Barbell Shrugged - [Sport Performance] Breaking Down the NSCA Position Paper on Olympic Lifting and Sport Performance w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #692

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Welcome to the Barbell Shrugged Podcast! In this episode, we dive into the NSCA's position paper on Olympic weightlifting for sport performance. Olympic weightlifting is a complex sport that requires a high level of skill, strength, power, and speed. It has become increasingly popular among athletes and coaches as a training tool to improve sport-specific performance. The NSCA's position paper provides a comprehensive overview of the scientific evidence on the benefits and risks of Olympic weightlifting for sport performance. The authors discuss the biomechanics of Olympic weightlifting, which involve the snatch and the clean and jerk, and emphasize the importance of proper form and coaching. The paper reviews the evidence on the benefits of Olympic weightlifting, including improvements in strength, power, speed, and jump performance. The authors also note that Olympic weightlifting can improve bone density, which is especially important for female athletes who are at higher risk of osteoporosis. However, the authors also discuss the potential risks of Olympic weightlifting, including the risk of injury. They note that injury rates in Olympic weightlifting are relatively low compared to other sports, but caution that proper form and technique are critical to minimizing the risk of injury. The paper provides guidelines for coaches and athletes on how to incorporate Olympic weightlifting into their training programs. The authors recommend starting with lighter weights and gradually increasing the load as athletes improve their skill and strength. They also recommend incorporating Olympic weightlifting into a comprehensive strength and conditioning program that includes other exercises such as plyometrics, agility drills, and resistance training. Overall, the NSCA's position paper on Olympic weightlifting for sport performance is a valuable resource for coaches and athletes looking to incorporate Olympic weightlifting into their training programs. By emphasizing the importance of proper technique and coaching, and providing guidelines for safe and effective training, the paper helps ensure that athletes can reap the benefits of Olympic weightlifting while minimizing the risk of injury. Thanks for tuning in to the Barbell Shrugged Podcast! Be sure to check out our other episodes for more great content on fitness, nutrition, and strength training.   To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are digging into Olympic lifting and as it relates to a training methodology for sport performance. The NSCA, the National Strength and Conditioning Association, recently put out a position paper on Olympic lifting and its role in training for sport performance. And there's been tons of controversy over the years, especially with the popularity of Olympic lifting. A lot of that as it pertains to how CrossFit kind of got, made Olympic lifting in, especially in the United States, a very popular sport, which then created all kinds of controversy on when do we use it? How do we use it? What athletes do we use it for? Is it good for general population? And this position paper solely focused on sport performance and should athletes interested in performing or increasing their performance in sports,

should they be using the snatch and clean and jerk as a methodology to increase that performance? And this paper resoundingly came up with it being a very, very good tool for coaches to be using. But we wanted to spend the show digging into the details of it because I think it's a really interesting topic that as anything new, I mean, the snatch and clean and jerk have been around forever, but as anything gains popularity, it starts to hit the mainstream, call it CrossFit, call

Olympic lifting. You may have heard Andy Galpin say these two works together a zillion times in a row, but it really depends. And a lot of this stuff depends upon, are you learning the lifts the right way? Or do you have the mobility? Do you have the athleticism? Are you able to understand the positions of the lifts so that you're able to do them well, using the proper weights and doing them for the right purpose. As it relates to sport performance, this paper was a resounding yes that you should be doing them. There could be endless debates, but what this paper did was kind of put the NSCA stamp on Olympic lifting and the snatch and clean and jerk specifically saying that they are very, very good for sport performance. And that is what we're going to dig into today.

Why it's great for sport performance, what the papers, what the paper talked about, the people behind the paper. And then a lot of this, our experiences in coaching athletes over the years and how how we use those lifts to improve speed, power, athleticism. And generally, we love the Olympic lifts. So as always, friends, you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are digging into a lab lifestyle and performance analysis. You can go watch that hour-long video to see those two brains break down everything that we do inside Rapid Health Optimization. So get over to rapidhealthreport.com. Enjoy the show, friends. Welcome to Why We'll Shrug. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. I feel like the stars align here, team. Batman put the signal up into the sky in Gotham and said,

get the bros back together. Travis Mash is all down. And where the hell were you winning silver medals and stuff? Argentina. We just went to, yeah. Brian won his first senior medals. It was awesome. See, kids out there, if you're listening,

