Barbell Shrugged - Innovative Strength Equipment to Make Strength Training Accessible, Fun, and Engaging w/ Eleiko CMO Jochem Oldenbroek Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #440

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, Anders, Doug, and Travis discuss:   Relationships with the Olympics and Powerlifting Federations How to innovate equipment to make strength training more accessible Rigorous testing process at Eleiko How to innovate new equipment for strength training The responsibility of designing equipment to test the highest levels of strength Why Eleiko is the leader in barbell design and strength equipment innovation. And more…   Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Travis Mash on Instagram Jochem Oldenbroek on Instagram   TRAINING PROGRAMS   One Ton Challenge One Ton Strong - 8 Weeks to PR your snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, and bench press 20 REP BACK SQUAT PROGRAM - Giant Legs and a Barrell Core 8 Week Snatch Cycle - 8 Weeks to PR you Snatch Aerobic Monster - 12 week conditioning, long metcons, and pacing strategy   Please Support Our Sponsors   “Save $20 on High Quality Sleep Aid at Momentous livemomentous.com/shrugged us code “SHRUGGED20” at checkout.   US Air Force Special Operations - http://airforce.com/specialops   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   PRx Performance - http://prxperformance.com use code “shrugged” to save 5%

Another sellout, Ken Folk Fitness One Ton Challenge. Snatch, Clean Jerk, Squat, Deadlift, and Bench. We're testing the lifelong pursuit of strength. And we're having the most fun making strong gyms stronger. Been loving working with all the gyms, getting the One Ton Challenge in there. And the fact that these things are selling out, it's so obvious. We have the new, coolest, most fun weightlifting competition that exists. It's not just another CrossFit competition that's hitting the scene in your town.

It's not a weightlifting or a powerlifting competition. We live in the middle of all of them. We make it fun like CrossFit. We lift the weights like the powerlifters. We lift the weights like the Olympic lifters. We combine them all together. And the most important thing is we're putting barbells in people's hands and smiles on their faces. If you are a gym owner and you would like to host the One Ton Challenge, you need to send me an email right now. Anders at barbellshrug.com.

Anders at barbellshrug.com. So excited because we're working with gyms. We're helping them get these events off the ground, providing you with all of the marketing materials that you need, plus landing pages, leaderboards, everything to keep your community engaged. We've got the emails to let them know what's going on. We've got the social media posts to bring some coaching, bring some guidance, get everybody comfortable with the day, and then the event operating procedures so that you know that you can run a safe, effective, and profitable event at your gym. Anders at barbellshrug.com. This is so exciting. I can't believe this thing's taking off in the way it is.

And I'm just really, really happy that we're selling out events across the country. It's wild to me. Anders at barbellshrug.com. And friends, you can come and hang out with me. We've got two spaces. I feel like I've really, really capitalized on my life here. I am going to be an official judge at the Dixie Deer Classic Venison Chili Cook-Off in Raleigh, North Carolina

on February 29th. If you live in North Carolina, you like venison, you like chili, come rage because this is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me in my life. Get over to dixiedeerclassic.org slash venison chili cook-off. Come join us. Buy some tickets. I'll be there. Take it to pictures. High-fiving people. It's super

awesome. And then, of course, WOD on the waves. Not so much chili cook-off. Much more fitness. We're going to be working out, interviewing. Everyone's going to be down there. I'm so excited. You can get over to WOD on the Waves dot com. Vacation packages starting at $6.99.

And that is going to get you on the boat, eating all the food, doing all the fitness, group classes. We're stopping at Private Islands. We're going to be in the Bahamas. The sun will be out. The bronze will be on. Lots of bronzing. Lots of fitness.

And then we'll probably party a little bit at night. So get over to wadonthewaves.com. Use the coupon code SHRUG to save 5%. It's going to save you like $300 to $500 on the cruise. And friends, we got Yoakum. Yoakum from Aleko. He's the CMO. He's the one that puts the most beautiful barbells in the hands of the strongest people in the world.

And this is a very informative conversation. We'll catch you guys at the break. Oh, yeah. His posture will be like that for at least the intro. I've never seen him beside this guy. Welcome to Barbells Drugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Joachim Oldenbrook.

Yeah. That was as good as I've gotten. I got, Joachim Oldenbrook. Yeah, that's – That was as good as I've gotten. I got that Joachim thing right off the bat yesterday. He's by far the best-looking, tallest, charismatic chief marketing officer here at Aleko. Dude, by the time we leave here, I'm going to have a totally different dialect, totally different accent. It's going to be beautiful. And taller.

You'll be taller. I'll be taller. Yeah, you've been growing. And you'll be able to pronounce your name in Swedish, right? Anders. Anders. I got that one because when you first said that, I'm like, man, this guy knows how strong I am for sure. Exactly. He knows I should be world's strongest man. I was bred for it. Yeah.

I've been wanting to tell you that. Something about 5'8", 190. Says World's Strongest Man. In the midget league. Do you guys have weight classes for World's Strongest Man? No. It's just be badass. You know?

Dude, you're the guy that's responsible for getting us out here, making our barbells yesterday, bringing us to this absolutely gorgeous facility. She's hanging out taking pictures. This is, one, thank you for having us out. This is the coolest thing ever. We get to come hang out with our friends and be at the greatest barbell company in the world. How did you get to Aleko and get to be a part of this beautiful business? I've been with Aleko for about one and a half years now.

And I actually started off as a customer of Aleko. So I opened up a CrossFit powerlifting, weightlifting gym called Unscared in the Netherlands. Called what? It's called Unscared. Ah, yes. And, yeah, so I basically wanted to build a really good premier gym. And Aleko was the obvious choice to also stand out from the crowd and to offer our athletes the best type of equipment. And through the salesperson from Aleko, we immediately hit it off.

He was really helpful. Like everybody here. Right, yeah. I had the same experience from the customer side and uh we hit it off immediately and actually brought like 30 members to sweden to show them the facility after we were open for a year we hosted some of the elaco education we tested prototypes and there was a constant dialogue basically between unscathed and Aleko yeah and at some point I also got in touch with Eric with the CEO whom you guys met yeah and he was like well you have some good ideas so why did you come out in Sweden and go work yeah what are I guess

when you have good ideas and you're talking to the CEO of Aleko what it what it what's like your vision for marketing a company like this and it's a lot easier when you have the best product in the world. Right. That's why we're here. Best product in the world. They called us. Hey, come on out to Sweden. Well, I think to me, the personal appeal was that and just the pervasiveness of the values that seep through everything that was being done through Aleko.

And that was so obvious by the people that work here, the passion that really drew to me. And then, you know, looking at Aleko as a brand and then seeing where the entire fitness industry is still moving towards, which is more towards free weight, which is more towards strength training, moving away from machines. You know, I just saw so many opportunities. And Eric was definitely on board with that.

And so I thought we need to capture that even better because, yeah, we own that space. Your gym, Unscared, is that a CrossFit functional fitness gym? Yeah. Yeah. So we have a huge CrossFit area, and then we have on the side, we have a strength area with five platforms where we, you know, coach strength classes and then specific Olympic weightlifting classes. Do you do any open gym where powerlifters, the elites can come in and do their thing? No, we have made a very conscious decision

to have no open gym and only offer coached classes at our facility. Do you have all LACO bars at this point? Yeah, it's fully a LACO gym. That would be bad. It's fantastic. That's amazing. That would be bad. It's fantastic. That's amazing. The funny thing is...

I've never been to a CrossFit gym that had all Laco bars. Well, and if you have new lifters coming in or new athletes, they don't know any better. So what we did after some point in time, we actually, in our closed Facebook group, we asked our members, hey, please go and cheat on us. Go to other gyms.

