Barbell Shrugged - John Welbourn - CEO of Power Athlete— Real Chalk #80

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

John Welbourn is CEO of Power Athlete and Fuse Move. Creator of the online training phenomena called “Johnnie WOD” and a hilarious/informative blog called, “Talk To Me Johnny.” He also just happens to be a 9 year veteran of the NFL and a absolutely behemoth of a human.   Ever since I first met John at a CrossFit football seminar about 10 years ago, he has always been a great source of knowledge for me. He has a no bullshit approach to his speaking and writing style, along with the brains to back up and then some... This guy is amazing to listen to when he’s on a topic he enjoys.   John has worked with CrossFit Games athletes, MLB, NFL, NHL, Olympic athletes and the Military. He currently most of his time traveling the world lecturing on performance and nutrition for Power Athlete. You can catch up with John at @powerathletehq and powerathletehq.com   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/rc-welbourn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/ barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

What's up guys? It's Tuesday. It's time for another episode of Real Chalk. I'm super excited for this episode because you guys get to listen to someone that I've admired for a really long time. And his name is John Wellborn. He's played almost 10 years in the NFL. He's a behemoth of a man. Every time I see him I have to just look straight up, you know? It's not like an angle of like, he's pretty tall. He's like fucking really tall. And he weighs over 300 pounds. So he's just a huge human. And when you're Ryan Fisher and you're 5'5 and you weigh 180 pounds, he just looks like three of me potentially.

I guess my leg's probably the size of his arm. His arm is probably the size. Okay, never mind. So check it out. We talk about a little bit of everything. He's just such a cool dude. He's so knowledgeable on so many things. I think one of my favorite things about him is he has a blog on his website, powerathletehq.com. It's called Talk To Me Johnny, because his name is John.

And he basically like rips people apart in these blogs, but in like the most knowledgeable and like funny, but yet go fuck yourself type of a way, which I think is amazing. It's just, it's really easy to read. It's, you know, very insightful. You learn a lot in it, but you also laugh at the same time. So there's very few people on earth where I can read through their whole thing and learn something and laugh at the same time. So I absolutely love this,'s style. When I was a competitor, he was training a couple CrossFit Games athletes, and now he's into, you know, Major League Baseball, more of the NFL stuff, more of the military stuff. We talk a little bit about how he's about to start a big program for the military, which is gonna be really cool. And he's just doing big things. Like, in the CrossFit

space, in the strength conditioning space, he's a super knowledgeable guy that a lot of people don't talk about. And it kind of bothers me actually, because he's so smart. And he's on to a lot of things right now that a lot of people aren't doing. And he's making his own course. For those of you who want to get a little bit more educated, he has his own course on the powerathletehq.com. You guys can check out. And he has a whole bunch of different training modules, and he's teaching people all sorts of stuff, whether they're just a regular coach or they're getting their doctorate in college. So he has great, great information to spread to the world, and he's just an awesome dude. So we're going to talk. You're going to hear him talk about all sorts of things here and there.

And, yeah, you guys are going to love it. I'm super, super excited. I went to one of his seminars, the CrossFit football seminar, like almost 10 years ago when I was still competing. And I remember hearing him speak and I was like, man, this guy's awesome. And I followed him ever since. So hopefully after this podcast, you will follow him a little bit and you'll see why I have like a slight man crush on him. So before we get into the show, I just want to highlight real quick that on June 24th, I'm going to start another round of the carb cycling challenge. The carb cycling challenge has

been just murdering it. And, um, I'm actually filming this episode right now on a Monday. So you guys are going to listen to this literally tomorrow. So if you're listening to it now, um, which is going to be June 18th, This episode will be very, very new. And basically I just posted a bunch of the recent before and after photos on my Instagram and the Chalk Instagram. And you guys can see the just insane results that people are getting in 30 days

from this particular ratio of carbohydrates that I'm having people go through on a daily basis throughout the week, aka carb cycling. And there's a bunch of other numbers in there too that make it very, very easy. It is macros, but at the same time, it's a very easy to eyeball type of macro situation. So some stuff is very tedious to measure out. This is like after a couple of days, you're eyeballing it, you're good to go. And the results, I think like 98% of the people who do the challenge have insane results.

So this next challenge, I'm gonna fly out the winner. You guys get to come out here, hang out with me at Chalk, work out, do a bunch of fun stuff or you can just take some cash. I give $1,000 to each of the top three people who win and you learn all sorts of stuff. You get a free ebook of mine, any ebook you want. You also get a free month of Chalk online.

Basically the whole damn thing is free, to be honest, by the time you get all this shit. So also on top of that, you guys get to be part of my private Facebook group. That is basically anything you could ever ask about the challenge will be on there and you'll be a member of that for life, not just for the challenge. And people can go in there and ask questions forever and talk amongst yourselves and send memes that literally are the funniest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. So all that part of the challenge, you guys can go to Jim Ryan, G Y M R Y a n.com and check out all the stuff I have on there. If you don't even want to do the challenge, but you're interested in some of the books and some of the other things that I have, it's all on there. Just buy whatever

you want. Type in real chalk and all capital letters and you get 25% off everything except for the challenge. Um, and that's it. Let's get into this episode. Super pumped. John Wellborn, CEO of Power Athlete. And here we go. All right, Chalk Nation, really excited today. I get to sit down with Mr. John Wellborn. For those of you who don't know him, he was one of the OG CrossFit gym owners and then created something you guys might have heard called CrossFit Football. And now he's the CEO of Power Athlete. And Power Athlete is all over the world. Yeah, global strength conditioning.

And now you guys are getting into the military realm, which is pretty cool. Yeah, we've been doing a ton of stuff with the U.S. military for a long time. So is there anything that we can talk about on that right now? Or is that secretive? Yeah, no, I mean we do. You can tell me and then I have to die after. Oh, yeah. No.

You know, we came in and worked with the 18th Airborne Corps, which is, you know, the 101st, 82nd. Worked with those guys and taught a series of seminars. I just spoke at an HPO summit down there for them. And then we've been presently working with the Texas National Guard. And then we do a ton of stuff with the guys at Naval Special Warfare, specifically Development Group, which is kind of neat. Down in San Diego? Actually out in Virginia Beach at Dam Neck. Oh, yeah.

There's another one down there. Yeah. So SEAL teams are based in either San Diego or over in Virginia Beach. I think all of us who did CrossFit at one point when we were children wanted to be a Navy SEAL, so I'm fully aware of all the stations. Not me. I saw the movie Navy SEALs when I I was a kid and I was like, ah, those guys look... They look cold.

Well then, and it looks like a lot of running. I'm good at sprinting, but long distance running was never my deal. I remember actually watching the CrossFit Games very early in its early days and I remember watching you run and you were by far just the biggest human out there.

I was like, that did not look very fun for him at all no it wasn't i remember when i showed up to the games and they asked me to go which is kind of funny because uh like i saw recently that like some like adventure racer dude got like uh the blowhard he's actually one of my best friends oh is he um hunter mcintyre okay he's a world champion ocr racer, obstacle course racer. And he won the billet for the wild card. Yeah. So I guess Glassman – I saw the interview with Armin where they called it like the wild card blowhard award or something.

And he asked him to come on. I think it was perfect. Yeah. But then it was great. The amount of butt hurt from the CrossFit community was massive. He just told me recently. He's like, dude, everybody hates me. And I was like, dude, it's fine.

Don't worry. I was like, everybody hated me too. I was that guy that threatened to murder the judge. But a similar thing happened to me. I mean, shit, I'd never even heard of the CrossFit Games. And then it was only like a couple weeks before where they hit me up and were like, dude, do you want to do this thing called the CrossFit Games? I'm like, what is that? And they're like, oh, it's this exercise

competition fittest on earth. And I was like, fuck it, I'll go win this thing. And that was a week before i went to training camp for the patriots so oh wow so you're still playing in the nfl no i was a current nfl player oh damn i did i showed up at like 308 pounds uh ready to go out and fucking do this thing and i remember i'm looking at 308 ready to go well i was ready to go to training camp i wasn't ready to do the crossfit games and i figured fuck it we'll just go do a weekend of workouts we'll be fine and then i look over and there's like chris spieler

like five six 135 and i'm like this this does not bode well for my big ass well like the next biggest dude was like i think kalipa like 201 you know yeah so i remember i was giving away like at least 100 pounds and everything yeah now that i'm seeing that picture now this is really good yeah so yeah it was uh it was tough and uh we went up there and worked out it was fucking dusty and dirty and shitty and uh it was fun we had a good time so at that time i actually was working at a gym called basin recreation field house in park city utah and there was this guy who was training people and inside we had like an indoor track we had an indoor like soccer field and we had a whole gym and this guy would just gather up like six or

seven people he'd always be in the corner doing all these farmer carries and all this weird shit i saw him doing these butterfly pull-ups and that was chris buehler oh he didn't have a gym yet and i remember he would like he was like showing me videos. Oh, this is what I did this weekend, the CrossFit Games. And he's like doing burpee pull-ups and deadlifts or thrusters. I don't know. It was like a Fran thing. Yeah. And I was like, oh, cool, dude.

I'm in. Not even. I was on the bobsled team at the time in Park City. And I was like, yeah, cool, like whatever. And then like every couple weeks he'd be like, oh, I want to see how fast you can do this workout. And I'd be like, dude, that, whatever. And then every couple weeks he'd be like, I want to see how fast you can do this workout. And I'd be like, dude, that workout looks fucking dumb. Yeah.

And I never did it. Yeah. And then eventually I wound up doing one of the workouts and got addicted to it and this and that. Because he was like, you know what, dude? I'll give you 500 bucks if you can beat my Fran time. And I was like, oh, really? You're like, I'm hungry.

Let's fucking do this. I didn't realize, though, that at the time, Chris Buehler was like the best CrossFit athlete in the world. When it came to butterflies and pull-ups and 95-pound thrusters, he was pretty good. Yeah. So then I was like, oh, wow. And I remember the very first time I did it, I did like strict pull-ups with like just a cheating style movement. And then doing the thrusters unbroken obviously every time and then i did it in like four minutes was my first fran

and then i immediately was projectile vomiting for like i for sure got rhabdo like i was throwing up everywhere like for two hours and i was so fucked up my arms were like locked my hands were like facing my forearms and i was just stuck like this for like an hour and i literally was like wow that fucked me up and i didn't do it again for like two weeks and i did the same workout again same thing happened i've got like 330 this time vomited freaked out the whole deal another week went by i tried it again because i just wanted to win the 500 bucks yeah which was so much money at the time yeah oh yeah i believe it you're like fuck i gotta win this yeah that's that's how actually how my crossfit career started dude mine was even stranger than that uh i i had a buddy uh who was training at crossfit la and this is when i was an active

nfl player and he was uh uh like shit we were in the off season and he was asking me about olympic lifting and he's like hey um you know like you know much about like snatch clean and jerk and all that and I was like yeah uh fuck since I was a kid like that's what we did in football um you know Todd Rice was my strength coach at Cal and all we did was snatch clean and jerk fuck I didn't back squat for like three years uh and he was like oh like what are your numbers and I was like well I snatched or I snatched 130 I clean and jerk 172.5, and I power cleaned 180. Front squatted, you know, 235 kilos for a triple, and I kind of started giving him some numbers.

And he was like, when I threw the numbers out, you know, I was in kilos, and he thought I was talking about pounds. And he was like, oh, yeah, no, I snatch, you know, 135 or 155. And I was like, dude, you snatch 155? And then I realized he was talking about pounds, and I was talking about kilos. And then I was like was like wait what the fuck are you doing yeah and uh like he's you know fuck 30 year old dude who was like not really had done anything like performance wise and he's asking me about snatch clean and jerk and talking to me about all this shit he's like well how many

pull-ups can you do i'm like i can do 10 pull-ups of 90 pounds between my waist he's like well i can do like 30 in a row and i was like you do 30 fucking strict pull-ups and you do? I'm like, I can do 10 pull-ups of 90 pounds between my waist. He's like, well, I can do like 30 in a row. And I was like, you can do 30 fucking strict pull-ups? And he was like, no, we do this kipping thing. And then he showed me and I was like, wait a minute, how many of these can I do? And I fucking busted out like 35 in a row just the first time I did it. And I remember thinking, if I can do almost 40 of these fucking pull-ups, this is bullshit. So I talked shit to him about it. I was like, hey, what's up with your little fucking cheating workouts? And then finally he was, um, he was, uh, sent me a link for CrossFit.com and was like, yo man, you should go to a seminar and go check this shit out. And, uh, I was like, uh, and I was kind of hemming and hawing. And then they had a seminar on Valentine's

day up in Santa Cruz. And I was like, oh shit. And you know, uh, the girl I was dating at the time, I was like, yo, we'll go up to San Francisco. Maybe Santa Cruz, we'll hang out, uh, go to Monterey Bay aquarium and we'll make a weekend out of it. So I show up to this little gym in Santa Cruz, which was CrossFit HQ. And I'm sitting there and I'm looking around at all these people just fucking pounding coffee. All these people are fucking wired up and I'm looking around like the little upstairs loft, right? I can see it now. Yeah. I'm wearing jeans and basketball shoes and a t-shirt. And, uh, I thought it was like a upstairs loft, right? Yeah. I can see it now, yeah. I'm wearing jeans and basketball shoes and a t-shirt. And I thought it was like a seminar where you go to learn.

I didn't know you were there to work out. I'm like, man, why are these people all dressed in workout clothes? And they get up and they fucking, you know, Castro and Glassman and all these people are giving their talks. And then they're like, okay, you guys ready to work out? And I'm like, what do you mean fucking work out? So the first workout we did was Fight Gone Bad. In jeans. In jeans. so we uh uh the first workout we did was fight gone bad and in jeans in jeans uh but we it started with this like three mile fucking run out into the mountains and we ended up in this circle to do all

this tabata shit then we race back and i remember i'm fucking dying and i'm like whoo and they're like okay you guys ready to work out that was a warm-up and i was like are you guys out of your fucking mind now mind you like my season had ended in uh like late january i think we went to the playoffs that year or early january and then this was february so i didn't really start like my workouts started right around mid-february like valentine's day so like that was when we'd come in start doing a little conditioning like i wasn't like i hadn't trained in five or six weeks and that was at the end of the season so i wasn't anywhere near top physical shape. Yeah.

