Barbell Shrugged - The Path to Being The Greatest of All Time w/ Mike Boyle — Barbell Shrugged #371

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

Mike Boyle is one of the foremost experts in the fields of Strength and Conditioning, Functional Training and general fitness. He currently spends his time lecturing, teaching, training and writing. In 1996 Mikel co founded Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, one of the first for-profit strength and conditioning companies in the world. Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning exists for one reason: to provide performance enhancement training for athletes of all levels. Athletes trained range from junior high school students to All Stars in almost every major professional sport.   Prior to Co- founding Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, Mike served as the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Boston University for 15 years, also for the past 25 years he been  the Strength and Conditioning Coach for Men's Ice Hockey at Boston University. Mike also was the Boston Red Sox strength and conditioning coach in 2013 that won the World Series. In addition to his duties at Boston University and the Red Sox, from 1991-1999 Boyle served as the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League. Mike was also the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the 1998 US Women's Olympic Ice Hockey Team, Gold Medalists in Nagano and 2014 Silver medalists in Sochi, and served as a consultant in the development of the USA Hockey National Team Development Program in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In this episode of Barbell Shrugged, Mike discusses starting the strength program at Boston University, being the first voice in strength and conditioning online, the process of continual growth 30 years later and creating an entire industry and reshaping the way our country views strength coaches.   Enjoy! - Anders and Doug ___________________ Episode Breakdown:   ⚡️0-10: Mike Boyle’s background and the importance of opportunity   ⚡️11-20: How to be a good strength coach and why reading is important ⚡️21-30: How to go from follower to leader ⚡️31-40: The importance of perspective, developing good coaches, and finding the right people ⚡️ 41-50: What is the role of a strength coach? ⚡️51-60: The Crossfit conversation and how to prescribe exercise ⚡️61-68: The fundamentals of strength and conditioning and squatting ⚡️69-80: Finding the holy grail   ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-boyle ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20%@bioptimizers: www.BiOptimizers.com/shrugged  “shrugged” to save 37% ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrug family, we're going long today. Mike Boyle is in the house. Mike Boyle is the greatest of all time when it comes to strength coaches. His depth of knowledge spans over 30 years. He has created a web of strength coaches that has infiltrated every single level of sports from the Olympics to professional sports to collegiate sports, all the way through youth sports. Doug and I went to Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning in Boston, and there are hundreds of kids running around, learning how to lift weights properly, getting faster, getting stronger, wiring movement mechanics, really incredible stuff going on at his facility. But on top of that, he has been the strength coach for Boston University men's ice hockey for over 25 years. And he's been the head strength and conditioning coach at Boston University for over 15 years.

And guess what? Before he showed up, that position never ever actually was a position. In fact, he created it by just posting up in the gym and helping people get stronger and faster. He created it. It did not exist. On top of that, anything you have heard about strength and conditioning at a professional level, these people that are demanding high six-figure salaries, they all come out of his coaching program. He has gold medals. He's got national championships. He's got World Series rings for the Boston Red Sox when they broke their curse in 2013. Boston University Ice Hockey, U.S. Women's Ice Hockey,

gold medals and silver medals. And he's a consultant for USA Hockey's National Development Programs. This guy has done everything, continues to be a speaker, continues to be an influence on the strength and conditioning community, and truly a legend and the greatest of all time. There is nobody else that has had a greater influence on this industry than Mike Boyle. With that, I want to thank our sponsors today, BioOptimizers. BioOptimizers.com forward slash

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Gold Juice with the pumpkin spice. Christmas in my mouth every day. Ready to get into the show? Make sure you take a screenshot. Tag me at anders varner hit me with the hashtag go long we're doing this thing the greatest of all time mike boyle let's go He cracks me up so much

because he really doesn't play up the fact that he's an Ivy League student. No, not at all. And if you looked at him, that wouldn't be your first guess. In fact, on Instagram the other day, I think he got his first real haircut. I know. I saw that. It's funny because he was one of these guys. I was dying.

I couldn't believe it. I don't even know why. He walked in here one day and said, you know, I really want to be an intern. You know, I went to Columbia, and I'm like, what? I'm like, what the fuck? You went to Columbia, and you want to be an intern? You stopped in Boston. You were supposed to go to New York.

Could you please explain to me what would possibly make you want to do that? And then we'll work. Then we'll move from there. I'll be ready to rock, dude. Let's do it. Are we rolling? Yeah. Welcome to Barbell Strug.

My name is Anders Varner. Hanging out with Doug Larson. We are at Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning. It took me years to get over here. Years and years. This is the first time in Boston. We are hanging out with Mike Boyle. And and conditioning. It took me years to get over here. Years and years. In Boston, we are hanging out with Mike Boyle. And just a small back story. Three-ish years ago, I was going through this crazy life-changing process

where I was questioning all the things I was doing in my gym. Is CrossFit really the right thing to be doing? And you spend hours on the Internet searching for the truth. Mike Boyle was the very first person that I found and took the deep dive for about two years. Found myself at a certified functional strength coach seminar at Perform Better. And what I didn't know at the time was,

you're a legend. You've been doing this forever. You've got gold medals. You've got World Series rings. You've coached literally i'm gonna just say hundreds i said literally hundreds without actually knowing the number but nhl hockey players um strength coach at boston university it's an unbelievable resume of the number of people that you've worked with yeah i guess that's what happens time time is a good thing 30 37 years

actually i figured out the other day I've been actually coaching for 37 and I've probably been involved in this field like started probably like had the you know the Joe Weider chart the weight set you know 47 years ago one of the interesting things that I think

you at the time that the internet happened you already had like 20 years under your belt. Which is a really interesting thing to go through this as a career because we didn't know who to learn from when we were 15 years old. And then T Nation showed up. Bodybuilding.com showed up. Your name was kind of popping around. There was articles.

But there was nobody really, what happened in that time where you were like, man, I can actually write blogs and educate the world on how to do this thing properly? It's funny because someone asked me, they said, describe the greatest technological change of your career. And I was like, the personal computer. And they just looked at me, they're like, what? And I'm like, the personal computer. There just looked at me they're like what and i'm like the personal computer there was no such thing as a personal computer when i started doing this i had an apple 2c yeah i don't remember what i had but yeah and so apple was definitely the one at a 386 you know that is right exactly that's yeah atari or something or uh i'm trying to know commodore was 386 right i think it was a commodore yeah i was gonna say ibm but i really don't know

i think it's a commodore actually to be honest and but so i remember the first computer companies i remember the first attempts i remember all these things i remember a friend coming to me and telling me what the internet was yeah a chemistry professor and saying you should get your stuff up on the internet and thinking like i don't know what this is but But I've always been, the one thing I have been is I've been an early adopter. So when the internet thing started to happen, I was smart enough to realize, wait a second, this internet thing is probably going to stick. Well, I think that it's interesting, too, because there was probably, I mean, probably in any profession, the people that were operating and thinking at the same level that you were at that time, is probably, there's a handful, maybe 20 people. Dan John's floating around. Gray Coke's floating around.

You guys kind of had to find each other. The internet somehow connected you guys. What was it like actually finding the people? Or were you going to seminars and finding these other people that were trying to put a real story to strength and conditioning and do it the proper way. Well, the interesting thing was it was more kind of the network and the seminar circle. I can remember meeting Greg Cook through another friend of mine, Darrell Eto, who was one of the original athletes performance employees before there was EXO. So this was actually, if you follow Mark all the way back, there was International Performance

Institute, which was down in Bradenton, Florida, at Ball Terry Tennis Academy. And a bunch of guys, Brandon Marcello and Daryl and Mark, and a bunch of guys came out of kind of that group of people. I actually found them through an article in Outside Magazine. So it was magazines. I mean, when I started out doing this, we were reading muscle and fitness. We were reading strength and health. We were reading strength and health we were reading iron man and this was really and then sort of muscle media 2000 came along which was kind of the the next step up i guess in some of these things and you had you were still learning to filter you

were looking at stuff and trying to think okay these guys believable and not realizing okay who writes the articles i had a friend who used to write for muscle and fitness and he would show me his article and be he'd be like, look at this article that I wrote as Arnold. I said, what are you talking about? He's like, I'm a ghostwriter for Muscle & Fitness. He said, I write articles. He was one of the first guys I worked with in the fitness industry.

That's so awesome. I'm Arnold. I'm Arnold. And he was literally like, I don't know, I shouldn't say Arnold, because I'll probably get sued, but he was some big bodybuilder of the time. Sylvester Stallone is not listening. Go with him. You know what I mean?

