Barbell Shrugged - How to Track Workouts and Objectively View Progress in the Gym w/ Anders Varner, and Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged - #481

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

In today’s episode the crew discusses:   Why tracking workouts is the necessary to see progress The best methods for tracking your workouts Why tracking reps, sets, and weights is beneficial for success Tracking calories and quality of food. Tracking sleep and recovery  Things that go beyond objective numbers and why you should track them  How to track progress if you hate tracking progress And more…   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   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   www.magbreakthrough.com/shrugged - use coupon code SHRUGGED10 to save up to 40%   http://onelink.to/fittogether - Brand New Fitness Social Media App Fittogether   Purchase our favorite Supplements here and use code “Shrugged” to save 20% on your order: https://bit.ly/2K2Qlq4 

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, how to track your workouts, what metrics you need from nutrition to mindset to how you feel to the actual weights, reps, and sets that you have on the bar to make sure you're getting all the gains, making sure you're getting everything you need to move forward, progress, and get stronger. Before we get rolling though, I want to thank our sponsors. Our boy Yannick is going to hook you up. Everybody out there that is trying to start a podcast right now, if you've had an idea but don't really know how to get high quality audio, you don't really know how to produce an episode or all the things that go into what you hear on Barbell Shrugged each week, it's much more than just laying down a show and then putting it on Spotify or iTunes. There's an entire process that we go through

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And if you're like me, trust me, you are dying to just see fitness between, should you wear a mask? Should you be rioting? Should you be protesting? And should cops be defunded? I think those are the five things, and is COVID-19 real? I think those are the five things right now that I'm the most tired of seeing in my social media because I only follow fitness people. I only want to see fitness people working out. I only want to have fitness conversations. And trust me, if you go to Fit Together, you can see just the fitness. F-I-T-T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R, Fit Together. Download it in all the app stores. Find me at Anders Varner. We've got a special group, Barbell Shrugged,

for all Barbell Shrugged listeners. They're going to be doing a massive giveaway at the end of this week. So make sure you get over, download the Fit Together app, and find me, find the Barbell Shrugged group, and have a chance to win some really sick prizes. Let's get into the show. Tracking workouts and the metrics you need. Get all the gains.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're talking about tracking workouts. I'm really excited to hear what you guys have to say about this because this is something I am terrible at. I have been very, very inconsistent throughout the last 23 years of tracking workouts in my brain i have a little checklist of like a 1rm a 3rm for most lifts but i know some people that can go into their glove box

of their car right now and pull out journals from when they were like 14 years old with every single rep every single set every single rpe every single like how they felt with the accessory it's like a legitimate log going through and i'm stoked to find out how you guys did it um throughout your entire career and then also how do you guys work with athletes or what you're looking for in in log sheets from people that we can start to use to make them make them better faster um duggar where's your where's your log sheet do you have the old ones from like from like 14 years old snatch and clean and jerk uh no not not that far back i actually lost recently uh one of my favorite my favorite ones when i made like the most progress uh back from like like 2005 when i did the i did a training program and I broke all my PRs.

I hung on to it for a long time and now I don't know where it is. Usually, I just use regular old spreadsheets. I just put all my movements in the movement category and then I have set 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and I just write down the weights. That was traditionally how I did it. I might take notes next to things, but I didn't take a lot of notes. Just bullet points, but not like journaling. Some people journal the whole training session, so they have a big store of their thoughts and feelings throughout.

As long as I had the numbers, I did this many reps at this weight, etc., then I felt good about logging it. I actually can't wait to hear because you go into some serious tracking stuff from your sleep to your weight. You have a very long list of things that you're tracking throughout that are more health-related and personal stuff than just workouts. Yeah, I use a tracker app. I think it's called Track and Share. I think it costs a couple dollars in the iTunes store. It's very simple, which is why I like it.

All you need to do is just tap each thing, and it'll click yes, no, or it'll be blank. I just want to know, did I work out today? Yes. Did I have any alcohol today? For that one, I actually have a little rating system. It's like one, two, or three, or four. I never drink more than four drinks a day.

You had five drinks? What do you do? You're messed up, man. Dude is lit. Five IPAs, just like nine percenters. Doug will be hammered on Tuesday from drinking Saturday. Yeah, but I track all kinds of things on there. For each one of my boys, did I take them out and give them some one-on-one time?

Did we go somewhere one-on-one together? I want to see how am I giving each one of them roughly equal time one-on-one? You know, I'll track more, like, personal things between me and my wife. Like, you know, do we go on a date night? That way I can see, like, how many date nights we've gone on. Like, did I go on four date nights in July and then this month I only went on one date night? Like that type of thing. It's just so easy to set up and it's so fast to do that. You can track,

you can track almost anything. And then visually you can see, you can just see the month of, of July and you can just see like, you know, on the, on the first, there's a big green check mark. And on,

and on the fifth, there's a big, there's a big X. It's just big check marks and X. So you can see your whole month very easily. Like, you know, is it all check marks for working out or is it all blank

yeah you can you can very see easily just go oh yeah cool three times a week four times a week two times a week six times a week and you can just see exactly how much you train yeah it sounds so cool mash did you track uh all of the all the workouts i mean dude you were you were pre computers you had to go back into the logbook. Yeah, I was writing in a journal. Yeah, writing in the notebook for sure. I had stacks upon stacks of journals. Yeah, my mom still keeps them. They're somewhere at her house.

There's some craziness. You'll see. I can't wait to show my kids. I was the most insane powerlifter that's ever been. I have no doubt. I just went heavy every day. I was the Bulgarian powerlifter for sure ever been i have no doubts like i just went heavy every day i was the bulgarian powerlifter for sure yeah retarded i wouldn't have any of my athletes do what i did

so i would have them aspects but i definitely would not have them like maxing out every day of their life but i did that same thing and that's probably why I didn't. I used to try to keep it. I think that if you're doing the body part split in the first, call it five, seven years of working out when you're doing a lot of bodybuilding stuff, and trying to remember what your incline press is for six is just really, really hard. You're not going to be able to remember every single number. Like you're not going to know what your front raise is and how many reps you got and when your form broke down. So being able to do that, I think once I found CrossFit, it was, there was like five numbers that I cared about. It's like, what's my Fran time? What's my back squat? How much do I snatch? How much do I clean and jerk?