And I remember I go do fight gone bad and got fucking fight gone fucked up. And I remember I went to dinner that night and my brother was up in Monterey for a death, uh, uh, death penalty conference. He's a lawyer. And, uh,

I was sitting at dinner and he's like, yeah, you want to go out and get some drinks? And I'm like, no, I just want to go back and go to, uh, go to the room.

And I remember I was like so sore and he's like, what the fuck is this? What happened? He's like yelling at me. So we get done for the weekend i remember on monday he was like well hey let's do some of this crossfit shit and so i put him through the only workout i knew which was fight gone bad yeah and i just remember it like round after round two he was like outside by his car trying to like get into his car to fucking leave and i was like you can't leave and that's how it started so it was a funny funny deal. So then eventually, I guess you loved it to some level to open a gym, yeah? I wanted to open a gym because I wanted a place to lift weights.

Yep. That was it. And I just wanted a place to train with my brothers. And I had weights in my downstairs. And then I got talked into opening a gym. And I never really wanted to open a gym. So I remember when I first got into CrossFit, I was like, just, you know, maybe it was YouTube videos.

Maybe it was, I don't even know where I was seeing whatever I was seeing. Cause now there's so much media and stuff. Now I can't even remember. But I do remember being like, dude, that guy's life is fucking badass. Cause I remember seeing you like, it was like Newport, cause like, you know, it was like, maybe it was like every second counts. Maybe it was that movie because so-and-so is like in a gym in like Ohio and like, you know, all these gyms look like these shitty little gyms like in the middle of nowhere. And then it's like, all right, we're going to Newport Beach to see John Wellborn's spot.

And you're like hanging out in this ridiculous loft like – Well, it helps to have NFL money. Yeah. Yeah, it's a – you know, fucking – But I just was like this guy fucking is insane. And then like, you guys are all working out downstairs. And I was like, wow, that it's the dream. Yeah.

It was a good deal. So I, but I realized, uh, which I have now, like I always wanted to lift weights. I wanted the gym, uh, with bad-ass equipment. I just didn't want members showing up and fucking up my stuff. Yeah. Which drove me crazy about the CrossFit gym. Cause I would buy all this really bitching stuff and I had all this cool equipment. And I would come in and shit would just be broken. Or people would fuck things up and I'd be like, you know, like we'd have like a really nice bar.

And all of a sudden somebody just rains a fucking empty bar from over their head. And you're like, dude, that bar was a fucking thousand dollar Alico bar. You know, I mean, the cost is one thing, but it took me fucking like three months to get it. Because back then, like, it wasn't like now where you can get online and order an Alico bar and it'll be here on Amazon. But like back then, I had to actually order that shit from Alico. In Sweden. In Sweden. Yeah.

Like the stuff I had, like I had a nice woodway treadmill. Like I had my own nice workout stuff. And then all these people come in and they're just fucking it up. And I'm like, oh, shit. It took me a long time to be able to be okay with even six plates being on a rack versus five. There was so many things where I was like, oh, my God, this is insane. Yeah, it messes with your OCD. And especially if you've – I think it's different if you've never had anything and then you have something to post from people that just have shit.

I mean, I didn't have anything. And everything I had, I paid paid for myself nobody bought me anything so like i have value and i have like you know fucking pride of ownership and a lot of things like whether it be cars or my house like i take care of shit yeah so to see people not take care of shit i'm like you know like i show up to your gym like i'm gonna try to like leave it as nice as it was if not clean it and like if something's broken i'll fix it like it's just within my nature to always do that. People leave shit broken all the time and don't even say anything. Yeah.

At least if you're going to break something, be like, oh, man, I broke this thing. Yeah, I'm not even going to make you pay for it. I just want to know that it's broken. So I can fix it or somebody doesn't fucking kill themselves. Yeah. Oh, it just drives me nuts. So that's my first vision of John Weldmore

is hanging out in this cool loft in Newport Beach and he created this cool thing. And then I do remember following CrossFit football because you guys just had a very classic, basic strength program because I think once CrossFit started, a lot of people – Well, I'll give you a history on this. So when CrossFit started, there was an idea that there was just 10 elements of fitness, and strength was just another element of fitness. And when CrossFit football came in, it was based on the premise that strength is the platform in which everything's built on.

So all I did was take periodized strength conditioning templates and drop them into CrossFit language. Which is not super hard to do. No, but nobody had done it yet. Which is amazing to me because... So when you went to a CrossFit gym, strength might be randomly programmed with like... It was just in the mix. And before us, everybody just kind of did the programming. And then after us, once we started, it's pretty rare to walk into a CrossFit gym that doesn't have some form of strength element mixed with a conditioning element.

It's even more rare if that strength element actually makes sense. And then I was using basic progressions, like linear progressions for beginner. I cycled, like I created a kind of a template years ago, which is based off of like rep maxes, compensatory acceleration, speed work, and then, you know, volume. And then we do some form of primal movement. And I basically cycle through that. And that's kind of been the template that we've used for should a decade with CrossFit ball and power athlete. But what's always bothered me about crossfit and still does is people are trying to create these different types of programs that don't really exist so they're like they're just creating just very very

obscure things and i think that people are really messing it up because all the original og stuff is what really works the best yeah and i think that's like what I really liked about the CrossFit football scheme at the time. And then also because that was so old school and it was just like bare bones, like the actual OG template. Then there was also this blog, Talk To Me Johnny, that was like even more raw and even like more OG than anything too. Because I remember just being like, some guys be like, I just want to know like how to get fucking jacked or whatever.

And you'd be like, dude, first off, you're a fucking idiot. And this is like this, and this, this would be like your actual response. And I'm like,

wow, this guy's giving it to him right now. Like you would just like completely blast him. Yeah. With your initial thoughts. And then you would blast them with like legit literature. So there's a, uh, which became potentially my favorite thing would blast them with, like, legit literature. So there's a – Which became potentially my favorite thing to read of all time.

There's, like, 300 of those. I kind of stopped writing them just because we started doing the podcast, and then also I just stopped really getting really good questions. It was just, like, people would send me questions, and I would just forward them old stuff. And I was like, man, I just can't keep, you know, sparking up the same anger for the same questions yeah but it was really funny back in the day man people had these like they were

very upset about things yeah and i think like now people aren't nearly as pissed off as they used to be or maybe there's just more information or more people well i remember in the beginning because in the beginning everybody was so nerd about crossfit that they knew every single thing going on at every single moment yeah and i was working for someone named Ronnie Teasdale, if you remember him. Yeah. And he wrote an article about fat people. Yeah. Do you remember that?

Yeah. CrossFit took it down. And he literally was basically explaining how fat people were ruining the planet. And like, it was ruining the gene pool. And then like. He's a funny dude, man. I actually. He went off on like such a tangent and made it like a scientific proven thing that they were ruining the world.

No, people were mad at that dude. Wasn't there something where they had a workout with homeless people where you had to do something weird? He actually took care of the homeless people, though. It just happened in one particular video. It looked like he hated them. Yeah, he was a funny dude. i talked to him a few times i actually uh he i always appreciate that there's people that are like just slightly off kill off kilter i usually call them like cattywampus they're a little cattywampus he was cattywampus have you seen what he's doing these

days uh did he get into like yoga he's very strange like uh like a nudist retreats or something yeah he does all sorts of weird stuff but i mean he seems happy yeah yeah i saw like uh something where he was like riding a unicycle around venice beach yeah that's how you know you've reached your final level of fucking weirdness when you're on a unicycle around venice yeah i mean he does just following he's like there's videos of him like drinking his own urine and eating his own cum for certain reasons. I mean, he's wild. And he puts it all on Instagram. It's insane.

The age old of sharing too much. Yeah. That does happen. No, you can share way too much on that. Yeah, for sure. So from the TalkToMeJohnny blog and then the Power Athlete thing, and then now you've built this huge thing now, which is now a humongous company, I feel like. Yeah, we're a good size.

And now you guys have – well, you and your family have moved down to Austin. And you guys live in Texas now. And now you're starting to create these big contracts. And now this whole thing is probably bigger than you ever thought it ever would be, right? Yeah, I mean my goal was always to try to bring really good, efficient training. Like, I had an interesting piece in that shit. I go back, you know, I retired in 2009 from the NFL, and I remember trying to figure out, like, what my next step was.

And, you know, when I was in college, I was a rhetoric major, and, you know, took my LSATs and was getting ready to go to law school when I got drafted. And I figured, like, hey, I'll play for, like like a year or two. I'll make some dough and I'll go to law school. And then that turned into 10 years. And all of a sudden I got out and thought, shit, what am I going to do? And so I was actually filling out law school applications. Oh, wow. And I was going to take my LSATs again. I was going to go to law school. And I remember if Greg Glassman hadn't called me and asked me to do this thing called CrossFit football,

I probably would be an attorney and probably here training at your gym. It's just some fucking normal dude in a suit. And, uh, I remember Glassman being like, Hey, I think people are really interested in this shit. And I was like, you think people really want to know this stuff? Like, um, the skillset that I developed in the NFL was this really just kind of like a proof of concept in that was the training that I was doing able to allow me to be the best on the field. And I was able to figure out like the training in real time, because if shit didn't work, then we would throw it out the things that we would keep. And, um, you know, I read a ton and I remember trying to explain to somebody once that like, uh, in the NFL, like the strength

conditioning has to be something that you can do where, you know, you basically discard what's useless and you keep what's useful. And there were some really interesting principles within the training that I saw like one-to-one direct dividends on the field. Like the stronger I get was helpful up to a certain point. So like one year I tried to push my strength and get as strong as I could, but the strength that I gained ended up making me slower. So then I kind of figured out this kind of daily matrix, or more importantly like my training matrix.

Like if I could hit these numbers, then I had done the work that I needed to do to be successful that next year I think it was like uh bench 405 squat 500 495 if I could do five sets of five in under 10 minutes then I knew I was fucking strong enough and I had enough capacity to be able to go out and go to training camp and be fine if I could do 10 pull-ups with 90 pounds between my waist, if I could do like 10 dips with like 135 between my waist. And so I had like, I think it was 585 for a set of eight on RDLs. And I kind of like put all these kind of training numbers in place. And I noticed when I hit those numbers, I was able to kind of do everything very well.

And I kind of completed this like complete circuit. And I would sprint and run, and the time that it took me to do the bench 530 was not helpful for me as much as it was to do that 405 for 5 sets of 5. And so when CrossFit approached me, I saw what they were doing, and I was like, oh, benchmarks. That's literally what you had implemented in your own style. Yeah, and there was capacity things like,

Oh shit. Like they asked me, I remember glass and was like, you know, what's the toughest workout you ever did? And I was like, well, dude,

I squatted, um, it was 25 reps, a bench at four or five, 25 reps at, uh, four 95 is five sets of five and under 10 minutes. And he was like,

fuck, I don't think there's anybody on the planet that can do that. And I was like, well, well, like, okay. But, but like you're talking 135 pound men not fucking 300 pound professional football players so like all the benchmarks that uh when i started and i think that was what clicked when i sat with glassman he was like uh asked me about like well you know what these are our benchmarks and here

were my benchmarks and i understood you know the different energy systems um you know that there was a big one in terms of like the ability to you know the different energy systems um you know that there was a big one in terms of like the ability to you know uh display strength dynamically as power and there was just a lot of interesting pieces that I had collected and when I when he talked about CrossFit like I could understand what they were talking about but it was just kind of off like it was generalist I was specific yeah and I was, dude, I'm talking about a training style for big fucking strong dudes that want to sprint through walls.

And he was like, man, I think people would dig this stuff. And I feel like the niche group stuff in general is, especially now with social media and like your ability to reach so many people, I think people who go out of their zone and create like a niche, I think just works out really, really well for them.

However, CrossFit Endurance was starting at the same time well for them. However, I don't cross it. Endurance was starting at the same time that you cross the football started. And I don't think they have the same success that you guys have. Um, Brian McKenzie and I trained together. So it's interesting right now. Uh, no years ago.

I haven't seen Brian in fucking years. Um, it just doesn't seem like it took off as well. Uh, it did. You know, he, what he was doing with cross endurance is he was teaching running and he's

teaching pose method, which was Dr. Romanoff stuff. And so Brian had worked for Dr. Romano you know, he, what he was doing with CrossFit Endurance is he was teaching running and he was teaching pose method, which was Dr. Romanoff stuff. And so Brian had worked for Dr. Romanoff and, uh, had been one of his post coaches and then came over and did CrossFit Endurance and was teaching, uh, a lot of the techniques and methodologies that he had learned from Romanoff. And then I think at some point Romanoff was like, Hey, you know, you're teaching my stuff. And then that's how pose got back into CrossFit. Oh, okay.

Cause I remember they were big for a little while, but now I haven't heard very much about them anymore. Yeah, I think, you know, like, hey, if I have a system in place and then you go teach the system under a different name, I think that's how people get sued and shit. Someone got mad. Yeah. So I think that's what happened.

But it was a really interesting time, and I just was surprised that there were people that were doing this style of training that weren't professional athletes. And what was interesting on the other side was the workout had never been – the training had never been about the workout. The workout was just something to test the training so that I knew that going into something, I was able to test it. Like the training was useless if it wasn't going to allow me to get better on the field. And over the course of like a number of years, I was able to create these benchmarks that allowed me to be successful on the field. But if I didn't have on-the-field success, then like the benchmarks are useless.