He said, this article. He goes, I wrote that. But Muscle & Fitness then would publish them under the names of whatever, Lee Haney or whoever the champ of the time was would write a bicep article. And you didn't even realize that some of these guys, they may not have been able to write. They may not have spoken English. You have no idea. But you just you assume there was this and it's like the internet now there's this assumption that the people who are writing or speaking actually have some idea of what they're doing which is a totally erroneous assumption and it's so much worse now

because the internet doesn't have an editor yeah and at least at the time in the muscle magazine industry there were editors who were somewhat responsible for making sure that there was some element of veracity to what someone was saying. The internet now is just, if you shout from the rooftops loud enough and long enough, eventually people start believing that what you said was true. I feel like one of the downsides of the internet is that everyone is now gravitating toward smaller, smaller bite-sized pieces of information. They're reading articles and blog posts. Podcasts are actually kind of rejuvenating like the long form conversation things, but people aren't reading textbooks anymore. Like back when, like when I graduated college, um, you, Eric Cressy, um, Mike, or not Mike, Mike Boyle, you Mike Boyle, um, great cook, uh, Shirley Sarman. Like I was reading these, these longer

textbooks, uh uh your advances in functional training book gray's movement books you know shirley's movement impairment syndrome book that whole joint by joint concept really kind of gave me a framework for movement and i don't feel like if i if i just read blog posts and whatnot i wouldn't have as comprehensive of a view of those concepts uh like i did with when i read a whole textbook and i feel like people really got away from that and i feel like for for people that want to be a good strength coach, you can't just read articles. You have to dig into the textbooks and have these long-form conversations

to really be as good as you can be. So I feel like for me, if I just stuck with doing articles, then I'm swimming in circles right now. I'm actually relatively nervous to meet you because that's really what's happening right now. But that's okay. Which doesn't happen very often. But what you're saying is absolutely right

because you realize the people now, and this is unfortunately, this will be a millennial thing in terms of we're existing in bite-sized chunks of one and two minute videos. and it's sort of what can you do on instagram right now you know in under 60 seconds that can grab somebody and and people do i always you need to understand anatomy you need to understand physics if you understand anatomy and you understand physics then you can start to read shirley sarman you can be like everybody

should read diagnosis and treatment of movement impairment syndromes i actually went and met Shirley, which was really funny. So I'm not a fan type, but I took a picture with Shirley at her seminar and I went up and I introduced myself. And she said, she goes, I know who you are. She said, I have tons of people come to my seminars because of you. She said, I have no idea why. And I said, and I literally, she's a little teeny lady. She's a physical therapist. She's probably five feet tall. I said, you've revolutionized strength and conditioning as I understand it. And she looked at me, she goes, I have? I said, absolutely. I said, you've made me think about everything differently. And she was dumbfounded in terms of, I had no idea that anybody who had anything to do with strength and conditioning even knew that I

existed on the planet, much less was going to come to one of my seminars and listen to me talk. But you're right. So I guess the point is we do at some point need to move back into, like you said, whether more long form stuff in it, not even necessarily the conversation I think is great because we're finding a way to occupy mindless time for people in terms of when they were driving. Like for me, this is a great way. If I get to drive, my daughter goes to school six hours away i can you know a three or four podcast ride and i can feel like hey i'm a lot smarter yeah than i was when i got in the car which is really

really good but at the same time you do have to read books and it's doesn't sound absurd you have to read books yes because that's what people always say would be like what do you like what did you do before i read people do it right but that's like what did you do to read books? Yes. Because that's what people always say. Like, what did you do before? I don't think many people do anymore. Right, but that's what people are like, what did you do? I read books. Yeah. I read a lot of books.

Well, I think that reading books is incredibly important. The internet piece is cool for these little quick hits, but how you read the book from Shirley, how long does it take you to create the joint-by-joint kind of training

system that you've put together? Like where, where, how did you enter into strength and conditioning? Because when I, one thing that I struggled with when we were talking CrossFit and we can like going from CrossFit to understanding and finding you, I instantly recognized, oh, CrossFit and strength and conditioning are very different. And when I view your career, it's 100% pure strength and conditioning. And I feel like the joint by joint system kind of came out of that. So kind of where did you enter into it? And maybe some of the big pieces that led into the joint by joint system. So I entered into it legitimately.

I went to school to be, I thought I was going to be an athletic trainer, which is I still am a certified athletic trainer. So initially I had the I thought I was going to be an athletic trainer, which is I still am a certified athletic trainer. So initially I had the idea that I was going to be dealing with injured athletes. Because if you think about this, strength and conditioning didn't exist. If you think about it, if you go back to my early background, this whole kind of bodybuilding, physical culture thing was a bit of an oddity. There was small kind of mom and pop sort of gyms where these odd people who like to lift weights all congregated together.

And that was sort of the initial intro for somebody like me. But I, you know, it's funny. Again, early adopter. I can remember thinking as a kid, if I want to get better, I need to figure out what you can do to get better and that led me to strength training the idea that okay if i get stronger i will probably get better at sports yeah

and that led me and that's why i wrote years ago i wrote evolution of a strength coach you know it led me to um power lifting i competed as a power lifter in the 80s that's one of the things i tell people is that i'm not telling you anything that I haven't already done wrong. And that's why when people argue with me, I'm like, sorry, been there, done that. It's been 37 years. There's like a stage of your life where you do a certain type of training and then you get hurt and you go, I got to back this up. That's evolution of a strength coach. I said, everybody's the bodybuilder first, right? Everybody wants to look cool and meet girls. That's why guys start lifting weights. Very rare do guys start lifting weights really without the idea of, wow, I really want to look good at the beach with my shirt off. And then what you realize.

I still want that. Married and I have a kid, I still want that. See, and I'm not. I'm going to Florida tomorrow. Just because. Just to have it. I'll be the fat guy at the pool tomorrow happily drinking a beer with no zero remorse. But what you realize is then, as you go through your education, so when you're first in the gym, you're doing curls and benching.

You're like an idiot and you tell people how much you can bench. Like I always say to somebody, if you ever have a conversation with anybody and they start explaining to you how much weight they can lift, you should immediately exit the conversation. Like, okay, this guy's a moron. I can't believe he's an adult and he wants to tell me, you know, what his best lifts are. It's like, oh, God, spare me. I'll tell you right now. Back on that joint by joint concept, has that concept evolved in any particular way over like the last five or ten years? I don't think it's really evolved much, no, because I always said to people it was just it's a framework it's a way to get people to think that's what i remember and i can

tell you exactly what happened we're sitting at a bar great cook and i and some other people and somehow we're talking about the whole movement screen idea and i said well you know squatting is always an ankle problem and he said yeah he goes because it just the joints just alternate you know mobile stable mobile stable mobile stable and i was like what do you mean and he said yeah he goes because it just the joints just alternate you know mobile stable mobile stable mobile stable and i was like what do you mean and he said well you know your ankles always need to be more mobile you know people always have stiff ankles he said but your knee obviously just needs to be stable he said and then your hip really needs to be mobile and then your lumbar spine needs to be stable and i literally was like okay freeze and gray's one of

these guys he's so smart like he says smart stuff all the time And doesn't know that it's smart Because he's really smart And I was like stop And I literally got The bartender's pen We were literally talking about him He's too good Right He's too good

You almost don't believe him Right It's too smooth It's too good But you know why His dad's a preacher See Honestly when I say that

He gets up We literally were talking I was like I watched him talk He's too good He's too smooth. He spent his life in church listening to his dad preach. So when he gets up to talk, you're like, I believe this guy.

Right? Like he's smart and I believe him. He has that quality. So I literally wrote on a bar napkin. I wrote like ankles mobile, knees stable. And I said, this is freaking – like he's absolutely dead on right. And I've never thought about it like this. And it really explains why we're doing what we're doing.

And then I wrote this joint by joint approach to training. I said, okay, I need to write this article because everybody else needs to understand this. Because what to Gray was so readily apparent was not readily apparent to anybody but Gray. Yeah. Literally. No one else had said the words that he had said. And then suddenly I'm there like going. Because even if you talk now like to Greg Rose, it's the foundation of the TPI golf program.

It's become so foundational that I don't get credit for it anymore, which I think is really funny. And I've actually had to – I had another person whose name I will leave out but who's a podcaster, strength and conditioning coach, who actually published it. And I was like, you can't publish it without saying where it came from. I said, you literally took my chart out of my book and there's no reference. And he's like, oh, I didn't know. That's the internet. I'm like, exactly. there's no reference and he's like oh i i didn't know that's the internet i'm like exactly that's me and that's exactly it the internet unedited in terms of i'm like you did know because that's my chart i said i can show you the page of the book where you took my chart from so you knew because it was my book and it was my chart in my book but that's the internet in terms of it's amazing how people

as you said there's no um there's no need to credit anybody else there's almost a built-in desire to not credit everybody else because you want to be perceived as the expert so if you can make people think that it was your idea then you can hopefully up your stock in their mind and you know whatever yeah get another click or sell another DVD or get whatever it is, whatever you're looking to do. Who was the guy that – I think this was you that said this on a seminar that I saw at one point. Who was the guy that said, like, you get two weeks and then I thought of it? I said that, but I stole that, which is true. Peter Friesen, actually, former athletic trainer for the Carolina Hurricanes, gets credit for that.

