Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 210 Live - James Fitzgerald

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

anyhow those are the things I think about when I take these off all the noise of the world is just going to infiltrate your brain all at one time yeah yeah I shouldn't meditate with these on it's pretty yeah no yeah right don't need to listen to anything else around me if you did that you might be able to actually float yeah no I do float already that's not an issue oh you've been doing that like an iso tank now yeah that'd be I really want to try one of those out we're going to talk about that all the time Yeah. No, I do float already. That's not an issue. Oh, you've been doing that? Like an ISO tank? I've been doing that for years now. Yeah. I really want to try one of those out.

Ruben talks about that all the time. Yeah, they're cool. I've done it once, but I didn't really notice much of anything. My concern is always the cleanliness. I don't know why I directly go there, but how do they clean those things? Yeah, well, considering like I won't, like even as a kid, I didn't ever want to go into like a public pool or like, you know, like they have those theme parks with the slides and all that. I can't do this because that's all I think about. So do you know any idea of the cleaning?

Supposedly, they keep them extremely clean, but like they're going to say, ah, we do. I just wonder what that means. We do a pretty good job. They're halfway clean. They're clean enough. I mean, we just wipe around the floor when people get out. Yeah. That's our version.

Yeah. People probably go in there right after the gym or something too, right? Definitely. They're a little salty. To wind down. A little stinky. Super excited to have you here today. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. Well, thank you for having me. It's a great setup and a great idea to bring people over. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. We love it. It's a lot setup and a great idea to bring people over. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, we love it.

It's a lot of fun for us. Yeah, we were discussing the concept of it as how it's different because I'm always trying to figure out that long-term impact of having conversation. And I'm not sure that anyone is really doing that where you can bring them into place besides the big names out there that brings them in and actually has a conversation, you know, in spot. So I think it does make a difference. So I like to shake hands. Yeah. I like to really develop a relationship. Yeah.

You know, you meet somebody and you have occasionally we have, you know, we might have some doctors or some different people that we might just communicate via like Skype. Yeah. They don't really, we don't, They don't really physically need to be here. It probably doesn't make a lot of sense for them to come here, and it probably doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have them here. Yeah, time-wise. Yeah, therefore, it makes a little bit more sense just to kind of a sleep doctor or somebody like that, it might make more sense to just have them on in that particular way.

But for the most part, when we have like athletes, coaches, stuff like that, it's like, I want to meet these people. I want to get to know them and I want them to see like, you know, how we operate and kind of what we have, what we developed. Because I think, you know, whether somebody is ahead of us or behind us or whatever, from a business perspective, you can always get inspiration from everywhere, from everyone. So different people have different ways of doing things.

Uh, some people have a really buttoned up operation where everything's super strict. Other people have things where they're, you know, laid back more, you know, it's good to get different perspectives.

And you've known, uh, Jason Kalipa for quite a long time. Uh, there's a guy who's a madman in both in CrossFit and, and, uh, and in business,

you know, he's executing on a really high level on a bunch of different ways, just like yourself, you know? And so that's, you know, that's why I wanted to bring you in and kind of see, you know, the operation that you guys have. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the company that you have and some of your background? Yeah. OPEX is a, uh, well, I guess it's known today as a fitness education company globally. We're trying to put a stamp out there through fitness coaches by giving them tools to go out and help people persevere in fitness or try to figure out exactly what does fitness mean to them for a lifetime.

