Barbell Shrugged - Setting Realistic Expectations for Strength Training w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash - Barbell Shrugged #560

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: Why getting started is so challenging. Why the best metric for success is showing up How long it will take before seeing results Why two years is a good metric for judging progress Why hiring a coach can eliminate you feel like youre wasting time Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   U.S. Air Force. Find out if you do at airforce.com.   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, we are talking about setting realistic expectations for strength training. And in this episode, we talk about why getting started can be so challenging, why the best metric for success is just showing up, how long it will take before you start seeing the results, why two years is a good metric for judging progress, and why hiring a coach can eliminate the fact that you may be feeling like you're wasting your time. Friends, I have to tell you about a project I've been working on for the last 24 years of my life. It's called The Diesel Dad Diet. It's a book that

I am so excited to get out to everybody to help you optimize your metabolism, lose 13 pounds in 13 weeks, build a strong, lean, and athletic body you are proud of. For the last five, six years, I've really been trying to figure out a way in which I can put all of this information in my brain and put it together so that it makes sense to help specific people. And it's tough because you have so much stuff in your brain and you have so much information. You've talked to so many professionals on this podcast that it's challenging to know exactly who you can help since you've talked to such a broad group of people.

And now that I'm a father, now that this Diesel Dad movement has started, now that we have so many cool dads that are following our programs. And I want to create a book in which that allows dads to be able to have conversations in their household to help their children. And what I mean by that is if your kid walks up to you and says, hey dad, I want to get stronger. You don't just say go to the gym

or go lift weights. You're actually able to sit down and have an intelligent conversation about what strength training is. If you're a dad and your kid walks up to you and says, I'd like to eat healthy. Well, what is your metabolism? What are all the pieces that go into that? How is your metabolism used during the day? What is non-exercise activity thermogenesis? What actually happens when you're exercising? What are the pieces that you need to understand your basal metabolic rate, your baseline metabolism?

How much energy are you burning while you're eating food? Not only that, why are fad diets so crazy? What are they doing? Why do some of them work, some of them not work? And in the end, calories are king, so why do we focus on all these keto and carnivore and vegan and the zone diets? What are the common threads between all of these? We're not just throwing tactics out there, but we're actually able to focus on principles and why things work. And I'm so excited about it because the best way for anybody to actually be able to get in and learn how to do things is for them to practice

them and be leaders in their household. And that is what the Diesel Dad Diet is going to do. Along the way, you're going to learn about your metabolism, you're going to learn how to optimize it, you're going to learn all the pieces that go into it, as well as the most important part, which is going to be building muscle, tearing your body down, rebuilding it with new healthy, strong cells. That's where the training programs come in. As well as we're providing a macronutrient calculator so that you can lose 13 pounds in 13 weeks. Because most dads, especially if you're listening to the show, it's not like you're walking around obese. But what you are doing is probably not adhering to

some simple guidelines that allow you to have the body fat that you're looking for, as well as the summer's coming. So you want to get strong, you want to get lean, you want to get athletic. And I want to help you build the education system that allows you to have an intelligent conversation about being strong, lean and athletic in your household and arming you with all the information that goes along with that. The Diesel Dad Diet launches on April 5th. Optimize your metabolism. Lose 13 pounds in 13 weeks. Build a strong, lean, and athletic body you're proud of. Friends, I'm excited to do it. I'm super, super excited about this. I really wanted to put all this information onto paper and write a book that I'm very proud of. And the Diesel Dad Diet is the answer.

We're going to do reads at the break. I appreciate you guys. Let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Coach Travis Smash. I'm going to get this intro right.

I promise. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we are talking about setting realistic expectations for strength training. And the reason that this show needs to happen is because last weekend, I built this beautiful workbench in my garage. And I got super excited, like I'm going to be that guy that knows how to build things. And I went on the internet, I went to YouTube. I found this awesome thing so that I could go buy some build octagon floating shelves

to make my house look beautiful and artsy and classy and nice. And my wife was going to love me. And you know, when the wife loves you because you build her something nice that she can show off to your friends, there's a good chance magic's going to happen that night. You get lucky, yeah. I spent the next five hours being so frustrated in my garage

yeah and the only thing that was built was some wood in a close to octagon like shape that nobody wants to put up in their house, much less for it to be a talking point or a centerpiece. And the entire time I was sitting there thinking, this is what it must feel like walking in the gym with no experience and thinking you're going to get jacked. You're going to the games. Like me, it's basically like in my brain, within a year, I was going to be building a house for somebody. And the reality was, I don't even know how to cut things on an angle.

I don't even know how to use a tape measurer. And all it is is just a different widget for somebody else coming into the gym when they're 35 years old saying, I'm 15 pounds overweight. I need to get in shape. And what do they do? They struggle. It's hard. And I think that there's a big disconnect between getting started, building the house, or actually getting to the body and the results and kind of what the expectations are once you start working out and that people don't really realize how long it takes

or what the process is of going through it. And i was hit in the face because i never really think about this stuff in my own training career but man you want to hand me a skill saw and say go cut a straight line well now i feel like the guy doing the ab machine in the middle of gold's Gym with a pullover ab machine thinking I'm going to get jacked abs. This is not the reality. So I want to talk about setting realistic expectations of what should happen from beginner, maybe from no experience when you walk in, to actually how long it takes in the process of becoming strong and getting the results that you're looking for.

