Barbell Shrugged - Travis Mash Joins the Rapid Health and Performance Team w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #767

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged we introduce our newest coach at RAPID Health Optimization, the one and only, Travis Mash. Travis Mash’s first appearance on Barbell Shrugged dates back 8 years ago. He became a co-host in 2019. And finally, we have found the right opportunity to unite forces and we are fired up. Mash will lead strength and conditioning coaching for our professional athletes, utilizing decades of experience with players across the NFL, Team USA, UFC, and Boxing. Game on. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we have a massive announcement. Coach Travis Mash is joining us. Rapid health optimization. It's about time. Mash showed up on his first episode of Barbell Shrugged like eight years ago. I met him, I can't remember when we joined forces, but in about 2019, we started recording a lot of shows, doing a little traveling together, went to Sweden, we made barbells at Aleko. In that time time he went and got his master's degree in exercise physiology which is super cool just been on this hunt through barbell shrug together we've never been able to like professionally align ourselves and coaching and business we've done a few things together

as far as kind of like him writing programs for us but now now it's real very very excited about this but having him be able to come in and be the strength conditioning coach for all the athletes that roll through our program not only do i feel like the the business picked up one of the best minds in the strength conditioning world but i love travis mash he's a phenomenal human being one thing that's very cool about this show and doing it with him for as long as we have you get to like know people you get to know their families you travel with them we get to go do stuff together the shows on zoom but we have a date every Tuesday that we got to go and check in and talk about fitness and talk about health talk about the things that are important to

us in life and this show has made me has allowed me to be in touch with very cool people and over the hundreds of interviews we were able to make Travis a host and add a ton of value to the show and also become really good friends and our families all know each other we've all traveled together and we've spent time together and it's a very cool to to be in the same sphere and finally be able to align. I feel like the force is strong here. We've got all the right people and this is a very cool moment. So please get over to rapidhealthreport.com if you would

like to check out what's going on in rapid health optimization. And there's a free case study over there. Timothy Jones, that man came into the program with hereditary cholesterol issues that were never going to be solvable. And then we cut his cholesterol in half, got him completely ripped in the process. Men's Health and Apple News actually ran a case study on him because it was very, very cool to see how far we were able to take his programming. So if you want to read that case study, head over to rapidhealthreport.com. Travis Mash, love you, buddy. We're excited to have you on the team and let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Andrews Vaughn, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Nobody else today. No one else is invited.

Just a bunch of homies hanging out, talking about the fitness. Number one on the docket today, Coach Travis Mash. How long have we known you now i've known see you still when was the first time you were involved i'll shrug i just had a time hop from one of our first episodes that was 10 years 10 years so presumably 11 or 12 years but you probably helped on the show within a year or two have known us for sure yeah were you coaching bledsoe before you were on the show right around the same time pretty much see uh i met him 2013 it was the uh american open when it started snowing in dallas well places it was like an ice spaghetti and you know it was crazy yeah so i met him it took us it took us 12 years to officially work together yeah it seems

like a long time right i know i was so pumped you know when uh who was it was it you and his asked me or doug no doug asked one of y'all asked me i was so pumped yeah we did we did a little bit together uh when we were doing the one ton challenge oh yeah yeah we did right before covid remember we tried to start an event company like right before covid two months before covid that was like the worst decision of all time you did write the programming for the one ton challenge which still is phenomenal programming right before COVID, two months before COVID. That was like the worst decision of all time. You did write the programming for the one ton challenge, which still is phenomenal programming.

Everybody wants to get just insanely strong on the six big lifts between powerlifting and weightlifting. That was fun. Yeah. Do y'all still sell that? I mean, we have it. We haven't promoted in a long time, but it's still, it's still available in the ether of the internet. You can find it.

I see it come through on our uh on our receipts on a yeah somewhat random basis i'm like damn there's people out there still getting jacked you guys got the rapid is crazy man the team how do y'all do that you have such an amazing team you've assembled like i hope you're not asking me you've been here for three weeks now you should know not to ask me that doug's the one that does it all. Doug's the one that knows all the people. Yeah, man. Doug is really good about the whole process shit.

