Barbell Shrugged - [Longevity] How to Train for Health and Performance for the Rest of Your Life w/ Dan Garner, Andy Galpin, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and Dan Garner #743

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash dive into periodization models and a framework for longevity through the lens of health and performance. Longevity is a common goal. Unfortunately, it is impossible to define. How do you know if you are doing it right? Do you have to wait 40 years to find out all the at effort gave you 10 extra days? Longevity is great what you really want is a long life filled with performance goals that amounts to a life full of high quality experiences. In today’s episode we will tackle this exact question so you can stay at the top of your game, while living a long, healthy life. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, the home team is back. Myself, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mesh. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're gonna be kind of digging into the idea of longevity. And a lot of this dig into at the beginning of the show, but I talked to a lot of people about kind of what their fitness goals are.

And one of the things that comes up so much, and I think a lot of it's just because it's kind of a big buzzword right now, is the idea of longevity. And people want to live a really long time and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but we have no real way of measuring it. We have no way of kind of like putting a plan together that what works for living another 50 years? Because what happens if we make all these decisions and then, you know, you live from 100 to 101, but that last 1% of your life, that last, like, what are we really getting out of

the difference between 100 to 101? So is longevity really the goal or is it a framework to trying to say like, I'd like to embrace the challenges of life and be really healthy and be really fit for as long as I possibly can, which I'm a hundred percent in on. And then how do we break that down into smaller components? Like what, how do we periodize out a year? on. And then how do we break that down into smaller components? Like what, how do we periodize out a year? How do we, how do we manage the intensities that we're either focused on our nutrition, focused on our training, focused on cardiovascular health, focused on some sort of big event that adds a lot of value to your life. And I feel like this is a much better conversation in the idea or inside the framework of thinking about longevity. And that is why we

wanted to record this show today, because I love the idea of longevity. And I also love the tactical way of how you can break down a year, the components that go into living a healthy, strong athletic life. And how do we keep those skills moving, keep them interesting for as long as possible, which will then in turn allow us to meet the idea and the goal of longevity. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Marner,

Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Marner. Doug Larson. Coach Travis Mash. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about this new cool word that has entered into all of the Instagrams and podcasts, longevity. You know, anytime like a word or like a thing takes over the fitness industry, and at first you're like, cool, I can buy into that. I like longevity. I think people should live a long life and do it healthy. And then all of a sudden you hear it enough. You start rolling your eyes and you go, Oh no, we've got it. We've got

to dig into this buzzword and figure out how do we actually chase longevity and what's like a better framework than just, I'd like to live for an extra 12 days, even if I don't know what the quality of those last days are. I feel like it's kind of like biohacking where really the vast majority of it's just good, solid advice. It's not like anything extra special or amazing. It's like, nope, you should just do the basics consistently for your whole life and then you'll be fine. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Go to sleep at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. The reason, yeah, the reason, uh, I, I mean, I talked to a lot of people about their, their goals and I talk, uh, you know, it's like one of

the things I'm the most interested in. Like, why do you want to come work with us? Or why do you want to go through this big process or why, why is like, why is coming to us and getting all of this health performance stuff done so important? And longevity being one of the most common answers. I feel like the next question that always comes out of my mouth and I go, how do we define that? Which typically is met with some pretty blank stares because we don't really know. We know that we want to live a long time, which is why the longevity word exists, but we don't actually understand kind of like what happens in the middle between today and forever. And how do we know if forever works? Because you only get to roll the dice once.

You only get to like really figure out are the decisions you're making today really going to impact 20 years from now, 30 years from now. And I feel like the better question or the better way to frame this is periodization. And how do you do that throughout a year with all of the levers that you can pull, all of the intensities, all the training programs, supplementation, nutrition, sleep, what are the constants that we need to keep throughout the year so that we're always working on living a healthy life and having kind of like the base model and a broad range of healthy behaviors that we're always keeping, which then allows us to bring into the year. Do we want to be more focused on training? Do we want to be more focused on body composition? And how do we break those break kind of like a 12 month period

together where the idea of like performance and being like the trying to beat Ryan Grimsland or be stronger than Travis Mash? Like we're not all competing in sports anymore. So how do we do it under the massive framework of longevity and then shortening that into how do we periodize out kind of like a year and all the levers that you can pull to, to put those pieces together. Does that make sense, friends? I like, I like what you said about like the whole periodization. And like, cause you know, like Andy, Andy mentioned, it was on a Huberman that there's like these nine parameters that come to

like fitness. It's like ana nine parameters that come to like fitness. It's like anaerobic fitness, aerobic, long work capacity, strength, power, speed, skill development. Anyway, like thinking about, you know, I've been thinking it's a lot of stuff to try to do at the same time. Maybe like you said, spend time periods working on one, kind of like we did with the, what do you call it, the thing we used to do, the super total program that we called it. One-time challenge.