you can be very, very good at lifting weights and travel the world. If you want to be like Travis Mash, it's the only way to do it right find yeah figure out how to tell us the lift weights yo tell us the story i haven't actually heard all the details about how his performance was and just the whole deal i saw that he did really well but i don't i don't know the the backstory about about the traveling warming up the all the psychological components how he felt like if he was injury-free going in like if he had any real competition tell me the whole thing this is gonna blow you away so like we were in really good shape going down there and i knew that this time but the travel i mean like you know i

never i'm not making excuses because everyone had to go through what I'm about to tell you. So it was equal. But here's what happened. On the way down, it took us, number one, they flew us to New York to go to Argentina. It was 12 hours from New York to Argentina. But then in Buenos Aires, boys, there were no lines. It was just people. And we could see where we needed to be, but I had no idea how we were going to get there.

It was just cattle. It was cattle. And finally, somehow, we made it through that. And when we got there, like, the travel was so terrible. And they put us on these little planes. I think that was the only choice they had to get us there. And when we got there, we all had retained a lot of water, which is typical. He was like

78 kilos, but it was mainly water. That means we're five over, but we had four days, we thought. We get there, and they switched it, which is just part of being the Pan American Federation. They do what they want.

Now we lost a day. On Monday, instead of being we thought a day. And so on Monday, instead of being, you know, we thought we were going to compete on Thursday, now we're competing on Wednesday, which people are like, one day's a lot when you have to lose five kilos. So then he gets sick. He couldn't hear. His ear was

stopped up. His eye was swollen shut. You know, so yeah, he was so he needed antibiotics which we finally got him because we didn't have any it was not easy to get down there so we got him antibiotics but on monday here's where it gets you'll see what we were going through on monday he's he's uh doing his last workout and so we were just going to do 130 170 which is easy for him that's not even his opener we thought and so he misses 130 and i when i say he missed it he missed it badly meanwhile our competition you know which is another american you know awesome this kid is going to be super

good but he smashes it 130 and so you know we're know, we're like, oh, holy cow. And so. You're in the training hall together so they can see each other training at this point? The other guy could see Ryan miss it and he could see the other guy smoke it? Oh, no. Okay. And so Ryan looks at me and says, can we pull out? So he wants to pull out of this.

So then I go to Mike Gattone. This is where Team USA really bonded and crushed it for us. Gattone is like, you can't because it was the last qualifier for the world championships, and that happens to be one of two meets that's mandatory. None of these meets have been mandatory. You just got to do four out of six. But that one is mandatory, and that was the last day to qualify was at the pan

ants so i had to go to him i'm like bro you got to figure this out you know no chance no chance you can't or our olympic dream ends right here and so they get him with the sports psych person with this and they get him with the team nutritionist. Normally he does his own cut, but they took charge of his nutrition cut and his sports psych. And each day he got better and better. And then this is where I learned the most, the sports psych. That morning I woke up and my wife looked at me because she was with me she said look he's going to be however you are so if you go in there and you're doubting him or you ask him you know how are you doing it's he's going to flop he said if you go in there and tell him he's he's he's on he's going to be on and

spencer arnold texted me the exact same thing then the sports psych lady says the exact same thing she says these are the words that pump him up it was something like um aggressive uh unbeatable like those are the words i need to say to him over and over and she said you know you assume how he's going to feel so she so she affirmed everything they're saying so that nice so you know normally it's typical to say hey how you feeling today? I didn't do any of that. And nor will I ever again. I said, man, you look awesome today.

We're about to crush it. You're going to crush all these fools. I was being loud about it, like overly confident. So I was being, for the first time ever, like I was as an athlete. Like I was pacing like the hold. Just overly aggressive. You were doing all the barking for him yes yes

and i was like i was like these fools don't deserve to be in here with you i was doing the same thing i did as an athlete which i was overly confident and you know kind of arrogant i mean and so anyway it could you see it was working though because his demeanor like was like like his state was changing and he he was coming out of it? Yes. Each warm-up, he was getting better and better. Oh, one more thing to remember. The last time he competed was at the Worlds, and he bombed out.

The first time ever. So all this is happening on his first meet back. So it's overly... Anyway, so he just gets better, and then he hits his... I think we had to open we had to open at 132 and like one c one one 132 175 was the minimum we could open based on his entry total so he smashed 32 jumped to 37 smashed 37 jumped to 42, smashed 42. I mean, dang.

What is that? 2.84. That's 312. 312 pounds. And he annihilated it. And then I was confident we could have done. We were planning on doing 50 and 90, which would have locked him for the Olympics. But we could have.

