Barbell Shrugged - Real Chalk  — Adapting to Change w/ Bryan Boorstein - 21

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Bryan Boorstein is the owner and founder of Evolved Training Systems. He is also owner of San Diego Athletics, a hybrid style CrossFit gym that provides programming for CrossFit and physique athletes. The Evolved Training System is Bryan’s staple program; a unique combination of multiple different training methodologies combined together with the optimal dose of each: - Low-Rep Strength Training - Bodybuilding for aesthetics - Metcon and “HIIT” intervals for conditioning - Bodyweight Training On Monday May 7th, the Evolved Daily Training Program will be released on the website for only $19 per month. All of the training utilizes only free weight and bodyweight movements, so you can perform this training in a functional fitness gym, a standard “Globo” gym atmosphere, or even your home gym! Bryan is determined to educate the fitness community on working-out smarter. He is continually researching new methodologies to help his clients reach their goals while maintaining a happy, balanced life. In this episode, Bryan shares his new style of programming and how he loves to stick to his staples, squatting and deadlifting heavy at least once a week. He also touches on the importance of CNS recovery and paying attention to the body, what to do about motivation, visualizations during training, and moving meditation. Enjoy! - Ryan and Yaya ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/rc_boorstein ------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: thrivemarket.com/realchalk How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► 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/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Welcome to Real Chalk, a Shrug Collective production. Mike Bledsoe here. Stoked to be launching this network so that we can introduce you to amazing content providers like Ryan Fisher. We'll be posting new shows every weekday, so be on the lookout. As a thank you for listening, Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of free organic groceries, plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash real chalk. This is how it works.

Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more, plus free shipping. No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week, so just hit up Thrive Market today. Go to thrivemarket.com slash realchalk to get set up. Enjoy the show. All righty, kids. Yaya here coming at you with a brand new episode of the Real Chalk Podcast on the Shrugged Collective. This week, Ryan and I sat down on his couch with one of his oldest buddies, Brian Borstein from CrossFit PB, one of the gyms that Ryan worked at during his time when he was living down in San Diego and just starting out his career in the CrossFit world.

So we chatted a little bit about the history that the two have together and then a lot about just training, pacing, how training has evolved over the years, especially CrossFit and where Brian sees this whole thing going. He is also huge on personal client programming. So he has a lot of online clients that he programs for. So we dive into that, not only how to write programming, but also how to provide the greatest value to athletes that are following your workouts. Fish and I literally just got back. I must have walked into a door maybe 30 minutes ago from Paleo FX, our very first event with the entire Shrug Collective. And we had an absolute blast this entire weekend. Great mix of having fun and getting our work done.

And there is so much just amazing content that's coming your way on the Shrug Collective right here on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you guys are listening, but also on their website, ShrugCollective.com, on the YouTube channel. Follow me at Yaisview and Ryan at Ryan Fish on Instagram. And there's going to be a lot of cool stuff coming your way that I'm really, really excited for.

I'm going to stop yapping, let you guys jump into the episode. Hope you guys enjoy it. All right, kids, we're live back on Fish's couch, sitting down with Brian Borstein. Fish knows him from way, way back when he was coming up in San Diego, just starting CrossFit, and then you were working at his gym, correct? I was not working at his gym. I wanted to be part of any gym that would actually let me come in and work out.

Oh, there you go. This was like right around the time when I lost everything that I had, and I was just trying to reach out to anybody. I wanted a job with with you guys yeah you had just come from the other gym the one we won't speak about I didn't talk about it we can talk about it okay and where who is programming all all hero workouts all the time yeah yeah so this some of you guys know like a little bit about my story where I started at this gym where

I just didn't agree with the programming and it just like really evolved into just hero workouts every single day and then it turned into people being like really burned out and it's actually why Brian's here and why we're on this podcast we're gonna talk about programming we're gonna talk about different avenues to get into and how everything's evolved um and then we'll talk about evolved which is brian's training system at some point oh nice little yeah i love that great little slide in there so yeah we had all that going on and i quit my job and things went downhill for me and a lot of you guys know and um just was at the bottom of the bottom and then i sent an email to this guy here and i was like, Hey guys,

I just want to reach out to you guys and see if I can do anything for you. I can shadow coach or do whatever. And, um, the first time I walked in, you can talk about that experience when you guys met me, I guess. Yeah. So, so fish walks into the gym, never seen this guy before. Um, I remember Anders immediately looked up your resume when you sent it over and he was like oh this dude's been in the olympic training team and like he's been a helicopter pilot and he's been coaching at this other gym for a while and blah blah and he walks in and looks like this just like muscled bowling ball like more jack than noah olsen the muscle hamster and uh i think the first workout we ever did with you in the gym you walked in and it was dt and i remember at the time i did that thing in

like seven and a half minutes or something loden did it in like 6 30 and we were we thought we were hot shit and then fish comes in and does it in like 3 36 i think was the time and i never never done it did like the first two rounds unbroken yeah exactly like no one knew any better it's like 2010 at the time no one knew any better and uh we just knew he'd be a good fit to hang out with us at that point so yeah I started spending a lot of time in there and then from there um that was when I actually found the first person who I'd be sleeping on their couch, Erin. Erin, what a nice girl she is, huh? Yeah, she hooked me up, and when everything was at its bottom, I got to hang out on her couch for a little bit.

Did you have to strip for her to sleep on the couch? So the stripping thing came after, actually. A lot of you guys know about the stripping situation. I think you actually got to see one of my routines during new year's eve my routine yeah we did have the new year's eve and the new year's day pub crawl i think that might have been where it came out or came out as well there but at the shore club the shore club yeah i was doing my strip routine for all these girls at the shore club and it worked and it did work all right let's talk about you a little bit like how you got into crossfit fitness all

that stuff you can start wherever you want like take it all the way back cool and then we'll go from there so ninth grade high school i'm uh i'm a little kid haven't hit puberty yet and uh the one fight i ever gotten in my life was because some kid in ninth grade decided that he'd call me the Pillsbury Doughboy. I wasn't even fat. I just had baby fat on me. Kids are so fucking mean, too. Dude, so mean, right? Totally.

So we ended up throwing down in chemistry class. And we both got detention for it. But literally that day, I was like, I need to get bigger. I need to get stronger. And I started going online, started researching training. How did the fight go oh man it was like two blows and then the teachers broke it up it was a really stupid pansy fight um nobody even really got like hit that hard you know um but we had this little like universal gym uh in our high school it was a shitty private school with not much of an athletic team or

anything, but you know, I do like three sets of 10 bench press, three sets of 10 rows, three sets of 10, whatever, everything just kind of in a circuit. Didn't really know much better. Um, eventually the first real kind of structured training that I came across was hit, not like high intensity interval training training but high intensity training which is kind of like you know one set to failure just work as hard as you can on one set per per movement and you get the most benefit from that so this is kind of where my view on not necessarily needing all the volume in the world to

train really started to come to prominence. And that's one of my big things now is just do a little bit less, make it a little bit higher quality and get the most out of it that way. So I played basketball in high school. Training with weights was one of the things that allowed me to actually compete with people that were much bigger and taller than me. And I was decent at basketball, I guess. Went into college, exercise phys, same as Phish. Or kinesiology, whichever you guys want to think of it as.

Exactly, with sports management as well. And just kind of continued lifting, started programming for friends in college that just didn't really know what else to do. And then after college, fell into the corporate world. It was miserable. Went to sit at a desk every day for three plus years. Getting nauseous just thinking about that. Yeah, it was terrible.