Step one, you should have hired somebody. Just like everyone listening who is a beginner should hire somebody. Hire a coach. If you have no idea what you're doing, all you're going to do is mess it up and then pay someone to fix it. Exactly. You might as well pay someone to do it on the front end. Instead of spending five hours of wasting your time, and then you're like, how much am I valued?

And you start adding how much you are valued per hour. You're like, I just spent a shit ton on this bullshit, is what you just did. Yeah. Money's always a factor. So paying someone to do it, you have to have the money to pay the person. But if you look at really, really, really successful people, that is like their main skill. Their main skill is figuring out something that needs to be done, finding the person that can do it, and then paying that person to do it for them.

That is the skill of wealthy, successful people. That's like if you're a CEO of a company with 100,000 people, like you wouldn't be able to do all the big things that company does unless you paid 100,000 people to work for you. You can't do it all by yourself. So it's a scalable skill to get good at. Yeah. 100%.

The thing that popped into my brain and, of course, everything I structure around just the idea of training and where people are at in their career of training. But fitness is the only thing that you really can't outsource. You can outsource coaching, but you still have to show up. And you still have to do the work. Like outsourcing is a great thing. Like if you need a copywriter to go write email copy, you could go find somebody that knows how to write really, really well.

If you want to go build octagon shelves, there's probably some dude that's got a skill saw that knows how to use it. But if you want to get in shape, you have to go build octagon shelves, there's probably some dude that's got a skill saw that knows how to use it. But if you want to get in shape, you have to go. You have to show up. And you have to go through that super awkward phase at the beginning of just feeling dumb and clumsy and not seeing any results. I actually was in the middle of it thinking like, man, I can't remember. I mean, I can remember a time when I was a kid and playing sports and all that and not doing strength training. But as far as like a stage of life, I can't really remember not being able to do a back squat or not or feeling like I was a beginner doing a back squat and those stages are

just really awkward and you feel like super insecure about yourself when you're in there I remember like when I was training with the high school wrestling team and I was still in eighth grade and just feeling so small and like assuming everybody in the place was looking at me being so goofy and i feel like that's what most people struggle with the most getting through that first like three months year whatever it is of like the general insecurities of sucking and and being able to fight through those through those plateaus i remember remember at 11 just looking at, you know, I went to this gym in the mountains that I want to show you guys about, but it was in the basement underneath what was then called a White Star,

basically like a dollar store is what it was. It was in the basement of that, and I can still smell it. And I remember being in love with it because I had watched Conan the Barbarian. And then my uncle had told me these dudes lift weights and they get like that. And I just assumed that's just what they look like. Then I put two and two together. I'm like, so if I go do X, I look like this guy. He said, I remember my uncle being like, well, I mean, you'll get bigger.

When I got down there, I just assessed the scene. There were some big dudes. I started finding the first one that I thought I could catch. That's all I ever thought of. I was like, all right, let's beat this dude first. I'm working out. You beat that guy. By the time I was out of high school, I was beating all those people.

I remember that first day, but it was was out of high school, I was beating all those people. But I remember that first day. But it was different. I was like, I was 11. I don't think I had, I think I was too young to even think about people looking at me. Yeah, it's also, but people say, like, you will grow. Like, when we were filming last week in Winston-Salem, and we and you both looked at some kid that had been training, like, three months, and we were like, you need to be a power lifter.

He was jacked. He had super thick bones, was already pretty well built. We asked him how long he'd been training. Three weeks, or three months. We were like, you need to go get a power lifting coach right now. Yeah. Like, not yesterday. Right now.

Go do it. He had no idea. Yeah. He's so insecure. He had no clue. Like just we're sitting there with a camera on us he probably thinks we know what we're talking about and all we both immediately looked at her like go get a powerlifting coach right now you will be very good at lifting weights if you just find somebody that knows how to do this thing. And do it right. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

I was going to change subjects. You can go ahead and finish that story if you want. Quickly, I was just going to say the owner of that gym is one of my old athletes. And so a shout out to Seth, by the way. It was really cool to hear one of my athletes had bought the gym. He'd worked there as a manager forever. But now him and his wife bought it. And it's just another it's just really cool to me that is the ultimate when i hear one of my athletes not necessarily did they make the limbics or were they a world champion but what did they do with their lives is my favorite thing to hear and so just hearing him you know start

there over a decade ago he started in 2008 as the manager and here we are 13 years later and he buys it. I think that's cool. That's awesome. Good for him. Seth Seifert, shout out to anyone in advanced methicoline. You should go to Gym 365. That dude knows what he's doing because I taught him. He's a good coach. He doesn't know shit. He's just a coach.

