Barbell Shrugged - Scientific Research and CrossFit Workouts w/ Dr. Gerald Mangine, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane #853

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

For years, one of the biggest criticisms of CrossFit has been that, Given every workout is different, it's difficult to measure and track training stress in a meaningful way. Dr. Jerry Mangine joins Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and Mike Lane to discuss a decade of research aimed at solving that problem. Jerry breaks down how his team analyzed every CrossFit Open workout ever performed, developed equations to quantify workload across different movements, and created a system for classifying workouts based on total work performed and the rate at which athletes complete it. The conversation explores why some workouts produce specific adaptations, how coaches can better manage training stress, and what the future of CrossFit programming might look like when workload can finally be measured objectively.   The discussion expands into broader athletic performance, including the impact of body type on CrossFit success, critical power testing, VO2 max, lactate tolerance, gymnastics versus weightlifting backgrounds, and how AI may soon automate performance analysis across sports. Jerry also shares his vision as founding director of Kennesaw State's new Human Sport Performance and Well-Being Research Center, where researchers are developing new technologies to help athletes and coaches make smarter decisions. Whether you're a CrossFit athlete, strength coach, sport scientist, or simply interested in how performance is measured and improved, this episode offers a fascinating look at where athletic monitoring and training optimization are headed next. Links: Doug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family. Doug Larson here. And this week on Barbels Shrug, we're joined by Dr. Jerry Manjine, one of the world's leading scientific authorities and researchers studying athletes competing in sport of CrossFit. Dr. Manjine breaks down how he and his team analyzed every single CrossFit open workout and then developed a system to quantify relative workload and training stress, as well as how they are using biomechanics, wearables, and AI to better understand CrossFit-specific athletic performance. Also, in our conversation, we dig into what body types are best suited for CrossFit,

how elite athletes manage training stress and fatigue, what critical power testing can teach us about endurance, as well as where the industry of sports science is headed over the next decade. So if you're a coach, an athlete, or just someone who loves to learn about the science of training, this episode is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell's Drug. I'm Doug Larsen here with Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane.

Today on the show, Jerry Manjean. Is that Dr. Jerry Manjean. Dr. Jerry Manjean. I want to leave that part out. You earn that thing. You got to have a name here. You've got buddies to Mike Lane. Presumably you guys worked together for a long time.

Is that how the relationship started here? It's mostly through the NSA, just seeing yearly, you know, having a lot of like interests. And we just stayed connected. There's almost a decade now. Yeah, well, we also share a history of hooking. But that's in the rugby perspective, which type of. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah, come.

Yeah, we're both fuckers. Yeah, we're about to do. Yeah, I know. I was speaking about a decade ago, you told me before the show, it's 2026 now, of course. In 2016, you started doing research on CrossFit. I thought we could kick it off there. What kind of research did you do? What were the results?

Why did you dig into that world? And, you know, what kind of data are we looking at here? Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, I got into it. I mean, I'll be up front. Before 2016, I was very much, like, anti-CrossFit because there's a whole, like, oh, It's a different workout every single day.

How do you keep track of anything? You know, the Olympic lifts, you know, doing them, you know, for reps instead of for power. You know, there's all that stuff. So I was like, eh, but it was more of a political thing when I got the job here at Kenneselt State. There was already a couple researchers doing CrossFit studies. And so I joined up. And first study was on the 2016 Open. We, we, I took a traditional approach with it.

because like my background was on resistance training. So we looked at a couple hormone responses. We tracked performance, body comp, some predictive measures. I kind of treated it like how I normally did sports science. And I guess, you know, the big conclusion aside from what we concluded about the data, was that, well, this is only going to apply to that open because every workout's different. And that was one of like the early limitations that I noticed with CrossFit Reefat. So then I started thinking about, well, how do we connect all the different workouts?

What is intensity in terms of CrossFit? How do we quantify volume load in a way that a coach would actually do it? Because a repetition up for a double under is not going to be the same as a repetition for a muscle up or a deadlift. They're all different and then forget about getting on the rower. Super exciting now. Yeah. My most research is connecting all of that.

So connecting all of it with the hopes of what kind of output or conclusion or like what was the goal? So there's two goals. One, if, you know, Crossford research, when I first got into it, we're only looking at around 50 studies total on anything. Then over the last decade, we're, I think we're in the 400s now. But when we look at the number of workouts that have been investigated across the. different studies, maybe less than 50. Whatever outcome that we see there, it really is only relevant to that group of people, that particular workout that they did. So, you know, the benefit, you know, what we try to do with exercise science is like we're trying to predict responses.