Sure. I've been in business long enough to know that it's not that easy. It's not like I could just do this with anything. Like, you know, Barbell Strug worked out really well, and we crushed for many, many years, and are still doing our thing. And now Rapid has been crushing for a couple of years, and it's grown very well. But I've tried many, many things over the years. Most of them did not work. Every once in a while, you get something that does work and you just you make hay while the sun shines. So Rapid has been doing phenomenal. You know,

I got a great team. Anders, me, Dan, Andy, you know, came together and we all have our own unique roles and we don't cross over very much at all. Like have our our own unique roles and we uh we don't cross over very much at all like we have our own unique thing that we do within the company we all stay in our lane and then you know luckily we have a gangster service that has been absolutely smashing for our clients and you know the more we sell the better we can grow the team i remember y'all asking me about you're telling me about andy uh he's doing this crazy testing for athletes he's right around i was taking this class i'll be monitoring i remember totally and then like three and a half years ago yeah like we're november like november 3rd or something like that so we're coming up

right on three years of it of the first client joining um but doug and I went and did it like four or five months before that. And we were like, oh, this is like a real thing. We were down at Bledsoe's event, the Strong Coach Summit, or I think that's what it was called, in Austin. Doug and I were like,

damn, I feel amazing right now. We need to go do this thing. Yeah. And there we go, three years later. Correct. And there you go. Three years later. Correct. And there you go. It was only a fraction of what it is now. That was like,

that was like the, the 1.0 version. And we're like, we're now on, I don't know, three or 4.0, whatever it is. And it's,

it's scaled up and gotten much more comprehensive since then. I mean, back then it was just Dan, Annie running labs on people. They didn't have any, like the coaching side of it. There were no subject matter experts. There were no nutritionists or physical therapists or behavioral health coaches or sleep specialists. Now we have a whole team of people that work with our clients as opposed to just running labs and giving people advice

and suggestions based on labs. It's so perfect. I don't feel forced. It's so much more than that now. It's cool because I don't feel forced know it's cool i don't feel forced to do things that i don't necessarily feel like the expert you know like in the past i'll be coaching someone and i will try to you know help people with nutrition i mean obviously i know nutrition but i don't know it like a nutritionist who their whole focus is nutrition it's like feels so good it's like when someone asks me a question and I'm like, Oh, we have this other person that's way better than me at this. Yeah. Yeah. This is the, this is the first business. I feel like, um, we've, we've only like looked for the world-class solution.

Yeah. It's crazy. Not just a nutritionist, but who's like really worked with like really high level people and can. I mean, every single person that comes through, there's like and this is just the nutrition side of things. There's like an hour presentation of. We could do a podcast on nutrition, but like, yeah, for every single client that comes through having a 60 minute video presentation of what their current nutrition is, where it's lacking, how to improve it. And here are the exact meal plans to get all the way calorically, macronutrients, micronutrients to an optimal level so that you can go slay is wild. And then to be able to do that for behavioral health and sleep and stress management, the physical therapy side of things. Like it's wild. It's crazy. Yeah.

Every business that I've ever been a part of where we had any level of success, I've also been like the target customer. Like when I was running a CrossFit gym, like I wanted to be like the best athlete I could be. I was competing in MMA at the time. I wanted to be strong, fit, mobile and and in every sense of the world, so I could be a very well-rounded athlete. And so running a CrossFit gym, teaching people gymnastics and weightlifting and powerlifting and just training in general, it was what I wanted to do

all day, every day. And so because I was interested in it, I was more interested in teaching it because I was more interested in learning about it at the time. The more you can be your own customer in a business, the more you're just going to be all in on that business. And it's going to be like an extension of, of, of your life. It's going to be an extension of your personality and your temperament and, and your goals and just the, the life that you're surrounding yourself with. If you have a business around that, it's easy to be in business and to work all day. Cause you don't feel like you're working all day. You're just living your life. And that, that has then scaled from owning a gym to running shrug, which was very similar. Like my

life, I wanted to be someone who was just traveling around with my friends, lifting weights and talking about training with cool people that knew a lot about training. And that was the easy business to run. It still is an easy business to run, not because it's easy to do, but my interest is so high and it's so enjoyable for me with who I am that it just doesn't feel like work. Same thing when we moved on to the diesel dad, like I had kids, I was in a new stage of life. Now I still wanted to be strong and fit and whatever else, but I had like these new constraints of having these, you know, three little monsters run around where, where I, I wanted to be fit, but I had, I had a limited amount of time to get it done.

And so, you know, we created email aesthetics and, and all the other training programs that I wanted to be fit, but I had a limited amount of time to get it done. And so, you know, we created EMOM Aesthetics and all the other training programs that were involved with the Diesel Dad because I, again, was the target customer. And then now fast forward to Rapid, part of the reason that we decided to get together with Dan and Andy and create this like super program was because as I'm getting older, like my goals, goals again have shifted. Like I just want to have like high energy, high libido, again, strength, speed, power, et cetera, but be as lean as possible. I want to age well is the reality of it. And the medical side of it and running, running labs and working with specialists and whatnot, like all that stuff is available, but it was all siloed