I think it's crazy. People who go to school for kinesiology or exercise physiology, you think you're going to come out and have this dope job. And a lot of people out there, if you guys are listening right now, like when you guys are in that career field, like in college, you're like really setting yourself up for like a very, very small piece of career opportunities. Yeah. I think my biggest hindrance was I started looking at jobs in that field and everything was like $28,000 a year

or like, you know, internship unpaid with like an opportunity to potentially become employed. And potentially make $28,000. Right, exactly. So then I sit down and I'm like, okay, I can be like a government contracting here and I'll be making like 60 to 65 right out of college, like not a bad gig and whatever. I'll just like do programming on the side. So that's kind of what I did. I trained on my own typical bodybuilding splits type stuff, five days a week, chess one day back the next day, that sort of thing. Um, but it always took a backseat to, you know, feeling like there was more out there in 2009, Anders moves out to San Diego and It was one drunk night in Vegas We're there for like a bachelor party or something and he turns over to me and he's like, dude

You want to start a CrossFit gym and I didn't even remember this at all And a couple days later we get back from Vegas and he's like hey do you remember when like we talked about opening the gym and I'm like no not really but sort of and uh I was like yeah sure let's do it so we walked down Garnett Ave the main drag in Pacific Beach in San Diego and we noticed this like record store going out of business we walk in we take some measurements we talked to the landlord didn't really think much of it went to a coffee shop started jotting down some ideas on some business plans and stuff like that the landlord calls us and he's's like, Hey, you can have the place, but you need to sign in the next couple of weeks. So we spend the next few weeks writing a business plan from our corporate jobs,

get some funding from a couple of different sources. And the next thing we know it's April, 2010, and we own a CrossFit gym. So that was, uh, that's how it all started and uh when did you come down july 2010 maybe the summer something like that but it was we were relatively new at the time like 2012 i don't know bro i feel like we were still just getting started maybe it was a few uh it's like 11 maybe it's 11 2011 were we full time at the gym at that, or were we still working other jobs? No, you guys were both full-time. You were both telling me how you had your corporate jobs, and you hated it. Andrew just told me the same.

So I remember you guys both having corporate jobs, and then I remember asking you guys how you started. I thought it was super interesting because you guys made a bunch of window paint and said, free CrossFit, right? Yeah. We ran the gym for free for a month and a half and it was literally just try as many classes you want come for free for an entire six weeks and i think we put 220 people through the gym in six weeks and then july 1st we were like okay you either sign up or get the fuck out. And 33 people signed up. That's pretty cool. So we started a gym with 33 members, and that was almost break-even at that point.

I was just going to ask you that, too, because especially during that time, like 2009, 2010, there were CrossFit gyms opening up, like, every single day, right? So besides that, like, I really like that, the whole, like, free CrossFit idea. What were some other things you guys were doing that separated you a little from the other stuff because especially in san diego too they have to be gyms like on every corner right you guys are the first one oh yeah so that's actually completely wrong so in 2010 we were like the third or fourth crossfit gym in the san diego area there was invictus there was crossfit san diego there was what is now bear republic was crossfit east village And that's where

Anders and I actually started training together because they had open gym. And I was like, so when Anders first moved out here, I was anti CrossFit. I didn't even know that I wanted to do it really. I just thought it was only Metcons. I didn't know there was a strength component to it or anything. Cause I'd look at the daily WOD and it would be like Fran, Cindy, like all these different things. And I was like, I don't want to just do cardio. I want to lift. So we went to East Village where they had open gym and we would do like our deadlifts and we would do a Metcon. Then like, you know, the next day it'd be like power cleans and squats and then a Metcon. And that's where I kind of evolved some of my ideas about training and how important incorporating strength work is and stuff like that.

So it was a, it was a process though. Like, um, it took me a little while of actually kind of doing CrossFit and doing it my way or the way that I wanted to do it before we actually kind of came up with the idea of starting our own gym and then being able to program it exactly how we wanted to. So, um, like anybody starting a CrossFit gym, we didn't really know what proper training was either. You know, I think one day we programmed CalSU for the gym. CalSU, if you don't know, it's a hundred thrusters for time at 135, which now is like not a big deal, which is not a big deal. back then it ruined people yeah i remember doing it one day and like i think anders crawled out of the gym and puked at like 60 reps and then came back in and completed the workout and no one knew anything about pacing or strategy

so it was like you come out the first minute and you do 15 thrusters because that's what you're capable of yeah and then the next minute you're like doing three because that's also what you're capable of people are doing like one and then five burpees and then some minutes you just do burpees yeah um so no one really knew right like we were just like hard workouts are the key and there really wasn't any process of hey how do we create better athletes it was just kill yourself every day and come back and do it again the next day well then the crossfit game started happening and then from there everyone saw rich froning and they're like oh i have to work out six times a day for me to be as good as rich froning and i think that really ruined i think rich froning is personally responsible for ruining crossfit oh my

god jesus it was like honestly that's a great a huge huge i mean as as good as he is for the sport that video when he came out and everybody was like oh my god like because i didn't know either like i would work out in the gym and like and then i would think that was it and i would be like excited to work out the next day and whatever and then um and then i'd you know everyone says recover and this and that and then all of a sudden you watch this video and you're like oh that's why he's so good he's doing this and that and this and that and this and that eight times a day so everyone went from working out one hour a day to six hours a day and then that's when all the injuries started that's when like over programming started

that's when especially people back then everybody's goal was still to make it to the games like everybody that walked into a crossfit gym wanted to go regionals wanted to go to the game so they can't wait to get into all these things right now i'm so excited this is actually yeah this is actually like a really good kind of um transition into one of the things that i wanted to talk about which is like when froning worked out six times a day he wasn't actually working out six times a day and people looked at it and they're like I remember specifically one of the movies it was like the life of rich running or a day in the life of rich froning and one of his workouts was three squat cleans on the minute for 20 minutes at 185 yeah which is nothing which is nothing right

this is exactly it or like 10 thrusters on the minute at 95 for 10 minutes or something like that which to him is like I use the analogy of like it or like 10 thrusters on the minute at 95 for 10 minutes or something like that which to him is like i use the analogy of like it's like a basketball player shooting free throws yeah it's literally like taking zero effort and you're just practicing technique and yet people look at that and they're like oh three cleans on the minute at 185 i could do that and suddenly for them 185 is 90 exactly 60, exactly. So what people need to be doing is doing it at 115 or at 135 at most. And if you did that, then working out six times a day isn't actually working out six times a day. It's working out once or twice a day with like a lot of practice.

Yeah, exactly. And this is one thing we talk about on the podcast all the time is that I think one of the biggest problems right now in CrossFit gyms is kind of like that training and practice that people don't see the difference in there anymore right yeah they go in and they train every single day and they compete every single day they're competing with everybody else in the class they're competing with everybody else on leaderboard they're competing with the score they got on the same workout six weeks ago or whatever it is right but no one really ever goes in and just does 15 double unders on a minute or does a rope climb or works on their clams or like just because you do a hundred chest for pull-ups as fast as you

possibly can that's not going to make you better at chest absolutely not right so i think people nowadays i think it's starting to people are starting to understand that like okay what i'm doing isn't working i gotta slow down a little bit but especially back then like no one was doing stuff like that exactly and if they were i think the injuries would be significantly less and people would be better at movement yeah even something like five chest of our pull-ups every 30 seconds for 10 minutes or something you look at that and you still did a hundred chest of our pull-ups yeah exactly but you did it so much smarter right they were great reps your technique was great Your kip was being worked on. The timing of the movement, your breathing patterns, like all these different things.

And the one thing that is super important to me, I feel like, is if you're able to move perfectly at any given movement, let's say your snatch, your chest rep, pull-ups, wall balls, whatever it is, as you get more and more tired in the workout, everybody, all of of us our efficiency and the movement is going to decline just a little bit right but if you start at perfect and you get tired then you end at above average still right if i start at oh my movement is like slightly above average and then you get tired you end up fucking shit show like that's the end that's the end result yep no i agree 100 you're inefficient you cause injuries to occur your shoulder girdle gets smashed exactly yeah and at this time this is like when people are getting really addicted to the sport so then they think that the next evolution for them is to own a gym so they can train more which yeah actually does not equal the opposite effect but even if it is the opposite effect what

you think is going to happen is you're going to get to train more, but you also get excited to put your programming for the people. So then you give them this ridiculous competitive programming that no one can really do. So there's a lot of scaling going on. Or maybe you don't have coaches that are good enough to even show proper scaling. So then you get people who can start getting pissed. And then when people get pissed, they don't have a good experience. Then they tell someone that they tried CrossFit and they didn't have a good experience and then that person tells someone that they did crossfit they have a good experience and all of a sudden now crossfit

is not a dope program to do yeah i'm gonna go do spin or i'm gonna go do orange theory or whatever because my good friend told me that this is what it's like yeah it's like no no no because coaches don't give a fuck like you said people open gyms because they want to train more and they think that that lifestyle is going to enable them to go to the games go to regionals whatever it is right i mean you've seen me like i've had to like yell at people in class to take weight off their bar yeah for people that walk into the gym and all of a sudden it's their first day and they're doing push press at 95 which fucking is nothing but their back is all arched and they don't know what they're doing and they're about

to drop it on their head and I'm like dude take the fucking weight off or walk out the door like those are the two options you're not getting

hurt in my class I remember there was one guy he literally had such a problem with oh my god dude it was so bad like Fish had to

like step in and be like look you can put like cause I was telling him just do the bar and then Fish came in and he's like

okay you can do tens but that's absolutely that's the most you can do first day in there absolutely that's the most you could do first day in there like probably finishing in front of his face every time like not clearing through no mobility there's so many funny things that happen yeah but it's a very interesting time that whole time period i think is just crazy like for us i think it's great to look back on and be like oh that's such a fun time but man if were so much smarter, like the things we would have done

and like the athlete that I probably would have been if I was just a little bit smarter, I definitely fell victim to doing everything. Dude, the best story ever is when you were like, I went out with intention to run a 5K and it just kept feeling good. So I kept running and I think I just ran a marathon. You walked in all sweaty.