We're trying to predict what's going to happen with training and what kind of adaptations you're going to get. But if whatever finding we get from a study is only relevant to that workout, well, that's not really going to be helpful. So one of the outcomes is allowing us to start grouping data that's been collected findings, saying, hey, it's this type of workout is leading to these responses versus this other type of workout would lead to this response. And if I'm the practitioner, well, I don't necessarily have to do that workout. I have to do that type of workout. And so if I were to replace some exercises,

what is the appropriate replacement? That's one of the goals, the outcomes, to make sense of research. And the other one is for the coaching aspect, if it's different every day, how do you know you're challenging the person, more than you did the week before? How do you know if I'm trying to cut back right now,

it's like take a day off? because if I do another WOD and I change the sets and the reps, how do I know that's easier, especially if I'm telling the person get it done as fast as possible? Yeah. And so being able to quantify workloads as a coach and say, all right, well, this week, we are trying to do this amount of work. We're trying to get it done at this kind of work rate. And then next week I want to go up or next week I want to go down because this was an overreaching week.

being a, providing the coach with a system that does all that math work for them. So that, I mean, I think that's the big limitation. They, they teach in the level one training guide how to quantify workload, but I don't think any coaches are going to spend the time to do that.

And so we're trying to do that work for it. I'm so curious because I've always been, you know, saying that that's the problem is that you can't quantify anything. So it's like you're just throwing stuff against the wall. and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. But like, you know, like, and being able to understand, does this person need anaerobic work? Do they need aerobic work?

What type of aerobic work? What type of aerobic work? You know, like, you know, like, you know, that. So I'm just so curious, like, what were the different, like, you know, category? Did you do max strength, strength, endurance? Like. So, all right, the process right now where we're at, Now there's going to be certain limitations, but we decided on concentric mechanical work is what we're quantifying.

It leaves out the eccentric component, you know, the lowering, that's kind of like, well, how slow and controlled am I doing it? We can't really estimate what each person's going to do ahead of time, but the concentric work, we can. We know that movements have standards, the barbell has to cover a certain distance. I'm doing a pull up the arms have to be straight, and then I've got to get my chin over the bar. So we calculated concentric mechanical work, and the process that we just did was downloaded all of the scores from every CrossFit Open athlete ever. Yeah, nice. Yeah. Then we applied those scores to figure out how many reps they got for each exercise and each workout.

applied the expected distance. If they're following movement standards, then they would have covered this much distance in a pull-up. From that point, we applied a standard average model. So not how much the person weighs or how tall they were, but on average what the crossfitter was. And we based that off of previously reported research to figure out what the average distance would be.

And at the end of the day for each exercise, given the movement standards, and then some biomechanical principles, we figured out workload, kilogram meters, in kilogram meters, what was represented by a single repetition for every exercise that's ever appeared in the open. Oh my gosh. So like, yes, it was a pain in the butt. I have a paper and review that is going to publish, those equations, but then from there, given the score and the workout how long it was,

or if it was one of those for time, how quick they got it done, we took that workload and divided it by exercise duration to get workload completion rate. So we have how much work they're doing, and then workload completion rate. And then what I did was cluster analysis to group workouts by workload and completion rate to come up with three classifications for men and women. So right now that's where we're at, is three different classification. So yeah, not strength, not necessarily strength-based. It's based off of how much work we're asking them to do versus how much, how fast we're asking them to get that work done. I mean, really, you just nailed CrossFit. It's really just work-based. What are the three, what are those

three categories. This was the surprising part. You would think with more work than you would see a slower work rate, but they are progressively for both men and women, because we did them separate, low work, low work, volume, low work completion rate, and then moderate volume completion rate, and then high workload and completion rate. So it doesn't just get more work done. They have to get that more work done faster across the three classifications. So it's horrible, more horrible, most horrible. Oh, man. All right. But yeah, so that's where we're at right now. There's certainly going to be other classifications that come up. You know, and we'd want to kind of validate these classifications with the actual physical attributes of the athletes. So like I said,

we did a standard person. Now we'd like to actually get athletes, real athletes, and what they weigh and how that might alter the score. But I'm actually going to be presenting, that's going to be my poster at NSA this year. We did one poster where we looked at statistical differences between every open on average, the average workload and workload rate and made comparisons of the years getting harder, and then have another poster looking at the classifications.

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match, you guys are about the same height and built. Like, you know, you're both built, you know, as kind of fire plugs. So you think if all of us are going to go do a barbell snatch, Doug and I got to move at the furthest just because we're taller. Yeah. The long limbs. That's what I was thinking. Tall people are going to.

But if you look at a rope climb, if we can start off by that reaching up, we're already deducting about a foot that we got to ascend. And so hence, that'll be interesting when your model goes through of like, what is anthropometrically? because we know if I want to be a better bench presser, I want to deduct about a foot off of these arms and make that rib page about six inches bigger. So what's going to be the best body type?

That's really being selected for. I would think that long arms, it would be, you know, I'm just going through all the movements. I feel like those are way less advantageous, like because except for the rope climb, because, you know, you've got muscle ups, pull-ups, all of those are going to be better if you have short arms, cleans, snatches, jerks.

