Barbell Shrugged - [Road To Regionals]

Episode Date: July 15, 2014

Info on our Road To Regionals programming.

Hey, Doug here from Barbell Shrugged. What you're about to listen to isn't one of our podcasts. It's actually the audio we clipped out from a video that Mike and I shot to promote the launch of the upcoming Road to Regionals program, which is one of our online training programs to help you prep for the upcoming open competition. We do reference our slides quite a few times. So if you're interested in seeing what pictures of the program look like, then I highly suggest you go to r2r.barbellshrugged.com to check out the video

version. And if you're interested, you can also sign up for the program while you're there. Registration for the program is open until July 25th, which is a Friday. If you sign up early, you get a discount. So definitely don't wait until the last minute if you're interested in investing in this program. Again, all the information for the program is available on r2r.barbellshrug.com. If you have any questions, you can email us, help at barbellshrug.com. Hope you enjoy it. If you're interested in crushing the Open next year, you're in the right place.

I'm Mike Blitzer here with Doug Larson from the Barbell Shrug Podcast. We got CTP behind the camera here, and we're going to be talking about what you need to do if you aren't prepared for next year's Open and do well enough to go on the regionals that's right we basically noticed that within the crossfit community people keep making the same mistakes over and over and over with regard to to programming and training when they want to be competitive athletes a lot of people that have been in our six-month muscle game program have gotten a lot of benefit from getting stronger and stronger and stronger and then just focusing on conditioning for the few months before the upcoming Open. And then very few people from that program have been strong enough to go to regionals.

They need a year-round training program that's going to get them strong in the offseason and then focus on conditioning prior to the Open to hopefully get them to regionals in the coming year. So these common mistakes are really pretty easy fixes for the most part if you have experience. But until you have experience, it's kind of a mystery about what exactly to do to fix your programming. Yeah, I think one of the biggest problems is people jump from program to program and don't give any one program long enough, a big enough chance to see a difference. And any good program is going to have long-term results in mind. And a lot of times people don't see those long-term results immediately. And so

they feel like they need to go to another program. Too much program jumping will lead to stagnant progress. Yeah. Right. In your own programs, we're just hopping from one program to the next, to the next, to the next sporadically, or just going like one blog one day, one blog the next day. It's not a good long-term plan, as Mike said. So really you need to structure a whole entire year with your goal and your weaknesses in mind, and then follow one set training program that, yeah, you can put a little adjustments to it, but really it's a thought out one year long training program with the upcoming competition in mind, in this case, the open and then eventually regionals. Yeah. So last year we started a program called the six month muscle gain where people wanted

to get bigger and stronger. At the end of that, we talked to people and asked them what they'd like to see and they want to do open prep. So we started our first road to regionals group back in November. And that group has already seen really great results. We have several athletes that are going to go on to regionals and they've made a lot of progress. So the muscle gain challenge, which is our other program, as Mike said, is really focused on getting you bigger and stronger, really focused on weightlifting. There's enough conditioning to kind of keep you in shape, but not really to peak your conditioning or your gymnastic skills. So we made this program basically as a, as a compliment to the other program where you can go through the muscle gain challenge. If you're a person that's

not as big and as strong as you should be, then you can go into the road to regionals program afterward. After you've gotten big, after you've gotten strong, then you can max out your muscular endurance. You can max out your conditioning and you can work on your gymnastics skills. That way, when you show up to a CrossFit competition, you're big and strong and you add fitness to that to that strength that you've already developed and you can be at your best for the competition. Yeah, so this road to regionals program was developed throughout the entire year to help build up Metcon speed, work capacity, muscular endurance, and overall conditioning. We do take in phases of the year into consideration. During the spring and summer, we're definitely focused more on strength, but also building a big aerobic capacity. And then as we get closer to open, we're going to be doing things that look a lot more like the open movement wise and volume wise.

Right. We've also found that that people that attend regular CrossFit classes, oftentimes those CrossFit classes are catering more to kind of general fitness and the competitive athletes, since they're in the minority, are the people that are often left out and and they're not getting enough volume. They're not getting enough specific competition based training in their daily wads. They're just left to do what everyone else in the class is left to do, which which for the most part is good as far as general fitness goes, but it's not good if you're trying to be a high level competitive athlete, a guy that wants to go to regionals as an example or ladies. Yeah. And if your training looks a lot the same in May

as it does in December, if those training months look a lot alike, then you're probably doing something that's not preparing you for the, for a specific moment in time at the end of the year. So what happens in May should be very different than what happens in December. And I know that a lot of programs that are really focused on just general fitness, looking good naked, the way those programs are developed is kind of a month at a time. You get fit for a month and you kind of start over and go back. And there's nothing wrong with that type of program. I've done that type of program myself when I'm not competing. But if you want to be a competition athlete, you've got to kind of plan out the entire year, focus on certain things at certain times of the year, and then taper and peak for

the season. We also noticed that a lot of people that watch the Barbell Shrug podcast are watching because they don't necessarily have a coach of their own. Maybe they train by themselves in their garage or they train at a global gym. They don't have a good CrossFit gym nearby. And so they're seeking other sources of information. And so they are doing blog programming or writing their own workouts or what have you. And maybe they're getting by with that, but then they don't have support for finding their mobility restrictions or what supplements to take, or they don't have any nutrition information coming from someone who's looking at their diet and giving them very specific feedback on what they can change. So we try to put together a program where even though it's done online in a virtual environment, it's actually very similar to going to a CrossFit gym

where at our place, we say that the three things to make CrossFit gym successful are the three C's there's coaching competition and community. And that's hard to get if you're doing an online training program. But we figured out how to how to make each one of those a reality, so to speak, where we do online program, online training programs, where there's a coach there to help you in a Facebook group or even in some cases for some of our higher level memberships. There's one on one Skype calls and one on one nutrition consultations on a weekly or monthly basis. Being in a Facebook group and using Wattify performance tracking software, we've gotten to where you can actually see on a leaderboard with a worldwide team, so to speak, where you stack up compared to everyone else that's in the program, whether they live in the United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, or anywhere else on the planet, you can still be on a leaderboard just like you would see with the CrossFit Games, the open WOD where you can see where you stack

up to everyone else in the world, just kind of on a little bit of a smaller scale. And then finally with that, since you're on a leaderboard and you can see where you stack up compared to everyone and you're in the Facebook group where you can interact on a daily basis, doing the same workouts at the same time, you do get that sense of community online that you get if you're just at a regular CrossFit gym and you're doing workouts right next to to your buddies yeah so you might be wondering if this program is for you and I would say it is if you want to prep for the open if your if your goal is to prep for the open not for regionals not for the games if you need to really focus on the open get through that so you can get to regionals, not for the games. If you need to really focus on the open, get through that so you

can get to regionals, this program is for you. This is the only program that I'm aware of that's specifically designed for getting really good at the open, the movements, the time domain, all of that. Yeah, if you're looking to do really well in the open and maybe someday go to regionals, but you've never been to regionals before, this is a good program to go through. Again, it's going to help you get stronger in the off season and then towards or closer rather to the open. It's going to help focus on your conditioning, your muscular endurance and your gymnastics skills specifically. So if you want to do really well at the open and that's where you're planning on peaking, that's exactly what this program is designed to do. It's designed to

help you peak for the open. So hopefully you can qualify and go to regional someday yeah we see the the biggest limiters for doing the open well tends to be uh handstand or not handstand push-ups chest bar pull-ups muscle-ups so there's a lot of focus on there we definitely do a lot of weight lifting and we work a lot of the lifting and barbell stuff into the conditioning uh as it gets closer to the. We also do a good amount of strength work in the offseason far away. But the main focus as we're running in is going to be being able to knock out chest bar pull ups like there's nobody's nobody's business and be able to knock out muscle ups once you're really fatigued. Yeah, those are two of the movements that show up in the open every single year.

The other gymnastic skills like handstand pushups and pistols, you need to be good at those, especially if you do make it to regionals. But in the open, they haven't had a big showing in the past. So chest-to-bar pull-ups and muscle-ups are must-have skills for anyone that wants to do well in the open, though. So we focus on those a lot. Those tend to be big differentiators, if I can talk. Those are the things that you can do moderately well throughout the Open. If that pops up, if you can knock those out really well, that's going to move your placement. If you can't do them, it's going to move you way back.