What should I do now? Like nothing, go home. Yeah, I was was like i think i'm gonna squat and i think i did like a 500 pound back squat and to this day it's like what everyone always talks about he ran a marathon and squatted 500 pounds in a day yeah i mean that's like a pinnacle right like that's what you want to achieve strength and conditioning simultaneously that was a good run. Speaking of running a marathon, we were talking before we started recording a little bit about your Olympic world record trial. Oh, my attempted Guinness Book of World Records.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so 500 muscle-ups in a day. And originally I set out to do 1,000. I thought that that would get me noticed. Oh, my God. More is better, guys. More is always better. So this was also probably the first year of owning the gym but uh i looked up the guinness book of world records and

the only record in there was max muscle-ups unbroken and at the time it was 26 and it was bar muscle-ups which now like every games athlete can do 26 muscle-ups in a row like it's not even hard but i was like you know what i'm gonna set a new record so I videoed the whole thing I created this like whiteboard with a checkbox for every five reps that I complete so that I could keep track of it and the camera would show the the board every time I completed a set and I did 500 ring muscle-ups in seven hours and 51 minutes and uh how do you even start that like how do you even start that? Like, how do you even break that up? It's a good question. So I did, I did the first 250 in sets of five reps. Okay. And I just did one set of five every five minutes.

Wow. Cause I knew it was a pacing game, right? I wasn't going to try and go out and like kill myself. But by that, uh, by the 250th rep, I was feeling it. And, uh, I'm feeling it right now. Just talking about it. I, I was feeling it. I'm feeling it right now. Just talk about it. I was actually not feeling great.

I started at 6 a.m., and I remember Anders had to go out and buy me chocolate milk because I was just so drained. I was like, I can't stop doing muscle-ups. So he ran across the street and bought me chocolate milk. I chugged some chocolate milk and kept going. I did the next 100 reps in singles i tried to do one single on the minute for 100 minutes so i did that 100 minutes so then i was at 350 and then i think i did triples the rest of the way so the last 150 were all in triples um and whatever it was it took seven hours and 51 minutes and uh the next day what did you feel like surprisingly not nearly as bad as i

thought it would be i had a rip in my hands and my lats were sore but other than lat soreness and a small rip in my hands it was way better than i thought it'd be i only took one day off you know it was 2010 you can't be taking days off one day off and did you get it was 2010. You can't be taking days off. One day off. And did you get the world record? So Guinness Book of World Records got back to me and they said, this is not an acceptable record. Please see Max Muscle-Up's Unbroken. And I was like, oh, come on. I'm trying to create, I'm trying to pave my own path here.

Like, give me this credit, you know? Somehow, Dave Castro heard about this and he emailed me and he was like, are you the idiot that did 500 bucks? And I was like, yeah, that was me, you know, whatever. I thought I'd at least get some love on the CrossFit site, but it wasn't meant to be. Nothing, I didn't even know he reached out to you. Yeah, or maybe I reached

out to him and then he got back to me, but it was one of the two. Wow. But he was aware of it, because I remember he brought it up at regionals the following year he was like yeah you're that idiot that did 500 muscle ups so he was aware yeah but no no record to speak of so it is what it is you know well you still got your street cred though exactly exactly the only idiot to do 500 muscle ups in a day and they're still like to this day one of my favorite movements right like when fish walked into the gym he could barely even do muscle ups as athletic as he is and

we did like 30 muscle ups for time i used to get so bummed because you'd always do so many more than me it was the only workout i could ever beat fish at so i tried to be your favorite movement i love i tried to make him do it all the time because i just wanted to beat him at something so from there now we're in probably 2000 because I think I went to a regional in 2012 with you guys. Yep. That was when I got fourth. That was a great day.

You had three straight years of top five. Yeah. Which sucks. Always one spot up, right? But that was always when it was only like top three main regionals. Yep. Then they made it top five and I got fucking sixth. Yeah.

I know. Isn't that, I remember that too. Isn't that so good? Oh my God. I know. Anyway, so now this is during a time where people are starting to get kind of smart about this

stuff. And what I think is like really, really interesting for you guys out there, if you're a CrossFitter and you're a fan of CrossFit and you've been around for a while and you're starting to see all these online programs kind of pop up i think the first like one of the first people to do like remote coaching was brian i started way long ago yeah it started with you and carly and it was 2010 2011 no it must have been 2011 um but you're like one of the first people that i can think of in my mind that actually started that.

Yeah, it was. And I made a post for you one day. I was like, you guys need a coach one day. And then Carly signed up and then Carly got all stoked and posted about it. And then that was when Instagram was starting. Yeah. You were an early adopter. I really wish I really was into it though.

Because I would just post every once in a while. It wasn't like every day. I didn't have any like strategy to it now it's like well yeah there wasn't like social media experts that tell you like on this day like content calendars right on this day you're gonna post about this this day about this this is about this like every day has to have some sort of content associated but yeah my uh the remote coaching thing though was like ingrained in me from so long ago. Like even in college when I was just, you know, pursuing exercise fizz, I was remote coaching for friends and family at the time, like around the country that just needed guidance. And I didn't know that it was remote coaching at the time. It was just me emailing them workouts and

them doing them. Um, so then you came along and you needed coaching and that was a perfect in and then carly came along and she made regionals after six months of doing crossfit which is something that you just don't see anymore yeah um and it just kind of grew from there and like my whole philosophy grew too right like yeah i'm excited to talk about that. Yeah, so you started out doing programs. So like, when you had all these people come into your gym, and now you have this CrossFit gym, what was the programming process going in your head right away out the gate? Did you want everyone to just kind of make sure they get a really good sweat in and leave? Did you want people to get strong? Did you want a little bit of both? Or did you just want to just do classic CrossFit workouts?

It was a mix of all of it, man. Like, I don't know like as i as i alluded to in the beginning when we were training at east village i always had a strong belief in strength work and i all i was you know averse to crossfit at first because i just thought it was all cardio so then when we started our own gym and i realized that i could create whatever sort of programming I wanted to do, it was really cool to be able to be like, okay, well, Mondays we squat. And to this day, that is one thing that's unchanged. We squat on Mondays and Tuesdays was generally like more of a longer Metcon. Um, Wednesdays would be some sort of focus on an Olympic lift. Thursdays was more gymnastics and cardio focus, so you get a little break from the barbell. And Fridays generally would be some sort of deadlift or pull off the ground.

And then Saturdays was more of like a team workout approach. And that side of things hasn't really changed much when it comes to gym programming. Yeah, I think that sounds great. I was going gonna say that i like that structure a lot that sounds good to me i think it's important to have structure for your gym too like your members want to be able to see themselves getting stronger and you guys alluded to this too in your how to program podcast you did a couple weeks ago where you know you get down these four-week squat cycles and members can actually see themselves getting stronger over a four-week period and that's important it's really

hard to see improvement on metcons because you just don't repeat the same metcon that often unless it's like a named workout that's done every six months or something like that so you have a squat program or you have like you know triples on deadlift that you do every Friday and you know every fourth week there's a deload week because you just can't tax your CNS like that but you know every Friday you're dead lifting and then you know on Wednesdays you snatch or you clean or you do some sort of combo of both and you can actually tangibly see yourself getting better whether it's getting more reps with the same weight or higher loading.

