Barbell Shrugged - The Separator Between Being Good and Being Great - 210

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

Professional gymnast and creator of the Power Monkey method Dave Durante drops knowledge bombs and speaks the truth on this episode... a must listen.

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we go to Power Monkey Fitness Camp and interview Dave Durante. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Hey, I see you sitting there, lonely by your keyboard. If you want to, just whip your fingers out. Put them on your keys. Type in http://www.barbellshrugged.com. While you're there, swing on over, sign up for the newsletter. We'll send you some cool free stuff. And make sure to check out Overtime. It's a sweet place with a bunch of sweet stuff. And last but not least, I know you're trying to find a bitchin' t-shirt to get your mom for her birthday.

Head on over to merch.barbellstruck.com. We've been actually trying to make this happen for a while now. I was talking to Mike last year, a year and a half ago, about trying to get you guys down, and it didn't work out. So I'm glad we finally got to do it. I know. I've told him. I've been here the last two years.

I'm like, we've got to come down. There's just so many cool people here to interview. Oh, yeah. CTP wants you to powerbomb me. Can we do it at the close of this one? Are you ready to do it cold? I'll do it ice cold. I don't need to warm up for that.

Don't weigh very much. What do you weigh? Like 160. Perfect. I can do that. Yeah. I think my max is like up for that. Don't weigh very much. What do you weigh? Like 160. Perfect. I can do that. Yeah. I think my max is like 200 pound ice cold powerbomb. The cold powerbomb max?

Yeah, generally. You can powerbomb me. All right. Here we go. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm your host, Mike McGoldrick, here with Alex Macklin. What's up? Kurt Mulliken.

Hola. And as always, behind the camera, CTP. And we are joined here today with our special guest, Dave Durante. How you doing, guys? Here at the Power Monkey Fitness Camp in Crossville, Tennessee. I almost messed it up. We just talked about Durante. We did.

I didn't say it wrong, though. It was maybe 10 seconds ago. Dave Durante. Testing it out. Yeah, Durante. That's fine. But in Italy, it's Durante. Durante.

That's right. Oh, God. I'm sorry about that. All right. So, yeah, man. We're here at the Power Monkey Fitness Camp. For those of you who don't know what this place is, it's pretty magical. You have to take, like, a secret train to get here, kind of like in Harry Potter.

There's a gate. It's very much true, yeah. To summarize what this awesome place is, it's basically a week-long fitness camp with anything and everything you can imagine when it comes to fitness training, gymnastics, weightlifting, endurance. Like, you guys have it all. Yeah. Well, Dave, why don't you tell us what it is?

That's essentially it. Mike, thanks for breaking it all down. We don't have anything else to talk about. Did I do good? Yeah, perfect. Thank you. I had all the notes. Check, check.

That's basically what we're trying to do. John Roethlisberger and John McCready are two U.S. Olympians on the gymnastics side. They own this space and they use it 12 weeks out of the year for gymnastics camp for kids. And I spent a lot of time

here in the summer teaching little kids and I was like, a few years ago, I was like, you know, this location could be used for some pretty kick-ass stuff.

So, spoke with them about it and they were all on board. And fortunately, you know, we have some good connections in the community. I've been doing stuff

with Chad Vaughn for a long time. Dave Newman with RxMark here decided to all on board. And fortunately, you know, we have some good connections in the community. I've been doing stuff with Chad Vaughn for a long time. Dave Newman with RX Mark here decided to come on board and bring in some great athletes. And it started to snowball. It started to snowball into something pretty significant. And we really feel like we're bringing in people that are just like kick-ass members of the community with their own respective sports and within their backgrounds. And we all do it in one location, one small camp, one full week of just learning.

You saw it and you were like, man, I know a lot of adults that act like kids. They would be perfect. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, tell us about you. So where do you fall in the mix with this? You mentioned John McCready and John Roethlisberger. If you guys don't know who they are, go look them up.

They're very, very, very good gymnasts. Yeah, very decorated. But Dave Durante as well is also one, and he's probably not going to bring it up unless I ask about it. Thank you. Yeah, so I grew up doing gymnastics. I grew up in New Jersey, just outside of the city, and I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to Stanford University, so I moved out west for college. I lived out there on and off for seven years. I graduated from Stanford and coached while I was training for the Athens Olympic Games, which I just missed out on. Then I moved to the Olympic Training Center

and lived in Colorado Springs for four and a half years while I trained for Beijing. During that time, I was team captain, team USA, for a number of years and on a few world championship teams, national champion a bunch of times, and then was part of the team in Beijing in 2008. Damn. After I retired after Beijing, I kind of found CrossFit

and started doing my own workouts, and it kind of grew from there, working out in my buddy's garage. You know, CrossFit around that time was still in the infantismal, you know, the infant stages. And it kind of got bigger and bigger. I met Chad at CrossFit Milford with Jay Lydon. Oh, cool. We did a seminar together five or six years ago now.