Some people do really well in the first three workouts of the Open. They get to week four, they're crushing it. They can't do any muscle-ups, and they're basically out. It cuts you off. All right, so here's what the program looks like. We've kind of bounced around and given you and given you a few a few tastes of what it looks like at different times of the year. But we're going to break it down and make it a little more visual so you can really see what it looks like. So big picture first, we're going to run through what looks like on a yearly basis,

what each month looks like, what each week looks like, and then kind of what the day to day is going to look like as part of the program. So again, starting big picture, we're looking at the year. Basically, here's how your total training volume is going to go throughout the year. So regionals typically are kind of April, May, June, depending on the year, but for the most part, it's the month of May. Games typically happen at the end of July, and then the open is typically the month of March. So actually if we start off on the far right side in the month of March where the open is, you can see that there's dramatically less volume done during that month. That month you're basically just doing your open WOD, doing a couple more workouts right afterward, you know, backing off for a day or two and then doing

your next open WOD and you're repeating that cycle for five weeks. So your overall training volume is pretty low. And then after that, if we swing all the way to the far left, say you didn't make it to regionals, you would start ramping up your volume again for the next year, slowly over time, doing a little more volume, a little more volume, a little more volume until you hit around October, November. And that's where your volume is probably going to peak, especially for strength. And then your volume will taper down just a little bit. You'll be doing less total work, but you'll be doing more high intensity, high intensity, shorter, fast paced kind of lactic intervals. So here's kind of what that's going to look like. What Doug means by volume, especially

in conditioning, when you think about conditioning is the amount of time you're spent doing the workouts. So we want to be able to build a large amount of time throughout the year, and then we'll taper down. We'll spend less time doing conditioning as we get closer. But kind of basically out in the fall, as we're going to see fall and winter, you're going to see a big bump in how much time you're spending doing conditioning workouts and kind of the same for the strength as well. Right. So if you did 60 minutes at a low intensity on a rower, that's not necessarily like 20 times better than doing, you know, three five hundreds on a rower where you do a minute and a half pace on three five hundreds with a three minute break. Just because you rode for four and a half minutes on the intervals in an hour on the long endurance wad, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's was that 12 times because it's 12 times as long it's 12 times as beneficial so even if your volume goes down you're doing that higher intensity it's kind of what crossfit's all

about not doing long workouts it's doing high intensity short workouts so even though your volume's going down leading up to the open it still can benefit you as far as prepping for the open so do you did you want to walk through that that thing as far as? Yeah, we can walk through this. So throughout the year, you're looking at this at the graph. You've got to, as we get out of the open, we've got to build up that volume again. Because what we do is we take about a month or two during the open where we drastically reduce the amount of volume. So what we can't do is we can't jump back in the volume we were doing back in November-ish. So what we're going to do is we're't jump back in the volume we were doing back in November-ish. So what we're

going to do is we're going to build that back up. We're going to build up the strength volume and we're going to build up the aerobic base, the aerobic capacity volume from there on out. As you can see with the aerobic endurance and the strength, we're going to build that up all the way up through September. We're going to be peaking in September, October, November. And then in December, what we'll do is we'll start backing off the strength work. We'll start backing off the aerobic endurance work so much. And then what we'll be doing is getting much more intense. We'll be doing the shorter duration of things that burn, the things that hurt, and the things that look a lot like what happens in the open.

The workouts that are 5 to 20 minutes long and tend to be lighter weights at high speeds. All right. So that's kind of what the whole year looks like. That's called a macro cycle. It's a whole year long training program. And now we're going to look at mesocycles, which typically are between kind of four and eight weeks long. We typically do four week blocks. So on a monthly basis, you can see a week one on the left. I quantified these. The numbers don't mean anything. It just gives you an idea of kind of how much you're doing relative to the other weeks. So maybe the first week's like a three, then you do a four the second week, a five the third week. So you're doing more and more volume each week. And then every fourth week, you're going to back off just a little bit,

have kind of a deload week. Often at the end of those deload weeks, we'll do rep maxes or one RMs or some type of a tester. That's when you're seeing if the training's working, seeing if you're getting better, what you're improving on, what you're not improving on. And then we stack all of these mesocycles together and we use them to build volume over time. So you can see the first cycle there on the left, you go up, up, up, down. And then the second cycle, you go up, up, up a little higher and then you're down. And you kind of build volume in waves like this. And it can't go on like that for forever and ever

and ever. But this is a good example of kind of what that looks like. So you can kind of conceptualize how you're doing more volume over time, but you're not just doing more and more every single week. You're moving up, you're backing off, you're recovering, and then you're ramping back up again. And you're going to kind of repeat that process with at the end of every fourth week, some type of a tester to see whether you're getting better yeah and that volume is not going to as doug was saying is not going to keep ramping up forever there is an optimal range of volume to get ready for workouts that last between 5 and 20 minutes long the things that we see during the open but it is something we want to ramp up to and so you can be optimal you have

optimal volume leading into basically the training that's going to prep you for the open. All right. So that was four week blocks. Those were the mesocycles. Now we're niching it down even more. We're going to show you what each individual week looks like. For the most part, we do about five days a week. That's Monday, Tuesday.

Wednesday's a rest. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then Sunday is a rest. So five days on. Sometimes on Wednesdays, we'll put in some light, light, light work just to help you recover, light aerobic work. So you're not doing nothing necessarily, but it won't be a hard, intense workout that's really going to beat you up. And then usually Sundays we take all the way off, maybe give you some stretching or some soft tissue work. But for the most part, it's Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Now, if you need to mix those days up, uh, you definitely can, but that's kind of the general structure of the program.

Yeah. Most of the year, I say the 10, 10 to 10 and a half months of the year, it really doesn't matter if you shift the days around a little bit, but as we get closer, as we get inside the open, it's really critical that you are, the training is actually needs to line up on the days a little bit better. Um, especially if you plan on doing the open on the days that we suggest. Uh, and then during the open, the workouts are going to spread out a little bit throughout the week. So you may train six or seven days a week, but a few of the days are going to be a lot lighter and a lot lower volume. All right. So here's a, here's an example of what your days

look like. This is just day 92 of one of the programs we've done in the past. Just as an example, usually at the top of the page, we give some information on one of the movements that is a part of that day. And then usually there's some video support to go along with that. Below that, usually there's some type of a habit. Usually it's mobility or nutrition related. This one's talking about how to structure your anytime meals versus your workout meals and basically how to add in extra carbs where they will help you gain muscle and they won't make you fat. Below that, there's usually a for the entire week of the program. We would give you the whole week up front that way if you ever need to like make an adjustment like the Wednesdaynesday doesn't work for you and so you're gonna do wednesday's

workout on tuesday if you need to like make some adjustments you can so there's links to the entire week week's worth of workouts and that looks just like this usually just send you some type of a spreadsheet and then also it'll look prettier than that yeah that's some old stuff actually does look a lot nicer than that now. But we promise below that below that we have a log sheet as well that you can print out and take to the gym if you want to manually write in your weights and whatnot. That way you don't have to keep looking it up on your phone and you can just have the whole week's worth of workouts printed up and taken with you. I would suggest taking your phone and using the Wattify app, though. You know, whatever.

Yep, we have a bunch of options. We got options. We have a bunch of options. We haven't gotten to Wattify yet, but yeah, that's what most people probably do is they just look up their workouts on Wattify anymore. We have weightlifting specific warmups and we have other types of warms as well,

but it's usually laid out right below the workouts for the week. And then there's always video support. You just click on any one of the links and it'll take you to videos that show you exactly how to do each one of the warmups. And then below that, same thing for your workouts on each individual day when it lists your workout for the movement and then for the technique watch. And then we also have progression videos. There's going to be a link showing you what the movement is there will be a link showing you exactly how to do that particular movement and then the progression video will show you how to scale either up or progress higher or make it more

difficult if if that's something you want to do as well so there's a ton of video support showing you how to do all of the movements for each specific workout. And so you can see these videos on the left are just demos of the ring dips, walking lunges, and GHC sit-ups. And then on the right, if you click on the technique wads, it shows you all the details of doing ring dips, walking lunges, and GHC sit-ups. All right, so that is for the five training days each week, usually Wednesdays and Sundays. As

