Barbell Shrugged - Steroids, Supplements, and Strength in CrossFit - EPISODE 40

Episode Date: December 28, 2012

http://www.FITR.tv

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we celebrate Christmas. Talk about supplements, steroids, moderate weights at medium speeds, and getting stronger. Santa, I want something paleo. Hey guys, this is Rich Veroning, and you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to fitter.tv. This is what we have to go with? Yep. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe.

Here with Doug Larson. You bet. Doug Larson and Chris Moore. This is the Christmas episode. Our guest, Brad Pope. Merry Christmas. If only you knew what we were talking about before we turned the microphones on. But you never will. That's right.

It's not appropriate for children's ears nope just so you know brad pope is known for being able to move moderate weights at medium speeds at faction strength and conditioning you're welcome you want to tell the uh before we get into that let's uh i'm gonna remind you guys to go to fitter.tv that's fitr.tv sign up for our newsletter so you can get updated whenever we do new technique wads, new, uh, barbell shrugged episodes and, the daily BS where we answer all the questions you guys submit.

We go there and just do a short, like two to five minute videos and, try and get those answers since we're terrible about doing them on this show. Uh, we thought we were going to be good at it, but we're not. We're pretty bad, actually. We're bringing Brad on,

not only because he can move moderate weight at medium speeds, but because he also might be... Is that right? That's right. Might be. I don't know. You're going to have to finish that sentence for me

before I can tell you if that's true or not. He might be, may or may not be involved in the supplement industry, the Chinese supplement industry. No, I'm definitely involved in that. That's a fair statement. So assume for the rest of this episode that these things that we talk about may or may not be true, just in case we step over the line somewhere. Yeah, to clear that up, I work in the supplement industry, and I also have many friends who work in the supplement industry who have seen some very interesting things. So I'll try to give you guys some insight into that. And not only that, the supplement industry, not only is it just like selling supplements to stores and stuff like that, but the supplement industry that you work with may or may not be multi-level marketing yeah we have several distributors you know we we were our business doesn't go directly to retail outlets in china we go to several

distributors and and some of those distributors are better than others and some of them have have better business practices than others but uh you know and some of them aren't so great but that's not really our our concern you know how some of them aren't so great but that's not really our our concern you know how you run your business in china after you get our product doesn't matter to us so we want money uh more or less yeah oh shit hey chris turn your microphone uh 180 degrees please you are not there you go keep going now speaking to the mic much better check there you go oh god i uh two bad jokes i told were lost to the mic much better. Check. There you go. Oh, God. Those two bad jokes I told were lost to the world forever.

You could hear it, just not well. I kind of like it the other way. Can we go back to that? Hey, Brad. Just kidding. Love you, buddy. That's mean. Poor Chris. No respect. I don't know. Chris is bringing a lot of good feedback on

Twitter. people like you people surprisingly surprisingly i don't know uh who's biggest douche on twitter you or i i probably used to be but i think you're winning if you up the political uh libertarian rants i think i've actually i've actually kind of taken a break from all political stuff good i've let brad actually handle all of my my political fights on facebook yeah we have a slap system in place now so anytime anytime i find myself jumping out of line i just remind mike to like slap me anytime i get into a yeah so brad and i have rules brad and i agree 95 of the time um about politics and economics so like if he ends up

uh saying there's certain times on Facebook when the other one, when we recognize that it's probably not a smart thing to get involved in the conversation. But you just can't help yourself. You can't. So if I see that he's done that, then I have the permission to slap him in the face

and vice versa. So I pretty much just stop posting altogether. Yeah, good call. He'll slap you with medium intensity at a medium speed. That's right. It's still painful with medium intensity at a medium speed. That's right. It's still painful. Moderate force at medium speed. So we were talking about, I heard this story a while back.

Your friend came back from China. Right. And he had this pretty amazing story about how he was treated like royalty. In a Chinese type way yeah uh this could be which was extremely interesting there was tuxedos and yeah yeah there was women crying like beatles style yeah yeah it's pretty all right my curiosity is peaked i guess yeah so let me let me set this up that friend was me so we'll just knock that out of the way. And we did have a distributor, and China is a developing economy, as a lot of people know, and some consumers may or may not be as savvy as a kind of up-to-speed, free internet access

having American consumer might be. So a lot of the sales tactics are some of the things that you would have seen, you know, 40 or 50 years ago in the United States. So, uh, one of our distributors really likes to hype our company as, you know, this great American company with this great leadership. And, um, I'm kind of the face of our company for that distributor. So they invited me over and I knew it was going to go strangely, let's say, um, they asked me to bring some fancy clothes for this, for this dinner. And so I was like, yeah, yeah, I'll bring a suit. And they're like, no, no, not a suit, fancy clothes. And I was like, okay, I'm not really sure. Maybe something's getting

lost in translation here. And I was like, okay. A suit suit. I was like, okay, how about. Want some lace. Yeah. How about. A lace gown. Yeah. And I said, how about a tuxedo?

You know, like a black tie fair type tuxedo. And so at this point we had resorted to kind of sending pictures back and forth. And they said, no, no, not a tuxedo. Like really fancy clothes. And I was like, okay, can you find. One of the shit is more fancy not a tuxedo, like really fancy clothes. And I was like, okay, can you find... Well, that shit is more fancy than a tuxedo. Right. Like a gown like an Indian groom would wear at his wedding,

like all bright yellow and neon green and dazzled and such. We'll get there. You have pictures of this? I do. I definitely have pictures to verify the story. To your CTP. Yeah, CTP will probably edit those in i'm sure if i get them to them but i'm debating on whether or not i want you guys to see me in this attire yes we do so um

you have to now so they sent me they sent me a photo of a typical guy in like a tuxedo with tails and the ascot and i was just like you know you guys are a really good distributor but okay so so we go over there and i have a good friend over there who um his job is he's hired by various states in the united states to kind of lobby manufacturers and businesses in china to bring manufacturing or any kind of business to their state. And so he was going to go to this dinner with us as a favor to us, you know, since we had, we kind of talk him up and every time we go to China, we kind of try to involve him in it. So we're there and it's this, it's kind of this reception dinner. It's like a VIP dinner for,

for good salespeople and good clients of this distributor. And they're like, okay, we're going to walk you guys in. And I was like, okay, all right, well. And they're like, there's going to be a red carpet, and we're going to need you guys to just walk down the red carpet. And I was like, okay. I had no idea how many people were going to be at this. They told us to get there a little bit early. And I kind of saw people and customers funneling in,

and I got the impression that it was going to be, I kind of could tell that it was going be kind of kind of big probably what's the venue like is it a is it like a hotel or this yeah it would be like a large hotel conference room here okay so you know I'd say by the time we got in there there were probably 750 to a thousand people and so and I had no idea like no idea they said three to five hundred it was way more than three to five hundred so we're sitting we're kind of like waiting to come in and there's this red carpet rolled out

and there's me and this guy named Paul and some people behind us. And they cue, have you guys seen Star Wars? You know? Of course, yeah, I mean. No. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure most of the viewership has seen Star Wars, but the intro to Star Wars

when the, I don't know what the name of that song is. The scrolling text. Yeah, the scrolling text. Ba-ba-ba don't know what the name of that song is. The scrolling text. Yeah, the scrolling text. It sounds exactly like that, actually. You're like Emperor Palpatine walking into this Congress Hall. Not the imperial theme,

the other one. The happy one. And so that comes on and I look at Paul and I go, is that what I think it is? He's a little bit more experienced in Chinese culture than I am at this point. He just goes, yeah, yeah, it is. He wasn't going to tell you ahead of time. He just wanted to see your surprise. That's where he gets his kicks.