Tell us what they're doing right and what we can learn from, which was great. We got some great input, some good feedback. But we also got a lot of feedback saying, okay, now I appreciate our equipment. Is that a lot of the culture here? Because when we were talking to Eric and he was saying that they basically in 2012 went back and looked at the barbell.

You were walking us through the sports center yesterday and you looked at the bench press press machine what's it called it's it's a combo right yeah the combo right it's what they use in a competition yeah and you were saying that the engineers came in and found a list of 80 things wrong where to my naked eye the thing looks perfect and we'll never have to make any updates at all uh it seems like there's a big culture of checking yourself and just a big system of checking yourself and just a big system of really checks and balances to make sure that the engineers are seeing the same thing and that you guys really are maintaining this best in class products yeah exactly well and i think what

also really helps is that we have a company filled with uh ex-athletes or current athletes from all different types of sports backgrounds so and you've guys seen that yesterday as well. We train on the equipment that we build. And so we actually have a lot of testing done in-house because we get so much feedback from guys like Oscar, a powerlifting coach himself. I think this company lives their motto better. Most companies, you go in, they have some kind of statement. It's just some statement.

And the employees are just like, but they actually do it like everything what you guys didn't see there was his hand yeah but like they really do like yeah every human here lives you know their whole yeah we're trying to do good by the environment by other people by our own body yeah they you know it's just cool that the that finally there's a company that yeah lives their statements yeah as the cmo getting that message out uh yeah you have the best products in the game but your job is to go out and share it with the world um what's a little bit of the mindset and process that you take uh coming into a company that's so well established and clearly has the best products and then now you have to you have to start your job and get the message out to people.

What is a little bit of that process, and where do you see Aleko headed? Yeah. Well, I think there's two challenges to it. Yes, we are very well known in a certain niche of specifically weightlifting power athletes that have used our products a lot due to the uptake and just strength training in general we now service a lot of commercial gyms as well yeah good example from the state is 24 hour fitness who now buy a lot of our platforms and bars and discs uh and there you know the end user not doesn't necessarily know a lego

yeah so that's where i have a i have a job to do. And second to that, it's also, you know, we need to recognize that our product is not for everyone. Like there's a lot of great manufacturers out there that build solid products. And we really need to target the customers that actually, you know, value high performance at the right price. So it's also for me to find those customers and acknowledge their problems and their challenges and then showing them the solutions that we offer. Because we're not necessarily a company that can service everyone with everyone's needs.

That doesn't work. You guys have trained, I trained out of Lifetime Fitness for some percentage of my training and they have maybe a dozen aleko bars and then they have a bunch of other bars that are like on the totally opposite end of the spectrum they're like they're like the walmart 150 dollar like piece of shit barbells yeah and and i look and they'll be like someone would be on a rack they'll be in a lego bar like in in the slot like just sitting

there yeah and then they'll be using the shitty bar like they they don't, most regular people don't know the difference. Like it's coming more into the mainstream where like places like Lifetime Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, like even the big box gyms are bringing these very nice barbells into their facilities. But the vast majority of like the regular people still don't understand the difference. So there's lots of progress being made, a ton of progress being made as far as it being pushed into the mainstream. But like the average regular not, the person that's not super into fitness still doesn't know the difference. So there's a lot of room to grow there. But I'm very happy to see that I can go to Lifetime Fitness and I can grab a local bar.

And you're actually talking about education now, right? Right. And sometimes that means going out to the gym owner and showing them that, you know, a decent bar will actually improve safety, will, you know, get a better ROI in the long run, and then giving them the tools to actually tell their customers that they get a better experience by using that bar. We do see the opposite as well. So, again, taking 24-hour fitness as an example,

right now if I go to Instagram and I start searching for people hashtagging Aleko in their 24-hour fitness as an example uh right now if i go to instagram and i start searching for people hashtagging a lego in their 24-hour fitness gym we now see end users actually posting about hey we have this lego equipment in our gym uh and that's great for us because we can go back to 24 hours and say hey yeah this is working for you guys yeah um so thank god that's happening yeah the porsche versus the hyundai man you gotta know porsche is awesome hyundai it's good doing a pretty nice job actually yeah they've done it very well for themselves but now we're talking cars is there is there for the people that listening to this that do the same thing i do that train in a in a regular gym but they happen to have a lego equipment there is there a hashtag that you prefer like that that people that people that are like, hey, I want to, I want to help out and add to,

add to that hashtag or? Yeah. So the two ones we use consistently are hashtag Eleko and then hashtag raise the bar are our regular payoff. And then if people

just tag their gym, that's enough for us to, to, to comment and come back to them. Are you responsible for the,

the raise the bar or was that, was that here before you got to? Yeah. It's so on brand and so simple i love when you walk in and raise the bars everywhere clearly in here um i love when you walk in and you're like oh that makes so much sense yeah who was the genius that thought of that

why didn't i think of that it makes so it's just like this place makes me hate my gym well and it ties in with our value of performance right so yeah we jokingly uh there's a lot of ideas we have with raise the bar one time we wanted to go to an expo and actually have like you know a suspended bar yeah raise the bar and have people drink very strong swedish coffee there but we never got to that that's what we've been doing all day yeah when you the majority of your job really is about education and getting people to understand what goes into making a barbell. Yeah, why it's the best. Yeah.

Do you find that process really difficult? I mean, one, you have a couple hurdles. Like you have to get people that are interested in learning about barbells and then actually giving a shit like what they are lifting on. And then, you know, talking to eric safety being one of the biggest things can you dig into like one why a barbell that is so nice as a laco's barbells like the safety piece being the base of why you guys are making products like this um what what is so much safer about an aleko barbell versus going and using the the walmart version yeah exactly well

we talked about this a little bit when we constructed the bars, right? So both the steel and the knurling, the rotation, and then the extensive testing that we do. And I think those four points really capture how we pursue building the best bar in the world day after day. And we always build products focused on the athlete so if the if the if the actual experience using a bar or any other type of equipment that we make it feels very natural and has that eleco feeling to it and you know i often i often use either cars or phones as example like if you pick up a phone and you understand immediately how it works and it feels right, then it means that it's been designed well. And then if that experience is consistent,

which is also very important, regardless of the weight that you use, regardless of the exercises that you're doing, you know, that's when you basically progress faster and better as an athlete and you build up confidence in your lifts much quicker as an old man i can speak for that like you know if a bar spins it doesn't hurt my wrists my elbows if the you know if it doesn't bend if you've ever done snatches or cleans on a bent bar that hurts and like as an the my goal is to be able to train without hurting and so like you know for the everyday person who has to sit all day at a desk, you want them to come and it to be a smooth experience.

Yeah. You know, if you're going to do squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, jerks, you want it to be smooth and not hurt. You don't know how good the product is until you use one that isn't as quality and, like, it's just janky. And those things are coming. On an inferior product, those things are coming on an inferior product those things are coming

they're going to bend they're going to stop spinning and then it starts to be not a fun experience dude have you tried to do a clean or snatch on a bar that doesn't spin at all

yeah it's awful it's a fucking nightmare you have to like let go and then catch it yeah you're going to do a clean it's like

you know that's exactly what happened to me the first time I tried to do it back when I was talking about our bars that didn't spin because they got water in the bearings. I tried to do a clean.

Like, it was already on the platform. I already had 25 on there and I was like, talking to somebody and was just like, I'm going to do like a quick warmup set and I just grabbed it and pulled it

and was like, oh shit, and just like dropped it. I was like, what the fuck's wrong with that bar? Yeah. And then I was like, oh,

all the bars are messed up and I got rid of all of them. Well, and I think also, you know, that's the day-to-day experience you have with a bar. But if you think of, like, if you spend money on something that has true value to you, I'd rather spend a little bit more and have something that's sustainable. So, you know, I will buy a bar and use it in my own gym. I will buy so you know uh i i will buy a bar and use it in my own home gym i will buy an illegal bar and i will buy a bar for life and i will not only buy it for myself but i will buy it for my son as well yeah and teach him to lift on that same bar and i'm i'm pretty certain that i'll be able to pass that bar down to him and he will

be able to pass that bar down to to his kids later on and and that to me is what we stand for in a nutshell that is a great commercial that you guys should put together. I know. I just saw. Hashtag bar for life. I'm claiming that right now. Bar for life.