And I said, you know what, Chad, me and you could do something pretty unique within the community. And it kind of grew from there. Sorry, what was your events? What did you do when you competed in gymnastics? All around. All around. So I was all-around national champion a couple times. And all around is six events. So we see quite a few of them come up in the CrossFit world.

Men's gymnastics events are floor exercise, pommel horse, rings, parallel bars, vault, and high bar. Those are the six events that we have to do to get a full all around score. And I was pretty good across the board. I was definitely more of an upper body guy. So rings, pommel horse, high bar. Those were my events. My knees were jacked up all the time. I blew out my knees three times. ACL,

MCL, meniscus. So floor and vault for me were always kind of my shitty events. But definitely across the board I was pretty stable.

Pretty good all around. Did you know that you had a Wikipedia page? I did not. I didn't. I actually, I can't even imagine

what's on there. I was going to ask artistic gymnastics. Artistic gymnastics. It's artistic because there's rhythmic as well. And rhythmic, I think, is like Will Ferrell in old school, waving the ribbons around. That's the other side of gymnastics.

No fire hoops? No, we don't dive through hoops. What was your favorite event out of all the events that you did? I always tell people on good days I liked all of them, and on bad days I didn't like any of them. So it depended on how the body felt on that day. I'm sure you guys as athletes too understand how it feels when you're not feeling 100%. But I really like swinging on parallel bars.

Parallel bars, I was national champion a few times, and that was definitely one that I excelled in a little bit more. I like swinging around on P-bars quite a bit. Yeah. So you've been able to take that expertise and bring it to this camp. What is kind of the overall goal or mission of this camp? I think there's a few missions, and they have kind of changed initially from what we intended them to be from the start.

Our hope was to create an environment where people could learn from some of the highest-level technicians in individual fields in a really compact learning environment. That was really our initial intention, to bring good technique and foundation across a lot of modalities to people in an easy format. From there, it kind of grew into something that we didn't expect. Our first camp, we had 30 campers and 30 or 40 coaches.

So the ratio was pretty significant. For the campers who came to that first one, they were like out of this world. They were one-on-one with the coaches and staff. I was here for the first camp. Yeah, yeah, you came to the first one. Yep, absolutely. You came to the first two. So it has grown pretty significantly since that one.

Yeah, big time. Yeah. So what we didn't intend was kind of the relationships that were built because of it and people wanting to come back because they had met people and jobs that would create relationships, like actual marriages. Fitness network. Crazy stuff that came out of it.

We were just like, let's put together a kick-ass week for people to work out. And it grew into this morphed thing that we weren't expecting. So for us, the intention of the camp changed as the camp grew. Yeah. Going back to you a little bit with your coaching methods,

so tell us about Monkey Method. That's part of the coaching style that you guys kind of came up with. It's what your principles are. Right. Tell me a little bit about that and how it's developed. Absolutely. So myself, along with Colin Garrity, who's a movement ninja in his own right, Colin's amazing,

and me and him sat down and we wanted to bring a programming method that was based around the way that we used to train as gymnasts and make it more accessible to people in the fitness world. And really, Monkey Method, the initial phase is about training GPP

in the gymnastic sense. And the way that we break it down... What is GPP, just for everybody? General Physical Preparedness. Okay. And the way that we break it down. What is GPP just for everybody? General Physical Preparedness. Okay. So the way that we break it down is in a four-stage process, a four-phase process. And what that is, and this is how we train gymnastics. And I wanted to explain it in a way to the layperson in as easy a way as possible.

Phase one is about creation of body shapes. And what that means is I really break it down into two pieces. One is about getting more flexibility, being able to mold your body into positions that we're asking you to put them in. And part two is, yeah, so you'd be on phase one a little bit more, right? Shoulder mobility, just whole body creation of shapes, hollow and arch, being able to actually put your body in the shapes that we're requesting of it. And part two is core centric movement. More core exercises. And we see core a lot of the times we're doing this kind of core. We're doing toes to bar, knees to elbow, GHD sit-ups. That's kind of our

world of what people think of working on core. And we need to kind of expand that to everything that encompasses our midline. So it's not only our abdominals, hip flexors, obliques, our posterior chain, glutes, hamstrings, lower back, everything that really encompasses that midline. And I think people kind of miss out on that a little bit. So phase one, creation of body shapes through more core-centric movement and through more flexibility.