And that involves a whole bunch of things inside of that. Um, it's taken, you know, a couple of decades of just me practicing as that sole entrepreneur and coach and figuring things out. Um, and I think what binds a lot of us here today was the, you know, um, the nineties movement in terms of resistance and bodybuilding. And, and, uh, I think, uh, I am at a good point now where I've been through all of that. I've been through the initial starting aspects of the crazy fitness craze three or four times. And so it allows us to, um, to be leaders out there for education for that. So that's, that's basically what we're doing today as OPEX. And so I'm the founder of the company. Um, and I help, um, a number of people who are at OPEX HQ, um, just help create, I guess, a vision for what that's going to look like for our impact we want to make. That's great. And you're basically a kind of like coaching coaches type of deal, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Through, um, an education that allows those coaches to go out and teach people in fitness. Um, and that is. And those people sometimes have their own facility as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They have, you know, we want them long-term. That's the big term plan is to send all those coaches out to turn their knowledge into a business that's called an OPEX gym.

That's the long-term plan. Uh, but initially it was just to spread the education so they can go out and have success in fitness. Um, and I'm sure we'll discuss it, but there's been a lot of challenges as to how that, how they make it work. Um, and so we decided to just change the game by, you know, making brick and mortar places that have that beacon as to what fitness means. How do you think some, how do you think like a newer person should get their name out there? Cause, um, you know, you kind of, uh, you did, uh, you did a lot of groundwork, you know, and I think sometimes

people don't recognize the amount of, the enormous amount of work that happens. You mentioned a few decades and in kind of researching you and looking up stuff, like you had a blog in like 2005 or 2006 or something like that, but you know, that was before a lot of people were doing that kind of stuff. So you were, you were already talking about a lot of these things years and years before you started to have some momentum and started to have some success, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think to your, to answer your question as to how people get started, um, I think you got to define, I think it's a problem today cause there's nothing really defined as to what fitness coaching means. It's, it's honestly, uh, I use this language,

excuse me, but it's, it's rape and pillage out there for fitness today. Um, and, and I'm, I'm part of it. You know, I built part of that. He tries to rape me all the time. Sick bastard. And it's, um, you know, I was a part of that. So I'm not claiming that I wasn't, uh, didn't have any movement in it, but, uh in it. But I think it's really challenging for people because they don't have a clear vision, nor is there mentors out there today that are writing the story as to what it should look like for a fitness professional for a long-term goal and career for numerous different reasons, tech, you know, culture's perspective as to what jobs mean today, et cetera, et cetera. And I have my own biased belief in it,

but I'm old school. I'm also 45. I was born in 1974. I have two kids. I've had a business for a long period of time, just to give you a bias of it, where I come from. But I think a coach, as a fitness coach, should have that job for decades. And I really don't think that that's even on people's thoughts. And so I think that's the biggest challenge. There's no vision. There's no book set out there as to say what it should look like. And there's people making lots of money on allowing everyone to do it. And that's a problem. That's a problem because I think it's a really big aspect of fitness that could make serious impact. And people can make a living doing it and love their job, obviously.

But I just don't think there's a pathway. So I think that's the biggest problem of trying to set that up is, number one, they just don't have a vision. There's nothing set in stone. So I propose to lay that out, not using only my own story because you use that as an example of being around for a while. I think you have to be culturally aware as to how people perceive fitness today. So you've got to understand how the market sees fitness. You have to recognize that they see it as a fix, whether you like it or not. It's culturally inside generations now that fitness is not like this expression of movement anymore, like it used to be. It's now like, oh, what is this going to help me do? What do you mean by that expression of movement? Yeah like it used to be. It's now like, oh, what is this going to help me do?

What do you mean by that expression of movement? Yeah. It used to be something that we used to participate in because we loved doing it. So the intention was around looking good naked in the mirror when we couldn't share that picture with anyone else, lifting more weight and just talking to your buddies about it, or just experiencing it because it's something that we had to do. And I think there's, there's a longer story to that, but 200 years ago we had to move to survive and now we have to intelligently put movement together as folly. Right. Just think about that. Like there's no reason for us to do, you know, it makes sense. So, but, but there, there was that sweet spot time. I think I was