And I don't know if I stole it from him. I'm not sure who he stole it from. But I use it all the time because that's – but interestingly enough, I'll tell you, this goes back to the history part. I go to Springfield college in 1977 and I am lucky enough to walk. I walk up to my dorm and there is a large man at the door kind of greeting everybody as they come in, who obviously lifts weights. I introduce myself to him. His name's Mike. My name's Mike.

No big deal. We go about our business. I find out he's the field event graduate assistant coach. He's my dorm director, and he's the graduate assistant field event coach. So he's going to coach the shot putters and the discus throwers. And then I find out he's like at Boston College. He holds the record for the shot and discus, all these things. And I just realized, then I realized he's got every muscle and fitness magazine,

every Ironman, and every strength and health in his room, in milk crates categorized like in chronological order. So now I'm starting to think I like this guy. Then I realized he likes 50s music. And then I realized he likes beer. And I'm like, this is my freaking guy right now. You don't know, but we're best friends. Right, literally.

He became my mentor. But his name is Mike Wo guy right here. You don't know, but we're best friends. Literally. He became my mentor. But his name is Mike Wojcik. If you know strength and conditioning, Mike has more Super Bowl rings than Tom Brady. He's the longest tenured guy in the National Football League. He's now in Dallas again with the Cowboys. But he's been with the Cowboys. He's been with the Saints. He's been with the Patriots.

Now he's back with the Cowboys. He's probably spent now. He's probably approaching 30 years in the National Football League. But I was lucky enough that this guy's my dorm director. Another guy named Rusty Jones, who's the second longest tenured guy in the NFL,

is also at Springfield College at the same time I'm at Springfield College. And our weight training instructor, because we have to take weight training as a class, because it's a physical education school, has just come back from university of

hawaii where he was an assistant to bill starr who wrote strongest shells five so i'm literally like in the freaking yeah dude that's awesome as a freshman and i don't know it yeah but i start training with these track guys you were basically going to school like in the internet from all the people you're supposed to learn from you get to talk to them all day long exactly and this guy mike wojcik i remember mike was talking about plyometrics in this in the 70s when we could not find the word we had to go to we started looking at like yeses journals which was michael yeses which at that time was actually called soviet sport review it wasn't even yeses journal yet but it was yeses translating basically russian articles and we're

in we're like looking at like microfiche in at microfiche in the library trying to get these magazines. So I come literally from a different time. But as I said, I've been an early adopter. I decided to get a website. I put up a forum. I started a blog. And then, you know, Anthony, we started a podcast. And then we started a membership site.

I was just sort of stumbling along looking at know, Anthony, we started a podcast and then we started a membership site. I was just sort of stumbling along, looking at like, OK, what are people doing that seems to be equating somewhat? I'm a big Anthony Robbins guy. You know, if you read, I think it's Awaken the Giant, and I forget within whichever the first one was, but he says success leaves clues. And it's true. If you kind of look at what other people are doing to be successful you can kind of find your way along and realize okay this is what's happening and then i think i started to become the guy that was leaving the clues yeah and so i think somewhere along the way in that like 40 to 50 range you start to switch spots yeah where you go from follower to leader without any intent. But that's what happens. Yeah, I think a lot of that too, like you live – this weekend I was with my in-laws

and I'm sitting there literally watching old interviews on YouTube that we've done and I'm just like immersed in this stuff with all these people. And my mother-in-law comes over and she's like, are you working? I was like, kind of. of yeah if i wasn't doing this though i'd be unhappy so i don't know if that's work and we just try and learn from all these people that are so smart because we want to know what the truth is and the best way to go about doing this and one of the reasons that i opened a gym was because i needed people to test you got to go to bu and

hang out with the best hockey players in the country how did you get to be you and like can you just kind of tell me about that experience because you're literally working with the highest level athletes that exist to say i got to be you the same way everybody gets everywhere my father had a friend who was the athletic director at bu yeah actually my father is in the boston university hall of fame was one. Actually, my father is in the Boston University Hall of Fame. Was one of the greatest football players ever in the history of Boston University. And his teammate was the athletic director in whatever, 1981,

when I applied for an assistant athletic trainer job. So I got my job because I knew somebody, which I think is how everybody probably gets their job. And I went there for, I can continue to tell you these stories, but I went there in 1981 thinking I wanted to be an athletic trainer. After about six months of being an athletic trainer, I realized this really sucks and I don't like her people that much. You weren't cut out for taping ankles? I was not cut out for taping ankles.

I definitely was not. And there's another field that is suddenly opening up. My friend Mike Wojcik, who I spoke about, had gotten a job at Syracuse and he was the assistant track coach and the football strength coach. And Rusty Jones had gotten a job with, and this is really dating people, but he had gotten a job with the Pittsburgh Maulers in the USFL. And at that time with the Pittsburgh Penguins, they were all owned by the DiBartolo family who eventually owned the 49ers. But at that time, they owned the Pittsburgh Penguins. And I was like, oh, my God, this exists. Like this perfect combination of me lifting weights and kind of dealing with the body, it now exists. It's a field.

Yeah. And so I quit my job at BU and became a bartender. And I literally, the weight room was a little bit bigger than the room we're in right now. It was probably 600 square feet. I took over the weight room. I literally walked across the hall from the training room and was like, I'm here. Yeah. I'm the strength coach. I don't, I make zero dollars and zero cents. I'm totally not recognized by the university, but I'm taking up residence in this room right now. And it was

funny. The basketball coach was Rick Pitino. This is how crazy the world is. Yeah. Our point guard was Brett Brown, who's a 76ers coach right now. Yeah. Our point guard was Brett Brown who's the 76ers coach right now. Our off guard was Sean Teague who's George Teague and I forget his other son

but he's got two sons that play in the NBA now. They were all there. Our assistant coach was a guy named John Kuster who ended up coaching the Detroit Pistons

and one of our other assistants later on was Steve Clifford who now I think still coaches the Charlotte Bobcats. And one of our best players in history

Dredrick irving who has a famous son kairi irving dredrick is the all-time leading scorer at boston university so i initially started out as more of a basketball guy yeah but i wanted what i really want to do is football so i talked my way into football and then the hockey coaches came to me and we had just come off obviously it's 1982 80 80 Olympics, you know, Jim Craig, Mike Ruggioni, Dave Silk,

those guys, you know, Jack O'Callaghan, they just won the gold medal. We're top 10 hockey program in the country. You should have been in the documentary, by the way.

Just throwing it out there. Best documentary of all time. The funny thing is, it's crazy, but I do, I know all those guys. I mean, Dave Silk and Mike Ruggioni

both were assistant coaches for us at different times during the time that I was there. I've only watched that documentary 130 times. Even it's funny. Even watching Miracle, like, it's just funny to watch the movie. Like, my son, it's a great story. So I have a 13-year-old son, 19-year-old daughter. Actually, it was my daughter.

So every year my daughter, who's a college hockey player, would meet Mike Ruggioni every year because Mike's at every game. And I was like, you remember Mr. Ruzzioni? You know, he scored the winning goal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my daughter has that. The puck just kind of popped out. It just happened. Miracle comes out. The movie comes out.

She loves the movie. The next year I'm like, you remember Mr. Ruzzioni? All of a sudden she's like. The movie changed it. From the movie? Mike's funny because Mike literally looks at you and he's like, Michaela,

I've met you every year of your life since you were born. He said, and now all of a sudden you realize what I did. Well, the documentary is

way cooler than the movie. I don't care what you say. What anybody says, the documentary where the actual guys are talking about how they're literally children,

because they're all old enough to realize like, oh, I'm a baby in that video video like you're watching me just play hockey with my friends they're all old enough to recognize it um the but when you were at bu you actually are able to structure a program so you have to go and create like to fast forward the one of the first times i'd ever seen like a phase one phase two an actual program laid out was from you a two-day-a-week program a three-day-a-week program four-day-a-week

program and how did you i guess it was probably by failing which is how most of us go and create systems and structures and things but um creating those those system structures and the programming model that you've created, was that done at BU with the players? Yeah, it was all done at BU with the players. And it really was. And I will give, actually, I will give a lot of credit to the late Charles Poliquin because he was, as much as he was not necessarily the most personable guy to be around all the

time, he was incredibly brilliant. And he had a huge effect on me from a programming standpoint because he always made me think. I always looked and thought. I still show people like he has a an article that he wrote called variety and strength training uh that was 19 i think 81 and i still send it to people you know as i said it's the best periodization article ever written so i started to look at this and so i really was the big influence was track yeah because you know mike wojcik was a track guy and i started hanging around and then there was like guys like don chu and verne gambetta and uh you know brent mcfarland who's since passed away these were all track guys but what i started to look at was

okay you know and this one again i was i was always like captain obvious you know the master of common sense who are the best players the fast guys right yeah and i can remember it be you like i think i probably i did i will i will give myself credit for changing strength training in ice hockey because there was a time when it was very aerobically based and it was like guys were riding bikes for 45 minutes and we did a test one year and what i realized was that we had six guys who would go on to make i think the 92 olympic team and we did a five mile run a vertical jump and probably at that time a 10 yard dash the six guys that made the olympic team were basically numbers one through six

in vertical jump in 10 yard dash and basically numbers 20 through 26 in the five-mile run and i kind of sat there and i looked at this and i said okay conventional wisdom would tell me that these guys are not in shape and that i need to get them in shape but my intuition tells me that they're just different than the other guys and now i have a choice to make which is I can either make the other guys like them or try to make them like the other guys. I chose to make them or the other guys like them. I chose the other route, which was, no, I'm going to try to increase the speed and the vertical jump of all these other guys. The interesting thing, a bunch of those guys are coaching in the NHL right now.