So training for benchmarks without having like a proving ground to me was fucking ridiculous. Yeah. And I was like, so wait a minute, you guys are just training to train? Like that part didn't make sense to me. But there were, oh, I was going to say, was there the games yet? But there was, yeah, there was the games at the time. So, like, but for most people, they were competing on CrossFit.com on these comments sections. Yeah.

You know, the daily WOD was their competition. And I was like, man, that's so interesting. Like, I don't know if I like it or dislike it. It just, it feels, but, you know, and then social media. You were a true athlete at the time. Most people probably went to work nine to five and then they're like, oh, I have this thing I can compete in. Yeah.

And, uh, I think it's great. Cause what do people do? The, uh, the only thing I'm a little sad about is, um, that I was, uh, I kind of missed social media in that, uh, like if I was 25 or 26, when the social media thing started, I would have posted more of my workouts. And, uh, at the time, like, I think when I was 26, I was, uh, the only dude they'd ever tested over 300 pounds. That was under 10% in the bod pod. I was like 8%. So I was 282 pounds of lean muscle at three Oh something. And I do, I,

I was so fucking big and strong. And like, uh, I remember when the Eagles built their new training facility, I was training down in Florida and they flew me back so I could do, uh, like the training montage in their new facility, uh, for the media. And like, it was like fucking run this. And, um, I was like, man, if, uh, I was in my 32 when I did the games, I was like, if y'all could have caught me like eight years ago, I would have fucking smoked this thing. Yeah. You know, 10 years in the NFL is a long time.

It's so crazy now what you can do with social media. And I meet so many kids on this podcast, off this podcast when I go travel. And they're just like 25 and already making so much money because of social media. Yeah. I don't know if it's good or bad. I'm wondering what it's going to do for education. I feel like a lot of people are just not going to go to school anymore. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've met who are like,

I went to a semester in school. I was working out. I started posting my workouts. And now I just dropped out. Well, what if the internet goes away? What if it gets turned off? I was talking to a guy yesterday. Pretty interesting.

He was talking about the education, the learning from social media is something that's current. And we, so we learned things in snippets and it doesn't cause people to actually do a deep dive into anything. And, um, you know, like only within the last 10 years of retiring from the NFL, have I really taken like this, like exam and look at my life and kind of paired it with a lot of the readings and a lot of the stuff that I learned at Berkeley. I went back and reread all the books that, uh, I learned in that. I just basically just tried to learn for the tests or learn to be successful in my major. And having that background, I went back and reread all this stuff and was like, God damn it. Uh, I didn't have the experience or like the age to be able

to understand like, you know, um, Plato and Socrates and like reading the Phaedrus and like a lot of these classical thinkers. And there's a reason this shit's been around for two and three thousand years because it's fucking great. And even though, you know, like just the classical stuff, like I think people are just kind of abandoning it or learning it and fucking memes. Yeah. Like not understanding really the face of that and that classical education helps you understand, kind of examine.

That it's extremely rare. So like I remember I've been to so many seminars kind of examine. It's extremely rare. So I remember I've been to so many seminars in my life. I don't know. I've already – and I've even met just an incredible amount of people just from the podcast. And to this day, I still think that you're my top one person I've ever listened to speak about something you're passionate about. It just comes across as like I fucking know it. You know what I mean? like this is how i'm gonna regurgitate it back to you and it's always seemed very impressive to me and it's like the

words that you use when you describe everything like the intensity that you put into it when you're talking about it uh like the practical experiences that you've had with it or this or that like i remember listening to a crossfit football certification and you just like went over like all these different things. And it was just – I remember just being like, damn, that was super badass. And people were like, should I go to a CrossFit football tournament? I was like, if John's there, absolutely. The guys used to laugh that whenever I came and did the seminars,

that it would go so far off the fucking rails. Yeah. Just because we have a schedule. You definitely talked for a long time, but there's no reason that you would not want to listen to it. Well, yeah, and people were always like, man, you talked for like 90 minutes, and I don't even know what the fuck you talked about,

but it was good. The one thing, I think a lot of people don't do a lot of self-examination. Like, for me, I was always my biggest critic. And, you know, when I was playing, I have this, pretty much to this, you know, when I was playing, like, um, I have this, uh, pretty much to this day, like a tremendous fear of failure where, uh, like, you know, it kicks me in the pants every morning, wakes me up. Like I, it doesn't freeze me. Like I don't

get scared where it like, you know, stops me from doing things. But like this fear of failure is what wakes me up every morning and forces me to do new things. So I'm constantly searching for things outside of my comfort zone or things that make me scared. So if something is like too easy or has not put me into a, like a, um, you know, dangerous position, not that I'm out there fucking searching for danger, but like it just forces me to go do new things. And I think, um, what blew me away was, uh, in college I was, like I said, I was a rhetoric major, English philosophy, and there was a ton of Socratic method. And it was a lot of like, you know, reading and arguing and just a lot of interaction. And when I got to the NFL, man, I remember just being like surrounded by adults, just sent by fucking the lowest IQ individuals that were the highest performers. And people were more interested in what kind of fucking rims I should buy a post from like anything intellectual. And I remember trying to have some intellectual conversations with people. Like,

uh, I remember one time at the media, they asked me a question like you know what does it feel like to run out on the field and um i told them i'm like the only thing that goes through my mind is and they like fucking looked at me and these people like got all quiet and i'm like you guys know what that latin is they were like like that's what the gladiators would say that fucking caesar before they died those of us about to you know those of us you know hail caesar those of us about to die salute you like that's what fucking goesiators would say to fucking Caesar before they died. Those of us about to, you know, those of us, you know, hail Caesar, those of us about to die salute you. Like, that's what fucking goes through my mind as I run on the field. Like, fucking crickets. And like, they didn't fucking ask me any more questions.

And I'm like, you guys don't fucking think that? And people are like, nah, what I really dug when I came out or so when I retired and, uh, I figured I would just, you know, use this intellect to go, you know, work with my brother and my dad and like kind of do our family business, which is, uh, defending scumbag criminals. Um, and then when CrossFit hit me up, what I liked was the ability to get up and teach, uh, the ability to like think and write and just do a lot of different pursuits. And it just kind of gelled with me. And, um, I really enjoy teaching seminars. Uh, you know, the problem that I think a lot of people is they don't have like the foundational experience to teach a lot of this shit. Like I can get up and I can

talk to you about all these different strength conditioning principles, but not only can I talk to you about them, but I can talk about the practical application of the training and where I saw them within like the realm of competition. And that's what I remember most about hearing you talk versus anybody else. All those practical applications, I remember every single thing. Yeah. Well, it's because I saw weird shit happen. Like I'm 6'6", and I'm a big dude, but in the realm of the NFL, I wasn't the genetic freak.

Guys are fucking serious genetic freaks. I've never touched a weight, and I bench 500 pounds, like type of shit. And so for me, my margin of error was very, very small. Like I knew exactly like, hey, if I'm going to fucking hit this dude and I need to have this position, I got to rotate my foot here to get my knee over my instep. So when I come off, I can fucking hit this guy. Whereas other dudes are just like fucking Mongo hit.

And so I like, my shit was way more strategic. Like I knew like i couldn't fuck up if i wasn't perfect i would get beat whereas other dudes just i'm just out there playing yeah and so like when you take shit from that kind of like intellectual like very fine-tuned level you can kind of go back and and um explain it and then the other thing is is i think most professional athletes and most guys at a high level don't have a process for how they got there. I had a process because I was trying to reach genetic potential. I was trying to overshoot what I was able to do. And so when I got out of the NFL, they talk about like, oh, fuck, guys don't know what to do. They have this trouble finding their way and acclimating back

into real life. And they were like, your transition was pretty easy. I'm like, well, yeah, I had a fucking process that allowed me to be successful in school. I had a process allowed me to be successful in the NFL. Why wouldn't I take those same fucking processes and make it post NFL career? Yeah. A lot of people don't do well. No, because you know why most guys, like if you talk to most good athletes are like, I don't know why I'm good. I just was better than everybody. I could just do it. And because they've never had to put a training process in place, they don't understand how they got there.

They don't understand that there were steps to move. Is there that many athletes when you were there that literally were just there because they were just fucking boring to be like that? I always joke that the majority of the guys in the NFL, unless they got killed in a drive-by or got killed at 10 years old in a car accident, we're going to make it to the NFL.

Like, it's just fucking crazy. Like, I played with a dude. I remember he didn't lift weights that summer. He just fucking hung out on the couch. I think he had, like, he got three girls pregnant within, like, two months of each of them. So he had three kids born about the same time. You know, three different women, which fucking blew my mind.

And so he just basically was daddy for, like, six months in the offseason. Didn't come to the OTAs, didn't come to any of the training. Showed up the first day on a watching bench like 5.35 for a set of five in probably like four seconds. I was like, bam, bam, bam, bam, put it away. He's like, you can do that? And I'm like, no. I've trained every day of my life, man, and I can't fucking do that. And so there were just –

How big was this guy? Probably 6'3", probably 325. Oh, wow, okay. Big, big black dude. Fucking super fast. Probably still fucking faster than me. So there were guys that were just genetic freaks. There were, you know, the guys who were the best of the best.

I mean, these guys are pro bowlers, hall of famers, and they're just really good. And they just have a certain genetic advantage over others. And so, you know, I mean, if you're going to ask that dude, like, how do you get strong? How'd you do that? He's like, I don't know.

I was sitting on the couch for fucking six months. I didn't do anything. So, whereas me, I can talk to you about, you know, volume and intensity and fucking periodization and all the other things that I took to be able to fucking get up to something close to that.

So then if you ask me, how did you get strong? I'm like, well, I did this and I did this and I did this. And I would do this and this. Yeah, like when I benched 500 pounds in college, I mean, shit, I called Louie Simmons on the phone. And I remember Louie kind of helped me develop a little template for like some like max effort, dynamic work, some volume, and helped me kind of put some beginning spin on the template that I ended up creating and using within our own training programs.

And that's how I benched 500 pounds. So that was kind of like my next couple of questions for you was to geek out on, on the training program stuff. So I do know that you worked with Louie and I do know that you'd love a lot of the West side barbell stuff, which is, you know, your max effort day and then a dynamic day. And then there's all sorts of bands and different accessories. I'm not big on the accommodating resistance. I use a little bit of it.

But I just think that it's, it's kind of unneeded for a lot of people. You don't really have access. It's not as easily accessible either, like especially if you're traveling or something like that. But anyway, you could always just do like 50% and just end blast, right? Well, so what's interesting is if you look at the Westside stuff, it, it's really based off of geared lifters and it's, it's based off of a lot of kind of different factors. And then when you try to extrapolate it over for like performance, it's,

uh, it doesn't really apply in the same way. So when I went out and trained with Louie and when I talked to him, he was like, uh, helped me develop a template that was specific for athletes. Like I asked him, I'm like,

you know, what do you think about max effort? And he's like, well, you play football. Why would you do singles? I rather, I'm more interested in what you can do for like five, four and three. Like I asked him, I'm like, you know, what do you think about max effort? And he's like, well, you play football. Why would you do singles? I rather, I'm more interested in what you can do for like five, four and three. Like, I want to see what your rep maxes are next in your max effort stuff. Um, so we did a ton of max effort work. Uh, I found that close grips were

more advantageous for me for football than they were on, um, than a normal comp bench. Like we did a ton of floor pressing because that, like, you know, being able to take the stretch shortening cycle out and drive up was helpful. Um, on the squat stuff, I'd ever really, you know, he was big on the box squat. I never really liked the box squat because I always wanted to be able to use the stretch shortening cycle. I didn't want to take it out. And so there was just a bunch of different things that I liked, but he was like, you know, uh, work on rep maxes. I'm more interested in what you can do for your five and your four and your three. And then, um, you know, the old power lifter I trained with a guy named George saying as he was buddies with Fred Hatfield. So we always talked about compensatory acceleration,

which is the ideas, mechanical advantage increases. So does bar speed. So I always lifted weights. Like I was trying to break the, break the weights. And when I came to the, uh, when I would go to commercial gym, when I came to CrossFit, everybody looks so careful. Like it was fucking weird, man. I'd watch people lift and they'd always like slow down. And when they'd watch me, they'd be like, dude, you're going to hurt yourself. And I'm like, like, why would you try to move the weight slower at the top? What are you training for? Yeah. And so like my deal was as I came off, I tried to drive as hard. And then as the weight, you know, tends to get easier as you get more mechanical advantage. I worked on always speeding it up, which is compensatory acceleration, which I think was by far the single greatest principle, because I call it a principle, that I ever found in my training that allowed me to

carry over shit from the weight room on the field. Because think about it, like as I go punch a guy, as I'm bringing my hands back, and as I go to accelerate, as mechanical advantage increases, so does speed. And I would try to punch my hands through a dude or if I would hit a guy I would try to drive through him and that was why I think I was able to hit harder and punch harder than people. So of all the things that you know because I know that you could talk about strength and stuff all day long

like you've done a million different programs like for you specifically what was your favorite strength training template like of all time? So it's the one that I currently use with like FieldStrong and some of our programs and Johnny Watt. It's basically based off of rep maxes. So we'll say, hey, you know, if we're going to do, let's say, I don't know, a five, a three or one, let's say, because people like those numbers, but it's really based off of rep max and like,

hey, I'm going to lift the five heaviest reps that I can on, let's say, bench press. And then the next time I come back and I bench, I'm going to do some compensatory acceleration work, which I found that, like, let's say I did fives here. I'm going to do fives over there. I'll do five by five at probably 80% of my 5RM. And I found that we started doing a bunch of stuff with, like, tendo work. And I found that there were certain percentages based off of the rep maxes that allowed me to work within my speed range. So based off of the tendo, we figured out that, like, hey, you know, 0.6 to 0.7, 0.8 meters per second, and your ability

to move the weight as fast as you can. And we kind of did some conditioning stuff with that. We used a bunch of pap, like post activation potentiation work with it. And then the next time I came back, we do a ton of volume work, like, Hey, I'm going to squat tens, you know, some heavy tens. And then the next time i came into let's or sorry if we did bench we did speed bench i would do some volume upper body and then the next day i came in it was usually something unilateral or something different like so how many days a week was this program so uh we would probably hit uh upper probably two times and i would hit lower two times and then some form of pull on the fifth day. So I always

try to break up my pulls from my lower body days. Cause for me, uh, I never really thought about deadlifting and pulling as a lower body exercise. Like it was weird. Like I don't know about you, but if I pull heavy, like my back is fucking tired. Like my traps are tired. So I always thought deadlifting and pulling was like an upper body work. I'm all hamstrings and glutes. When I do deadlifts, I'm toast down there, dude. Uh, I never, like I feel it maybe in like my low back and my upper back. Yeah, I don't feel it at all there. Yeah, so it's just for me, like if I were to squat and deadlift on the same day, they probably wouldn't be very good.

