toughness day. They're missing the context. They didn't go hard enough the first time. Yeah, and they didn't want to hurt. So they're missing the context. They didn't go hard enough the first time. Yeah, and they didn't want to hurt. So they're missing the value of the class. They're missing the value of the experience because you're going to be able to dig yourself out.

It's just a matter of can you and will you. Sorry, but this is one thing that I know Julian has talked about. So one of the problems with doing all competition days is that you pace a lot and you figure out how to slow and what do I say about gas here. Your mental toughness days is like, not only are we going to eliminate that piece, we're going to throw it out the door entirely if we're doing

the anti-pacing. If done correctly within the context that we're trying to provide. Still moving well and all that stuff in good positions, but you're trashing pacing and strategy completely out the gate saying go as hard as you possibly can you know you got two more rounds but don't save anything for the next two rounds clear completely and then see how clear completely

get the next time and then the third piece worry about it when you get there right and this is all survivable but by the third element i mean people people are, you know, that intensity relative to the first effort has dropped significantly. So now you're really producing physiologically about 60%. So now the third time you're back that 500 meters and now it's a time trial again. So the first time it was. So actually you row for time the distance that you got in the second effort so let's say oh that's what so let's say you row 460 meters then you row 460 meters for time and usually even 40 meters shorter is 5 10 15 seconds longer just in the first trial yeah just on a

mental toughness day so now a very easy you winded this one oh yeah i did it right after natasha and i did it too it was great we did on the airdyne though because i don't have a rower worse oh man and so no winning so one of the things one of the things we do one of the things we do good though it took 10 minutes you know or whatever it's it's literally 10 minutes yeah it's 10 12 minute workout and what you can do in the context of a mental toughness day is you can deepen the experience for the people. So you can just simply say, look, if you get after this thing in the first round, you're going to be a fractured version of yourself by round three. But that's a really cool opportunity to decide who you're going to be in that moment. So sometimes what we'll do is we'll,

we'll write post-its of somebody that's important and put and place that on the rower by round three. Like, who are you going to, who are you going to be to stand for this person in your life? So then the mental toughness, like, would you be the type of person who will stand for your son or daughter or wife or husband whatever it may be on that third round and yes you're not physically you're not going to produce the same result but the experience it's it's not about like the physiology of it it's about the experience of it and going to another place and using the physical body as a vehicle to deepen your experience and now that's like a really that's a really profound way to change a very simple

workout, three glycolytic intervals. Now done in a competition format, it would be about maximizing as close to your upper abilities as possible as level across all three sets. So you don't want to sandbag it because then your collective times and distances or your collective time will be really slow. So you want to be in that sort of 90 plus but not quite 100. You can come back three minutes later, still get at it again,

come back three minutes later and be pretty much right on there. And that's like a skill. That would maximize your score. And that's a lot about pacing. So learning how to understand your body, what stroke rate you need to be, what damper setting you need to be, where you need to be at 125 meters, 250 meters, 275, and with 125 to go in your last 50. You need to have that mapped out like an athlete would first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter of a game. And you get geeked out and calculated and like, how am I going to yield my best effort in this thing? So you're competing against yourself. Maybe the other's like, all right, Andy, let's see what you got. We're going to compare results when this thing's over. Okay.

Let's see. Then the third example would be the practice day. Now on the practice day, that's when you're kind of going, okay, look, on the first one, you're going to lock in at 28 strokes per minute. On the second one, you're going to put it on a damper setting of two. And on the third one, you're going to do it at a damper setting of 10, just to sort of learn, experience, practice. Is it a workout? Yes, it's still a workout, but the experience is vastly different. And so every workout, and I just use that as a very simple one because it just demonstrates you can really add to the dimensionality of the experience. And I feel like where the market is going in fitness, there's such a strong movement to the commoditization of intensity.

And so like a lot of, um, there's a lot of being, a lot of money being thrown in the fitness market at like making intensity, very condensed down, very easy, very digestible, low skill type stuff. But what they might be missing in that is sort of a deeper experience. And so that's what we're trying to provide is like, look, here's this experience where we're asking you to grow with your physical practice. Like there's some responsibility for your clients in this environment. And a lot of people aren't into that. They're like, fuck it. You know what?

That sounds great. It's a great like self-development program. But A, you're not my therapist. And two, I can go to Orange Theory. And like, you know what? You're right about both. But it's also like the physical body is connected to the brain and to the heart, and this whole thing can be a way richer experience if you want it to be.

And we're just trying to make space for people to sort of allow that experience to deepen. There was three things I liked about it a lot. Number one, I knew that my task coming was going to be awful and it was only going to be a few minutes long. And so it was like the best warm-up I've ever had in my life. I took a lot of time. I knew the whole workout was going to be 12, right? Because I didn't have to be like, oh, I've got to get this in.

You spent 45 minutes warming up. That's okay. Yeah, exactly. And I didn't feel like I was wasting time because I knew I needed to be able to get in everything set to go to right here that was what i liked the most number two i also felt like okay i know this is not coming again for like another 10 days for me yeah or something and so i was able to really be like there's no when you get there then also be like well you know you gotta train again monday like i don't know there's no because it's just like this is it this is where we going. And I know it's not happening for a long time again.