I just, based on everything that happened i couldn't make that yeah you had to play it safe to make worlds anyway so then um so we we got silver the only guy who beat us in the snatch was the olympic silver medalist so like we were on fire then going to clean and jerk he um got his first two and then we jumped to 187 for his final and he hit it he had it and then as he's 187 for his final. And he hit it. He had it. And then as he's recovering, he dropped it behind. Or that would have been gold medal in the clean jerk.

He would have beat the silver medalist in the clean jerk and almost would have beat him in the total on a bad day. So all in all, it was amazing. He's locked. It locked him in for Worlds. It gave us all the confidence in the world. I learned a ton. Also, the sports nutritionist lady, she crushed it.

She was able to, you know, normally he would starve and not eat. He ate the whole time, and she was brilliant. So now he's going to work with both of them on one. There's the story. It was amazing. I didn't sleep for two days. Things you still learn about coaching man look at that i know here i am i'm 50 years old i turned 52 20 something people on yeah team usa man you

still learn 32 32 yeah who's counting that apologies apologies um that's awesome man it's a great segue talking about olympic lifting, yo, I want to talk about the, uh, this position stance paper that the NSCA just put out on Olympic lifting and a sport performance. Um, I know this has been around a long time. Why did they even need to put out a new paper? I feel like we, we settled a lot of these, uh, maybe not debates even, I hate to even call them debates anymore, but why but why do we need more position papers from the NSCA on why Olympic weightlifting is a good thing for athletes? Because people still debate it and people will use anecdotal evidence

to say that it's not good or they'll say that there's other things that are better. And so everyone who did this paper, I'm just looking at it, half Dr. Sukumil, Dr. Sukumil is brilliant. Anyone who's not,

let's, you know, doesn't know him, Tim Sukumil, um, look him up. And then it's got all the guys, Hornsby,

Kyle Pierce, Stone, Andrew Fry, like Andrew Fry is your boy. Isn't it Doug? Didn't you? Yeah. He was my advisor at university Memphis.

Um, for the first year I was there, he's, he's the reason that I went to University of Memphis in the first place. Brilliant guy. Yeah. And then some people have misquoted Dr. Sukramil. He's published things like that.

As far as power, you can create the same amount of power just doing like a pull. And potentially, you can create more power when you do like a trap bar jump. But he's not saying you should do a limbic lift. He's saying if you can't teach it and you can't perform it, then there are other things you can do. But what you'd have to do for what you could do in one movement, it would take you three to equal all the things that happen. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com,

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

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

please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. Do you feel like a lot of the – A broad stroke. I was going to say a broad stroke here is I feel like all lot of the broad stroke yeah i was gonna say a broad stroke here is i feel like all the people in my experience over the last 20 years the people that don't think olympic lifting is a great idea for athletes are also not very good at olympic lifting that's exactly all the people that are really good at it they're like well yeah it's fantastic

for athletes as long as they know what they're doing if they're really good at it then it's great for them and if they're not very good at it then then to your point from a second ago they need to do hex bar jumps or some other less technical, easier to learn quickly movement that can also, um, train rate of force development, power, et cetera.

It's just, it's, it's purely a technical issue like, um, and, or do the athletes even want to learn Olympic lifting? Some people just don't, they don't care to put the time into it.

If I have someone who's, they're just not interested in the olympic lifts for the long term then i have no i have no desire to try to make them learn to do it they can go do something else agree plows will get you a long way plows and loaded jumps will take you a long way if you have no desire to learn the technicalities of snatching yeah agreed agreed um i also feel like just in a framework of like people see olympic weightlifting as a sport and how could another sport help you in your sport without really understanding all the uh things that go into the coordination speed power like moving your body around an object at in a very athletic way um and i feel like even even tying it back to like when kids are growing up it's like this this new like uh the the aau

parent that is sending their kid to baseball camps at five years old it's like well if we're gonna give them a chance they gotta be able to play baseball from five until they're dead never going to be good at baseball it's like why don't you just train an athlete and then just and then figure out where their body actually fits into sports exactly yeah i feel like people don't make that argument across the board though it's it's like siloed to weightlifting they don't say like well powerlifting sport or bodybuilding is a sport or sprinting is a sport you know it's a track and field event like but they make it for for weightlifting specifically for some reason anybody anybody's gonna be biased against things they don't like or they're not good at so which is unfortunate

so um yeah so if if you were to kind of like uh whether it's through that paper and and what they pointed out or just in general like um what are what are really like the uh call it like putting out a position paper sounds so so official uh like this is our official stance on how this works um how does that get implemented into people that want to like i talked to a guy yesterday like i don't know how to do olympic lifting at all but i really want to be an elite tennis player that's over 45 years old. How do they start to go about implementing in that, in only lifting into their training?