Well, let me talk about. push back on that. So like I thought, so like for a snatch, for example, I have longer arms. That means, you know, I can start out that movement a little bit higher, a little bit mechanically advantaged position. And then biomechanics wise, that longer arm means that I can generate more velocity at the end where my hand is. So if I'm doing one rep, longer limbs compared to the rest of my body has been shown to be more beneficial. But that's not. CrossFit. I mean, it is sometimes. It is sometimes where they do a max out. But the key with CrossFit is being able to recycle that. Well, wait, let me let me let me let me push back on you.

So if I have longer, if I have longer arms and I'm starting higher, you know, with impulse being force times time, I'm having less time to develop force. So unless I, it would depend on what anthropometric you're talking about. So for example, you have a guy like, um, Ryan Grimsela, he's my top weightlifter. The fact that his arms are kind of short, he gets to push way longer than me, even though we're the exact same height. Let me clarify. Okay.

So, oh, I get what you're saying. But you're start, because you're starting out, yes, force times time, you have to exert force longer. But he gets to start his force or the taller, the longer armed person in relation to the rest of their body. can start that force production in a position where they have that mechanical advantage. And then biomechanic-wise, the longer limb, traveling the same in the same amount of time, but travelers from their distance creates more velocity. I mean, that's why you have tall pitchers and whatnot. So there's certain movements here where individually being tall makes sense.

But the problem is with CrossFit, usually you're not doing it just once. You're doing it 30, 40, 50 times in a row. And so being able to recycle it, that's an issue. But then you come into some activities like rowing. You look at elite row. Oh, yeah. Or if I'm running, if I have running in the workout, I mean, having that longer stride.

100%. I mean, if they give me, if I have to do MRF, I mean, I hate life, you know, especially that second one. Yeah. So then the question is, but you get to do the pull-ups and the push-ups. You do. But is it what's going to kill the athlete more so? Are they going to be, are they going to die horribly on the run? Or if they're, I am sure. So that's the kind of the question. And we're doing a study right now looking at the effect of height and limb length proportions on, it's basically six different exercises. We have, we're going to look at pacing individually as well as within two, three exercise wads, mini wads.

What are the exercise? We got the row. We have the snatch. We're doing wall balls, toes to bar, and pull-ups. That's five. And there's one more. Box jumps. That's the other thing.

Box jumps. For me, when I walk up to that box, I'm like, this is half my height. I have to jump. Whereas you get these taller people, it's just like. like, you know, they could just step over it. It's a box jump over. Over time, that extra amount of work that I have to do being shorter could be the fatiguing thing.

So we're going to look at all those things and see how it plays out. So do you think like because the average height has been like that 590, 185 for men, like that very modern, not even, that's definitely like for most sport that's short. Yeah. Yeah. 5-9 is the average height of the American male. Okay? Call down.

Very average. Yeah, it's still taller than me. Yeah. Me too. Yeah, I'm 5-70s. They're like, you know, so like, is there a bit a lot of taller guys that have done well? You get a couple of you taller, like, what was his name, Velner from Canada? He's a taller athlete, so is Fikowski.

They've been up there, you know, they've been up there year and year out. Yeah. You see your Matt Fraser. Yeah. That was pretty good. He won the Open last year. He's a shorter guy.

His name's not popping in my head, but, you know, he looks like he's 5-5. Yeah. He doesn't die. Yeah. It does seem like like the shorter guys typically win like on average. Like the short guys in the NBA, but like typically they're taller people. It's like that way lifting. It's like that for cross.

Yeah, certainly rowing and then if you have to like jump up to a high pull up bar it helps to be tall but like but on average I feel like shorter is is advantageous most of the time Right. I mean yeah have you have you run any numbers I know it's hard to do kind kind of like you said with with like there's so much variety and every every every every competition is different with the movements while not where where we're looking at not just like percentage of the time or percentage of Repetitions done by a certain movement or like percentage of the time while they're working out done by a certain movement so that's the other thing I haven't been able to do that yet. Percentage of exercise type, you know, one of the things that we'll report on this summer is the percentage of gymnastics versus weightlifting and monostructural for the different

competition years within those different clusters. We're going to be, we're going to be reporting on that. And there is a difference with that. But I can't get the time spent on each exercise, not without having to go through tons and tons of video. Sure. That's another area that we've been working on is trying to get AI to be able to analyze the videos for us. Because I've done that during the pandemic. When I couldn't meet with people, I went and downloaded like 500 different videos and sat there and watched the video, hit pause, wrote down the start and end time of every single rep. and quantified that.

Yeah, a little bit. Boy, you really bit an awful lot here. Yeah. You get a digital high five for me, my man. Yeah. Well done. But we're looking to try and get AI to based off of all that work to start doing that for us,

in which case then we'd be able to get that because that is definitely an interest of mine. And that would help give us an indication of the metabolic work. That's why we did not consider metabolic work right now, because we don't know how much time they're spending doing these exercises. Maybe we can guess by how what is the average amount of time it takes to do one double under versus a wall ball or one lift. But at the end of the day, it really depends on what that means, relatively speaking,

for that person. Yeah. Well, so you said two things earlier. You said that essentially like the lighter weights account for more work in less time. You're just doing more stuff. Is that basically what you said? Like if you do a one rep max versus versus a 20 rep max, you're just doing more work with the 20 rep max.