Right. So the door pops open. This grand door opens up and we're walking down this hallway or this red carpet kind of entryway. And, you know, they kind of want to make it like kind of a big to-do, and so they've designated these people with like noisemakers and confetti to like throw confetti in front of us. And I don't think that this guy

really understood the concept of confetti because he just had a handful of paper and he just ran up and just threw it in my face. You know? Really kind of started. That's customary in china yeah i guess so so he kind of laced confetti in your face right he kind of threw it in my face and there's a picture of me like going with like confetti hitting me in the face um which will probably pop up on the screen here soon uh so so that happened and then we sat they sat

kind of the the guests of honor i guess which is i guess what we were i don't i don't really know um up at this front table and things just got weirder from there you know they had these like i guess they were like kung fu acrobats so these kids would like come out and do backflips and they would like i guess you tiger yeah you've seen that acrobats if you've seen like a sha Yeah, you've seen that. Acrobats. If you've seen a Shaolin show, you've seen they balance with their belly button in the tip of a spear. And they're like this and all kinds of strange things. It's an exciting party so far.

Right, yeah. So that happens. And then there's these girls who come out and they have like it's it's called race queen attire but it's basically like a bikini with like boy shorts and they're playing they're they're playing electric violins sounds terrible and so they're just like they're just like dancing around the stage in these bikinis and boy shorts and like playing violin but you can tell that the violin is they're like it's it's like the violin version of lip syncing you know they're just like kind of like doing this and kind of like anybody yeah yeah yeah so yeah

the night the whole night just kind of went like that you know just one weird kind of charade after another and so i'm not really sure what we were going to get out of that story but it's a great story that that happened and then i went home you know It was just kind of like that was really strange. So what kind of awesome supplements are you getting from this distributor? We are selling awesome supplements to this distributor. So our main product is kind of a heavy water product, which probably wouldn't sell that well in America. It's kind of a perceived benefit supplement is what we'll call it.

What's the big selling point there? You know, they like it is the big selling point there? You know they like it is the big point are there any like shark fins Blackbear bladders. Yeah, I think we talked about that a little bit the last time I was here is You know, there's definitely a market for you know Homeopathic remedies really caught we call it, or like ancient remedies or whatever you would want to call it. Um, I don't know, old, old wives tale

type stuff. And where the Chinese, where Chinese, the Chinese market really goes crazy is when they have a product that is kind of like an old product or a homeopathic product that people have believed to work for all these years. And then there's some sort of scientific backing to add that to kind of confirm that bias that like, you know, St. John's word is good for your memory. You know,

they've been using St. John's word for thousands of years or, or ginseng is another one. You know, they've been using ginseng for thousands of years. And then when, when modern shit, all right.

Then when modern science backs that up, my cousin died of ginseng overdose is that true no no no i'm pretty sure i've had a cousin to have something though i could be true yeah yeah well i had a cousin at one point i don't have a cousin anymore right i'm sure he died of something but curiously enough ginseng is just as good as anything i know like in the business i'm in there's a curious association between homeopathic supplements right and like spikes and like hip hip dysplasia development and chinese populations where they take stuff and it predisposed them certain developmental conditions right such as the kind you may need

for to be treated by an orthopedic industry leader right uh so it presents some curious business opportunities sure on all sides sure. That's actually true. So some of this stuff is making you more money, Chris? Not me. People who own me make more money. The company you work for that pays you. So you're not making any money off of this. No, not me. Don't you know how capitalism works?

I'm definitely confused right now. So the heavy water is the most popular supplement in china right now or oh well that's the most popular one that you guys are yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't say that's the most popular supplement in china i'd say that's far and away the most popular one that we sell yeah what's the most popular one in china and let's let's clarify something we are not a large company in china not not by any stretch of the imagination our distributors are not large but the thing about it is is you know when you've got a city of 10 12 million people if you get

0.01 percent of the marketplace you've got a hundred thousand people that want to buy your product on a regular basis you know it's it's kind of scraping the bottom of the pyramid to get any percentage of interest you know and it's something that you would really have to visit China to understand and that's not it's not me being a jerk and being like, Oh, I've been there, you know, I'm so much better than you, but just the, the volume and condensation of people in China, you know, just makes in any sort of niche market, just exponentially greater opportunity for profit than it is here. So I'm not sure if you'd know much about this or not, but, you know, China is huge in the weightlifting world. They always do well at the Olympics and the World Championships and whatnot.

Do you have any insight into the type of supplements or what we would call illegal performance-enhancing drugs that they might be using? Yeah. To be honest with you, Doug, I don't. I would assume that probably a lot of that goes on. I can tell you this in regards to that. My friend who we talked about earlier, Paul, who's been over there for a long time, lot of that goes on i could i could kind of tell you i can tell you this in regards to that my friend who we talked about earlier paul who's been over there for a long time he's been doing business in china for for 20 years and 20 plus years probably his wife is chinese and he's lived

there he speaks fluent chinese he's very kind of engulfed in chinese culture and very integrated to chinese culture i we had a conversation about four beers deep and um some of the of the best conversations happen, right? That is for sure. And I asked him, you know, for brainstorming too, you know, no doubt. Yeah. So I feel like that's probably how this podcast was born anyway. Um, Scott, it was Scotch, not beer. Right. So I asked him, you know, what's, what do you think is the best and worst thing about, about living here? And to be honest, I was a little too drunk to remember what the best thing was, but he said the worst thing that he felt was the erosion of kind of morality and business that he's seen happen.

About being in China? Yeah, that he's seen happen in China over the last 20 years. There was a prominent Chinese leader who said to be rich is glorious, and the country kind of really took that to heart. Well, if not, they were going to be murdered, so they're going to take it to heart. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I would go that far, but he said there's definitely been kind of an erosion in consideration for moral consequence

or consideration for moral purity for the sake of profit and winning, we'll call it. So to think that Chinese weightlifters or American weightlifters or any weightlifter is not on some level probably using vitamin S, as we'll call it, is naive for sure. There's always going to be a population of those people. Could I give you a number?

No, I have no idea. Well, if you look at like, I wish you could find the link, but on Imgur, I-M-G-U-R dot com, great photo sharing site, somebody set up a photo library of pictures from youth gymnastics training camps in China. Right.

And this is glorious and shocking in all the sorts of bad ways. Right. Like there's this, one of the pictures in particular, I'll describe two. One is these two wooden blocks that are clearly made for you to put your ankles upon sort of straddle.

Right. And then it's like a six, seven year old girl doing the splits on these with like a middle-aged Chinese coach shoving her down with tears running down her face. And the other one is these, what looked to be toddlers draped out across like a chin up bar, but with their feet probably like eight or 10 feet off the ground.

And they're all crying with very distressed looks on their faces because the training objectives clearly to make these kids hang. If they fall and thus stop training their grip strength and their ability to hang on a parallel bar or whatever, then they fall and maybe break their ankle and sit there and scream for an hour. So this is the lesser of two evils. This is like the sort of coaching methodologies being put in place. Sure.