into like, you had to have all these like separate individual specialists. There was nowhere you could go or nowhere I could go nowhere. I could find where I could have this like one-stop shop where I could work with all the different people I wanted to work with, where they're all talking to each other and they all knew each other. And I was getting one comprehensive plan without having, I don't need a strength coach specifically. Of course, everyone can have a coach and that would be helpful. But, you know, if I had a strength coach and I had a nutritionist and I had a physical therapist and I had a functional medicine practitioner and I had a behavioral health coach, like if I had all these different separate specialists, even if I had them all, they're not talking to each other. They're all giving me different advice that's potentially

conflicting and it's just a headache. so once once we were able to meet with dan and andy and and realize that they they have this like unique part of it with the the labs side of it with the functional medicine practitioner and a muscle scientist looking at labs giving hyper specific recommendations we had the coaching side of it and then we get we could come and layer in all the other specialists to make this like comprehensive super program and i was the client i knew exactly what i was looking for And we basically just built it for ourselves, knowing other people in our same similar situation would definitely want it. It was a no brainer. And now we work all day on this like very complicated. I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com.

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

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

watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com. And let's get back to the show. Doug just laid out like the absolute best way to go build the highest level program you can have all the people that he wants to be training with and consulting. You actually hire all the people, Doug. You actually like have all of our team members on your team writing your programs for you. Like you're, you're working with our physical therapists in the program, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's probably my, my main person right now is our, our physical therapist. She,

she writes all my, my PT, um, you know, basically like what I do before my training, she handles that side of things. Um, just clearing up aches and pains like i did jiu jitsu rib injuries are super common in jiu jitsu and as an example with me like i've had i've had three or four like back to back to back my spinal rotation is very poor like i've been very flexible my entire life i did gymnastics growing up i could do the splits until i was like 30 um but doing you know weight lifting and power lifting my entire basically my entire life um and almost no rotational sports like my spinal or thoracic rotation is super locked up so in jiu-jitsu when i get cranked to the side instead of my spine just rotating it doesn't and then my ribs fucking pop and that's it's already a common thing in jiu-jitsu and it's happened to me many times

and it's painful for all the obvious reasons uh not just when it happens but doing breathing and coughing and sneezing and getting out of bed like it makes everything hurt especially wrestling that's a big mistake a lot of adults make is not doing any rotational movement you know that no one does anything in the transverse plane and then they're like let's go do golf and then guaranteed 90 of the people, I hurt my back because they played golf out of the blue. It's like, we need to do rotation. All of us need to.

Yeah. A lot of my rotation is very stability-based. It wasn't really mobility-based. And I think that's contributed to these rib injuries. So anyway, to cycle back to Andrew's original comment, yeah, I've been working with our physical therapist specifically to clear that up, plus a handful of other things i got going on because i'm always dinged up from just doing jujitsu now in my 40s for the last 20 years

um but yeah she's my main person uh anders i know you're working with uh with our buddy mike t nelson on on cardio related things there for a while i got my vo2 max tested this week or last friday what is your vo2 max oh yeah what is it 53.1 wow dude that's that's really good when i was like fighting mma my own mine was only like 56 and i was like much better shape than i am right now i'm afraid to do it now now i'm definitely afraid to do i'm gonna be embarrassed uh one year ago before i started working with mike it was 51 so a whole year working hard to get two points to go from super superior to

extremely superior I mean it's incredible anything that they say is superior on the sheet is like the coolest marketing thing ever it's like who came up with that it's like bad not bad good better elite

superior superiorly shitty is what mine is yeah uh dude you should take the bike test one this one was like way harder i remember last the last time a year ago when i did it and coming off the coming off the treadmill and going feel like i had a lot more to give here not realizing like i was at a max heart rate but this time the dude cranked me up to like a level 10 on the incline and my legs were just gassed so i felt like i um you probably need to do it with like the same tester person to like you would it's like your max heart rate and everything's kind of hurting for a little bit anyways, but to be at one of the, one of the, um, doctors or, uh, some guy at a running Raleigh runners, something it's like a PT slash running gym.

They've got all the, all the things in there, but it's, it's basically like where, uh, a bunch of runners go to get tested and buy new shoes and stuff like that. But you can do them on a bike. I feel like a bike, though, I've never done it on a bike. A bike just doesn't seem as challenging. I don't know how. It's got to be hard to get your heart rate to a max heart rate just pedaling your legs. Not on an aerodyne bike

i think you do it on the aerodyne better than a bike you know like right but yeah like how do you increase the difficulty on on an air on a regular bike like how did you slow down like like that's how they do it on the on the treadmills on there forever is the incline but i don't i don't know how they do it on a bike i've never had that one i've never done on the bike either but yeah i mean they could increase the resistance on the bike you know every couple of minutes it just gets more and more resistance as opposed to like having to pedal faster yeah but yeah i've never done it on a bike i've only done do max testing on treadmill yeah i'm done with the mile run though i can't do it anymore i could do it i enjoy i still run