If that showed up on my YouTube and you were doing snatches and cleans. I'm writing this down. I like to do this. And then you have a picture of your son using it and then the grandson. And there's like a legacy of the barbell.

Yeah, I wrote my daughter's name on the barbell yeah that was awesome and that's exactly what i'm talking about well it's really cool to i mean it's i'm 36 years old this is my first trip which i feel like with the first time i touched an alico barbell it was like the coach came up to me i had no idea like what it meant to him to have one of these because before weight lifting became so cool and like the majority of people understand barbell movements like finding a nice barbell was really really challenging much less than a laco barbell which is the highest end and by the time i actually got to use one the coach was like look this is like my kid don't fuck it up like please don't do anything dumb and you can tell that it was like so emotionally attached to this barbell and then to be able to have your family out here and make your own is yeah so rad and and to be

clear like these bars are made to be used right so i i have a i have an interesting story from from a few years ago when we um wasn't working for Aleko myself yet but the sales colleague I was talking about, he actually did a raffle and one of the affiliate owners in the Netherlands won an Aleko bar and he didn't want to use it in his glasses

he was like, no, no, that's it's too special and I told him, hey dude these bars are made to perform, you should put them to use. Don't not use them. It's still an equipment piece. What's the point? People are used to their stuff breaking is the thing.

Yeah. I've broken so many small plates, and I've had many sleeves come off the end of my bar. Shit just breaks. And I think people are used to that. If they had all the equipment, nothing ever broke, then they would just be normal. But most people don't have top-of-the-line equipment. They have whatever they can afford, and the shit breaks all the time.

Then they get one nice bar, and they're like, nobody touch it. I don't want it to break, but it's not going to break. The only way you're bending in a LECO is if you drop it on something. Yeah, if you drop it on a safety arm, like fully loaded. Then it might. Well, anything's going to bend at that point. But other than that, it's not bending. Another way point. But other than that, like, it's not bending. No.

Another way to bend it, we're like finding ways. There's three ways that you can do it. Don't do this is if you wreck your bar and then load it fully and just let it rest there

for like weeks on end. I've seen this happen. It will eventually, you know, bend out of shape. Don't do that. But if you're an idiot idiot if you do that. You don't deserve any late-goers.

People get creative. I will bend this. You guys have some really cool partnerships, though, with IPF. You guys have done tons of Olympics and world championships for international weightlifting competitions, IWF. And then the Paralympics. Where do you come into those relationships? Maybe not on the product side but the relationship side are you working pretty

closely with those companies yeah so we have contacts obviously with their respective marketing departments and when it comes to you know the worlds in Thailand for instance it's the local Federation that's responsible for organizing it in conjunction with the IWF. So they work together and then it's us coming in and talking about, you know, uh, specifically, uh,

we, most of the competition, we will build a customized set of, uh, plates, you know, platform, et cetera,

et cetera. So with the logo in there and, and we propose a color scheme. So then it's our marketing department, the customization department talking to their look team, uh, and going back and forth on, you know,

finding a unique design that fits their competition. If someone wants to buy equipment from past world championships, is some of that stuff still available? I saw a Gold Coast 2018 plate in there. Is there a Houston 2015 bumper plate set floating around you can buy? It depends a bit on the type of competition but usually it goes either through the federation or the distributor that we have in place so uh we don't manage that ourselves we usually what happens uh again it depends a little bit per competition but we actually sell to the competition uh for that specific uh event and then it's up to

them if they want to keep it in the federation or you know pass it down to sometimes it gets donated to gyms as a charity effort but that's that's not on us i saw in 2017 at the we had the worlds in anaheim and it was gone like you know they said yeah we're selling it gone yeah we were there yeah yeah yeah for sure i think that's where i met you see so i'm curious you know flipping the script a bit about you have an amazing, like, CrossFit gym with 500 members, which is awesome. So, like, what makes, you know, that gym so awesome? Like, are you guys getting results? Is that family? Like, how is it so awesome?

Yeah, I think running a facility is never about doing one thing right. It's really about looking at every single detail and making sure that you keep the customer that you're targeting at the heart of the story. So, you know, like I said, we made a very conscious decision to not have an open gym. We only coach, you know, group classes and we do that to the highest standard. That automatically weeds out certain people who want to do their own thing which is cool but we then actively show them gyms in our city that do that and that we're friends with uh which in turn gets us members from them that don't fit yeah yeah yeah and then um yeah like like I said, one thing that is interesting is that we in Europe can sort of see what's happening in the States in your, you know, two, three years in front of us. So when I opened in 2015, I was like, okay, now is the time in the Netherlands to open up a professional gym with full-time coaches at a decent rate as well, which will sustain that crew, which will allow them a true career opportunity.

And that, at that time, was still a novelty in the Netherlands. And that attracted a certain group of people who value that. Who do you target? Are you targeting people who want to compete in CrossFit? No, we have different personas that we target, but it's mostly 25 to 45-year-olds living in the city center with an above-average income, highly educated, who already have an active lifestyle.

What does the programming look like? It's going to be super fun to hear about a European. Yeah. So we have a strength coach, head strength coach, who programs our strength classes and weightlifting classes. Number one, I like that they say we have a strength coach. Yeah, right. Not some, yeah, anyway.

No, he's an avid. Not some broad CrossFit coach. Yeah. And then we have, and he's an avid weightlifter himself, and then we have a CrossFit strength coach who does the CrossFit. He's an ex-strongman guy, pretty decent polo, water polo player as well. And he does all of the crossfit programming. And we make sure that...

Just put that in your mouth a little more. You're a little bit low. There you go. Right in that beard. I wanted to say that's what she said. You just did. You just did. I'm sorry, I'm on back. But I didn't say it. We basically theme each month and we make sure that the three different programs are interconnected so this month sorry the weightlifting powerlifting and this the crossfit

class are all interconnected yeah so we we theme each month so strength class might be functional bodybuilding this month uh for the weightlifting classes we might go uh you know higher reps more touch and go style technique we might you know do a three-month cycle building up to uh you know, higher reps, more touch and go style technique. We might, you know, do a three month cycle building up to, uh, you know, setting one, one rep maxes, et cetera, et cetera. But we always try to balance the three programs so that when we're going really heavy in a strength class, we'll be more like body weight type training in the CrossFit classes. So if people want to do several things, they get variety because that's why people stay. Yeah. Oh, I see. So it all flows together. Now, is it like, say, at 1 o'clock or at 1300, is it the weightlifting class and at 1400 is the powerlifting class? Or are they all going at the same time? Yes.

So it's one space, but we have five platforms in the back. So at peak hours, we'll have two coaches doing a 20-person CrossFit class. Right. And then we'll have one coach doing a 12-person weightlifting class. Right. And then we'll have one coach doing a 12-person weightlifting class. Is that what you limit at? Is it 20 and 12? Yeah. Yeah, we have 15 for the strength and then 12 for the Olympic weightlifting

because they're more technical movements usually. And then, yeah, 20 on two coaches or 12 on one coach. What about powerlifting? So strength class to us is powerlifting, but we try to broaden it a bit. So we're good friends with Julien Pinault, so sometimes we'll be more on a strong fit type theme a month or we'll do a bit more functional bodybuilding. But usually the three big lifts are the main staple of that class.