And what's my deadlift? Everything else didn't matter. Everything else was just training. And then I had specific things that I would set up. One of the workouts that I would always test myself to be, 20 rep back squat was always one of them, just so I knew that my legs were in shape to be able to compete and like mentally be able to check in um but another one that I used to always do periodically throughout the year just to see how strong and how well I was moving

um was 30 reps 30 snatches at one at 185 as fast as possible trying to go 3 on the minute. Once I was able to snatch 185 for 30 in under 10 minutes I was like oh, okay, we're ready. Time to go play. As far as

rep maxes goes, I mentioned spreadsheets a minute ago. If you have a spreadsheet where across the top it's just like 1 rep max, two rep max, all the way through like 25 rep max. And then down the side it's just a bunch of different movements. Not necessarily like attempting to hit a 13 rep max. But throughout your training, like you might just have a weight on there. And you might happen to do 13 reps. And it might feel like, okay, I couldn't have done any more reps. You might as well go log that on a spreadsheet somewhere where you can just keep track of

all your different rep maxes, even if they're not your goals. I've done that before and I actually really like that. If you have a really good idea of your one rep max, your five rep max, your 10 rep max, and your 25 rep max, and then you can graph those things if you want to. I've done that before. Just kind of see what that curve looks like. Like am I way stronger at 25 rep max with leg stuff compared to pulling exercises?

Yeah. It doesn't necessarily help me make that many decisions, but I definitely find it interesting. Yeah. I just, once you start to get into that, I always found, as I get older, I find that the biggest motivation for me in training was always having fun. So maxing out is always fun.

Nobody doesn't like maxing out. So for like an entire year, I maxed out six days a week. Like Monday was squat. It was like 2RM every Monday. 2 or 1RM every single Monday. Tuesday, like snatch, 1RM. How much can i snatch especially when i couldn't snatch 225 and i would stay up at night and it would just eat at me that i couldn't

snatch 225 it was like the most mentally gruesome thing that i could snatch 220 anytime i wanted and then 225 was just like this giant number five whole pounds just haunting me every night so every tuesday i'd max out i had to wednesday was clean and jerk thursday was some sort of press friday was back to squat or front squat or back squat like every single day and obviously that wasn't the greatest training program that you could possibly be on um but once you once i like got past one rm um those numbers just became like training numbers to me and you know as we talk about a lot it's like they can vary so much on any given day based on what was done the day before uh what was done the day after so like being tracking those things

and remembering every single detail about them after a while just started i just started to realize like that's just it becomes way too cumbersome it almost becomes its own feat like in a way it becomes like tracking your macros every single day you're like it's yeah you should be able to do it yes you should understand the food that's going in your mouth and you should be able to understand all the reps and sets and the training program that you're following and be able to look back and see where you were and how you got to where you're at. But there's a cutoff point where it just becomes insanity where you're tracking every single tiny thing that goes into your training. It literally just depends on your goals. You know, like if you're trying to be a world champion,

you need to track every single thing that there is. You know, like there's no way to do the West Side Method without tracking three reps, five reps. You don't really have to track the 10, but I agree with Doug. You know, if you do a heavy 10, it feels like something that you couldn't do any more of. It'd be cool to know so you can track progress over time. To do the max effort method, you have to know what your three rep max is. Otherwise,

you don't know if it really is your max effort. You need to know threes and fives if you do that method. If you don't, you don't really need to. It's not a big deal so you guys heard dorian yates talk about tracking like when he was when he was on top and was uh mr olympia for however many years that was my favorite of all time yeah dude he's just said he has he has just you know very basic notebooks and he just you know but he has like stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of them from all the years of his training. He writes down everything, every rep, every set, how he felt, what his rest intervals were, what he ate right before he went, how many calories, all those macros.

It's just he has all of it documented. He was like, whenever I needed to make a change, I knew exactly where I was. I knew exactly the change I was going to make. I documented the change. People come to me and they want to train with me or they want me to train them. And I ask them basic questions like how much protein you're eating. And they say, oh, I don't know. He goes, how am I supposed to help you?

You don't even know what you're doing. How am I supposed to tell you what to change? I don't know what you're doing. I guess step one. He would not like me at all. According to him. Yeah. Huh?

He wouldn't like me at all. How much protein do you eat? I don't know. I had three big helpings today. He'd be like, all right, step one, start tracking. And then come back to me when you start tracking. Well, I mean, that's what I really wanted to talk about because i feel like i'm on the the very low end and in my brain i have rough metrics that i've i deem to be important and that i value like when i ran the mile and i was like i should be able to

run a mile at this and then i didn't not even close. And that irritated me. So I started training for it. But I feel like I want to be able to just walk around and be like, oh, I run a 630 mile. That's just what it is. And like if somebody wants to know your 20 rep back squat, I know that number. I don't know what my one RM back squat is right now. But I feel like there's just, there are numbers that I deem valuable that give me an overall sense of I am fit. But when it gets into accessory movements, and this is kind of the next level down of like, when you're tracking accessories, I sometimes wonder if even more than reps and sets, it's the ability to kind of journal and write where your brain's at, how things feel versus, you know, are you adding five pounds to the bar every time you do a single leg deadlift or every time you're doing split squats?