An idea of taking a submet that is largely not legal and maybe taking a you know doping your test to get around what they'll screen for at olympic games is probably not on the list of the most extreme things going on sure and you know you see that you see that anywhere you know to kind of take it to you know i've spent some time in Japan as well. If you look at sumo and sumo culture, the way those guys train and the way they're forced around in a sumo stable is definitely similar to that type of environment. It's just hyper-competitive whether you really want to be hyper-competitive or not.

People think that is all fat, lazy guys push each other around. Definitely not. No. You have never seen sumo wrestlers compete. One, they're forcing themselves, which on its own would be a terrible sport to compete in. Yeah. If you had to sit down and couldn't stand up

until you ate like 20 pounds of whatever the hell they put in front of you. But they train brutally. Yeah, I know exactly what you're about to ask. Aren't the lower-ranked guys treated horribly? They're just shit on the whole time. Speaking of shit, don't they have to fucking wipe the other guys? They do.

Like the big guys that can't reach? Like the lower-level guys have to go wipe them. If you're 380, 400 pounds, it gets pretty tough to clean yourself. Oh, that's a lightweight, man. That's a lightweight. Wow, that's the first perk I've heard from being extremely fat. Yeah. Some countries, people have to wipe your ass.

Or they face extreme dishonor. So, yeah. And so, you know, you were talking about falling off the bar. I mean, would you rather, you know, you can either win an improving rank and have somebody else wiping your ass, or you can lose and kind of stay at a low level. Yeah. How about we try that affection? If you play slow in the WOD, you wipe the winner's ass.

I don't know. Oh, you signed the contract. You have to pay a $500 penalty by law. I think we're making a lot of money. The key thing to consider is I think – The money instead of the ass wiping. Come back to a point I thought of when you were talking. I think the American culture is to say, look what these foreign people do isn't that stupid we don't do anything stupid these assholes

eat chicken feet for example or you know xyz they drink heavy water what idiots right and then what do we do that is as at least as idiotic yeah i mean we don't laugh i got drinking hard water for whatever you sell that we don't have to know every detail of your sort of business but if you but at the same time I'll get a post

from somebody on Facebook hey man I haven't talked to you in 10 years but I see you're in a CrossFit I'm not in the CrossFit I'm just loosely associated with this glorious brand

but you said to me you know I wanted to share with you the story of my wife you know my wife and I have been taking Advocare supplements now for a year and she's competing in the St. Jude Marathon and I think you know, I wanted to share with you the story of my wife. You know, my wife and I have been taking Advocare supplements now for a year, and she has competed in the St. Jude Marathon. And I think, you know, if you want to maybe try it out,

I can give you a special coupon code, blah, blah, blah, for $800, or whatever the shit this package costs for a month. Thanks, buddy. And people think, oh, wow, you know, I'm just changing lives here. And they don't have any perception of the silly shit that they're doing. Or some guy who looks like he's a materialized version of the Incredible Hulk says, you should take this supplement and use my device and train with my method. And you too, CrossFitter, could easily add X to your lifts. Whatever.

And no one stops to think that this is all just silliness and stupidness. Sure. I mean, you walk into your local vitamin shop or supplement store or whatever, you might see 10% of the stuff that may actually give you 1% benefit or greater. Most of that stuff is just junk. And a curious inverse relationship between cost and efficacy. I felt like the most effective thing

in that place is just cheap creations like $5 for a bucket of it. With loads of scientific evidence backing up why you should just spend $5 to get this thing. And the other thing, which is flat out just dangerous and silly, you have to mortgage it to get a supply of it.

I was actually, when I was in St. Louis last week, I was in a supplement store. And it was actually a pretty good supplement store. People there were pretty knowledgeable. But I had this conversation walking out with Corey. And we were just kind of talking about the amount of money you could spend on something, you know, XYZ or whatever it is. Or you could just probably stop drinking that beer on saturday night and save the money and it'd have a much bigger effect you know just like removing that one thing from your diet or adding something to your diet maybe

you should eat three more servings of vegetables per day instead of spending fifty dollars on this weird supplement over there and you probably get way more benefit out of it. And yeah, I mean, if you were really that hard up and, uh, sort of disengaged with what you really sought in your own life and the kind of goals you were making, if you really just didn't care about anything other than just forking out money and getting a result, you should just take that money and buy a bunch of steroids with it. I mean, shit, be honest with yourself. I mean, all that, a lot of those supplements are elements are effective but it's it's to such a small degree

it's probably not worth the money you know it's like you'll see a one percent increase for extra a hundred dollars a month you know you could probably yeah at some point it just makes sense to do steroids i think yeah it's like it's like running really high grade oil in your car you know it's not gonna add 2 000000 horsepower. It's going to give you a marginal benefit in engine life maybe. I think what everybody could stand in this glorious age of information, I mentioned it

briefly before, is this good old-fashioned a little dose of honesty and perspective. A lot of these guys have some good advice you could apply to your training. Fair enough. In all these e-Books and all this bullshit, there's good information to be had. Uh,

you know, some of it's common sense. Some of it's not, but yeah, learning is always good. But I saw on all things, Jim, uh,

guys got a great site. I like to plug it whenever I can. Gregor post. Yeah. He posted, uh, a really cool, honest video,

uh, of Dorian Yates, who most people who listen to the show probably remember Dorian Yates being the guy in the magazines that you idolized when you were in middle school. He was the guy. Barn door lats. He was pre-Ronnie Coleman, master of the universe, all things bodybuilding. My brother, who's now 40, when he was in high school and college, he was going through a bodybuilding phase. I remember that.

He'd bring home bags of egg protein powder and trying to be a bodybuilder, which failed miserably. But he had like Dorian Yates' training video, and we had pictures of Dorian Yates all over the kitchen table. Like, you know, my brother, 170 pounds, and I'm posing, and it's like, what do I need to do to get the lats of Dorian Yates

should I do the one set to failure should I try that machine I've got one at French Riviera Spa yeah but here he is on this thing

and he's like in some Romanian bodybuilding seminar I guess he's probably still making pretty good coins sharing his experience but he comes out and says look

here's actually I saw some things on the internet the Dorian Yates steroid cycle so I figured it's probably time for me to come out and just say what i took so people don't try this and kill themselves he actually is fairly responsible position to take he comes out honestly says look i look to to do this i did this i took this and these amounts it's what i did it wasn't a make or break thing for me. Obviously, he made a pretty good analogy. He said you could give, in some

like marbled British accent, I won't try to replicate that. I will save everybody the pain of that. He says, you could take a small dog and give it steroids. And what do you get? You get a bigger, small dog. But you take a Rottweiler. He's making a parallel. I'm the genetically pure Rottweiler

in this scenario, which he probably could argue that. He's a phenomenal bodybuilder. You give them steroids and now you have a chance for a champion, which is probably true. But what most people don't hear usually is that open, honest message that, look, if you don't do this thing,

you don't have even a close shot. You have even a worse shot than you have now, but you can't compete with that guy without doing it. It's true another video i saw this week on actually only fitness when they're lifters so i'll leave the names out not necessary but he came out and said look if you want to compete in powerlifting or strongman or weightlifting here's probably what you should take as in i don't know why you would try unless you do this fundamental thing like sleeping or eating protein and lifting you probably need to do this other pillar of being a successful competitor in these sports and just to clarify that other pillar is a steroid regimen correct