And I also knew this is not about getting the best number. I don't even know what the number is going to be at the end. Right. This is about being awful. Right. So this is, there's no score. Yeah. At the end of this, you're trying.

So if you get there faster, good. Yeah. Like, that's the idea. And number three, it was incredibly easy for me to explain to Natasha. Yeah. Like, here's what we're doing. Bang, bang, bang. Okay.

And then she immediately got it. She didn't have to be like, okay, what are we doing afterwards? How do I do this? And how is this going to relate? She's like, oh, great. And she hates these types of things. And we're back again. Technical difficulties resolved.

Technical, yeah, whatever. I hope. I hope. We're going to wrap it up soon, though. It's going to be brutally chilly here in, whatever. I hope. I hope. We're going to wrap it up soon, though. It's going to be brutally chilly here in a minute. Good example. And tacos. So tough here.

Tacos. Kind of hit mental toughness day. One example of what that might look like. What about competition days? And this is, again, what most people associate crossfit with yeah yeah i think i think one way to think about um competition days if you're familiar with crossfit it's basically like how crossfit's existed like a lot of couplets a lot of triplets with a variety of time domains so we'll have workouts as short as two minutes

and then we'll have and sometimes we'll do use, use CrossFit Total as a great example. It's not even metabolic. It's just the three lifts done maximally, you know, in 45 minutes. So it's, you can't get that heavy in that amount of time

with three lifts, but it's a fun way to sort of divide things. And it really is about using everything that you've been working on and practice and that grit

that you've been developing periodically to try to put it into practice. it's game day and so during game days a lot of things are tested um i thought 30 of the training it's 30 of the training and i find that like um julian talks about this i talked with him at length when we were in london together a couple months ago but um julian if you don't know Julian Strongfit, who a lot of people in the strength and conditioning world are finding out about now, he talks about you got about one or two

sort of really hard efforts per week. I would agree with that. I think that beyond that, you just start to lose intensity. And there's so much to be gained from the intensity. But the way that I like to think about it is like your training doesn't always much to be gained from the intensity yeah um but the way that i like to think about it is like your training doesn't always have to be peak intensity nor does it have to be like gentle like mild pilates pilates class it can be an undulating experience of everything

in between and if you have people who understand that on not just a physical level but on a mental and emotional level going look i'm i'm here to come in day in day out and do this thing for a while knowing that even the most basic things there's always room to to grow in just i mean your air squat mechanics improve right push-ups can improve your pull-ups can improve i mean that that those are fundamental basic movements that like most advanced CrossFitters just go, ah, but there's always ways to modify or tweak things. Always. And it doesn't have to be trickery.

Ido Portal just put up a post that I really appreciated. And Mike, you might have reposted this, or I don't know if I saw it on your feed, but it's a really interesting post. And on the first part of the post he was doing this back flip and he said this this catches our eye it's this like massive amazing experience of what a human being is capable of but it was juxtaposed to juggling a small ball juggling soccer style a small ball and and the question was which one requires more skill? And that to me is a really sophisticated, interesting response. Because at first glance, it's like, oh, the backflip. But then when you think about it,

the body, each time you're juggling, is responding and nerves are going in a different pattern every single time, responding to something that you don't know moment to moment what's going to happen. So on a neurological level, juggling a soccer ball may be more complicated than doing a backflip. And yet our culture is very interested in tricks and metrics. And although that stuff is the sort of the thing, the gold standard of which we should in some hand be judged by, it's metrics. It's pure. It's not a matter of opinion.

It's just the power that you're producing. But that unto itself lacks humanity. That's great for a lab rat, but I feel like as human beings, there's much more space for the process of all this stuff and if we're only focused on the tricks always somehow managing and metrics which is to me the crossfit equivalent of tricks in sort of the movement world or the move net world or ito pertel's world like or the the idea of tricking like this metric driven thing can be like overly intoxicating and and somewhat debilitating because it's so um unidimensional in its experience and at a certain point that just plateaus like people just get drained of it well i think i think

the metrics that we're focused on are based on these big absolute numbers and they're like it's like looking at uh quantity metrics uh, quantity metrics versus quality metrics. And so like metric is not, I don't think it's so much about to me when I think about that, when I hear that, I think, well, a lot of these metrics are more about the quantity than the quality of,

of whatever's happening. So like what's typically measured in a CrossFit workout is, is a quantity metric yeah yeah yeah and it's very definable standards and so that's easy to measure it's very easy to measure and so what i'm talking about is like keeping all of that and keeping all that very clear and so we have very defined metrics to understand all this stuff for our population and within our training methodology but then beyond that is this experiential layer. Like what's the experience?

And is that experience sustainable? And that's the part of the conversation I feel like across the industry has room for growth and maturity. If balance and longevity and sustainability are something that is compelling, if mastery of the basics over time happens to be compelling. To me, I find that fascinating. I don't feel like there's a, like the squat should be something

that should be looked at a thousand different ways and played with and augmented. It's still improving mine after 20 years. It shouldn't stop. And it's a basic. It's foundational. One of the things that I was really impressed with is your method is so simple. Right.