Squat, bench, and deadlift. And how many can you run for that? 15. 15? Yeah. How are you guys implementing the strong fit stuff, all that weird nervous system stuff that he's got going on. Yeah, I don't think we do that much with that piece of his philosophy,

although it's very interesting, but we just use a shit ton of sandbags. Which is awesome. Because there's a lot of eye-openers in his method, and one thing that I really like is just sandbag squats as an alternative for goblet squats. It's great for beginners to just learn the basic pattern and have lower load on the back, et cetera. So we do cut a bit of yokes, and we have a ton of sled work as well. It's hard not to have a stable torso if you have a big sandbag and you're fucking squeezing it super hard to try to have good posture.

It's hard to breathe. And the sandbag walks, man. They're gruesome. And they build character like no other. I love it. You have a history as well, though, with Reebok. And you were there kind of when this CrossFit explosion happened and Reebok became part of the games.

How does that experience kind of lend into building a gym and then ultimately being here at Aleko? Yeah. Well, I mean, Reebok being part of Adidas, it was the first and only time I worked for Adidas. Crazy Americans. Adidas, Adidas. Adidas. I actually like that way more.

Adidas. Adidas. Yeah. How do we mess things up so bad? We fuck it up so bad. Well, is it? Americans are lazy. Not our audience, of course.

Nike or Nike? Nike. Nike. Nike? All right. All right. Anyway. Adidas is German, correct? Yeah, it's German. Yeah, Nike does not Nike or Nike? Nike. Nike? All right. Anyway. Adidas is German, correct?

Yeah, it's German. Yeah, Nike does not sound as good as Nike. But Adidas sounds better than Nike. We'll stick to Adidas. But anyway, that was the first and only time I got to work into a big corporate. So that was really useful to see what happens when you have like big budgets. And one of the things I was on the receiving end being in the Benelux and being responsible for being a fitness and training manager for Reebok in that area.

And being on the receiving end, I mean, you know, all of the campaigns and all of the products were built in the US and all of the visuals and got sent to us. So we got a bunch of info and then it was like, okay, apply this to your market. So then you need to do translations, think about how you're going to activate these products,

how you're going to work with local athletes. So it was a very useful experience because now I'm on the other end. I'm global, Sweden, Lego HQ, and I need to work with marketeers in different countries. So I understand their frustration when it comes to, you know, communication, their local challenges.

So I really try to take that at heart and understand that I need to meet them where they're at. You're on the marketing side and you've mentioned the sales team or like a global having representatives in each region. How do you, I guess, the differences between those because I think marketing and sales get lumped together so much. Separating that message to you,

how do you view both of those? Yeah. And the responsibilities at Aleko? Yeah, so I think we add, from the global office, we add most value if we talk about product launches, if we talk about the events that we do,

if we also support the trade shows, the bigger trade shows around the globe, bigger competitions that we participate in, like CrossFit Strength in Depth or CrossFit Filthy 150 that we're working with right now. And then it's really just talking to the people in their markets about what Eleko is doing there and how well known they are, because there's huge differences across the globe. Like if you go to Sweden, I've been in an hotel gym in Sweden and found an Aleko bar. Like that was amazing to me.

Yeah, last time we were here, we stayed at a hotel and they had Aleko in their hotel gym. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that would not happen in the Netherlands even, which is a two-hour flight from here. So, you know, the way Aleko is known in Sweden differs from the Netherlands, differs from the U.S. definitely, differs from Taiwan where we do business as well.

So in that respect, I just have to have a good conversation with everyone in their market and say, what do you need from us? What country is your number one? What country uses the most Eleko? Yeah, that's a good question. It's a pretty tight race right now between the U.S. and Sweden, actually. Oh, really? Wow.

I didn't know that you guys had that many gyms. Yeah, Sweden has always been the biggest, but the U.S. is catching up fast. The U.S. team, they're running hard, man. I mean, what's the population of the U.S. compared to Sweden, though? Is it like 10 million versus 350 million? Yeah, I think it's even less in Sweden, yeah. It's around that, yeah. That experience with Reebok, though,

working with big athletes, you guys clearly have massive names coming through here all the time. Yeah. Are you working with most of the athletes to get ideas on messaging and how do you get the brand out to people? I know you guys work with Matty Rogers.

Yeah. CJ Cummings. Yeah. CJ? No longer, I know you guys work with Maddie Rogers. Yeah. CJ Cummings. Yeah. CJ. No longer. No longer. Oh, no. We'll edit that.

Yeah. No longer which? Both. Oh. Yeah. Okay. We've got to take that poster down. We're behind the times.

Yeah. I just saw that poster of her walking in. Yeah. Then I'll change gears. Yeah. No, but how do you guys know, you guys decide on specific athletes to work with? It's clearly more than just standing on podiums because some of those people have never stood on actual podiums.

Yeah, yeah. So most of the ambassadors or the partnerships that we do with athletes, they're done locally as well because, again, someone in the French market might say it's it makes way more sense for me to work with our national rugby team instead of chasing you know weightlifters in this area uh so i have conversation with conversations with them saying okay you know who do you want to work with who can you build relationships with because in the end that's also something i learned with reebok it's if you work with, you need to dedicate a fair amount of

your time in building that relationship. It takes a lot of time. Yes. Yeah. So it takes a lot of energy. Very needy. You can work with a hundred gyms and like send them product and then do nothing, but that does nothing for your brand. So you're much better off working with a select few people or select few gyms and really building a strong relationship and getting, you know, honest feedback and getting a sense that both part partners are excited to work with each other. Um, and, and then, then it adds value when it, when it, when it comes to partnerships. When you are working with an athlete, like what does that relationship look like?

What's, what's, what's, what's the trade off so to speak? Yeah. So I don't from, from global, we have no international athletes or global athletes that we work with. They're all managed locally, and it really differs per country. So I need to bring in the French team to have an answer to that. Or the U.S. team. Yeah, exactly.

So sometimes they'll come to me and say, hey, we got this request in, what do you think? And I'll give some advice based on my experience. But I have them manage that locally. Yeah. I'm just, I'm super interested in you talk about when you were with Reebok. Oh,

go ahead. One thing on the partnership side as well, the, the, and this has been a conscious decision of mine to do that, to not work with a global ambassadors. Uh, it has to do with the resources that I mentioned,

because if we do it, we need to like dedicate a full-time employee to it and, and really build those relationships. The second thing is as well, like as a brand, we stand for strength. We stand for strength training and we want to support everyone from low to high in their experience in that,

in that journey. So, um, you know, working with barbels for boobs, for instance, and creating products to support their cause. I saw you guys, yeah.

That is something that's... That's a great partnership. Yeah, that is a partnership that works really well. Credit to the U.S. team again for setting that up. But yeah, that's where we put most of our energy at the moment when it comes to partnerships. Well, and there's a strategic side to that of Barbells for Boobs is introducing the Aleko Barbell to thousands of people every year. And they're doing 30 clean and jerks for time. Yeah.

Yeah. If you do that with janky barbells, you're going to get jacked up. That's a great way to get hurt. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I've done that. Cycling barbells. If you have a barbell that is just perfectly made all of a sudden that becomes a very clean

clean clean clean cycling it feels like you're moving like yesterday Eric was talking about that a really good barbell it's like it becomes a part of your body and it's just like moving your own body that's exactly right if you get a smoother one when you're doing that crazy cycling stuff

it just feels like it's your body going up and down and it's just connected going up and down. It's just connected. They're back. We're taking a little break to thank our sponsors at Organifi. Organifi.com forward slash drug. Save 20% on the green, the red, and the gold.

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L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com forward slash shrugged to save $20. Friends, we're getting back to the show. Let's do it. We're all miming cleaning jerks here. Yeah, I know. In your experiences with Reebok, I'm actually very interested in how you were clearly growing a sport through CrossFit and working with Reebok. That was their piece of the CrossFit side. Yeah.