Mike said earlier, that's a rest day and usually we give you some type of either part of one of our products or some type of exercises to do for, again, usually nutrition or mobility. So here's an example of the workout on your rest day. In this case, it's just follow the follow the video below and it shows you three different stretches to do if you click on the poster to show you pictures of each one of the stretches it recommends today was five six and seven and then it shows you exactly which stretches or mobility drills to do for two minutes each i'll tell you what when it comes to stretching i can i can train right i can eat, right. But the stretching is

pretty tough, but knowing that everyone's doing the same stretches as you and can talk about in the Facebook group and stuff like that, which we'll get to that, that makes it a lot easier. And I have something that just says specifically do these stretches. Like someone just says, Hey, do this as exactly how to do it. It makes it so much easier just to do it. Uh, you know, I think most people don't do some of these easy habits, things that could be considered easy just because they don't have someone saying, Hey, do exactly this. And it kind of makes your life easy, simple, and thoughtless, thoughtless. Yeah. I mean, you really, we lay the whole thing out. You don't have to do any thinking for yourself if you don't want to, if there's other stretches you want to do,

cause you know, you need to work on a, on some particular area. You definitely can, but we lay out pretty much everything you need to do. So if you're a, a person that does well, just following step-by-step instructions or, and you just don't want to worry about what to do, you're like, you're like, just walk in the gym, know exactly what you're going to do. And you just want to do it and get out. Then this a good program for that because we tell you every single thing you need to do i got the train with one of the people in the programs when i was out of town and they fucking loved that they were like man everything's just no guessing on the warm-up they like hated the warm-up and now i was like okay here's all the stuff i have to do ain't that right mike

they hated the warm-up no no they they hated warm-ups they hated warming up previously but since it was all written out like this they loved loved it. So they probably made it like walking in and trying to figure out what to do for their own warmup. Right. I actually like jumping in a class warmup for that reason. Uh, just, just to have someone else lead it. Uh, and if you are somebody who doesn't want to just be thoughtless and just follow the directions piece by piece, uh, especially for mobility and nutrition, uh, what we've done is, uh, piece, especially for mobility and nutrition. What we've done is you'll get maximum mobility and Faction Foods nutrition course throughout the program. So on the days that you're not training,

you'll have an opportunity to learn. So if you want to take it a step further and understand why things are the way they are, this is a perfect opportunity to get that information. Right, so you can see on the next slide right below where on the rest day you would see your workout, which was the stretches we just showed you a second ago. Here's an example of getting a piece of the maximum mobility program as homework on a Wednesday or a Sunday where I show you an assessment for getting more hip extension, basically stretching your hip flexors and how to

tell if they're tight. And then right below that assessment video, I show you an assessment for getting more hip extension, basically stretching your hip flexors and how to tell if they're tight. And then right below that assessment video, I show you a presentation that we did at Faction Strength and Conditioning a little while back explaining exactly why you might need to lengthen your hip flexors. And if you don't have long hip flexors and they're tight and you lack hip extension, how are you going to hurt your back or hurt your knees or what could go wrong if you never fix that problem, if you have it at all. So I tell you, here's how to test if you have the problem. And then here's why it's important. Here's what to do about it if you happen to have that problem. And again, that's just one example of the type of thing you'll get on a Wednesday or a

Sunday. So usually some homework there. Yeah. So we do sell maximum mobility. In the past, we sold it for a minimum of $127. So you get $127 as basically a bonus as part of the program. And then you get all the assessment videos. And then again, all of the kind of support videos from the presentation telling you if you do the assessment, you find out you have a limitation. Here's to fix it here's why it's important and also here's what you can do as far as what's safe to do with that limitation while you're fixing the limitation and then how to progress to harder more difficult fuller range of motion exercises after you fix the problem yeah so if you're somebody who has achy joints or tends to re-injure the same thing over and over again, this is actually the perfect thing to kind of identify what's going wrong. For years, I had different joints that were giving me trouble. And then once I understood, you know, better kinesiology and actually Doug helped me out on a lot of things to understand what needed to be fixed. It was really simple stuff once I figured out exactly what it was and never re-injured those joints again. Right. Along with that, you also get the

Faction Foods Nutrition course, which again, the lowest we've sold that for in the past is down at $197. And so with that complete course, we cover everything you need to buy and put in your kitchen to make cooking as easy as possible. We teach you how to grocery shop, how to save money at the store, kind of the old concept of shop the perimeter and what to buy. And I take pictures of all the stuff that I buy, take a picture of what my grocery cart looks like. I lay all my food out when I go home on my kitchen table and I take a picture of it. So it's very, it's very kind of behind the scenes. It just shows you exactly how I cook and how I shop and what I buy. So a

lot of pictures from my life, a lot of pictures of my meals, like during the middle of the day, when I'm, when I'm just kind of working on my computer, what kind of meals I eat then. And during, um, during training, what, what I drink in my workout shake and what supplements I put in it and what I eat for my first meal after training. It's a lot of very practical examples from my life. Uh, we talk about good cards, a lot of value out of the pictures of your dumps. So we know like a regular. Yeah, some solid, some not. There's a lot of variety in there. There's no pictures of dumps. Don't worry. We also run through again, good carbs, bad carbs, fruit and veggies, how to get how to get variety and why variety is important. Good fats and bad fats,

how to save money while eating out. And when're on the road. If you're traveling and you're going to restaurants, how to make sure that you can still get some good quality paleo meals and when it's okay to cheat. Also, we talk about energy bounce and how working out and nutrition work together and how to basically alter your metabolism with training and how to gain or lose weight for your specific body type, which is something that a lot of people really don't talk about. Uh, there's for the most part, 90% of what you need to eat is the same kind of for everybody as far as like what's healthy. But there are awesome little tweaks you can do if you're a super skinny person or if you're

naturally a heavier person that just carries more body fat. And if you want and you want to be leaner or the skinny person wants to gain muscle, there's little tweaks you can do to accomplish both of those things. Absolutely right. We also had our buddy Paul. I just came and did a presentation at Faction Strength Conditioning for us a little while back. And his approach to nutrition is very different than my approach. My approach is a little more practical. Just here, do this. And I really don't get into like the kind of the history or the like agriculture or other cultures and what they eat. And I really don't compare cultures and look at like archaeology or anything like that. Paul loves that stuff. And so it's this whole other perspective about why eating paleo works

and kind of why it's really the way to go as far as we can tell in the modern world. So we give you all of Paul's videos as well. And getting that other perspective really, really kind of changed how I look at nutrition and it made paleo make even more sense. So we're giving that to you as well. And we sold that in the past for about a hundred bucks. So that's another bonus you get for free as part of the program. Yeah. What's great about this is, is having the different perspective, different learning and teaching styles. So if you don't connect with one instructor, a lot of times, sometimes it's just the style, the way they teach. And so if you don't connect with one instructor a lot of times sometimes it's just the style the way they teach and so if you get doug and then you get paul the bases are going to get covered you're going to understand nutrition that's right you're going to get nutrition double team

all right so those are a few of the bonuses you get with with the program regardless of which level you choose but right now i'm going to walk through the three levels of the program. Each one has a slightly different offering. The three levels of program basically are the solo program, the RX program, and the pro program. Long story short, solo basically means you're doing it all by yourself. RX means you get some group coaching in the Facebook group and with Wattify. And then the pro program means you get all those things plus a weekly nutrition screencast from a coach. Basically, you can log your nutrition in Wattify and then they'll do a screen recording of them talking over what you're doing well, where you can improve, and they'll send that to you as a YouTube video every week. That way, you know what to improve specifically on your end as far as nutrition goes. That way, you can make sure that you're gaining 26 pounds in 26 weeks if that's your particular goal or whatever your goals are. And you're going to be able to discuss your goals with the coach during a Skype call, which is once a month. And then you can also talk with them over email in the Facebook group and

whatnot. So the pro program, it basically has a little bit more one-on-one interaction with the coach of your particular group. The Facebook group, basically what that is for is to, again, I said earlier, I talked about three C's and one of those was community. The Facebook group helps instill a little bit of community into the program. That way, everyone else that's in the program with you, they're doing the same workouts on the same days. They're having the same struggles. They're PRing on the same days, et cetera. You're going to be able to be in there and hanging out in the Facebook group, posting your videos, talking with each other. And it's just kind of fun being in a Facebook group with everyone else in the program, but also the coaches in there. So if you have questions, you can submit your question to the Facebook group.