One-time challenge. How we focused on one thing and then focused on, you know, what meanwhile we kept everything else like on a holding pattern. And just like, but I think that, you know, and I only thought of that right at the beginning of the show when you kind of blew longevity up in my face and like made me cry. Well, I had to ask you before the show so we can put a definition to it. It's almost impossible.

Like, I feel like it really is almost impossible to say, like, I just want to play the game longer. Well, how do we how do you define the quality of life inside that or the adventure of life. If the goal is to just add another year, like say you make it to a hundred, do you really get that much out of 101? Do you really get like that, that big of a boost by adding just an, you know, an additional like 1% to the end of the game? And it doesn't i i feel like it's it's a theory that sounds great um if you were to kind of think about like in a 12 month window though the the the constants uh that you feel like no matter what no matter what your goal is where do you start i think i mean personally for me movement is always going to be key.

Like making sure that all my joints move throughout a full range of motion. Cause if you can't do that, I don't know that you can do any of the others. Like, you know, if your hips and ankles and knees and shoulders and thrust, if they don't move well, like it's really hard to do anaerobic conditioning or aerobic conditioning or strength or power without kind of hurting yourself. So I think step one would be making sure people can move correctly or at least if they can't you know deciding that maybe we'll avoid certain movements if it's just not in the cards most people end their athletic careers because of injury like they break something and then they

wash out a little bit too early it's a similar analogy for life like if you are if you're old and you're broken so to speak like you just you can't go for a run because your knee hurts and you can't you can't train because your body's all messed up then you're eventually going to you know especially after you have like a real injury you know old people break their hip they become become bedridden they lose a bunch of muscle mass and then they're they're on the downhill slide and they wash out quickly after that. So a big part of longevity, in my opinion, although, of course, you're never going to know if what you did extended your life beyond where you would have been. Otherwise, it's all a big guess. But we're all trying to expand our health span versus our lifespan, so to speak.

We want to be able to train regularly for the duration of our lives and not have to stop training when we're 55 because we're too broken and too hurt and we've had too many knee surgeries or whatever it is um to your point from from prior to the show like you want to be able to have sex for as long as possible like if you're able to have sex like into your 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s or however long people have sex these days like then you're doing just fine but if you're if you're if you're listening to this you know where my priorities are and you just have like a banging libido you're doing just fine. But if you're listening to this, you know where my priorities are now. You're like 90, and you just have like a banging libido. You're just knocking it down at the home. I'm going to.

You're doing it, man. Sure. My understanding is that STDs are a real problem at the old folks' home because they're just hanging out and getting after it. What are you doing today? What are you doing at noon today? I don't know. I thought I'd have some vanilla soft serve and get to work for eight minutes

if you have any free time on your calendar between dance class and bingo. And bridge. So we just offended our whole 80-year-old audience right there. Or maybe we just nailed it. I don't know.

Let me say this. Oh my gosh. The great author Hemingway he was this great boxer he was super manly horse amazing rider and was known to be this kind of crazy guy

in the sack he loved sex might have been a swinger I don't know at the end of his life his arthritis made it hard for him to write. All of a sudden, he became impotent so he couldn't have sex anymore. And then so he wasn't tough anymore.

And that's when he flies to Idaho to this cabin in the middle of nowhere and then ends it for, you know, God, the dude, at least he went out hard. He didn't just shoot himself. He shot himself with a shotgun like who does that like so there's like people find you there's nothing left that's him anyway man so he's my favorite yeah um circling all that back let me circle all that back to the beginning. Staying physically healthy, not hurting yourself, really, I feel like is such a big key here. You should train regularly. But if you're training through pain and your shoulder hurts and you're just training through it anyway just because, then if you're training through pain because you know you have two years left in your MMA career

and you just got to do it because your fight fights in eight weeks and you got to fight. That's how you make money. And it's just it's just a part of the deal to be in some sports to play professional football or MMA fighting or whatever it is. Hockey, you're going to be hurt. If you're a hockey player, you're probably going to pull your groin and have to play in the game anyway. It's just this is a part of the deal. Right. But once you're once you're not competing anymore and you're playing the longevity game then training through pain becomes becomes a bad idea if you're if you're

doing it for the long haul so finding training that you enjoy that doesn't hurt you that you can do consistently forever is an enormous part of of longevity like we all you know we did the crossfit thing at some level for for many years like mash you did like mash what if you were still doing grid you're doing grid for the rest of your life no no you're gonna be you're gonna be a mess one year it's a cool sport process cool sport but if you if you do that the rest of your life like you're you're eventually just gonna you know after xyz surgeries like you're just not gonna be able to train anymore if you can't train anymore you can't maintain muscle mass it's hard to stay lean for me if i'm not gonna be able to train anymore. If you can't train anymore, you can't maintain muscle mass. It's hard to stay lean. For me, if I'm not training, my desire to eat really well actually goes down. When I train well, I want to, I want to eat well

and recover well and sleep well to support the quality of my training. So if I stop training, the other aspects of my life also, maybe they don't fall off completely, but they, they will, they'll dwindle. And at some level they will regress. Shark family. I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in