And I think one of the interesting things that CrossFit's going through right now is the messaging of are we a sport or are we a fitness program? Right. Glassman has clearly chosen the fitness program route. Yeah. fitness program right glassman has clearly chosen the fitness program route yeah in your experiences working with them and now how do you decide like alico is a sports brand and we have all these ambassadors and we're working with ipf uh iwa um or iwf sorry not association federation um IWF. IWF. Sorry. Not association. Federation. The Paralympics. Yeah.

And the Paralympics. You have this big sports side, but you're also, in a way, a fitness brand that you want mom and dads around the world using great barbells so they don't get hurt. Where's the tradeoff in that? And, you know, you've had experiences doing it already, but managing the messaging using the the sport side and also having to manage the fitness side yeah yeah exactly well i mean first off we need to recognize that we've been making bars for over 60 years and we're deeply deeply rooted into uh into the um into the competition side that's where we come from. That's where we've existed for a very, very long time. And it will always be, you know, the area where we focus on to create, you know, the best products to set world records.

But I'd like to see that as, you know, our sort of halo market. But all the lessons that we learned there and all the products that we make for those uh for those athletes um we can still use all of that knowledge to build products for the regular gym and fitness environment you know think of it as a you know again a car brand building like a super nice sports car but they have other you know models available as well which people can use the one common denominator across all products will always be

performance yeah so that's never negotiable like we build products that should perform that you that you use to build performance and that can be in sports but it can also be in life man that just lit me up thinking about this like let's say that your mom for the first time ever is trying crossfit and her experience her first experience with a barbell is a janky one. And it hurts her. She's done. She'll never, like, you finally got her there. I'm just thinking of my own mother.

If I could get her, it would be awesome to teach my mom the thing that I love. I spent my whole life on the barbell. And she tried it, and it was a janky experience. Yeah. Otherwise, she goes, and her first experience is on a Laker bar. What's the very first thing you do when you walk into a gym that isn't your own because you don't have to worry about it when you're at your own

I walk over, spin it I hit it in the middle to see the oscillation I do the exact same thing every single gym I walk into if I spin it and it goes I am not touching that barbell ever again I'm leaving that gym

I think that's also something that CrossFit as an organization or a movement has brought us. We're all coaches. We know that squatting, hinging, rotating, running, those things, they're universal. Everyone needs them. We all need to do that to perform in sports or in life. And so, you know, that really resonates with what Eleco stands for as well. And I actually have a mom who started CrossFit.

No way. On Eleco equipment. So her experience was awesome. Yeah. And she now is actually, she got her level one. She then did an extensive PT course. And she's now, she's 60 plus and she now started Silver Strength did an extensive PT course. And she's now 60 plus. And she now started Silver Strength, her own PT business.

Nice. That is so awesome. Yeah. Super cool. Shout out to my mom. Some of the latest research would tell you that as far as longevity of life. So used to they would say, I'm sure when you were doing your master's, that it was cardiovascular. You know, the better that system was, the longer you lived.

Now the number one predictor of longevity of life is the amount of muscle mass you have is one. The movement a person has is two. And then cardiovascular. I mean, they're all three important. But, like, if you want your mom and dad to live, they need to have some muscle mass so they don't wither away. And they need to be able to move so you don't have your mom falling and can't get up crap.

Like she can fall. Fall risk is super serious. Andy talks about it all the time with leg strength in particular has one of the highest correlations to longevity out of any factor. This is what the world needs to hear. And then they need to do some barbell training to live. You don't just need to go out there on the road and run 10 miles, guys. again if you if we're all coaches we've had gyms or have gyms uh and and uh you know again going back to your question on on whether we're uh you know a sports brand or a

fitness brand you know athleticism and and top athletes are are super inspirational uh you know they provide the world with, again, with inspiration, with, you know, pushing the bar and raising the bar, pushing boundaries. There it is. Which is awesome to watch and to learn from. But we also know that every person that comes into our gym and who will never be a professional athlete, what we wish them the most is them playing the long game

and staying fit for as long as possible to just be able to have a fulfilling life how do you manage that in your own gym uh you know your target market is hard charging yeah 25 25 year olds yeah i know what i was like when i was 25 and if you asked me to i'd run through the wall yeah especially if i really like you i would totally run through the wall yeah it's it's it's head first it's a tough question like I actually just built a gym guide for Unscared with the head strength coach, and we put an article in that gym guide that people get when they become an Unscaredian, which is called The Long Game. An Unscaredian.

Did you just say Unscaredian? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We build Unscaredians. Dude, that's awesome. Can we just be honorary Unscaredians for the show? Let's get a tattoo right here. Yeah, get the tattoo. Oh, it's right there. Can we just be honorary unscaredians for the show? Let's get a tattoo right here. Yeah, get the tattoo.

Oh, it's right there. There we go. That was really a subtle tricep flex. He was like, bam, boom.

See my lat spread at the bottom too? But to your point. Did you get that on camera? I love that. I think we all know once people really get into barbell sports,

there's the curve where people just charge hard and consume everything. And at some point after nine months of training, they think they need individual programming, that whole life cycle. At some point, and it depends a bit on how coachable people are but most people need to get injured now how you manage that injury hold on a second hold on a second because i'm totally learning process yeah i'm a hundred percent with you and as soon as i write that on instagram that getting injured is actually important the whole fucking world hates me well again it's all about context and why you're saying it.

Instagram's not listening to that, though. But listen, let's look at the journey, right? You get into barbell training. I just want to argue with them. Listen up, Instagram. Yeah. Getting injured is important. You get enthusiastic. We tell athletes coming in, start training twice a week.

Build some muscle. Build some experience. Build some muscle memory. Go to three times. Earn your fourth time. But I won't, you know, we won't check every member if they do so. And if they decide to go start training

five times a week after three months, the chances of them running into a wall are fairly severe. Now we will always coach them and scale them down and talk to them. But if people get a minor tweak and then we send them to our in-house physical therapist and show them, hey, you know, if you keep training with this, you are screwed in the long run, then it clicks.

So people need to experience the full range of what their body is capable of and not capable of. I've never heard anyone say that. I'm so into – like that message thing is – when I think about my journey through strength training, getting injured has been the reason I've wanted to learn more. Of course. If I never hit the roadblock, I would have never had to look for answers. Well, what's the function of pain? It's to show your limits. If you don't know your limits, you just keep charging forward.

So at some point, you need to find that limit. And now, and that's where, you know, coaching and guiding people become super important because once someone has hopefully a minor injury, then, then the true lesson starts. Man, you know, I, I did not get my first injury until I was in my thirties. And I honestly used to think that people were just soft. I would have been a terrible coach. If I would have coached people, which I did, so I probably was a terrible coach. Now I'm the best in the state, so you can grow. Until I got hurt, I did not have that empathy, and I did not have the understanding, and I was full steam ahead. I think my empathy has gone away, though, because I understand that it's part of the process. Now when someone gets hurt, I'm like, cool, let's just keep going. I'm talking about empathy prior.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Learning to say, you know i would have pushed my athletes a lot harder yeah like the i have you know some of the best in the world and i would have pushed them harder than i do right now if i had not experienced my own injury and be like oh you can you know reach a roadblock yeah you're also just one of the first seminars i ever heard from you you gave a big talk about being injured and it was like it was the opposite what i expect i thought you're gonna start talking about injuries and you got to work around it and you got to like do things safely.

Cause if you stay on injury free in the long run, you'll be, you'll do better. And it was like, yo, you got to hurt wrist. I don't fucking give a shit. Go keep cleaning.

It was, it was, it was something very, very aggressive. I was just in the audience like, wow, this dude needs to train 15 year olds forever. Yeah.