If someone else in the program knows it, they can answer right away. If the coach is in there and sees sees it right away, they can answer it. The coach will log into to the Facebook group, probably usually about three times a day, kind of kind of morning, afternoon and evening to answer any questions and to provide feedback on any of your training videos. So you can submit your your clean videos, your snatch videos, your jerk videos, your squat videos, or whatever muscle ups, muscle ups. Absolutely. And the coach can say, okay, you're doing this well, you're not doing this very well. Here's what to do to get more reps, or here's what to do. So you don't miss the weight and drop it in front of you or drop behind you or, or whatever. They can be there to give you feedback. You can go try it, make another video, submit it again. And the coach can again, give coach can again give you more feedback so you're getting coached within the facebook group yeah even though we have plenty of demo videos and technique videos during the program those are going to be helpful in cleaning up your technique

and make you a much uh much more efficient athlete i really think getting that interaction with the coach it can be really important for speeding up the process and getting the most out of the program. Right. We also have we have hundreds of technique videos, which is great if you know what your problem is and which one you should focus on watching. So the coach a lot of times will say, OK, well, your big problem is that your butt pops up too quickly on your first pull. So here here's a snatch first pull video. Pay attention to about two minutes in where we're talking about keeping your butt down and they can direct you to the right spot because

there's tons of information online. But if you don't know which information to consume, then it doesn't matter that there's a lot of it because you just don't know what to watch. Yeah. If you don't have somebody with a lot of weightlifting experience helping you out on your technique, I think doing the Facebook group is basically a good minimum for improving your technique. Right. So you can see on the screen here, there's an example of kind of what the Facebook groups look like. There's questions being asked and then the coaches get in there. Me, Mike, me, Mike, Chris Moore, CTP, we kind of flow in and out of all the groups because we have multiple groups. But you're going to have one main coach that's going to answer probably the

majority of the questions. And then every once in a while, we'll be in there as well to give our thoughts and tell you great job on your PR, et cetera, et cetera. So this is kind of what it looks like. If you're curious, most people are pretty familiar with Facebook at this point, I'd imagine. In addition to the Facebook group,

if you're in the RX or Pro group, you'll also have Wattify. And as you can see here on the screen, we got Rich Froning as the model for have Wattify. As you can see here on the screen, we got Rich Froning as the model for the Wattify website. He's who we learned about Wattify from. It's exactly who we learned about.

Should have been me. But if you want to look like Rich Froning and lift like Rich Froning, you'll use Wattify in the very least. That's why he's so jacked. Yeah, it's Wattify software. Alright, so if you're not familiar with Wattify in the very least. That's why he's so jacked. Yeah, that's Wattify software. All right. So if you're not familiar with Wattify, basically it's a performance tracking software where we can post the workouts on Wattify and then it has it has the capability to show you

what the workouts are. And then also when you submit your score, it'll it'll take everyone in the program doing the same workout and it'll it'll put you on the leaderboard and it'll put the first or the first place person, whoever went the fastest at the top, and then it'll filter everyone else down all the way to the last place person. So you can see every day on each individual movement who lifted the most on, say, the back squat, and then you can also recategorize by the Metcon times. You can see who went fastest on the metcon for that day so pretty cool that you can be in a worldwide program where people are in the united states and south africa and uk and australia and you all still be on the same leaderboard seeing who who's winning on that particular day for each piece of the workout what's cool about wadify too is just

that you can track your own progress you can look look at what you did previously. It's a good central location. You can log it on your computer or on your phone and any of those results, you know, they're, they're logged in the cloud. So if you lose your notebook one day, you're not completely screwed and you can't remember what you did last week for, you know, four sets of five on back squat or something like that. So the information being stored in the crowd cloud is super important for me. And in addition to that, we use Wattify for the nutrition, the nutrition, the weekly nutrition logs. And if you're in the pro account, then the coach is going to get in there and use Wattify to interact with you. Even if you're not in the pro account and you're not interacting with your nutrition through

a screencast with the coach, you can still log that in there just for your own reference. Right. So if you look at the screen here, you can see what the nutrition journals basically look like. There's a tab at the top of the screen that says my nutrition journal, and then you can just fill in whatever you ate on that particular day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, any of your snacks. You can also log how much water you drank, how much you slept, what your weight was, and then add any additional comments. Then you can just submit that for review. And then at the end of the week, the coach can go in there and look through each day and then make a screen

cast recording of exactly his thoughts on your nutrition log. So basically, it's almost like the coach sitting right next to you. You're both looking at the screen at the same time, and he's just talking you through what you've done on that particular week. Yeah. My favorite thing about Wattify is the fact that, uh, we work with them a little bit. We went up and we hung out with the guys at Wattify and we told them what we thought could make it better for us and for our, uh, clients and athletes and for our coaches and just to make things better. And they're super receptive. So, uh, the Wattify program is currently really great. And I think it's going to keep getting better. Yeah. Sometimes you're friends with somebody and they start a business and then you support them no matter what. This was the total opposite. We started using their stuff,

realized it's awesome, then figured we probably should go be friends with those guys because their stuff is taking over the CrossFit world right now. So Wattify is the shit if you've never used it before. If you haven't seen this yet, here's what the leaderboard looks like. Here's an example of what it looks like. So it categorizes male and female athletes on the left and right side of the screen, respectively. And then you see in the top right corner, it says power clean, clean deadlift, shoulder press, Metcon. And then we had some kind of supplemental dumbbell rows at the end of this particular workout. But clean deadlifts were the movement that are selected on this screen here.

You can see two sets of two at 355 pounds for Johnny, and then two sets of two at 310 pounds for Jay. Johnny did the most, so he's in first place. Jay's in second place. Then it goes on down the line. If you keep scrolling down the page, it goes to third place, fourth place, down, down, down. Then if you go back to the top left corner, you could do the same thing. Look at the power cleans. You could look at the shoulder press. You can look at the Metcon and it shows you each one of those. So here's the shoulder press. Here's the Metcon. And again, for each piece of the workout, you can see who did the best at that piece of the workout. And you can see where you stack up compared to everyone else in the program boom boom so also we've mentioned

that Wattify has an app so if you have a smartphone super convenient you can just download the app and put it right on right on your smartphone so you don't have to like go to your web browser and type in Wattify.com slash whatever you're going to click on the app it'll take you right to your login page and then you can log in you can see all the exact same stuff that I just showed you from basically like a web browser view on a regular computer. I showed you the same thing here on the app on your phone. And if you don't have a smartphone, you should go get one. All right. Here's a few of the common questions we've gotten over the years about the program. First, how do I get my workouts each day?

So all the workouts are distributed every single day. Every day you will get something. We'll email you a link. And then also if you just log into the Barbell Shrug membership sites, all of your links to all of your workouts will be on the Road to Regionals page of the membership site. So you'll have access automatically given to you after you sign up for the program and then all of your information will be compiled in one place on the membership site. Yeah, and the WODs are going to post at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time the day before. So that means if you live in another country,

if you live on the other side of the world, you're going to get your workout in time. We have several athletes that live in places like Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa. And we take that into consideration when posting. In addition to that, we're going to post. Oh, never mind. Am I moving ahead?

Am I moving ahead too far? That's OK. Yeah. All right. So we mentioned the weekly nutrition reviews. Those are for pro members only. Basically, you're going to log all of your meals in Wattify as I showed you earlier, and that's going to make it really easy for your coach to look over your meals and then provide you with a screencast recording, which basically means he's recording

his computer screen showing you exactly what he thinks you should change, what you should improve on, what you should cut out, maybe eat more of one thing and eat less of some other things, or whatever feedback he thinks is acceptable at the time based on you and your goals. You probably try to keep it simple and do like one or two easy suggestions per week. Also, you're going to get Skype calls again for the pro members only to answer any and all of your questions. So as you go through the program, you're going to develop a relationship with the coach. He's going to get to know you better and better and better each week.

And you can bring any question you have about nutrition or training or how to scale around any achy joints or injuries or anything else that is really bothering you or if you're not making progress or whatever. And you can have that time to consult with a coach so you can get your specific situation figured out. That way, if you plateau or you're not making progress as fast as you think that you should, you can know what to do to accelerate some more progress. Yeah, I think this can be really key, especially for a program preparing for the open in regard to nutrition. A lot of your nutritional needs are going to change throughout the year, depending on the volume of training. As we discussed before, how that's going to increase and change throughout the year depending on the volume of training as

we discussed before how that's going to increase and decrease throughout the year and the type of training is going to kind of change the type of foods you should be eating so having a monthly skype call and having the weekly nutrition reviews not only are those going to help you get to a good baseline but once you get to that baseline it's going to help you adjust most appropriately throughout the year. Another common question is how long is the program? Really, the expectation is that you stick with the program all the way through at a minimum the end of the open. We're prepping you for the open. You would stick with the program all the way to the open and then through the open because we're going to be programming specifically for each workout as it comes out.