If we can get that in place, you're ready to move on to phase two. Phase two is about static and controlled movement. And that's the part that everybody hates. Nobody wants to work on holding positions for 10 seconds. Nobody wants to work on pause work or tempo work. That's what is the boring part, but it's the absolutely necessary part of creating stability.

It's the foundation. It is. That's what allows you to have longevity within movements. We were just asking that or talking about that on the way up here, driving up. We were like, man, we see hollow body work all the time. And I feel like we kind of were like we're just scratching the surface on why you're starting to do these things. You're starting to see it in more classes and more CrossFit classes and more clinics and things like that.

But I still feel like there's not a great understanding of why we're actually doing it. Yeah, because it's not fun. It's not sexy. It's not one of the things that people love to do. So please do enlighten us. Absolutely. Well, that's the separator, right? The separator between being good and being great at something is doing the things that not everybody wants to do. You have to make those sacrifices.

Say that again. Because that is what that is. Yeah, I say that. It's one of the things that I normally say when I speak to little gymnasts that are kind of growing up and wanting to become an elite athlete. The separation between someone who is good and someone who is great is making the sacrifices and doing the things and being in the gym when you don't want to be there. Anyone can do the things on the days that they feel great. Who can't do their movements and feel 100% PRs on when they're feeling 100%?

It's what you do on the days that you don't want to be in the gym. Making sacrifices on those days that separates people from good from being great. And it's pretty significant. And you'll be able to tell the people right away, all right, that person is going to come and just sit on their ass and do nothing today because their shoulder hurts. Well, with that being said, does it make it harder for you to maybe work with adults versus children who are like super maybe already a little bit developed in gymnastics or gung ho versus like an adult who's not having a great day?

Well, not really because what I've noticed is that I'm willing to work 100% wholeheartedly with someone who cares. And you can be the most talented person in the world. You can be top games level athlete. But if you don't care, I don't care. I'm not going to care for you. Yeah, it's tough. It is.

I mean, I can't give that part of it to you as a coach, as a trainer. You have to want it. And I will work with the most basic level person, the person that can barely hold himself in a plank, the person that can barely hold himself on one foot. Someone that has the most foundational level that needs that. But if they care and they really want to get better on a daily basis, I will give everything I have to that person to make them get better.

Hell yeah. And for me, that's the difference between really whether or not they're an adult, a kid, it has to do more with the passion for what you're doing than anything else. Who do you spend most of your time coaching? Like who's your crowd? Now, it's kind of split throughout the year. I have a regular gymnastics class at CrossFit Solace where I teach in New York City. And we just went through a muscle-up cycle.

And those are mostly adults. A lot of them are CrossFitters. Some of them are just movement enthusiasts. So it's a wide range, but most of them are adults on a regular basis. And then I also work with Team USA. I have a position with the Olympic Committee and also with USA Gymnastics. I'm the athlete representative on both sides.

So I have to keep track of how the guys are doing in preparation for Rio this summer. And I'm also on the selection committee for the Olympic team. Yeah. So I have to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to. And then I'm going to be helping pick the team in June. OK. And then in the summers, I do things like this. I come to camps and I work with little kids. So it has pretty wide range spectrum in terms of who I work with. So going back, you were talking about there's four phases. Yeah. We kind of cut you off. We touched on two. So what are the other two phases? The third one is the one that everybody jumps to.

It's the one that everybody goes through right away, dynamic action. Dynamic action. We want to get that kipping action. We want to get kipping pull-ups, kipping muscle-ups. Everybody jumps right to phase three because it's the sexy one. It's the fun one. You can't do sexy before you actually do the controlled movement. Yeah, that's right.

Phase two, phase one have to be put into place before you can move on to phase three. And that's what we preach. That's what we preach all the time. So a person, you would say, if they don't have strict pull-ups, they should not even try to touch kipping? Or what would you say? So I would say that there's an important distinction between doing something like a kip and then a kipping pull-up.