So I always try to like if I'm going to squat Monday, I deadlift Wednesday, and I'll hit upper body on Tuesday. I'll come back and do, you know, some legs on Thursday, and then Friday's upper, and then Saturday's usually just a ton of fucking conditioning work Like I like swinging heavy kettlebells We just got this big old 203 And so I read about this workout Andy Bolton would do Where it was 10 sets of

It was on the minute for 10 minutes 10 swings So it was 100 swings in 10 minutes Well I remember you guys used to have a cross the football challenge It was like 30 swings every minute on the minute right? It's called monkey claws And what is it? Is the minute, right? It's called Monkey Claws. Is it five minutes long? It's 30 swings?

Yeah, it's every other minute. Oh, every other minute. Yeah, so it's 150 swings in 10 minutes, but you do it every other minute. And you've got to get 30 swings in a minute to continue. With a red? With a 72. 72, yeah. Yeah, 72.

Yeah, I remember doing that challenge. We called it Monkey Claws because when we get done, our hands were fucking stuck like monkey claws. And it fucked people's worlds up. I should try that challenge. It was, we called it monkey claws because when we get done, our hands were fucking stuck like monkey claws. And it fucked people's worlds up. I should try that again. I haven't done that in a very, very long time. Dude, that 203, man, I swung it the other day, and it was basically like 10 swings on the minute for 10 minutes. And I'm not kidding you, dude.

Like, I was fucking sore in places I didn't even think about. I'm absolutely obsessed with kettlebell swings. I think they're amazing. For trunk work. Hamstrings, glutes, hip flexors, the lower bottom of your core. Stabilization. You have to be in a very particular place at the right time. There's people out there. I remember just seeing just the worst feedback about kettlebell swings from Charles Poliquin.

He thought it was the dumbest movement in the whole world. And I can't remember exactly what he was saying about it. But he's just like, when does your body ever need to be in this position? And I was like, well, when do our bodies ever need to be in a lot of these different positions sure to be honest like well what what i like is the fact that you kind of do this breathing thing so you have to like stabilize your trunk to control the bell and as it comes down you kind of have to like fight against the weight and so you're kind of like breathing and then you isometric contraction and so you're in this constant like fighting to hold position especially with the heavier ones and i think it's like trunk work like i think it makes my fucking like my midsection and my trunk like i feel stronger

on everything else when i swing kettlebells yeah and so we had like the biggest one we had i think was like an 85 for a long time i have a 106 out there and then i went and bought a 106 a 150 and a 203 so kettlebell kings is in austin and because i was always like fuck man i gotta like order these things the shipping's as much as the fucking bells. And then finally, when I realized that there was a kettlebell person in Austin, I could go pick them up,

I was like, fuck yes. So I went over and picked them up, and we've been swinging that Big Papa. It's fucking, it's legit. Unfortunately, I think I'm too small to even swing that.

I don't think it would fit between my legs. Because I've tried to swing a pretty big one before, and I'm like, this is a fucking, this is a deadlift for me. It's 73% of my body weight. Yeah. And so I was trying to swing like a pretty big one before and I'm like this is a fucking this is a deadlift for me it's 73 percent of my body weight yeah and so I was trying to like kind of it's just fitting it in between here it's fucking huge you gotta like you're in this sumo

position yeah and uh yeah and then the the handle's big man like I fucking ripped my hand pretty good the other day doing it and uh it's funny though watching people like pick it up they're like you're gonna swing this thing I'm like yeah're going to swing this thing? I'm like, yeah, I'm going to swing this motherfucker. So I do 50 swings every day, typically as heavy as I can. Nice. It's an old Dan John actual principle. Yeah. I thought it was like, wasn't it like, was it 100 swings? There's like the 100 swing challenge or something.

There's 100 swings, but he originally started with 50 swings a day. And he was like one of the first people I read about before even CrossFit and everything. He was just like a meathead journalist on freaking t nation yeah and uh i remember being he was like yeah like i after i did it's all i did extra was 50 swings a day and it turned into like uh i i saw that i was getting leaner and i saw all these different things and then i saw improvements in my lifts and he was training for the highland games at the time and he just said it was a huge attribute addition to everything he was doing. Now I do them all the time.

I don't always swing the 106 for all 50 because that's the heaviest one I have. Some days I'll be like, I'm just going to swing the 70 today because I had a long day or whatever, but I still want to get them in. It's been huge for me. I think it makes a huge difference. I always think too, if you're just going out and doing something physical every day, like I – let's see how I put this.

It's kind of like education or just like training, like even like nutrition, man. I feel like where people kind of fuck up and you see this, dude. Like you see somebody come to the gym a bunch and they're grinding, grinding, grinding and you don't see them for like a week. And then they come back and they're like, here, I eat well. I realized like the greatest fucking success is the person that can do something consistency, consistency the longest. Like if I can, you know, like, uh, we run into people all the time, like, Oh, I can't lose weight. And I'm like, okay, have you eaten in a caloric deficit for like six months? Like literally track your macros for six months. Like if you can fucking manage a spreadsheet, you can get fucking ripped.

Yeah. And, uh, it's just like strength training. Like if you can consistently, I'd rather see you come in and lift hard three days a week than lift hard, like for five days a week and then not show up for a week. And so like the person that's able to consistently do the most, the longest usually is the most successful person in everything in life. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree on that. So, yeah, I mean, so if you come in and you swing at least 50 swings every day, so like really never, it's never a rest day and then you train and you do your other shit. Opposed from the person that just, you know, hey, I'm going to do two days on, one day off. So it just feels like consistency is by far the greatest, like, observation.

I like to hear that you're doing your swings. It's good. Oh, I love it. So we mix them up a bunch with the assault bike. I'm, like, obsessed with trying to, like, set standard bunch with the assault bike. I'm obsessed with trying to set standardization of the assault bike. I'm constantly on all of our programs. How fast can you guys do 50 calories? How fast can you guys do 100 calories?

How fast can you do 150? What can you do 300 in? I have an old program from Jim Jones, Mark Twight. I have an assault bike program from him. You should check out. It's intense. It's a month long of just the assault bike. And it's like unreal.

It's like one of the first programs I ever did when I first started CrossFit. I met Tommy Hackenbrook. And I worked out of his gym. And I was on the bobsled team at the time. And I weighed 210. And I'm 5'5". So that was...

That's pretty stout. I was a big dude. So I remember walking into his gym. And he's like, you just need conditioning. You're already strong as fuck he's like you're not going to lift any weights

you're just going to do this program and he gave me this assault bike program and I remember I remember days where I did 90 calories or no not 90 90 minutes

for max calories on the assault bike which at the time was like just death yeah it was crazy but I think

I think it's in my bag it's an interesting program yeah we've been Mark Twight wrote it like the 300 calories I think it's in my bag. It's an interesting program. Yeah, we've been messing with it. And Mark Twight wrote it. Like the 300 calories per time is like a big one. Yeah. You know, trying to figure like how you can do that. And it's like anywhere sub like 17, 18 minutes.

If you can get, at least for me personally, like 18 minutes and below is fucking, is pretty legit. Yeah, I'm trying to think of what. So I remember at the time, it was the Schwinn Airdyne, and it was 10 minutes, 300 calories in 10 minutes was the goal. But the Assault Bike's a totally different story. And then the Rogue Echo Bike is way different too.

Which I don't like at all. You might like it because you're a huge person, but. It's weird. I mean, it's big, like the, I don't understand how the, like the, I mean, I'm going to fuck it up, but it's the anthropometrical ratios. You've got to be pretty fucking tall. If you're a short person because the handles are so high.

It's so high, yeah. Yeah. And the resistance isn't – it's not friendly. Well, it's like a band. Yeah. It's like a – or not a band, but it's a belt, not chain. And so like either, and what's crazy is like normally

with the Assault, you gotta like, it takes you a little bit to get up to speed. This thing, you're just like at speed. Yep. It kind of threw me for a loop. And as soon as you slow down,

it's done. It's done. Like there's no extra spin. Like you're not getting any free fucking calories. That's why I don't like it. I used it at the Wadapalooza competition just last year. And I was like, this thing fucking sucks.

How are those things? It's so fun. Is it? Yeah. It's the best venue I've ever been to. Yeah. And I just got back from the Rogue Invitational, which was amazing. Did you compete in that or you just went out there?

No, I just went and podcasted and talked to people. But that was a great venue. The Rogue Warehouse is one of the most mind-blowing things I've seen. Yeah, like 600,000 square feet or something, the Rogue Campus. That was a great venue. The Rogue Warehouse is one of the most mind-blowing things I've seen. Yeah, like 600,000 square feet or something, the Rogue Campus. Yeah, it looks like seven Home Depots just connected together of just shit packaged and ready to go. And their showroom is insane. Yeah, I mean, it was unreal.

But yeah, the Wadapalooza, it's like right on the water. The venue is humongous. You can walk around. There's so many cool areas where people are competing. There's tons of places that you can work out personally. At the Rogue One, you couldn't work out anywhere. You weren't allowed to work out in the facility on any of the stuff. It kind of sucked in that aspect. But yeah, Wadapalooza is an amazing, amazing venue for sure.

Yeah, no, every time I see the pictures, man, I'm always like, man, I wish the CrossFit Games looked more like Guadalupalooza than what the games were. And at the very end of Guadalupalooza, everybody goes to this giant strip club. Nice. And you're seeing some of your favorite CrossFitters throwing dollars and girls freaking underwear and stuff. It's like the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life. Nice.

Well, the problem is that the CrossFit girls are probably dressed more scandalous than the strippers, which I, you know, I'm totally game for. I'm always stoked. I believe me, dude. I, uh, I forgot who I was telling this to, but I was like, man, um, uh, as an NFL player, I was single for most of my NFL career. Uh, I like to think I was around some really like attractive girls a lot. And, uh, what blows my mind is I wish wish that CrossFit had had more application when I was... Because it's amazing how all these girls have nice bodies now. It was pretty rare to see a girl that was super fit. Girls were just kind of skinny.

And then all of a sudden, this whole strength is beautiful thing. And all these girls started lifting weights and getting jacked. And I remember being like, man, all these girls look like the sprinter girls. I dated a girl who was an 800-meter runner at Cal. And all the girls now kind of look similar to that body type. And I'm like, god damn, that was like one in a million. Now it's like I'm walking into any CrossFit gym and find a girl with a nice butt. Yeah, nice butt thing is totally normal now.

It's like everybody. It's like my wife is fucking shredded. My wife competed in the games. And's like my wife is fucking shredded. Like my wife competed in the games and she, you know, we got three kids and she trains

and she's so fucking jacked. I'm like, God damn, like the dudes at work are like, man, I just want to be as fucking good a shape

as your wife. I'm like, well, first of all, you motherfuckers have, you guys don't understand what it takes to, you know,

like women are way more dedicated than we are. Yeah. They're insane. They have a crazy, crazy work capacity and I remember listening to that in your seminar, how you actually preferred women to do their Metcons first and lifting after,

which was something I never forgot. Well, the, um, the idea was like, if, uh, in terms of like androgen response,

like men create a testosterone in the testes and the adrenals, women only have the adrenals, obviously they don't have testes. So I had this, uh, you know, kind of research idea that that like why were the crossfit girls getting so jacked um no offense to anybody listening to this but like i played in the nfl where dudes were like three four percent body fat at like 260 pounds so like i've been around big fucking strong jack dudes so like seeing a guy at like you know five five and you're what like 175 180 pounds 180 180 like

not hurting your feelings when i'm like there were dudes who were fucking way more jacked than you yeah and like that was so like i go into crossfit gyms see dudes in good shape and i'm like dude i played in the nfl where like you guys are training five days a week where dudes didn't train and were in better shape than you so like it didn't really like people like all these crossfit guys i'm like ah you guys need to come to an NFL weight room. Like it just, or even a college weight room. Like it's just different. But what I'd never seen is that the level of conditioning in girls.

So that blew my fucking mind. Like I'd been around, you know, college gymnasts. I'd been around all these different girls. I mean, Abby Wambach was one of my training partners at Athletes Performance. I had seen like the top fucking female athletes and they did not look like the CrossFit girls. So I remember thinking like, what's going on on here because they all can't be on drugs yeah like it's just it's just mathematically impossible and I trained China Cho and I know she wasn't doing anything other than probably fucking eating jelly beans yeah as a performance enhancer and so um going back and look at some of the physiology like what are they doing that's

making like like where's this adaptation coming from? And the only thing I could think of is it comes from lactic bathing. You know, the body releases growth hormone in response to lactic acid. It's called, you know, growth hormone release or, you know, growth hormone stimulated lactic acid, right? Or lactic acid stimulated growth hormone. So what I kind of, my idea was like, all right, so you have these girls that are in this situation now where they are. Don't worry about it. Oh, forget about it.