Yeah. You're doing more weight over more distance. You do more repetitions, more movement. So with that, you kind of said also that you're wondering if it's quote unquote gotten harder over time, like based on work. It's certainly gotten heavier over time. So based on work rate, would it look like it got easier? But it also got heavier.

So it's like a different type of hard. It's definitely different. What we see, though, you know, you mentioned weightlifting. It's interesting when we look at the years, if we were to rank them in terms of least amount of work to most amount of work, the years where they did the least amount of work, that was weightlifting. Those were heavily contributed by weightlifting, whereas the most work, and then the hardest cluster where you're doing a lot more work at a faster work rate. you have more of an even distribution from the three modalities, but you see this big uptick in gymnastics as being the biggest contributor.

And that's usually without much change in how much work is being done. But at a, I'm sorry, not much change in the amount of repetitions that are being asked, but the amount of work that has to get done. So that suggests more gymnastics and more complex gymnastics. So if I give you, if you're asking 10 reps and that doesn't change, but I end up having to do more work, well, the reps didn't change. The work did. It has to be something more complex, like a muscle up versus a regular pull-up or chest bar versus a regular pull-up. So that's where it seems like they're getting more difficult.

And yeah, I would say the last four or five years have had the highest workloads and workload rates. You get more of those cluster three. type workouts. Interesting because you think about then you've got the entire extra part of the internal versus external mass. So the weight of the athlete and then of course

they're throwing on a vest, you know, are they doing walking lunges with 80-something pound kettlebells on each shoulder? Are they doing lunges with two dumbbells above their head? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, and that's the other thing

that you bring up right now our equations won't account for how fatiguing holding the dumbbell is over your head. It's the initial lift will quantify that, but then after that, that's a metabolic stress. Right. Now you're not doing any more mechanical work. You're just holding it there. And so that's where relative difficulty is another avenue that we've been exploring to quantify the actual intensity of a workout, CrossFit workout.

We said it earlier, it's about getting work done quickly. So it's about speed. And so trying to look at intensity like a distance runner would look at it. If you look at a distance runner, they have their racing pace. And then in practice, they either go a longer distance just under their racing pace or they do shorter runs at a faster pace. Right. So viewing the work out as a function of how fast they could do those exercise or those combinations of exercise. So we've been playing around with a way to quantify that intensity.

And actually, that was a thesis of new doctoral student at Kentucky, the kid James. I don't know if you've met him, Mike. he's Mark Abel's new research assistant. We did a intensity study with that in mind. Mike's still there. I think Mike's frozen. He looks like he's in deep thought, but he's actually frozen. He's really considering your question right now.

I mean, I'm just glad that somebody is finally like doing something where we can quantify workouts and like make good decisions you know it I mean because we we were flying blind otherwise yeah we have they have been they literally have been fly yeah I'll ask I'll ask coaches you know as I come across them some of them you know they coach games athletes or they've been games athletes themselves and I ask them about their programming and they do it by feel they do it's like yeah it's like you're using the force right I couldn't believe I can't remember Ben, was it Ben Smith?

Yeah. Yeah, I taught him. And it literally, they just, they, the, right before they go train, they just get together and make up something, go out there. And I was like, I mean, as an, as a sports scientist did crush me. I'm like, ah, but I mean, dude, he's awesome. So, I mean, but. Yeah. But, I mean, is he just Jeanette?

I mean, is he lucky? Yeah, could he be better? He has the sponsors where, you know, he has all the recovery techniques, you know. And then you have these other younger athletes that are trying to get there and they're hurting themselves or whatever. You don't know what's happening there. It's kind of like the Bulgarian system. You know, you think about it. You're like, okay, yes, it produced a lot.

But, you know, did a lot of great athletes. If they had been in a better system, could they have been even better. Yeah. You know, like, but I'm, it sounds exciting. Yeah, it's fun. It's nice to feel like I'm solving an actual problem. And it's something, you know, being, having a strength conditioning background. And I'm passionate about it.

I'm not, I'm not doing it to go chase for some big grant. You know, I definitely see this having a lot of transfer over to what I'm now doing with athletics, you know, making, you know, finding ways to quantify volume in an easy way so that strength coaches can. track workloads real quickly, you know, different ways of looking at intensity, the AI stuff, of quantifying recorded workouts, all of that's transferring over to athletic performance. So now I'm going to take it in those directions too. Okay. Yeah, before we dig into new sports, on the practical side, with all the research you've done, are you consulting with like high-level athletes for CrossFit games or coaches and,

and helping guide their programming, et cetera. No, not really. I mean, I get, there's a couple, I mean, being in the Atlanta area, there's a lot of higher end athletes around here that I've just met throughout. And, you know, I'll talk with them and share ideas. And, you know, they probably take that, but no, nothing official. We need to get you with training think tank, you know. Yeah, I know, Max.