Are you, your ability to write like five pounds each week for 12 weeks like so much of the stuff that we program in workout is to develop a feel with weights and it probably isn't even specifically needed that you're increasing weight and that's that's start of kind of like where where i start to lose the value in in me personally how how i'm tracking workouts i can see what you're saying like when i do a single leg deadlift or rdl single leg rdl i'm doing it for the movement. I'm not necessarily trying to load it or I'm not trying to, but it just depends on why you're doing it. But when I have an athlete, for example, and I program a front squat carry, there's a reason. It's because I see some flexion in their thoracic spine.

And so to make sure that we actually get it strong we have to increase the load to create an adaptation so like if they just do carries which happens a lot which is frustrating for me because i'm like you might as well not do it at all because if you just do front squat carries and you don't try to increase the load or increase the volume you're not going to do anything so if like one week I do 135 and then I'm like, oh, I'm in a hurry. I'm just going to grab this 95-pound bar and do it. You should have just left and went on to do what you needed to do because nothing happened. So you do that.

It just depends on why. That's a good point though. I don't track my single leg RDLs. I'm doing it for the movement, not for the weight. I wonder how much of the training age really comes into it because saying feel is a very broad term for – I hate that word. Yeah, like if somebody – but I feel like if I say it to you guys,

you guys know what I'm talking about. Like I just want to feel good in this movement. I'm focused on movement patterns, and I'd like to go heavy. I'd like to add five pounds each week, but that stuff just at 20 something years into this, it's just, it gets boring to think next week I'm going to add five pounds. I just want to go play. So I do want to just feel good and movement helps me do that. And adding weight to it challenges the movement and makes me feel good. And movement helps me do that. And adding weight to it challenges the movement and makes me feel better. But to go back three weeks and think that like I'm climbing the linear periodization or climbing the ladder five pounds a week, and then in four weeks, I'm going to back

it down five pounds. And then I'm going to go climb it again for three weeks and then do a deload week. I just don't have that rigid of a training schedule that I can actually go and do that. Which comes down to your goal. It depends on your goal. Are you trying to be the best at something or are you trying to get stronger at something? It just depends on ultimately your goal and and like how important it is to you like my athletes we track insane amount and like that's as soon as school starts it's about to get even more insane yeah so that's why i'm so stoked to actually have us three on here because i i'm the dude that goes into the gym and just feels like i'm playing around for 60 minutes yeah i

just go hang out and whatever we want to do i just go go do it. I don't care if we do legs five days in a row. Yeah, legs five days in a row. I don't care. Let's go squat. But you actually have people in four years who are going to go stand on Olympic stages and you want to know how much water they're drinking every day. I want to know everything. We're going to track obviously total volume, we're going to we need to know total

reps we need to know average intensities you know we need to know relative intensities um there's a thing called the k value that we're going to you know find out we need to know optimal number of lifts that's all based on preliminary chart you know we're going to know the velocities we're going to know you know with omega wave you'll know their cns, with Omega Wave, you'll know their CNS, their PNS, and we'll know their anaerobic, aerobic capacities. It's like, yeah, we'll track every – I'm tracking every single thing now, especially with Velocity. And like a company like Gemma Ware makes it so easy. Like it just – like it happens. Like I write in the number I'm about to go because I'm trying to see how fast it is.

Well, then it's tracked. So they track the volume for for me i don't even have to put in sets of reps they track that all i have to put in is the weight i'm about to do and it tracks sets reps so it does a lot of that for you you know thank god because that would be tedious but um yeah we'll need to track everything man because you're talking about you have a team changing things you know yeah do you have a team that comes in like do you have the nutritionist that looks at it and says it this needs to happen and then like a sleep ish person that comes in it's tracking recovery and making sure that they're down regulating before they go to bed and like the whole system is built out um with people for each specific part.

Yeah. USA Weightlifting, once you get to a certain level, they have a sleep guy, they have a nutrition person, but at Lenore Ryan, we will have that at our school. That way it's, you know, I can be more involved. And there's like this big, there's a big website that they're developing to where we all get on there together at separate times and fill in information and we can all start to see everybody's you know, like I can see the sleep, you know, because the sleep person is documented. I can see the, you know, the recovery because the recovery guy's doing it.

So yeah, it'll be, it's going to be intense there. And like we have some really, it's amazing, Eleanor, Ryan and Hickory, North Carolina, how many incredible exercise scientists there really are. It's just luck that it all has fallen the way it has. Is Morgan coming out there with you? Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah.

I assumed he was. I'm not leaving without Morgan. I hope one day he comes into the gym at like 11.30 on a Saturday. He's like, let me see your workout log. He's like, well, last night I had 74 natty lights and just slayed. You're like, that's not on track.

That is not on track. You are too strong. Settle down. You're like, Coach Bash, I learned from you. You told me. I listened to Barbell Shrugged. Oh, God. I'd be so mad. So, no, like that – Morgan is already – we're already starting to track his –

you know, we're tracking his K value. I maybe talked a little bit about it. It's a kind of – it's not as complicated as it sounds, but there's a ratio you come up with. You know, it's like a coefficient that you develop. And what happens is like you need to know the number of reps you did, the total volume you did, and you need to know the average intensity for a training cycle. And so it leads to a coefficient that equal to like a 300-kilo total. Then you use that same coefficient to do the equation backwards to say, like, now I want to increase my total to 315 and then you have this

number now i need to make an average intensity that's five or ten kilos more than i just did yeah it's pretty are you tracking rpe with each of the lifts that comes out or do you just do that through the speed side of things velocity because the reason I don't like RPE is because it's so – Feel. I use it a lot. Yeah. But it's like – but I prefer to use velocity because it's feel. It's a hard number. Yeah, you can't quantify feel. I really hate that word.

Yeah. What do you mean by feel? Because you'll have young athletes say the weight feels fast or the weight feels slow, and they're so emotional at that age that that means nothing to me. Cause I'm like, I'm watching it. It's super fast. Like it is not slow.