very fortunate to be a part of in the eighties and nineties that movement was still like, this shit's, this shit's good. We didn't even care if it connected to fitness or health right it was just like this shit you do right you get up you lift weights and you do your job you know um but now it's like something that has to be manufactured back to my point of of fixing things and i think that's where the you have to understand that as a new coach right right? Back to your question on the challenges a coach has, I don't think a coach recognizes how people perceive fitness today and what that's going to be in a part of their life. And so you can only write models of what I call the technician to the craftsperson to the master coach life cycle. And you have to recognize that, like you said, there's decades. Yeah, there's time as a coach where you got to fucking exercise. You got to be in the trenches for years working with people, not hurting them, but having good principles as base support. That could even be a weekend course or book. But you got to learn how to create relationships with folks and give them experiences and movement. And then over time you turn into like being a coach, which is the craftsperson, right? And then long-term you're probably teaching other coaches or still, you know,

probably where your position is now. You're like being the top of an organization that's pushing a model of, of movement and exercise. And that's called mastery and coaching. But I don't think that's written. And I don't think it's like, it used to be something, you know, but now it's like, there's a few people talking about it, but it's like three people. Yeah. And you're probably one of them. There's like two other people, you know, it's like you got guys out there that may be like a Paul Cech who's kind of talking more of like from a systematic approach and people

are talking more about like the mental side. Like it's not just physical. I think when we're young, we're thinking this is just a physical thing. I'm going to get jacked or I'm going to get strong or I'm going to get ripped or whatever the intent is. And we're kind of failing to recognize maybe there's a mental capacity to all this as well. And then there's kind of the, what you mentioned, which I think is brilliant is that, yeah, a lot of people are looking at it as a fix and man, what a huge problem that is because that creates a giant mountain to climb because when do people really fix their own problems?

It's very hard to do. It is because you've got to get past the social behaviors first, people's expectations of why they're doing fitness. And then secondarily, which is I think the biggest nut to crack is really asking the question. And I don't want to turn this into generally where it goes as a nihilistic conversation on why we do anything, but like, why do you exercise? You know, we, we have, you know, we, that has to enter into the conversation because if you don't even propose that to people, um, you'll never get them connected to an alignment of doing exercise forever. You'll never get them connected. It'll always be a dance of you coming up with new shit every couple of months, but that you never asked the question, like, why are we really doing this? Right?

Special forces, different. Winning a power competition, different. Sport, different. Live long and prosper. Now we got some questions, right? Now we got some questions, like, why are you really doing any of that stuff? And why are we wrapping so much education and expertise and, and mentality around moving every day? You know, like we got to do mindset seminars to get people active. Like that's a fucking problem. Right. But the issue is that again, we're not asking that really tough question. Um, and it doesn't mean it's going to go to that nihilistic area, but I think it'll get people more aware. Like maybe you should move every day because if you don't, you'll, you'll get into entropy, like you will go downhill. So what are you going to do every day? You got to do some form of movement because the way we live today,

you actually have to impart that in your daily practice. Why do you work out? I do it because I'm an addict of exercise. Where did it start? but on first level. Where did it start? My love for it, I think was, I think it's deep seated in what I loved about the training for sport.

I never really loved participating at the highest level in the sports. I remember myself being very nervous and anxious. And although as an adult long-term, you're like, okay, that was good shit because you learned a lot from the pain. I remembered the practices being the stuff where I could like sleep at night, you know, where you finish really hard practices in hockey. I can remember like trying to beat people on suicides, uh, sprints and thinking to myself at that age, like 10, 11, 12 going, why do, why am I loving this process of this feeling in my legs and like this expression of myself physically?