in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the

programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that

page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. Yeah, my mental health especially as well like if dude if i don't train if i don't do physical stuff especially like like we mentioned sex earlier like i'm a very physical touch oriented person like like my favorite thing to do with my boys is like play wrestle my favorite thing to do with my guy friends is jiu-jitsu my favorite thing to do with my wife is to have sex like i like to be physical like it's very good for not just my physical health but my mental health as well so if i can't train then like i

do i start i start to feel worse just like walking around day to day for no particular reason and so staying physically healthy and keeping my joints from hurting is like very key for me i'm very sensitive to that these days so to circle that back to periodization to your original original question of how do you how do you periodize uh your training and and other aspects of your life as you get older like when i was in my 20s i didn't really periodize at all in the sense that i didn't really like have structured back off weeks i didn't know i didn't i didn't take breaks you know like my break was like oh it's spring break and we're going to the beach. And then I would take those days off. Spring break.

All the breaks I took during the break was like my legs stopped working. I hurt my back so bad my leg wouldn't work. So I better take a week off here. I'm dragging around my leg like a hunchback of Notre Dame. But like right now, as an example, I'm 40. I'm not that old old but i'm getting older and taking scheduled breaks is is more more commonplace for me these days like right now i happen to be doing five three one i'm doing like super low volume every fourth week you know

it's basically hypertrophy work and that and that's it it's all higher rep ranges right now for the most part my body feels great i take a break every four weeks i still do some training back it off. I don't do any, I don't do heavy stuff every fourth week. And that works great for me right now. My body feels amazing. Like I feel strong. I'm putting on some muscle mass and it seems very sustainable for me to, to have like a four week block where I have one back off week again, not totally off, but just a back off week every fourth week for me in my current state. I do the same exact thing. I think one of the things, and this is just because both of my parents are pushing 70, which is crazy. I feel like the fitness and the training side of things, it gives them a place

that they have to show up every day. And when you start to like play that timeline out, I mean, the number of friends that I had when I was like 21 compared to soon to be 41, it's like a fraction. And I can only imagine if you play the game out even longer, like you stop training with people. All of our lives are online now. Like we're all on Zoom.

We're all kind of like working from home. We don't go into an office. We don't own gyms anymore. You start to like need a place to show up every day. And the gym is like the best possible place. And I have like every single morning I call my dad, like after I drop my kids off at school and I'm like, did you go swim today? And it's really just like a check-in. It's like, did you

get up and do the thing that you knew was going to move all of the other pieces of life forward? Like you had to get up early. You had to go do the fitness. You had to like talk to people, be around. You can't just hide. You have to go actually get up and go do, do that piece. So you're getting kind of like a, a large group of very important things from the social benefits. When I, my mom trains with a bunch of people that like are in the same demographic, they have this, like, I don't even know what they call themselves, but basically like the old ladies club that's like at the gym. And they're just, you know, like there, there's a reason, uh, that's even more than just like the physical fitness side, which is clearly super important to being able to keep muscle mass and all those aspects. But, um, I've actually seen

it play out many times where it's like, you stop working out. You also lose a lot of the secondary benefits, which are in ways like just as important as building muscle mass, having, having those social interactions, sharing space with people, like working in a group format of some sort. Um, I feel like all of those pieces, if, if one a is, you know, being in shape, staying strong, keeping muscle mass, keeping your, your function, um, having a place to go where there's other people and having to having that community that you like genuinely rely on on a daily basis where everybody is committed to just getting up and going to that place. And I always tell my parents, I'm like, hey, if we show up today and we know that we have

to show up tomorrow, then there's no reason for us not to have to get up and get after it. It's just a mindset of like, instead of having nowhere to go, and then you start layering weeks and days and months or days and weeks and months of, I don't have anything to do, you lose that purpose. But if your purpose is to get up

and train your body every single day, it gives you a place in the world as you do start to understand the longevity. But today at 40, or what I didn't even know at 14, you're laying the groundwork and the habits that your body starts to crave over time. What Doug's talking about, your mental health goes along with it. I didn't train. I wasn't able to get up and go run. I would go freaking nuts. My kids would think I had the worst temper in the world because I just wouldn't have that, like that place to go, that place that I have to check in every day. I think everything in my life starts to go down.

And when I don't train, like whether it's my work or definitely the quality of work, even my ability to coach declines when I'm not, you know, fit. I'm sure it has something to do with my mental health starts to decline. Like at the end of my Lenore Ryan tenure, it was like, it was declining majorly. I literally thought I was accepting the fact, well, maybe I'm at this point where I start to die. You know, I wasn't thinking I was going to die tomorrow,

but I was just at this major decline, I thought. But it was really just fact i needed to make some changes you know and start you know i'll go you know it all starts too with movement it's like if i start you know getting in the gym moving around like being active everything else starts to happen i become more on top of things i'm less you know i'm more organized i feel better about life i'm excited to get up in the morning. So, but it just had to, the first step is the hardest is like, I can't even believe I'm having, you know, that I, that was a hard thing for me too.