You're just broke up with your girlfriend and you're pissed at the world. And so you're saying that cause you're mad, but like, it's not, it's fast. And so I love velocity because there's no feel. It's like, it is,

or is it, it's either going fast at 85% or it's going slow. Yeah. So you can make going fast 85 or it's going slow yeah so you can make a real and it's good for them to to be like you know shut your mouth you haven't you had a bad night with your girlfriend but you're really strong today so get focused yeah how does when you're when you're looking at the k value i think you mentioned it like three or four shows ago uh depending upon when this airs but um when you're building an accessory work or like pure bodybuilding work, does that count towards – so that's just getting jacked, but it doesn't count towards snatch and clean and jerk?

No, only it counts as snatch, clean and jerk, any power snatches, power clean, pulls and squats and presses, anything that's directly related to snatching cleaning and jerking that's it uh like you know we don't count blue hem raises or or carries or any of that that's just extra so are you do you track all their accessories as total volume for the week but not based on specific to the clean and jerk or snatch clean jerk yeah i'm, I'm not saying that that equals a better snatch or clean and jerk. I'm just trying to attack a certain region of their body. I have no illusion that says that a front squat carry is going to equal a better snatch or clean and jerk. It's going to help me stabilize their spine, which should help me a little bit.

But it's so far away from the exact list that it's no point in tracking and like a carry for example you know there's no eccentric there's no muscle damage really so it's not very hard to recover from either yeah um i feel like when people start out though i mean we're talking about people that are going to go to the olympics and probably stand very very close to top of the podiums if not on top of the podium uh i i feel like the tracking thing if you were to kind of take it all the way back to the the opposite end of the spectrum and talking about beginners i think tracking is probably and having a notebook and writing down notes for how people feel.

One of the biggest benefits is just about movement quality and confidence around lifting weights. I even noticed that some with myself right now. Like if you took me into a globo gym and we went and did like inclined bench press it would feel awkward because i haven't done it in so long and i think the confidence around weights is like one of the biggest things that you can you know just get just getting comfortable lifting weights just being in the weight room and and seeing movement over and over and over again, going and practicing, like there is a massive benefit to just the idea of adding five pounds each week to the bar and going on 12, 16 week training cycles where you're just, I mean, you can do that

for so long, especially when you're doing body part split workouts or you're just, even if it's full body three days a week, but you're going in and just the same repetitive movements over and over and over again, just to practice movements. I remember doing that and having, like, one of the hardest things to overcome when you're just getting started and working out is feeling confident in the gym. We all have these, like, weird hangups when we get in there at a very young age or whenever we're starting. It could be adults. And you think everyone's looking at you, even though no one's looking at you. You'd like to think everyone's looking at you.

No one's looking at you. But you feel so goofy because you don't know what a bench press is supposed to feel like. So the bar just goes down to your chest, and you push it up, and it looks awkward. And you know it looks awkward because it feels awkward. But if you can sit there and add five pounds each week and actually go on a 12, 16 week training cycle where you're just doing incline bench press three days a week, and then you go and do bent over rows three days a week for the same reps, but you add five pounds or you add two reps. There's such a massive benefit in, in just being comfortable and seeing progress. And I think that that's one of the things that people in the CrossFit space really lack when they're getting started is that they don't actually see the progress.

You may do Fran twice a year. You might do Murph for Memorial Day Murph once a year. And now you've got people that have no metrics to actually be able to see growth. And the only way to – That's the problem. It's a big problem because if every single day is different and everybody is writing their scores on a whiteboard and all you're doing is getting hammered

and you're in the bottom quarter of the class every day, you never actually see yourself climb the leaderboard because every single day is new. You never develop that muscle, the brain-body-muscle connection to actually being able to get stronger, for lack of a better word. And get better. Yeah. To get better at movement. You don't snatch enough. You don't – anything that's very complex.

Like, you know, do you need to deadlift all the time? Probably not because it's not as complex. But, you know, snatching, cleaning, if you're doing any gymnastics, like, you know, even squatting, I think, is complex enough that you need, you know, quite a bit of frequency. Like, you know, you need to do it to get better. Otherwise, why do people practice basketball every day? Why do people practice baseball every day? Why don't they just do it once a month and go play a game and see what happens? We're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors over at Organifi.

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This is such a good conversation that I've had way too many times, especially when I own the gym. It's like gym owners and coaches are – especially when you're training gen pop and you're just working on getting people leaner and stronger so that their abs pop out just a little bit or at all. is the balance between consistent training that works and keeping things fun and exciting and flexible and doing something new every day because it's cool. Because people want to show up and they want something new. They want something that's novel every single day because it keeps it fun. They don't know what's coming.

But the best training program for most people is to sit there and do the same training block for 8 to 12 weeks. Right. Take a deload week, back it down a little bit, and probably go back to something that's very, very similar that's a big compound lift again. And just keep adding 5 pounds to the bar for many, many years until you get to a point where it's like it's boring. And now you're really looking to go play some sort of sport or some ad like really start chasing heavyweights right i think um people would sacrifice maybe that you know initial joy of like change all the time but when in six weeks they retested you know that big movement that they dig like snatch or they're trying to get a muscle up or, you know, whatever it is. And then in six weeks, they, you know, they do more weight or

they do it better or they do it for more reps. That feeling is 10 times better than that daily, you know, excitement that you get from a brand new crazy workout, you know, like that feeling of accomplishment when you can overcome something is second to none that's why we do it like it's why i do it you know feeling when i you know squatting 500 pounds again it was just that feeling you get is nothing can replace that doug how did you guys do that in fact training i was gonna say that i feel like the people that really love training like they're totally fine with the monotony of it because they just they just love it no matter what like you can tell something front squat heavy every single day it's the same thing every single day and every day

they wake up fucking excited to go smash weights i even read that on instagram yesterday i was like i just do legs seven days a week i don't have a choice i just i don't want to do anything else i just sit there and front squat every day if you want me to front squat with the sandbag a front squat with bands a front squat with a barbell front squat with a barbell, front squat with dumbbells. I don't care. I'm just going to squat. I don't want to do anything else. I just want to do front squats. Dude, that band thing Corey Gregory talked about is legit.