So now they're doing this like high intensity interval training where they're constantly, you know, putting themselves in this like, you know, lactic acid bathing deal. And it's stimulating growth hormone and putting them in kind of a favorable androgen profile. And then they're eating a high protein diet. They're lifting fucking weights. And women can, you know, lift a heavier percentage of their 1RM for more reps. Which always blew me away. We do 20 rep back squats in the gym. It's like, what's your 1RM max?

105. What's your 20 rep? 100. I'm like, what? It doesn't make any fucking sense. Why is that? People couldn't figure it out. I was like, well, the 1RM is not a true 1RM.

You need a really efficient nervous system. And women just don't have as efficient a nervous system because I think one of the key factors for nervous system efficiency is testosterone. But then you have these girls that are doing this fucking high-intensity interval training all the time. So they're always in this kind of favorable lactic bathing. They're able to lift a higher percentage of their 1RM for more reps. And we don't get that same effect? I don't think it works the same way. I know, but here's the other problem too.

I think what we see with a lot of CrossFit now is we're seeing outliers. Whereas I think for a lot of guys doing just nothing but high-intensity interval training ends up creating so much oxidative stress that it ends up hurting testosterone levels. So I think you're seeing guys that are kind of outliers because we didn't really see like for most of the dudes. Um, and I think why across the football was pretty successful was, Hey, I want you to do a periodized strength template. I want you to bang heavy weights. And then I want you to do literally like sub 15. The majority of the workouts are between seven and 10 minutes, little conditioning workouts. And when people did that, they were fine. The problem is when you start cooking this stuff out real far,

all of a sudden it started negatively affecting the strength gains. And I think dudes just do really well with lifting weights and doing a little bit of conditioning. Like if you can do conditioning five days a week that looks like some short Metcons, a little bit of aerobic work, and some strongman shit and then bang heavy weights, you're usually pretty jacked. The chicks come in and they do fucking high-intensity interval training and do these Metcons for like 20 or 30 minutes and then go in and fucking lift weights high-intensity interval training and do these Metcons. For like three hours.

Yeah, for like 20 or 30 minutes and then go in and fucking lift weights. They get in shape really fast. And then the other one is, when was it ever fashionable for a woman to eat a high-protein diet? Like pre-CrossFit, like chicks are like, oh, I'm going to have a fucking smoothie and I'm going to do this. And so they're eating like a higher-carb, low-protein, low-fat diet. And then all of a sudden CrossFit came in and they were 30-30-30, you know, 40, 30, 30 zone, higher protein diet, one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And all of a sudden, dude, they're like creating this favorable anabolic environment with enough protein. Cause you know, man, like I, like I see all the nutrition stuff you do online and it's

like at the end of the day, man, like, um, uh, the only macronutrient I really saw in terms of like creating lean body composition was protein. If you eat enough protein, you can kind of fucking play with all the other stuff. You can carb cycle. You can play with fat. And I think a lot of that's personal preference. I think it's certain. And it's however you manipulate it.

But the only macronutrient that really everybody agrees on is you've got to eat enough protein. I don't know how to get you jacked on a low-protein diet. Which is getting weird nowadays, though, because you have people like Dave Ospreay and some of these other – Well, he's a fucking bullshit artist. He's a fucking charlatan. But there's a whole bunch of people like him now that are starting this whole thing where it's like, you only need fucking 50 to 100 grams of protein a day. And I'm like, I don't think so. No, it's – the idea is –

The literature is out there on that. Yeah, that shit's been argued like i mean how much protein do you need for protein synthesis was their idea okay so like hey like let's say 40 to 50 grams of protein i think it's like 0.8 grams per uh whatever it was like i forgot 0.8 is like the year yeah like 0.8 like per like let's say i forgot how it worked but it was like, basically, there's a certain amount of protein per meal to stimulate protein synthesis, and the past set amount doesn't necessarily help.

But yet, you have to do that every three hours if you want to keep doing it. That's why, like, Branch Chain Aminos came in. And, like, at the end of the day, like, and you see this, dude, like, you know, don't you always love when, like, the Dave Asperger's of the world giving all this training nutrition advice, and the dude's in awful fucking shape terrible and he's always talking about like extending life expectancy he looks once lived like 150 I'm like dude you look yeah way older than most people your age yeah yeah it's he uh yeah I like there's never really been anything I've ever heard of that dude say other than like

the infrared sauna thing I was like oh I kind of buy into that yeah but um no I, I have one of those in my garage. I do too. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I try to get in a couple of days a week. I remember Rob Wolf talked about it and was like, Hey man, if, uh, if you can get in there a couple of days a week, like you'll die of something. It just won't be cardiovascular disease. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, the female athlete thing is super interesting. And I think what's crazy is you have, um, for the first time, um, a the first time, um, a huge population of, of, of female athletes that are doing high intensity interval training and doing

it. And they look fucking great. Their results are insane. I do remember in school, cause I went to school for exercise physiology also. And I remember one of my professors talking about how they have, I could be wrong right now, but,

um, I think he said like their cross-sectional muscle fibers are like different than men's and they have the ability to gain more muscle mass than we do oh is either that or was they have the ability to gain more strength than we do like in a shorter period of time or something like that yeah because of the muscle fibers the way they were lined up it's um like uh um like women have the ability to handle more lower body load, I think. Like if you look at gymnastics, all the events for the girls are ground-based. So they have the vault, they have the tumbling, they have the balance beam.

The only one that they have for the upper body is the uneven bars. The dudes are rings, pommel horse, vault. So, I mean, like the guys are more predominantly upper body and it's just actually never even really thought about that. Yeah. So those girls, that's why the, whenever the girls come from gymnastics into CrossFit, they're like, this is fucking easy. Yeah. Like, um, I took my daughters down to these area and gymnastics place down in South, uh, South County. And, uh, I would take them early to watch the older girls train and the workouts that those girls would do would make the average CrossFitter fucking quit in a day.

Like they're out there for fucking three hours doing just like tumbling and this and this. And like the crazy part is I'm like these like 10 and 12-year-old girls are so fucking yoked. It just – I was like, fuck, man. So my little girls still go to gymnastics three, four days a week and they love it. And it's just – yeah, it's a great training system. Yeah, I think so for sure. Okay, so we talked about your favorite strength program. What's your favorite program for just getting super jacked?

Personally, mine's German volume. GBT? Well, there is definitely some really cool research that talks about volume being the biggest driving factor for hypertrophy. But for us, I found that some of just the classic bodybuilding splits, man. If you're going to do X amount, like how many sets per body part, I found a pretty cool program where we started doing like – we started at 20 sets per body part one day a week. 20 sets? Oh, per week. Yeah, per week. So you hit it twice a week or just one day a week. If you wanted to do it, like I'm going to go in and I'm going to do, you know, let's say I'm going to hit

four different lifts at five sets. And so we started charting, um, sets per body part, and then you can split it up into two days. So originally the program started at 20 sets and we were doing one body part one day a week. And then we started adding two or three sets every week. And then it ends up, I think at like, at like 25 sets, you split it into two days. And we were just doing kind of progressive volume in that way. So I always found that for me personally, doing some progressive overload in terms of not only weight, but also in volume and reps just kind of ends up kind of hitting the number for me. Perfect.

So, yeah, I mean, it's really hard to like, and this is even too, when you start looking at like, um, like shit, I remember my favorite bodybuilder was Dorian Yates still is. And, uh, I remember looking at his programs when I was a kid and just being like one set to failure. Well, what he didn't tell you is the dude had like 20 warmup sets up to his peak set. You know? So he's like, oh, I did, you know, bent rows with 600 pounds for a set of eight. But what they didn't show you was he did like 135, 225. So he had all this fucking volume on the bottom side leading up to it, which is what I really like to do.

I like to try to get my volume in all the lower sets and then really hit out on like one max set. And that always set to failure, which comes back from like Arnold Schwarzenegger when they asked Arnold, like, is it, you know Arnold which rep range allows you to get the biggest. He was like, if I want to do five reps and

I can do a sixth, then it's the sixth rep. If I can do seven, it's the seventh rep. Whatever rep allows me to go to failure is the one that causes me to grow. I've looked into the literature on that too. Some of them are saying that it's counterproductive to always do that. What's your opinion on that?

Not always. I'm thinking of it in terms of a drop set. Yeah. You know what I mean? When you go to ridiculous burnout. Well, they found – I just read a deal where they talked about doing drop sets, like working up something heavy and then doing drop sets. For your final drop set, going back to the original weight and trying to do max reps and making sure that you've killed all your,

your motor units and muscle fibers. Okay. So I, I always, uh, I don't know, man, I never really like the way it feels regardless.

Like I like the pump. If, uh, like there was a bunch of shit for a long time where people always talked about like leaving a rep or two in the tank. Oh, you want to leave a rep or two in the tank and i was always like fuck that yeah like i'm gonna do something i want to blow it out and then i'm gonna try to recover and see if i can

blow it out again it just felt like it worked better for me that way all right yeah i mean i feel the same i just like i was reading something about it recently where it was like the rep or two in the tank was physiologically a better adaptation for what for recovery or for muscle to get to build more muscle they're saying like if you're always burning it out all the time i forget exactly what was going on but it was like too much maybe like cortisol levels or something yeah uh that they brought up well don't don't you think a lot of that comes down to conditioning i think it does i think everybody's completely different for sure sure but uh what i found is that uh the better condition i

was in the more load i could handle which kind kind of makes sense. Like, Hey, if I'm like in better condition, then I should be able to train more. And I remember Louie Simmons was the one that talked to me about that. He asked me, he goes, how many days a week do you train or how many workouts do you get a week? And I'm like, uh, six. He's like, I get 18. I was like 18 fucking workouts. He's like, yeah, I do, you know, four strength workouts. I do these accessory, I do these restorative workouts. And, um, and it's allowed me to be able to increase my volume over time. So like, if I can get this many workouts and you get this many, and it was really, I was like, huh. So that kind of talked to me about like training frequency and how hard you're going and what you're able to do. And that was kind of, yeah, he, he's on a whole nother level

of, of training for sure. He's fucking, he's a crazy person yeah he seems like it legit and he's he's uh um super interesting dude and just has like so much practical knowledge that uh when he passes away all that shit will get lost i know when he's like one person because i just went to columbus i was like he's like the one person i was sad that i didn't get to go meet and talk to but yeah one day it is definitely a dream of mine to go talk to him and get a bunch of cool stuff on on the podcast for sure um is there any other programs that you want to talk about like even just like a very light so dusting so we talked about your favorite strength favorite way to build muscle well you you know i rebooted crossfit football i didn't know that yeah it's's a program that we put out called Johnny Wad.

Okay. And it was just kind of a tongue-in-cheek kind of spoof. I mean, obviously, my name's John. I had talked to me Johnny. I thought Johnny Wad was funny. And also, it's kind of the play on John Holmes, Johnny Wad. Yeah, okay. So it kind of has this funny, kind of like porn sense of humor to it.

Yeah. But I went back and basically pulled all the original workouts, which nobody else has but me. Just because like the way it was set up, it was real hard to capture everything. And I started going back and putting all the original CrossFit football workouts out. And people are funny, man. They show up and they do them. And it's on. Yeah.

So if you search Johnny Watt, you can go. And there's like a free trial and shit. People do it. Oh, sweet. It's pretty fun. People have a good time. Is the 30 swings every other minute on there yeah oh yeah oh nice oh yeah all the hero workouts perfect so i was laughing that on memorial day people posted a bunch of my hero

workouts that they attribute now to crossfit like i had like tillman workout and calcew which it's pretty funny that calcew is considered like the most uh hardest crossfit workout in history yep and was never on crossfit yeah Yeah. It was all CrossFit football. So really, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. That was us. Uh, yeah, I created that one or Andy stuff and I created that one. And, uh, Bob Calciola was, uh, was a duty, was a college football player. And, uh, I think he might've been an NFL player and then got drafted and ended up dying in Vietnam. And so we were looking for like some hero workouts to some ex professional athletes, um, similar to like Pat Tillman. And so like Bob Kalsu and then also Pat Tillman,

we created a workout for him, which CrossFit never had a workout for him. Kalsu was always the workout that I wanted to do when I didn't have a lot of time. And I was like, I want to fucking die. And I remember programming it for the gym, like the first year I was open and one of the members came in, he was super OG. He had worked out at another gym that I used to work at orange coast crossfit for like years and then he he's still a member here and i remember he walked in and he's like i'm not

fucking doing that and he left and i like i just remember that workout having that type of effect on people and i remember like 135 thruster was like the heaviest thing in the whole world because everybody was doing 95 and it was like the only workout at 135 yeah and the burpees I remember just yeah the five burpee buy-in devastating what we we found that if um so I I never told anybody this but the way that we ended up doing it and making it totally fucking doable was we started doing rack thrusters so the first one we would go a normal thruster then I'd bring it down to my back and i would just start doing rack thrusters and i was able i was trying to get like 10 like do five burpees and then get 10 and i realized the faster i could fucking do it uh the sooner i got done with it like if i was too conservative the shit would just last forever

and you're like jesus christ i've been here for like fucking 30 minutes yeah some people it would take like an hour they'd be doing like one like they were just dying yeah dude we had a guy that uh posted like a sub 10 minute and we were like bullshit yeah and so i sent him an invite to the cross at football seminar and we were like hey uh uh we'll comp you in please come so the dude shows up and he was a running back from valdosta valdosta state and he was probably five six about 235 pounds and the dude was born to fucking squat like he showed up as he walked in i was like oh fuck this dude i was like i was like i just seeing him there was no fucking doubt his name was uh travis i can't remember his last name but like as he walked in the gym i was like his fucking legs were like twice as big as his whole body he

was fucking like five six he was a running back and was easily 230 pounds 225 235 and i remember he walked in and i was like this is the sub 10 minute fucking deal like because we were like had this idea we're like dude we're gonna make him fucking do it there's no way he's full of shit and the dude walked in i'm like no he's good yeah and then he came in and he squatted like we were doing the squats and he squatted like fucking like 550 or 600 for a pretty easy triple and i was like he only had to squat like this far. And it was like ping, ping, like a fucking spark plug. I remember doing 500 for a triple at your seminar too.