So did you have this kind of format from the beginning? Yeah. Yeah. I would say that that was always kind of my belief system. And it's just, it's evolved over time to the point that now I'm much more like when I program AMRAP type work or four time work, i often will do it in a pacing mechanism so i was going to say before you get into like that part necessarily i remember talking to you when you were going through the opt stuff yeah and that was like 2013 or 14 correct yeah right so

now now you have a couple years of gym programming and now you're going on to something that's getting really really popular a lot of people kind of, and now you're going on to something that's getting really, really popular. A lot of people kind of want to know what's going on because OPT is starting his own training systems. And now you started something that opened up a whole different window. Yeah, exactly. In style of training. Because I remember I was still being trained by you, and I remember the workouts changed significantly, and I was asking why. And you're like, oh, this is the way you want to do it, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So let's go over what that was like and how that changed your philosophy and then what we're doing with that now with awesome with what you do now yeah totally so the biggest change that I think came from the OPEX OPT stuff was this focus on pacing and how you don't want to go 100% all the time and I think for most people that are in the know that are CrossFit coaches at this point, that's kind of just an obvious thing. Like the sport has evolved to a point where you know, you can't go a hundred percent all the time. So back in 2013, 2014, it was almost unique to be like, okay, we're going to do an AMRAP five minutes. We're going to rest three. Then we're going to do an AMRAP five minutes. Again, we're going to rest three. We're going to do another AMRAP five. And your score is going to be the worst of the three workouts.

It's the only way I could get people to pace. Because if I'm like, you know, your score is the cumulative total of all three AMRAPs, people are going to go 100% on all three AMRAPs. You hold them back a little and you're like, okay, your score is the least of the three. And that was my first real kind of involvement with the whole pacing mechanism. I remember seeing that in the programming, and I was like, oh, shit, how do I do this? Yeah, and by the way, think about, do you remember the OCT when we programmed three friends? Oh, yeah.

So that was literally taken from that same philosophy. It was like, you're going to do three friends, each one is going to be on the five minutes, and your score is your worst fran. That sounds awful. Guess who won that? Fisher. What was your slowest fran? My slowest fran, I want to say it was like 320.

I was going to say 321. And my fastest one, I did my last one in like 240. No, no, no. It was your slowest score? It was your slowest score, yeah. Yeah, but I think I got faster faster which is why everybody was freaking out because i was getting like i started my first one and i think my first one was my slowest and i went a little bit faster each time so you won that workout with a 321 fran and you were able to sustain a 321 or better for all three

and it was a slap in the face for a lot of crossfitters that didn't understand pacing like they go out there and they're like oh i could hold a three minute fran forever And it was a slap in the face for a lot of CrossFitters that didn't understand pacing. Like they go out there and they're like, oh, I could hold a three-minute Fran forever. Until you can't. Yeah. I think that stuff is so cool. I talk to Fish about this stuff all the time, like the OPEX, OPT stuff. When I lived in Chicago, one of the guys there, regional athlete also, he then moved to Arizona.

He's like one of their sponsored athletes now um so i follow him on instagram and he basically posts all his programming all day every day all the stuff he does and i just think it's so cool to see someone with such like scientific approach to crossfit not just like i'm gonna beat the fuck out of you and you're gonna feel like you're dying every single day and we're gonna hope that that's gonna make you better they have so many different standards that you have to uphold i feel like every single day and i think me as an athlete too as i get smarter as i learn more about programming and understand what i'm doing because even me i started crossfit later than way later than you guys i've been crossfit for two and a half years now so the crossfit scene in general i feel like was a lot more evolved by the time i

jumped into it but i still made the same mistakes that everybody else everybody does it's so exciting yeah you just you go you go so fast you go so hard and you go seven days a week and you just you know what i mean try and prove yourself and then your body's kind of like okay dude maybe not right yeah maybe slow down a little bit so i think stuff where like the pacing is more in the foreground it's just so i just like it so much more because i feel so much more connected to working out whereas if i'm doing friend as fast as i possibly can or even a 15 minute mrap as fast as i possibly can there comes this time where you just kind of black out and you just kind of become a zombie right and you're just kind of like going through

the motions where stuff like this where i have to pace and you have to think and you're like okay i have to breathe and every rep has to think, and you're like, okay, I have to breathe, and every rep has to be perfect, and you're so much more connected to the workout, I feel like, that when I leave the gym, I feel way more fulfilled than if I just went as hard as I could, blacked out after 10 minutes, and then laid on the ground for another 15 minutes. I agree completely, man. It's like turning fitness into a cerebral sport. Yeah.

It's like a smart man's game. It's active meditation. That's what I call it. Totally. No, I think that's a, you should coin sport. Yeah. It's like a smart man's game. It's active meditation. That's what I call it. Totally. No, I think that's like, you should coin that. Yeah. And if you watch Froning work out.

It's literally like that. He is not dead. Yeah, no, 100% not. He's leaving some stuff on the table for sure. If you watch him do, like when I was coaching Kenny at the games in 2013, there was the workout that was like

27-21 15-9 thrusters with like rope climbs yeah exactly Froning was like the last one off the set of 27 thrusters he takes that nice pause at the top of every thruster rep he takes a breath

he stays composed he just rolled through that thing and made such quick work of it as if it was just like a casual walk in the park totally and uh kenny actually did great on that workout as well but just just because he's a freak at rope climbs yeah but um watching froning do that that was like that's always stuck with me like how just composed he seemed the whole time and one of the things we preach in OPEX when we do like energy systems work and stuff like that is to not show pain on your face. And that's really hard. Fisher actually used to make fun of me all the time for my pain face because it was just so ugly. I always was in the pain face.

The pain face and the O phase are really close together. They're basically the same thing. Yeah. So energy systems is another thing that, like, you know, I learned in that 2013 time frame where, you know, you have, like, alactic anaerobic on one spectrum and you have, like, super long aerobic on the other. And just kind of the unique ways in which you can program those two energy systems to mesh over time like over a ten week cycle you know you start with one anaerobic aspect and one aerobic aspect and you make your aerobic work a little more anaerobic and you make your anaerobic work a little more aerobic and suddenly these two things meet in the

middle at like lactic power and lactic endurance and you have like a five to eight minute amrap and you've just like primed your body to succeed over the course of 10 weeks through manipulating these energy system cycles and it's just really cool to be able to see the way that your body kind of adapts and responds to that the scientific side of it is just so so fucking interesting to me like thinking of training like that instead of just thinking of training like, okay, I did four or five back squats last week, now I'm going to do four or ten back squats this week. You know what I mean? There's so much more nowadays that we understand,

so I think it's just about applying it. And when you talk about stuff like that, I can geek out about that all day long. It's so fun, man. Me too. That is so fucking cool to me. It's interesting for me as an athlete, though, because I always wanted to get better. to get better and i'd be like all right well i want to do whatever opex is doing because that seems to be like he had a lot of great athletes and stuff and then somebody would win who was like under dusty highland right and kenny started training with dusty highland and like um who's the other girl that won Lindsay Lindsay was under Dusty

and then Valley of Elbrow was under Dusty like literally there was like five people on the podium that were under Dusty and I remember looking at his programming

and I was like this is death every day it's death like I didn't understand it and I'm like what what should I do should I die

or should I do the smart thing or like should I do both you make this point all the time because whenever I geek out about OPEX you always make the point like whoa but they don't have any fucking games athletes like they never had anybody big do you have an explanation for that why that's going on I I don't I don't think I do honestly I think that at this point there's a longevity component to it okay yeah I love that I fucking love that yeah and like you know i don't i don't

necessarily want to train somebody that's going to be on the podium at the games i don't think that that's like my bread and butter right now okay my whole thing with this like evolved training systems that i created is to get people to whatever their goal is to ensure longevity. Like my main target market right now, my clientele base is people that want to look like an athlete, feel like an athlete, still kind of train like an athlete, but they also want to feel good, sleep well, have hormone balance, be able to eat a little bit of fun food every now and then. Fun food.