I have to admit. I'm trying to get on it. Did he send you the program? Yeah, tell him. I want to know. We're writing that book, me and him. What are we doing in the roundtable? Tom Ross. Whenever.

It would be awesome. The Squat Every Day Roundtable. Squat Every Day Roundtable. Whenever you want. But, like, so he – What do you guys do when you guys push the book out so we can get people doing it? He just front squats with bands. It's mini bands doubled.

And so, like, you start the first week as, like, two bands. And you do, like, a day of pauses, a day of non-pauses, a day of not pauses, take it off and keep going. Anyway, so like I started week one with two bands and went up to two bands per side, which the bands are legit 25 kilos each. Like because it took two reds and a green and collars to hold the damn thing down. It was insane how much tension is is that like the quarter inch band or the one inch band that you're talking about the reds the red minis whatever i don't know you double it see what happens i got a bunch of stuff hanging around me adelaide steals my little bands all the time if you go look there's a video on my uh instagram

and you'll see i actually like took video the the whole thing, how I set it up and what it looked like. Anyway, so the first week, all I did was like 105 kilos with two bands per side, and it was hard. And then fast forward to the next week, I did three bands with 115 kilos added. So it ended up being something ridiculous. with 110 or 115. Yeah, three bands with 115 kilos added. So it ended up being something ridiculous. It was like 170. It was 260 kilos total at the top. And it was brutal. But it was like in one week, my body adapted to the bands.

Yeah. And I did it faster. So I did more weight, more bands, and faster. And then I took the bands off and then set a 10-kilo straight weight pause. I did 470 pause. And so the thing is legit. I don't know. I need to know why.

It bothers me because I don't know why is that working quite so much. He's got that Corey Gregory touch. I get more people hitting me up about lunges now than i can even i can't get through the dms i can't get through enough of them everybody talking hitting me up with cameras in their face doing lunges talking about cory gregory i'm like i know the dude yeah just keep doing the lunges you get jacked he's never he's never put a picture on the internet yesterday dude i thought you only had six abs and then the real shred of people have eight he's got 12 he's got 99 he's got all of them he got he's got the top serratus thing going oh my god that

dude knows his training he might not know the science you know he might not be able to talk about k value and velocity but i tell you what he has never seen of all the people in my lifetime i have he's probably i've listened to him the most isn't that crazy like i've always just like i'll try that and it's always worked incredibly well like i feel like there's some people like that they like and it's actually really pertinent to this show of like having intuition about your own training and and having things that are really important and it goes back to the idea of like having intuition about your own training and and having things that are really important and it goes back to the idea of like this feels right and i'm getting stronger faster i don't need to know the numbers but it takes just so long to be able to get there and he's i mean the first

time i talked to cory he was like dude i wake up at three o'clock in the morning because that's the only time i'm guaranteed to have my own time during the day to go train. And I just love it that much. And the fact that I got 20 something people that want to show up and bang barbells with me at three 30 in the morning, that's a dream come true. So I show up at three 30 and we get to work. I was like,

that's my dude. I want to hang out with that guy. I love that guy. Sunday after I had that squat workout, I text him and like, we had, you know, like you have that oxytocin

kick in. You're just loving life. I'm like, bro, you're so amazing. Once they get us out of the coronavirus captivity, we're going to go to Ohio and just hang out with Louie for a day. Louie can be like, that's American squatting. Not that strong. He'll be pointing right at me like, that guy's so

average. So below average. I love it. And then we'll go hang out with Corey Gregory at 4 a.m. Yes. And Dave Tate and Jim Wendler. I mean, it's weird how many people are in Columbus. I thought those guys were in Texas. No.

They're in Columbus. Everybody we just talked about. Mark Watts, Corey Gregory, Dave Tate, Jim Wendler, Louie Simmes, Matt Winning. Call Colton. JL. JL Holdren. We've got a documentary coming out.

Documentary time. They're all there, man. Film another one. Doug, going back, did you guys struggle with programming or was it pretty well accepted at faction? Um, kind of that balance between creating new constantly varied, uh, workouts every day and,

and understanding that there is like a real science to, you know, linear progression and the fact that we need to be repeating how, how did the programming conversation go with faction for you guys? I feel like most, most CrossFit gyms, they graduated from just doing random Metcons every single day. This happened 10 years ago where everyone decided maybe we shouldn't just do random Metcons, completely random every day. We should have some structure which Metcons can be a part of.

So I feel like a lot of people move toward having a lot of structure for the strength portion. Like you might have some, you know, like they might do 5-3-1 type structure for heavy squatting. So every Monday, you know, you're doing five reps this Monday, three reps the next Monday for however many sets, etc. But then the Metcons were a little more random. You know, like the structure of the Metcons would change. You know, some days it's round for time. Some days it's AMRAP. Some days you have buy-ins and cash-outs and all that. They try to make it look – we try to make it look different every time.

But if we're cycling back to our conversation about movement patterns and total volume, the movement patterns and the total volume were cycled on a schedule. But the way we made the workouts um look made it look different but if you were educated and you you could see the patterns and you knew the concepts behind it all you could see there was a progression there but the clients didn't know that yeah they wanted different every day so we gave them kind of different every day they have something yeah not different every day of everything. Doug, when you trained with Rich Froney, does he do random or is it well thought out? Well, I never trained with him. We'd gone up there to his place and hung out quite a few times, but I never went up there for weeks at a time and saw what the day-to-day looked like for many days in a row.