Typically on Thursday nights during the open that way we can write that night get the workout write all the workouts for the rest of the week and and we can make it as specific as possible during the open so it's not just up to the open it's all the way through the actual open season as well that way we can calibrate after getting each workout announced each week to further, six months is kind of the minimum time that we think you need to be on a program before you can really decide if it's working or not working. So six months is the minimum for this program. That's why originally with our other program, the six month muscle gain challenge, that's why we named it that because we wanted

people to stick with something for six weeks. That way, that way six months or six months, excuse me, that we can go into something ahead time, knowing you're going to do something full bore for six months. You're not going to program hop after two weeks thinking, okay, well, I'm going to go try something else. You're never going to get solid results if you just hop around all the time. And another thing we were talking about before with how the program may look different in May than it should in December or January or something like that. I think a lot of times people look at a program at one point in the year and decide, oh, this isn't getting me better at the open. Well, sometimes it's counterintuitive, the type of training you need to do today to be good at it three or four months from now. So even though something may seem counterintuitive,

you may not see as an athlete, and there's some coaches looking at with a long-term perspective and the short-term results are not always indicative of what the long-term results are going to give you. It's very true. Long-term, excuse me, how long rather will each day last? Typically each workout usually we do one a day, rarely two a day. We'd ever do two a day ever. You do the programming. Yeah, the two a days are sometimes suggested, and it would be like easy, light aerobic work, something like jogging or something like that. But yeah, we keep it to one a day. The only people who really get extra prescription

would be the pro clients who are interacting, who feel the need. They really need some additional work, some additional volume, in which case the appropriate type of volume or appropriate type of training will be prescribed to the pro client. The pro client kind of has the opportunity to get the additional individualized tweaks that they need to their program. Right. So 90% of time, 95% of time, probably that's going to be one workout per day.

Usually it's between 60 and 90 minutes. If you don't have 60 or 90 minutes on any particular day, that's OK. As long as you still just go in and warm up quick and then do whatever's first in the workout. Usually the stuff that's most important is done first for the most part. So go in and hammer out some squats or some cleans or whatever. Do a short Metcon or a portion of the Metcon and you can get out of there still in 30 or 40 minutes if that's all the time that you have. Obviously, we want you to do the whole workout whenever possible, but if you ever need

to cut it down or if you need to skip a workout, you certainly can. If you don't know what to do or what the best adjustment is to make, again, that's why we have group coaching in the Facebook group. You can just ask the coach what to do. If you're a pro client also, then you can just send the coach a quick message either again on Facebook or if you have a Skype call coming up, you can just ask them over Skype. Another question we get is how will the programming be during the five weeks of the open. So the programming during the open definitely is different than it is in the middle of the summer. So what you're going to be looking at

is the movements that we're going to be doing during the open. Basically, we're looking at historical data, what's been done in the open before, and we're doing a lot of practice. We are practicing doing those movements and then the rep schemes that we need to be doing them in during the open.

As the open goes on, we're able to, by process of elimination, figure out what movements we've already covered. They rarely, I don't think they've ever done the same movement twice throughout the open. So once we've done double unders, we can cross those off and go, okay, we don't really need to practice those much more. We can focus on practicing these other movements. And we can do that. It's only five weeks, really need to practice those much more. We can focus on practicing these other movements, and we can do that.

It's only five weeks, so we can practice those movements quite a bit without getting overuse injuries. But with that being said, as soon as the Open is over, we're going to get away from those movements pretty quick so that we don't get those overuse injuries. Any good program is going to look a lot like what you're preparing for right in the middle of the season. Yeah, programming during the open is an interesting thing in that you're trying to do as much

as possible where you can even improve your conditioning during the open, but not so much where you feel run down. You want to feel very fresh, very recovered. You want to have all of your joints feeling good. You want to go into every workout each week feeling fresh, recovered, and kind of alive and not so run down so it's a it's a balancing act depending on what is scheduled on that particular week so we put a lot of focus into what we do during the open itself and this is super important to be on

the program that you're doing in july august september and the the program you're doing during the open needs to be the same coach programming, those workouts, because the considerations for volume done during the open is based off of the knowledge of the volume that was done previously by those athletes. So if you weren't doing a lot of volume previously, the volume that we're doing for during the open might seem like a lot to you. But if you've been in the program the whole year and you're, you've got all that volume underneath your, under your belt, what's going to happen is you're going to feel like Doug said to you. But if you've been in the program the whole year and you've got all that

volume underneath your under your belt, what's going to happen is you're going to feel like Doug said, you're going to feel really fresh. The days are lined up where we kind of kick your ass right after you do the open workout. And then as we get closer, we do certain things. We work on some speed. We work on the right type of conditioning and it's going to basically prime you to crush that open wad on that friday all right that being said even if you don't want to go to regionals or you know that you're never going to make it to regionals whatever that means for you it doesn't mean you still can't do this program doesn't mean you still can't go to the open and do the best that you've ever done before we're programming to help you do well at the Open. It's called the Road to Regionals.

The reality of it is that CrossFit keeps getting more and more competitive and only a small number of people that are in the CrossFit world competing in the Open are ever really going to go to Regionals. So that minority percentage, usually they're super good athletes when they show up in a lot of cases. So it's turning into kind of like a regular sport where really recruiting is the best thing as far as getting a team to go to uh two regionals or individuals to go to regionals so uh you're not you don't have to want to go to

regionals if you want to go to the open and just do the best you've ever done and you want to get better at crossfit you can still do this program it's not going to be full of a bunch of regionals and games super athletes you're not going to be the only person that's never been to regionals. Most people in the program or in past programs didn't go to regionals. They're still working at it. It's usually a small percentage, kind of like any CrossFit gym, any CrossFit gym you go to, there's only like three, three, five people that are, that are even close to going to regionals out of like the 200. Yeah. Another question we get is, will this help me get faster at Metcons, at WODs? Yeah. And that's exactly what this is designed to do.

And as we said before, the training is going to look different throughout the year. So where you may not feel like you're getting a lot better at one type of fitness at one point in the year, overall, in the long run, you're going to be in much better shape a year down the road than if you were to do something else. But this is specifically geared towards improving your Metcon times and increasing the amount of reps you can do in a certain amount of time. Especially for open-like workouts that typically are shorter AMRAPs, fast-paced with relatively light weights for the most part although the they're trying to kind of fix that by doing progressive or hq's trying to fix it by doing progressive loading on the barbells you start with 95 then you go 135 185 225 and things like that and that's making it where the stronger athletes are the people that are going

to regionals which is all the more reason to train for strength in the off season. Being stronger is always a good thing. And we'll definitely be doing that in the open program, uh, in the, uh, road regionals program. Uh, and if you are really behind on strength, if, if strength is like the name number one limiter, then you might want to look at the six month muscle gain program, uh program instead of this. Another question we get is, will this program help me get leaner? And yeah, probably. Because not only are we going to be giving you workouts that are going to,

basically, these type of workouts are like the best type of workouts you can do to shed fat. But at the same time, we're going to be giving nutrition advice. There's a lot of stuff like that in there. And then there's habits to form. If you follow the advice step by step that we give, more than likely you're going to be really lean. I would say the only people that aren't going to get leaner are the people that are already like 5 or 6 percent body fat. Yeah. Or if you're a person that's still aggressively trying to get bigger and stronger throughout this program,

you can be doing these conditioning workouts, but still if strength is your limiter, then you might want to be putting on a little bit of muscle mass along with even high intensity conditioning type workouts. So if you're 165 pounds and the open is four months away, you probably still should be trying to put on some muscle. So if you're trying to get bigger, you probably won't get leaner at the same time. It's certainly happened before,

but it's not the best way to do it. You want to be getting kind of into that prototypical 185 to 195 pound range for guys and that 135 to 145 pound range for the ladies to be as competitive as possible. But being lean is a good thing since relative strength on your gymnastics skills, being very strong at a light body weight is kind of the key to being really good at gymnastics and key to attracting people of the opposite sex or this or the same sex depends on whatever you want. Attracting anybody. It's up to you. Doug, can you guarantee that I'm going to make it to the regionals? You? Yeah. Can you guarantee that? I can't guarantee you'll make it to regionals. No, we can't guarantee that. I mean, like I said before, it really comes down to, I mean, are you as an athlete the same caliber as the athletes that are going to regionals right now? Which, you know, most of the athletes that are going to regionals right now are deadlifting 500 pounds or 550.