And not spend their entire life in the gym training. Like that is the evolved method as far as I'm concerned. And of all the remote clients that I work with, I would say 80% of them right now are on some version of this evolved training program. And then the other 20% are like still kind of diehard CrossFitters. So is there stuff that you do for your clients besides just writing the programming that involves like the sleeping pattern, the, uh, getting out of the gym, food, like all that stuff. Is that just a big.

So I kind of talked about this a little before the podcast too, right? Like I partnered with IN3 nutrition and Jason Phillips, the CEO over there, he's an awesome dude. Um, he has a bunch of the nutritionists that work underneath him and i i originally started coaching one of them four or five years ago amanda barelli she's a six-time regional athlete here in socal and um it was about 2015 that she started kind of getting burnt out on CrossFit. And this is when I created my first like evolved program. And it was a hybrid based program. It involved Olympic lifting twice a week. It involved, um, Metcons at the end of each day, like one Metcon a day, but most of the day

training was more bodybuilding focused. So there'd be a day that was like, I call it horizontal push pull, but you can just think of that as chest back. Okay. So it's just a fancier term for it. I mean, it's a movement pattern system as opposed to a body part split. Got it. Um, so then I also have like a leg day that's quad dominant and we have a leg day that's hamstring dominant. Okay. So we separate that into like posterior and anterior sides. anterior sides one day is more focused on squatting movements getting below parallel and then one day is more focused on hip hinging hip extensions good mornings deadlifts RDLs things along those lines and then we have one day that's a vertical push pull think of that as like shoulders arms yeah so

vertical push pull right shoulders some pull-ups, some dips, and then throw in like some bicep curls and some tricep extensions at the end. Love it. Took you with fun. Yeah. And then on Saturday, we had a gymnastics day. So it was a big day focused on like working on butterfly pull-ups because all that other stuff is strict. So we're working on like muscle-ups and butterfly pull-ups and kipping handstand push-ups and stuff like that. So this was my very first kind of like evolved program and she loved it not only did her hormone levels get better she started sleeping

better feeling better in general um but she actually got stronger and i think that was the biggest unique thing where she was just like holy shit there's this like other way out there and so she was my kind of in to this, um, I am three nutrition group. And, uh, a few months ago I partnered up with Jason Phillips and now I'm training six or seven of his nutritionists. And then his nutritionists are now sending me their clients that they work with. And all of these people have one thing in common, which tends to be they over-trained in CrossFit and now they need to get right. Yeah. And so they're all on some version. Take a step back, slow down a

little bit. Dude, exactly. And like, I was talking to fish about this earlier, but I'm training three times a week now, which is crazy. I never thought like when I had started on this CrossFit journey that I'd be the guy that's like, I'm just going to train three times a week for 60 to 90 minutes. And that's more or less what I'm doing. It's, um, it's a movement pattern orientation program, like horizontal push, pull, vertical push, pull, stuff like that. And there's still some Metcon work in there, but instead of going out and killing yourself and doing Fran at the end of your workout, it's like three rounds of 10 burpees and 200 meter farmer's carry. Gotcha. And so you're getting your conditioning in.

Creating work. You're just doing work. You're just keeping your body healthy and... So do you think you can do something like that, like the three days a week, because you've achieved a certain baseline as an athlete? I know people talk about Pat Barber all the time too, or Matt Chan,

where they're like, well, Matt Chan only works out three days a week. And it's like, yeah, but fucking Matt Chan worked out for six years every single day. So he's achieved something. He's achieved a certain level of athleticism where now three days a week is enough for him to maintain that level. It's a great point, yeah. And I think that the key is not that you have to have followed a high volume training program prior, but more that you had to have put in enough time in the gym that your movement patterns don't need work. Yeah. Cause this all goes back to the whole froning thing where he's practicing movement.

He's shooting free throws all the time, right? It's muscle memory. That's what you're drilling, right? Yeah. Like I don't need to work on my form and thrusters at this moment. I don't need to work on my chest of our pull-ups. Like I how to do these things right we've been in this game long enough that like this movement is almost second nature like riding a bike comes back to you it's like riding a bike yeah so I'm able to I know at this point how to activate the proper muscles we're training three times a week I'm able to get enough stimulus to make it worthwhile and I'm sure Matt Chan and Pat Barber in the same boat they understand fitness or a level two where they can just like you

you know what I mean where they know okay I'm only working on three days a week but you know exactly what you're gonna do in those three days to achieve the greatest effect exactly I remember when I was on the Olympic bobsled team that was our training was Monday Wednesday Friday seriously that was it Monday Wednesday Friday we would Seriously? That was it. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we would lift, like, we had a strength program, there was no conditioning in it,

just a strength program in the morning, and then in the afternoon, we would push sleds. So we had like a, in the summertime, we'd have a wheel sled, and then in the winter, we'd have on the ice. Okay.

But that was Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then, I think that was on a Saturday or Sunday, the whole workout for the whole day was we would go to the track and do sprints and it would be like literally the whole day would be like a 10 by 100 meter sprint i bet dude that's exactly what it should be i mean and they weren't all out either no exactly because by the time one 90 if you went 100 on 10 by 100 the amount of decline that you would experience from sprint to sprint would be so significant.

But dude, I used to be fucking so excited for like my days to squat and stuff. Because like I had worked out Monday and then Tuesday's off. And then I'd work out Wednesday and then the next day's off. And I knew I was going to deadlift or whatever on Friday. And I'd wait. Get excited about that. And then like the whole weekend, I'm like, oh, I can't wait till monday i'm gonna smash this you know so that it was like exciting but like now for me i mean well for me i like i have all these different injuries and stuff now but

like sometimes like the thought of working out like isn't really like super exciting like it used to be so this is actually like another point that if your motivation in the gym is suffering maybe you start training less. Like, I noticed the same thing. I originally started on, you know, okay, I'm going to go four days a week instead of five. But I found that training back-to-back days, I was not excited about my session on the second day in a row.

And if you have high stress levels, like cortisol or something going on, because you're not excited. Then, exactly. It's almost like you feel like you have to go to the gym to feel better and that's the thing that i really am preaching for people to get away from is like you should feel at your best and the workout should be something that you want to do you shouldn't have to walk into the gym and be like oh i feel like shit today my brain is so foggy i just need to work out and i know i'm gonna feel better

like the amount of times that i've heard people say that and the amount of times that I used to say that, right? It's all over the place. Yeah. But that's just not the point. Like that's just not – it's not fun anymore. No. And if you're like us and working out is such a big part of your life, then it should be an enjoyable part of your life. It shouldn't just be something that you dread every single day.

I try to take every six to eight weeks somewhere around there. try and take a week off but it's not really off like what i do is i go out of the gym you know what i mean i'm running i'm biking i'm swimming playing basketball playing beach volleyball whatever it is and just staying outside the gym i just did that a few weeks ago after the open was over i took like 10 days off fish and i went snowboarding the first weekend and then after that was just like running, biking, swimming, doing yoga, all that stuff. That's awesome. And after 10 days, you're fucking craving the barbell, right? You're like, oh my God, I want to pick up something heavy like right now.

And that's what it should feel like every single day. I 100% agree, man. And the fact that you even are like aware enough to think of taking a week off every eight weeks. Yeah. More people could do that. I always say 12 to 16 weeks. But yeah, if eight weeks yeah more people could could do that i always say 12 to 16 weeks but yeah if eight makes you feel better like awesome right and then you come back and you realize you didn't actually lose something that's always the biggest fear is people are like oh if i take a week off i'm gonna lose all my gains yeah no it's different like because all

of a sudden now you're working out the right way now you're feeling good now you're making progress you know so i think that's cool um as far as your online programming and like the remote client stuff goes what do you do because there's a lot of options out there for athletes right they can go google something and a hundred thousand pages are going to pop up yeah what is something that you guys do to add value to your program over someone else's so i do um i coach through private facebook groups i know other people do that too um but i try to give them just the full experience i give them full access to me so within our facebook group i encourage them to post videos of their movement um i make sure that any movements that i program that might not be you know the most obvious movements,

something kind of obscure, maybe it's a bodybuilding movement or something like that. I'll always either film my own video to demo for them or I'll link to a YouTube video. Another thing that is extremely time consuming, but I find very productive is to actually help guide people through how they need to progress in their strength work. Cause I find that to be one of the most confusing areas for people is, you know, I write, okay, we're going to do five sets of three on your pull-ups. Okay. Well, what happens when I make five sets of three? Well, you try to increase weight. Okay. What if I can't increase weight? Okay. Then now we're going to try and increase weight the first set only. And then we're going to try and hit the four remaining sets at your old weight.