Well, that's the questions you would ask is like, who's your person? And if they're, you know, if someone is 45 years old and wants to be good at tennis, you know, I'm not sure that I would even use weightlifting at that point because the joints, the pliability, the risk at that point might not be worth it. And the amount of time it would take to get them. What I would do is if you have someone young enough, it's very easy to implement. My daughter my daughter who's four can do cleans now better than most people you're gonna see in college and so if you can implement it early it's like any other

thing it's like they're gonna pick it up easily like you know learning to walk learning to ride a bike like learning to ride a bike i mean it's more complicated than doing it clean and so you know it's just a good time when they're young. So if you can start early or even like middle school, if you can start doing front squats, you know, pulls, maybe some cleans from the power position, overhead squats. If you can do that by the time they're in ninth grade, it's a very easy transition. Like Spencer Arnold, he has a program in Georgia where he's in charge from sixth grade all the way to seniors.

So his middle school coaches are doing the things he's telling them, which is overhead squat, front squats, maybe power clean from hips, the movements you're going to have to be proficient at. And then ninth grade, it's a very easy transition. You just start from the top. Well, you can go top down, ground up. I don't have a camp that I think is dominant, but it's very easy. I think, honestly, the snatch is probably the easiest movement.

It's easier than the clean, in my opinion, to teach. So just got to have a system. Yeah, I think you bring up an awesome point to that, too. Just N equals one, this guy that I was talking to that's very interested in becoming uh an elite level tennis player but he's over 45 never done any of it right and specifically trains like mainly with body weight stuff and i was like man i don't know if it really is like the right specific thing for you um there's so many uh bad habits that you could develop and not having that mobility there's really no reason to force it which i think is another reason that people just start bad habits that you could develop and not having that mobility.

There's really no reason to force it, which I think is another reason that people just start to push back where if you look at a broad audience of everybody that plays sports, well, most of those people stop playing sports when they're either 14 or 18 years old, right? You're either good enough to play at high school or you're not. And then you're either good enough to play in college or you're not. Right.

And once you take a call at 45 years old, minus the 18 years of playing sports at a high level or whatever level you played at, um, all of a sudden you realize there's 25 to 30 years of bad movement, poor mobility. You haven't really been thinking about anything that you're doing. And then you try and snatch on day one or do a clean. And all of a sudden, there's a bunch of problems that show up. It's a bad idea. Right. So everybody can argue that this is not a good thing.

But what is the population that you're actually working with? Right. Yeah. That's the key. And those are where those decisions have to get made on an individualized basis. But if you're working with athletes in high school and you're working with athletes in college, I feel like it's the go-to. And here's why. It's because you're limited in time.

Like in high school, you're probably going to have an hour at most to coach a big group of people. And the same thing with the NCAA mandating how long you can coach these athletes, you don't have all the time in the world. You're limited. And so weightlifting combines several things. It combines not only rate of force development, power, it also is going to be force absorption, which is one I think that they forget the most is like when you're catching a clean or you're catching a snatch, that ability to absorb that force and using impulse, that's what you, when you're a contact sport football, especially like you've got to be able to quickly absorb and then transfer

force the other direction. And you don't get that when you're doing a trap bar jump, you know, there's no absorption. You just get the force production. Yeah, that's true. You don you don't ever you have to you really do have to break all those moving downs like you'd have to do that into like some sort of weighted depth jump right which sounds insanely dangerous it can be for sure yeah i don't think i would want to load anybody up with 100 pounds and say jump off this box and try and do it well right um and i think teaching a depth

jump is is as hard or harder than the clean you should see my weightlifters we do the depth jump a lot like multiple times a week every week and like some of them are very good some of them are not and they can but then when you watch them snatch your clean and jerk you're like man these guys are such great athletes but like the depth jump is is very complicated the timing they're always trying to like figure out how can i like trick this thing you can't yeah you know keep it simple jump as high and as fast you can so yeah yeah man it's like in the movement the mobility you know like you know i feel like we've talked about that before but like you know the best way to be mobile is to never lose mobility in the first place and weightlifting