i think we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago um i feel like if if i put it in like a month at a track so the last two miles that I've run six, 18 and six, 19, like back to back testing, essentially that's a plateau. Um, I can get better at the sports specificity of going to a track four days a week, running four hundreds,

pacing it out to exactly like one 25, one 27, one 27, hold on for dear life on lap four like i i could i could go do that but it just doesn't align with life i don't i don't have a track that i can consistently get to schools back in session so like all the soccer kids are at the at the tracks now or like the soccer field in the middle of the tracks um so it's the in order to get where i want to go it is going to take more of my life away than i'm willing to give that's because you're too good that um you're just naturally so good at it man it's like so yeah you would for you to get better you're gonna have to train like a ding you know bro or something yeah like all the training i've done right now is roughly like go

run a quarter mile hill which is like outside my house like i can just i'm looking at the start line right now um and then run around my neighborhood that has an uphill and a downhill so like i can i can bomb the downhills like i've run the 0.93 mile loop and 554 but i'm also just really good at running that loop now which is kind of like what i need to do to get to six minutes or i feel like right now i'm in good enough shape to run like a 609 but it would take um if i if i ran it intelligently, but to get the last 10 seconds off. In the year, I essentially shaved 12 seconds. Man, that's what happens when you're so...

Another 10 seconds off that is just sports-specific, getting to a track. It's like when you listen to Usain Bolt talk about the 100 meter, it sounds like he's racing like a mile, but it, it's because he knows the exact number of steps, exactly how he's supposed to feel at those steps. Like every single meter along the way,

he knows exactly what's going on. Um, you just got to get to that point to be able to, for my, for my current fitness, it becomes like a very exact process of just getting reps. And I can't, I can't do that. It's easy for me, Mike, because my VO2 max is so poor.

I could just, if I move, it's a good thing. Dude, you're still so jacked though, man. You're still clean 300 pounds, can't you? I'm getting there, especially like my power is up. So everything is trending good. All my health is like, which is, you know, I heard Andy say, this would be good for our listeners. It was like Andy was talking about how closely like longevity and health for people like us is the same as it is for peak performance. It's like, you know, we need to focus on maximizing all the areas of our life to live a long time and to feel good.

Whereas like the athletes that we work with, the high-end athletes to maximize their athletic ability, it's the same exact thing. It's like maximize these areas, you know, anaerobic, aerobic. So PO2 max. I feel like when you're young and you you're an athlete if you want to have any amount of success in a sport you should be taking your strengths and really capitalizing on them and making them as good as possible if you're already naturally strong if you want to win at something

pick a strength sport and get really really really strong and then you'll be a winner right but as far as like health and longevity goes it's kind of the opposite where as you get older, you really should pick the thing that you're the worst at and shore that up, bring that up. And then that's the thing that's actually going to help you like live a longer, more balanced life. I've heard a similar analogy in business. Like if you want to make a lot of money in business, you should, you should take something that you're really good at in our case, like health and fitness things, and then make a business out of that. You already really good at it go be the best at it and then you'll be successful but like in your relationships like your relationship with your wife or best friends or whatever then it's like whatever your deficiencies are then shoring up your deficiencies

will minimize the amount of conflict in your relationship so relationship wise you should shore up your deficiencies but like money and wealth wise you should shore up your deficiencies, but like money and wealth wise, you should capitalize on your strengths. I feel like it's like that for young athletes versus older non-athletes that are just looking to be healthy and have good energy, longevity and just feel good. Right. Well, I mean, even like you talk about the athlete just depends on the person, like, you know, like if you a decathletelete well then that would probably be the exact perfect program for longevity because they got to be strong fast gotta have anaerobic aerobic and so it just depends on the athlete but even if it's like a um if you think about a my one mile sprinter i guess runner i'm calling a sprinter but the way you improve that person is the same way you improve

like an adult i was like looking at their vo2 max and seeing anaerobic aerobic you know lactate threshold and all those things and so yeah it was was he was one of his newer podcasts was talking about longevity and performance oh yeah it was the reason why he named his, his podcast perform. It's like these things that work for the, the best athletes in the world work for old men like me and you, you know, well, you guys aren't old, but old men like me. Yeah. We actually did a show on longevity, maybe like a year ago or somewhere, somewhere around there. And we were talking a lot about this and it was when at the seminar down in dallas like the very first slide that galpin had was essentially comparing the