And then the next week we'll come in and do that. And like being able to manipulate volume and loading, being able to manipulate intensity in a way of like, okay, well, I've been doing this, you know, for three weeks and I haven't made progress on it. How do we then attack that to individualize it to you and make sure that you can continue to progress from there? Whether it's like, like some days I've had people be like, okay, I'm not progressing on my five by three weighted pull-ups anymore. And I'm like, okay, today we're going to do five times max reps of just body weight, as many as you can do. Okay.

And suddenly they're like, you know, achieving 60 to 75 reps. So you said you have around like 35 clients right now. Are you able to keep like one-on-one contact with all of them yeah i mean some of them require more attention than others like some of them actually really dig the the individual communication and they're very diligent about posting their results every single training day and they they crave the feedback from me and then there are others that are much more self-sustainable and they kind of are just like, I got this, you know? And they only contact me when they're like stuck or when they feel like maybe they're starting to overreach and they're starting to feel a little less motivated. And, you know, then we'll have a kind of enlightened discussion about what do we need to do with your training volume?

Maybe it's time to start kind of peaking this cycle and starting a new one. I'm a hugely metric-based coach. I strongly believe that there are certain movements in a program that need to repeat week to week to week so that you can tangibly see yourself getting stronger. And technically, that's the CrossFit idea, right? I feel like that's something that's getting lost too. When I did my level one, that was one thing that they were preaching

where basically you're trying to do five pull-ups you're trying to do those five pull-ups as perfect as you possibly can and the integrity of the movement comes before the intensity then after you do those five pull-ups you add a sixth one now that sixth one may not be perfect now because you're kind of getting to the edge of being fatigued right so now you're going to train and keep going until that sixth one is perfect, and then that seventh one. And you're just going to keep doing that and increase your load as it goes. But I think a lot of people have forgotten about that. And like I said earlier, it's like, okay, I snatched 225 last week.

I'm going to snatch 235 this week. And it's like, well, dude, you fucking barely snatched 225. Right, right, right. That was not a good rep. Your knee's caving in, your shoulder's buckling. Exactly. There's a lot that you can fix at 225 before having to add weight. Yeah.

I mean there's so many good reasons to spend less time at submaximal loads. And people are all the time like, well, I snatched 225, so I'm going to snatch 235. Well, okay, what if we go back and now we spend a week or two snatching 205? Yeah. And we make 205 perfect or 185 perfect and people think that if they don't go to a max every time they lift that they're somehow going to get weaker yeah like what the hell is that here's my view right now you know what i'm about to say who fucking cares if you snatch these35 right like my mind is blown the fuck away like i just don't care

like right snatch 275 i don't care you're irrelevant like what is the point unless you're going to the games like we have someone in our gym right now like she it's a girl and she's just like so obsessed with snatching like some number i forget what it is but I'm like why like Instagram bro like yeah I mean I understand like why you like I understand that like it would be cool like as a guy like I always want to snatch 300 pounds you know and but it's just like there's a there's a point where like if it's taking over your life like you're not doing anything else in your life but like focusing on snatching that 300 and working out all these different times and this and that blah blah blah and then you snatched 300 then what happens at some point it's like it's enough to you know what i mean like it's fine like you're done

the one thing that my ex-girlfriend always used to say to me and i'm not a big fan of her anymore but this was one thing this was one thing that was actually my ex-girlfriend i'm not a big fan of it yeah it's actually really funny because during that time, that's when it started crossing. I thought I was going to regionals. I thought I was going to games. It was consuming my life. And I would come home and I would tell her, oh my god, I clean jerked fucking 315 today. And she would always just look at me and she'd just be like, is it necessary to be lifting that much weight?

Isn't that just the typical uninformed girl that you see? But at the same time, it's like, well, she's fucking right. Like, no, I'm never going to fucking pick up 315 and put it up over my head in any different scenario. Exactly. Unless you start getting into fat girls. Oh, yeah. Fat girl acroyoga. That way you can progress as she gains weight.

Yeah. You just got to keep feeding her. Oh, man. That's wrong. So going back to like talking about like working out at submaximal loading, like the amount of times that I've seen people just, you know, hang out at like 75%, 80% and do perfect reps, and I won't even let them touch a one rep max or even close to a one

rep max for weeks upon weeks. And then they go back and we're like, okay, now you're going to test your one rep max. And they do their one rep max. They're like, Oh my God, that was so easy. You know? And you're just like, yeah, cause your form is so much better. You didn't miss reps for like eight straight weeks. Yeah. And like when you fail, you teach your body failure. You don't teach your body to succeed Yeah, when I teach people all the things specifically like I teach them that like It should feel like you should feel Like you know what you did wrong

like if when I'm done coaching you at the end of it like if I do like a one-on-one session with someone for all the other thing like at the end of that hour if you feel like you still need me as far as like where the bar was Like I didn't do a good job coaching you. Yeah. And it goes back to the active meditation too. I think like visualization is such a huge key to me. Like I've kind of come in contact with that when I was still playing football and a lot of people, successful people was talking about that. You got to see yourself succeed before it actually happens.

And I go through that all the time in the gym when it comes to lifts. Dude, I haven't missed a clean in, I don't know how long, two or three years. And that feels great, right? You know what I mean? Like, I haven't failed. I hit 365 during that open workout, which was a 20-pound PR. Wow. And it's just like, I don't know how to fail a clean anymore.

You know what I mean? Like, I don't know what that feels like. You just teach success. Yeah. And on snatch, that's 100% not the case. I get to, like, 90% on my snatch, and I'm like, I don't know what to fail a clean anymore you know what i mean like i don't know what it feels like and on snatch that's 100 not the case i go i get to like 90 on my snatch and i'm like i don't know what the fuck's gonna happen here right but it's so that's i think i've never thought of it like that but the way you said it you know what i mean you're teaching your body failure on my snatch i failed so many times that i kind of go in i'm like ah i might hit this i may not you know what i mean on my clean i'm so certain that you just know.

I'm going to pick this bar up and I'm going to stand this up. And I'm just going to go out of my mind. I know I'm going to snatch a lot of weight. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to clean anything. I mean, I think ultimately it comes down to just working at weights that allow you to make reps. Like going back to the Rich Froning, like 135 snatches for three reps on the minute forever like yeah i i don't i did one squat clean on the minute for an hour one time a few years ago i was just like i'm just gonna do one a minute every rep is gonna be perfect and i'm gonna try

and it exactly was stupid i know an hour was bad this was this was in the pre like i told you dude he's always dying pre-enlightened days yeah Dude, you gotta do some dumb shit every now and then. No, exactly. I'm so happy about dumb shit. My buddies and I did the fucking Iron Triathlon. Remember the going one up to 20? Yeah. Oh, I did that the next day after.

Or did I do it the day before? It took me an hour 55, bro. Wow. Yeah. That's so stupid, right? And it's so dumb, but it's like, all right, I did it. I just wanted to do it. It's like some of those 12 days of Christmas workouts out there.

I remember you and I went into the gym one Christmas, and it was the day after we did a 12 days of Christmas workout, and we decided to test our one rep max barbell curl. Oh, do you remember this? Oh, my God. I think I still have the video on my computer. And I hit 165 strict. Wow.

Like, no momentum. It was just like, boom. And then you tore a rib or something. I popped a rib out. Bro, I was laid up for, like, 10 days. Worth it. I could barely breathe. Dude, I want to say he might have bicep curled 185.

It was, like, so savage that all of us were like, what? Like, I hadn't even done a bicep curl in years. And I saw him do it. I think it was 165 or 175, but whatever it was, That's a lot of fucking weight, dude. It popped a rib out and I was, I was so laid up for so long, man.

That's so awesome. I think my overall, like, dumbest workout I've ever done was with this guy, Paul Smith. You remember him? Yeah, the dude out of Texas, right? Yep. He hits me up and he's like, I'm coming to stop by this gym I used to work out.