Loving this process of this feeling in my legs and like this expression of myself physically. So I can always remember that being like the connector to what bound myself to exercise. And then I got injured playing soccer. And then there was a whole new transformation of myself, I think, that directly connected me to loving exercise. And that was through depression. You know, getting injured and then recognizing that the rebirth of myself had to lose the entire ego that I had wrapped myself around, which was this athlete. And then that was taken away. And then I recognized I was a fucking number, right? Quickly at 18 years of age. And so at that point, you're like, oh, you're not the top dog

anymore. You know, you get all these great grades and you're the, you know, athlete of the year in your province for a couple of years in a row, everything's going full forward. And then all of a sudden it's taken away from you. And then no one's, although there was no cell phones then, no one's calling anymore. Right. There's no conversation anymore about the future and all the upside. So I'm like, okay, the only fucking way out of this thing is to get fit. And I started doing resistance training as part of my rehab and then started these little, you know, sessions as you can probably remember of the

easy curl bar with the with the sand weights in your bedroom you know and started looking at yourself like yeah this is fucking this is what it means to be strong right and i started connecting that to how i was more fit doing that shit than what i was when i was playing sports so that was that's the that's those are the two connectors um-term, um, I went so deep into like, um, the love for intense fitness through sport, um, that I experienced some things in there that people talk about when they go on psychedelic trips, um, you know, of really deep, you know, explorations of what you're capable of. I got to figure out what kind of training you're doing. Well, it was CrossFit, you know? No, I mean, you'd go into so much pain, you know, that it really was an opportunity for people to ask yourself a fundamental question of, are you really worth it? Like, what are you made of?

What are you made of? And so I'm sure you've had multiple parallels in resistance that are the same way. But I think that little thing will never leave me to the point of like why exercise. It's inside of me. It's a part of me. I'll have no regrets long term of that being who I am and what makes me up. love exercising every day. I get to learn so many different things when I do it, the aspects of variety and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So a long-winded answer to why I, uh, why I love to exercise or do it every day. Yeah. You know, I was having a, I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and you touched on an injury that you had, which puts you into a depression. Um, I had multiple injuries that when they took me out, like I've never felt depression up until those points. And I realized that like, uh, I love movement. It

doesn't need to be, it didn't have to be soccer. Didn't need to be lifting. I need to just move. I need to like expend a lot of energy. So I feel good. What did that depression for you actually like look like? What did you do? Yeah, I didn't, I didn't recognize, first of all, I didn't recognize what it was, right? Until I was an adult, like I was an adult, like probably into my thirties. I couldn't reflect back and say, oh, that was a really rough time in my life. At the time, you know, at 18 and, you know, being in a hospital bed and being in a wheelchair for a while and being on a cane for months i mean i don't reflect but you know at that point i wasn't like oh you know at this point in time i'm really depressed right i was in my own like psyche in my own bubble for months and months in my basement watching seinfeld reruns and going to community college because i had to that kind of thing so um so i think that the um um what was your question on the aspect of it? What it looked like because the conversation I was having.

Oh yeah. What it looked like. Yeah. I didn't, I, I don't even know. I can't, you know, I can only look back now and say, oh, you know, that wasn't a good time. Um, and, uh, I think though that, uh, the, I keep thinking about these, I'm not sure if that's what the leading question is, but I keep thinking about things like what brought me out? Like what was the light? And I always connected to fitness. You know, it is, it's something about being able to move again and then doing those resistance sessions and getting stronger. Like it lit a spark. It was like, no dude, there's another side, right? You can come out of here and this is what it looks like. And that's what I can remember reflecting back on. Like seeing myself in the mirror in my bedroom

with those weights going, there's a way out, you know? And now like, as if almost like someone's like, you know, nudging me, like, come on, you know, wake up. And that's why I love resistance, you know, the beauty around it. Cause you know, it never lies to you. It'll always be, it'll always be there to, to, to challenge you. The hope is that it's always going to be there. You know, there's sometimes that I wonder, and I think about the idea of like not being able to train or being, yeah, like getting such a rough injury that, well, this is the, well, I think that's the, uh, I think that's the beauty around what I'm trying to accomplish in moving every day is, um, I want to try to figure out like every time I'm doing something, I'm saying like, how is this going to lead to me doing this until I'm 95, right?