But talking with him, if I remember correctly, and you can go back and listen to these shows, he, on those shows, basically said that it doesn't matter. You don't need to have structure. You just need to show up every day and just fucking work really, really hard and just do a lot of volume. Wow. That blows me away. I think the show we did with him, we did a show with him and Ben Smith. I know Ben Smith. He's been on my show.

He said the same thing. We had six people on the show that day, and I can't remember. Wait, Ben Smith's just a random throw-it-all-together guy? The day of, he just throws it on the board. Oh. That's what he told me. I don't know what their training's like these days it might have changed since you know i talked to you know we did these shows five years ago it's been been quite a while but yeah yeah back then uh you know he was just like you know doesn't matter you don't have to have like a big this big comprehensive periodized training plan. He said that last year.

He said the same thing. Five times a day. I was like, what? Like, I mean, I just would assume that, you know, what do you think? What does the dude now who's like the best of the best? This is Matt Frazier. Matt Frazier. Matt Frazier.

You think he's like that? No, those – they all have coaches right now. Thank God. His husband does i rich froning and i don't he's obviously a freak but he was like and he finished 19th in the world in the open so it's not like he's not a freak anymore he still could go out and win the games next week if he needed to probably i mean not actually do it but he would be he could stand on a podium next week i'm needed to. I mean, not actually do it, but he could stand on a podium next week, I'm sure.

Game time, let's go. Can he beat Matt Fraser? Probably not, just because there's an age to that. But he's top 20 in the world. Yeah. I feel like

in order to beat Matt Fraser and Tia Cl Claire to me at this stage in the game, because when Froning showed up, he was just, he was so much more athletic and so just far ahead of everybody. Like I would imagine that Froning had a great strength coach in high school that taught movement patterns really, really well. And he didn't know that he was preparing himself. He was probably just a little bit not good enough to play baseball. And he was probably a little bit not good enough to play football and a little bit too small to play this. And when you're a little bit not fast enough and when you're a little bit

not tall enough and a little bit not heavy enough, you are the perfect CrossFitter because you're a little bit not fast enough and when you're a little bit not tall enough and a little bit not heavy enough you are the perfect crossfitter yeah because you're the most athletic person like froning's the guy that when you were a kid that was like hey can you do a backflip and he'd be like i don't know try it huck yourself over and he does like a perfect backflip like he just he was probably the most athletic kid always. And then he showed up and destroyed everyone because it just wasn't popular enough to have 15 people that were Rich Froning. Like Matt Frazier didn't even know

you could be a CrossFitter. So he was in the Olympic Training Center playing all the other sports. But I think that those people now, they have super dialed in nutrition at least for six months a year when they have to really start pushing it. I know Hinshaw moved to Cookville, Tennessee. They've all moved to the same place. i mean we all know that it's not just how much weight are you lifting it's about surrounding yourself with these champions all the time so the mindset that they're all training with is all it like to get into that training group

is the hardest that's the hardest part where do you have train? He trains there? Yeah, he trains in his garage with Tia. And him and Tia are the only two people on this planet that can train together. Wow. And then Rich Froning. So he trains at Mayhem, and then they've got garage gyms, each of them. Oh, so they all live in Cookeville now. All of them. And they've brought –

Matt, Freddie, Tia. God. Tia moved from Australia to Cookville. To Cookville, Tennessee. And Henshaw moved to Cookville. Yeah. What's the 18-year-old girl's name? Haley.

Used to coach her, right? Yeah. Yeah. She was at our gym. She moved to Cookville. She's a beast so there's there's like five six of these people plus the teams and they all just moved to cookville to just smash so like they just no team this year and well there's no anything really but um

but yeah i mean to i so shane tia's husband does all of their programming and he's probably a very i mean he put t on the olympic stage and he's won a handful of crossfit games now um so yeah all the all of their stuff whether they know it or not and i'm sure they do is very very dialed in if you you should have henshaw on your show he's not a strength coach but he's got a super killer brain and he's like the speed or the running right and he like the endurance person that's where he got in um but he's such a he's a he's a metrics number guru. Oh, good.

He breaks down all of their stuff. So complex. I think he's – the last time I interviewed him, I kind of left and thought like, oh, this guy is like just such an energy system, like genius. Yeah. Um, I had one of the coolest moments with him. So I used to do this workout called, uh, I didn't call it anything, but I would jump in a pool and swim. I tried to do 500 meters underwater as fast as possible in 25 meter spurts and um since that's like one length of the pool and uh he was talking to me and he was like well when i started working as soon as i got down to cookville and started working with everybody because their swimming is so bad and everybody freaks out the water very first thing that i had them do was 500 underwater as fast as they could and i was like

that's my workout i feel so smart right now. But yeah, I did a lot of underwater training when I was out in San Diego for a very long time. I've seen videos of you like underwater with dumbbells and crazy stuff like that. It's awesome. But yeah, like stuff like that, when you get into like, how am I going to track that? Because I'm just playing around. But that's just where i'm at with my my goals my goals now like um but i feel like all of those people like you were saying if you're gonna be the best in the world you might not be specifically tracking how much you're eating but somebody is right and if you're not tracking your recovery somebody is and they're going no you're not best i don't think you can be the best you know this

better than anybody when morgan walks into the gym your eyeballs aren't watching some guy walk into the gym like you've never met them before your eyeballs are so trained to watch somebody walk yeah that you know if there's like a hip issue you go oh whoa why what happened where where's that coming from why why are your eyes droopy today did you sleep like shit like you know you have like the the smell test you just look at him and you know everything that's going on on the inside of his body because you're so tuned into every single aspect of his life to get that extra 0.1% out of him every day. So somebody's tracking everything with those people. They just might not be writing it in a notebook like the average Joe.

That's cool. That's good to know too because after talking to Ben Smith, I'm like, this makes no scientific sense. It blew me away. And I think getting back to Froning, the last time I saw a really long video of his training where somebody was down there for a couple days, he just – it's like he knows what he's doing. But he also is like playing the game every day. He's just going super hard.