yeah I would say I mean is it gonna make your break no but if you don't do it you're not gonna win a big competition I think that's pretty much true i remember you telling me a story at one point when you were we won't name names or whatever you were hanging out with some people and you got i guess you got in a car or something like that and yeah i was in i'll let you tell it let me tell this story i don't want to like botch it for you gather around the fire ladies and gentlemen this is a a good old-fashioned Christmas steroid story. Yeah, so I was deluded for many years in that I had a goal of being as strong as possible and really thought I could actually compete on a high level without doing drugs. In open honesty, Brad practices lie detector detector tests you can grab my arm you want

i actually have never taken a steroid of any kind ever not absolutely unequivocally true yeah not that that was real but it's actually true i've never taken any of it ever not because i had some sort of moral dilemma with it yeah that's because i didn't do that i just didn't i remember years ago you were talking about it. I was like, I was telling you, I was like, yeah, you should probably do steroids. Yeah. If you want, because you were talking about going to a certain level. I was like, you're going to have to do it.

And I really believe that I, not that I would get there, but I want to, I believe that I can take a good shot at this. I did okay. I mean, I was probably on an amateur level. I could probably place top three at any amateur meet, which I did pretty consistently. And I would go to a professional meet, which oddly enough in powerlifting just means that this meet we don't test. But the amateur ones, they tested you.

And the professional ones are sort of like, show up and lift. Hey, trophies. It was a thinly veiled, show up and lift. Hey, trophies. It was never, it was a thinly veiled. The difference is drugs. Sure. Huh?

And these guys that these amateur meets who were lifting five days a week and voting their fucking lives, the power lifting, we're totaling X amount. And these other guys who are doing the same thing, all just normal guys who are training really hard. We're tolling 400 pounds more for some reason. And that's the only reason it's because they were Rottweilers yes i used to go on train cations

in this time and i one train cation was to columbus ohio and during that week-long stay which all these stays were great you learn and you progress regardless of what you choose to supplement with but one thing we did was we took a a car ride with this crew of guys from this very famous gym over to, I think it was like Akron or, you know, a little bit west of Columbus, whatever the shit, the geography of Ohio was, I can't remember. Some city with some hole in the wall bench press meet where 10 guys from this gym were going to show up, put on tight bench shirts and try to impress a hundred people in the crowd by benching like 700 plus pounds. Fair enough.

So we went there. We had fun. I didn't lift, but I helped all the guys out. Coming back, it kind of split over into a discussion about training, and then it quickly turned into, yeah, I'm so beat up to shit and blah, blah, blah. And somebody kind of introduced, like, well, you should just take more of this thing. It'll help your ligaments and joints. And everybody's like, oh, yeah, I should do that.

Kind of like I say, you know, oh, Brad, you know, you should just take more of this thing you know it'll help your ligaments and joints and everybody's like oh yeah i should do that kind of like i say you know oh brad you know you should try a weightlifting shoe if you have ankle mobility issues or you should try to take some vitamin c if you have a cold like common knowledge shit that no one thought was provocative at all oh yeah i probably should do that right and so i sense and that that thing that was recommended to be taken was a steroid i'm yeah yeah was like, not that you're a master of steroids, but there's some steroids that they take to advocate joint health. Like, oh, this will help your joints feel better. This will help you gain a lot of strength.

But if you don't want to gain too much too quick, because then you could tear your ligament. So this thing is probably going to help your ligament. So it was some kind of discussion like that. I don't remember the specifics because I don't know this shit. Right. But I kind of mentioned, like, yeah, I have a problem with that because i usually had to stop training a little bit because i don't take the drugs and when i convincingly said i don't take drugs it was like it was like the record coming off the rails and like complete silence

and the guy at bat goes what the fuck you talking about you don't take drugs i don't take them he's like why would you even try that was the statement i almost remember that like stone cold truth he said why would you even try to compete without taking steroids and the guy suggests like i couldn't even come to the gym if i didn't take the drugs couldn't recover and i was doing the same training programs these guys and lifting with them doing okay and they suggested you shouldn't even come to train and try if you don't take the steroids sure and that was their reality like it'd be like saying why like if somebody told you that they didn't sleep more than two hours a night why why would you even not sleep? That was the kind of response I got.

It was that important to them. In retrospect, do you regret not taking drugs and being more competitive in your sport? No. Luckily, level ahead of the time, although I was willing to gain way too much weight and do damage to joints and to sacrifice personal development. I mean, there's a whole lot of things I could have been doing

other than just piloting. At the time, I gladly made those sacrifices, and I probably didn't carry a whole lot of regrets at that time. I learned a lot of good lessons. I would have done things differently, but that was one thing I didn't screw up on. I knew the whole time that it was probably something I didn't want to venture down because I knew I wanted to figure out how to make myself as strong as possible without doing the thing that i knew was just a shortcut i knew i wouldn't gain knowledge by training and

also taking that because i didn't i wouldn't know the difference with my training and yeah i mean and what effect this drug kind of lose sight of the journey at that point because there are guys i could clearly see like they were just doing whatever the fuck they thought would be fun that day and getting really strong. I was like, well, what would be the point

of just having this given to me? Because if I would have taken the steroids, I would have gone from squatting, I'm sure, 975

to maybe 1100. I would have benched maybe 800 instead of 675. I would have deadlifted 750 instead of struggling like a madman to deadlift 675. Those would have been really good numbers in 2001 or 2002, 2003.

It would have been fantastic. So that was the difference, really. Like I say, with clarity, I wouldn't go back and do it. I would never do it now. There's no point. Yeah, so let me ask you this. Is the only reason you chose not to take them because of their legality no i mean i actually i've never had much much of a fuss over

the legal aspects of it because i realized that look if if some guy wants to do this to compete in a sport sure i don't really see why anybody should step in and say i always had that sort of libertarian slant on that issue like why shouldn't you care if this guy takes steroids and behave and source them responsibly and not poison himself or whatever. I mean, who's to say, I don't care. I have an ethical issue with it.

My problem always was with the slow realization. I'm showing up to a meet to try to win and some guys doing this and he's propping himself up on his, his training and his approach. He's not really being honest. He's competing against me and trying to pass off as somebody who's not doing these things. Sure.