For us to like grew up loving fitness, where it's not something we got to make ourselves do. It was super like, I couldn't believe I was at the point in my life where I had to make myself take that first step into the gym. And that was making, it was like, it was making me so frustrated, but then, you know, then I started seeing progress again. I'm like, okay, here I am. I'm not dying yet. And then now, now that I've been through that,

like I refuse to ever lose that ever again, not for anything, not for school, not, not for anything. My whole family suffered because of me. Yeah. The the other part which is kind of like to me um there's an amount of energy you just got to get out yeah which immediately leads to kind of like something that i i feel like to me is is a constant throughout the year how do I just make sure I'm getting the best sleep possible? Like if I can make sure that my sleep and I'm getting seven-ish hours on average a night, like actual sleep, not just time in bed, the brain health stays there. Mental clarity stays there. I'm like engaged.

I'm able to kind of have like the patience and not that like short temper that comes many times when you're just tired and worn out, fatigued and just kind of like drained from the day. But in order to sleep well, and I know this just anytime, it almost happens more when I'm like on vacation where I'm like trying not to work out or like trying to be with my family. Not that there's anything wrong with the family, but trying to be with the family, like 24 hours a day. And I don't have 30, 60 minutes or so to like go to the gym, train really hard, do like the me time. And then I come back and it's like, I didn't get the energy out. Now my

sleep suffers. Like I'm just, I'm able to just like be up. My body doesn't have that, like, um, that natural like process of like, you get up, you work hard, you train hard, you go to bed. And there's just all this excess surplus energy that you just don't get out for the day, which affects sleep in a bad way. It's a spiraling thing. Then I don't sleep well that night. So it's hard to get up. I feel grumpy the next day. I don't want to train because I'm tired.

Absolutely. It's like, it's just, it spirals out of control with me when I do what you said, when I, when I'm not able to be active, I lay in bed and I can't, I can't sleep.

Yeah. I can't do shit to make me tired. You know? Right. yeah. You got to empty the bucket. Right. You got to empty the bucket. So, yeah, I think, you know, looking at this thing,

you guys have made me, you've blown me away, by the way, that whole, like, shot, shooting longevity down. Like, I'm writing all these notes as we're talking and, like, you know, being able to, like, take these things and just focus on one at a time you know makes total sense and it's just like it's all just one big puzzle get my movement right okay then for me strength training is not that important i do that because i love it i gotta do it a little bit but like that's only three days a week but my aerobic and anaerobic is more important to me now so that's that's three of my days are dedicated just to that and even on my strength days it's still doing some of that and so

you know just like and but it's going to make it so much more exciting now to look at it more like this periodized thing over a long period of my life makes it way more fun so even though you shot my shot me in the leg with longevity, it's given me like new hope. All I did was check you. Cause next time you say my goal is longevity, you're going to go, oh, that's,

I should probably be more specific. You know, it reminded me, I have this chiropractor who's my buddy who like, he was when I was competing and I, you know, I'd go see him and, you know,

I would say something like, I feel X. And he's like, what does feel mean man it's like define feel and he shit on me with phil right there it's same thing you did with longevity it's like good question so i spent my whole life trying to define that instead of saying i feel x now i go to him and say okay i i'm lacking internal rotation on my left hip by about 10 degrees. Do something. There's a definition.

There you go. Dude, whenever we trained at Coach Bergener's in California, and we would get there right after he got done training with his old guy friends. They called them the geezers. They had the geezers train like three days a week, and it was like 70-year-old plus men all just training in the garage and of course their training looks different than our training but they're still out there you know five or six of them hanging out

in the sunshine working out outside what do they do they do stats cleaning jerk or are they just doing battle really yeah battle stuff push-ups he's got like a nasty hill walking up to his garage. He carries wheelbarrows, farmer carries. I mean, exactly what you would think. A bunch of old men that lifted millions of pounds cumulative over their life when they got creaky joints, but it's just in them. They have to go there, and they got to sweat, and they got to grunt and do man shit yeah exactly every time i saw that i was like dude i'm gonna be

just like that when i grow up yeah yeah it's my still is my aspiration to this day like i don't really do it so much right now like training with my friends is so fun of course but i don't do it nearly as much as i would like to these days just because i'm busy running a company and i got kids and the whole thing but like when i'm retired i 100 i'm gonna like round up my my five or six closest friends and just like dude you guys come over and we'll just we'll just train every morning it'll be get us out of the housing i i do it once a week now my buddy i used to do powerlifting with you guys have met him chris you stayed at his his house. Chris Mason. We owned a gym together. We train on Fridays together now. We do different stuff.

I go heavier than he goes now, but I always did. Anyway, that was terrible. I'm 51 years old. Taking shots at the man on the show. I didn't hear the defense.