Practice most of the time. Compete a little bit. Go crazy a little bit. A lot of people could go out and implement this almost immediately. Right. A lot of people do. They'll hear this and they'll go, oh, it makes sense. Right.

It's not that much more complex than that. But at the same time behind this, you have an incredibly complex but still fairly user-friendly method of putting these things all together so that everyone in your gym could use the same broad approach but yet still get their individual goals.

Right. You need to be able to overhead press more. Your deadlift is your problem. Your rotary stability is your issue. And so this is all built out kind of behind the scenes. So on one layer, it's extremely simple. Boom, boom, boom. But you've actually built the infrastructure behind that that allows you,

your coaches, yourself, and other people to pick up this skill set from you and be like, oh, okay, I want to actually implement this in my gym. That resource is available. We didn't have the time to get into a lot of it, but it's there. The coaching tools, we give it out at the workshop or whatever, but basically it allows the coaches an opportunity to kind of go, okay, I know that Doug has a little bit of shoulder pathology.

Mike had at one point, hip issues. You've got short femurs, so who the heck knows what's going on with you. Short femurs, no cartilage. And so, you know, we might want to. It's a birth defect. So those are. A movement defect, yeah. Those are conversations that happen with, like, if you have good coaches and you have coaches who care about the students and coaches who are connecting

with the students daily there's opportunities in those environments for to go for doug to go look there's some the shoulder stuff that i'm going to be working on within this particular workout he's going to be gone look i just came back from hip surgery x y and z you're going to go i'm going to lengthen my femurs by having doug and. Whatever the thing is. I'll have those two pull my leg anytime. Whichever leg they want. The intent is that with time, students start to take increasing responsibility for that with the coaches. So it's like a mutual thing.

But that's sort of built in. And that requires sort of advanced coaching. That requires advanced understanding from the students as well. Yeah. I know I was really, Doug and I had the same sentiments. Like when we showed up to your workshop, I didn't really even understand what was about to happen. And I was like, cool. Another programming coaching workshop. Like, awesome. Like, and I mean that as sarcastically as possible.

And then once you got into a little bit and there's so much more about how you set these people up, the language you use before the different workouts and how that can be different, how you can put them in different positions that we didn't really have time to get to today. But I was shocked with that stuff. And I remember just being like, oh, my God, my students have got to hear this. I just didn't realize any of these things. And one of my students, actually, they just turned in their macro cycle Friday. And the whole thing was set up basically.

It was 60-30-10. Like all broke down the whole year. Are you allowed to send that to me? Can I take a look at that? Yeah. That's cool.

I might get back to him. But I can get it from him. It was really cool. Cool. Look at it. Time to wrap it up? Sure. Doug's like,

I got to eat some tacos. I just want to go get tacos. That's all I'm thinking about right now it's been hours since my smoothie tacos are next we gotta hit these or else Doug will pass out

if I don't get my tacos in time tacos train go home yeah nice actually if people want to find out about the mastery method couple things they can do just go to mastery-method.com,

and there's going to be some information up there. We have a couple of international workshops that we're going to be doing this year. We had originally scheduled one for June in Australia, but my wife and I are having a baby in June, so I'm going to be in Sweden at that point. But I will be in London in May teaching this as well. We're going to be putting up some domestic dates,

and those might be online by the time this episode airs. If not, just email us through the mastery-method.com website. We can fill you in more on when the domestic. Yeah, so day one of that covers the programming, the specifics, numbers, how many reps, the sets, and all that stuff. Then day two is really more about the integration and stuff, right? Yeah, and really this is basically just a tool, a workshop for coaches to coach better and to think in more simpler ways but understand things with more complexity. And it's also interactive. So at the end, you actually make them write out their own programs for their own gym.

Then they have to come back and they have to deliver it in front of the rest of the group and they go through it. So it's not just like you're sitting in an audience for two days. It's incredible. Our opinion is not that we come and say, this is the way to program. It is rather, come with the tool set that you have. We're here to help you accelerate that and make that better. And my sort of long-term goal with the development of the mastery method is that people who come through and learn come back.

People much smarter than us come back and wind up teaching us a lot. Because there's some people who are really sophisticated, who really get programming on very advanced levels. And I'd like to see, you know, those people come back and start teaching. Already that's happening. For example, the Basin Peak thing that another gym's doing our thing.

They integrated that. We're like, we're going to do that too. So it's one of the first examples of people that have studied us that are now teaching us. Right. So, and rather, and I teaching us. So it rather, and I see the strength and conditioning world and this last thing I'll say, sometimes it's very divisive.

So it's a lot of like people saying they're most right about whatever philosophy that they need to hold on to. And I'm, I'm very guilty of that myself. I just went through like an egotistical thing about the mastery method. Now I'm starting to learn to let some of that go. But like it's, as we divide up our spaces in the fitness industry of like,

who's the most right at like, this isn't about being the most right. It's this is truly intended to be a tool to help people better serve their clients as the Sherpas they are. And with that, we're out. Thanks Kenny. Appreciate it dude. Peace.