He's like, I got this workout in mind. We're going to do 100 power cleans at 225 with five burpees on the minute. Oh. Like calc. It's a super calc. Yeah. With power cleans. And I was like, oh, okay, you know.

Little did I know, like, we start after like three rounds i'm like i'm doing like sets of three or four on the minute and i'm like oh my god and then like that like later on we start getting to the point where like him and i both did like one like yeah i watched my burpees and then i watched him like take a minute off and i was like oh my god he's really good dude he's massive and he took us like 30 minutes and we finished yeah no matter what i did the rest of that week it felt like i tried to squat like 135 like warming up and i was like your nervousness was just so i i just knew i was like i can't do this like i literally i know i can't squat yeah and then like the next day i come and try to work out i was like i can't work out the cns impact of high volume olympic lifting is so gnarly yeah but that was the dumbest thing I've

ever done in my life sure and that's like I ever done was actually before CrossFit my body and I were like working out for football is what I was playing seven pro Germany and we're doing what is it called Westside barbell for skinny bastards right they had like an extra like for skinny bastards program in there I was like much like Benjamin it was actually pretty cool stuff and then one day the cash out was 100 calf raises. So they had like the little calf raise machine, you know,

where like the pads go on your shoulders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we went pretty light. I think it was like the three stacks or something like that. And the 100 calf raises, dude, I couldn't walk for a week.

I had to take two days off of practice because I literally got to practice. I'm like, there is no fucking way I can run right now. Dude, it got to the point where like, whenever I would stand up off a couch, right, I'd, like, stand up like this

and then press on my knee just to, like, straighten my leg. Dude, it was so fucking terrible. I'm like, yeah, I'm done with this fucking program. I'm not doing this ever again. The same thing happened to me on my college tour. I did 100 calf raises right before I had to go tour University of Cincinnati,

and I literally couldn't walk, so they had to give me a golf cart so this is actually perfect segue talking about stupid shit where do you see you're at the forefront of CrossFit you're one of the first I crossed in San Diego you and the first people like start online programming when you see theFit world, or if you want to go fitness world in general, where do you see it evolving over the next 5, 10, 15 years? Such a big question.

I'll take 15 years out. Let's go 5, 10. Okay. I mean, you know, CrossFit is a tough one because all the weights just are going to keep getting heavier and all the gymnastics movements are going to get more complicated. Like all of the gymnastics stuff has to turn into like grid style stuff. Right. I mean, there just is no more evolution of,

of, of gymnastics work or it becomes more of like actually Olympic style gymnastics. I would love to watch them degress and go back down to like classic CrossFit with like lighter weights and see just what happens Yeah I think it'd be so much cooler But I think what's gonna be cool too To see is

If you look at Matt Fraser He's so dominant right now And he started CrossFit When he was How old is he now? He's I think he started when he was Like mid-twenties

So he was a weightlifter right? He was a little bit of a weightlifter And then he like started Like mid-twenties So like he started CrossFit In mid-twenties There's kids that are Starting CrossFit now

When they're fucking Eight years old Oh yeah You know what I mean? so when those kids get to like 18 19 21 a lot of times that they get burned out yeah or injuries occur i mean your body can only handle so much like heavy volume high load work that's true so i think as far as evolution goes like people need to train smarter yeah you need to focus on longevity, especially if you're going to start it younger. Like, Fisher's been, you know, killing himself in Olympic training and CrossFit training for over a decade, and now he can't squat anymore.

And, like, I tore a labrum in 2012 because I decided that I wanted to go on an Olympic lifting cycle and do CrossFit. And, like, these are things that are just so dumb dumb and you didn't know any better when you're younger, but if you do shit long enough, you're going to get injured. It's a sport. You played football, like you play football long enough. You will get injured. And like, if you're going to be good at CrossFit in years to come, you're going to get injured, but you need to be smart about what you're putting in like isn't an hour

five days a week for 30 years better than four hours a day six times a week for four years yeah I mean

like and the whole longevity factor what you were saying before we started recording too at the end of the day and what Fisher was saying too like who the fuck cares if he's not 225 or not at the end of the day like you want to be able to pick up your kids and play catch and

you know not have to fucking sit on the sidelines and just watch them grow up what i think is really cool is a couple years ago well i guess in may 1st my gym will be open for four years and um i remember like when i first opened the gym i started this thing called sweat which was like you know you know it obviously yeah it's more of like a first opened the gym, I started this thing called sweat, which was like, you know, you know it obviously. Yeah. It's more of like a conditioning class. The way that I started it, which, which, uh, to like what it is now is like so much different. I feel like it's evolved into like just so many cooler workouts in my opinion.

But the amount of people that are like, I really want to come in and do sweat today is just getting like more and more and more and more and more. And I remember at that time, I was telling him about my sweat class and he had started a bodybuilding class in his CrossFit gym. Oh, dope. And people were digging it, right? Yeah, we actually still have a version of it now.

Yeah. It's strong. Yeah. So like he started bodybuilding stuff way before. There's a chalk that would dig that for sure. Like we always do the fucking bro downs after class. So like I feel like that would take off too. I know fucking bro downs after class so like i feel like that would take off too i thought about putting that in there at some point so like i was gonna

say like my i think you're gonna start seeing a lot more like bodybuilding style stuff like in the crossfit workouts type of stuff but what do you think yeah that's that's a perfect segue into like the strong program that we have on our gym. Cause you know, we have a very CrossFit based membership. And even when we had the bodybuilding program in like 2013, 14, 15, when I did the men's physique comp, um, it wasn't like taking off like you wanted it to. No, it wasn't really taken off. Like certain people did it. And then it was mostly new people that came in that were like, Hey, I'm scared of CrossFit, but I'll try this bodybuilding program. So now I reintroduced the program called Strong probably like six, seven months ago. And it's not nearly as much of a focus on like a pure bodybuilding program as much as like a hybrid between strength training, bodybuilding,

and CrossFit style like Metcon stuff like I was saying, like 200 meter farmers carrying 10 burpees for three rounds or something like that. So now it's like actually taken over the gym and we've had a number of different people from the CrossFit classes that are like, I'm just going to do this program now because they feel like they have all the components that they want in one program where they have the aesthetic component of the bodybuilding. They have the strength component from the power lifting side of things. Like I always program the squats and deads, um, in a

lower rep range. Like, you know, we alluded to earlier, like three to five reps, got the hypertrophy stuff in there, like the eight to 15 rep stuff. And then we have the little, what do you do for hypertrophy? alright so let's I'll just go over one of the programs from this past week so it was horizontal push pull day so we went bench press and bent over rows

for sets of 6 to 8 so that was more of our strength work for the day and then we had dumbbell bench press and dumbbell croc rows and those were for 10 to 12 reps and then we did some super sets of one or two sets of dumbbell flies with ring rows and then the workout at the end was 200 meter farmers carry 30 burpee deadlifts with your kettlebells

and then 30 rushing kettlebell swings nice so that's the whole thing right you got your strength work your hypertrophy work you got your little metcon at the end yeah you get a little bit of sweat at least at the end exactly and it's not like dude i was dead after the croc rows like picking up 110 pound dumbbell and rowing that shit 15 times is like what the fuck's a croc row it's like a dumbbell bent over row but instead of your knee being on the bench you're holding like a stack of plates for support so you can get a little more momentum in there oh okay you know what i'm saying yeah get a little lat extension and lat contraction

um and then like on the squat day like today i came into your gym and i was doing our our strong program so it was uh work up to a heavy triple for back squat and then three sets of three at 10 percent less so i'm big into the back offsets now triple for back squat and then three sets of three at 10% less. So I'm big into the back offsets now. Like one heavy set and then a bunch of back offsets where you're just kind of working on form, efficiency, breathing, active meditation. There you go. And then after that, we did some split squats. So it was like 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, something like that.