Fantastic. For people that are just getting into training, you know, if they have anywhere close to a good training program, they show up consistently, they're going to make pretty good progress in the beginning. It's going to come very easy. You know, muscle mass might not come on like super, super fast, but you're certainly going to be able to put more weight on the bar each session.

Not necessarily because you got stronger, but you're getting more comfortable with, with the weights and, and, you know, there's, there's other, um, non muscle building ways that you can get a little bit stronger, mostly, mostly as a result of your, your nervous system and how, uh, you know, how, how quickly your muscle fibers are contracting, et cetera. Uh, and then that kind of slows down after a while. After a while, you stop putting 5 pounds on the bar, 10 pounds on the bar every single week for those same exercises. And I feel like a lot of people, they kind of expect every week that they're going to make massive progress. And then it doesn't happen every week. And then it's like 5 pounds a month and it's like 5 pounds a quarter.

And it starts to slow. And people, they get frustrated thinking that it's not working. Why am I still doing this? Because they expect it to be like it was. So having the expectation on the front end that your progress is going to slow over time is really good to know. A lot of people don't realize that when they first start training. Yeah. Yeah, totally. good to know a lot of people don't realize that when they first start training yeah yeah totally about two years is it like i think the studies we said brian man says that for the first two years

that as long as you you know just all you should really track is like your one your one rm and as your one rm goes up so does everything hypertrophy stress speed speed strength everything just kind of like uh and i just saw another study on that last week. It's just this linear path. And then, you know, at the end of two years, now it's serious business. And then that's when you really find out is somebody real or not. Because, you know, first two years is all, you know, unicorns and candy canes. And then it gets hard. Yeah.

I was talking to a buddy of mine back when I used to run the gym. He's a medical doctor, and he was just getting started with training. He gave me the talk of, hey, I don't want to get too big. I don't want to look like one of those bodybuilders, that whole spiel. I still do. I don't think you realize how difficult this is going to be to train here and to do the kind of workouts that you need to do to look like that. I'm going to try and get you to look like that, and hopefully you make some progress. Again, he was a doctor, and so I was like, you basically just showed up to medical school, and you went to your professor, and you're like, hey, I don't want to get too smart. And they'd be like, what? You're going to be lucky if you survive at all. Yeah.

You're going to be lucky to become a doctor, man. Let's say that. Yeah. And then when you do, you're just be lucky if you survive at all yeah yeah you're gonna be lucky to become a doctor man let's say yeah and then when you do you're just gonna be very average yeah you're gonna be a doctor and that's about it i think that's probably the it's got to be the biggest um you know hindrance to people continuing past that six mark, even getting to the two-year mark, is really the mental side of realizing how hard it is to actually grow. I actually specifically remember I interned in Washington, D.C., my junior year of college, and didn't want to get, like, wrapped into the happy hour scene. Like you interning in DC, you basically have the option every single day to go to happy hour and hang out with all the interns that are

in DC at the time, or do something positive for your life. And that was when I really started, I was training by myself. I didn't have anybody there with me, but I really started to hit the gym hard every day, just trying to do something different than party. And that was probably when I actually started to notice a lot of the physical changes, but I had already been training since I was 14 to get all the way to 19 years old.

So it was like five years before I feel like even all the good testosterone and natural things kick in. If it wasn't for sports, I don't know how much I would have stuck with strength training if like pure aesthetics and just looking jacked was the answer. Like if that was the answer. If that was the thing that I was chasing, I don't know how much I would have continued with strength training just because the results are so slow to actually get to those aesthetic goals

that you almost have to have something outside of that to be the why that you're focusing on. And your body is designed to stay there. It's like if I start eating a lot, my body will literally release a hormone that makes me not hungry. If I start trying to lose and restrict calories, it will naturally release a hormone that makes me hungry. So it's designed to work against aesthetic goals it wants to keep you homeostasis is a real thing it's trying to keep you like where you are it doesn't want you it doesn't want to feel like it's starving and doesn't want to feel like it's

getting too fat because it's trying to live who knows that'll kill you and so will that and so it's trying to stay right where it is yeah i. I wrote an article to our email list, I guess it was last Sunday. But it was about building confidence. And the idea that, and I got this, Sean Pastuch was the first person that I heard say this, so I didn't make this quote. But the idea of confidence is saying you're going to do something and then doing it. Right. And doing it over and over and over again, but saying, I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow. And then you go to the gym.

And no matter what the actual result is, the fact that you just went there and lifted some weights and did what you said you were going to do starts to play out in so many different areas of your life and that you did it you accomplished whatever that goal was it was a win and you know some people talk about like say you're going to make your bed and then go make your bed every single morning like that that's a that's a real way that people go about setting these small goals and getting wins early in their day. But there's something about like just committing to the hard work that I think, um, I think goes just a really long way in that I don't know, um, any other way to do it. If I was, if I was like chasing us, I keep coming back to aesthetic goals because that's what so many people want. That's what derails more people.