Mike Sullivan, actually he didn't make that Olympic team, but he ended up being a good player at BU. He's the Pittsburgh Penguins head coach, has won the last two Stanley Cups. He was one of the players in that group of guys. Joe Sacco is an assistant coach right now for the Bruins. He was one of those guys that was in that group. A guy named Sean McGackran actually is coaching at prep school. He's another guy that was in that group.

But what I realized was that they had something that everybody else didn't have. They all ended up playing in the NHL until they all had long careers. They all probably played somewhere between 10 and 15 years in the nhl after that point but it was that point of looking and saying wait a second these guys have 30 inch vertical jumps they're really fast and they're not very good aerobically i need to look at this intelligently and realize that this is probably why they're good as opposed to looking at it the other way and thinking, I always say it's like Samson and Delilah. Oh, I'm going to fix them.

I'll cut all their hair off. I'll fix everybody. And, you know, we've been fixing people, you know, breaking. I'll give you my favorite story. A guy goes out for a motorcycle ride on a cold day, and he realizes that his jacket zipper is broken.

So he says, well, it's freezing. I'm going to put the jacket on backwards because I want the jacket to be able to break the wind, and I want to be able to ride the shit out of this motorcycle. So he's out flying on the motorcycle. He hits a patch of dirt, and he wipes out on the motorcycle, and a good Samaritan comes along and finds him. About a minute later, the ambulance shows up,

and the guy in the ambulance is like, what's going on? And the guy was like, you know, he was alive when I found found him by the time i got his head back on straight he was dead you know and that's us like if there's a lot of times we're trying to you know we don't know what we're looking at and we fix the wrong thing instead of looking and think like thinking like just sitting for a minute longer and going wait a second does this really make sense yeah the number of coaches that have come through your program that are incredible strength coaches and have done gone on to have phenomenal careers on their own um i don't think there's another place that has such a program set up uh can you walk us through kind of the intern process and why you've had such success producing coaches?

I mean, I feel like the ripple effects of a strength coach or just anyone when they dedicate themselves to being very good at a profession is really important. And the CFSC is a really good place to start. But also, your name is all over virtually every single good strength program in the country. We're in a lot of places. It's really funny because I laughed. So if you follow the internet, the highest paid strength coach in the United States is a guy named Chris Doyle who's at University of Iowa.

Do you know where Chris Doyle went to college? BU. Yes. Do you know who his college strength coach was? Had to have been Mike Boyle. Yes. Do you know who convinced him to get out of football and go into strength and conditioning? Had to have been Mike Boyle. Yes. Do you know who convinced him to get out of football and go into strength and conditioning?

Had to have been Mike Boyle, right? That would also be Mike Boyle, yes. The highest pay. And again, Chris is in his 50s. He's an amazing strength coach. It's a very interesting time because strength coaches used to not really be that important. And now all of a sudden they're millionaires. And that's because of guys like Chris, in all honesty. It really is.

Because guys have shown that they can really change programs and that they can build culture. So they have – guys like Chris have created value. And that's why whenever anybody is resentful of Chris, I'm like, you should be freaking thrilled that that guy's making $600,000 a year because he's become the comparative. He's made strength and conditioning coach on par with offensive coordinator defensive coordinator like when you're building your staff out you're thinking

i need a great offensive coordinator i need a great defensive coordinator and i need a great strength coach and that's for our field that's an amazing accomplishment so we have it we've had a lot of luck i mean we've had a lot not a lot of luck but a lot of guys come through and i think some of it is just i hope it's providing a good example of what a good coach is supposed to be. Cause again, Chris, it's funny, got hurt. See, didn't play senior year, was a graduate assistant or was a undergraduate assistant football coach a senior year after he hurt his neck. And, but was very much immersed in our program and was always a kid who was great in the weight room. But I think if you provide a good example for people initially,

that's a pretty good start. But our internship program is different in terms of I've always tried to find bright, motivated people that wanted to be strength coaches. So again, I've got a bunch of guys that are in, you know, there are guys in the NHL, there are guys in the NFL, there's guys in the NBA, there's guys all over the place probably that have been through the program but it's more a

matter of and i had this conversation yesterday with some of we have our we had our international partners in this week in the cfsc so we have we had groups from like um korea and china and italy and they were all here for three days and they were asking similar questions and I said sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right people and and that's the first part like don't like I always said like I don't care I can make you smart I can't make you nice I can't make you motivated I mean I guess you know people say maybe I don't believe that really like I don't think like if you if you're a freaking drudgeudge who just doesn't want to do anything, I'm not going to get you excited about being a strength coach and all of a sudden you're going to take up reading and studying

and doing all these things. That's probably not going to happen. I need to find a kid who's got that. But what I don't want is somebody, and the problem with our field is that there's usually a massive ego component that brings you into it initially. That sort of, I want to look good, I want to be big, I want to get chicks, that kind of thing is what brings a lot of guys into the field. And as a result, there's a lot of dicks.

Yeah. And so you've got to screen those guys out and realize that, like, I can have a five-minute conversation and be like. You're not going to make it. Yeah. Not here anyway. Like, maybe somewhere, but it definitely won't be here. Because I say this half-j but again if somebody talks to me about how much they

lift or starts telling me what they're going to eat or you know they have like a can of the thing of tupperware with them with like their chicken breast in it i'm just like probably this buddy this isn't going to work like you're not you're not going to make it because it's what you realize is when you get good it can't be about you. If you need two hours to work out and you've got to, like, eat clean, if you can't, like, have a protein shake on the run in between, like, sessions and gulp it down and get, like, a five-minute workout in, you know, where you do whatever, like, you know, as many reps on the bench as you can do

and as many chin-ups as you can do or something, you know, and a bunch of one-leg squats and then get back to work, you ain't going to make it. Yeah. So is that a situation where it's like if you want to be an athlete still, just go be an athlete? Oh, exactly. Once you're done doing that, then come and do the coaching thing? Like be like, you know, like be a freaking adult. You know what I mean?

Like if you went to work for IBM and you were asking, like, what's the gym like at IBM? You know, do I get two hours to work out? You know, like what do you think of my arms? How do I look? The IBM shirts, where's the logo? Are they mid-length? Do they go to the elbow? No one in a real job would even have a conversation.

Where do I store my Tupperware? I like to eat really clean. So as a result, I do all my chicken breast on Sunday. You'd freaking be like, I'm not hiring this guy. He's insane. Yeah. But that's a lot of our people in our field is that there are these people who are just, you know, narcissistic, egomaniacs. And then they expect to be like, I want to be a really good trainer. And I always think like, if someone doesn't want to spend an hour with you, you will not be a good trainer. Yeah. I don't care how much you know. You will not be good at this if someone doesn't want to be around you for an hour.

If someone's counting down the minutes until you're gone, that's not a good thing. I think you coined it as like the certified nurse person. Nice person. Yeah, that's Ben. Why is Ben successful? Because he got a new haircut. He got a new haircut. But he's really smart, and he's really smart and he's really

nice and he's like he's in the perfect world he's in celebrity world he has no ego so there's no like hey there's plenty you get plenty ego in his gym right i mean they're some of the most successful people in the world of entertainment that he's training if he was all about him it's like i can't be all about me and all about you yeah that's just not the way the world works it doesn't doesn't balance out right whatever yin and all about you. That's just not the way the world works. It doesn't balance out, right? Whatever, yin and yang, however you want to look at it. You've got to be able to look and think. And that's like for me with athletes, all I cared about was getting people better.

Like that's why people say, oh, you changed your mind. You did this, you did that. I'm like, yeah, because I don't care. But I think that that's a really important thing too is what is the role of a strength coach? I mean, to me, the role of a strength coach, one, it depends on where you are. At the super elite level, a lot of times it's to protect the athlete from themselves.