Having an erection at 95 and climbing a mountain at the end of the day and then dying. I'm not finding anybody to be on the receiving end of that. And now it's changed because we're on this podcast. It's now an erection while you're climbing a mountain. And then falling off and dying. Like I paint that picture, but I keep that in my mind every time I'm going into the gym. When we train this afternoon, like I'm thinking about like, how can I experience things today? But what can I do today that's still going to connect me to being able to do this forever?

Right? able to do this forever. Right. So that's why I think that we may, um, and this is where, you know, performance for exercise kind of clouds the fitness for, for exercise thing. You know what I'm saying? Cause performance is a different realm where there are some times where you, like you said, push yourself to limits where you need some recovery pieces. But I think, you know, I'd like to get people into this concept that you're capable of moving every day. It should be like breakfast and everything you should do every day should lead to that ultimate ideal, which allows us to exercise whenever we want forever. You know, there should be some opportunity for us to do that. And I think, I think it's possible.

I just think we get so jammed up in performance or trying to look good naked or some other, other incorrect intentions that pull us away from that. But it's good learning. I mean, we're the ones that got to go through that in order to, in order to help others about it. You know, you got to kind of push yourself too far to figure out like, what's the happy medium, right? Exactly. Do you kind of think that, you know, there's just a lot, like you're talking about moving every day. So, you know, maybe somebody just goes for a walk one day and maybe the next day they, they try to push a little harder. Maybe they try some running or some sprinting. Maybe the next day is in the gym.

Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? Yeah. So to squeeze it out really long term, you just put people beautifully on a continuum of movement, right? Because it's all based upon what you're capable of and then connecting though to the ideal. What's reasonable. Yeah. So what you're capable of, if you're not not doing anything is something that's just more than nothing that's what you're capable of and that's what you do tomorrow that's a great quote right and then and then if you combine that

to your point would you said it you just said it eloquently but it's resistance and sustainable work right if you combine both of those that i believe primarily were put together to do well forever not just for six months to look good, right? But forever. I think that package of you're talking about walking one day and then doing a couple of pushups at home with a slingshot the next day, which can help your eccentrics of your pushups, by the way, product placement. I think that turns into like six years down the road where they're like doing aerobic intervals one day and then they're doing deadlifting the next day. Right. And then 35 years down the road, they're doing a flywheel bike one day and then they're doing, you know, sets of bench and deadlift another day. You know what I'm saying? So it's, it's an, it's a continuum

that people, it just, it just looks different along the way, but allows people to, I think, uh, yeah, just be moving all the time with what we can do. What's sustainable. I had a friend who's, uh, he's very attached to his business and stuff. And he, he was, uh, been a friend of mine since like high school and stuff. We haven't seen each other forever. And he was really digging deep on asking like very heavy business questions. Now I'm not the person to ask that kind of stuff. I'm, I'm very, I'm pretty basic, you know, I'm pretty, the person to ask that kind of stuff. I'm, I'm very, I'm pretty basic, you know, I'm pretty, I got basic concepts and basic ideas. And then, uh, you know, I've been able to formulate a team around me to, uh, execute a lot of that stuff really well. And it's worked out really well,

but he was trying to kind of dig deep on a lot of, um, you know, business, business heavy questions. And he was like, he was like, well, what do you, you know, what's your message now? Like, what are you, you know, what are you trying to do now? I'm like, I'm just trying to teach people to walk. He's like, but that doesn't make any sense. He's like, you're a power lifter. And he's like, you said earlier that you're here to make the world a better place to lift. I said, yes, I am. But you know, there's already a lot of people lifting. There's already a lot of people that are into intense exercise. I would say, I would saying like, you know, I would like for people that aren't doing that to just get up off the couch and just try, just put one foot in front of the other, go throw on some socks, go throw on some shoes and just start moving. So that falls in line exactly with, with what you were saying.