Oh, no, you crushed it. Yeah, it was fun. Cool. So you have all the old school WODs coming back. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, we've been doing it for, geez, since. I had Johnny WOD and then somebody hit me up. And so for the 10-year anniversary of CrossFit Football,

and I started at the first of the year, I just went back and just started dumping all the original workouts in there. That is so cool. I really like that a lot. Putting the commentary in there and talking about, hey, this is where this workout came from. This is the date and this is what I was thinking and this is where we were in the training cycle.

Oh, damn. I actually kind of want to check that out. That is really cool. Yeah, it's fun. Is there anything else you have kind of going on right now that you want to talk about? Just been doing that. You know, we have our methodology course getting ready to kick out where, you know, the issue I had, especially with teaching CrossFit football and Power Athlete was getting coaches up to

speed on the information. And they would have to come to seminars and like do a bunch of remote stuff. And so we put together an online course and it's called power athlete methodology. And, um, we have those semesters starting and that's really like gives people the foundational knowledge to be successful as a coach. Is there like modules that they go through that kind of little tests and quizzes and stuff like that? Oh yeah. Everything's online. It's like a, uh, you know, I, not a dig on the NSCA or any of these other groups, NASM, whatever, but what they do is they teach everything because, you know, they're kind of like agnostic of one style.

Like that's not what the NSCA is about. They're going to teach you like everything you need to know about strength conditioning. And what I wanted to do was I wanted to disseminate and boil it down to what you needed to be successful. Instead of me like giving you all of the tools, I'm like, hey, man, here's some principles. This is what I think. If you took this course, you could show up and be a strength coach tomorrow. And, um, the guys from the NSCA really dig it. Uh, we've had them go through the course and they're like, man, this

is really good. And we can't do this, but we really like what you do. And so we've been working with them with some programming stuff. Um, and, uh, so we have that. And then once you get done with that, they, uh, we have our block one test. I don't know if you've seen the little blocks I welled up, um up on my site. So people go through a two-day test. They come to Austin, and we put them through a two-day coaching exam. Not only is it kind of a Socratic method. You have to be able to talk about it, but you have to be able to teach it,

and you have to be able to kind of go through some other things, a written test, and it's two days in Austin. And at the end of that, you pass your Block 1. I call it Block because I actually weld up these little three by three steel blocks. Oh, I have seen that. Okay, yeah. So those are, that's for, instead of, you know, normally at a coach's deal, you get a fucking certificate. You actually earn these fucking blocks.

And I make them. I weld up fucking 20 of them at a time. And you basically got to come in and fucking earn them from us. We don't give them away. I like that. That's cool. Yeah. Well, dude, you know, you go to these certifications.

They give you a fucking certificate. You put it in a book. You never see it. I wanted something that somebody could be like, I earned this motherfucker. And this is a weapon if I had to use it. That's cool. So we do that a ton. So we have methodology.

Obviously, we do programming. And then we've been doing a bunch of stuff with the US military. So I was just down at an HBO summit at Fort Bragg talking about, you know, like a human performance and the new ACFT, which is the Army changed their conditioning or their physical test from run push-ups and pull-ups to this run, reverse med ball toss, trap bar deadlift, knees to elbow, and then these heavy kind of – So you're changing it to this? No, this is what the u.s army did so in 1982 the u.s army put the present conditioning test in which was a two mile run max push-up max sit-up in two minutes and then uh just last year um they they the u.s army's put out a new conditioning test which is uh uh five movements it's a trap bar deadlift for a 3RM reverse med ball toss.

And then they have like this weird thing where it's like you're kind of hanging on a bar and you have to basically bring your knees to elbow and do kind of an isometric hold. And then it's a farmer's carry and a sled drag. And then a sprint. It's like a sprint, farmer carry, sprint, kind of sled drag, kind of little circuit. And then it's a two mile run. And so that's their new PT test test the problem way better yeah oh uh yeah it's it's um it is a drastic improvement for culture in terms of the u.s army the problem is is not only do you have to have the

equipment to do it so think about like running and push-ups and sit-ups you can do it anywhere now they have this huge equipment lag so they're trying to backfill that piece but they also since 1982 man really haven't had a culture of lifting weights so going in and trying to teach these guys like hey this is how you trap bar deadlift this is how you're efficient this is how you not only like test and like execute the movements but like this is how you train for it so trying to put in better training programs with the u.s military so we've been doing that and then we still do work with a bunch of the guys from naval special warfare and do that so we gotta go out and see them in july that's really cool so it's. So we've been doing that. And then we still do work with a bunch of the guys from Naval special warfare and do that. So we got to go out and see them in July. That's really cool. So it's, it's neat that we've been able to kind of branch off and, and just kind of expand

and keep doing what we're doing. So just finding you in general and finding all this stuff that you're doing is just, is this powerathlete.com? Yeah. Uh, powerathlete HQ, powerathlete HQ.com. Yeah. The guy that owns power athletes been squatting it for 10 years. Oh, okay. In some fucking weird country that I don't have access to a lawyer in. And then he kind of was like, I'll hit him up every couple of years. Like every year I hit him up and he wants some like six figures for it. So I was like, oh, fuck it. I own the trademark for Power Athlete, but that's the URL, PowerAthleteHQ. Okay, PowerAthleteHQ.com.

And you can find us on social media and all that. Yeah, you guys have a social media. Is it PowerAthleteHQ? Yeah, Power Athlete. If you just put in Power And you can find us on social media and all that. Yeah, you guys have a social media. Is it powerathlete.hq? Yeah, powerathlete. If you just put in powerathlete, we're usually the ones that come up. Okay, cool. And then if they follow you, they'll see a bunch of old cars and stuff like that. Yeah, so what's up, man?

We're going to find you a Bronco? I do, really. I'm either between the Bronco or the Boss. Man, 6970 Boss 302 is a badass car. Yeah, it's a really cool car. Oh yeah. No, it's a few around here right now that are pretty nice. Yeah.

The, uh, they, they came at some really cool colors. Like they, they have a grabber blue and they have that. That's the one I was looking at. Yeah. That, that grabber blue to me is, uh, so years ago I was at a car show in Philadelphia with my buddy RC and, um, this dude pulled up and, uh, he was driving, um, you know what a Boss 9 is? So the Boss 302. That's the 429, right?

Yeah, the 429 Boss motor. So their shit is probably about a million bucks, half a million. But this guy pulled up, he had a black Boss 9 that he had bought brand new in 69 and then he bought a Boss 302 in 70 and he showed up to a car show and he had these little flags

that was like original owner on them and they were two immaculate cars and the guy showed up and brought him to a car show yeah i mean fucking unreal yeah those things are insane the boss nine was um so pretty cool they took the boss and they sent it out to this place called car craft and they cut the the front shock towers did all this fucking custom work to get that big ass fucking boss 429 motor in it and um like seeing that pop the hood and seeing29 motor in it and um like seeing that pop the hood and seeing that motor in there you're like holy shit this is cool yeah and um but yeah his was triple black which was fucking insane and then that boss uh the 70 uh boss 302 and grabber

blue fucking man uh the four speeds i mean dude immaculate. Like never been painted, unrestored, perfect cars. Wow. I was like goosebumps. You know, for a car person. I saw one one day driving around and I was like, holy shit, that car is badass. So, you know, I have a 68 GT500 Shelby. Oh, I did not know that. So I had a 67 and now I have an all original 68 that I pulled the motor out and redid the engine bay and I got to put the interior back in it.

So I've been working on that my spare time. That's like you work on cars quite a bit, I feel like. Yeah. It seems like you have a whole garage kind of out here. So I have a 5,000-square-foot building. Half is a gym, and then the other half is a shop. That's where I weld and work on cars and lifts and the whole deal. Yeah, that's really cool.

So, yeah, I'm working on – I've got to finish that. And then I have a 79 GMC Chevy K30 crew cab that I'm working on. I parted a Duramax out, and I'm putting a Duramax in that. I know. I've seen all the photos of the different Broncos and stuff. And around here in California, for those of you guys who don't live here, you see a Bronco, and you're like, damn, I want one so bad. It's just like a classic California car. Yeah.

And now they're as expensive as, like, a fucking G-Wagon. Yeah. Well, dude, I was laughing. They got a bunch of them down on the Phillips lot. Yep. So I went down there, and I was looking. car yeah and now they're as expensive as like a fucking g-wagon yeah it's like well dude i was laughing uh they got a bunch of them down on the phillips lot yep so i went down there and i was looking they're like 80 90 grand i know and they're not even the nicest ones i know they yeah they're they want high dollar but i was laughing because they have those have you seen those lifted g-wagons oh yeah the huge ones yeah dude i i like went over they have one that's highlighter yellow yep and i'm like who who's going to fucking buy this?

Yeah, some Arab dude. Nobody. I was like, man, you're better just giving me this thing. Years ago when I played in Philly, I did a car deal with Mercedes. And so every month I got a different Mercedes to drive. Oh, really? That's cool. And I got to drive a G-Wagon for a month.

And I remember they were like, man, what would you buy? Or what would you want to buy in these? I'm like, I buy this G wagon, but, um, nobody makes a lift for it and I'd want to put bigger tires and now they make lifts for them. So I'm always like looking at them like, man, I'd buy a G wagon. I think it's like 300 grand. Like when you buy a meal. Oh yeah. No, I, I went into a Mercedes dealership in Austin and they had like a, I want to say it was like a G 63, which was the, uh, 6.3 liter twin turbo and G one. And I think the price it was like a G63, which was the 6.3 liter twin turbo AMG one. And I think the price tag was like $1.80 or $203,000. Yeah.

And I'm looking at the guy. I said, what do you think? I'm like, can I get three car seats in here? And he kind of looked at me. He's like, I'm like, oh, well. Yeah. I'm good. I'm going to have to leave and not buy this thing then.

I just saw, because I've had his OBJ's trainer on here a few times, Odell Beckham. And he just bought an orange Rolls Royce. Yeah. And instead of the Rolls Royce symbol coming up the front, it's him holding a football. That's awesome. It's the coolest thing. I think he put it on his Instagram. It's the coolest thing I've ever seen.

So when I trained at Athletes Performance, Marcellus Wiley was one of my training partners. And I remember one day we were coming out, and he's like, yo, you want to go grab lunch? I was like, yeah, let's fucking do it. So he had bought a brand new Rolls, and we get in this thing. And I just remember the carpets were like six inches thick. And I'm like sitting in this fucking,

I felt like it was like something, the only way I could describe it was like, whenever you hear like in ancient Rome where they had like the decadence and like Nero and like fucking all these like crazy ass like Roman emperors. Like, I always imagine like this is what their chariots look like. Like, there was just leather everywhere. And like, you know, you hear the stories that Rolls Royce and Ferrari and these companies actually have their own cattle farms where they raise a specific breed of cattle. They like don't have any like razor or a barbed wire or they don't have anything where they can fall and nick and hurt themselves because they want the skins to be perfect. And they raise like this specific breed for their animal.

And like, you know, you're sitting in there and this is all like, like, it's not like they're, I're i mean this is from their farm like you're sitting on this leather and it's all perfect like the carpets are like you know six inches of beaver skin you're not allowed to fucking kill beavers and skin them anymore so they raise beavers for this yeah and like and like we're sitting in this thing and the hood's a mile long and i get in it like the door is shut and it's like like the space shuttle he's like watch this he hits a button and all of a sudden the little rolls royce symbol goes it shoots out and then when you park it it pops down so no you know nobody steals it like first of all where the fuck are you parking this thing if somebody's gonna steal your fucking emblem and i remember we went to lunch and it was just like so nice and i remember thinking i'm like god this is like this is so fucking cool yeah and then like i mean

what it was like yeah like a 325 like 400 000 what? It was like, yeah, like a $325,000, like $400,000 car. And I'm like, ah. They're like boats. They're humongous. It's so nice. Like, dude, like everything is, ah, it's just. Yeah. There's craftsmanship at the highest level.

But, like, I remember seeing a documentary about Ferraris. And when they built, like, whenever, like, I think it was the 599 or one of the new ones. They built this whole factory. And it was, like, everything, like, I think it was the 599 or one of the new ones, they built this whole factory. And it was, like, everything was set up for these perfect environments. So they painted the cars in, like, a greenhouse. So there was, like, normal light around plants. So they painted so that the color would be perfect. They tuned the motors with a, like, in a sound room so that the motor has to have the exact decibel sound

that a front engine V12 Ferrari has. So they know that like, hey, like Ferrari has like trademarked their Ferrari sound and they tune it based off of like in a sound room. So the guy's like, oh, this isn't making the right sound. So they go back and they adjust lifters and cams and they fuck with the motor so that it sounds, they all sound the same. And like the frames and like like the the frames were like hydro bent so there's like no welds everything's like hydro bent i mean like

fuck like i'm like watching this and being like i'm more interested in going to the factory than actually seeing the car just to see like the level at which they were doing it and they won these huge awards and it was just like here's the farm where we raise our cows here's this that is insane i never i never even knew any of that yeah it's uh there's a whole documentary on that ferrari factory to build that one car and the steps that they went through to like for perfection and i was never really a big ferrari fan until i saw that and then i was like man i'm i'm amazed by anybody that can take that level of detail and do something that well like uh it's like i have some really cool friends like that are like just amazing artisans. Like my buddy,

Rick at Starling gear. And, um, um, you know, the guys from like Strider and like, I was out at Sorenix two weeks ago and, uh,

Neil, uh, Kama, Kama Mura, who is one of the guys on fortune fire actually forged a blade and like seeing like artisans build that type of stuff like Sornex is the same thing on equipment yeah like my buddy Will here in Orange County builds like you know million dollar trophy trucks and it's like the most insane

TIG welder you've ever seen and like just like that level I mean there's um there's a dude uh that builds you know oh um like Jonathan at Icon, uh, my buddy, uh, Brian Stone at Stone's metal shop to do all of his metal work and like builds. He's just like, like shit where you walk in and you're like, God damn. Like, like to me, that's, uh, like really interesting. And I always think like in the strength conditioning world, if, if like you can become an artisan in that way where like, you know, now here you're sculpting people and able to do all this and really maximize performance in that level.