goals of performance versus longevity and he was like basically the only things in there's like a very few number of things in here that are different and one of them is like joint pain yeah the goals of longevity joint pain like he was comparing it to kind of like the olympic athletes because the olympics were going on he was like if your goal is to live forever joint pain is probably very important because you don't want to just live in pain he's like if you're an athlete and you're competing for a gold medal pain is that's par for the course just get to it. Like you're pushing the limits that hard. But when you start to look at all of the performance metrics,

they're also the exact same things that are going to allow you to live a long time and perform at a high level for as long as you possibly can. Totally. I remember talking with Julian Pinault many years ago. Oh yeah. Yeah, I do. Where is that guy now? yeah totally i don't know i haven't talked to him a long time he's a great dude yeah um we're out of his gym um dude where is julian 16 17 yeah wildly ahead of the game oh yeah he really was yeah he was like so far ahead and i haven't thought about him in five years he was on the show before totally that was like a massive show that was like right before i came on that was a massive show the um was it yeah chris and i can't remember there was something

you guys had like the full crew out there doing people were throwing up pushing sleds yeah we did throw up out there that was like his like that was like julian pinot's like breakout thing everybody was talking about that show with dj martin didn't he start working with cj martin and yeah oh yeah i think he did that's right yeah yeah we did yeah he uh he introduced us to to bear crawl sled pulls i never really done like heavy bear crawl sled pulls where what he would do is he would put a bunch of 45s on the sled and you would you would bear crawl as hard as you could but you'd only be able to pull it like 10 feet and then he then you're basically stuck and he

would remove a 45 and you'd be able to like barely pulled another 10 feet and then he would remove a 45 it was like it was like these drop sets of bear crawl sled pulls where it was heavy enough where you could barely pull it at all and then then he would slowly make it lighter and lighter and lighter and yeah i told i totally threw up in that parking lot that day i was not prepared for that i mean i and i and again i i was in great shape back then and still that got me good i really enjoyed it well actually one of his main points yeah one of his main points was like crossfit kind of originally started as like this uh this idea that you would go a hundred percent all out on one workout and then you'd call it a day and then it slowly kind of got away from that over time where where people weren't really reaching true anaerobic threshold every single day they were now they were just training

for a sport which of course there's advantages to that too but he was like every once in a while you need to make yourself as tired as you possibly can like in in a short bout so there's like airdyne sprints or salt bike sprints or whatever you want to call them these days um and sled pulls is definitely one of those things where if you want to go 100 all-out effort for you know 30 seconds and end up throwing up in a parking lot then heavy sled poles can get it done and so he absolutely used us to that and it was a great time i actually missed doing stuff like i haven't done a lot of sled work a long time i feel like any talks a lot about that now about like he's not so much into the whole like um like zone two cardio long you know he's more into like the anaerobic the sweep your butt or, you know, combination of the two. So I agree.

I like that. I would rather kill me for 10 minutes than let me miserable for 30 minutes. Yeah, I found more of a balance of that over time where I used to be. I used to be heavy on the high intensity side of things. I used to only do like high intensity interval training and then just kind of general weight training type things and didn't do almost any slow long duration zone two cardio type work um now it's a little more balanced where my my ideal setup is if i'm not counting jujitsu as cardio which it totally is at some level of course um but if i'm just doing quote-unquote cardio work um i love doing assault

bike sprints that's probably like my my low impact um easy thing that i can do it doesn't take a lot of time we get a lot of bang for your buck and if i'm trying to like hit max heart rate say once a week like that's the easy way to do it where there's almost no possibility of me injuring myself or exacerbating any pain that i already have from jujitsu or wherever else. And then as far as like zone two cardio, you know, just doing something very light for an hour or more. I've become more friendly to that over time purely because I just want to be outside. Agreed. Yeah.

I just want to go for an easy bike ride or for like a ruck or of course just going for a jog because I just spend too much time in my cave. I'm podcasting right now with all the lights off in this room with a light in my face. With all my windows closed because that's what makes for the best lighting on Zoom. You've got to get out in the garage.

I know. I need to get outside. We all need a garage like yours. This is why I sit out here, just so I can stare outside and look at sunlight all day. I mean, that's the only zone, too, I'm going to do is, like, go for a rut, go for a walk. You know, and the thing about the Airdyne, too, is, like, my running, because of, you know, hips and other issues, if I go hard on a run, odds are it's going to give me, you know, I'm going to hurt because my gait's not perfect. That's another thing people listening, you know, if you're running, you know,

if you're not really efficient as a runner, you know, if you're going to go and turn it up a little bit, it's probably not the, it's not the movement I would choose. Airdyne would be better. Or even like a, what's the the climber you know climbers would be good yeah versus climber but yeah really done like a hard set of of intervals on a burst of climber i've like played with them before but i've never seriously trained on one before oh for sure i did because rocky remember in the russian rocky ford yeah so when i did my one fight of my life i did

that thing like right like it was the russian guy yeah i was nowhere near the russian guy but yeah it looked cool i'd rather go run hill sprints hill sprints and stairs of the shit yeah yes again again too your your um risk injury uh injury risk is low when you're doing things like that because you know it's when you get that max v and you're upright and you're you know your risk of hurting a hamstring or even a glute goes up so high especially for me you know yeah air dive i feel like the the uh the zone two training i i really struggle when I hear people are like, and then I sit on the rower for 45 minutes. I'm like, man, zone two is like the living part.