If you come into this program deadlifting 250, then no, there's no way we can guarantee you're going to go to regionals. If you're a person that over time can get to those numbers, we know the path to get to regionals. It's called the road to regionals. We know the path to get there, but you have to put in the time and get to the point where you're strong enough to make it even a possibility and you're mobile enough to make it a possibility to do all these movements so it's kind of a it's an easy path to to see but it's a hard path to to ride so to speak sure four years ago four or five years ago uh getting to regionals uh wasn't tough you basically signed up or or you you there was also sectional workouts and and there were ways to get to regionals uh that it just wasn't as competitive and people could train for a year they could find crossfit

and within a year they could be ready to go to regional level competition uh now people are having to set two three year plans people are having to go through something like six-month muscle gain first getting you know their deadlift to 500, getting their squat up to 400 if you're a guy. They're having to get their strength numbers up and then they're having to pursue a lot of conditioning over a lot of time, building up that volume that we were talking about. A lot of times it takes a couple years of cycles to build that up. What we can guarantee is that you're going to be in better shape and that you're going to perform better than you have previously. But we can't guarantee is how you're going to stack up against other people who are just as committed or more committed and have a different background. Yeah. Following the advice and being committed really is the key.

And like Mike said, you will definitely get better. But as far as how how much better you get relative to all the other other people in the world or in your region, it's really just, it's tough to say we can't make that claim, but you as a person will definitely get better. Yeah. Genetics and dedication are the two biggest things I've seen guys that aren't exactly genetically gifted, who are the most dedicated athletes I've ever seen, who, who never, you know, if they're taking a break, it's so they can recover. They're always doing the purpose of their life is to go to the games. And they may not be the most genetically gifted, but they're definitely the most dedicated. And so if you don't, if you're not the genetically gifted guy or girl, you're going to have to work just a little bit harder

and be more dedicated and stay more on point. Another common question is we laid out the days of the week that we commonly do like our harder days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Wednesdays, Sundays are our rest days for the most part. If you want to change that because that schedule doesn't fit your schedule, that's totally OK. If you want to like switch Thursdays and Wednesdays or something like that, that's not a big deal. If you can't make a workout at all, like on Fridays, as an example, then, you know, maybe you could do Fridays on Saturday morning, taking a big nap in the afternoon and then do some like a two a day on Saturday. We do the actual Saturday workout Saturday evening or something like that. We can find a way to

to make it where it will work. So talk to your coach, tell him your schedule and he can help you adjust your training schedule to fit your real life schedule. That way you can still get all the workouts in. If you miss a day here and there, no big deal. It's not set in stone though. You can change the schedule around to make it work best for you. Another question we get is, can women do this program? You mostly talk about men in your videos and on the show. Yeah, it's because we're dudes. And yeah, I apologize for that. No, but yeah, a lot of the most of our audience are men. We definitely have women in our programs.

We have women who are crushing it. We have some ladies that are going to regionals this year. It looks like. And we have women that actually join our six-month muscle gain program as well which is less likely but yeah more than welcome ladies more than what we enjoy having you along with that masters athletes are more than welcome to the program as well granted masters athletes probably can't handle the volume the same volume as the younger athletes in most cases so so it is okay to scale or

cut back the volume if you feel like you need to, if you're a master's athlete and you don't feel like you're able to recover at the rate at which you need to, to show up fresh for each subsequent workout. Or maybe you need to take an extra day off here and there, whatever works for you. But as far as the programming, it's not so crazy that masters athletes can't do it. They certainly can. But again, that's why we have coaches to help you out and to help you potentially scale or to help you back off when you feel like you need to back off or help you with extra recovery methods if you feel like you need extra recovery methods. So I definitely think that masters athletes can get a lot out of this program, just like any other athlete could. I think for the masters athletes, think what's key here is uh first being really

tuned in your body really paying attention uh knowing when you need to back off and then this is uh this these are definitely the athletes that would benefit from uh going pro uh going into the pro account where they have more interaction with a coach, where things can be adjusted specifically for your needs. Can I do this program if I haven't been training much lately? Again, you also can do it if you haven't been training much lately, but I highly recommend that you start training right now. So there's a few weeks in between signing up and starting the program. So you're going to want to get started as soon as possible.

That way you're not wrecked during that first week. But that being said, the first couple mes mesocycles or the first couple of four week blocks of the program are intentionally built to ramp you up to a volume that's going to be more consistent with the rest of the training program. But we don't just throw you to the wolves right away. We we ramp you up into the normal training program. And then again, we ramp up at certain times of the year, depending on when you sign up. Yeah, this is,

this is something that we, we try to like, I'm not, I'm not saying we try to make it as low as possible. We kind of aim for, uh, the average athlete and help ramp you up to the, the appropriate volume,

basically to get you in shape to train. But if you start from no training or only training three days a week, you might want to try to start pushing four or five day training sessions per week before we get in there. Also, if I'm not very good at Olympic lifts, can I still do the program? Yeah. The focus of this program isn't necessarily on improving your Olympic lifts specifically the same way that it is for the muscle gain challenge. Muscle gain challenge is on getting bigger, stronger, and improving your weightlifting specifically. So if you really want to get bigger and stronger and improve your

weightlifting, then that other program, the six month muscle gain challenge is probably a better program for you. But there's still going to be plenty of Olympic lifts done in the road to regionals program. There's still going to be plenty of video support and technique help on fixing those lists. You can still take a recording of your lift, put it in the Facebook group, and let a coach look over your video, provide feedback, tell you what you're doing well, tell you what you're not doing well.

You can get that feedback, go practice again, submit a new video. So the coach is going to be there to help you perfect whichever lifts you need help on, whether it's Olympic lifts or gymnastics skills or any of the other movements in CrossFit. Yeah. What Doug said. It's pretty good, covered it all. What kind of help will we get with our nutrition? Well, we are working with Brandy

Martyr. She owns Bedrock Eats and Sweets here in town and she's been delicious food. I don't know if anybody knows this, but me and Mike and CTP also, we buy weekly from her and she basically supplies almost all of our meals which is fantastic for us it's a healthy paleo food and it makes it where you don't have to cook very often which is awesome so unfortunately she's only in Memphis right now but maybe she'll be spreading out we'll see yeah so we we eat a ton of bedrock eats and sweets and it's fantastic and so we got together with her and we put together a PDF recipes that also have links on the clickable PDF that take you to a video that shows you exactly how to make the meal that's outlined in the recipe. And we send those out throughout the program to help you learn how to cook and what to cook and show you exactly how to do it.

So that's a pretty specific nutrition sport. There are recipes with videos on how to make the food. But we also, like I said earlier, get the Faction Foods Nutrition course as well as Paul Eich's That Stuff Will Kill You Paleo seminar. And then, again, you have the Facebook group where you can ask questions to the coach in the group or to the other athletes in the group to ask them what they do for their post-workout meals or what supplements they take or what they drink during their workouts or how they hydrate or what they eat at work or whatever question you want to ask there's gonna be people there to help you out and give you their opinion and advice and then the coach is kind of there to moderate and to give you his take on things too a lot of people are in the facebook groups and are in the program our crossfit coaches themselves have a background in fitness and they actually have really good advice to give each other. I don't know how many times I've, I've checked in on a Facebook group just to see, uh, another, an athlete in the group giving the same advice I would give were, uh, giving something refreshing where I go, Oh, I never

thought about it like that before. So it does happen. Yeah. A lot of people in these groups from past groups in the Facebook group from password regionals, uh, programs have been coaches themselves or are coaches themselves, and they're just looking to go to regionals. So even though they're doing our programming, it doesn't mean that they're a beginner necessarily. And they'll hop in and give really good advice on occasion. Yeah. So also here, I'll flash forward. Here's an example of one of the PDF recipes that Brandy Marta has put together for us. This is grass fed barbacoa over rice. It's kind of like a post-workout meal, mostly mostly meat and starchier carbs.