Yeah. I've spoken with Max and track. Well, I haven't met Travis, but through Max, I talk with them and we share a lot of great ideas, but yeah, they do their thing and hopefully they're reading my stuff. But that's like that's any sport, isn't it? It's like the people that are doing all the science, how many of the athletes are actually hearing that, even the ones that consult, how much they say they collect all this data, but how much of it actually transition into the actual training, especially with pro athletes, like a lot of them do their own thing. They don't even listen to what the team person says. That's scary.

I mean, not scary. I feel like you're leaving a lot on the table. Yeah, especially when we're talking about millions of dollars. You'd think they'd turn over every stone. Well, they've got the trust issues of who they've worked with for how many years and they've got their rapport. And then you also have, it's a nice way that we can walk this line. The number of individuals that have tools like a. catapult or other type of unit and then it's like oh so you run in acute to chronic workload

ratios you know exponentially weight of moving averages and they're like when the number big we happy number big when yeah we know how communicating that's the challenge i mean that's going to be the challenge that i i'm going to have to deal with here i i you know i flat out tell the different strength coaches as well as the team coaches listen i'm not going to collect anything unless there's a practical application for it and my job is to communicate it to you in the best way, whether that's through visuals or just piecemeal, but, you know, that's the challenge. And, you know, I don't know what is the best avenue to create the person to do that job. Because, you know, part of it is being a people person.

The other part is having that exercise science background and then having that data analytics and, I don't know, making pretty graphs background. Um, there's a lot, there's a lot to it. And, you know, I'm going to try and be the person that brings them all together. You know, hopefully I'll be successful with that. Um, but I don't know too many people that already do that. I mean, yeah, that has, they have the complete picture. Yeah.

Wait, so you're, you're moving into a new sport now. You're trying to get away from CrossFit. Or you can kind of check the box there and now you move on to something else. Or what were you about to say earlier? Absolutely not. I still, CrossFit is, you know, kind of like my personal research line. However, a couple years ago, one of the hospital systems, Wellstar, did a deal with Kennesaw State to create this grant for a research center on human sport performance and well-being. and they did a search for a director,

and I was fortunate enough to be hired as the founding director. And so now I'm launching this research center. And the goal is to service not just KSU athletes, but youth athletes, retired athletes, club sports, you know, all the local athletes, in both performance and well-being and not just the athletes, the coaches themselves, helping make their jobs easier, more efficient at communicating, actionable information. And we're going to be spending a lot of time looking at different technologies that are available,

improving upon technologies to quantify a performance without having to interfere so much for the athletes. So that's where the video analysis and AI is going to be coming into play, looking at some existing wearables, creating our own to kind of fill in the gaps of what certain things do and don't do. So we're getting a lot of the different academics departments involved. And, you know, as the director, I view my job there as the point guard. I'm going to figure out what job needs to get done and try and get the ball to the right people. And I'm still all along the way going to be focusing on my own CrossFit research. What are some of the wear, but what are some of these tools that you would recommend?

So if you were like, if I were the best CrossFit guy in the world, I came to you, like, what are the things you would use to track what I'm doing? Existing right now, there's a good one that's made, it's called Output Sports. It's made in Ireland. That's familiar, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that one, you know, in this height study that we're doing, you can move it around a different spot. So we can pick up velocity during a pull-up.

We can put it on the foot for the box jumps. You know, it's pretty universal. So if I'm a CrossFit athlete and I want to kind of, you know, look at efficiency, probably more so consistency over the course of a workout that, you know, I try to break down. And like, it's not can I do one rep fast? Is can I be consistent in performing it each time? That one's a pretty good one. It works indoors.

It's really easy to use. Now, switching from movement to movement, you need someone's help switching the app for that. But, I mean, I want to figure out how to do it all through a recording. I mean, that's really what I want to do. It can be that far away, you know, even talking to Dr. Galpin. And, you know, we were at SORNX. And it can't be that far away to where you can use the camera to do almost all velocity in all directions on anything. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I do have a colleague over here that's one of those boy geniuses computer-wise. He's, you know, he said the same thing. This is doable, especially because, you know, I came up with that whole script of start and end time for all the different reps. of teaching the machine, this is the beginning of the movement, this is what it looks like, this is the end, this is how long it takes, let's just keep doing it, looking at from different angles, and then eventually it picks it up. It's doable. It just takes time and a lot of data to input into the machine to get it there so it can recognize pretty much anything. I mean, they're the really good VBT tool right now. That's, I mean, gosh, I got to be careful. You know, I love Jim Aware. Don't get me wrong.

I think they're the best. But, you know, there's a good, really good BBT that's online. I mean, it's just a video. You video with your phone, and it's getting really close. What's, is it OpenCAP? Is that what you're thinking of? Nope. Not Elaine.