Anyway, we still train every Friday. We go to lunch. Taking shots at the man on the show. Not in here to defend himself. I know. That was love. Anyway, but like we still train every Friday. We go to lunch. We talk. We train together. We talk about each other. It's like what we're trying to accomplish. He gives me some insight.

I give him insights. It's a fun time. Yeah. I think also on kind of like the, you know, if you were to like take all the pieces of this thing and how nutrition plays into it, it's super interesting to me. This is like an N equals one personal way of like looking at all this. And this is like kind of inside of a 12 month period is there's many months where like, I don't really pay that much attention to nutrition, but every day I'm still eating my body weight and protein

every day. I'm still eating very healthy food. Um, but the quantities in my body weight will fluctuate, you know, five to eight pounds or so throughout the year. And I know that when I hit like 192, it's probably like March and, and my body goes, Hey dude, it's summertime. You might want to get that back down into the one eighties. So you're not, um, like it's, it's, it's time to stop doing these things that you're currently doing. Like maybe, maybe not eating at 10 o'clock right before you go to bed, just because, um, the, the intensities, I feel like of the actions that you take, like if you were going to be training for a specific event, obviously the training and the intensity of how adherent you are to sleep, nutrition, training, um, all of those things need to be at kind of like a level 10. But after you're done with those events, or if it's the winter, it's okay to kind of like

loosen up on nutrition side of things or the training side of things. As long as you're still checking the box and getting to those big numbers of making sure you're getting enough protein, making sure you're still lifting four days a week, three days a week, still getting conditioning work in. But that is something that I feel like I've had to like really become comfortable with, especially coming from like the CrossFit side of things where it was like, if I don't feel like I'm going to die, did I even do anything today? Was it even worth my time to go to the gym and just check the box of training if I wasn't writhing in pain at the end of the workout?

And I really feel like that, the long-term, when you kind of think about like the longevity of it, checking the box matters a lot. Even if you throw up like a seven out of 10 in effort, you check the box, you didn't get weaker for sure. You definitely made at least a small percentage jump in the right direction and you're just stacking wins. And then maybe this is just because I've been training so long and kind of like doing this for, this will be summer 28 that I've been training, which is insanity to even think about. But there's kind of like a natural progression or like a natural way that my body

reacts to, maybe it's the season of the year or just like, hey, it's about to get warm outside. You should like get out there, go run more, like more wind sprints, more getting to a track. And then when it gets cold, I want to be inside. I want to be lifting more. I want to be kind of like more focused on strength and cause outside isn't as fun. Um, and I feel like those, those intensities and the focus of those, um, when you're younger, it's harder to not try to push things 10 out of 10 every single day. But now if I went an entire three months where like I wasn't improving on my lifting, I'd be totally fine with it because I'm not going to be as strong as I was when I was 32 years old for the rest of my life. That's fine. But I'm still checking the box. I'm still turning the

muscles on. I'm still moving through a full range of motion. I'm still checking so many positive things off that I don't stress about the day to day because I'm able to realize like, oh, well, my conditioning today in November might not be awesome, but that's because it's cold outside and I don't want to be outside running. But as soon as the sun comes out, all of a sudden, like there's something naturally in me that's like, dude, you're supposed to be outside. Like get the shirt off, go get some sun, like get the vitamin D rolling and turn the solar power on. And let's like, let's go, let's go get after it outside and start doing things like that. Just because it's that time of the year. And if you do it long enough, I feel like your body starts to like recognize those patterns. Maybe it's in nature. Maybe it's just like you kind of hit the end of like, hey, time to tighten the nutrition up. Maybe it's like time to time to go outside and train more and do the more natural thing.

And then when it's cold outside, it's okay to be inside and working purely on lifting. Yeah, dude, having that natural rhythm. You just gave me some massive ideas. Anyway, go ahead. You're having that natural rhythm on a yearly cycle of six months of building muscle and getting stronger. And then six months of getting leaner and improving cardiovascular capacity just makes it where you're not going to get just totally bored at some point. Like having the ability to switch your focus where building muscle mass is obviously very important, but if that's all you ever focus on, maybe you end up getting a little fluffy over time and, and you, and you lose cardio vascular capacity, of course.

And then, um, on the other side of that, like if you're just focusing on, on cardio and fat loss all the time, then, then maybe you're losing muscle mass. You're kind of getting a little skinny, like you're, you're getting weaker over time. time like having having both of those in balance over the course of a year i feel like is is an easy strategy for anyone to do where they're going to stay pretty dang healthy in the long run without without getting burnt out and bored yeah um you have actually i have a question for you um for each of you for each of you right, what is the hole in your game that is potentially limiting your long-term fitness or longevity? Oh, that's a good one. I'd be easy for me.