like encourages movement through all the planes i feel like if you got an athlete you can do an overhead squat or if you have an athlete you can do a snatch a beautiful snatch i doubt there's anything that you can throw at them that they can't do because they're just their kinesthetic awareness is just perfect yeah you mentioned depth jumps a minute ago and force absorption it's like not like you have to pick between one or the other like like when i was in college me and andy both we did a lot of olympic stuff combined with with depth jumps and plows immediately afterwards you do a you do a double or triple on on cleans and then you immediately go do depth jumps you know 20 30 seconds later and like that combination was

actually fantastic. I felt like I felt like in the off season when I, when I did that type of training, like I always felt very explosive come the next season. Right. Totally agree. And like a lot of my weightlifters now we do, you know, they do their Olympic lift. And so we don't, we don't contrast that because it's the, you know, that's the competition. And so we're trying to really focus but then well now when we do squats almost everyone on my team is pairing it with a type of

depth jump or a jump depending on where they're at you know the depth jump is going to be more experienced and more developed badly if they don't have that development then we'll do just a jump but you know just trying to get better at rate of force development. Another thing too is like, this is going to be something that might shake some people up, but just because something registers as the maximum amount of power in the weight room doesn't necessarily mean that that's what you need to develop power. It just means that's what's demonstrating the power at that moment. But depending on where you're at in that force and velocity curve, like you might need to spend more time in force, or maybe you need to spend more time in velocity only, but the power might not be where you need to be.

It just depends on who you are. So break those things, break those three components down. So we're not just speaking quickly here. All right. So power equals force times velocity. And so people are going to be, they're going to fit somewhere in a spectrum of like, if they're at the far left in velocity category,

that means they're super fast and weak. If they're way on the other side, that means they're super strong and slow, like a typical power lifter. Like they have the amazing ability to grind. You know, they can squat at 0.15 meters per second which is super slow whereas the weight lifter can't go there and so and then there's the powerful human there's the ryans of the world who are like unbelievably

powerful so they're pretty much in the middle which is depending on what you're doing that's where you want to be so once you find your individual and you label who they are you you work them in the areas they need working so with ryan you just a equal amount of force and velocity and power is where you want to be because he's where you want however if you got somebody who's slow who needs to be powerful you spend more time on that far end on the left and we're high velocity so we're doing jumps a lot and we're doing like you know like a typical dynamic effort that west side would have mentioned you know but like that's why west side bar you know west side did not work for everybody because you know like

that speed squats is something i did not need i was i was faster because i've been in weightlifting first when i was in powerlifting i did not need to spend time was faster because i've been in weightlifting first when i was in powerlifting i did not need to spend time doing dynamic effort i was dynamic in nature so i needed more time just in the force learning to grind because those are different adaptations like when i'm doing high force you get adaptations like um your pronation angle is changing it's getting a you know your muscle fibers are now to, to allow for growth. They're creating more of an angle, which is good, but it's slower. It means you're going to have, each muscle fiber is going to produce less movement. So you got to have more of those

contracting to get the same joint angle movement. However, if they're longer, if I'm doing a lot of stuff, that's like high velocity, you get less of an angle and they're longer now in nature. And so when they contract, it's a faster movement for the joint. So you just need to know your people. And a lot of people, a lot of coaches who are listening will say, well, I have 40 people, so I can't individualize. You can individualize in that way. If you can just say, you know, you got to test everybody at the very first day, test everybody, find out who they are.

And then they can do the same type of workout, but just one group focuses on velocity. One group focuses more on force and one group stays in the middle. And now you would have a program that would be very different than 99.9 of all programs in america and you would be a brilliant genius strength coach there's your tip of the day there it is team yeah um i when you look at uh athlete development kind of over the last decade um i'll even go all the way to kind of like how this hits me personally. Like when I walk into a Globo gym now, when I walk into Lifetime Fitness, pre-CrossFit, that was hell.

Like walking into a Gold's gym that wasn't like one of those like bodybuilders. Gangsters, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like badass Gold's gyms. You just didn't want to be in any of those gyms anywhere. People didn't understand intensity. People didn't understand intensity. People didn't understand how to move. They didn't even know how to use the machines.