I told you about it before. There is one that I've heard of called Metric. Yeah, that is good to measure off of. Yeah, and you're right. The stuff is, I wouldn't say it's not its infancy, but it's for sure not fully formed because you figure whoever solves this first, think about it. That's game film for every single sport.

And you know how fast every athlete goes. Like, I don't even 40 time anymore. I can watch how fast you move on the field. I can figure out how fast you cut compared to this guy. And, like, talk about, like, you sell that to every single D1 and pro team in the nation. And now they got all those analytics. on every single athlete. I don't care about your project.

Think bigger. Have you ever, you're talking about like football, for example. Yeah. Have you ever watched film? Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice not to have to watch hours and hours of film and having an AI pick up on formations and tendencies and little subtle movements?

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yep. What's the tell? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's where we're going. actually even further than that.

But that's what you're trying. I mean, that's one of the end goals, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Hey, we got to do something. We're Kennesaw State. We've got to beat Georgia. You're going to need something more than that, probably.

I don't, yeah. Maybe we know what they're going to do, man. We can shock the world at least improve on our Madden or the NCAA football rating. That's right. Yeah. People play as Kennesaw State. if they want super hard mode. But wouldn't it be super cool if you could just like, yeah, look at like whether they're doing a bra

jump, whether they're doing a box jump, like you can measure everything then. And like, and like, they have, I mean, like Kinovia is an easy one. You put a dot on them. I mean, perch, you know, the perch cameras. Yeah, yeah. They do pick up vertical jump. Now the P1 system, it does it, but it's not very reliable. but apparently the P2s are much better at that.

Yeah, the metric will do vertical jump as well, by the way, just FYI. Yeah. Once again, that's just on your phone. Yeah. Not trying to even sell the guy, but he's from, I met the creator. He's an Australian as well. So, but he's pretty darn good. Yeah.

I actually have to look at that one. I had this one kid. He got his Ph.D. from Clemson. He's down in the area while his wife finished. up at Georgia Tech, but he developed from the camera system with the baseball team over there, how to pick up injury risk in ball velocity for the pitchers from the camera system. Yeah. So, I mean, there's so many things that we can do with that stuff.

Yeah. It's coming. I'm just glad. And I know that you're looking even past CrossFit, but I'm super, I'm glad that these guys, that these athletes are going to be able to. start to quantify things a bit better. I have a girl who's actually near you. I think at least she's working with training think tank.

Hannah Black is her name. She just qualified for the games. She's now, she got pretty big in the last year or two because she crushed, of course, and weight lifting. But she's a taller athlete. So I'd be curious to see what she would pick up with her because she's getting near that six foot marker. She's matched 225 pounds.

I think that's what got her popular, but yeah, quite the beast. And yeah, we're always looking for connections with the different athletes. You know, when I get students involved in the lab, you know, that's one of the things I look at, you know, do they like CrossFit? Because, you know, I want them to have that insight. I actually had a really good student. I actually lost her to Ben Bergeron. He hired her away from me. I was going to bring her in as a grad student, but she's not.

now up in Nashville, the new concept that they were opening up. But, um, what new concept? What new concept? It's a new gym concept that they're, and, uh, but it, I'd bring her in and we just sit there and talk. She actually helped me and she's going to be part of these, uh, you know, we created the equations for calculating workload. She's going to be on the patent that we try to do when we try to do. try to turn it into a software, but it was nice to have somebody to just talk with and, you know, bounce ideas off of. So after her, I actually got the very first, the owner of the very first CrossFit I, Jim, I ever went to. He retired and now he's back in his getting his

master's. And so he's my new, my new guy, my new GA. Well, let me ask you, I mean, she already has her master. She has her master's in biomechanics. So the girl. Yeah, the girl who made the games. And if she's in your area, I'll never tell her to come. Please connect us. Yeah. Sounds like it'd be good for her.

Yeah. And I know, I mean, they sit there and do their podcast, training think tank, and talk about different aspects of the cross. You know, just they're already doing talking about it. Let's talk about it and see if we can't get some answers to the questions that they have. Yeah. Definitely. And obviously, we've talked a lot about the biomechanics.

than just the different ways of quantifying movement, workload, and otherwise. But I know things that you and I've talked about, Jerry, is the other components like, you know, V-O-2 Max, lactate threshold, all of those metrics. We were able ever to do? I know, unfortunately, there was a muscle biopsy study that you try to do where you're going to actually look at things like mitochondrial density, muscle fiber type, and how that was related to higher level CrossFit athletes. And this is where I have not stayed abreast of the literature. They finally put out anything where they may be used to sea horses. This is still, oh, man, that is such an area.