So like I said, the question for me becomes why didn't you like, like what was the, what was the factor that swayed you onto the, no, I'm not going to go down this road path. I guess it, it,

it boiled down to like, I want to know what I was capable of. Sure. You know, if I can't get there with thinking really hard about training and trying to do it the best way possible, then it just wasn't going to happen. And at that point, I was like,

if I took it and just got an extra 100 pounds on lifts, I didn't ever find that to be a very satisfying idea. That's what drives me now. What I write about and what I talk about and what I try to communicate is that, look, you can go after these goals and you can have that too. I'll do whatever it takes to get there. But once you get there, you got to realize looking back, you know,

was this worth it that I go after this for the right reasons? Was it on my terms? Because those are the things that actually make the goal meaningful to you. Not that you did something. I've trained up until a very recent past with guys who were training for reasons that weren't necessarily their own. They wanted something, but didn't even ask what the goal of it was. They were going to take whatever and do whatever just to get somewhere. And you get there and you realize none of that was really worth it. You've blown five years in

pursuit of something that was sort of a mirage. You didn't even take the time to think about it. What did you get out of it? What do you have to show for so i want people to as they begin it's a kind of a luxury if you can begin the process thinking about okay what do i really want out of this what do i what am i willing to give up what kind of balance am i after what do i want to develop what do i want to also do on the side to have fun keep proper perspectives that go through this in five years you could have a incredibly rewarding experience and save yourself all this struggle that we all have to go through on some level or another sure that's sort of my take on all that do you um competing in a in a sport that has like a culture of like steroid use being pretty much the norm uh and then

now you've you hang out with a bunch of crossfitters essentially uh and you watch the games and stuff like that do you do you do you kind of see the same stuff going on or do you do you think that crossfit competitions are relatively drug free what do you what i just want to know your opinion on that i mean i i mean sometimes i i wonder because you see the same sorts of i'll do whatever shit it takes to to nail this wide the same sorts of, I'll do whatever shit it takes to nail this wide. The same kind of personalities emerge as they do in whale thing and piloting astronomer where if I got paid a hundred dollars for calf compression sleeves,

I'll do it. If it means I can double under 5% faster. Sure. So I would never put it past somebody to take things to get better, especially now that money is coming in to play on CrossFit. Some people, people are going to take shit to do better, whether it's just massive amounts of something

that's legal or whether they venture into things to get recovered. I'm not actually sure how savvy the drug testing protocols that somebody meets for CrossFit are or if they even test. At CrossFit Games, are they screening athletes? They test a little bit now. You know what they do? Yeah. Well, they're taking

urine at regionals from the top competitors. I know one of the girls that got tested this last time. I can't remember if they took blood or not, but I think all they took was urine. One thing's for sure. When the CrossFit Games kicked off, no one even probably put a second thought towards drug testing. Everybody showed up in a field. They did the little little hopper testing and everybody had a good time they started testing in 2010 or at least they announced that they were going to be testing in 2010 i mean we probably all agree as soon as you put this sport on espn and as soon as you throw a 250

grand purse to the winner and as soon as sponsorship grows in and as soon as this sport becomes anything like you know football or uh you know tour de france cycling or something where there's big money notoriety to be had and you track more athletes who are willing to really compete at all costs this is going to be a problem and that's the other thing is tracking year-round uh they're only testing at the competition. You talk to some guys that are experts in getting past tests, like Victor Conti. Yeah, exactly. You talk to that guy, and he's got information online on how to bypass.

It's not hard to find, like, oh, you just stop taking this stuff this far out. You do this. You mask it this way. And Doug can probably talk about this from an MMA standpoint. You know, 2000 or 95, 96, when UFC was getting off the ground and it really wasn't a big deal. You know, nobody ever popped positive for steroids. But since what, Ultimate Fighter Season 1, you know, the proliferation of steroids in MMA has been much higher.

It's almost becoming normal. Exactly what Chris is talking about. Once people were getting more money for fighting and there was a lot more fame involved, it started to become a bigger issue. People want that shit, man. They get it at all costs. It's really disappointing.

This is my take on it. From somebody who's a very bordering on beginner, possibly moving to intermediate stage CrossFitter. It's really, you're the medium guy, right? I'm solid medium, moderate weight, medium speed, excellent mediocrity anyway. So, you know, when, when we look at, you know, when somebody in my position looks at, um, you know, somebody who's an elite level CrossFitter and, and they seem so far away, um, you know, or, uh, and a high level MMA guy, and then he, he pops positive for steroids. You know, it's a little disheartening, not so much that they're using steroids, but that just,

we can't have this honest dialogue about steroids. So that guy can't come out and say, Hey, to be competitive, you're going to have to do this. I don't care. I don't care if the most popular guys in the world use steroids. I just want the honesty. One thing that strikes me about this is it pops out at me every time I watch the CrossFit Games on ESPN

when they show the flight and they show the names of the rankings and they show the flag next to the athletes. This international world championship is 99% Americans. And that's just a fact that this is still really young, and developing athletes around the world don't quite know enough about this to target this as a competition.

But one thing's for sure. In America, even though some people are always going to cheat, it's probably going to be not a lot of people because we have this bizarre, like other drugs are great and fine, especially the ones over the counter regardless of safety and efficacy. But steroids is this thing. Oh man,

I couldn't do that. It's this, you know, this no other view, no other drug. Can you get dragged in front of Congress question in front of the whole world? But this is not true in probably the bulk of all other countries, especially

in former Soviet nations and Asian countries where I think there's this sort of accepted view of some substances. Like in weightlifting, I think it's a perfect analog. There's some open discussions on forums like Glenn's forum, like some

open exchanges about some of his lifters who have lived with other great lifters from other countries. And for a large part of the year, maybe a guy like Donnie Schengel or something is lifting toe to toe with a great Greek or Bulgarian weightlifter. And at a certain time during the year, this guy is going to add, you know,

30 kilos or 40 kilos, whatever to his total. And that difference is going to be because he or 40 kilos, whatever, to his total. And that difference is going to be because he started a cycle and he's moving into a different phase and he leaves you in a dust. Sure. He's not better than you in any way other than this thing he's doing. Right. And he confronts you and says,

why wouldn't you take this opportunity to be a world champion? So I think as time goes on, as more flags get on that map and as more international athletes like some some kid realizes he has an additional ticket to fame and fortune in this country and that's winning this crossfit games and in that country it's accepted that you can do some things that you couldn't do in america he's going to do it and he's going to compete and potentially take a lot of these competitions it's going to become more and more of a problem yeah i think that's almost certain and to be fair you know like i think that probably 95 of people who who point the finger at steroid use like

you know probably 95 of people who really aspire to be great crossfit athletes but never get there it's steroids wouldn't make the difference you know it's something something else you know they probably pop mcdonald's a couple times a week and get wasted on weekends and sleep. Between the four of us, how many guys can you name? Say what? Between the four of us, how many guys could you name either you know or in your mind you can think back to have seen them or know of them in a gym around town?

This goes for any town in the world. There's plenty of guys who show up to some run-of-the-mill globo gym and are taking steroids in order to be bloated and puffy-faced to bench 350. Which is really great for that guy.

But wouldn't win any power to me. That's probably the majority of steroid use, actually. It's giving you a bump. This guy would bench 205 without it. And I don't know that they care about benching 350. I think they want to look a certain way with their shirt off. I used to train somewhere where almost everyone was on something. 350 i think they want to look a certain way with their shirt off yeah i used to train somewhere

where they uh where it was almost everyone almost everyone was on something um and and yeah i don't think anyone cared about getting stronger they just wanted to look better right it's all about taking your shirt off at the beach that weekend or whatever and uh you know that was that was the mentality and like you know you ask those guys what they benched and they'd and uh you know that was that was the mentality and like you know you ask those guys what they bench and they'd be like you know they probably know but they don't really care sure there's all these kind of degrees and the other flip side is again we talked about before the show but there are high profile strength web leberties or whatever you want to call them who sell things and peddle things and sell ideas and are entertaining and they're they're getting attention and some of it's good but some

it's bad some of these people are in high profile positions where on camera on video in movies they have said statements like i'm not going to stop doing this because if i do i'm going to squat 200 pounds less and i just can't live with that reality. These are the same people who do things like instruct CrossFit courses. That's where I have a real rubber-meets-the-road conflict with... At least he's being honest. At the same time, a practical question should be, so I take training advice from you, why? Or why do we demonize steroids so so badly in the

first place well i mean that's a very valid point you know that if that guy can would lose 200 pounds on a squat you know he even with the steroids he's probably fitter than 95 99 of the general populace stronger you know. Not about fitter. Steroids just allow you to work harder and recover faster. So you can work harder again, so you can recover faster again than you would be able to do otherwise. In a lot of cases, people aren't taking steroids because they're lazy. They're taking steroids because they want to be able to work harder and get to wherever they're trying to go faster.