Go. This is my, my hip is right. Is my, is my whole, you know, like my left, you know, I have my right hip replaced. And so it feels like it's 20. Then my left hip feels like it's 105. So like, you know know just um you know trying to deal with that which i've been trying to do on my own but soon it's coming to the point where i'll get that one replaced because it keeps me from like i would like to sprint you know and i

i've been doing some power training i mean i've been doing some jump training but i would like to do more so like that's that's the one that's keeping me from like sprinting and and doing the plyometrics that i would like to do so that's my biggest hole right now other than i've done a bunch in thanks to my wife nutrition she makes it that easy i would say the uh there's there's i've handled half of the problem um because i do a lot of sprinting i do like lots of mile time trials right now um just around my house that's 0.93 miles i actually went and measured it the other day um the 0.93 mile loop i banged out in 609 yesterday if you're counting at home that's fast um the uh the thing that i want to do is very similar to what mash just talked about

is more plyometrics. Um, I think I even brought up on the show a couple weeks ago, maybe months ago, but it was like, there's some ridiculously high number of people that after the age of 18, which is essentially when most people are told, Hey, I know you love the sport that you play, but you're not good enough to keep going. And they go, well, I'm never going to run another wind sprint in my life. And it's like, it's like over 80%. It may even be like 90% of the humans on this planet do not run a wind sprint past the age of 18 years old. And when I heard that, I immediately was like, everything I'm doing right now stops.

So I'm not a part of that 90%. Um, but the, the plyometric side, the, the speed, the jumping, the power, um, I have not really addressed that. And I don't know if you guys ever, when you're, when you're playing with your kids every once in a while and they, and like the little one will like jump off a box and i'll go to jump off the box and i'm like whoa whoa whoa hold on a second and i immediately go oh i lost the spring i like don't trust the jumping and landing part yeah that freaks me out because that's like me too the number one thing you lose first, like that is, that is the, the premier problem with aging power and elasticity, speed and power, and then your ability to, uh, receive impact and jumping off of something, or like, I w I would not do a death jump at all right

now. And that's a massive hole. That is something that i like absolutely need to i would follow that up by saying anyone listening like don't just start doing like if you're 40 or 50 years old and you haven't been doing it don't go you know that is something you would have to work back into like you know by doing some deceleration drills maybe do box jumps before you do a depth jump make sure you're strength training first to a full range of motion and then slowly add in the plyometrics.

Or that's, you know, you always hear, like I remember watching my high school football coach play on a 50 and over basketball team. First game, he tears his Achilles. You know, his elasticity is shot because he hadn't been doing anything. So be careful and ease that back in. I do low-level plyos basically every time I train. Like my warm-ups still to this day,

I got turf in the gym that I train at, and I still go over there and do five to ten minutes of high knees and butt kickers and skips and lateral shuffles and karaoke. Smart. And whatever else, man. It's like I'm not doing depth jumps, and I'm not really bounding. it's not i'm not doing depth jumps and i'm not really bounding you know i'm not doing intense jumps necessarily but but i do a little bit every day if i do box jumps typically i just jump up and then step down uh unless i'm like specifically

trying to do something um you know if i have a workout where i've specifically designed it for bounding but but every day my warm-up it's it's light low level plyometrics that way if i ever do go jump into a soccer game or a basketball game or whatever like you're ready i i've been i've been you know i've been bouncing around so to speak basically every day um i had a hamstring thing for a while so i hadn't really been running any sprints lately like the closest thing would be like i run stair sprints at my house which is again if i'm training at home that'll be like part of my part of my warm-up but but i would like to get back to sprinting i've done a whole lot of sprinting and been probably two years now that i've been i would say like run sprints on flat ground yeah back into it 60 70 even doing heels heels are way more safe than

like or way safer than you know running full sprints because since it's you're in that acceleration phase which kind of takes that pawing motion out of it which is where you you know pop a hamstring so maybe starting with heels and then slowly going into full sprints would be a good idea i would even say to them not plugging gym wear but i guess i am but it's because it really will at your age yeah yeah mash five but like um he's like setting um minimum velocity threshold so like instead of squatting and doing you know five rep max to all out do you know, five rep max to all out, do, you know, a five rep max, but at 0.7 meters per second, which is, you know, you're still, the thing is, is that using velocity, you're going to accelerate. It's a whole different workout. Instead of just squatting, there's a difference

in squatting 300 pounds, just go down and come up and going down and coming up as fast as you can. It's a big difference. And so it's really good for increasing elasticity and power so but but adding those parameters too is another way to what doug said at the very beginning of the show is to avoid getting hurt in your training because that what good is that yeah yeah i mean right now with with 531 you know the you know the first week of 531 you're doing you know it's like you know I think it's 70, 80, 90% for, is that right? No, it's a little lighter than that. Anyway, 60, 70, 80 or something like that. It's like, it's, it's light sub max reps. You know, you're doing, if you're doing 70% for a set of five, you can do that. No problem. Like if I, if I did 70% for max reps, I don't know what I get, but say be a 12 or 15 or something like that. I could do a

lot with a, with 70%. 70 so i'm just doing a set of five i'm essentially doing velocity based training i'm you know control on the way down then as fast as possible on the way up sub max and i do a couple sets like that and i and i did something kind of heavy kind of explosive very controlled and i'm out of there i'm not i'm not doing you know 80 85 90 to failure six days a week. I'm doing sub max weights for, you know, half the reps I could otherwise, you know, once or twice a week. And it's been very easy on my body lately where I feel fast and athletic, but I'm not getting beat up at all. It's been wonderful. Yeah.