Like, let's just figure out a way to get somebody moving. Maybe they feel a little bit better from that movement. And maybe they get to a point where a few months down the road, they become like locked in. The option to not do it is no longer an option anymore because it feels so good to do it. And it feels so bad not to do it. That's a hard spot to get somebody to. But if we do it with stuff that's real simple and easy. Yeah. With some air squats and pushups

and walking, it's like, I don't know, maybe we, maybe we end up there. Yeah. I think there's a missing link though. I think that there's a, we have like, so we put soldiers, soldiers out on the street. Right. But there, but, but those are people that are interested. Right. And you're talking about like, there's billions of people that we're talking about. Right. Like large percentages. Right. And I think that there's, there's billions of people that we're talking about, right? Like large percentages, right? And I think that there's not mentors and there's not like a civil agreement on what movement should be that's admirable, honorable, and that likes a daily practice. And we used to, I don't know if you had it in the States, but we used to have it in Canada with the physical

activity fitness testing every year. And like, whether you liked it or not, you weren't judged, but at least it was in like your psyche, that physicality is part of what you do. It's just, it's just part of your daily process. And I think we have this, this massive missing link and all this conversation like we're discussing today, but there's a fuck ton of people who will never hear that concept, right? They'll never hear it. It's only fitness people that are tuned in. Yeah. And now with tech today, I mean, they're, they're probably not going to hear that message for a decade because you know, what they're, what they're going to hear on their Facebook page is pharmaceuticals or what they're going to hear is insurance conversation, what they're going to, you know what I'm saying?

Like they're not going to get our conversation in that. So I'm not sure what the breaking point is to change that. And it's all admirable that we're pushing to kind of get those people moving and up and going. But that's where my brain goes all the time is like, what's the real tipping point? And that's why I got frustrated over time. I was like, fuck it. I just got to make my own gyms. Because I can't lose sleep at night thinking about the things you're thinking about.

Like, what's the big impact to get people inspired on moving every day because when i i get into i you know i just get lost thinking how is it possible to like transform a whole generation of people on loving movement again it's moving out of our schools right it's not something that's a daily practice anymore um it's you know it's going from like you know well you got to be in a sport because again it's another fix so now at 12 you're learning that it's a fix, right? Instead of movement being, well, why are we moving today, Dad? It's like, just because that's what we do. We just move every day.

And that's lost. And I just really don't, I think there's a big missing link as to how to get out there. Brush our teeth, take a shower, and move. Yeah. It's just part of the day. And we have breakfast and lunch. Yeah, but I don't know if you guys got any thoughts on that. Like what's the real thing that makes the impact long term to, unless we get a president that's like, you know, every morning, you know, and that sounds like, you know, authoritarian, but what's your fucking other option?

What's the other option? It's a hard sell because I think that a lot of people think that fitness is painful. Yeah. So they think that if they're going to get into this, and they also look at a lot of us and they're like, well, those guys are fitness people. That's too intense. And I'll never be that way. And they'll also have the verbiage of, I can't do that. And then when it comes to nutrition, they feel the same way.

I can never try a low-carb diet or I can never get off of sugar. That's the dialogue in their head. And so they're already kind of self-defeated, but I really like what you're saying because what you're saying is, it kind of reminds me of like laws or rules of like war. Like there's a certain, there's certain, you know, not everybody always follows them all the time, but you're supposed to, you're supposed to try to follow them. And there's just certain things that you just, there's certain barriers that you just don't cross. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe for us, you know, we could start with something like that where there's some sort of not just national but international.

Yeah. Rules of engagement. Yeah. We call them basic lifestyle guidelines in our gyms. But again, and I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not aware of this fact because everyone's like, oh, well, in your gyms people are motivated and they're moving. And you are correct. Right. I'm not aware of this fact because everyone's like, oh, well, in your gyms, people are motivated and they're moving. And you are correct, right? But outside the gyms, these basic lifestyle guidelines of what we just talked about may be something that is not going to be sexy.