So they're not always... I think people think that in a lot of cases, that they're just being lazy and trying to take a shortcut, like you were saying earlier. They're not always, I think people think that in a lot of cases, that they're just being lazy and trying to take a shortcut, like you were saying earlier. They're not taking a shortcut necessarily. They're taking the only path to 1,200 pound squats. Sure.

You know what I mean? Yeah. But I think the real truth is that it all seems to be the honesty component. Therefore, when some 13-year-old kid seeks your advice and you give it to him and you're not disclosing the fact that this is just the way this is.

Yeah. I mean, I like what you're saying. The guy who gonna train like you i mean even though this guy is being honest about having done steroids before and then he's instructing people who have never been on it i mean like i mean is he is he talking from personal experience or has he actually trained drug-free athletes before because if he hasn't trained drug free athletes before then maybe he doesn't have any business telling drug-free athletes before. Because if he hasn't trained drug-free athletes before, then maybe he doesn't have any business telling drug-free athletes how they should train because he probably has no idea what that's like. Sure. Or, you know, effectively.

Have some people trained themselves drug-free and achieved success without? I think that's probably a number that's less than people who get to the podium on one of these sports and who have not done it anywhere close to being without AIDS. With exceptions, I think there are some really notable exceptions, like guys like Brad Gillingham, I think, who comes from a monstrously genetically gifted family,

who I think, if he's taken anything, has probably been very next to nothing. But the guy's just a big human being. And he trains a lot differently than other high-level guys who do things differently, or fundamentally different. I think there's some guys who you can tell immediately, like, this guy's just a freak of nature.

Those guys do exist. Like, the greatest story I ever heard was my old string of the ocean coach at the University of Memphis told me. He said he was in the gym bench pressing with Bill Kazmaier in Alabama like in the 70s. Bill Kazmaier was a monster.

Just genetically gifted in every way and a freak. And also taking loads of shit. I mean, that's just patently obvious to anybody who's looked at the guy. You saw his early 2000s return to strongman commentary and he went from being like 48, 50 year old fat Bill Kazmaier

to having a metric sponsorship in a year. It was like, okay, he made some decisions to do some other things. But there's this guy who walked into the gym. I forget his name. He was a big local farmer. Guy was like 400 pounds and had never lifted weights. Somebody brought him in. He goes, hey, this guy's Bill Kazmaier.

He goes, oh, I've seen you on TV whatever this guy had said it's like oh I like the bench press we he lays down how you do this oh this barbell is interesting I don't lift these that often he lays down like benches four or five for ten yeah and puts the bar in our act just a big fat guy but not a big site he works hard on the farm and then I think Kaz Marlins over his friend Eric it's also owns the gym and goes, if you invite this guy back, I'm never training here again.

Because there's this weird sort of conflict with, I'm doing certain things. Here's this guy who just has this gift and doesn't really work for it, doesn't have to do things I do. And he just could beat me. And it was this strange sort of like, if you get this guy out of here,

I'm going to quit. I'm leaving this gym. You're going to see me again. The old story i heard about casmar growing up was that he used to do conferences or you know just like strongman meetups or whatever and like as part of the the demonstration for the day he would pick five guys out of the audience and they would take the the the 90s the dumbbells and five guys would go try to press them overhead and then he would add up the number that all five of them them overhead and then he would add up the number that all five of them did right and then he would do it himself right and those are 90 kilo dumbbells nice geez which is about 200 pounds yeah it's crazy that's a ridiculous dumbbell but that kind

of brings another point like okay when you're when you're a young crossfitter up-and-comer you won't be strong you won't be fit you're looking at people for advice. There's the drug issue that is obvious. The other issue is some guys you're looking to are freaks. Sure. And they can just do things that you just can't do. It's like Leslie Schilling used to tell me stories about the Grizzlies and how one of the more famous point guards they had in the past, she'd always get on his case like, why don't you eat these?

Because this guy would show up eat like three hot dogs and play high level professional basketball I'm like why do I gotta eat worry about my nutrition

I had to eat hot dogs I make like 10 million dollars a year playing basketball sure the guy's that's a good point if I was making 10 million dollars a year I'd be eating something

better than hot dogs yeah well it's kind of like the stories I hear about I mean you know Rich really well, does Rich pay a whole lot of attention to his diet

all the time? Is he sometimes eating hamburgers and whatever he wants? And he competes at a high level. The guy is a freak. It doesn't mean,

oh, me and Brad Pope want to get better at CrossFit. We don't have to worry about eating hamburgers. We'll just train because Rich Froning eats hamburgers. That's the kind of disconnect you have to face.

So if you're also talking about mirroring his training and trying to do the things he does, regardless of what you do, it's going to be foolish. It's going to end terribly. You should buy a mirror as nutrition as well. That's what I'm just kidding. But that's the kind of discussion you've got to have. If I'm going to mirror, I've got to realize some things

that are going to really affect the outcomes of what I'm doing. Right. Ironically, I feel like that's probably the only area that I would ever be able to compete with rich froning in anything. I bet I could probably eat more Rolos than rich froning. Gauntlet laid down. If you're out there listening, rich froning, it probably is. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to take a break real quick. And when we come back, we're going to talk about, uh, getting muscle and weight and stuff like that without having to take the juice. welcome back we're discussing moderate weights medium speeds but with uh brad pope uh supplement

steroids gaining muscle chinese chops with women playing violins fake lean boy shorts exactly and we're gonna i promise you that we're gonna talk about gaining muscle without the use of steroids i want to go into something real quick though um i entered a daily bs the other day and uh talked about the guy i'm not sure i uh i think we can go into this question a little more detail there's a guy he weighs about 165 pounds i'm not sure how tall he is he was squatting you know in the in the low threes dead lifting in the low fours and he was asking you know his end goal it is it's pretty strong and his end goal is to uh be competitive at crossfit um so he was kind of asking, like, should I forsake the conditioning for a while

to really pursue the strength? You know, what's the best route here? And I advise him to get stronger, but I think I may have left out some of the details on what I would do. So I'll tell you right now. And that is that you probably need to add about 100 pounds to your squat, add about 100 pounds to your deadlift

if you want to truly be competitive I don't know any guys that are going to the games and there's plenty of guys that aren't going to the games that are just placing top 30 at regionals and those guys are all deadlifting around 500 pounds I'm not seeing anyone who's not doing that.

And the flipping lifts as well. Sure. And they're all at least in the 185 to 215 range. Yeah, exactly. There's a guy, I can't remember the name of the blog, but he does a lot of stats with the open regionals and the games. Maybe I can try to find that and post that. But I know it was on my Facebook wall at some point.