Doug, I know we've talked about this many times. And with a five and a two-year-old, all of it seems almost impossible, which means we need to get them older. We need time to pass. We're not wishing time away, but we might need it to pass a little bit. I feel like the ultimate kind of like baller goal

that people don't talk about when it comes to longevity is the adventure side of fitness. And we have many clients that each year they go and do some just like gnarly race or they go hella skiing or they go rim to rim to rim in the Grand Canyon or they have some goal of going on a bike ride across the country. What is the name of the bike race across America? Maybe that is Race Across America. Race Across America.

There you go. Great job on naming that race, guys, all the way across America. And that really, as I stop having a five and a two-year-old, and maybe I have a 12 and a nine-year-old and maybe I have like a 12 and a nine-year-old or something like that, that really is how I believe the idea of longevity should be played out. We have a year in which we periodize out the intensities that we're training at. The big focus of the year could be cardiovascular health. It could be building muscle. It could be, you know, just improving your sleep. It could be getting body composition to where you want it with better nutrition,

but what the hell is it all for? And the idea of just like doing it just to do it forever, as I mentioned at the beginning, doesn't make a lot of sense to me until you start actually putting larger goals. And the idea of going on these like large adventures that you have to be physically fit for, you have to specifically be training for, um, you know, four days. Well, if you're going to go rim to rim to rim, that's, that's a gigantic 50 mile hour, 50 mile day, kind of like endurance race. If you're going to be doing race across America, you're looking at like two weeks on a bike and a hundred miles a day or something along those lines. Like they don't have to go and be those specific events, but finding a day where you're going to go do something that creates an

experience that you could only do if you were in peak physical condition, which requires all of those things, the nutrition, the sleep supplementation, kind of like the lifestyle side of it, all of it where you have to dedicate a quarter of that year to getting everything finally tuned. So you've got three quarters of your year, which is roughly what? Nine months. And now all of a sudden that nine months is just building this giant base of healthy habits, fitness, so that when you get to that last quarter and you go, I want to go do the race across America.

Now, all of a sudden, you've got a 13-week training program where that big base gets very specific in what you need to be doing so that then you can go have some crazy experience that people that, unfortunately, are not in great shape have no chance of doing. And I think that when people talk about longevity, that's what they really mean. They really want to know how do they have

the physical fitness or the physical capacity to be able to go experience life in the most radical way possible. And if you love fitness, going on a giant adventure every year sounds like my Super Bowl because I'll never actually be able to go to the Super Bowl. I have no affiliation with this company. I just found out about them.

But if you go to AdventureRaces.com, it's a bunch of cool shit just like that. It's just like ultra marathons and whatnot through national parks throughout the United States. It's like the most beautiful scenery you can find, and they do races there. I haven't done any of those yet. It's totally on my list. Yeah. Problem is you've got three kids. I know.

I can't break away just to go run for fun. You mind if I go run in the woods for like a week? Wouldn't it be cool, though, to like – you know how everybody wants to feel and look how you did in high school? You think about what did you do in high school. Like you said, Anders, you ran sprints. You did jump. It would be so cool to have an event where you go there,

you test your 40, you test your vertical, you run a mile, you do some strength, you do some power, and just see, like test your parameters and see where you are in comparison to other people your age, men and i think that would be so cool pop on the google machine go way back in time before they softened society so much that they had to get rid of the presidential fitness awards seriously what you got see what your beauty is yeah mobility yeah ability. Be sitting reach, pull-ups, sit-ups, and run a mile. That would be amazing. For me, it would be something to work towards, you know, to get fast or to jump high for.

Kind of like, you know, when you train for football, Doug, or, you know, you train for hockey. Like you trained in visiting, getting faster, getting stronger, and it gave such a purpose. And then, you know, slowly we fell in love with training. but it would be cool to add that purpose back just the event so yeah i think i misspoke a second ago by the way i think that let's say adventure races.com i think it's vacation races.com oh vacation races that is more aligned vacations where you go and do where you train that sounds more of my of my you can't bring kids on those yeah trancation adult only adult only fitness races

um i like adult only other things oh man drew i'm gonna be in so much trouble after this one. The, yeah, I feel like when I, when I, when we started having people that were coming in to the programs and that, those are the things that they were training for. Like, those are, those are the pieces that I went, the longevity thing is great. Like I totally commend people that want to like live forever, but in the middle of that, use the fitness to be able to have the experiences and actually create