I have the strongest 18-year-olds. I was talking more with people who are like, they're achy. That's happening. Hold on. Just for the record, everybody that's listening, it's not like we want you to be injured. It's just a part of the process. If you are interested in finding out how good you could be and where your genetic potential can take you, you have to play at the edges. And part of playing at the edges is you're going to get nicks and dings.

And if you don't learn from those nicks and dings, the next step is real injury. Because your body is going to tell you to stop. Yeah, and again, we're talking about a specific athlete here, right? Because let's say three different athletes. One, we have someone who's fighting to get into the next olympics right if they get injured and they have a serious problem and their world starts crushing down and i have full sympathy they're hungry now yeah then we have that you know let's call them recreational athlete but they're charging forward four or five six times a week they're trying to reach their genetic potential if they get injured uh i need to show them the long game like you're going to be training

for the next 50 60 70 years so understand that you having a wrist injury is an opportunity to learn uh it's it's an opportunity for you to work on other weaknesses and you'll be okay in 12 weeks yeah your world is fine then there's a third group of athletes who are not necessarily looking to push their boundaries, but who want to stay fit. And for that group, my number one priority is to not get them injured. Because that group, if they get injured, they will usually quit training. They're like, oh, this doesn't work for me. I'm injured.

I can't do anything anymore. And having that conversation showing that they can do other things, that's pretty hard. And it's 100% possible to go through an entire life of training and never be injured. Yeah. But you'll also do nothing more than 85%. Yeah, which is fine. You don't know where the line is until you cross it.

What's that? You don't know where the line is until you cross it. So you just casually lift weights without much intensity or desire to get a lot better. And then your board is fucked for the rest of your life. And compared to the general population, you'll be healthy and strong and look fantastic, but you'll probably never reach your full potential in that case. Yeah, just spend your whole life bored.

Somebody doesn't care. But that might not be bored to them, though. No, but I actually identify with that last group. So right now my training is I'm almost never maxing out anymore. I'm trying to build strength very, very slowly. My number one priority is to not get injured in the weight room because I'm not fully into biking. I just want to die a little

bit less when I crash. That's my priority. A little bit less. You're going 40 down a mountain. I want to be in that group. Here I'm 46. I want to be in that group. You're still chasing the dragon, bro.

As soon as I start lifting, I become a kid again. I'm 46, and I want to be. You're still chasing the dragon, bro. And the minute, as soon as I started lifting, I become a kid again. Yeah. And I'm just like. Yeah, but just own it. I mean, if it's you, go to you. But that number to you is not world records anymore. No. That number is.

A little bit stronger. In your brain, it's like, if I can't. I have numbers in my brain that I just want to see how long I can do. At any point in time, I want to know how old will I be the last time I snatch 225. Yeah. I hope it's 70. Yeah. But how do I stay strong enough if I'm 70 and I snatch two and a quarter? That's really good.

I want to squat 315 when I'm 80. I actually think about that all the time. Being 80 years old and sitting under 315 would be so rad. If you do it every week, what's stopping you from front squatting 400 if you do it every week of your life? It just is so normal. Why wouldn't you be able to do it next week if you did it this week? Right before I came, the day before we left,

I'd really taken a couple months of barely training at all. But I'm like, let me get in shape today. I'm going to Oliko. Got me get in shape today right now i'm going to alico gotta get in shape got 24 hours let's get jacked i start front squatting and then i'm starting immediately here's what i do i look at my athletes i'm like who can i pick off first like and like it's a it's a room filled with the best. So I take my – this is terrible. So my little youth, 67-kilo lifter, had just front squatted 182. You're 400 pounds. That's really good. So he's number one.

I pick him off first. Youth. Yeah. So I go 185. I mean, but clearly he's, like, one of the best no matter who. He's, like, top three in the entire country. He's bad, but I got to pick on something. That's just how I think.

You're a teenager. You front squat three times body weight. Next thing I'm thinking about Morgan, my 16-year-old, trying to pick him off. When you're trying to out front squat Morgan. I get out front squat. I know you can't. What's your front squat in these days? He's 16.

He's got 225. I did 230 just a few months ago. Really? Yeah. You 500 pound front squat? 506. I got to throw those six pounds. Don't deny the six. Tell me he didn't just look like you at Louis Simmons right there. It's hard to know. 506.

506.2. I had the colors on. I sprinkled some chalk on it. Yo, by the way, if you guys want to start making all the money, you got to start selling these guys. Ah, the PopSuckets. Yeah, I got the end of the barbell sticker on the little pop thing on the phone. I keep looking at this.

We got the close-up cam coming. Oh, we need one of these guys right here. That's a great idea. All right. I've got another to do. I'm too down right now. We should talk more often. Yo, actually thinking about stuff like that, kind of getting back to a little bit of the product things.

You get to tell the story of the future of weightlifting through the products you guys design. And with you being kind of the voice of Aleko getting the messaging out, the responsibility of that can be quite large. When you think about you guys were the first, well I shouldn't say the but you guys were the became the first brand to color the plates yeah which i wasn't born before when that happened but i imagine that radically shifts the storytelling that's going on like even when you go to a local weightlifting competition everyone's got colored plates so you know roughly what's on the bar if it was all black plates no one would know if it was 185, 225. It's all just a black bumper plate. Yeah, it used to be like steel plates with like a bicycle tire around it.

That was way, way back. I've lifted with those plates. Really? Yeah. That's old school. Yeah, in my high school we had bumper plates like that. Yeah, we had some too. But do you think about that when you're –

obviously you don't make the products, but you're in the design process of thinking about how you can work with companies to tell better stories of people on platforms? Yeah, exactly. Well, I think, you know, it's mostly very, very humbling to be able to play a role in that. Isn't it awesome? Yeah, it's awesome. It's so awesome. If you think about all the athletes around the world that do strength training

either to be better at their sport or to pursue it as a barbell sport or even, you know, we work quite a bit with defense personnel

at the moment as well. So people getting combat ready, for instance. That's awesome. You know, it's really humbling to think that our equipment

at least plays a part in them getting stronger. So us helping them get stronger. So, uh, to protect the world. That's awesome. I think it's a, it's a huge responsibility for us to, to provide the equipment that will, you know, help them perform the best way they can. And, and to me that that's, that gives me goosebumps. I'm like, that's, that's so awesome that people, you know, use our equipment to get stronger and, and really, you know use our equipment to get stronger and and really you know be better in their work and their sport in their life and um yeah it's just a very uh gratifying job i'm really grateful i think that's the coolest thing i'll do you know

working with you know the defense people that's yeah just because they protect us and yeah yeah and in a very real way you're helping them save their own lives. You're keeping them alive. It was the Danish military that we worked with first. And we've had a good relationship with them for a long time right now. And now also in other markets, also in the U.S., we work with them quite a bit. Also working on education. We're getting soft as a human species. So we need strength training to get fit and stay fit.

Until we started working with the military, I never thought of humans, like the actual human body, and the number of them as like a supply for the military. And when your supply is very fat and out of shape and unhealthy and addicted to drugs, your supply starts to get very low. So finding the top 1% to go and fight for the country becomes a big problem. I was actually fortunate enough to visit one of the bases of the Marine Corps in the Netherlands when I was organizing the CrossFit Lowlands Throwdown for a few years back.

And I talked to the commander there who was responsible for their version of Hell Week. And he told me that they were forced to lower their standards for entry. Because the influx was just too weak. Like they were gaming too much and not just going outside and playing and just being out there.

So it's a real problem. Our overall athleticism must be a fraction of what it used to be. I think about all the time, if I was just building a garage gym, if you went and knocked on your neighbor's door and you were like, I'm squatting over here if you'd like to come hang out, what the look on their face would be if you were like, no, just come lift weights with me. Or let's go play kickball in the court.