I think we get to what we want to do. We're like no longer just some fucking trainer yelling in a gym. You're actually like, you know, some form of like, you know, a fabricator artisan, like a, you know, creator of people and making, you know, better versions of themselves, which is what I've always hoped for power athlete that, you know, people enter into our ecosystem that they're going to come out of this thing, a better version of themselves with the set of tools to not only improve themselves, but improve other people too. And that's all I ever wanted for, you know, CrossFit football and any of the other stuff I ever put out with Talk To Me Johnny was more like, you know, um, I don't know if,

if, uh, saying things in like the nicest way is always gonna force people. I think sometimes you gotta like upset people a little bit or piss them off to try to get them to think and just kind of confirmation bias and keep giving people the same information over and over again, hoping they fucking do it. Sometimes you got to kick people in the fucking balls a little bit. Yeah, I think so for sure. I also think that, I mean like there's definitely been times like in my just career of fitness in general where I feel really smart and then times where I feel really dumb. Like I just feel like if you're not constantly up on something, like I don't think that necessarily taking one of your courses would be bad for someone who's really knowledgeable and just hasn't brushed up in a while. But what's cool too is whenever people that are super knowledgeable

come through, like we have a bunch of guys that are PhDs and doctors that have taken our stuff and it's always good validation for me, but it's also adds more people into my ecosystem that allow me to be smarter. Like we have a guy, a couple, actually two guys that are doing their PhDs right now and that are in college and the amount of research that they forward me, Hey John, what about this? Or what's interesting is they'll forward me research that supports what we do. And they're like, Holy shit, this research got published, but you've been doing this for 10 years. And I'm like, well, yeah, man, if you got to wait for the research to come out, and Paul Quinn said that, if you've got to wait for the research to come out, you're going to be 10 years behind the curve.

Yeah. So, like, for me, like, I have this idea of always being a white belt. Like, I don't know where I got it. I probably stole it from, like, Mike O'Hearn or something. But that idea of, like, always trying to be a beginner, always humbling yourself to try to learn new information. And I don't understand, like, and then maybe it's the uh social media internet thing where like everybody's trying to fight for this guru status because I think it allows them affords them some advantage in terms of business but at the end of the day man like I'm just trying to

fucking learn as much as I can yeah like fuck I it's bored if I always have to teach and I don't think anybody cares if you're like the originator of anything I just think that as long as you can preach it well And give credit If it's due then I think everyone's fine with it Like if you you know Like my 50 swings a day it's not like my 50 swings a day Like I got it from somewhere else But that shows not only

It shows like An elevated thinking but also class Like I'm the first one to be like hey this is where I got this Like I learned this from you know Louis Simmons I learned i learned this from uh fred hatfield i learned this you know here this is some other stuff i did like i'm the first to try to pay homage whereas you have like fucking all these people that are like oh i invented this shit you're like yo man like like i just think it's disingenuous and um it also shows that people that i think are insecure in who they are you're like ah yeah i, yeah, I got it from this person.

It's really good. And I use it. Why does that make it any less valuable? Yeah. And I think it's just because people fight for this guru status, you know, like Glassman, like, oh, you know, nobody did, you know, metabolic conditioning before me. And I was like, yeah, that's completely, dude, I've heard him make some fucking like, like, um, we used to joke that the, uh, the claims were like in, uh, Austin Powers, like, oh, you made crazy claims.

Like you invented the question mark, you know, like that type of shit. Like Glassman, nobody did metabolic conditioning. Nobody lifted weights at a high heart rate before me. I was like, wow, fuck. Like it just, but, you know, for the uneducated people, they were like, oh, you know, this is CrossFit training. And I'm like, you realize you walk into any fucking college weight room, you're going to see people doing some form of metabolic conditioning work. Yeah. And well, any Olympics in general. Yeah. I mean, dude, you were a bobsled guy, right? Like you guys didn't do metabolic conditioning

all the time. Yeah. Fucking everybody does, you know? I mean, shit like the GPP stuff. I mean, that was theorized by the Russians in the forties and the fifties. But you think about when the Olympics started, I mean, people were throwing shot put and stuff like that. You think that they weren't doing some sort of metabolic conditioning or something like that? Well, it just, yeah. I don't know.

What do you think about all this CrossFit shit, like burning the games down and doing all that? I think it's interesting that they came out and said something ridiculous about Facebook being like, because they deleted their social media completely. I saw that. And it's basically saying that Facebook was

kind of like a bully. Yeah, like nefarious and dangerous and singling people out and basically trying to quiet certain people and that it doesn't protect privacy and they came out and had this big kind of... Well, it all happened because they started a diet.

They started some diet group where it was like, you know... Well, I think that diet thing was independent of CrossFit. But it was the guy that started it, like Dan's Plan or something. But they deleted the group. Yeah, like he had like 1.6 million followers and it was a low-carb, high-protein diet. And people would get in there and share their before and afters. And they just fucking deleted it

without warning. It seemed very basic. It didn't seem like a big deal. Well, CrossFit's weird. Or not CrossFit, but Facebook is weird on before and afters. They think that it's like if you're posting a before and after picture, it's somehow disingenuous or it's been fucking altered. That was one of their reasons.

They deleted it and then they put it back and then they deleted it again. And then CrossFit came out and said, I don't want to buy into any of Zuckerberg's shit, basically. Yeah, which I think is crazy. You know what, though? I mean, I don't think it's crazy, but financially, it's a huge hit for... Do you think CrossFit was making a lot of money off of social media? I think in a roundabout way yeah or do you think that it was hurting them because people weren't going to CrossFit.com anymore I think what happened personally is they probably had

pulled all their analytics and realized that like CrossFit WOD and CrossFit training and CrossFit this all these uh different pages on social media was where people were digesting all their CrossFit information and they weren't going to CrossFit.com. They're like, what, did they just spend like a billion dollars on their website and they probably have all this money in this? They're like, shit, man, we used to have thousands of comments a day and now we have 20 or 30 and people aren't coming to CrossFit.com for their information anymore. I think they probably looked at it and said, shit, the way people are digesting their information is through social media. Why don't we just get rid of it and see if we can drive more people to CrossFit.com? That's kind of what I think.

Or maybe they died on the sword on some real, I don't know, new world order. Well, they had like millions of followers already. Ten million. It's kind of hard to get rid of that. Ten million followers on Instagram and they just fucking shut it down. That is insane. I always wonder who's the guy that's like his Glassman's proposing this or talking about it. And everybody's like, sounds like a fucking great idea.

Being like. Well, do you see what they did with social media? It started being like really old people getting off of couches and doing like air squats and stuff. And there's like this ridiculous scene where it's like oldest house like of anyone's ever seen in their life. It's – if you guys are old enough, it looks like the set from Archie Bunker. Yeah. So like Archie Bunker was this show about this old racist and it looks like Archie Bunker meets Married with Children. Yeah.

So I think – Married with Children looks exactly like that. So I think what happened – and I'll tell you this, man. Just from like purely – this is my observation and having been in the CrossFit deal a long time. I think what happened is CrossFit did a really interesting analysis of their brand. And they realized that their best forward facing or their most prolific champions for their image were a bunch of early 20-something-year-old professional CrossFitters that didn't own gyms, right? Like, Hey, I'm 22 years old and I basically fucking post four times a day in my underwear, uh, you know, and probably, um, I'm either fucking exercise anorexic or taking some form of drugs and I'm, you know, fucking tanning and Instagram filters and like doing these crazy fucking

workouts. And so the mass media or the mass general public gets online, social media, they hit the hashtag CrossFit and they see all these like fucking, uh, narcissistic Uber Jack, 20 something year old professional CrossFitters that don't have jobs. And probably CrossFit probably looked at it and they were like, you know,

cause we do this as a company for analysis. You hire people to do like a, you know, market research analysis for your website. Like, like how are people viewing your brand? And, um, like we just went through this whole thing about like understanding our brand and the way I understand it isn't necessarily how, uh, the website or our forward properties are doing it. So then you have to like reach out, figure out how people are viewing it and then, you know, do some AB split testing or do some

other shit so that you can project the image that you want. I bet you CrossFit looked and said, fuck, our biggest forward-facing social media platform is all these 20-something-year-old fucking CrossFitters who are hashtagging us and posting fucking millions of times a day over the course of the world. And then our biggest media outlet is the CrossFit Games, which looks like an homage to a bunch of 20-something- something year old fucking super jack kids doing a bunch of crazy fucking workouts

that not one of them really own affiliates. So CrossFit probably looked and was like, wait a minute. So our best forward facing or our most prolific forward facing image is a bunch of kids that don't pay us a dollar, but yet are making lives, making huge paychecks off of Reebok and fucking RX Bar and all this other shit, right? And they probably looked and was like, this is a fucking problem because we're not controlling our image. And if I'm like, let's say I'm a 50-something-year-old dad

and I want to go and get back in shape, I'm going to like, oh, I heard about this CrossFit thing. I'm going to search it on social media. And then you're going to see a bunch of 20-something-year-old kids training in their underwear or dudes in their Speedos. You don't want to do it anymore. And you're going to be like, well, this doesn't look like me. Or let's say a huge demographic of 50- or 60-year-olds

are even fucking going to be worse, and they're going to be like, well, this really doesn't look like me. So then Glassman made an interesting comment in one of his interviews where he said, you know, we started the CrossFit games. Like if you owned a car dealership and you bring in a clown and some cotton candy so that the, you know, the kids want to come in and you can bring in and sell the parents. Then all of a sudden five years later, you look out there and the entire parking lot is full of fucking clowns.

Sometimes you just shut the fucking dealership down. And that was the comment that he made after when they basically unhinged this CrossFit Games thing where he's like, we're going to fire the game staff, we're going to fire the media, we're going to fucking basically change the whole format, we're going to get rid of this motherfucker, we're going to auger it in the side of the mountain.

I like the new format way more. Yeah, but there's no support for it. Yeah, there is no real true support. When this thing happens, who's going to be at line making sure that people, athletes check in? So there's no game staff. There's no media staff. They went and have these independent – I think it's all volunteers.

Yeah, it's all volunteers. Yeah. I mean, like if you had volunteer coaches, what's the quality of what they're doing? And then are they paying coaches? I mean, are they paying judges? I mean, the quality of fucking all that stuff has always been shitty anyway. Yeah. But how is it going to go down?

I mean, so how are they going to regulate? Okay, so you won an all-in-one qualifier. You went through the open, this. I mean, to me, it feels very – there's a lot of variables. And maybe it goes off without a hitch and it looks fucking amazing. But I just have to think like changing the format and doing something that drastic. And then I think it's like they're having like the top affiliate person in each country. Like there's – like they didn't put out any of this stuff.

I mean, shit, I learned about it from Armin. Yeah. But it just – it felt like – That's very strange they didn't they didn't put anything out there for anyone to read to really understand like what's happening i just personally like it because i feel like crossfit's back like i like what i love about crossfit is back a little bit because i went from having all these kids i think they're going to go to the games and that's all they care about and all they want to do is die in the gym all fucking day long

now it's so hard for them to get to the games yeah that they're like you know what man i just want to come in and work out yeah and have fun so like now i have all these changed it so now i have all these people where it's like hey man you want you want to fucking you want to do a bunch of bench press and pull-ups you know what i mean and now they're like yeah let's do it because so it as an affiliate owner the change in the games format and also like all of these things will probably help your business because it's not going to be the most forward-facing i mean and that's what greg wanted 100 he wanted to give back to the affiliates yeah and and dude but like can you imagine like if um

and i think about this for my own company if i like clicked on uh power athlete or i clicked on whatever my hashtag and this is this company that I built and the people that are my most forward-facing organic form of content are not the demographic that I want to be going after right like I mean shit like a bunch of 20 something year old kids that are training at a gym for free that are probably you know fuck you remember surfing on a couch this I mean trying to be something and do this professional crossfit thing and're like, these kids aren't putting a dollar in my pocket. They're making a living off of my business. And they're effectively not representing my affiliates, which is by far my best income stream.

So, I mean, are they the ones buying gear? No, they're getting free shit. So they're not buying shoes. I mean, it's just, like he probably looked at it and thought, fuck, I got to get rid of this shit. And you're creating thousands of people that are getting funneled into a position where they have nothing. Yeah.

I mean, the odds of me turning out the way that I did are very, very insanely small. Yeah. But here's the thing. It couldn't happen today. No. When you got into this place and this, it was still kind of like you caught it at the right time. It's just like when we were talking, shit, was it two or three years ago about the online programming stuff, like the people that are trying to get into the online programming stuff now. Yeah, you just can't now.

It's just there's people that are established markets and this. I mean, we saw it kind of pivoting years ago. Like five years ago, we started doing the online stuff. Like it took me two years to build our online course and you know shit we've taught you know fuck 200 300 seminars around the globe on every continent over the last 10 years and like i had it's hard to catch up to that well i remember brandon lilly i was on soar nexus podcast and he's like well if somebody wanted to start their own certification or do their own seminar how would they do it i was like fuck man i don't know i was like dude like 2008 glassman calls me and says, hey, come teach this thing.