We're just so cool. We did it. We wanted to use the microbiopsy because we didn't want to pull out big chunks of muscle. Brought it to Mike Roberts over at Auburn, you know, the guy. And, you know, the samples are just too small to look at fiber type. But then we played around with at the time was a brand new. technique that he created that could distinguish myofibular versus sarcoplasmic proteins. And if, for example, there's more sarcoplasmic proteins, then you kind of like think

of a more of a metabolic adaptation, whereas myofibular would be bigger muscles. And he was doing that for the hypertrophy research that was out there. And we didn't get CVs that were good enough for publishing, but we did see that more sargoplasmic proteins in the higher-end cross-fit athletes. And it makes sense. I mean, metabolically. Metabolically. About conditioning, you know?

Yeah. Yes, they're strong, but they have to have that motor. Yeah. Yeah, and then in that same study, we did look at critical power. That's the one where it's like a three-minute version of a Wingate test, where it's all out for three-minute straight. They can't look at the time. They have to just go all out right from the get-go. And you get this big giant curve that comes down and then it starts to level out. Well, that level out, everything underneath there, that threshold is called critical power.

So theoretically, that's their floor. If you set the work rate there, they can theoretically go forever. And we're hypothesizing that the higher-end athletes, would have a higher floor. We didn't have a sample size to see statistical significance, but their floor, every single water room was higher. So it looked like if we had a bigger end size, we probably would have seen that. Yeah, that's an interesting way to figure that out.

It's a painful way to figure that out, but I think it's one of those things. Here's the weird thing. So I was part of the recreational group in that study. It's one of those tests where like after about a minute and a half, you actually start catching your breath because your legs just don't work. You're cycling and you're trying to go as fast as you can, but it's slow and you actually catch your breath. But so it, yes, it's terrible. It's painful.

But there is a point where it's like, well, wow, that ain't that bad. I mean, do you think that's a look at like the central governing theory there? Like, you know, the person's, if you ever read the book Endurance and they talk about, you know, why do people fatigue? Is it, you know, physiological? Is it a part of the brain? But it appears it's probably a bit of both. But it sounds like this critical power would be like a look at like the brain meets the body, you know, like. It's funny you say that because one of the games athletes that was a participant, she said it's not really our bodies, it's our minds that makes the games athletes.

And I mean, I totally agree with that. I mean, and that's pretty common in high-level athletes to be able to have turn off that safety switch. Like you have the, you know, mechanisms in your brain that, you know, if, you know, lactate, you know, or the pH is getting really low or temperature is getting really high, there's mechanisms in the brain that are supposed to shut you off so that you don't keep doing the thing that's going to basically destroy your cells. Right. But it's one of those things that high-level athletes turn off. And I mean, it doesn't mean it's any safer, but they can get to that threshold. And I would assume that that is very common amongst your games athletes. They turn that off or they're on the flip side.

They just don't feel it. Right. You get some people that just don't feel it. I got this kid in my neighborhood. He's 11 now, I want to say, but at age 9, he was running a sub five-minute mile. What the? And he's only like, what? He was like just under five feet at the time.

He just, he would, and he would get faster. His dad was a distance runner, and so he's got some genetics, but he gets faster as the race goes on. So there's some people that just don't really have much of a lactate threshold. They just, it's long going. Yeah. The tails of the bell curve go real far, guys. Yes, they do. And at the other side, with the realities of that critical power test, Jerry is a very fit guy.

So those of you listening at home, you don't become comfortably numb after one minute. It's just more of like you just get used to the bird. Like it's just like, ah, like this is what Hades feels like. Okay, here's where I live now. And the worst thing is for guys that lift a lot of weights, but they don't do any conditioning. Those are the guys that get destroyed by that test because they're the ones that can go hard enough lactically that their brain thinks they're poisoned. And they take a visit to pukey. Yeah.

So, you know, it is, yeah, the critical power test. I joke with my students that, if you have you with two maxes, we just go until you hit the ceiling and then you're done, a critical power test is I just drop you and then eventually you hit the top of the building. Yeah. God, that's awful. Speaking of those really strong guys that lift a lot of weight, that's, CrossFit is there come to Jesus moment. Yeah. I remember when I first got into it, I'm like, oh, yeah, I can clean that. no problem for however many reps.

And halfway through, I'm like, I'm using less weight than like the retired women in the gym. I would love like when you did grid, right? Oh, yeah. I was just thinking about that. Oh, you did grid? Yeah, I did grids for a while. And like, like for example, you know, we had to do 245 for 20 shoulders to overhead or whatever, you know. And so like the first day I did it, I, you know, I held my breath like, you know, every weightlifter does.

And I got to 11 and just locked up. And the whole goal is to get to 20 without stopping. But I learned to breathe. And so I learned. Yeah. It's one of those things that you kind of figure out. And now it's like, you know, I'm getting, you know, I'm approaching 50 and I could definitely feel like things are slowing down.