So you get all the kind of rep range zones there. And then we throw in, uh, I can't remember exactly what the hypertrophy work after that was, but it was something like lunges and GHD sit-ups. Okay. Um, so you just kind of get a good mix of everything. Like you get a little bit of CrossFit at the end, you get your strength work, your hypertrophy work, and it's kind of like this super program and everyone, we've had a lot of people kind of veer off the CrossFit path and start doing that recently and they love it they actually feel like they're getting more volume in than they do with crossfit i can see that i really like stuff like that and i've been doing a lot of stuff like that yeah i'm i really like uh personally i like the um

like the pat o'shea stuff from back in the 70s the uh the iwts yeah i love the iwts because i still have that part of me that wants that death feeling just because i don't know it's just kind of like my dna yeah um i really like endurance like i really like like it sucks that i can't run anymore because my knee's so fucked up but i love to just like get on the bike and put in like 100 calories or get on the ski and put on like a hundred calories or do like a huge workout but now i try to make a lot of that stuff make a little bit more sense where it's kind of like an iwt yeah for those of you guys who don't know it's like interval weight training and it's usually a lifting component and a cardio component with some rest i think if you're gonna kill

yourself that's way better to do it for your cns on a piece of cardio equipment than it is with a mixed modal training yeah for sure we do a lot of cardio to handle for sure in the gym yeah and you can recover from that and like you know you're not gonna end up in a cns depleted state by doing thousand meter repeats on the rower no like it's just cardio yeah a lot of the cardio stuff too like it's gonna suck but you you can do cardio stuff every day like just absolutely you're a track athlete you're doing something you want to do track athletes also periodize though and that's like you know one of the aspects of crossfit that is is now in instituted but could be focused on a

little bit more is the fact that like you're not going 100% all the time you're periodizing your training out a little bit and track athletes are the same way like like you kind of said earlier you know you have one day where you're doing 100 meter repeats and a lot of the other days are lower intensity work form work and stuff like that shooting free throws yeah train smarter not harder yeah 100% dude some of my days would be 10 by 30 meter sprint. Yeah. That'd be it. It's just a takeoff,

basically. It's really not a huge day. That was the day. I know. But then you can really focus on a takeoff, you know what I mean? Like,

you're not exhausted, you're not, you're still there, you're not blacking out, you know, you're feeling every step and you're just a lot more connected to what you're doing.

Anything else you want to add? I do like, kind of like where where we're kind of getting to from like what you started with the gym and then like where we think everything is going to kind of go and then what do you benefit what do you like to do personally now after all these years like basically kind of like your strong program yeah exactly i really like to have a little mix of everything like i really truly enjoy squatting and deadlifting heavy. I also enjoy cleaning heavy. I think those three things are going to be staples for as long as my body can do it. And I don't always go heavy.

Like I like to, you know, have my back off weeks. And I think out of every month, I like to have at least one week where I deload all those movements. And then I feel like I am able to, at this point in my life, spend three weeks going heavier. I don't know if that's going to stay forever when I'm 45, it might be two weeks heavy and two weeks deload, but whatever it is, I'm going to continue doing those three movements heavy. Cause I really enjoy them. And I enjoy doing some of that, like farmer's carries and more of like kind of strongman conditioning stuff. And I enjoy hypertrophy work because it still makes me breathe heavy.

You get the pump. Dude, you get the pump. Chase the pump, dude. Chase the pump, man. And we live at the beach like all of us. Like I live in Pacific Beach. You guys live in Newport. Like we're walking around with our shirts off all the time.

Yeah, exactly. It's cool to be sore in that way. And the way always beach season too. It's always beach. The way that I get sore doing that type of training is real good soreness as opposed to CNS fatigue. Yeah. And you can feel the difference.

So for me, it's all about avoiding CNS fatigue. If I do something stupid, like an open workout workout which i did do the open this year or you know 12 days of christmas or murph or whatever because those things come up and they're part of the community and they're fun and they're fun i'm definitely going to take two days off after that like i'm not going to be that kid that comes in and does a one rep max barbell curl the next day not anymore no it's just crazy i think the hardest part is trying to get these people to just... Slow down. Not even slow down.

Like, just, like, get them to believe that something else is going to work for them. Yeah. I get so bummed. Like, sometimes I'll program for the gym. Like, I had an Olympic total, like, a week ago. And I was like, we're going to do one rep max snatch, one rep max clean and jerk. And then, like, I'd be totally cool with, like, that. But I have to put 1,000 meter row in there at the end. Because people need to breathe cool with like that but i have to put a thousand

meter row in there at the end because people need to breathe heavy right they have to have it so it'll be it's you had 15 you had 30 minutes for a 100 max snatch and a clean and jerk and then it was uh at the end everybody went we did a thousand meter row for time but it's like there is and this is kind of like where i always talk about when it comes to programming like there is that, like, you have to please the crowd type of thing. Absolutely. You know what I mean?

Like, you could be a really, You're gym members, yeah. You could be a great musician, but if you suck on stage, you know what I mean? Like,

no one really wants to watch you play. Yeah. So, that's a good analogy. There is, like, a little bit of that, like,

for the gym owners out there and all that stuff, like, but also doing it in a way where it's still fun and not, like, you know, taking you the fuck down and you feel like you're dead all the time so i think there's a there's a very interesting way to program for your gym and then what's really right and i think what everyone should be doing though is cycling different programs all the time

i think that's like the most important thing you got to keep it interesting you got to keep your members safe and you got to give them something that they look forward to doing. Yeah. And you got to educate yourself because the more I learn about working out, the more I understand, the more I want to try new things. Oh my God. Yeah.

You know what I mean? The more I, and the better I feel outside of the gym too, you know, just going in and just murdering yourself is one thing. But the more you understand, you're like, oh wow, I can actually feel good and make progress at the same time. Let's do that. It's the perfect world, man. and just murdering yourself is one thing, but the more you understand, you're like, oh, wow, I can actually feel good and make progress at the same time. Let's do that. It's the perfect world, man.

That's why I always preach for everybody out there to try different gyms. Yeah. Like, if you're not really sure if your program's that good, like, how many times do you hear people say, like, oh, my gym's programming is shit, but, like, I just love everybody there,

or, like, or that gym's programming is shit, or whatever, you know what I mean? It's like, I think you should, I think everyone should try every gym in their area for a week and see if they like it and kind of, and like try different classes, try different coaches, try different programs.

Like if you're in San Diego and you go to a regular CrossFit gym, try a strong program and see if you like it. You know what I mean? Like try different things and see if you like it because you don't know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Feel that. All right. So, I think this is the part where you talk about where people can find you and your programs and all that stuff. Totally. Evolvedtradingsystems.com. That's my website.

I'm on Instagram, at Brian Borstein. Jim is San Diego Athletics, slash CrossFitPB. And you also post daily workouts on Fee's Crew. I do, yeah. I post slash CrossFit PB. And you also post daily workouts on B's Crew. I do, yeah. I post daily CrossFit workouts

at B's Crew Training on Instagram. Got two of those handles, B's Crew and Brian Borstein. Dude, thanks so much for having me.

This is rad. Very easy to find this guy for sure. Definitely. And if you're ever cruising down Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach,

you guys can go check out the gym it's a huge spot it's a cool spot John Cena's been known to work out there a few times hell yeah

and uh yeah yeah you got anything to add? no not really I'm excited to go to Paleo FX with you next week

yep we're gonna be out there probably get some cool interviews meet some cool people so there's a lot of good content coming your way

so yeah I'm excited for that alright guys awesome that's it that's the end of the show later alrighty then that's going to wrap it up with Brian hope you guys had fun learned a thing or two got a couple good bailouts in there

we definitely had a great time with Brian and as always guys if you like it now that the channel is or two got a couple good bit of laughs in there uh we definitely had a great time with brian and as always guys if you like it now that the channel is so new and we're trying to prove ourselves make sure you follow the shrug collective and subscribe make sure you guys leave a review and as always guys fish and i are super interested in what you guys are trying to do or what you guys want to hear more of so any ideas any comments any concerns you guys are trying to do or what you guys want to hear more of. So any ideas, any comments, any concerns you guys have, either send us an email. It's going to be yaya or ryan at crossfitchalk.com. Our Instagrams are at yaya's view, at ryanfish.

We really try to get back to everybody that sends us a message. So let us know your thoughts, what topics you want to hear about, what guests you want to have on. If you want to see more pictures of Ryan with a shirt on or off, whatever it is, we're going to do our best to make it happen just for you guys. So tell your mom, tell your mom's friends, tell everybody the Real Chalk Podcast. I'm Yaya and I'm out.