Good for recovery post-workout. And then you see a link there at the top for a Vimeo video. And that looks like that. And then it's a 10 minute or nine minute rather video showing you exactly how to make it from a lovely lady, Brandy Marta. So what do we do when the opening is over, Doug? Well, that's up to you. Um, again, the expectations that you do the program all the way through the end of the open, that's the best way to do it. Uh, at that point you have a couple of options. Again,

if you're a person that really needs to focus on getting bigger, stronger, and improving your weightlifting, I suggest you go to the muscle gain challenge. Uh, if you, um, feel like you're for the most part, big enough and strong enough, you still want to get a little bit stronger, but you have the whole year and you don't need to focus all of your effort on getting bigger and stronger, then you can just stay in the road regionals program. It's a year long program again, right after the open and leading up to kind of the middle of the year. It's mostly strength stuff. And then we ramp up the conditioning, especially the high intensity, high intensity fast pace shorter interval conditioning again towards the open a few months out from the open

yeah there will definitely be a lot of strength right after the open but there will also be we'll start kind of building that aerobic base so you'll see like the longer workouts not quite as intense but there will be quite a bit of conditioning there as well when will we have access to maximum mobility in the faction foods nutrition course? So basically those are the Wednesday, Sunday material for the first couple months of the program. So when you're getting homework on your rest days, Wednesdays and Sundays, you'll be getting these videos. And then after the first three months, we'll just give you full access to those products in the membership site. And then if you want to download the videos,

for example, you can do that once you have full access after the first three months of the program. Yeah. So it'll look like you had just bought the products, whether you're in a program or not. You'll get just what anyone would get when they purchase those products. Can I still work out with my friends at my box? So if you're following our program and then you see, oh man man it looks like a really cool workout that was programmed at the gym today and all your friends like come do it with us come do it with us you still can every once in a while if you're feeling good to go do an exercise or a workout rather a wad with your friends it's fun that's why most people gotten across it in

the first place doing wads with your friends is a pretty good time so if you're feeling good you're not too beat up. It's not something that's like the exact same thing you just did yesterday or whatever, then yeah, you can still go work out with your friends. But for the most part, you really don't need to. For the most part, we handle everything that you need to do. It's laid out in the program, step by step by step. We recover everything that you need to worry about in the program. You don't need to do extra workouts. Sometimes people say, can I do extra workouts? And they say that to us before they started the program. And we go, well, why don't

you, uh, once you do a couple of weeks of the program before you decide you need to do extra, right. But I'm not gonna tell you, no, cause maybe, maybe you do need it. That happens not very often, but, but it could happen. But for the most part, most people probably don't need to do extra workouts. Yeah. If you want to do extra workouts, uh, you know, if you're a pro client, then you can have that interaction with one of our coaches and they can assign the most appropriate extra stuff, uh, for you. Um, what I find too, sometimes is when we were talking about we're laying out what a mesocycle looks like, where we ramp up and then we, we have an unloading or, you know, lower volume where you're supposed to be recovering a lot of times people start feeling really good during that recovery week and they're supposed to be

starting to feel really good but a big mistake people do is since they feel good they start adding extra stuff and then and then they end up getting injured or they end up falling behind on workouts in the long run and they can't figure out why it's because they were stacking too much on the recovery days it's always good to ask before you add extra stuff sometimes like mike said we want you to feel beat up and sometimes we want you to feel recovered and so it's good to ask ahead of time like am i supposed to be feeling really good right now and might say yeah you're supposed to feel really good we're going to do a tester in two days from now and you go okay good good now now i know you would really hate the deadlift heavy and then run into diane the next day yeah

crush you yeah most people as far as getting crushed and over training uh we get questions all the time about are you going to help us with recovery and yes absolutely like i said before we provide basically everything that you need in a comprehensive training program for for recovery nutrition supplements uh um how to how even how to sleep better, little tips for how to stay into a deeper sleep, how to go to sleep faster at night. We cover everything you need to worry about in a training program. So we do help with recovery, again, mostly mobility, soft tissue work, nutrition, and then sleeping better. Even a few supplements for sleeping better as well. Boom. Supplements for sleeping better love it yeah

uh what equipment will i need uh for the most part you need barbells bumpers rings and a pull-up bar uh those are pretty much absolute musts if you don't have those those are things that you can if you're not training in a gym you can get those put those in your garage shake weight yeah definitely shake weight is on the list of must uh you also need a box jump rope kettlebell um i would say definitely a box and jump rope since those are things you are going to see uh in in uh during the open uh having the same jump rope all the time tends to help if you're changing jump ropes every time. Not a good idea. Kettlebells are also nice. Not 100% needed, but it's cheap enough that I think that if you're buying all this stuff and you're building a garage gym, that might be the last thing on your list. And 90% of your results are going to come from the stuff listed above.

Every once in a while, we may have options for a prowler push or a car push. So there's always ways that you can move things around. That's why it's great to be in the Facebook group and say, hey, I couldn't do this. What's a good scale for that? Yeah, we always try to put something in there. Like if it's a row, we say you can row or run or whatever. We try to like make it where everyone can do it. If you have a rower, that's great. But if not, then just go for a run and it's no big deal. Also, for injuries and scaling, basically we tell people to do the exact same thing with our program that you would do with any program.

Number one, if you're injured, if it hurts, don't do it. That's not a good idea. Do more of it. Find a better way. Make a better decision, as K-Star always says. Make a better decision. Find a different movement that

doesn't hurt that potentially works roughly the same pattern or same muscle groups. That way you can still at least at a minimum not lose your conditioning while you're healing up. Yeah. And then also along with that, again, you're in the Facebook group. You have a coach. If you don't know what to do, you don't know how to scale. Then we have the progression videos where you can look to see exactly how to make something easier or how to make it harder if you're feeling good. And then the coach is there to advise you on how to scale if you're not really sure what small adjustment to make if you're hurt or if you're just beat up or if you just plain can't do a movement because it's too hard. Yeah, I think the progression videos are really great unless you just can't do that at all. Yeah, and then talking to the coach is a must.

If you do get injured or you fall ill, you can freeze your account for one or two months with a doctor's note required. So if something happens, a lot of times people come in and they already have like a previous injury and then we're doing ring dips and now it doesn't feel good enough to do any pressing whatsoever. And now they have to kind of take a break from most of the program and they want to freeze their account or they get sick and up in the hospital. Doesn't happen very often, but it can happen. Hopping. It can definitely happen. If it does happen, we will cut you some slack uh let you take a break from the group uh just send us a reason why these people come to us the tail between their legs like overhead squats have been hurting for

months but i did it anyway and we're like no why'd you do that we told you not to do that something happened last week something happened last week somebody uh somebody hurt their it's like it's in the middle of the open and somebody uh was like well i was feeling really good going back to the whole like you're supposed to feel really good sometimes and you're supposed to feel beat up sometimes this person felt really good and they went for a heavy clean and jerk ended up really messing up their shoulder it wasn't in the program. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's what can happen. But that person, even though they made a bad decision, uh, we can freeze their account, let them heal up and then join us again. All right. So what if you get this programming and then you go try to do it at your box and your gym, the gym owner at your box says you can't do that. You have to do our stuff,

throw a fit, throw a fit. You definitely should throw a fit publicly on Twitter. Don't throw a fit. Whatever you do, don't throw a fit. That's not going to get you anywhere. I think the best thing to do is just sit the coach down, sit the gym owner down if they're not cool with that and just explain to them that, you know, maybe the goals of the programming of that facility don't match the programming goals that you have. So most gyms, the programming goal is to look good naked, is to kind of just keep, they're kind of aiming for the

middle of the road. That's kind of, you know, honest to God, that's what we do with our gym is we are programming for general fitness. We're not optimizing the training for the open. We definitely try to do better for the open, but we can't treat all of our clients who are in their 40s and 50s and people that are trying to lose weight like they're prepping for the open. It's just not going to work. So one of the things that we always do

is we always let the people who have goals that differ from the program that we have in the gym, just if they want to go do some weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, if they want to pursue getting leaner more, if they want to pursue getting bigger more, and they don't want to do one of our programs, that's okay. So basically you can tell your gym owner or your coach, it's like, hey, the barbell shrug guys let their athletes do whatever they want.

But truth be told, if you just explain it to them, most likely you're gonna understand. Uh, but there is the potential that you could just be screwed. Uh, you could change gyms or you could, uh, train out of your garage. We found that for the most part, when, when people go talk to their coaches or gym owners and really explain exactly what they're doing and, and they know that you're doing something intelligent and on purpose, then they usually say, okay, I didn't, I didn't realize that. And they let, they let them do something else. Yeah. A lot of times, uh, you know, one of the things I don't like about athletes doing their own thing is when, uh, they're doing a program and three days later they're doing a different program. And then I'm, I'm trying to be

a good coach and say, Hey, I don't care what program you do, just stick to one of them and make sure you're following somebody that knows what they're doing. So those are the two biggest things that I think most coaches are concerned about. They really care about you. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in the business.

All right, so also we get questions about how competitive do you really need to be to do the Road to Regionals program? And like I said before, even if you have no hope or aspirations to the road regionals program and like i said before even if you have no hope or aspirations to go to regionals you can still do this program it's just to get better at the open so you don't already have to have been a competitive athlete before but to get the most out of the program you probably want to have some requisite amount of strength if you're if you're particularly small uh if you are you know if you're a guy If you're, if you're particularly small, uh, if you are, you know, if you're a guy and you're like in the one 35 to like one 55 range, um, or a lady, if you're like in the

hundred pound to like, you know, one Oh five, one 10 pound range, and maybe you only deadlift like body weight and a half, then probably the muscle gain challenge is a better program for you. Really, uh, improving your cardiovascular fitness isn't going to help that much. You just need to have more muscle, get bigger, get stronger, and improve your barbell movements. Just general strength is your big limiter more than likely at the moment. If that's something that you're interested in, you go to join6mmgc or join the six-month musclegainchallenge.com,

and you can sign up and do that program rather than this program. This program really is for people that already have a requisite amount of strength and they're looking to maximize their conditioning in preparation for the next Open. Speaking of getting bigger and stronger, another question we get is, will I lose strength if I focus too much on Metcons? And the answer is you can, but not the way we're going to do it. So no one thought you were going to say that.