Because the mechanics of the kip kind of fall into the mobility and the creation of shapes that we were talking about in phase one. So then to really understand the fluidity and how to appreciate producing a proper kip is just as important as the stability component in phase two. So I like to separate kips and swinging actions and creating fluidity from the kip and the pull, which is kind of a combination of that puzzle piece. Right. So that's kind of a little bit of a distinction in terms of talking about pure static and then talking about adding the pulling component to the kip. Okay. Got it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, perfect sense. What's phase four? Phase four is kind of the culmination of it all. It's the creation of sequences, complexes, or routines. Gotcha. In the gymnastics world, it's what you see in the Olympics, a routine, an athlete putting all of these skills together in a really complex format. In the CrossFit world, or maybe in this sense, you'd see athletes maybe,

we just saw Jason Lydon get up there, big dude doing gymnastics movements. He did a bar pullover into a bar muscle. That's basically what it is, taking complex movements and putting them together. Yeah, before you came on the show, me and Kurt were actually watching, there was a gentleman in this contraption over here. Oh, yeah. Yeah, with the rings, and he was doing a full routine on the rings. He went to an iron cross.

He went to a front lever. Absolutely. It was all this crazy stuff. And what was most impressive, and I know now he had the harness on, but when he was doing it, you talk about that stability, he looked solid as a rock. Right. No shaking, no movement, just complete control and body awareness.

That's exactly right. And that's what you gain as a gymnast when you're growing up. You know, you spend the time working on that fundamental day in and day out when you're a kid. The thing is, what we see is there's a lot of impatience when it comes to this stuff. People expect to kind of cut down on that timeline when it comes to skill learning so much. We want instant gratification.

We want everything right now. And the reality of the situation doesn't work that way yeah that guy didn't learn that this week yeah oh yeah it was it's only day three right three wow wow no um i thought i think it was shane right was it shane maybe doing i don't know we have quite a few uh high level yeah shane defritas yeah he's one of our coaches he's another olympian he was on the 96 team for barbados so we have uh some high-level gymnasts running around here. Yeah, and it's interesting that you've married gymnastics and weightlifting, but if you think about it, they're not too different in terms of what they need, like what's required between the two.

Tell me how you kind of – do you apply anything, like, with your gymnastics training to weightlifting, or is it kind of separate? So as a gymnast, we didn't do very much weightlifting and you'll probably ask any gymnast not very much weightlifting in terms of Olympic weightlifting in our training. If we do any external load lifting has to do more with barbell training. Excuse me, dumbbell training. Okay. Dumbbell training allows us to actually create a little bit of instability which mimics actions like what we're doing on rings and things like that. So we do a ton of dumbbell work. Tons. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

But the barbell doesn't have too much application to what we were doing. But what we're seeing is that potentially it could. And I think most people are so stuck in the way that you've trained for so long that they're sometimes not willing to expand and appreciate the fact that you can maybe incorporate the way that other sports are doing things and make your sport potentially even better yeah so we've been working a lot with Chad and Mike and a lot of our other Olympic weightlifting coaches is seeing where there's good transferability seeing where you know some of the overhead stuff that they're doing can be applied to what we're trying to improve with handstand work or some of their mobility work for for elbow positioning can

assist with people getting that full locked out position and building that connective tissue around the elbow. There's these pieces that we didn't really think overlapped, but absolutely do as we start to sit down and really try to pick each other's brains a little bit more. Aja, I remember the story, and I'm going to let you tell it because I don't want to butcher it, but it was a conversation between you and Chad Vaughn when you had kind of just started. Oh, God, yeah. The hollow body deadlifts. Yeah, absolutely.

Please tell that story. It's so funny. So, like I said, you know, we don't do any barbell work. It was never anything that we really did growing up. So when I started doing CrossFit and me and Chad started working together, we started to see like, okay, let's see how you move. Let's see how you move with the barbell. Chad, let me see how you move in handstands and gymnastics work. And one of the biggest differences that we see between the gymnastics and weightlifting world

is what we do with our lower back positioning. In gymnastics, we're trying to create that hollow position. We're trying to create that posterior pelvic tilt, get that position of that hollow engaged. On the opposite side, in the weightlifting world, we're trying to make sure we have that lower lumbar arch intact before we do any heavy lifts off the ground to make sure we're nice and strong within that position. And there's some differences there.

There's some differences. And both Chad and I are very much specialists in our world. I've been doing these hollow and arch respectively for years, decades. So when I started lifting with Chad for the first time, I was like, all right, I'm going to show this guy what I got. Slap some plates on that bar. Feet together. Hollow position. I was just banging out the guy what I got. Slap some plates on that bar. Feet together. Hollow position.

I was just banging out the best hollow I possibly could. Doing deadlifts in, like, perfect hollow position. He's like, you're going to kill yourself. You're dead. Like, please don't even try to lift that off the ground. And for me, I was like, that's what my body goes to. That's what I know. I'm the opposite side.