I think when I took the entry level thing, that was something. See, I think the better you get at something, the simpler you are able to get the message to somebody. When you look at a program and it's got four trillion different things and A1 and A1, B, C, D, and it just goes and goes

and there's this complicated, you can't really understand. And then you look at your program and it's like, well, here's the two-day-a-week program. Use this. Here's phase one. Do this.

It's really simple. When you, I think it's in the very first lecture of the CFSC, I think the first slide says the role of the strength coach is to not injure your athlete.

That's right. But that's the business, again, we're going to hit the CrossFit bump at some point along this conversation. It's coming. See how we're getting there? We're getting there. But I look at that and think, because again, when you, like if you, one, I always say, if you hurt anybody, that's a mistake.

Like if you hurt somebody, like if I hurt you, I would feel bad. If I hurt your kid, like here in my business, you came through, there's a lot of kids in here. If I hurt your kid, I'd feel worse than if I hurt you. And if I'm in a professional sporting environment, if I hurt someone who makes $50 million, and then I say something like, oh, getting hurt is just part of training. If we're going to train, people are going to get hurt. You are out the door. If you ever said that in any professional sporting environment in the world you would be fired on the spot if you said

to somebody people are going to get hurt that's going to happen that's just part of the deal well it's been a big part of the news actually somewhat recently though of the role of a strength coach in a program because the position for the people that are not leading with or thinking about the athlete first and are taking a more ego-driven approach. And there's people that are getting injured. There's been deaths. There's things of this nature. And I feel like the strength coach, now that they're making a lot of money and they're in charge of these people's careers, it's become a very big highlight in the news. And when we don't see people putting the athlete first it becomes a real

problem and it's it's really started to make waves in a lot of the media as as a whole it's a big college problem it's not a big professional sports problem it's a big college problem because in some ways what they're doing now i'm not a fan of college strength and conditioning right now because i think what they do is they try to hire some kind of fake tough guy to intimidate and browbeat these young men. You've got to have a sweet YouTube video. Right. You do. You've got to have a sweet YouTube video.

You've got to have clothes that are too small. You've got to be able to dance. There's a lot of requirements not to be a strength coach that I would definitely not be meeting because my clothes fit. My dance moves stink. Yeah. Right? And I don't particularly like to intimidate young men. I really believe that your job is to empower these guys to get better, not to try to scare them.

Like if that's your culture where you're going to scare them into doing what you think they need to do or more importantly what your boss thinks they need to do, that's a problem. But that's where we are right now. That's unfortunately the current state of collegiate and i would probably go so far as to say american football really is where the problem lies not in a lot of the other areas i don't think basketball has that problem i don't think that ice hockey has that problem i think it is an american football problem that i hope gets straightened out because it really is unfortunate and it i mean it's it's more than unfortunate when people

are dying that's yeah that that's i mean it's indescribable i can't imagine and i'm thankful that i've never been in that situation i've never had an athlete i've had catastrophic injury we've never had in my lifetime somebody pass away which i don't know i don't know if i could go back to work the next day yeah if i felt like i was involved somehow in that action yeah so i feel like a lot of people right now especially in the crossfit space they they've been doing it long enough where they realize that the risk reward ratio of a lot of things that they've have done in the past isn't that great and they're kind of moving away from it but they're they're still coaching classes with people that want crossfit but they want to make

that sport even if they're not competing in it as a sport, they want to make that sport as safe as they can while at the same time still delivering what people are paying for. Do you have any thoughts on coaching a group of people in a CrossFit setting to keep it as safe as possible, still delivering results, but keeping it CrossFit-y enough where people are still getting what they're paying for? Yeah, I mean, I do. I think one of the things is that you have to go back, and this is another Paul Quinn.

Paul Quinn coined the term technical failure. Like I always say to somebody, you don't lift to failure. You lift to technical failure. When you can no longer do it the way that I want you to do it, that's the end of the set. It's not when you no longer have the volition to somehow get, you know, the objective is not A to B. Like, how do I get the bar from A to B? And when you eventually can't get the bar from A to B anymore, you're done. Like, that's not what we want.

There's going to be a perfect way to get the bar from A to B. And if you can't get it from A to B perfectly, stop. I think it's also interesting because you deal with when somebody like Eichel walks in the door he's different oh your job is to get the hell out of his way and allow him to be very good and it's really easy to say that look at that for somebody like eichel that can power clean three bills when he's 16 years old whatever it is but you have like joe schmoe that walks in it's like i want to get fit and you're like Joe Schmoe that walks in and is like, I want to get fit. And you're like, okay, well, let's teach you a power clean. Their body is so unprepared for that movement. But they want to do the thing.

Right. But that's my one sort of fundamental dispute with CrossFit is I don't believe that adults make good Olympic lifters. I do not believe this. Sort of like once the water has gone under the bridge, you know, you can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. You know, you get someone who's been slumped over like this for 10 or 15 years and then you try to get that person to you know be able to get his hands up over his head with a heavy load that ain't happening we're going to find a way to do that that's not conducive to that person remaining healthy and so they're going to do something whether it's to snatch or to jerk

or whatever you know thrusters they're right they're going to find a way to do that that's wrong and they may find a way to do it that's wrong that looks kind of like when you get into that it looks kind of right enough for me to be like yeah i'll let you do that for a while until you get hurt as opposed to looking and saying and this is where again i look at so you know wall ball i mean i think there's things if someone said to me okay redesign crossfit i think i could redesign the idea and say hey we're still going to have really kick-ass metabolic workouts if you look why do we have the assault bike because the rower was a failure right i mean how many backs did we blow up with people trying

to row until somebody finally said damn can we make something like the rower that's that durable yeah and people were like oh the schwinn air dine and you're like no i keep breaking the schwinn until somebody finally said, damn, can we make something like the rower that's that durable? And people were like, oh, the Schwinn Airdyne. And you're like, no, I keep breaking the Schwinn Airdynes. And someone said, no. You cost me a lot of money, by the way. Yeah. Oh, you cost me a lot of money. Not more than me.

I spent more than you, just so you know. And our repair guy is – You're never seeing a fully functional one. They're always broken. The Schwinn, and you put a 215-pound dude that's just D1 athlete. Hey, just go fast yeah we literally like in the beginning early on we broke the arms right off literally like i can remember johnny parker at the patriots i can remember him saying yeah they gotta beef up the arms because our guys just break

the arms off we had one guy like mike greer this kid that played in the nhl who was 235 pounds i mean he literally like at one point like broke the pedal off like he not not the pet like the whole thing like the whole side of the bike disengaged. Like, he broke the metal. Yeah. And, but the point is, now we have the assault bike, and we have, you know, now we have a rogue bike, and now we have a souped-up airdyne. And we have, because people have realized that, hey, I need that ability to really kick your ass metabolically, but I'd like to make it a touch safer. And that's, I mean, that's that bike versus the rower.

And there's so many of these things that you look at. You guys still use a Versaclimber here. We don't have a Versaclimber. No, I don't have a Versaclimber. I do have a stand-up bike, which is pretty cool. But I did have a Versaclimber, and then I got rid of it because the Versaclimber was just too hard. But I think, again, it is. But Versaclimber would fit in.

You know, the rower would fit in. Even to some degree, even to some degree maybe the skier like there's ways to do it and say hey we're going to because it's one of the things that i've said this before if you listen to the ideas of crossfit they make perfect sense it's until you see someone do it badly where you go no no no that is what i meant you know what i mean but it's like the idea like you know do multi-joint exercise the other thing i would take the gymnastics out i was going to ask you about that because i think you know again i mean i you know i love gymnastics right i worked when i was an athletic trainer in college i worked with our women's gymnastics team because i like women gymnasts much better than i like men gymnasts but um as a general rule of thumb but

people weren't made to be gymnasts like gymnasts were made to be gymnasts like we had to take gymnastics i had to take a full year of gymnastics at Springfield College, one of the many torturous things they did to us. But it was not nearly as torturous to me as it was to the guys on the basketball team. It was absurd to watch a basketball guy try to do the horizontal bar or try to do the pommel horse or try to do the rings. It was just ridiculous. It was like, okay, this guy was never – he's 6'6", he's 265 pounds. He's not made to do the pommel horse or try to do the rings like it was just ridiculous it was like okay this guy was never he's 6'6 he's 265 pounds he's not made to do this and it was fairly obvious

they were like little people who did it really well and they were big people who just were never going to do it and it's like being able to look at that and say okay you know the gymnastics thing yeah probably not a good idea you know muscle ups you know kipping pull-up you're never going to be able to justify like you can kipping pull-up. You're never going to be able to justify. Kipping pull-up, you just can't justify. It's cheating. It's okay. If there's anything redeeming about all of the kipping, Glassman actually went very publicly the other day and said if there was one thing he could throw out,

it would be all the kipping. Because it's just so bad for people. They just don't get it. It took him a long time to get there. But joint-wise... After he paid his first however many million. Like, ah, by the way, guys. Bad idea.