Yeah. So the whole the whole point here is to have a program that has a good balance, good balance between strength and strength at the right time of the year and the conditioning and the right types of conditioning to complement the strength. So a good program is not going to allow you to get weaker. You may not get as strong as quickly. And but I if your squat starts going down during the program, I would be really surprised. Yeah, if you're coming out like straight powerlifting with no conditioning and your squat and deadlift numbers are at an all time high

and you start focusing on conditioning and then doing strength a little bit, you probably will lose some strength. Most people aren't going to lose very much strength. Even the high-level competitors like our buddy Mike McGoldrick, when he does high volume of high-intensity interval stuff in preparation for the Open, even though he's already pretty strong and he front squat 400 pounds, he sometimes still gets stronger just by the amount of volume he does, even though he's not doing very much strength work.

It's crazy and kind of counterintuitive in a lot of ways, but it happens. Yeah, I think a well-balanced program that's well-written and something that has complementary strength to the type of conditioning is actually going to get you better conditioning and better strength at the same time it is possible. Another question we get is, how long before the open should I prioritize Metcons? Well, we're going to decide that.

We'll definitely take care of that problem. If you don't do this program, it kind of depends on your strengths and weaknesses. We have some assumptions coming in that you have the requisite strength to do well. So we're assuming that if you watch, which video was it that Doug had? Two. Yeah. If you watch video two and launch video two. Yeah. So if you see video two, where Doug laid out like the requisite amount of strength,

then if you meet that criteria, we're going to, you're going to be right on target for peaking right during the open. If you're not very strong or you're not very strong right on target for peaking right during the open. If you're not very strong or you're not very strong on chest bar pull-ups or muscle-ups or something like that, then how soon you should be prioritizing Metcons might change. But for our group, if you're meeting the prerequisites and if you're sticking with us throughout the whole year, we're going to start really focusing on the Metcons about eight weeks out.

We will be doing conditioning all year round, but around eight weeks out is when we're going to start. Eight to 12 weeks is when we'll start really narrowing in on the actual open workouts and preparing specifically for that. All right, the big question of the day for everyone that is actually probably going to go to regionals, what happens if you make it to regionals? Well, in that case, we're going to program specifically for you for the weeks in between the open and regionals. So we're going to look at you and specifically what you need to be working on

between the open and regionals. We're going to make workouts that fit your actual needs and your actual situation. So basically, we're giving you individualized remote coaching for those weeks, weeks, weeds, those weeks leading up to regionals, which is pretty cool. No,

no additional charge for that. Congrats on making this regionals. Yeah. We actually had a couple of athletes that are, they, they're like, it looks like I'm going to make it. What are we going to do?

And they obviously didn't pay attention when we told them, Hey, we'll handle the programming specifically for you to take you from where you are, assess where you are, and take you where you need to be so you can perform at your best at regionals. And if you make it to the games, we're going to fly you and your family on all exclusions.

It's true. Probably have a big celebration, yeah. All right, so here's a summary of what you get with the program. Again, there's three different levels with this program. There's a solo program, RX and pro. It's kind of like level one, level two, level three for the solo program. Just like the name implies, it is solo. It's all by yourself. So there's no coaching either in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting at all. With that, you get your four week mesocycles and we we sell those those a goal specific mesocycle for about forty seven bucks per month when we do individual programming

for people that just have a specific goal, but don't have like we're not writing one on one programming. We're just saying if you want to get bigger, get stronger. Here's kind of a template that you could follow. So we basically decided that each one of these four-week blocks was worth roughly $47 per month. Also, the Bedrock Eats and Sweets videos come out to about $36 worth of value per month. You're getting the downloadable PDFs that also have links to the videos explaining how to make each one of those recipes. We also have tons of other bonus videos that we normally sell, and you have to be a part of our membership site in order to get access to. And that's about a $17 per month value. We have the monthly habits.

You're getting about two habits per month. You get at least a $9 value there. Also, the live Q&As that you get with the coaches. Sometimes me and Mike are there in addition to the coaches. And that's about a $50 value per month where you can actually interact for an hour with the coach. So it's not a one-on-one phone call, but you still get to get all of your questions answered at least once per month. And we do that with GoToWebinar software. Also, as I said before, you get the maximum mobility product, which basically is a bonus

127 value you get the faction foods nutrition course product which is 197 value that stuff will kill you paul seminar that is 97 value and then total when all these things are added up for the monthly services you're looking at about 159 dollars per month in value given to you as part of the solo program and then then also you get about $421 worth of bonuses. That's not what you pay. That's what, that's what the value you're getting on a monthly basis for the RX program is basically solo plus group coaching. So with that, you get all the stuff you get with the solo program, and then you also get group coaching in the Facebook group. And that's about a $32 value

per month. You get the Waterfly performance tracking software, and that's about a $35 value per month. And then again, you get that as an app on your phone as well. And then if you take the solo program, plus all the stuff you get in addition to that with the RX program, you're looking at about $226 per month worth of value in the rx program and then again you get those same bonuses which is 421 dollars worth of value with the rx level two for the pro that's basically the level three it's the highest level membership for this program you get everything that you get with the solo program everything you get with the rx program plus you get some individual coaching as well so in addition to that you get with the solo program, everything you get with the RX program, plus you get some individual coaching as well. So in addition to everything you get with the

first two levels of the membership, you also get weekly nutrition reviews. That's about a $60 value where you can put in all of your meals for the week, submit it. The coach will do a five or 10 minute screencast telling you exactly what you should be or what adjustments you should be making, what you should eat instead of this, where you should eat less of something, et cetera, et cetera. They'll tell you exactly what to do. And then also you get monthly Skype calls with the coach. That's a $50 value per month. And then one of the coaches can be there face to face, just like this sweet picture on the screen here, face to face to answer your questions. And you can develop that relationship with your coach. And over time, they'll learn more and more about you. And they

give you more and more specific feedback to your specific situation. So per month, you're looking at about $336 worth of value. And again, you get those same bonuses, $421 as a free add-on. So how much is a membership? We have variable pricing for all of our programs, which basically means that the earlier you sign up, the cheaper it is. So if you sign up right away, you get a discount. And if you wait until the last day, then you're going to be paying full price. So full price, if you sign up at the very end of registration between July 22nd and July 25th, you're going to be paying $127 for your solo membership, $147 for RX, and $197 for Pro. Those are the costs of the program, but if you sign up earlier, then your membership will be a little bit cheaper. In fact, you'll save $20 per month if you sign up between July 19th and July 21st. So the solo cost goes down to $107 per month.

RX is $127 per month and the pro membership goes down to $177 per month. And then if you do the early bird sign up and you sign up between July 14th and July 18th, you get $40 off per month, which is going to add up quickly. So the solo membership goes down to $87. RX goes down to $107. And the pro membership goes down to just $157. So you want to sign up as soon as possible to save the most amount of money. Registration for this program opens Monday, July 14th. Maybe you were one of the lucky ones that made it onto the VIP launch list. And so you are getting access to this program Sunday, July 13th.

But that was just for the VIP members. For everyone else, it opens Monday, July 14th. And then we close whenever we're full. Or the last day that you can register is Friday, July 25th. And then there's about a week and a half of prep emails that go out and prep materials that you have to focus on until day one of the program begins on Monday, August fourth. So again, space is limited. You might still out sign up as soon as you possibly can. We have thousands of people, thousands, not dozens, not hundreds. We have thousands, multiple thousands. Uh, I don't think we're at 10,

we're not at 10,000 yet for, for these programs. We're, we're, we're, we're damn close. So we have a lot of people on, on specifically the waiting list for these programs. That's not just like our email list. That's like the people that said, I want more information about that program specifically. So we have thousands of people on these waiting lists. So, um, we don't know how fast we're going to fill up, but we're going to fill it pretty damn fast. So if you're interested in investing in the program, click on the option that interests you the most below, and we will see you in the program. Happy to have you. Thanks for watching. We'll see you another day. See you guys in the program.