I try to get Chad to do a handstand. The guy's a freaking gorilla, right? His back is so locked into that arch position that he tried to kick him a new handstand. He has no idea where that hollow is. So it is very much a habit that we've ingrained, and we recognize that we're specialists. We're specialists, exactly. We're working to build away from it because we want to become a more well-rounded athlete. But this is my 30th year doing gymnastics in some capacity, so my habits are pretty built in.

It's not going to be something that changes in a week or so. Yeah. So would you say it's more important to not necessarily discard one or the other, but, but understanding that it's good to have the ability to go back and forth between the two? That's absolutely what we preach. Our preach, what we preach here is from station to station is understand the technical movements and the why behind why we do things and then how to apply it to the specific movement that you're trying to train. Gotcha. So the people that are here are fairly new to these movements, right? Maybe within maximum within the last five years, they've started to work on rings or bar work. So for us, it's a good opportunity where their

habits haven't been really fully intact yet. So they can still be molded kind of like a ball of clay where we can say, okay, you can apply that hollow position as is needed for the gymnastics movements, and you can apply the lower lumbar arch as needed for the ollie lifts. And that really becomes a complete athlete. That's what we're searching for. Yeah, because, I mean, CrossFit, you have to be a generalist.

You have to be able to go in between. Absolutely. Yeah, you can't, like you're saying, you can't pull a max deadlift with a hollow position. Trust me, you can. Oh, you can?, like you're saying, you can't pull a max deadlift with a hollow position. Trust me, you can. Trust me. Oh, you can? You can. Or else you have back problems.

But you have to be skilled in both. How would you train somebody to do that? That's the hard part, right? That's the hard part. You can give them all the technique and everything, but being able to apply it in a method that makes sense is very, very challenging. And that's one of the things that we really feel is unique here as well

is because we get these minds of these people that are so great in their individual area, and we start to pick each other's brains and start to create formulas that make sense on a timeline for individual athletes where they can start working on those pieces together. So we have Chris Hinshaw here who's doing all the endurance training and doing his aerobic capacity, Chad and his crew with Mike Service on the Olympic weightlifting side and then myself with all of my gymnastics crew and we start to see okay if we're training we're trying to get an athlete that wants to become great at all of these things there's going to be a give and take right it's impossible for everyone to become an elite athlete across the board in all those areas it's not going to

happen so we have to figure out how to work around each individual, where their strengths and weaknesses are, and then we start to create formulas kind of like, you know, ratcheting it up in this area, toning it down here. And it's really like an art form. It's an art form to really try to put all those pieces together. A question I have on time when it comes to training for something like gymnastics specifically,

like let's say weightlifting is your goal. It's pretty clear what the goal might be. You have a number you want to hit, and you go chase after that number, and then you move on once you hit it. With gymnastics, it seems like there's a lot of elements, and it's really tough to have a lot of really good measuring points. For someone who's just getting into this, what would you recommend a mindset they could have going into that

and some things like baselines that they go after? I think that's why people are a little bit turned off by gymnastics movements sometimes too because they can't see their gains as much They can on the Olympic weightlifting side. You can throw two and a halves on each side and say okay I know it was better than I was last yeah exactly So it's a little bit more ambiguous, you know, the gains will come but it's harder to see on a daily basis So we try to do is try to introduce more progressions The more progressions the more you'll be able to see stepping stones in terms of your progress. And that's what I think is lacking a lot.

Can you give me an example? So let's say you're trying to learn a strict pull-up. So most people will work on strict pull-ups and they'll do band work and they'll just stay on the same band forever and they're not going to see any increase. So what we'd rather see them do is, one of the things we preach here a lot is working with partners and working with spotters so they can get immediate feedback as to where they are within the movement. Or we get them in the ring thing where we know what the set percentage is, and then we can slowly add additional body weight from there so they can start ratcheting up the difficulty from that point.

What's the ring thing? The ring thing is one of our ring training apparatus. This is what you were pointing to before when you guys were actually showing that person doing those ridiculous movements. It's a harness system that we've created. It's actually an apparatus that we've been using in the gymnastics world for decades. Most of the time you just go to a hardware store, pick up a bunch of shit and put it together and it doesn't

work real well. We wanted to make one that was actually pretty high end and safe. It works on 50% body weight through a pulley system so you can really get a self spot and it's one of the ways that we can start tracking progress pretty easily within certain movements. Gotcha. So we use that quite a bit.

Yeah, so working with a spotter is... Spotters is critical, critical. It's one of the things we use in the gymnastics world all the time and I think I try to preach it here because community is such a big part of what we kind of tack on to. Community is huge, right? We love the fact that people come in and you can jump in. And we don't mind you guys rolling in because it's part of what the community is all about.