And because they say they want the aesthetic goals and those aesthetic goals are many years away, it's really hard to get behind saying, oh, yeah, that's exactly what you should do. Because as you mentioned, your body wants to stay exactly where it's at right now, which is safe and alive. And now all of a sudden, you're going to put a barbell on your back and tell it to grow. And it just doesn't happen that easily when everything in nature is telling you not to do that

and is designed for you not to do that. What are some good, let's say somebody comes in, what do you feel like are some very healthy, realistic goals for the average person? They come to your gym, they're like, oh, it's my first time working out. What's something that, what do you feel like is a good goal for them? Well, we specifically, you know, in the Diesel diesel dad thing i'm really proud of the group that we've put together in there and match has even got the shirt on today yeah it's great um and i i i'm really proud of that facebook group just because there's dads from all over the world and because we're dads we all share in like the same struggles of the gym used to be very

important and now all of a sudden i'm rowing at eight o'clock at night because uh my day just got i got curbed bottom line i just didn't have it um and anytime i post something about like hey guys this is this is tough it's eight o'clock and I just got in here to do this. And I'm bringing up the late night shift. Like everybody in there responds to those so much more than the, like, look how cool, look how strong, look at, look at this feat of strength that I did because as a unit, it, everybody understands that struggle and i think that that's what i'm so drawn to in in coaching this group of people is that the metric isn't are we going to set world records are we going to go to the crossfit games are we going to do it it's hey it's it's just it's not

a reality with the the lifestyle and at the same time, the metric for success is like, we're all in here working really hard with the time that we have to get better. So the metric is just, and I feel like I've mentioned this in past shows, but like my metric for success really is doing it for another day. And if I take a day off, I feel like I went backwards. I don't want to go backwards. So I do 20 minutes a day, no matter what. I wake up in the morning and I do something every single day to continue the momentum going forward. And I feel like, you know, fitness is something that everybody has to do. You can't, it's not like building bad woodwork in my garage i don't have to do that you can hire somebody to do that but everybody has to do fitness so the goal should be just to continue

doing it another day right and allow your body to adapt to the environment that you're creating for yourself for the rest of your life. It's really tough. I've been lifting now soon to be 37 years. And Doug has been talking about it for a year, the 20-minute EMOMs that he's been doing. And the main point of that was he had 20 minutes or 10 minutes and he would just go do something and that is now 30 you know 37 years later has altered my fitness um journey because i'm slowly getting into the best shape at least of my 40s simply because of that one that one phrase like yeah do something 20 to 30 minutes

a day and like that's changed my whole life and i was able to to train with you for three dang hours the other day because of that you know yeah yeah i think another thing that i used to get a lot of people to focus on um and and i still do anytime i talk to them is is acquiring really positive habits And that if you're focused on aestheticals, as we've discussed, it's going to take a really long time. But we can all agree that going to the gym and being around good people, motivated, and moving their lives in a positive direction, like doing healthy things regularly, is a good thing and people you want to surround yourself with. So if you're not doing that, what are you doing during that 30 to 60 minutes a day?

You're probably doing something that's very unhealthy. Most likely, you're sitting on your phone, you're watching Netflix, you're doing trash. You're bringing trash into your brain, into your body. You're sitting. You're not moving. So if you can pick up a single good habit, like going to the gym, training for 20 minutes a day, it takes a block of time out of your day in which you're typically doing something negative and replacing it with something very positive and if you just continue doing that adding the new positive habit uh becomes significantly easier like you don't even you don't have to go and train and then eat chicken breasts all day long as like step one just showing up as step one if you think of the you know, the positives, we say this a lot because of Dr. Brady, but if you think of the positives just to your brain, when you start training and just training, not even eating right, nothing else. If you just start training, then, you know, the plasticity of your brain, it will start to grow and it'll be easier for you to learn habit

number two. It'll be easier for you to stick with habit number three. Yeah. I think the other piece, once people get past that beginner slash intermediate stage, I think some realistic goals, it's hard to say that everybody should be able to lift a specific amount of weight. But at some point, the thing that really keeps you coming back and setting your expectations for a lifelong pursuit of strength, you have to start chasing numbers. I think it's really important to see numbers on the bar go up. I think when you're in that beginner stage, you don't really understand why numbers are going up. It's just your body adapts so easily to a new stimulus. But at some point,

you have to set realistic expectations. And that means chasing numbers. Because seeing weights on the bar go up is motivating. It is. I don't believe that somebody could train their entire life and not go through a stage of finding out how strong they are. I think that that's a massive piece of what, what keeps this, um, what keeps everything going is, is truly trying to understand how strong you could be if you,

if you, if you went all in. Yeah, I'm, I'm totally agreeing with that. I think one of the biggest mistakes is people do start out with the aesthetic goals and that's all they stick with and then they end up failing ultimately. But all of a sudden, what I try to do is even if someone says, hey, will you help me lose 20 pounds, gain 20 pounds, gain 20 pounds?

I'm like, sure. But deep down, I'm thinking, I'm going to make this person fall in love with strength or movement. There's so many other elements that people aren't considering. Like the fact that one of my favorite parts of my fitness now is go do my 20 to 30 minutes and then study. I'm way better it's like being on Ritalin if I go downstairs and work out and come up here so that's that's one one goal second is strength three I mean is going to be if I move better at 48 years old if I'm able to squat better like that is to me very objective I'm like that's awesome. There's so many other elements.