They're doing weird shit that shows up on gym fails and like makes it everything weightlifting look bad. Right. Over the last decade, the amount of like information on how to move, understanding intensity, just the total understanding of like how to move, understanding intensity, just the, the total understanding of like how to build your body and perform, uh, lifting weights, whether it's weightlifting,

Olympic weightlifting specifically has gotten significantly better that when you go into a, a lifetime gold gym, whatever the average gym goer moves significantly better than you could ever imagine if you only were there 10, 12 years ago. And they, they do the exercises, they do it to a level of intensity that like, you know, it's pretty good. It's pretty solid. But now when I, when you, when you pan that out to athletes and you're taking call it the top 1% of people that are actually able to get to the collegiate level and then even smaller, 0.1% that are going to play pro, we start seeing some insanely freaky things that didn't happen a decade ago in college weight rooms. I think you even posted one of your college athletes cleaned like 400-something pounds the other day. Yeah. And it looks beautiful. one of your one of your college athletes cleaned like 400 something pounds the other day yeah and it looks beautiful um and we've also seen athleticism as a whole that has like sky like

you look at every single professional sport now and they are the freakiest of freak athletes that have ever walked on the face of this earth they are not normal people no i feel like those two things just getting so much better over the last 10 to 12 years is just um specifically in the olympic lifting and how that's being like uh advanced in itself plus athleticism being attached to that and how people are training from 14 15 years on to now they're 28 years old and they're pro athletes doing this stuff. Do those two things, do they link together and correlate together? Or is that just me making that up and how well those programs have been designed and

how well everybody knows that you can create strong, powerful athletes by doing these lifts and how much better that's gotten. I think you're dead on. I think, um, I think that everything has gotten better. I think kids are starting earlier with good coaches. Like, you know, the kid that you watched do the four 45 clean and, uh, that, I mean, he's been with me since he was in high school. And so like, he has a distinct advantage over when I went to college, I did, you know, like I lifted, but I didn't know what I was doing. And so like, it took me a year before I knew what I was doing. But yet this guy goes in there as a freshman already doing cleans better than everyone

else. And so he has a distinct advantage. He's where I was, he's entering college where I was a year later. And so that's a big difference, you know? And so, cause not only did I not know, but like by the time I'm a sophomore, I'm starting from zero. So now I know,

and now I'm building, this guy has already done that as starting as a freshman. So he's like two years ahead of me. Yeah. I definitely think, you know, plus that development side of it, it,

it, it, it gets exponentially better. I wish there was a better way of knowing actual numbers of like the compounding interest of when you actually start doing these things and then how long the neurological piece takes to ingrain, to actually build the athleticism. Then the musculature comes in behind that. And then all of a sudden sudden once they hit and intersect at the same time where you've got the hard wiring plus the musculature plus the testosterone plus

everything else that goes into it then all of a sudden you look out into the professional sports landscape and you're like holy shit yeah these people are absolute monsters out there right now that should not be put in these small cages called fields and hockey rinks to go play against each other. It's like, it's like warfare out there. It is insanity. I coached Tommy Bohannon years ago, who was a fullback seven years in the NFL and watching he could come listen to this.

He could work out with John North and beat him in the Olympic weightlifting as an NFL fullback with form that was not near as good as – it was good. It was proficient. It was man strength. Just unbelievable. You know, you come in there, he's doing doubles with 205 kilos in the cleans. So he's doing a 450 double, and he's a fullback. Imagine what he does. imagine getting hit by that guy

no no i you know i watched i watched the game he was playing and i saw an outside linebacker in the nfl turned their back out of fear to him they turned their back and then he bowled them like a bowling ball he's like that guy that turned his back probably has his brain left, which if he had made a worse decision that day, he might not have it anymore. No kidding, man. You've posted videos of that dude turning the corner, and it looks like a semi truck is coming at you.

He runs a 4-4-40. It's terrifying. Imagine that. He weighs 245, runs a 4-4, and can you know who knows 475 let's say what's he going to do to you it's gonna i mean i would not i'd be like no you're paying me a million not worth it no presumably there's many other people like him in the nfl though yeah and when those fucking dudes hit a hundred times in a game like you're just mentioning brain health like that's why people have trouble with tbis and brain health after a whole fucking career in the nfl because all those guys are freaks and they're fucking slamming into each other many many many many

times over the years what is that impact what's what separates that guy from the the best full back in the league because he wasn't even he's not even people probably don't even know who he is i know he almost made all pro twice just two times somebody else was a little bit better who was that guy no like dear lord like somebody could hit more i really feel like i've seen more videos of like uh and it may just because it's on video now but i've seen more video in the past couple years of um college weight rooms just doing things very very well and the amount of weight that is moving when you put these like very fast twitch super athletic people on a barbell they could just go be world champions in weightlifting tomorrow if you get a good coach if you have somebody that can