But he basically talked about the average weight of the guy, the guys that were doing the best. It ended up being like 185, 190 last year. They were between 5'8 and 5'9. And you watch these guys, they're snatching at least 245 pounds. So that's a big snatch. They're cleaning 315 or more. If you want to be able to do those things, you are going to have to lay off of.

And this used to not be the case because CrossFit used to not be this competitive. You used to be able to jump on CrossFit.com, do the WOD, and then show up. And you'd probably do pretty damn good uh but now what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to say okay i'm preparing for two years from now and i'm gonna have to really develop myself not just in strength but in skill as well so uh everything's becoming much more skill based so you're to have to sit really sit back and do a lot of raw strength work and a lot of Olympic weightlifting type work. I don't advise I used to advise a little bit strongly, more strongly about just forsaken conditioning altogether and just get stronger

only. But I've seen some pretty good results out of guys who just cut their conditioning back and maybe stayed away from the longer duration stuff, maybe kept it very interval-based. Keep the intervals really, really short. Keep it fast and keep it light for your conditioning, and then maybe two or three days a week. But five days a week, you are lifting heavy. And then maybe go through phases of hypertrophy where you're lifting heavier weights or lighter. Well, I'll say heavier weights. Yeah, moderate weight at medium speed. Stay away from my specialty, huh? No, I mean, that's exactly what you want to do.

You want to load up, you know, stuff that you can do sets of 10 with if you want to put on size. So you probably need to go through some cycles where you get bigger and then you get stronger. I mean, with size is going to come some strength, but, um, if you weigh 165 pounds,

you probably want to shoot to get to 195 pounds first and then try to get strong. If you're a training guy who's a little bit smaller naturally, that's not going to be easy thing. That's going to take a lot of focus. Right. A lot of easy path for you to put on 30 pounds yeah so i mean my advice is do you know your strength training you're gonna cycle back and forth between like hypertrophy phases and

strength phases but you know keep the conditioning light short and then um your eating is gonna have to be phenomenal a lot of really good food just eat big uh i i personally my favorite method for gaining weight is and i've tried everything um it is uh goat milk i i personally prefer goat milk just because uh cow's milk gives me congestion the casein messes me up but you can use any kind of milk really um and i mean i can eat paleo and if I just crush, I probably eat about 3,000 calories a day, paleo. And if I crush a gallon of milk on top of that, which is going to add another 2,500 to 3,000 calories in a day, I tend to put on weight really fast. Imagine that.

And I get strong real fast, too. It's not just like I get big and fat. My squat goes up. My press goes up. Everything goes up. It's pretty just like I get big and fat. My squat goes up. My press goes up. Everything goes up. It's pretty miserable, but it works. If you can go with raw milk, that's preferable just because the fats in that milk are probably from pastured animals. It also has not been pasteurized, so the fats are going to be higher quality and stuff like that. Doug can speak to this. There's probably not a bottle of muscle milk in the world

that can touch just a cheap glass of milk, right? I mean, in terms of cost versus benefit. Yeah, it's cheap, and it's pretty well balanced overall. I mean, kind of like he's saying, if you can get it raw, that's ideal, which is illegal in Tennessee. Is that right? It is. It's actually a felony.

We don't know anyone that's ever done that. I actually go to a state where it's legal i drink it there and then i come back right yeah it's digested by the time it gets back so you know while we're answering this question i i you know this has popped up over the last few days uh james from opt uh recently made a post on on his opt blog that to the effect that you know he feels that crossfit may be taking a little bit of a, too much of a strength skewed direction. He says that, you know,

there's something maybe kind of wrong. I believe that James probably feels that way. When he says, I believe him. He says, he believes there's something that might be kind of wrong when your top athletes could qualify for a USA Olympic weightlifting meet, but couldn't qualify for a high school track meet.

So now conversely, thank you. It's what's a high school track meet. I think that's bullshit. Conversely, it's what's helping them win the games. It is biased towards heavy weightlifting. I think a lot of those guys can do pretty well at track meets. Who wants to look like a high school track athlete? I don't think that's a good argument.

Conversely, Mark Ripto posted on T Nation about how he believes that... Crossfitters are too weak? No. He believes that strength translates to athletics more than endurance ever will. He thinks that strength makes a better foundation for athletics. Strength actually can have a greater effect on endurance than endurance training. So there you go.

Yeah, so do you guys kind of weigh into that, that strength is much more important than your endurance training? Oh, man, this is like a whole other podcast. We'll just totally do that in there. That's a really good topic, actually. It's just yes or no question. Okay? Yeah, okay, I'll go.

Sorry, Mike. You're making me derailed. They literally just popped up within like 20, I just read them within like 24 hours of each other, you know? Yeah. I don't think people are, these guys are doing wands for three, four days in a row in a week. If that's not endurance, you're a moron.

All right? Well, in the CrossFit Games, they did a triathlon. They did a sprint triathlon. They're doing – they're throwing things. They're not just doing Metcons. Right. Now, here's my question to that. You look at their snatch numbers,

and their snatch numbers, I would assume even during the games, are probably USAW meat-worthy. I have no idea what their sprint try times are. Are they competitive sprint try times compared to a professional sprint try guy? Well, the problem is the sprint try they did was they were wearing fins, and then they were in the sand so much on the bikes in the run that it would be a very, very tough comparison, unfortunately. I would like to see an even comparison.

There are some CrossFit athletes, some high-level guys, going and running a marathon is not hard for them. I'm not sure what their times are. Michelle Kenny is someone who does really well well she comes from an endurance background though so maybe it's not a good example but she runs uh half marathons at really uh fast paces yeah she does she's very competitive at that so um and she's no one would call michelle weak um but uh going back to that same blog where that guy runs all those stats on he also ran a bunch of stats on uh priority of movements at the open regionals and at the games

right and uh what got the highest uh the movement that was ranked the highest was actually the snatch yeah so james james may be right in the in the movement selection right ranked the highest was actually the snatch. Yeah. So James, James may be right in the, in the movement selection. Right. But as far as strength and stuff like that, I, I, I would have to disagree.

I think, I think that the people that are in the games are insane athletes and whatever they, if they chose to do some kind of endurance game, I thought was actually well balanced things I've seen at a CrossFit. I thought it was well done. Yeah. Those stats, those stats showed that at the open it was lightweight and a lot of weightlifting-type movements, a lot of barbell stuff.