Yeah. You're like just doing stuff. Don't move. You're in zone two, like doing the dishes, like folding clothes. You're like focused on something and just move. You're doing anything except sitting on the couch no doubt sitting on your phone like it's just getting up and doing stuff get out of your house walk play with your kids play basketball yeah i feel like that specific

thing is like the most overthought like how do i do it it's like you you literally just live that's it's slowly just transporting blood at a slightly higher level than laying in bed like it's it's a very simple process that involves like playing with your kids or uh having a sport outside that you want to go do playing catch. Like I feel like sitting on a rower for 45 minutes or like, uh, a bike trainer at a slow pace is it's, it's only the word it's, it's healthy, but it's the worst way because there's zero experiential piece to any of it.

When that is like, you could go for a hike or just no chance like it literally is like the simplest of actions of just going out and playing and then because you can train it in a specific way when i hear people talking about like sitting on a rower for 45 minutes monitoring their heart rate not to go over 130 and not to dip below 115 and i'm'm like, no way. It's just way, way better ways to go about living your life and incorporating fitness into it. Go for a walk and call your friends and talk. You know, like there's so many things you could do

other than sit on a damn bike for 45 minutes. No chance. I'd rather beat myself up for 12. I've done that a small handful of times where I've gotten on the Airdyne, the assault bike in my garage and just slow and steady for an hour.

I've done that like three times probably in my life. And I got done. I'm like, okay, I'm glad I did that. And I only did it because I only had that exact amount of time where I could train and maybe I hadn't trained in a couple days i just needed to do something and so i just so i did i just did something to check the box but it is it is not my preference at all yeah i just go do circuits outside my kids like i play football with there you know i play basketball

with rock uh with magnolia we'll just do whatever she. I'm just in a circuit with them. It's so much fun. Before you know it, you've got to crush your steps. Have a good time. You're outside. Anything outside for me is what I need. I'm not going outside as much as I should here in the last couple weeks. I've got to get out there. The outside

is... I try and set my whole life... SoCal ruins you, man. Once you get to SoCal Sun you, man. Once you, once you get the SoCal song, you're a full addict. Like that is, that is the chronic of life right there. If you can miss California,

um, I miss, uh, it's saying I miss California is like, in my opinion, after five years of living in the middle of North Carolina or South missing San Diego is like, it's like saying, uh, I miss frat parties. Oh yeah. Where it's like, I kind of missed that time of life, but I have way more valuable things going on right now. Um, but to think that

owning a gym three blocks from the water, that was perfect for you at the time. WWE might roll in and want to bang some weights around and like your beautiful facility. And it's 73 degrees outside and you haven't had a shirt on for two weeks and you might go surfing at noon in a golf cart. You know, who knows? Anything's possible, right? That's sick man yeah those

things probably won't happen again in my life but i also don't go to frat parties anymore either so i'm pretty curious though with rapid how did you guys find you know like uh you got mike lane and you got uh chris perry like you got how do you find these dudes i feel like you know there's andy was first you just like you find the super uh phds or something like the next chris perry is a rock star savage at forged athlete at my clinic he did like i was like man did you take acting lessons i mean that's how good of a presenter he is and mike lane i gotta i'm going to have him next year. Like, where are you finding these dudes? Like, I've been to plenty of universities, and I haven't seen researchers quite like these guys. Yeah, we're very fortunate at Rapid.

Like, we got a lot of success very quickly. Obviously, Andy, like, has the academic background in addition to all the cool stuff he does with pro athletes and now with his multiple businesses, you know, Rapid being kind of the primary one. As we've had more and more success all the coaches we've been able to hire they all have graduate degrees and a handful of them are like also college professors and they coach at rapid or they have they have professional teaching experience at a university level and we actually you know one of the core values of rapids is is

learning and teaching so like we very specifically and intentionally hire people that have professional teaching experience separate from professional coaching experience. So if we find people, again, very similar to Andy, have like high academic experience and then high professional athlete or coaching experience, like those are the people that we look for. And those people know other people that are like that like they all hang out in the same circles and so a lot of the people that we've recruited over time um have been recommendations from the you know from the people that already work with us so perry was a great example he he invited mike lane to to the mix because he just knew that uh that mike's a gangster and that we're looking for high quality people and um you know mike lane's a great fit in the company oh dude we work so well together it's so much fun and it is like it's a culture of really smart guys who can understand the practicality of things i feel