teach the movements properly and actually be able to like just not have them max out every single day if weightlifting had the money and and the prestige that the nfl has i would love the whole the landscape of that sport would be so fucking different because so many people do go to the nfl or you know all the sports that make the real money and they just don't they don't gravitate more to weightlifting there's way more people in the sport of weightlifting than there used to be because it's the thing now over the last you know 10 years because the crossfit it's like it's become something that uh is a part of pop culture so to speak and people recognize it but but still like if you have the opportunity to go to the nfl most people are going to go to the

nfl sure you know for now and so you know unless you can pay him a million I wonder Tommy Bohannon if he just goes to the you know weightlifting I mean I have to guess he's a world record holder like I have no doubt like I just saw him do things I would love it too if a guy from the NFL came into weightlifting and was like this sport is so easy on your body why doesn't everybody choose this that's what makes it like buried in the bottom with a 500 pound clean he's like this doesn't even hurt no one tried to kill me today i know man i i listen to my weightlifters complain i hope they're listening to this right i hear them complain about how hard weightlifting is and like i don't know how i can go to class, you know?

And I'm like, dude, if you played football. Travis Batch has me on 10 by 10s right now. And I just can't even make it to school. I'm like, go to one spring practice in football and shut your mouth. You'll never complain again. I'm like, man, dude, people become doctors and lawyers while playing football in college. And then a weightlifter is like, oh, I, you know, I can't, I can't, I can't take more than 12 hours. I'm lifting weights once a day.

I'm like, boy, try, try lifting weights, going to film, going to practice, you know, and then try to study after you banged your head you don't even know your own name anymore it's um yeah yeah those guys are just loving with it yo let's circle back to to this position paper like i actually have not seen this this more recent position paper what were the uh for those of you that have actually looked through it in any type of way what are the main bullets there is there any anything anything unique that stood out that obvious information to us i think it was mainly just obvious he was just saying how it's um you know that for the movement it's it's going to be probably your go-to for the multiple variables you know for like rate of force development force strength, mobility, consistent awareness. Like it's just saying it's, you know, unquivocally like it's good, you know, versus like, you know, doing all these different movements,

like high pulls or all things are good, man. Like there's a tool, there's a time and a place for everything, but when you're limited in time, it's saying you can't beat it. Like you can't beat it, you know? Yeah, it does seem to check the most boxes. As far as just one or two movements, snatches, clean jerks, they check more boxes than almost any other lift. They do.

So they're making a time efficiency argument. If you only have 30 minutes, an hour a day, or whatever it is, then these movements, you get the most bang for your buck you get the most bang for your buck and it's just saying you know um like unequivocally they do work and so like no doubt you know when it comes to like these parameters they work and so and like if you think about like what speed is like, you know, strength is important for sure. Being strength, being strong. But like what you're doing when you play sports, whether it's baseball, football, soccer on and off, you know, but like you've got to be able to reduce force at a high velocity.

And weightlifting is that. It is that. It's producing maximum amount people get really good at producing as much force as possible in a short time and here's what the cool part the adaptations you get from that are increased rate coding which is your brain sending a signal to your muscles you know to fire it's the motor unit the alpha motor neuron connected to all its muscle fibers fires quicker and you're going to get more synchronization meaning they're going to fire it's the motor unit the alpha motor neuron connected to all its muscle fibers fires quicker and you're going to get more synchronization meaning they're going to fire

at the same time in a smoother pattern so those are those are not only you know your type two fibers are going to you know work more and more like faster they're all whether you're type one type two a type two x they're all going to learn to fire faster. So whether 2A becomes 2X, ask Andy Galvin. But all of them are going to be faster at what they do. And so you just can't beat it. You can't get that from a squat. You can't get that from anything else.

Maybe a tri-bar jump, maybe. But that's all you get. Then you won't get the force absorption the movement the mobility the time you know kinesthetic awareness and i feel like if you were to to lay those things out the the force absorption really if you were to kind of like set the goal of longevity i feel like that's even more important than the ability to jump. Like jumping seems really easy compared to catching 225 pounds. Oh yeah. And much more important to be able to catch that and not get completely