But he knows that I need to go long. I need to go short. I need to go long, I need to go short, I need to go heavy, I need to go light, I need to do speed work, I need to do this. It's like, there's a map in his brain and he may, and instead of explaining the map to

most people because it's so complex and so deep, he just says, yeah, just kind of make it up. Yes, he is making it up a hundred percent. It's on the fly, but he could tell you probably why it's like a, it's like a golfer going out. They could tell you every single shot they hit at the masters last year, where it hit the club, every, every ounce, you ounce, what draw, what fade, where they went wrong, where they hit the ball too long. You hit a billion golf balls and you go out to the range,

you go, yeah, I'm just going to hit balls today. That's not what's going on. Morgan's not just snatching clean and jerking. There's thousands of those movements going on in his brain each time. So if something feels weird weird he doesn't need to write it in the notebook of that felt weird he knows it's weird and you're going to look at it and go what happened yeah where was that let's not do that again because then that's a bad movement pattern all of a sudden that now we got to go fix yeah there's a new speaking of that there's a new

software that i just tried out it's called coach now Now and like it's kind of raw, but it's so awesome because it has Coach's Eye built into it. So it's like a Facebook group. It's like a social Facebook group. But on every video I can easily go in and it's automatically Coach's Eye. So I can draw on it. I can it. I can do audio voiceover. It's the coolest. It just made my life so much easier. All coaches. Coach Now is so easy. I hope we're

not sponsored by another software company. Anyway, it's awesome. It's so cheap too. Is this an app? What is that? It's an app. It's called Coach Now. You can Google it, and it's like $300 a year for unlimited athletes. It's super, super cheap when you break it down per athlete,

and it makes it so much faster. I would see something on Facebook, and you can't even draw it. I can't do anything on Facebook. You can just say some things. So what I would do, I'd say, look, you need to send me that video. Then I would go to Coach's Eye. Then I would put it back. It was so tedious.

But now I just can go in there. I can voice over. I don't even have to type. It's so fast. It's the best. It made my life so much easier. So I'll gladly give him $300. Here you go.

Yeah. How do you generally use Coach's Eye and the drawing features with your athletes? What are the most common ways you do it? It depends on what their mistakes. I'm about to put a really good for example, I'm about to put up a new video all about the clean. I posted a video

on Twitter the other day about somebody doing an awful hand clean where they really hinge because I posted a video on Twitter the other day about, you know, somebody doing an awful hand clean, you know, where they really hinge it and they're using isolation more than doing anything. And I was like, this is not the same thing. And then I showed a video of Morgan, and I showed that ugly video again. I said, this does not yield the same results as I showed Ryan. And it blew up.

It was like, you know, it's probably like, well, 30,000 views on Twitter is a lot, you know. And so then I was like, do you guys want me to do like a really good, clean video? They said yes. So I'm using Coach's Eye to show the feet. You know, the feet normally start at hip width, and then when they jump out, I draw another line. You know, then they normally go to shoulder width,

and I show a circle, the elbow, as compared to the knee. I draw a line showing bar path. I draw another line showing center of mass, like shoulder, arms, bar, and then the middle foot. It's cool. It's just so much easier. So many people like us, men, a lot of boys, men, learn visually. So it's just – it gives the visual, the audio, and then I can type it too if I need to. I think Barben started putting up a lot of videos like that as well.

I saw one on the jerk yesterday that was just beautiful. Oh, sweet. Yeah, the little circle thing, how our position at the bottom was exactly the position that it was at the top like elbows all the all the angles were the exact same and it was just like it was gorgeous yeah i don't move like that i love squad university does a great job of you know of uh doing the voiceovers and the drawing and just explaining things, making it seem simple. Yeah. So.

When you guys get into or working with people and the idea of tracking things and keeping people's heads in the game, do you do any like goal setting on specific like metrics that you are tracking throughout? Like if someone's going into a big squat cycle, knowing that in 12 weeks, specific metrics that you are tracking throughout? If someone's going into a big squat cycle, knowing that in 12 weeks you want them to be squatting X amount, does that help with your athletes, Travis?

Here's exactly where I want you to be. It depends on the person. You tell one person and they obsess about it on a daily basis and it ruins them. Another person understands how to regulate. Ryan is really good at being very cool on a daily basis. Things aren't going to be 100%. And so he knows his body better than probably. That's where he's slightly ahead of Morgan.

But Morgan's getting much better. Morgan will get pissed and he'll try something like five times. Ryan realizes that he never does it. If he misses, he probably misses once at most. And normally he doesn't miss. So it depends on the person. Are they obsessed?

Hannah, I probably wouldn't tell her that because she'll focus on that number and lose track of everything else. She needs to focus on movement, you know. Yeah, I think that's where like the tracking thing really starts to go wrong. And I think it's really easy for people in the nutrition world where they start getting like they're tracking macros. And then they cut out the gluten. And then they go – they're so far down the rabbit hole in everything that they're tracking that they just can't live their life.

And it is goal specific. Like if you are trying to go be the best in the world, you probably need to do what the best in the world do. Yeah, because Anders, you don't want them to go 80%, do you? No, dude. You're not going anywhere. You're not going to be good at it. You could do it.

It is possible to do it, but it's going to be a tough road. You're not going to win at 80%. Yes. You're not going to get there. If you do 80%, I'm going to beat you. Do 80% all you want. I see a lot of people in captivity right now while they're in there. They're doing 80% laps around my block.