like forever you know like you know two decades ago you had the research side and then you had the coaches and you had the athletes and they weren't communicating really well but you guys have brought it all together in one spot you have people who've been great athletes coach great athletes and are super smart and understand academia which that makes for an incredible culture and it's which is why it's fun like you don't even make me go to the to the meetings and i just want to because it's cool i mean it's it's fun to hang out with those people yeah we dig having that you know for for people that don't know this we announced this at the beginning of the show that you were working with us now but um so you're you are specifically working with some of our professional athletes that need to

get stronger you are former strongest man in the world over here and one of the best weightlifting coaches in the country like who better to help professional athletes get strong than travis mash so we have we have all of our various specialists and our kind of our our you know our main coaches but then we're bringing you in specifically as a strength specialist just for those few people that need someone like with your your your very specific area of expertise here. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun. Mike is like, it's super fun to work with. We mix really well and the things I don't feel as confident and he's got it. It's been fun so far for sure. Yeah. The after coming out of your master's degree program,

do you find a lot of value and i'm assuming the answer is yes but uh do you still get to feel like you're learning from them seeing as they're kind of like who would have been your professors when you were yeah that's what's fun about it yes and i missed that a little bit about you know leno r Ryan because I was always around like, you know, if some research article came out, my professor is going to be like, Oh, did you hear about this new thing? And so we're, we're on the, we're the front lines of learning all the new things that were coming out. And so I miss that. I still continue.

Andy's a big part of my continue and I listen to him all the time as I, as I travel, but it's cool to be there with those guys like Mike Lane and Chris Perry. Especially, they're my favorites. Those two guys are just getting what they're working on, what's new. And they communicate it so well. That's the weird thing about those two guys.

It's like they're the clearest of communicating what most people consider complex. They can make it seem very, know i guess easy or easy to understand so yeah i think it's also cool about the clients that they are um asking questions or like nobody's like really coming to us right off the bat we're not like the first option they've been in like yeah performance or longevity space for a while and either not gotten the answers or looking to take things them at that level versus um like a like a basic macro oh yeah like a basic calorie conversation today was a great example of like um you know i'm not naming names but like we were talking to one of the athletes and they were just

you know they're so complex in there and they're can i say what's can i say a sport is that okay yeah yeah so they're fighters and so they're specifically boxers so they have think about how complex their training regime is you know they have to spar you know then they have to you know then they have their you know mitts and they have their bag work you know then they have their running their cardio then they have the strength training and they have all these complex pieces and so and then as a boxer you got to have an incredible obviously vo2 max is super important but then you have to have a really strong anaerobic system and so like because you know when it's time to go they got to be able to turn it on and knowing when to do what and so when we test them and we can take out the guessing, like today I felt I saw a guy's face relax for the first time.

And he's like, you know, I got to do this and I got to do this. And we explained to them, this is the part you're incredibly good at. Don't sweat that. That's already here. This is the part to target. And you could just see him feel so calm and like, oh, like they got me. I don't have to guess. This complex puzzle is solved.

It was a cool feeling. It just happened right before the show. So it was cool. Yeah. You got your boxers, but we also have like a ton of golfers, professional baseball players, MMA fighters, and on and on on the professional athlete side of things. But really the vast majority of people that are rapid clients are more on like the business side, like wealthy entrepreneurs, executives, investors, et cetera,

a handful of celebrities, but kind of mostly on the business side. And people that have a hundred million dollar company or more, we have very wealthy clients that have very high expectations. And so to your point about our coaches, like they expect our coaches to have a graduate degree or or you know at a minimum a master's but like probably a phd as well um or they don't want to work with someone who's just like a random personal trainer at a random

gym like they want to work with with a phd who has like professional athlete experience that's taking all of that knowledge and education and pouring it into them that way they can have the highest quality service available sure they don't want anybody guessing either but unfortunately you find so often like you go to california and sometimes the ones who are training the stars you know aren't the people that we have at rad but they're sadly just somebody who met somebody who met somebody and now they're coaching these people, and they have no idea what they're doing. But the poor, you know, the clients have no idea who they're with is just really not very smart.

But yet they come to us, it's a whole different ballgame. You know, we're going to make sure we test them in all the areas. And you get the physical therapy. That's crazy. So you test, make sure they have any shoulder issues, hip issues, ankle issues. Like it just literally, and we all communicate in the same place. I love how you've done that, Doug.