Let's go do something outside. Nobody's outside. Nobody does anything. They would be like, no, no thanks. I don't want to do that. I actually wonder if it spirals both directions. Like there's more and more people are really, really out of shape and fat and all that. But then there's actually probably more people now that are like really on the high end.

They're like super, super in shape. Because like us, like their whole life is dedicated to fitness. There's so many awesome resources. There's great equipment like there's all the things so there's probably like a subset of people that are that are really really in shape they're going to be like the number one best performers that's why all the world records across the board keep going up and up and up over the years because people are getting more and more into it we're learning more and more about it so if you're a navy seal like the top top top navy seals are probably way more in shape than the guys from 50 years ago they're talking mainly you know, my buddy who's a full bird colonel in the military.

He's special forces. But now he's in charge of a base that does a lot of the basic training. And it's those people. It's just like the grunts coming in, you know, the normal 18-year-old kid, you know, going from high school into the military. In terrible shape, he says. He's like, you wouldn't believe how many people can't do a push-up. They're mentally just soft, too. Because they're not outside playing and losing.

If you yell at them, they quit. If you have an option to go inside and play video games after you get your ass kicked in kickball or street hockey or whatever it is, and you just quit that day you've just quit for the rest of your life on becoming tougher right in between your ears because you've you lost and you quit and i never went back out to get better well here's a question for you guys because that's that's a riddle as a gym owner and also looking at the mission of a lake to get as many people stronger for life and sports as possible like it's a riddle between motivation and discipline because a lot of people then when

they talk about training they're like oh you need to have motivation and you know i'm not of they're waiting for motivation i'm most more than half of the times when i'm training i'm not motivated i just do it yeah because it's because it because it's part of my system so it's it's really about changing behavior instead of trying to change motivation. And that's where I'm stuck at the moment. Like how do you change, like for the regular people, like how do you change their behavior that training doesn't become something they have to do or they have to wait until motivation is there, but it's just so ingrained into their life that they go to the gym three times a week for one hour.

I think a big piece of it is believing that it's going to work. If you've never had any success whatsoever, then you're not confident, and you're not confident because you have zero actual competence in the field, and so their lack of motivation is like, well, I'm wasting my time. It's not going to work for me. Your lack of motivation might be like, ah, I'm kind of tired

today, but at the deepest level you believe what you're going to do is going to actually be beneficial, and other people they don't have that same belief so I think it's case that the the motivation is coming or the lack of motivation is coming from different places in that case yeah so in the in this case you're talking about people having experienced results and true change in that life as a as a underlying motivated right you and you and all your friends like have have lifted weights and everyone's gotten

great results and everyone thinks it's really fun but sometimes you show up and you're kind of like it's part of the grind you gotta do all that i gotta go fucking squat heavy and i got 20 rep squats a day it's gonna be brutal i don't really feel like it but you're gonna do it anyway because you know it's gonna be it's gonna work yeah you have other people that like they don't know anyone that's in shape all their friends are fat they've all tried to do it before it hasn't worked or they got results for like a small period of time and then and then they all went away like they you know they gained all the weight back or whatever it is and so it's like it's a it's a belief system problem from a lack of results in the past so they're not confident because they're not competent

yeah yeah i think a lot of it just comes down to the individual culture of friendships and relationships that people have yeah of if you were to take a look at all of if if we set up all of my friends and this is kind of where the empathy come right comes in if you put all the people that i hang out with in a room they would all be in shape they could all talk at a high level about back squats they could all talk about cleaning jerks at a very high level. And if you take somebody that's unhealthy and you bring all their friends into the room, it looks like the airport in America, which is a disaster. And they're all out of shape.

So you have to somehow find a way to either change the entire group or walk up to somebody and convince somebody, hey, you aren't just going to get in shape. All the people that are your support system right now, you've got to leave them. And that's really bad. It's going to be hard because you're going to be on your own. And unfortunately, this group that's over here that's in really good shape, they're not just going to accept you. You have to work really hard to be accepted by these people because these people have worked really hard their entire lives to be in shape, and they're not just going to take the unhealthy person in.

You have to do the work, and it might take you a year. It might take you two years to be able to have a level of health and have a level of strength that allows you to be a part of that group. It's one reason I love strength and conditioning so much is when you walk into this gym, and just right here, there's three racks. I guarantee you, if you put 20 people in this room, the strongest person would be down at that end. And the weakest person would naturally take that rack. And that person has to want to go down to that end. It's like sitting on a school bus. All the kids that are scared sit next to the bus driver and the bad kids sit in the back.

That's right. Yeah. And the bad kids sit in the back that's right yeah i mean the bad kids sit in the back because they get away with shit they get to play they get to be flexible they get to create their own space and the kids that sit up front they strictly by the rules this is this is safe if i play in this zone it's good yeah and if you want to start to live the life that the kids in the back of the bus do or the kid the the people that are the third squat rack in here are doing and actually testing the limits of strength and actually being a part of this like higher level conversation you gotta you gotta work your way up and you gotta push yourself to further seats back in the bus you gotta go to rack two but rack two is a hard rack

to figure out how to get into. One day you have to decide, I'm fucking sick of sitting at squat rack one. I'm at 95 pounds. I've never pushed myself past 135, and everybody on squat rack two goes blue, blue. So why can't I hang out at the blue, blue rack? And the guys down at the far end, they don't even touch blue.

They start at red. One thing that was the coolest part of my – I'm on a rant. One thing that was the raddest part that changed so much about what I did when I was training with Cena, we never started with greens. We always started with yellows. And now I don't ever touch greens when I'm snatching or clean and jerking or doing anything for warm-ups because Cena always started at yellow. So set one is always 115 I will never

put 95 on the bar because I know what the big strong people are always starting at 115 at a minimum well and I mean talking as a gym owner and coach like one of the most satisfactory experiences I've had with athletes is and we haven't talked about this group yet but that's that's the group that comes in you know know, willing to train, willing to learn. But they actually need to shed their past identity. So I've had conversations with one girl particularly that springs to mind where I said, hey, you are no longer this girl that's being picked last in gym class. You are an athlete now. You're training.

You're getting stronger. And I had to push her to put more weights on the bar and to show her that what she was capable of that's a very cool group to work with because they're they're actually afraid to release their potential and when once they start building up their own confidence and they start you know growing as as athletes and and reaping the benefits in real life then you know that i i can get out of bed for that how many times when you're coaching people and you look at them and you know in your brain that they're so much stronger but they're like man holding back i put the one oh like you talk to girls they're like wow well i'm i'm gonna get 105 pounds on the bar that's my that's where i'm at i've never done more what should i do yeah just i don't know put fives

on that we're all meatheads in here like all we do is count and add five pounds so why don't you just put five pounds on the bar well i've never done that before well today you're not yesterday so why don't you just put five pounds on the bar and fucking sit down already yeah like one thing that i do find interesting about your school bus example is uh which was awesome i yeah i agree and i think it's it's it's good that we we push people to strive to be better but one of the things that i found extremely important in our in our gym culture is to reduce the amount of egos walking around because they will always mess up your community is that the only thing that counts for me when you come in is attitude.

Like if you're willing to work and if you're humble and if you're willing to be coached, I don't care about if you can do zero push-ups or 100 or clean 300 or 100 pounds. That doesn't matter to me. If you show up with a working attitude and you're humble and you're greeting people you know you're being part of this group that creates an environment where everyone can strive to be their best absolutely and i think that when you can be that person on the third rack or the person that's like really really strong one of the most important skills as like that just loves strength and conditioning and something that I pride myself on so much is that I can go train with a girl that only squats 105.