And we feel like if you can take advantage of community with your own gym, the people that you work with on a regular basis, start partnering up, understanding how to work with someone so that every day you can start pushing each other. Getting that immediate feedback goes a long way in being able to build progression as we were talking about. That's huge. I don't see that a lot in CrossFit classes, like having people spot. We did that in the certificate.

I just recently did my O1, and we did that for muscle-up, and you had people spotting you and things like that. I think people are a little bit scared at first. They don't want to be in charge of someone else's movement. I dropped him. Yeah, they're worried enough to be in charge of someone else's movement. I dropped him. Yeah, they're worried enough about making mistakes on their own. They're like, I don't want to be in control of this person. So what we do is try to create an environment where they're comfortable,

getting understanding, okay, where do I put my hands to make sure that I'm getting this person safely? Because if you mess up one time, that person falls on their back. They'll never trust you again. You know what? I don't want to worry you ever again. Done. One time is all it takes takes and that confidence is broken. You're talking about that

trust fall video. Absolutely. Yeah. It's the same type of thing. There was a video, he said, of a girl that like had all her friends behind her

and like, do it, do it. And she fell forward. Oh, get out of here. Really? Yeah. And then she was like, y'all didn't catch me.

And then her mom was just laughing apparently. That trust is gone. Yeah, gone. That trust is gone. I'd gone. That trust is gone. I'd actually like going back to the phases. You said you have people progress through that. Do you do any kind of testing to see?

Okay. Yeah, so in our monkey method, we do an initial assessment to figure out where they are. We do a beginner, intermediate, and advanced, and we kind of get an assessment through a few different varieties of movements, and that categorizes them according to where they should be placed. And then from there, we have them go through.

It's a five-week block, so they'll build up. The third week would be the most challenging. Fourth week would be a deload week, and the fifth week is a test of all the movements that they've been going over through that block. So really the whole program is 15 months of training where the first three blocks are phase one, the second three blocks are phase two, the next three blocks are phase three,

and then the final are the creation of sequences, complex routines. Oh, cool. So it's built upon that same four phases that we're talking about. So that would be, the testing would be another way that you could see if you were actually gaining progress.

Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that we kind of shy away from that kind of thing because people don't stick with plans on the gymnastics side nearly as much as they do with weightlifting. They don't stick with plans at all. That's a problem across the board. So they'll do it like once or twice a week,

and then it comes to the test week, and they're like, I didn't get any better. It's like, well, because you didn't do any of it. As you say all this, it's kind of coming to me like, yeah, people stick with weightlifting because they can see that progress so much faster. And maybe, I think the information hasn't been that easy to find as far as gymnastics. I mean, I can Google weightlifting articles all day. Sure, sure.

Those progressions, or they're just crazy difficult and people are... Right. Enter power monkey. Yeah. I feel like that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to fill a niche. We're trying to fill this educational missing link between what the highest level of high gymnastics training is

and how to get people that never came from that background and make sure that they're doing it properly. But the key component is making sure that they're doing it for longevity. Most people are doing this for quality of life. Not everybody's a games competitor. We want people to be able to do it for the next 20, 30 years. It's not about just doing it one time, getting through a workout, and then being satisfied with that.

Doing a rep one time does not equate to mastery of that movement, and I think people miss that sometimes. So one leads to two, two leads to three, and it's a so-balling type of an effect. Yes. I'm going to jump in. Maybe the example of getting a muscle-up, you get your first muscle-up, and people think, I don't have to work on it again.

Absolutely. It's never the case. I'm done with it. I got the skill. But that's definitely not the case. I've been doing muscle-ups, you get your first muscle-up, and people think, I don't have to work on it again. Absolutely. It's never the case. I'm done with it. I got the skill. But that's definitely not the case. I've been doing muscle-ups for six years now, and I'm still... I did actually one of your gymnastics phases last year, and most of it was just swinging on the rings. I mean, very tedious work, but man, did it do a lot to improve the transitions, the kipping, all that work on the muscle-up. One of the things that we say with the four phases, too, of our monkey method

is that in your training, once you move from phase one to phase two, that does not mean that you're done with phase one. It just gets incorporated into the next phase. So at the end, you're doing phase one, two, three, and four together. And the other thing on that as well is that there's never a moment in a gymnast or any elite athlete's career where they stop working on basics. It doesn't happen. I was saying that the other day.