But when you look at that and you think, like, I love chin-ups and pull-ups. Love them. Love them, love them. But do them right. Don't expose the joints to these horrible forces that your ability to kip is generating. It just doesn't make any sense. So there's so many of these things so i guess you could be like okay you know we'll okay cross this out or modify this or change this it probably could be done but um but there's a i guess there's a lot of things i mean there's just

these sort of the initial thing is saying to somebody it doesn't matter you'll go until you can't do another one with the muscles we were targeting yeah well should people do you guys as a part of your system put a time metric or a a score to the end of workouts as if it is something that matters no never i don't because again this is what we were talking about one of the things that happens like you said you know you deal with, you know, you use Jack Eichel as an example. But if I take someone like that who's very, very talented and very, very motivated

and very, very competitive, and then I give him a challenge like that, more than likely he's going to hurt himself trying to complete it because he's competitive. That's why I said in terms of my job is to protect those guys from themselves and to be like, okay, we're going to do enough today to get the effect that we need but not enough so that you get hurt we need to be able to come back here tomorrow and do this over again because what i've what i found this is i ended up and this goes back to the initial crossfit interview i didn't know what crossfit was i got invited to the soma

meetings which is the special operations medical association and they have a meeting where they bring in everybody's medical people from all the special operations groups around the world so you get like british whatever sas and all these guys you know seals and delta force everybody sends their medical people and they empaneled a group of us to talk about crossfit and i had to kind of like i had to look up like what really is crossfit and so i kind of did some research and i looked i read the initial articles and I was kind of like, because their problem was that there was a high number of injuries in the military that were coming from these guys adopting CrossFit.

I think this was 08. And I just said that, you know, you can't take a special, like a trained special forces soldier who literally has vowed to give his life to accomplish a mission and then say i want you to do it till you can't do another one they are the wrong guys to tell to do that because these are guys who've i mean they've committed to just you know like a level of like physical training that is ungodly to begin with and then you're telling them for workouts like as many as you can, as fast as you can. Yeah.

If you said to me, what's the absolute positively wrong prescription for those guys, I'd say that. Like I would be like, if I'm training those guys, I would be super dosage controlled. I want you to do just this many. That's it. And I never want to make a competitive.

Yeah. Because I know that you're willing to die. Like we're not kidding here. Like, we're not fucking around. Excuse my language. But these are guys who are in a totally different place than the rest of the world. And you can't do that. And in some ways, like, some of your elite athletes are like that.

Like, they would, you know, training-wise, if I said, this is what it takes to win the gold medal, there's some people who are going to do some stuff to themselves that probably isn't good. So your job is you're literally the moderator like you're looking at this and saying i need to get you better with the idea that the goal might be a year from now next weekend friday it might be four years from now but i always have to get you to the end point and i can't afford to not get you there like i can't there's no um that's why I say college strength conditioning is great because no one cares if you hurt a freshman. Which is really sad but you kind of

get away with it. You got a trainer, you got a training room, you got doctors. Even if you're not very good at your job, you're not held to a really high level

of accountability. The NFL, the professional sports, very different. You get more than a couple people hurt in the weight room. There's people roaming

around looking like, what are you doing? There's a lot of millions going on. Yeah, there's a lot of millions weight room. There's people roaming around looking like, what are you doing? There's a lot of millions. Yeah, there's a lot of millions going here. There's a lot of lost games. We can't afford to have your philosophy be one that thinks that, hey, we're going to break a few eggs here, guys. That's just part of the deal. They're like, no.

Actually, you need to handle all. We gave you four dozen eggs, and we want all four dozen at the end of the year, exactly the way that they were. And ideally, we want them better. That's a very high bar. So on that note, if you're dealing with a world-class athlete who is in season, how much of what you're doing is purely just keeping them healthy, keeping the Ferrari on the racetrack, so to speak,

and how much of it is actually making them bigger, stronger, faster? I think it depends on the sport. So, like, I did Major League Baseball for two years. In Major League Baseball, you've got to, I mean, you basically have to maintain the entity for 162 games. So all of a sudden, maintenance becomes a pretty high bar because, you know, if you've got a guy who can pitch and throw 100 you want to throw 100 in the playoffs so in some ways you might look at that and think we're just trying to maintain but in actuality trying to maintain

somebody who's playing in a competitive event every single day it's not a very easy thing to do so you know nfl is different you know it's a guy in the practice squad how many minutes is the guy playing is the guy starting you know you get all these things that are different and so this is where we get into this idea you talk about you know and this i don't know if it was gray who said it but you start talking about like the minimal effective dose like what's the least i can do to get the most that's why i'm closer now when you look at like i mean this sort of i guess one end of the spectrum is crossfit some places you know where i would normally be here and then some places the old hit one set to failure kind of thing i'm probably closer to the hit thing than i am to anything else in terms of yeah saying hey you know i want you to do the least you can possibly do to get the most effect that I possibly can get.

And it's kind of why I always go, it's like the aspirin thing. If you said to me, I have aspirin here. You said, I have a headache. And I said, take the bottle. Just guzzle them, like as many as you can get down. You'd be like, that's really stupid. I think I could die from that. But that's kind of how we dose exercise in some situations.

Like I want to look at it and think, hey, take one and tell me if your headache goes away. And if it does, we're okay. And so, you know, you've got to be able to look at a guy every day and think, okay, what was his strength level? That's why, you know, monitoring has become such a big deal. But I like to have people vertical jump every week because I figure it's a really good, simple monitoring task. If I look at you, if you're a 30-inch vertical jump and suddenly one day you come in and you're 29 or you're 28 1⁄2,

I'm like, we're doing too much. Something's wrong. Your nervous system is showing a little wear on me here. What are you doing with your Gen Pop group classes then for, like how are you structuring those those sessions um is it a lot is it going very slow because a lot of those people sit at desks all day and they wake up and they're like god i can't wait to get to the gym and just be a warrior right and then you're like hey slow down yeah and that's it you know it's funny with us everybody

and we do get some of that everybody rolls everybody stretches everybody does a dynamic warm-up as a group like we take that cfsc idea yeah and we put it in practice in our groups and it's kind of like initially it's like this is the thing i think is interesting people will be like foam this foam rolling thing is stupid and i'll always be like just bear with me for a week just do it three times a week for a week if you still think it's stupid in the second week we'll talk about it because i already know think it's stupid in the second week, we'll talk about it. Because I already know what's going to happen. The second week, they're like, where do you buy the foam roller thing?

Yeah. And I'm like, oh, you can get it out of this Perform Better catalog. And they're like, yeah, I feel way better. And I'm like, yeah, remember you told me it was stupid last week? I know I told you it was stupid because I thought it was stupid because I'd never seen anybody roll around on the ground. It hurt. On a piece of styrofoam. Yeah.

Like, it's stupid. It's a dumb idea. And I'm like, it does seem like a dumb idea. Now they have weird-shaped ones like this. Right, exactly. And then you get people, you know, and it's the same way. Like, oh, stretching is stupid. Yeah.

I'm like, well, just the same thing. Bear with me for just a week and stretch. You'll probably feel better. And they're like, you know, my back and my hips feel way better. I'm so glad we're doing the stretching. And you're like, don't you remember last week when you told me it was stupid? And they're like, yeah, I i do but it's not stupid and so i think some of it the good thing is i think we have like street credibility so we get away with it a little bit

more and people are just kind of willing to like well this is the way they work out so you just got to kind of come in and play the game of follow the leader and do it but after people play follow the leader for a while they they start to feel better. But then we've done kind of what you said, like, you know, obviously not CrossFit, but it's like,

okay, what's, you know, I need, I need a joint friendly push. I need a joint friendly pull. I need a joint friendly squat. I need a joint friendly hip hinge.

Like, what am I going to be able to do with everybody? Cause I don't necessarily, you know, if someone's like, you know, the kind of, Hey,

I want to be a warrior. I'm like, okay, well, you know, know, come in and train with an athlete group. You know, we'll see how much of a warrior you actually are. But if you're going to be here sort of in the, you know, the 8 a.m. general population group, train like a guy who's got to go to work tomorrow. Yeah, what are you doing with the, like, when did the kids start in here? What age? Eleven.

Eleven. What does that look like? You just teach them how to do a push-up? Teach them how to run? Teach them how to clean. Teach them how to run. Teach them how to squat. Our basic beginner program, some people are like, that's CrossFit.