And, you know, work being busy and the kids and, you know, my son's in high school and all that. Training's become less frequent. And so when I go back, though, it's, I don't. see that as big of a drop-up because I've learned how to pace myself to not go kill myself like I did when I first started out. Sure. I would love to look at someone like, what is it, the guy we just talked about him, not Matt, Matt Frazier. Yeah. It was a really good weight lifter and then goes into CrossFit. I would love to see how he changed physiologically. You know,

when he got there, like, what did he look like internally versus now? Like, what were the adaptations, how did they change? Like, I mean, obviously we had to be immensely like, but. So like I think, you know, there's probably two backgrounds that are very beneficial to have getting into CrossFit. One of them would be Olympic weightlifting. The other one would have a gymnastics background. Because, I mean, those, the higher skill movements, I think that's the type of exercise that everyone has troubles with. Whether it's just they don't know how to do the gymnastic movement efficiently or, you you know, with the Olympic lives, they don't have the range of motion. They don't have the range of motion to do it.

You can't even do it. Can't do it. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's not just the timing, having to learn that to do it the right way, but then having that range of motion, that flexibility. So, I mean, I think he would have those things, a lot of really good course stability, which would translate to gymnastics. Right.

Or the gymnast, I think their biggest struggle is getting stronger. because you know gym a gymnast they don't that's a world that where they don't really emphasize pound their fist for weight training um they have great good muscular endurance yeah a lot of do a lot of traditional strength training yeah especially not for lower body not heavy but they're well they're well ahead of the game than anyone else yeah i mean i had a football background i was i was tight and I did things wrong. But I like to move weight. You will find a lot of times the weightlifters, most of them are able to do a lot of gym.

Like they'll just, you know, if you say, hey, Ryan, go do a several flips and he will just naturally do. I remember John North could do some crazy like tumbling. Like he's not a gymnast at all. You do have a huge amount of survivorship bias because if you're going to make it far in Olympic lifting when you're talking about getting close to two times body weight on a clean and jerk. You've got incredibly good body control because you still got to hit those positions. And you obviously have a hell but complement of type two muscle fiber.

Because that's the only way you get to be really good at Olympic lifting is you're just naturally poppy, so to speak. And you see that overlap with gymnastics. But I just want to touch on your point on a guy like Frazier. And I think that's where a number of folks, like you've, we've all seen a person that gets in a crossfit that don't really, they don't really have a good base of fitness. And the reality is cross-sectional area takes a lot, longer period of time to build, like the literal myofibular hypertrophy for strength, whereas the sarcoplasmic, the building that work capacity still takes time, but it's a much smaller time horizon. So kind of how you sequence that is still really important with who you're

working with. Yeah. And but the beauty is if you come in stronger and you look at, you know, typically with the CrossFit loads that they prescribe, you know, if you're stronger, everything's relatively easier. So, you know, you really don't, it's instead of having two problems, I got to get stronger and more fit. Well, I got the strength. I just got to worry about the fitness now. So having less things to learn. I think that's, it gives an advantage. But like Fraser could just pull way back on most strength things. Yeah. Focus on, you know, the one. Yeah. Yeah, that one time where I think they had to row for what, 10,000 meters and then get on the bike, you know, and I'm just, I'm just watching him and he's just so consistent.

I'm impressed because, you know, being shorter, I know how hard it is to sustain that rowing output for that long, and he's just doing it. Not as good as some of the taller guys, but good enough that I think he still finished top three or whatever in that event. I mean, I could be wrong, but I know he won. I know he won the whole thing. Easily.

Yeah. That's incredible. Fells, we got a wrap here. Dr. Jerry, Manjean, appreciate you coming on the show. Where can people find more about you? Anything you're working on? Social media, newsletters, all that. You know, you can come visit our website at Kennesaw State and the Exercise Science.

We're going to be launching a page for the Research Center soon. Otherwise, Dr. J. Manjean on X. Yeah, that's probably that one or, you know, the same. same with Facebook. They can find me there. Or just search my name. Right on. I'm still getting used to calling the X, too.

Yeah. It'll forever be cleared my head. Yeah. All right on. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Appreciate you coming on. Dr.

Mike Lane. Yep. Mike Lane, PhD. Come say hello. Oh, that's beautiful. For sure. Coach Travis Mash. Massleet.com.

This was a very exciting episode. Thanks for coming on. I could, you know, it's so cool to see someone trying. to quantify, you know, the sport of CrossFit. So I hope it gets better and better. I'm just saying Jerry and I are going to be at NatCon in New Orleans in July. I'll see you guys.

So will I. We could do this in person if Doug shows up too. Doug. Yeah, Doug. Let's go. If I'm in town, let me know. I'll be in the Northwest for half of July. But yeah, let me know dates and we'll figure it out.

Sounds cool. Right on. We're no longer rapid health optimization. We're now have folded all of that into biomoleoleoleoleole. bio molecular athlete, which kind of is aimed as like original company before we started rapid. Is it just biomolecularathlete.com? Is that what we just put the website to two days ago? Thumbs up from Mike.

There you go. Go to biomolecularathlete.com. If you want to work with Dr. Andy Galpin and these nice fellows here, Dr. Mike Lane and coach Travis Mash, friends, we'll see you guys next week.