And my goal, my job as a coach, is to make them fall in love with all these other elements. Yeah. I also think it's important for people to recognize what their strengths and weaknesses are, like, as an individual. Like, if you just go lift weights with your buddy, and your buddy is Travis, and, you know, he has a different build. Like, me and Travis, we have very different builds. I have super, super long arms, as an example travis is much much thicker i'm much skinnier naturally etc and so like if we walk in there and you know travis is benching many many hundreds of pounds and i'm over there benching you know 185 for like for my max and every week

i can't understand why i'm not getting stronger as fast as travis is well i'm just i'm just not for that particular movement. It's just not my strength. I'm never going to be a 700-pound bencher when you have super long arms. But then we wrestle, and I get my ass kicked. Yeah, wrapped up. Right, right. That's right.

Travis would have to have the same expectations if we ended up in a kickboxing match. Like, oh, he can punch me from a foot further away, and he can kick me from two feet further away. This is a bad spot that I'm in here. Yeah, I'd be like, did I just wake up into a nightmare? I think it's also like in exactly what you're saying, and I think there's also a piece of it in this like intermediate stage of like learning how you like to learn.

Like I don't really enjoy school. Somebody sitting there telling me this is important. You should learn this. We have a test coming up. But in order to get stronger, we have to see weight go up on the bar. And in order to do that, you have to learn a lot about strength conditioning. You have to learn. You either have to have a great coach that is teaching you along the way

or you're doing the research by yourself. Even following a training program, you're always going to wonder why it's programmed a specific way or why this percentage work is important or why am i doing fives for three weeks and then threes for five or for three weeks and then twos and then i finally like what what is this progressive overload thing um and and you just i feel like we were very lucky how little information there was for so long of our strength and conditioning commute like I talked to a buddy of mine Brian I talked to him about this the other day and it's one of the things I'm the most grateful for throughout this entire life under the

barbell is how little information there was when when we started out I I feel like it's so confusing if you were to start right now of where to start what's important and the only people that were publishing anything when we were It's so confusing if you were to start right now of where to start, what's important. And the only people that were publishing anything when we were starting out in any of the books were people that had been doing it and figuring it out on their own for a very long time and finally realized that they could write a book about it. And message board chat rooms weren't filled with a billion fitness coaches that you had no idea what their qualifications were. And it was only people that were really, really dedicated to it and understood that they could help people on the internet. The lack of information was actually something that was so nice because we had to go search for it.

And the only people that were putting it out were the people that were like truly lifers and living it. Like Schwarzenegger was like the best coach. He had like the book. Like McCollum had a book about where he was literally the entire book was written as if he was coaching a 19-year-old all the lessons he had learned in the gym. And, like, the 20-rep back squat book, or super squats, like, those were the places that people learned. It wasn't Instagram in 300, like, 2,200-character things. like 2200 character things and i i feel like that that was like if i wanted information about how to get better at this thing that i was trying to be good at i was chasing numbers on a barbell i had to go learn and the only way to do it was i had i had to like really look hard and it made

me want more information about getting better at this thing that I cared about. And I think found a way to do okay on tests without studying or doing it. But if you wanted me to get stronger, I would go read. I learned how to do all these things. Like, I wanted to get better at coaching people that weren't right in front of me. So I learned how to write better. Like, I learned all these things because i just i wanted to get better at teaching and learning the process of getting strong and excelling under the barbell and at some point you have to go down that path and figure out how you learn best the people that you learn best from like some people love the science of this stuff i'm not really that guy. Some people love the personalities and they want to be like Ryan Fisher or their dads and they want to come train with us or they want to be the

strongest person in the world and they find you, Travis. You have to figure out the pieces that really make you tick and motivate you to keep going. And I think that that is like just such a massive part of understanding the development that happens because you want to get stronger versus, you know, following the program and the reps and the sets, and you just go in, you go through the motions and it's done. It becomes a part of you and you learn so much more about yourself. And that part motivated me probably for the middle of the middle 15 years of this entire process over the last, you know, two and a half decades of training. Friends, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. There are infinite chemical and hormonal reactions needed to optimize your metabolisms. Reactions fueled by calories