At regionals it was heavy, real heavy, not a lot of gymnastic skill work. And then once they got to the games games it was a whole lot of gymnastics it was much more it wasn't as heavy as regionals which was like you know at first thought you're like oh you think it'd be heavier at the games it's not it's much higher skill so that the weight lifting at the games is not as difficult as it was at regionals this past year i'd say if there's a bias there's a skill bias you have to be very skilled and efficient to do well hey they were hitting a thing with a hammer what the hell is that there's a wide array of complex things unknown and unknowable that's right so so let's just cut that down to brass tacks like do you think endurance is as important as strength

strength training yes or no no okay i definitely think it's more important like strength strength is the foundation for all movement you have to be able to do something at all to be able to do it many times right right so if you're talking about like like endurance endurance like doing a try you're doing something super low load for a long time sure but in a crossfit competition usually you're doing something moderate weight medium speed and if you're really really strong then your moderate weight has a much larger range than someone who's just not as strong so there's actually research to support that crazy yeah being freaking strong is going to be the first thing you need to cover there's there's gonna be a point of diminishing returns for sure for sure you know if you take your data from 550 to 650 well maybe maybe you could have spent that time the time it took you

to get that extra 100 pounds doing something else that could have helped you a lot more. There's an opportunity cost there. Sure. Absolutely. But being able to front squat double body weight or snatch body weight in half, those are some things that are going to get you very far in the world of CrossFit. Sure. The other thing, too, in regard to just health, you take somebody who,

say they've been a marathon runner their whole life. At 65 years old, I think Brian Schilling was joking about this with somebody. He was like, you know, at 65, you're not going to be able to, like, unscrew the lid off your jar. At 65, I will. Right. You know, like most guys should be packing on probably as much healthy muscle as possible because you're going to start losing it when you get older. Sure. And then Andy Galpin, he's got a really great, Dr. Galpin out of Cal State Fullerton. Yeah.

He has a really great presentation on how leg strength is a better correlation to heart health than anything else we can measure. Crazy. And that's lipid profiles and cardio rest, VO2 max and all that BS. Again, it goes back to strength is probably more important. And if you're not very strong, then what's the point? Why would you even want to live? Throw yourself off the Chrysler building.

I feel like we hit the best part of this whole thing at the very end. For older people, losing power, the ability to produce force quickly, they lose that much quicker than losing pure raw strength. So training older people for power is one of the things that's of the biggest importance. The other thing is training older people for mobility. Actually, I got to say more ability. Mobility. Mobility.

For more mobility. I was to say more ability. Mobility. Mobility. For more mobility. I was like, more ability. Actually, I don't bring that up quite yet. I got a quiz for you. What's the number one mobility restriction that puts older people into old people homes? I would guess hips or knees. I'm going to say ankles. What about joints?

Yeah, yeah. What restriction? Neck. Close. Closer. What about a joint? Yeah, yeah. What restriction? Neck. Close. Closer. Back? Yes, thoracic spine rotation. Oh, really?

Yeah, because once they can't rotate and once they can't wipe themselves, that's when the kids are like, no, you've got to go in the home. You've got to go. Is that real or is that a joke? No, I just heard that. I watched Mike Boyle's Functional Strength Coach 4, and he was talking to a guy that he knows who primarily trains older people, and that's what that guy told him, and he said that on that DVD series.

Wow, interesting. Yeah, I totally didn't know that. Yeah, so now – I guess it would be like 55, like, Ashley, I can't reach. You're in trouble, man. I'm getting really worried now. It hurts. We could just take the sumo approach where, you know, the lower guy on the totem pole

wipes you. I know. Olympic weightlifting does not help my T-spine rotation at all. We're going to have so many older athletes at our gym doing thoracic rotation this week. That's right. That's actually terrifying. What brought you to faction? I'm going to start doing thoracic rotations this week i need

to wipe my ass right so i guess now that we've kind of established that baseline uh that that we've decided and as a collective that strength is more important how do we do that without steroids no you know you can get strong enough right yeah and that's the thing is like it's like for crossfit in regard to steroids you can get strong enough to be competitive at crossfit without doing steroids but to do the volume um what what what may end up being the game changer is maybe not absolute strength gains but what may be the fact that if you're doing drugs, you can just train more frequently with more volume. So you might be able to attain more endurance and stuff like that just because you can increase your work capacity. Right.

Yeah. If you're eating very wisely, you're investing in good food, you're investing in sleep, you're prioritizing those things. And if you're carefully considering training stimulus and you're carefully organizing it, you should be strong enough to be fine. It's just that if a guy chooses to do it the other way, he's going to be better than you quicker. But I think within CrossFit, there's plenty of a skill component where you can make up that bit of ground without taking that route. I think if you lack some of the basic skills and being athletic through some of those movements,

there's no amount of drugs that are going to get you there. Yeah, the good thing, if you look at, perhaps a final point, in America, like in gymnastics, we still kick ass even without drugs because there's huge skill and cultural components that make us able to compete at a high level. Shot put and strong man and weightlifting, where the strength components are much higher and drugs play a bigger role, it's not like that. But I think CrossFit's much more like gymnastics than it is those other sports.

I think you can still excel with attention to detail, skill work, effort. Recovery means you can do well. There's no need to resort to drugs. But it's going to get to a point where it's going to become more of an issue for sure. It's going to happen. But there's a reason why we still kick China's ass in weightlifting.

Despite the crazy shit they're up to. Go America! We did? Yeah, we won gold medal. Well, the women did. It's like, yeah, remember the gold? But the men were oh yeah it's like yeah remember the gold but the men the gold medal the men are contenders

if the men don't get on the podium they're a disappointment so we were still highly competitive in gymnastics there's a reason skill matters

in gymnastics we were oh you're talking about weightlifting and gymnastics a second ago gymnastics oh yeah okay we'd kick China's ass in weightlifting

I was like I don't remember that at all where there's more balance between endurance and skill and strength there is still the opportunity

to just outwork somebody who has an advantage over you that's why we will remain pretty good at basketball

too skill matters skill matters everybody looks at me and goes skill matters it does

that didn't have anything to do with muscle or strength what are you talking about skill, drugs, practice not as sexy as bullshit coffee, weight lifting let's shut it down I was just going to pull my microwave my microwave and my microphone away

see how long this can go on without me. All right. What do you want to plug, Doug? Hey, that rhymes. Very good. Good job. How many times has that been used? I guess I always plug maximum mobility, but we talk more about nutrition for today's episode,

so I'll talk a little bit about that. See, I wanted to say maximum mobility. The Faction about nutrition for today's episode so i'll talk a little bit about that uh see i want to say maximum ability uh the faction foods nutrition course excuse me um we talked a little bit about supplements in it but for the most part the majority of the core excuse me is dedicated to you know exactly what to eat and how to structure your meals and gives you a good framework on to um on which to kind of hang your decision making process so you always know what to eat and when to eat it regardless if you're trying to lose weight you know improve your performance or just trying to gain muscle mass just like we were going to talk about on the second half but we never really got no yeah that's right drink milk if you want to get bigger and do do bodybuilder squats sets of

8 to 12 nice there you go good luck godspeed all right so check out the faction foods nutrition course in the fitter store chris yeah the chris more blah.com new post up today go read it check it out it's cool what's it called uh of bulls and china shops perfect you can write that when you get home i wrote it it actually exists on there now on the internets google's it i don't believe you you don't have to believe me wait what do you got brad um i got nothing i didn't know if anyone needs some hard water right that's why i start with doug that way like the guest can be like oh shit multi-level china.org backslash whatever we

will have a new seminar coming out here pretty soon you look at me like you didn't know which one it was is that a question i'm really confused yeah paul's seminar is gonna be coming out here in the next couple weeks so uh be on the lookout for that we'll have it in the fitter shop hopefully maybe a week after this episode posts sweet yeah yeah it's also a nutrition seminar did you plug mike no i didn't plug yeah again go to fitter.tv sign for the newsletter check out our stuff subscribe to us on the twitters go to fitter tv and read everything that's basically what's happening here catch up you know if you're behind so see you next time all right thanks guys