Kind of, sort of. You know, goblet squat, deadlift. I'm so glad you said that. One of the things that really drew me to you when I was learning the system that you put together is one of the things I struggle with so much is CrossFit talks about the back squat so much and you clearly have lit the internet on fire with your article that you don't ever need to back squat and that you shouldn't back squat probably lost a couple nights sleep over that but your regression charts the progression and regression charts if whoever's listening go find them um but that was something that i had never seen

it had never backed those movements down so far so when you are working with kids are they all starting is everybody starts with a goblet squat yeah and then we build them up through that chart yep exactly everybody because there are and i always talk about there are fundamentals if you said to me okay i'm sending my son to school i'd be like okay i think we want him to learn to read and we want him to lean learn to write and we'd like him to be able to do arithmetic like that would be cool yeah you know and but if you said no i'm thinking about physics yeah you know and i'm thinking french i'm like well he can't read a book in english yet and he doesn't know his times tables so i think maybe we should like lay off on the physics and the french and maybe just get to the point where you can read in english and add and subtract multiply

divide and then we'll think about more advanced classes for him and you'd be like yeah that's pretty logical yeah but i don't understand why in fitness we don't do that. Why don't we look at somebody and say, okay, beginner, beginner stuff. And beginner stuff, beginner loads, it's okay. You don't have to leave flagellated. You don't have to leave and look like you just took the beating of your life. Because I always tell people what I want. If you said to me, I worked out today for the first time, I'm like, well, tomorrow I want you to get up and feel like, I feel like I worked out.

I'd be like, perfect. That's exactly what I wanted to have happen. If you get up and think, oh my God, I feel like I lost a freaking bat fight with somebody. Right? And I can't take a shit because I can't get on the toilet. I'm like, eh, we probably overshot the bar

a little bit on you that day. 20 rep back squats shouldn't get on the toilet. I'm like, eh, we probably overshot the bar a little bit on you that day. 20 rep back squats shouldn't start your training program. Which is what I started with. I remember feeling like that. And I tell people, I always tell people, if the goal was to make somebody sore, I'd be like, I know the ideal program. We'll go out in the back parking lot, I'll get a baseball bat,

and I'll wail this shit out of you. I'll hit you everywhere. I'll hit you in the arms, in the back, in the stomach, in the back parking lot, I'll get a baseball bat, and I'll wail this shit out of you. I'll hit you everywhere. I'll hit you in the arms, in the back, in the stomach, in the legs. And when you get up the next day, you'll be freaking crippled. You'll be black and blue and crippled, and you won't be able to move. If you told me that I went out and gave you a great workout because I beat you up like Ray Donovan with a baseball bat in the back alley, that somehow I was accomplished in my job, I don't think that would be very smart. But we do have people who are sort of being inundated

with that thought process that if you're not vomiting and crippled that it wasn't a good day. Yeah, right. And I always think if you don't work eventually, if at some point you don't work to the point that you at least think you're going to throw up, you probably haven't really experienced hard work, and maybe you need to. But I would also look at it and say, as an adult, does that ever need to be part of your life?

Think about it. You should throw up in college after a really good keg party. You shouldn't throw up in your 40s in an alley in Los Angeles somewhere because of your workout. That shouldn't be what happens. There's a stage of life where it's acceptable. Right. And then you should have other priorities. So back on the squatting front, where are you at these days with front squats, back squats, deadlifts, et cetera?

We do a lot of deadlifts, and we do very few squats. The kids all goblet squat. And my whole thing is you goblet squat until you get to the point where you can all goblet squat and my whole thing is you goblet squat until you get to the point where you can't goblet squat anymore. It's too heavy to pick the kettlebell up.

Self-limiting, exactly. It's too heavy. So with us, dumbbells, it's funny. My son's 13 and his friends are in here. They battle a little bit.

I have to hand them the 70. My son can do 70 for 10. He struggles to get 70 into position. Son's stronger than me now. Right? But you know what I mean? But at some point you're going to know like okay that was enough weight okay now we're going to split and do split squats the crazy thing because this goes into the whole bilateral deficit thing my son can gobble squat 70 pounds for 10 he can split squat 50 pounds for 10

that's not supposed to happen right except that if we actually pay attention we'll realize that unilaterally you have much more strength potential than you do bilaterally you know i always say to people if i said go touch the rim probably 10 of the people are going to go and stand under the rim on two feet and try to jump up and touch it 90 of the people are going to run at it and jump off one leg why i don't have know because they know right they everybody knows that they can go higher off one leg than they can off two yeah but you'd look at that and say that's not possible you have two like if you you should if you could jump 30 inches off one leg jumping to touch the rim you should be able to stand underneath off both legs and jump 60 inches

but you can't yeah and sometimes you can't jump 30 and then people go that's because of elasticity reactivity like i get it it's all there's all that stuff's in there but the reality is we were wired we're made to be unilateral we don't hop if you watch like a bunny was made to be bilateral yeah you know that you don't you don't see a lot of kind of bipedal action even though they have two legs kangaroos same way you don't see a lot of kind of bipedal action, even though they have two legs. Kangaroos, same way. You don't see a lot of humans hopping around. They're pretty unilateral people. And so, I guess, and that's why I said I could go.

You know, like you said, when you said we could do this for five hours, we could do this for five hours because I am the frigging master of common sense. And I do, I feel like I have an answer for every question. I'm not doing anything that I haven't thought about that hasn't kept me up at night. So that's how I'd love to wrap this thing up. You put together Functional Strength Coach, the CERT. You've got the programming laid out. You've got 37 years in this game. Are you still putting pieces together to creating a training program?

Absolutely. What's the new thing that you're working on so i wrote an article the other day called 37 years at the train station waiting for my ship to come in which is a good enough line that it took some people a while to go oh i read the article i get it i understand what you meant now and because we were talking about so we're doing more sled pushing we're doing more sled running we're running more sprints. One of the things I realized, and this is, you talk about the great embarrassments of your professional life. You wonder, why aren't I getting people faster? And one of the things I realized, when we trained guys for the NFL Combine, we always got people faster.

Always. We had great Combine performances. But when we have regular people training, we'd run sprints. You know, and what I would now call, we would run half-hearted sprints. We would run probably a lot of 80% sprints. And we probably wouldn't see the same changes in speed that we saw when we were training guys for the combine.

When we trained guys for the combine, we timed them. And then we timed them. And then we timed them. And then we timed them. And we were always working on timing them and trying to get better. And Tony Haller, Tony's a high school chemistry teacher from outside of Illinois, outside of Chicago,

who's also like a genius track coach. But one of the things that he said is if you want to get faster, one, you need to time everybody and figure out how fast they are. There's some brilliance for you. Because if you said, I want to get faster, first thing I should probably say to you is, well, how fast are you, Anders? Yeah. You know, and if you said, well, I'm pretty fast. I'm like, that's not going to cut it.

I would like to know your 10-yard dash time. Yeah. So that we now have piece one of the puzzle. Yeah. We know how fast you are. And then we could say, okay, I'd like to lower that by one-tenth of a second. Now we've got a realistic goal. We weren't doing that.

We really weren't doing that. And then you start looking at vectors and saying, okay, you know, what I said in this article was this. We developed this vertical program, you know, vertical, vertical, vertical, vertical, vertical. And then we get people that can really vertically jump and can really vertically lift, but they're not horizontally successful. And then we look and go, I can't figure out why. When sports are played horizontally, you have to move forward. And then you start looking at it and thinking, you know, so. Every sport.

I designed this like the weight room is vertical. But sport is horizontal. So I think when you start thinking about it. And when we move all the weights around, we actually move them very slowly. Right. And that's what, think about it. This was what I put in the article. You want to go home and eat dinner? I do, but I'm going to tell you this anyway.

My wife is going to meet me at a restaurant. I'm really good at this, by the way. And I suck at it because I end up, I get sucked in. We are a bad combination because I'll get sucked in with you and be here longer than I should. But the bad part is you – I have to get my train of thought back. But when we start thinking about horizontal speed, right? You know, people talk about, you know, velocity-based training and, you know, that's like I said, you know, dynamic method, you know, west side. You know, you got to move weights fast.

I'm like the fastest you can move a weight power snatch i think is one point either 1.5 or 2.5 meters a second i forget but let's say 2.5 a shitty sprinter moves eight meters a second a really good one moves 10 meters a second so you start realizing god almighty i've had a tool at my disposal here that's somewhere around four and a half to five times more effective than what I have in the weight room. But I've not been utilizing it. So I'll give you my son as an example again. My son, 13 years old, he's dropped his 10-yard dash time by 0.3 seconds in a year. That's a massive 10.

Like if you drop somebody's 40.3 seconds, that would be great. But he wasn't, you know, not saying he was fast at the beginning, because he wasn't, but just by simply timing him and saying, okay, you've run a 1.85. And he was like, that's terrible. I'm like, yep, it is. And hopefully next week you'll run a 1.84.