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Let's get back into the show. I believe what you're saying is the same reason i would tell people to wait to go to school a little bit later because like when you fell in love with lifting then you said you would read and you fell in love with you would read especially about the parts of it that you were drawn to the most yeah if people would wait i feel like you know a little bit later they would find out more about themselves and what they really love but yeah like once you're in it i find the people who succeed the most in this world of strength or fitness whichever one you want to look towards is are the people who do take more responsibility so you go to a coach and it gets you in the right

direction and you're like dang i really love movement biomechanics and getting strong and so then instead of like me spending lots of time trying to read about you know losing weight i focus on what i love which is movement and getting strong and those two things will lead you at least halfway down the path of all the other goals like aesthetics like if you get strong you're going you know you're not going to get stronger and not get more jacked that's you know you maybe a little bit because it's neural but then for the most part you're it's hypertrophy so like it'll lead you halfway down the road and then if you decide you know two years later now i really love aesthetics now is a good time It's going to be much easier than it was two years ago. And I think that's also like the coolest part too,

is like you really find out, and you've probably been this person your whole life, but you find out what lane you really like being in. Like CrossFit couldn't have hit at a better time in my life for exactly what it was. Like I needed a place to go compete i was i was not prepared to go be a real human being i was not prepared to go sit in an office i athletes are not every you're getting cancer no yeah every every thursday when they did like

ice cream social at my office all I could think about was this is not my life. Like I cannot be here right now. Nobody here is thinking about the total number of calories we're consuming for absolutely no freaking reason except to just not do what we're supposed to be doing here. Like nobody is trying to go to the gym at the end of this day right now. I'm the only person that's getting mild to high levels of insecurity or like anxiety sitting here acting like I'm having a good time eating ice cream in this cubicle jungle. It's just not – I was not designed to do this. I needed to go find CrossFit. Did you feel like you were chained? I feel like you would have felt chained behind that cubicle

it was brutal it was brutal they're all great people it's just I'm not designed to be in that environment it's a totally different value system of what is what I wanted to do

what I wanted to do was go lift weights and compete with my friends. And have fun, teach people. And have fun. It wasn't even about teaching people yet. It was just like, I can't wait to get out of here so I can go to recess. Can I just go to recess already?

This is so stupid. I don't even feel like I'm doing anything. But when I found CrossFit, it was like, oh, wow, I get to go be an athlete again and that's the thing that i still chase i still just want to be an athlete i i only care about like hypertrophy is so rad to me i love the idea of building muscle but not as much as i enjoy being an athlete i love all the science like when we get all the science people on this show, it blows my mind how smart people are and how dedicated they are to testing variables

and what it looks like over a long period of time and being in the lab. I love talking to them, but I don't like it as much as going and being an athlete and going and playing the game. I love when people go on deep dives about programming and all this, but I don't like it as much as, hey, there's a ball over there. Let's go get it.

I'll be like the dog and just go fetch. That's the thing that motivates me to keep getting better and keep training is that I just want to always be an athlete and be able to go play. It takes a little while to figure it out. It took CrossFit for me to realize that I could go do that and go play the game. And some people love hypertrophy so much and love bodybuilding so much and love the science of it so much. And they totally should choose those angles. You just, you had to stay in the game long enough to figure out exactly what you like and how you learn,

who you learn best from, and how to surround yourself with those people. This is where a lot of my friends are going to hate me right now, but that's why CrossFit is the best gateway to all these things. You go in there and you learn about weightlifting and you learn about

powerlifting. You learn about hypertrophy. You learn about movement. You learn all these different variables. And most people will find out that either, one, love CrossFit. They love to compete and do Cross. Or two, they love weightlifting or powerlifting or bodybuilding. You know, they're like Ryan Fisher. They love, you know, functional bodybuilding.

They will find the thing that they love. And then normally they will then, you know, shift over to that thing and focus on that thing. But it is by far the best gateway drug, for lack of a better term, of anything I could think of. Yeah, and I think it gives people – most people compete in nothing in their day-to-day life, like nothing. Most people don't own a business and realize that you got to go pave your way. Most people don't wake up in the morning and think about competing in any aspect of their life. They just go through the motions. But when there's a time next to how well you did something, you're in a competition, whether it's against yourself, whether it's

against who you were six months ago when you did that workout, whether it's against your buddy next to you. There's a time next to it, and now we have a hierarchy, and there's a ladder that you can climb, and it's up to you if you want to climb it or not. You can say it doesn't matter, but if you stay in the same or you go backwards, you know. You know that you're not doing it. It matters to everyone.

It's innate to us that it matters. It matters the most to the person saying it doesn't matter exactly okay it doesn't matter to you all right okay we'll put you at the bottom of that list every day how's that how's that feel you're gonna stay at this gym probably not no you're gonna go to the gym where you're you're accepted you're gonna go up that ladder and the further up that ladder you go, the more you're going to let people know you're going to start banging that table. I mean, that's okay. That's another thing that teaches you is to compete in life wherever you're at. Maybe you're a sales job and maybe you're the last place producer and you work your

way up that chart. It's just what a great, i think crossfit is such a great example of just life it's like here you are now where do you want to go like yeah stay do the work do the little things the coach is saying you start working your way up that that ladder it's beautiful i feel like i feel like modern day with having social media instagram youtube we can see all the best lifters in the world at any time and a lot. I think that sets expectations for people about what's

possible, which is a really good thing. There's an upside there, but also if you scroll your Instagram feed, it looks like basically everybody can snatch one and a half times body weight. How come I can only snatch one times body weight? It seems like it should be so easy cause it seems so common cause you see it

every day, but it's not exactly that common. If you went to your gym, well maybe there's one guy in there that can do it. Maybe. Yeah. That's a really good lift. Like you'd have to,

you have to go to some special places to find people that are, are as good as you see on a daily basis by just looking at your Instagram feed, which is the reason why when you're able to get a bunch of those lines in the same room, that's why it's so good. That's why I'm going to look like a good coach even if I'm not because you put all those people. Because there's just not many spots like that. There's like two or three in all of America that you put all these lines in the same room

and then they work their way up the ladder. two or three in all of america that you put all these lines in the same room and you know then they work their way up the ladder but yeah normally it's really one person when you say that the people who can do like one and a half times their body weight snap is still one percent way less than one percent less than one percent by i think if you can snatch your body weight you're in the one percent Totally. That's 200 pounds for an average male? That's a lot. That's a lot of weight. Yeah, the average male cannot snatch