Yeah, we're never too good or above working on basic stuff. It doesn't happen. It's always a part of the way that we train. I think people miss that sometimes. Yeah, always, at all times, at all times. How would, I guess if you were, I guess let me phrase this question. Let's say I wasn't an athlete trying to go to the highest level. What kind of, what should I focus on?

Or what should I just mostly devote my training time to? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think what I normally kind of push people to that are new to this, that aren't looking to go to the highest of high levels, is that they should be doing three things on a daily basis. And it really could be 15, 20 minutes, depending on how much time you want to spend on it. But part one is flexibility work, becoming more mobile.

It goes back to being able to put your body in those shapes that we're trying to create. Two is the core work, which is all part of phase one. And third is doing handstands, doing handstand work. Handstand work on a very regular basis. Now, why handstands? Handstands because it applies to so many other movements. And when I say handstands, it doesn't necessarily mean I want you to get inverted.

There are tons of handstand exercises that you can be doing that can be either laying on the ground, supinated, pronated, at angles, upright. Working on handstands does not necessarily mean you're inverted. So that's, I think, a misconception sometimes. I think I have to get upside down for 15 minutes or else this isn't going to work. That's not necessarily the case. But those three pieces, handstands, core work, and flexibility should be done on a very regular basis

so you can start getting your body prepared for moving out to some of those more difficult movements. Can you tell us real quick about your handstand journey? Oh, it's a journey, all right. It's this story. It's the greatest of the best. It's crazy. What was it you were after?

I'm trying. I'm still trying. I'm still trying. Oh, it's still going. It's still going. It's ongoing. I had hurt my elbow a little bit, so I kind of had to back off a little bit. But I've been trying for actually about two years now to get a freestanding,

no walk, 10-minute freestanding handstand. That's like I'm having trouble standing here for 30 minutes on my feet. So you would be completely inverted on your hands, straight up and down for 10 minutes. For 10 minutes. And not walking into it, just getting into it. Just staying in one place for 10 minutes. Okay. Yeah, so it's been a building process.

And this isn't really something you ever would do in the gymnastics world either. So it's been something after I retired to have a goal for myself. And my hands have gotten significantly better from when I was training as a gymnast because I could spend more time on it. And at this point, every second is like an hour. It feels like an hour. Every second that ticks off that clock is like the longest second of my life. But I've built up to just about eight minutes.

I'm at about eight minutes now. I do a lot of training where I do about 10 to 15 to 20-minute holds up against the wall just to kind of build the shoulder strength to be able to support it. But it's an incredible amount of shoulder strength and then a lot of grip strength too, your form. You don't really understand how much stability goes into your fingertips.

I would never get that, yeah. Is that unbroken when you're talking against the wall? Yeah, unbroken. Whoa. So we've got to get maybe a short clip or something with you after just showing your shoulder position. Yeah. Because if you haven't seen Dave's inverted shoulder position when he's in a handstand,

you don't understand how this probably wouldn't even be near possible. He looks so stacked and lined up, it looks like his shoulders are hips. Like everything is so lined up that without even having that, you know, that base, that phase one, he wouldn't be able to put this kind of volume in. Absolutely. It's pretty insane. Absolutely. Something that I'm just still trying to even get better at myself is i'm not trying to get better

at holding for longer periods of time i'm trying to get better at that actual position itself yeah and that is a lot of work and i thought so when i got to college i blew my knee out my first day at stanford i got off the plane from jersey went into the gym was all excited to be part of the team my first turn i blew my knee out and uh my coach was like okay there's certain things we're going to work on. I thought that my handstand was actually pretty good. I've been doing gymnastics 12 years at that point. I got in the gym, and he's like, your handstand sucks.

You're starting over from scratch. I was blown away. I was like, what does that even mean? What can I change? I've been doing it for 12 years. How can I change this? He said, we're going to start over from scratch again. I can't imagine someone telling me that after I've done something for 12 years.

I had to go back from scratch. And fortunately, you know, an injury turned into a blessing. Yeah. And for me, that's how I always try to approach injuries as kind of an opportunity. Absolutely. And I turned my handstand into something that really was a strength for me. And my handstand turned into, for me, what I think is one of the better positions that I have in the sport. And it became because of an injury that I had.

And I wouldn't have had it unless my coach was willing to say, your handstand sucks. How did you get it to that level? What did you do specifically? That's a whole episode on that. We could spend hours on that. But it's a ton of different movements. It's a lot of stability.

It's a lot of flexibility. It's a lot of working on end ranges, a lot of wrist work, a ton of elbow conditioning where you're working on the connective tissue to be able to support in that fully stacked position. There's so many little intricate pieces that I think most people miss out on. They just think, I'm going to get upside down, it's going to get better.