crushed by it, which you're not going to get if you just have only the jumping side of it. It's not that there isn't utility in doing weighted jumps of some sort. But if you were to like, as far as a body breaking down and being strong, you would want the force absorption piece to be something that you're practicing a lot, which is nearly impossible with heavy weight or even relatively heavy weight with any other exercise. Like you're not going to get that with someone throwing you a med ball while you're doing abs. No, it's not, it's not even close. No, I would say for your, you know, for a lot of the people who follow you guys now, your clientele, like one of the things you lose, people don't talk about this near as much, but you lose power. It's like, it's one of the aging things

that happen. And it's a sucky thing because like, for me of all the things that might affect me mentally, it's a loss of power that, that gets me, you know, like where I was able to, I was always really good at jumping, you know, like when my wife met me, this was like 2007, I entered a dunk contest. And so like, it was my thing it was my identity yeah jump you're like spud web out there i was and so web with a big old set of abs right yeah yeah yeah a 200 plus but losing that it hurts me man like when i go to jump now it's like and i can't you know i can't get the 30 inch vertically that hurts me so for all the you know all the people who are you know 30s 35 i would recommend

if you can do weightlifting continue to do it now if you can't find other ways but like power is important you know and the adaptations that come with that are good for longevity too because you think about the elasticity that that's you know if you have really good elasticity that means your your ligaments your tendons they're strong the connective tissue surrounding your muscles they're strong and so yeah it's important for longevity when you fall not to mention of course you know just weight in anything's going to help bone development but yeah it's an important thing for as we get older. That neurological side, it's like riding a bike. You don't even have to do it.

As soon as you have to go pick it up, your body will remember. It might not feel great right off the bat, but your body will remember how to get the bar to your hips, and it will teach you how to explode from there. And it all stays hardwired uh so the faster you can learn it the earlier you can learn it the easier it's going to be to learn it yes stays with you forever yeah i'm turning 40 at the end of the month i have to tell you this it took me all of the willpower not to send you this video but my power cleaned two and a quarter for five touch and go i was so proud of myself because i'm proud of you i haven't done olympic lifting really since like the pandemic started you just picked up the bar and did it you didn't like did you train for that or you just did it no

no no my neighbor said we're doing power cleans today for fives and i went why am i gonna do that yeah and then i realized okay maybe i should try and then i did it you can do all of the power not send you the video i was so proud of myself nah it's all hardwired in there man yeah man no you are an amazing athlete you can do anything well like like your standard crossfitter i think more than standard crossfit. Because you can, you know, like Ryan used to be a crossfitter, but he couldn't swim. So, like, he was winning Teenage Waterpalooza, and then the last of it was swimming, and he got next to last place.

So, like, you can do everything well. He can do a few things unbelievably well, and then some things unbelievably poorly, just like me. I'm the same. I'm the same. Yeah. But I, I really think that that neurological component, like once you have that stuff hardwired, there is not a single and, um, and watching, uh, my kids specifically, but watching them

develop and seeing how incredibly important it is. Like my daughter does not really know how her brain connects to her feet at all. But I handed my son a wiffle ball like three weeks ago, four weeks ago, and he just turned sideways, pushed off his back leg and threw it. And I went, well, that was just in there. I sound like I taught him anything like product number one, my four-year-old daughter throws with her elbow and it looks ridiculous. And then I hand him a wiffle ball and he just turned sideways and throws off his back leg. And I went, well, what did I do right here? And wrong in the first one, but it's just in there. And it's like, people need to figure out how their feet drive this whole thing. Cause you can just,

it opens your whole world up being able to drive through your feet, into the ground, and do something athletic as that energy transfers through your body and into your hands. You can play tennis. You can play baseball. It doesn't matter what the sport is. All of them are the same. If you can twist and rotate and push energy from your feet

all the way through your hands, you will do well at it. So you might as well be able to go practice it somewhere where you don't have to go play home run derby every day or whatever it is. Just go learn how to do a power clean, and it'll help a million fold in your quality of life. The next time you guys are busy, I can't wait to watch my two boys punch. Like, Rock will light your hand. Your son could kick my ass for sure.

Bear is now learning rock can like he can snap that punch man he's good if some kid oh i don't know if i should talk about this on there no no i'll tell you there's a little kid that's a gymnastics he's like messing with them and so i've given them the green light i've given them the green light. I've given them the green light. What is it? F around and find out. They're about to find out. Yeah, they're about to find out.

Travis Bass, where can people find you? Masterly.com or Instagram Masterly Performance. There it is. Doug Larson. On Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That is where you get to hang out with Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin, doing lab performance and lifestyle analysis. You can watch a full video of what everybody gets, at least one of the things that everybody gets inside of rapid health optimization. You can go watch that video over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.