200, yeah. One and a half is insanity. I saw one of my athletes I think even clean and jerking one and a half your body weight would be insane. For the average person, it wouldn't be. I have this kid who's in 9 ninth grade who's been with me forever, but, you know, now we've moved to Hickory.

But I'm taking my kids to wrestling, and the wrestling dojo is still back in Winston. And so, like, when I go there, I see this one athlete, Testa is his name, and he is amazing. Like, he still snatches beautifully. And so when he saw me walk in and he saw my kids were out there and I'm just hanging out, he's like, can I lift, coach, in front of you? It was just very cool to see this ninth grader who can still snatch beautifully.

And he's a wrestler. He's not a weightlifter. And he's like, I don't know. I thought that was really cool that this young kid, who's going to be an amazing wrestler, he is an amazing wrestler, who can still do these movements beautifully and it's so funny that the guy who was able to do those movements beautifully is also the dude kicking everyone's butt on the wrestling you think that's uh is that correlation causation i'm gonna say that's a good correlation but yeah um and and even coming out of those i i think that all of that stuff you're talking about like snatching

your body weight like people will work if you find snatching if you find Olympic lifting at 25 years old I think a phenomenal goal is to be able to snatch your body weight if you come from like a no weight lifting background and walk into a CrossFit gym or walk into a gym that teaches Olympic lifting and five years later, you can snatch 200 pounds. You're a savage. Like you, you found the edge. And I think that's just in those middle years or in, in that, like in that training age, intermediate, however long that is, try and stay there forever and learn as much as you possibly can but you know finding out where your genetic potential is for the number of years that you've been training and the amount of time and energy that you're putting into the gym um it's just a really important thing to be able to have an honest look and objectively look at those years

of training and go wow like i did what I could do and it was awesome. And now I need to be able to be fit and, and reestablish goals. And this is a lot of the people that were coaching in the diesel tag group. It's like people that push the level for a long time. And then all of a sudden don't have that much time anymore. But never really thought about like, well, what does fitness look like for the rest of my life, for the next 10 years? Until, you know, when you have a two-year-old, you can't be training for 90 minutes a day, two hours a day. So how do we establish those goals with limited time? There's my artist right there. There's your artist.

Sorry about that. Like how do we establish goals and how do we set long-term training programs and still continue to learn and still continue to progress but also being aware that life is just different once you grow out of that that like warrior stage of training so you know like one thing I would like

before we get too far I want to make sure that people understand too some of the biggest mistakes people make is when they come in and they say I want to be a CrossFit Games athlete yeah yeah we're talking about goal setting that's a bad mistake and not saying that you can't have that goal, but if that's your only goal, that's failure. Guaranteed, in three months, you're out of the gym. Or when they come in, they say, hey, I want to be an Olympian.

I'm like, you haven't even snatched yet. And once again, I'm not trying to bust a bubble and say you can't. I'm just saying, if that's your only goal, you will fail because that's a long ways away and so like yeah you know just coming in and being like i want to learn wait step one and i want to move a good goal would be i want to move properly crossfit i want to be able to you know do half the movements you know properly is my first goal or then i want to be able to do all the movements professionally.

Then now I want to start to – slow and steady. If you just start – if you just keep setting those goals that are attainable, eventually you'll get to a place where, yeah, maybe you will be able to say, I want to be a CrossFit Games athlete. Just don't say it right out of the gate and have that to be your only goal. That's failure. Guaranteed. The easiest way to find out if you're going to go to the CrossFit Games is to just see how good of a high school athlete you were.

Yeah. Because that's about how many people play CrossFit now is about the same number of people that are playing high school sports. If you were number one on that team, then you probably could go to college. That means you go to the next level. And then if you play in college and you smash that, there's a good chance you're genetically capable of being very good at crossfit i always feel like two hard stages you got across first yeah there's a lot of people that are trying to take your lunch money at those stages and it's just it's a if if you were like an average high school athlete

you're going to be pretty good at CrossFit because you're probably just athletic. I actually feel like that conversation, I hope that conversation is a lot less now because you used to be able to show up and put in like two good years. If you had an athletic background, a strength training background, and then you come in and learn all the specific skills and the gymnastics and Olympic lifting, and you could make it to regionals if you were because the pool was so small right now all the freaks are they know they know how to get there and they know how to do it the right way it's uh it's a really it's it's it's pro sport now and they're committing their whole lives they're going to mayhem or indictus and they're they're going to do a thing with the team and commit their whole lives yeah so if you're trying to do a thing with the team and commit their whole lives.