No one's getting swole. They're just jogging. You're wasting time they're working on their respiratory system it's good though 80% of it is yeah I think that like you said

it really depends on a lot of people I'm one of those people that I just in my brain if I'm, I'm one of those people that I just, like, if, in my brain, if I'm, if I'm about to start, uh,

SNAT, like, some 12-week block specific to SNAT, clean and jerk, um, I only really want to track those, those big,

high numbers. Like, what am I hitting every day? Because that's what all percentage work and, you know, accessory stuff is built off of

but inside there it's like level one what's the goal of that cycle level two the accessories and everything that goes into making that better that's where i fall off because i just every day everything's focused on the highest level and then after that, for the most part, I end up not being able to track. And then under that, it gets into like, how does it feel? How are your movement patterns? And you start working all the way down the list. But those are, that's for me, just because it starts to just become very cumbersome that I'm worried about so many details that it just, it becomes like a mental battle for

me to even stay in and actually be reporting and communicating that stuff to myself. So I think everybody just kind of needs to figure out like where you're at and understanding your own personality type in this and then figuring out what works for you. I think anybody that is sitting there with a notebook in 2020 and writing out sets and reps um and and tracking all their accessory stuff i just look at them and i'm like you are you're awesome you're gonna have this notebook for your whole life yeah looking back of you getting super jacked and anytime i see people that have those old notebooks and I go through them, I am like, I love,

I love going back. My, my old partner at the gym, Brian still has all of his notebooks from when he was a teenager. And probably like two or three years ago, we, we went back and just like thumb through them. And it's legit.

Like if you just add five pounds to the bar, try to get an extra rep, you're on a great training program. And we were doing body part splits at Gold's Gym back in 2001. And training's legit. We were strong. You put the hundreds up for six in the incline press, you're a boss in the incline press, you're a boss in the gold's gym.

Man, I look back at mine now and be like, I don't even know who that human was. I'm like, how did I do that? As a 47-year-old man, I'm like, I would love to just be that strong one more day just to feel that power, to be able to triple 500 on bench press. It was just, I can't even imagine that now. Like, you know, like, I can't even imagine tripling 400, let alone 500. Yeah.

That was so great. I look, you know, I'm like, man, it was insane. Or like, you know, doing my heaviest squat of all time was 11 35 i'm like and then i got hurt like i never got to produce it on stage because then you know like i think i reached that biological tipping point we're about to find out more about today but yeah just like how the hell did i put 1135 pounds on my 220 pound frame and squat that mess blows me away oh i love it find what works for you make sure you write something down though and i think that is the highest level make sure you're going into each training cycle or into each day with a some sort of specific goal and knowing

that you're moving towards that goal if everybody were to just start there, at least you're reporting back to yourself and having a conversation and kind of objectively viewing numbers and just the ability to go back and look and see where you were, where you're going and where you're at now is just, you can't get away from having to look at your own training program and make sure you're getting stronger. And it's easy to lie to yourself. It's easy to forget all the numbers unless you have something written down saying, this is what I did on this date, and here's where I'm at today. Yep.

Where can they find you, Coach? Go to MasterLead.com, Instagram, MasterLead Performance, Twitter, at MasterLead. Doug Larson. On Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. How much EMOM aesthetics are you tracking these days? I'm sorry, say that again? All the numbers in your EMOM aesthetics program getting jacked. You tracking numbers?

You tracking the numbers? No, I'm halfway through week six i but i don't track the numbers like while i'm while i'm doing it i might walk away and like go tell my wife like yeah i did i did 70 you know i did five four six four four or whatever it is yeah but i don't write any of it down right now it's not it's not my main goal i'm training for my own mental health mostly stuck in my house my kids you know what he my kids. You know what he's tracking, Mash? You know what he's tracking? He weighs 206 right now.

The boy is thick. He doesn't need to track. Hey, Anders, you should go do MMA with him right now. Yeah, right. Doug Larson. I feel like when I actually rolled with him last time I was out in Memphis, I say rolled just because that's what they call it. It wasn't that.

It was pathetic. But I felt like if you I was doing every move against myself. Like when he put his arm here, I would like counteract it with the most amateur move possible.

So he'd like move his hand and I'd move my hand. He'd be like, yep, that's exactly what you were supposed to do so I could choke you. I'd be like, oh, choke me now. Do it. Good night. When we all go to Ohio to go lift all the weights with all the strong people, we'll get choked out

just for fun, see what happens. That'd be kind of cool, I think. When you do wrestling or jiu-jitsu with people that don't wrestle or do jujitsu, sometimes you can't even get to the thing that you wanted to do because they, they kind of just like fall over early. Like they don't counter enough for you to like do your, your full set that you're wanting to practice. And they kind of just fall over and you go, what?

Wait, no, no, no. You can't, you can't just fall over like that. Hold on. I'm not done with you. There's more pain. I'm Andrew Zwarner at Andrew Zwarner. We're Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash store.

Programs, nutrition, online courses. Use the code SHRUGGED to save 10%. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap friends. Make sure you get over to barbellshrug.com forward slash store use the code shrugged to save 10%. We've got so many good programs going up

right now. We've got big sales coming up. Everything in life is just firing over there and we're really stoked to be getting all these programs out to people. I want to thank our sponsors over at the Fit Together app. Make sure you go and download Fit Together in all of your app stores, the fitness focused social media app that just makes me so happy to just see people working out, hitting their macros, going on long hikes, posting handstand pictures. I just love seeing fitness. I love it just being a fitness focused

app. It makes me so happy. So go and download fit together. Find me at Anders Varner. You can find Doug Larson at Doug Larson. And then we have a group called barbell shrugged in which you can party and hang out with all the barbell shrugged listeners get in there. Also want to thank Organifi at Organifi.com forward slash shrugged you save 20% on the greens, the reds and the golds. And then our friends at shadow creative studios get to podcast dot shadow stood dot IO P O D C A S T dot shadow stood S H A D O W S T U D dot IO. Ask for our friend Yannick. He's the one that's going to hook you up to save $200 using the code shrugged and getting you set up with a free consultation to get your podcast from an idea to live in less than two weeks with branding logos cover art and they're going to help you find sponsorships to make your show profitable on day

one that's a wrap my friends we will see you guys next week thanks you guys for tuning in