And like we had instant market. I had seminars this. And like then over the time, I was able to build my brand. And then, you know, now Power Athlete is able to branch out. But I don't know how I would organically create this today in this market. Not to say you couldn't do it. I just don't know if the path that I took would be able to be replicated just like your deal. Yeah. No, people ask me that all the time too. And I and i'm like dude i just don't know if you can do it

anymore it's like so hard i mean you would need something like very very big and marketable to happen up front and then you just like kind of capitalize on it well when you opened it was pretty good because it was when uh uh justin fucking drove oc crossfit into the fucking ground with that Groupon thing. He ran a Groupon for like $40. He created all these problems and then he left because he didn't want to deal with them. So he went to Bali every time. He'd create hundreds of people coming in the door and all this madness.

And he'd be like, oh, I don't want to deal with this. And he'd just go to Bali for a month and go surf. And he'd come back and the gym would just be like... In shambles. Yeah, the manager just was uh was stealing money and like all these like because of that i i never deal with cash i like literally everyone's like hey can i buy this in cash i'm like nope yeah credit credit card everything like everything's credit card well uh but like that whole fucking shit show um that whole thing kind of fucking like polarized and like destroyed like

i i would think a lot of the cross-Fit market here in Orange County and like we saw it at our gym and this, I mean, we were pretty good cause we had started and we had a good member base, but then like all the other gyms peeled out and like, just, it just was fucking a nightmare. But you started and I feel like, uh, you know, your idea was pretty good to like start like a really like kind of like a little smaller high-end gym. I mean, now at the time. Around here, it was the move.

Dude, you have a kick-ass location. You're not really on the east side coast of Mesa. You're on this side of Newport Boulevard. The gym is fucking nice. You've got good equipment. Shit, dude, you didn't cheap out on anything. So, I mean, no, it's legit, and I think there's a clientele for that. Well, I remember traveling around at the time,

and I just thought it was advantageous for me to just take every little thing that I liked about every gym I'd ever been to. The custom pull-up bar was an idea that I saw at somebody else's gym. I remember – I mean, I coached so many classes, and I think that's what a lot of people are lacking is they weren't a student for a very long, long time. They just saw the numbers. You're saying, oh, they have 200 members times this times that blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Like I didn't even have time to even think about that. I was trying to change for the CrossFit Games and I was coaching six classes, eight classes a day. And I remember just being like, fuck, I hate the feeling of today's workout is Helen and we don't have enough 53 pound kettlebells for everyone. Sure. I hate that today's workout is Diane and I don't have enough 45 pound plates for everybody in the gym if they all wanted to rx like i remember those feelings of like being embarrassed to be like well you're gonna have to deadlift 185 because we don't have enough 45 pound plates or yeah or this or that or and i remember you know the competitors

had a had a set of comp plates and i remember a gym only having one assault bike and you wanted to use it but they only had one so like when i remember when i opened the gym i was like all right well fuck that i'm gonna have 10 assault bikes i'm gonna have 10 rowers i'm gonna have so many kettlebells that everybody in the class can rx no matter what i'm gonna have so many plates everyone can do that um everything's gonna be organized god i'm fucking so no dude the gym is nice yeah i'm so mad about like walking across the whole gym to go grab a 45-pound plate. Like let's just put them on the racks and put them right there. And it's like I stole a little bit from NFL gyms and like the college gyms and like Ohio State.

I just actually got back from University of Oregon and I got a full tour of the whole facility there. It's pretty legit, huh? Yeah, and everything there is actually Ferrari leather seats. Yeah. Oh, yeah, and all their Sorenix gear. And all Sorenix, yeah. We outfitted our gym at Power Athlete to all Sorenix gear. I think it's the

nicest gear in the business, man. That shit's fucking next level. It's expensive. It's a little sturdier than the Rogue stuff. I remember we ordered racks, we ordered all this shit. I remember the bill came in and I was like, god damn. The crazy part is my kids. Kids will probably train on this equipment just cause it's fucking, it's bulletproof.

But man, it's a, it's, it's not cheap. I think what people don't realize is like Rogue has like the eco rig. Then they have like a monster light and they have like the monster rig, which is like the gnarliest one. That's like kind of like all of Soarin' X is like the monster style. It's all just like. Yeah. Their, their shit's all like, I was just out there, man.

And their stuff's so nice, dude. Like the amount of like – yeah, it's fucking legit. Yeah. Yeah. Well, shit. I think we hit like pretty much everything in all of CrossFit and everything that is Power 8 athlete. Yeah. No, I think the CrossFit stuff is super interesting, man.

I'm always fascinated by – you know like you know you see companies that do really interesting things like you know and i'm always kind of fascinated by non-conventional stuff like uh you know it feels like everybody's doing the same shit over and over again like i we laugh on social media like i do with the guys at work that like it's almost like a lot of people went to these weekend seminars where it's like i'm going to teach you how to be an influencer weekend seminar you have to post these fucking like you know uh emotional diatribes where you're basically telling everybody how it is you know the andy forsella model where you know or the gary v and it's like everybody's just trying to

parrot these dudes and like and then the other one is you have to go around and like take pictures with successful people because if you project success then you people will think you're successful which leads to more success which is just kind of like feels disingenuous and uh take pictures with successful people because if you project success, then you, people will think you're successful, which leads to more success, which is just kind of like feels disingenuous. And, uh, I don't know,

man, like, I just think like if, um, instead of, you know, trying to tell everybody how it is to try to build yourself up, I think you just try to do good shit and,

uh, be authentic and not be a fucking scumbag. Yeah. At the end of the day, like shouldn't be that fucking hard for most people but no i that i try to be as authentic as possible my whole fucking life is on my instagram like i remember i'm super jealous about your traveling dude because i got a wife and three kids like we were joking like for me to go anywhere i gotta buy five plane tickets yep you're like oh i'm

going here i'm like god damn it every like i think i've hit you up i'm like god i live vicariously through these fucking adventures now i remember like when you wrote me that i, oh, that's so fucking cool that he likes my stuff. Because a lot of times I'll post that stuff and it doesn't do very well. And a lot of people don't really care too much about it. But it's a huge thing for me. And as soon as I started making money, actually, the first thing that I did was I took my stepdad and we went to Switzerland and Amsterdam. We went hiking all over the place in France and all that stuff. Because I literally was like, dude, if you could do anything right now, what would you want to do?

And he's like, I've always wanted to go to Switzerland. I've always wanted to go to France and see the mountains and all that stuff. And I was like, dude, let's fucking do it. That's right up my alley. No, dude. You went to Iceland. Dude, you've been all over. I've been there a couple times now.

Oh, man. That's one place i want to go um i like uh the one that we're trying to figure out right now is my my one daughter is uh she's super sharp she's i got twin girls that are seven and my one daughter is like uh she's fucking really smart um so she's obsessed with egypt and so i found this like two-week thing in egypt where you go and like the the head of like the cairo museum takes you on like tours of the sphinx and like the like the giant pyramids the great pyramids luxor looks like the place to go and then luxor and then you get on a boat for the nile and you go and you like see all like the the valley of the kings the valley of the queens and you go all the way down

it's like two weeks and so it's like i think it's like fucking like eight or nine grand to do it for like two weeks for each person each person yeah so it cost me like 50 G's to go. And that doesn't include airfare. So I was, uh, like my wife was like, you know, like, what do you want to do? And I'm like, ah, or like, do you want to go anywhere? I'm like, I really want to do this Egypt thing. Like as a seven year old little kid, like to go on something like that would potentially alter your entire life. Uh, where like, you know, Hey, I was into this thing and my dad, like, you know, took us on this trip and it was like changed my entire existence. And so I have so many moments like that, but I can recall.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Like I, I can think of little things when I was like their age that like completely altered my thinking and, uh, my little boys three. And so he's, uh, he likes to fucking run and he's just crazy little kids cause he should be. But, um, I'm like kind of more fearful of being like, man, if I got to take this little kid to the Cairo Museum and like pyramids and this, I'm like I need him to like chill out just 5%. So my wife is like, if we can just get him to calm down a little bit, maybe we could go. So that's our next – I want to try to do that one. Egypt is something I've always wanted to do for sure.

That and an African safari are like my two like big experiences. Like I've climbed all the mountains. I've seen a lot of really cool things. But big, big moments like the pyramids and to see an African safari I think are the two things I have left. Machu Picchu is another one. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that one. And then the other one is Gobiteki.

So they found – I think I'm saying that right. But it's in turkey uh they found this structure it's kind of like a an early structure uh that the technology that they built and they've dated that it's like six or seven thousand years ago so based off of what we know within like recorded history it shouldn't exist in the time at which it did with the technology that they had so this when they found this deal, it kind of like completely fucked up everybody's observation or their hypothesis of like evolution because while we were still scratching our asses trying to figure out how to use the wheel, these guys were building like super complex giant

monolithic structures. And like if you look it up, it's like one of those things where like, you know, they're excavating dinosaur bones and they find like a cell phone. Like that's like the kind of the analogy it gives where like, they're like, wait a minute, like the technology that it took to build this, we didn't think that people had for thousands of years. Like the one that, um, my daughter and I were reading about, Jamie and I were reading about recently was, um, they, um, the, uh, they brought in a geologist to look at like, uh, the weather patterns for like the Sphinx and the weather patterns on the Sphinx and the where, and like the, the erosion on the Sphinx isn't from wind, it's from water. So this guy was like, you know,

you know, not a Egyptologist or not anything to do with just a geologist with an expertise in water erosion. And he's like the, the erosion you see on the Sphinx is based off of water erosion. So the last time that we would have had water in this place based off of soil samples that they were able to pull was like at the end of the last ice age. And they talked about like, you know, where the water was and like, this is all, and they kind of went through it. And based off of that, then the Sphinx is much older

than the pyramids. So like they talk about like, hey, the Sphinx is much older than the pyramids. So like they, they talk about like, Hey, the Sphinx was built at this time. And they're like, well, based off of the water erosion, we know how like, like this kind of dates it. And so like that type of stuff, like, uh, so like we've been talking about it and then she got into geology. So I got her like a rock polisher and she like polishes rocks. And like, so, so like first grade she goes and they're like, Oh, what do you want to be when you grow up? She's like, I to be an egyptologist that focuses on geology and i just laughed like thinking my other daughter's like i want to be a horse trainer and my other daughter

wants to be a fucking egyptologist but like um so that won't be killer i'd love to take him to go but i'd love to take him to egypt and then if i could go to machu picchu like that one to me is uh fucking the coolest shit i've ever seen yeah machu picchu looks really really cool and it's just it's really not that far from us no i got on the y and and it's a bitchin hike too yeah so like uh that piece but um yeah man like i i what's neat is i got to do a lot of really killer stuff when i played in the nfl and like you know do and like now that i have kids like i want to like give them like i don't want to buy them cell phones like i don't want to just like get them shit i want to take them and have experiences where like they become altering because like i

always think man like on your deathbed you're gonna be like oh thank god i got that iphone 10 you know like like like you know like oh thank god thank god i got that fucking odell beckham doing your thing that shot in and out of my fucking thing like to me that's like that that's not really what matters like as a father with my kids like to be able to stand in some greats and like inspire greatness within them is really what i hope for and like that's kind of like i hope i get to do that too i'm excited to have kids one day it's cool i uh i think every i think everybody should i think everybody should have kids but i don't think everybody should have kids, but I don't think everybody should have kids. I don't think if everybody – like if you're an extremely selfish person, having kids is really hard.

So like if you're a selfish fuck and you don't want to be like Cher or like you're the person that matters the most at all times, having kids is really difficult because they're selfish. And so it doesn't really work. Like you have to be kind of unselfish with kids. But I'm really stoked to like take them places and have these like conversations and see things and like the the amazement on their face like i took them down to uh the history museum in houston and they have like a huge exhibit on mummies and like it was the first time my daughters had actually seen like sarcophagus and real mummies and like the look of explosion and excitement on their faces i was like we gotta do more of this shit yeah i mean just more so than being like oh we're gonna watch you know pj mask

and fucking princess elena today on tv and you know here's your cell phone that you could be like i don't want that shit yeah like like that's not what's impactful and um you know like and then and then like what do they know about their parents i don't know my dad watched tv and got hammered on the couch every day like that's not the fucking that's not what i want their memories to have be, my dad fucking and his crazy buddies would show up and fucking train weights

and like, they would, you know, build fucking crazy monster trucks and do weird shit and then on top of it we would take these crazy trips and like go see shit

that like nobody else in the world had ever seen. And like, to me, that's what I want them to remember. Yeah, that's cool.

So, so it's like power athlete, man, I want people to be like, I did this form of training by this NFL dude who ended up being kind of an intellectually interesting dude. And everybody got better. I'm like, cool.

That's perfect. Right on. Perfect. Yeah. And now hopefully he's traveling around now having a good time. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks, man.

I appreciate you having me on. Dude, thank you so much. Of course. I'm like, yeah. This is definitely somebody I've wanted to have on the show for a long time. Well, thanks for fucking inviting me, dude. I'm excited. Now we get to go work out.

Let's go bang some weights. All right. See you guys later next Tuesday. Again, that's John Wellborn. You can see him on PowerAthleteHQ.com and PowerAthlete on Instagram. And you guys can find all the things that he just talked about. All right. I'll see you guys next week.

I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. I'll see you guys next week. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our show with Mr. John Wellborn. So happy to have had him on the show. I don't get to see him very often, maybe every couple of years or so. And every time he comes on, he just blows my mind with his knowledge base. And even before and after the show, he was saying all sorts of really cool stuff.

He's just a rad dude. I hope you guys go on his website, Power Athlete HQ. Check out all the stuff he's got going on. And as far as I go, JimRyan, G-Y-M-R-Y-A-N.com. You can see everything I have going on, Carb Cycle Challenge, all my books, all that stuff. You guys get discount code REALCHOC, all capital letters, on anything you want except for the challenge. Next challenge starts June 24th.

And yeah, thank you guys so much for listening to this show. There's a gazillion podcasts in the world right now, but the fact that you listen to mine makes me the happiest man in the whole world. So I hope you guys have a happy Tuesday. I hope you guys have a great day. No matter when you listen to this episode, just know that I love you and we are over and out and I will see you next week.