So if you're trying to be an accountant and do that, you'll probably just be an accountant. You'll probably make way more money just being an accountant. The girl that won, I'm good friends with Jen Ryan, she won the 40 to 44-year-old fittest woman in the world this year. She has been playing Crossfit for 15 straight years and she trains two to three hours a day not like banging weights all day she just practices skills she's just in the gym all the time throwing wall balls making sure everything she does is like perfectly efficient and moves well um it's it's like the most impressive and mind

boggling thing all it wants to watch watch somebody that is i mean literally the best in the world in her age group um continually get better year by year at 40 years old how long it's forever a great crossfitter well like i was saying at the beginning it was like if you had a strength training How long does it take? At 40 years old. How long does it take to become a great CrossFitter? Well, like I was saying at the beginning, it was like if you had a strength training background and you were relatively athletic. If you were an athletic person, you lifted weights. You could run. You could jump. You were basically just – if somebody looked at you, they would know you were an athlete.

It was like a two-year process to learn this. Even if you if you're an athlete, you don't do double-unders. You don't do muscle-ups. You don't – all that stuff was brand new to the fitness world. And you don't have this cardiovascular – Yeah. Just sitting there. So it takes two years to build an engine. It takes two years to deal with, like, the anaerobic beatdown.

Lactate threshold, yeah. It also takes two years to get really good and injured. So, you know, it all kind of culminates at the same time. Awesome. Which is just the reality of it. Yeah, that's just the reality. Like your body adapts, adapts, adapts, adapts, adapts, and then all of a sudden it's like, hey, we've got to go back and fix all this crap that you've been

doing wrong as heavy and as hard as you possibly can do it for the last two years and now all of a sudden, you're hurt. So you've got to go back to zero and redo it. And I think that that's what she's been so good at over the last 15 years is

staying injury free because she does low intensity efficiency moving like it's just a lot of moderate intensity a lot of just working on the efficiency of her movement a lot of building a big engine she lifts really well but she's not setting PRS and it's just constantly making deposits into being a savage wouldn't you think like if not that this whole thing is about CrossFit but like since a lot of people are CrossFitters but what do you think that it would be good to just like set instead of saying I want to always PR snatch clean and

jerk when you say that there's a good baseline that you need to get to and maintain and that's it. Like Matt Fraser, I'm sure, is not trying to PR his snatch or clean and jerk. But he's maintaining this certain baseline. Would you say you could put a number on everything? Yeah, the numbers used to be a lot different. I feel like snatching 300 pounds, I mean, if you want to be great, snatching 300 pounds is the number.

Clean and jerking 365 is probably right about the number. That just makes you strong enough. You need to be able to squat 450 to 500, pull 500 plus pounds. These are beasts. Yeah yeah they're monsters numbers are like i mean you're you're one of the top weightlifters like you're not winning but you're one of the top you know yeah and um and then from there once you can do those just maintaining and probably lifting between 80 and 93 percent every day somewhere in there on a very structured, intelligent program. But I think the bulk of all of that comes down to how much time are you just

building the aerobic capacity? And then when the time is right, spending as much time in that pain cave from four minutes to eight minutes to 12 minutes to 15 minutes. And that's how you build that they have to be strong and you have to have a gigantic aerobic system i think every crossfitter has to have some chains and whips in their bedroom they're am i right i bet matt frazier's life is so nice right now yeah he's just not facing another seven months of grueling pain just

sitting on an airdyne until he wants to die every day i should get him back into weightlifting is he i'm just saying i should call him that bro yeah yeah wait with the coach he's gonna go um i have uh he did he won five of them so he's got 1.25 million dollars career earnings i think he's good how much can i make in weightlifting i'm like well you can maybe get a stipend for a thousand we have a nice twin bed in a dorm room if you'd like to sleep at the center. I'd be like, hello, Matt. Hello. I love it. Coach Travis Smash, where can people find you?

MasterLeague.com. This is a good one. I hope everyone listens and takes it to heart. Yeah. Doug Larson. On Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged.

Barbell underscore shrug. Get over to BarbellShrugged.com forward slash Diesel Dad, where all the dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic without sacrifice in family, fatherhood, or fitness. And for everybody in Palm Springs, San Diego, L.A., and Vegas, get over to Walmart. We are in the pharmacy. Three programs on the shelves. Friends, we'll see you next Monday.

That's a wrap, my friends. April 5th, the Diesel Dad Diet is launching. I'm so stoked to get this book out. So proud of the product we put together to get everybody. Optimize your metabolism. Lose 13 pounds in 13 weeks and build a strong, lean, and athletic body that you're proud of. I want to thank our friends over at Organifi. Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Save 20% on the green, red, and gold. gold also buy optimizers love you guys leaky gut guardian dot com forward slash shrugged use the code shrugged and then head over to airforce.com to learn more things everything about u.s air force special warfare friends we'll see you on wednesday