The systems guy, where everybody can look and see, okay, this guy has to work on this thing. He's really good at this thing. So it makes it so easy. And we're all talking. And we're not guessing or doing something we're not supposed to or stepping over the line trying to pretend i'm a physical therapist when i'm not which happens way too much in my industries people pretending i don't understand that why strength conditioning coach wants to pretend to be a pt like go to pt school i don't want to do that you know i don't want to mess

rubber bands and stretching people you know i want to get them jacked but yeah sure yeah i mean again we have very wealthy clients have very high expectations and so like they want data-driven decisions so like we spend a ton of time doing data collection and assessments and whatnot they're usually older as well you know you rarely run a hundred million dollar company if you're a kid like it does happen to some people but but most of our people are they're in their you know 40s and 50s we'll say and once you're in your 40s and 50s as we all know like that's when shit starts getting achy and you got a shoulder thing that's been there for 20 years and and you know you don't want to get a hip replacement because you can kind of feel it coming and so having a physical therapist on staff to to ensure that uh a we're

we're you know accounting for any past surgeries ensure that, uh, a we're, we're, you know, accounting for any past surgeries and injuries and what have you. We're not exacerbating any current pain you have and making it worse. And ideally we're, we're fixing current problems and making that pain go away. And then they're coordinating with, with our strength coaches to make sure that whatever the training program is, is in line with the physical therapy plan. Like everyone has to work together in order to have a great result. Yeah. It's really cool.

Even with Mike and I, like he's the workout I just sent to one of our athletes. He looks it over. Then he fits his, you know, he's doing more of the overall picture. He's doing more of the, the aerobic and aerobic work and just, you know,

plus I put in warmups, but then he'll look and make sure that they kind of go with what everybody else is saying with PTs especially. So it's crazy. It's like a system. It's so well-oiled too. Like everybody knowing where they go. And like when we meet every week, we meet with our clients every single week. And we've got this checklist of stuff.

And Mike is good about holding them accountable too. So like he's like, man, man you gotta fill this out before you know before we get on here so we don't have to ask these questions and we could do more things it's really and then they're like even though you know they're paying us they're like oh you're right gotta get on top of it but i've learned a lot i've learned a lot how to really handle people online as if they're almost as better than if they're in front of us yeah do one other interesting kind of distinguishing factor with what we do is like a lot of people, if they're seeking out a personal trainer or a nutritionist, they're like, I'm 30 pounds

overweight. I want to lose 30 pounds. I'm going to go get a specialist to help me lose 30 pounds. They kind of already know what they need to do, but a lot of our clients, they're already in good shape. We're a health optimization company. People come to us when they're already doing pretty well, and're a health optimization company. People come to us when they're already doing pretty well, and they actually really don't know what they should be

doing. They probably already train to eat well and sleep well, and they already do many things, but they're coming to us to say, hey, what should I be working on right now? I kind of already work on a lot of things and I already feel pretty good, but what really should I be working on all things considered? Cause I don't actually know what is going to move the needle with my long-term health. And they're only going to figure that out by collecting a bunch of data and doing like a comprehensive analysis and then rank ordering all of your physiological needs in a hierarchical way. And then we will tell them, this is what you need to work on in order to increase your,

we call it your TPP or true physiological potential. Yeah. That was, that was the conversation we had today. It's like this guy who I'm talking about, he has like his VO2 max over 50. So it's really good. And it's over 50 now. And he's kind of like in an off season

where he hasn't been training well. So he's just like naturally really good at it. He's like Anders. He's naturally really, his VO2 max is beyond most people. But then, but his anaerobic capacity is not. His ability to be in the eighth round and be able to

turn it up, turn the heat up, isn't. So we can tell him, bro, let's focus on this aspect of the energy system. Answering his questions he's had so many, so many years. It was really fun today. Yeah.

It's awesome. Coach Travis Mash. Where can the people find you? Rabbit Health Optimization, right? Yes. If you want me to coach you, go to Rabbit Health. And so if you want to get to read my free articles, go to mashlead.com or go to jimwarry.com, of course,

for my latest articles. So, but if you want to work with me, go to masterleague.com or go to jimwarrior.com, of course, for my latest articles. If you want to work with me, go to these guys. They'll get you jacked out of your mind. Doug Larson. You bet. Travis, dude. Friends for many years, of course. Long time shrugged host at this point. Just stoked to

have you officially on the rapid team, man. Me too. This is fantastic news. Super pumped. Hell yeah, man. Find too. This is fantastic news. Super pumped. Hell yeah, man. Find me on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I am Anders Varner, at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged, Barbell underscore Shrugged.

Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where our friend Timothy Jones, client at Rapid Health Optimization, there's a case study up that you can see how he cut his cholesterol in half, got totally ripped in the process, and you can access that free case study over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys

next week.