And literally that's, but now he runs like a 1.54. Why? Because we timed him. Because we asked for volition. Yeah. So, yes, I guess my point, the answer to that question is the thing I love about this field, the reason I'm still doing freaking podcasts at 630 at night with guys I just met an hour ago, is because I really believe that I am going to find the Holy Grail.

And if you don't, I think if you get to the point where you don't think that, like I always said, is because I really believe that I'm going to find the Holy Grail. Yeah. And if you don't, I think if you get to the point where you don't think that, like I always said, if you think you know it all, you're out of your freaking mind. I mean, I can't even imagine. The people I know, like you talk about like Dan John or Gray or Mark Verstegen or guys like that, it's amazing how humble and thirsty for knowledge the really good people are. And there's something called, again, I'll leave you with this idea. Tell people that are listening, look up Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect, Dunning and Kruger were two researchers.

It is a documented phenomenon whereby people of lower ability and lower experience perceive themselves to have higher ability and higher experience. I should just walk away right now. Slowly backing away. But think about your transition, right? Yeah. When you're young, when you're in your 20s, you're positive. You're right. Yeah.

Positive. And then you kind of get in your 30s and you're like i might have been wrong and then you're in your 40s and you're like i was such an asshole like i can't believe i i just read i just retweeted a guy's tweet the other day it was something like to you know to all my patients from 10 years ago i'm really sorry you know to all my patients from last year i'm trying to be better better. It's something like that. And it's like that's the reality. And that's why people, they get mad at me, but I'm like I'm trying to be helpful.

I've been doing this for 37 years. I hurt a lot of people. I had a lot of not desirable outcomes. I had a lot of desirable outcomes. But what I did is I looked at non-desirable outcomes. I looked at those and said, okay, that didn't work. Then I sat down and thought, well, why didn't that work work or why didn't it work as well as i wanted it to work and is there and i'm always looking when i go to a seminar one of the things i said i want to

i want to know who's smarter than me and i was like you know mcgill's the perfect example i go to mcgill's first back lecture i still remember and i'm sitting there thinking and i'm just like damn we got it all freaking wrong like like we're just wronger than wrong can be yeah and of course i come back i remember the article you wrote uh i think it was an article you wrote about the kind of rotational movements exactly after going to his stuff you know and coming back to everybody and saying okay you know we're not doing this stuff and everybody's like what are you talking about you know no more scorpions no more 90 90s no more leg overs no more crunches and everybody's like what are you doing and i'm like i'm applying freaking science here kids

like i just met a guy who's way smarter than all of us he only does this one thing exactly he only he only actually has no friends he only cares about this one thing like he's got pig spines, guys, and he plays with them and stuff. He's doing shit that we haven't thought about. And he said these were not good ideas. But then I love the people who argue. You get the people, oh, well, whenever someone says to me, I disagree with McGill. And I'm like, and your degree is in what again? And how many

years approximately have you spent studying the spine just approximately like i just like a rough number and they'll say something like well i read like three articles i'm like so you read three articles and you are now disagreeing with the preeminent authority maybe in the whole world on this because you read three articles that all agreed with what you wanted to agree with anyway all written by people who you already agreed with and somehow you're going to try to look at me logically and tell me that you're correct and they'd be like yes absolutely i am what other changes did you make beside the kind of the you know small warm-up type exercise that you just mentioned well i think you know the biggest thing you know again squatting right you start looking at you know you know what the back doesn't like.

It doesn't like torque. It doesn't like shear. It doesn't like compression. Oh, that sounds just like back squat to me, doesn't it? You know, you know, you got this bar that's moving side to side. It's pushing you forward. It's pushing you down.

And you think, hey, this is not a great exercise. Yeah. And we all know it. Like we all, everybody's hurt their back. That's why I get so mad. pushing you down, and you think, hey, this is not a great exercise. And we all know it. Everybody's hurt their back. That's why I get so mad. We've all hurt ourselves squatting, right? And I started, I've got to finish the article, but I started writing an article called Slamming Your Hand in a Car Door.

And the basic idea is that if you came into me today and your hand was all swelled up and you had a cast on it, and I said, what happened? And you said, damn, you know, I slammed my fingers in the car door and then your next statement was i can't wait till they heal up to get back out there and slam my hand in the car door again right you're laughing right because you're like that's really stupid except if you substituted squat or bench press for slamming your hand in the car door it's not nearly as stupid because how many people have you talked to who are saying, yeah, I can't wait till my back heals up so I can get back to squatting.

And I'm like, car door? No, this doesn't ring a bell at all. Like, you don't realize, like, this is how you got hurt. This was the mechanism. You know, you were, like, laying on your floor and crawling around and going to physical therapy. And, you know, maybe you pissed your pants if you were in a really bad situation. Like, who knows what happened to you. And now you're telling me how you're looking forward to doing this again

right this is this is the logic that we're dealing with right now i remember another piece that uh you said you added to your training i think the actual quote was like turns out the yogis had it right all along but adding a bunch of breath work into your into your warm-ups yeah really changed a lot of things for you i think think it's changed everything, really, in terms of... And I'll finish with that, because I did say I was going to finish it. My wife's probably going to freaking shoot me, because it's 627. Do you still carry that weird guilt of, like, man, I'm talking about

working out, I should be home right now? I could literally give you another half hour just on my wonderful wife. I was hoping that after, like, an X number of years of marriage, that when you're talking about working out or working out out and you knew you were supposed to be home that that would go away. But it sounds like it doesn't. If you're looking at me texting, I'm like, I will be there in 15 minutes.

I promise I'm not with my friends talking about fitness. That's right. I always try to explain to her, I'm like, I'm actually making money when I do this. This is work. This is how I make a living. This is the reason we have the wonderful standard of living that we have. Well, speaking of non-fitness things and speaking of family, I remember you in an article that I read years and years ago, you said something along the lines of you wish that you would have had your kids earlier so you could have spent more time with them.

And that sticks with me. I talk about that all the time because there are times when I feel like, man, I should have waited a couple more years before I had kids. And then I think of that, and I feel much better about having had kids when I did have kids. So imagine being 60 almost. I'm 59. Having a 13-year-old and realizing, like, wow. Who knows from here on in? I mean, my dad was dead at 62.

I got a brother who's got 61 and has Parkinson's disease. So I'm not guaranteed anything from here on in. And there's a lot of stuff I still want to see. So, yeah, you know, my daughter's 19. There's like a lot of, you know, I'd like to see grandchildren and weddings. And there's a lot of things I want to see. So, yes, I think from a, and that's the other part. But like think about it.

We're such dicks when we're young. Like we're, that's what I mean. It's our world. It's ego. It's narcissism. It's all about me. And I was that guy. That's why I say to people, I've been i didn't have kids i was 40 right 40 yeah

and so yes i think i think everybody needs to do a lot of soul searching and realize like if the most important thing in your life is like the next workout or the next freaking chicken breast or the next can of tuna fish or whatever it is, then you probably should take a moment and inventory things because, I mean, your life is screwed up, and it's not going to get better. Yeah. And that's just reality. But, hey, I will leave it at that because I'm happily married here going on 30 years, and if you guys keep me here much longer.

I don't want you'd have to go home. Well, in the next podcast, I went on this Barbell Shrugged podcast and things just went south. Yep. And so I think we're at like an hour and 21 minutes. Awesome. Wrap it up.

Where can people find you or where would you like to direct our people to actually learn all these things they're talking about? Strengthcoach.com is really, that is where I spend. Yeah. Get into the forums, join, you know, and people like, oh, it's $15 a month. And I'm like, seriously, like you're going to complain about $15 a month. about strength coach.com is really um that is where i spend yeah get into the forums join you know and people like oh it's 15 a month and i'm like seriously like you're gonna complain about

15 a month you up the price to have some yeah 14.95 actually but um you might be a 9.95 member there are some people that were in at 9.95 but the point is you could argue with mike all day long to get you will lose every time to get your questions answered by literally some of the best people in the world within 24 hours. Very true. And they come on willingly. It's not just fitness. It's business.

It's running. It's very eye-opening to see how many different ways there are to do things, which is very important. Because if you live in the CrossFit world, it's a small bubble, people. Go get outside it and learn from other people. All right, cool. Thanks, guys. It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

Right on. Doug Larson. You bet. Thank you very much. was a real pleasure. Thank you. Right on. Doug Larson. You bet. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Told you. That guy knows everything. I could have talked to him for hours.

Love Mike Boyle. Man, that guy's done so many good things for our industry and so many good things for the strength and conditioning community that we need more people like him. The hard part is the fact he's got to do it for over 30 years in order to be on his level. He's been there, done that, seen it all, and his resume and his contributions to our industry are just incredible.

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at Anders Varner. Take a screenshot. We will see you guys on Saturday.