the quality of life where every year you're going and checking the box of like, I worked really hard to go do X. And it wasn't just so I maintained 10% body fat throughout the year or a lot of the like metrics that we, that you could, sure, if you wanted to go do a bodybuilding show, like that's part of it. Not many people stand on stage and flex in front of their friends. If you want to go run an ultra marathon, you're going to go do it somewhere super cool. We got people training for the Leadville 100 that we're working with. That's insanity, being able to climb that giant mountain. We got someone in here that ran all the way around the big island of Hawaii, crazy people. That's insanity. I want to do that though. Like you have to be in insane shape to be able to do that. You have to have some serious mental

fortune. You got to go train for that. That takes a long time to be able to actually have the capacity to be able to go and do that. And once you do that, I don't even know if you get a trophy, but you walk away knowing that you are living the life, man. You just ran around the big island of Hawaii. And that's a story to tell for the rest of your life. And I think that that's really kind of like the most important piece of this. It's like, go get in shape. For an experience.

Tell a story. I think that's the moral of the story. Yeah. Have an experience doing Tell a story about how cool it was. I think that's the moral of the story. Yeah. Have an experience doing this thing. Yeah. Get up and go do something rad. My buddy did the Alcatraz triathlon. And to me, it's insanity.

Yeah, he's totally nuts. Get him in the shark-infested water. Yeah. He's KJ, Kevin Jones. Oh, he's nuts, yeah. He is the man and like if you listen to this buddy we did so many things together like we were crazy but you won up with that one i'm not i'm not swimming in that water man i'm not gonna win that one frozen and it's loaded with sharks he's a beast i mean he even said he was swimming and he felt something bump

into him and he thought it was another racer you know because they're all bunched up he looked no one was around him and he said oh shit i just kept swimming what can you do like keep swimming like ah man most of the times the great white shark won't eat you. It's the one time that it does that's the problem. Exactly. Is this the time or not? Is that shark hungry? Did I get a little too close to its baby? You're dead.

Talk about shrakage. Number one, the water is already cold. Now you're about to get eaten by a shark. There's nothing left. It's turtle boy. Also, you can go to Alcatraz where, I mean, Sean Connery swam out of there, I think. Yeah, he made it. He survived.

He did. Sure he did. Coach Travis Mash, where can the people find you? Mashlead.com. You can read all my articles on atjimaware.com in the blog section. Yeah, dude, you got a new series you're doing, right? You're walking through all the training programs, what they do do how to use them how to use uh jim aware and i think not the two-mile norm but like they asked me to do the west side barbell the dynamic effort

and the uh max ever method and i really would like to think that if louis were alive he would think that i took all this stuff and just put it in one thing you know i just kind of put it all together all the articles all the articles, all the things I did and know over the years, the conversations with him and put it all in one place and how to apply it whether you're a weightlifter, a powerlifter, or just an athlete doing athletic performance. Yeah.

I don't know if you saw a little probably too niche of a comment for everyone listening to get, but did you see AJ benched 1,000 pounds? Did he really? He's crazy. He's totally crazy. Still getting it. Still getting it.

I don't know what he's up to on the weight, but, man, that is a lot. That's a lot of weight on the bar. Those new bitch shirts are insane. I feel like someone's going to get killed. It really is. What was his old max? I think he eats. I feel like someone's going to get killed. What was his old max? In his peak? I was going to say

that's way over his peak when he was in his prime. They're insane. Now the biggest shirted bench press is higher than the biggest squat. That tells you it's this new kind of crazy shirt.

Somebody's now benched 1,300. 13-something. So it's just like, someone's going to get killed though. That's a torn peck and a barbell straight to your face, man. Someone's going to get killed.

I just wish they would go raw. I'm more into the raw thing. State of life, right? That way. While you're past that. Doug Larson, where can the people find you? On Instagram. Doug C. Larson.

Doug, you're not benching 1,000 pounds this week, right? Nor am I on Instagram very often, for that matter. So, no. All lies. Too many people up in your DMs, man. You guys are too busy making people'sms man i'm three weeks out three weeks out of four fellas the fourth fourth week's a back off week it's all my best present these days mostly decline for the record five three ones these are easier on my shoulders it's a great

it's just a great progression i don't know if i have any friends that haven't done the five three one program i've done it yeah Yeah. Everybody. It's like, it's like baseline. I don't know what to do. We'll just go back to five through one and figure it out. Once you, once you do that for a little bit, you'll find some sort of weakness to go get after. And then.

Yeah. 80, 85, 90. Yeah. You do five on your last set of five on week one, you do 80. For as many as you can.

Second week, you do 85% for three plus. And then the final week you do 9% for as many past one as you can. Yeah. And then reload. And then repeat. Add five or ten more pounds. Yeah.

Simple as it gets. And the dude sold a billion e-books on it. He made millions of dollars. He did. Unreal. Jim Wendler, shout out. There you go. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner.

We are Barbell Shrugged, Barbell underscore shrugged. Make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That is where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that free report over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.