It's not really the case. It's like painting a masterpiece. Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you said that. I always tell people it's like a sculpture. I was acquainted with a sculpture where you have your big block, you do your big chunks, right? You do big chunks, then you start doing the fine detail work, and then it's like a sculpture. I was acquainted to a sculpture where you have your big block, you do your big chunks, right?

You do big chunks, then you start doing the fine detail work, and then it's about polish. So it's all about these fine steps, and I think most people want to get to the polish before they have the big chunks taken away. Oh, man. That's across the board. That's with everything.

It is. Even weightlifting, anything. You just want to get to the end result, but not do all the other things that you need to get to that end result. Absolutely. Yeah. And then they ask why. Why didn't I do it? Yeah. It's pretty obvious. Well, you said flexibility, core stability. So in handstands, are there any like, so flexibility and core stability, are there any like go-to movements that you do that you would say is somebody should just do every day? I think it's an individual case-by-case situation because if you're more flexible, less flexible in certain areas, there's areas of need that you need to be focusing on.

Same thing with core work. I'd say in general, most of the time what I see with a lot of people is that they're missing a ton of oblique work because it's an area that most people just never work on. A lot of Olympic weightlifters work on the posterior chain a ton. A lot of gymnasts work on their hip flexors and abdominals. So depending on your background, we'll kind of direct you in terms of where I would want you to be working. But it is more on a case-by-case situation. What do you do for your obliques? Tons of stuff.

So on a more basic level, we do a lot of side planks, a lot of side raises, things like that. On a more advanced side, we do things like flags where you're holding out on bars, holding yourself out completely. We have our stall bars up on the wall over there. I can show you a couple of those if you want to see what they look like. I'm going to be honest. I've tried it so many times. I just think my legs are too heavy. It could be. It could be. We have VO2 max testing and impedance testing here,

and they did impedance testing just telling body composition and things like that. Yesterday, I did it, and they were like, your upper body is really overdevelopeded and your legs are not so much. You're like, hmm, go figure. Oh, yeah, wow, that's crazy. You've been skipping leg day? What's going on? That's why I wear pants everywhere.

I haven't worn a pair of shorts in years. When I can stand on my hands longer than on my feet, yeah. Yeah, I started working with a strength coach when I was at the Olympic Training Center too. I tried to implement some Olympic lifting and at the time I had just started and I could bench more than I could squat and my strength coach was just like, get I could bench more than I could squat.

And my strength coach was just like, get out of here. Don't ever come back again. Like, this is pathetic. This is not allowed. This is not allowed. So you still do a lot, mostly bodyweight stuff. So, like, no, like, any kind of farmer's cares or anything like that? I do CrossFit now. Okay.

I do CrossFit, yeah. I mean, I do a lot of gymnastics training. I probably do, like, two workouts a day where I'll do gymnastics-specific training, and then I'll do a WOD. And, I mean, for me, I really love doing CrossFit, and it was like the right thing as soon as I finished from competing for me to kind of fill that gap. Yeah.

But I like what you said about that. You do do a lot of bodyweight stuff. Absolutely. So people always want to say, well, I can't do this because I don't have the equipment. But you've got your own body. You don't need it. You don't need it. That's the best thing.

That's the best thing you can do. And that shit is hard too, man. If you're doing it right, it's hard. Yeah, it hurts. It's exhausting. Doing isometric holds like that, it takes a lot of power. Like doing hanging L-tuck holds. I'm smoked by the end of that stuff.

Absolutely. I think you can't appreciate it. Ring support holds, so simple but so challenging. Yeah, you can't appreciate it until you actually get into it. And I think most people, again, because it's tedious, because it's boring, most people skip over it and they want to go to something more fun before they're prepared for it.

But it has tons of value. Tons of value. Very cool. Man, Dave, you killed us. That was awesome. Yeah, this was great. Is there anything else you want to add? Like where can people find more information about the monkey method, the camp?

So you can just go to PowerMonkeyCamp.com. Our next camp is coming up October 2nd through the 8th. We already have the registration up. There's an early bird special coming up on it. We have all the same coaches coming out, so it's going to be a pretty kick-ass week in the fall. So it's too late to sign up for this one. Too late.

You're going to be missing quite a bit if you want to show up today. But, yeah, the fall camp will be just as good as this one, if not bigger and better. And then monkey method will be still on our PowerMonkey website. It's just www.PowerMononkeyfitness.com. Very cool. Awesome. Awesome, man.

Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, guys.