And I can go train with somebody that's a wheelchair basketball player. And I can go train with some elite athlete. And it's all the most fun I can possibly have. And my job is to make sure that the person that I'm training with feels welcomed and is playing at like 90% of their edge. And then I can get them to introduce them to a bigger, better conversation about strength training. Because that piece of like, you're not going to change somebody overnight, but if I can sit on a squat rack with a girl that squats 135, and I'm like, look, I'm here for you. I got you. I've been doing this for 23 years. You're not going to be fucking hurt. I promise you. But let's doing this for 23 years. You're not going to be fucking hurt.

I promise you. But let's just try it. See what it looks like. See what it feels like. And that is the responsibility of the strong people. It's not to walk around and say, look at me, look at me. It's, hey, I'm here, but I could also go play down on rack one and it'll still be the most fun I can have all day long, but I'm going to introduce you to a conversation that you've never had before

and I'm going to teach you about weights in a way that, the way that I see it. You have to see strength training through my eyes to understand what goes on down on rack three, and you have to be able to play at all ends of the spectrum, not just super meathead look at me. I agree. You know what you said is super important. You know, if you, if attitude is first, you know, like I want to work hard and have a good attitude, then you have, you know, a superstar athlete in your gym, say like, you know if you if attitude is first you know like i want to work hard and have a good attitude then you have a you know a superstar athlete in your gym say like you know my morgan and he's got that he's like that too he's got the edge he inspires everybody and like in our gym we have a little flow of everyone you know we have uh our elites we have a little section for our elites and kind of in the back and then And then our average Joes are up front.

But they love Morgan because Morgan is nice to them and he helps them. Sometimes he'll come and we're doing a class and he'll help them with their technique on his own. No one tells him to do. He just does it. And they love him. It's nice to be nice to people. Right. And they're like, oh, my God, this kid is the strongest kid in the whole world.

He's helping me and wants me to do well then your elite guy you know brings everybody up yeah however you have that elite who wants to be standoffish who wants everybody to look at them never talks to those people they can bring everything down yeah yeah so one more time for all the people that don't know who morgan is like's 16 now. He's 16. And in whatever's left. Yeah, right. He's like 23. You just call him 16. You're lying. No version's good. Can't find it.

He just cleaned 190 kilos, 418 pounds. He snatches 300 pounds at 16. He's just the best kid. He finally started to look like he might become a man one day. He's got a few hairs on his chin. The new Instagram videos are looking like he's hit puberty, which is great. He's in it, I think. He's in it.

He's starting to get a little. I tell him all the time, he's like a grown man, weighs down. He's like still a little boy. But, I mean, if you describe, I've never met Morgan, but the way you describe him, it means that he, as an athlete, is already super mature. He is super mature. Right?

Because just the way he behaves himself and then he's my godson too i'm a little biased right now but i mean he is all these things i'm saying but you know well he's grown up in the gym and he's had to go through it so and this is getting back to even the beginning of this of like how do we expose people to fitness maybe it's through elite sports but that's probably not the best way to say look at the best in the world and this is what it has to be and it's something about the marketing piece that you have to put together is yeah we have the best in the world and we've got hundreds of world records on our barbells but what we're really doing is exposing people to this new idea

and who they could be in the future and telling the story of Aliko through the eyes of somebody two years from now. Yeah, it needs to be relatable. I totally agree. And I think, again, if you're talking about that broad spectrum of people who could or should be doing strength training, which is almost everyone, I think that plays a huge part that you don't want to scare off people with elite athletes. You need to show their neighbor or their friend doing the things that they could also be doing.

To me, out of all the cool things you get about working for Eliko or being a gym owner, the most tragic message I can ever hear out of someone's mouth when they're 40 or 50 are like, oh no i can i can't hike that mountain i'm too old for that i can't yeah you're like oh man you're gonna you're gonna live to 90 or 100 you have you're halfway you're too old for doing like regular stuff it's yeah it breaks my heart it's very sad that's where the whole world is right now and like through education i think you know if we all really took like you guys are taking education so seriously and you really like your company like uh spews that from the pores

we're trying to educate if like all of us really took education that seriously then working out becomes like brushing your teeth i don't have to get motivated to brush my teeth i know it's good for me i was in school and they told me that you can get cavities, also to leave other diseases. So I know I need to brush my darn teeth, right? If we can, like, educate the world and be like, you need to do this to live longer. Yeah. And, like, to feel better when you're old. You know, not just to live to 90, but when you're 90 to feel good about being 90.

If we could educate the world like that, then we'd change people. We'd change the whole game, man. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good way to look at it. Like, you know, we've talked a lot about making people stronger, making them, you know, perform in sports and in life. But to flip it around, it's actually trying to get a big group of people to say, yeah, I can do that.

Yeah. When they're looking at daily activities and just enjoying life and the world around them and using strength as a tool for that, that makes everything else easier. What about strength training too that, like, like you know you guys have all coached the my favorite thing about coaching the average person is when they say start when they start squatting or dead lifting it's objective and there's like you see the outcome right before your eyes you train four weeks and now all of a sudden you squat at 95 now you're at 115 you You're like, you can see the improvement. There's no doubt that happened. Whereas, like, when they only focus on weight loss, like, it can be, you know,

it goes up and down. Maybe it doesn't change at first. It's a lot, you know. So they get bored with it, tired of it, and they quit. But with strength training, you see that, you know, linear, especially like we all know the newbie gains. Yeah. So no matter who you are, you start training.

First year is going to be straight linear. And it's fun, and it's something they see, you know, and they're like, oh, I am. Some things are happening at this gym. So I think adding that component and seeing that objectivity. And then having the conversation, like what does this do for you? And to your point as well, Doug, like if people can give examples from their real life. And I have one example of a member in our gym, a super cool lady. And she has a glasses shop in Utrecht where my gym is.

And she runs it by herself. It's like really nice bespoke glasses that you can buy there straight in the city center. And she came to me after she'd been crossfitting for like a year. And she came to me, hey Jochem, Jochem, you know what what happened i chased a thief outside of my shop and i caught him and that's because of my fitness and i was like oh man this is the that's a commercial right there and that was she caught it yeah yeah i caught him and beat the shit out of him such a cool story i was like wow you know if if you want to see how how you know, training actually, you know, transforms your life, that's such a good example.

I think it's a good spot to wrap it up here. Where can people find you at? Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram, at SwedenIsCalling, and our Eleco Instagram handle is ElecoSports. And if you want to check out my gym, that's UnscaredCrossFit. Eleco.com, right?

Or, yeah, on our website, Eleco.com. Go get the best barbells in the world. You've got to do it. And Unscarred CrossFit's in the Netherlands, but where specifically? It's in Utrecht, which is about 30 minutes from Amsterdam. There you go. Okay. If we go there, I'd like to see that.

Eat some pastries and then just get lost. Make your way to the gym. You've got a good walk ahead of you. We're considering going to Amsterdam in a couple of days, so it's only 30 minutes away. It would be cool to go to the gym. You've got a good walk ahead of you. We're considering going to Amsterdam in a couple days. So it's only 30 minutes away. It would be cool to go to his gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be fucking dope.

I want an unscared t-shirt. Can I sell those? Yeah, of course. I'll give you one. Absolutely. Well, you're not going to have any money because we're about to go to the LECO. We're going to go to the LECO gift shop here and spend all of our money. Maybe I'll work it off.

I'll teach a class. Travis Smash, where can they find you? Go to matchlead.com, Instagram, matchleadperformance. Doug Larson. You bet. Find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. We're the Shrug Collective, at Shrug Collective,

one-ton-challenge.com. Snatch, clean, jerk, squat, deadlift, bench with a goal of 2,000 pounds for you men, 1,200 for you ladies. Get on the leaderboard. Download our brand-new e-book, Making Strong People Stronger, and we will see you next Wednesday. That's a wrap.

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