It's not entertaining, but we need to get people on board with. But that's – again, that's – I'm still back to like, well, how in the hell does that get implemented? It's tough because you're inside your gym. And Seema does jujitsu. So he's running into these people that are obsessed with jujitsu and sometimes when you're in you know a certain thing i'm into powerlifting so i think everybody i think that that's my like that's my world so i think everybody does it you know and we kind of lose sight of yeah there's a lot of other people out there just really have never gotten into

they never really skimmed across any of this they never they don't know what it feels like and so here we are so enthusiastic about how this makes us feel and we're trying to share it with everybody like you guys need to know about this you got to try jujitsu you got to try powerlifting yeah you gotta try bodybuilding you gotta try crossfit you gotta try these different methods you don't understand what it feels like and people are just like no man i you know i just want to like just chill and watch netflix yeah because it's hard. It's hard. And back to my point, there's no intention, right? Because they'll keep asking that question. Well, why am I really doing this?

And until they get on board with the fact that they need to be doing it for more than looking good naked, decreasing pain or feeling good, then, you know, it's going to be a lost cause. And they might not know why they're doing it until they've been doing it for like five or ten years. Exactly. And so that's why, you know, it almost needs to be preconditioned into the parent before the child, you know what I mean? To get it up to, it was going to say, especially cause they've tried everything. Right. And nothing's worked. Yeah. But if they keep at it for the, you know, five to 10 years, then it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. What do those basic lifestyle guidelines look like? Yeah. Uh, well they're, they're based upon biology and biological terms to how to function every day with basic processes like sleeping a certain amount of hours a night or quality sleep, drinking enough water during the day, moving blood every day, meaning you have to be some kind of form of activity every day to move blood, digestive processes, having

purpose and intention in your fitness. Yeah. It's these little rules that are pretty simple to follow that we get people on board with before we get to like the really complex things. Cause that's the, I really call it the basic lifestyle guidelines, but that's like a cleanup to get people on board with the basics before we even get into stuff that like macros and percentages loads and et cetera. Everyone wants to go there yet. You can't actually, you know, you have, you've been sleeping four hours a night for the past two years. That's maybe where we, you know, cause everything we do on the other end for your exercise nutrition, we're duct taping the fact that you're cognitively impaired and you have

insulin disruption. Um, and you know cognitively impaired and you have insulin disruption. And, you know, I can give you any program that's going to help duct tape that, but it's not going to fix the fact that you're just not recovering. So we put all lines ahead of those one things that are BLGs. And then when people get that up to speed, most, most times we don't even need to work on that other shit. It just falls into place. So it's helpful. Sounds a little bit like addition by subtraction. Like let's add in a bunch of this stuff and eventually you'll start to feel better. You'll start to look better. And then someone's going to come to you and be like, man, like I can't seem to, you know, get the extra five pounds on this lift, or I can't seem to lose these extra 10 pounds. And you know, then you got them really, you know, hooked into it, but, um, it's rhythmical trying to add a lot of stuff, you know, make it, but make it simple enough

that people can do it. Repeatable, right? Yeah. Yeah. Sustainable. Sustainable. That's the whole goal of it is to get people to fall in love with these, these, these things that we live with, you know, uh, the sun and the moon and, um, work and rest scenarios.

And, um, you just need to have balance in all those. So I think that's what we get, you know, most of our OPEX coaches in our gyms and all their clients up on board with. But to segue to that larger audience, that's a, that's a tough sell, man. Cause that's not sexy. You're not going to have Instagram posts on, on water, you know, can't sponsor water. Yeah. Like how do you have your coaches attack habit change? Because like all of this ends up being like just the individual's habits that they have per day. They have very bad habits that they don't even realize are bad. And then you're trying to help them supplement things like getting a little bit more sleep, getting in more water consistently. Yeah.

Getting moving. So how do you attack these different habits, take out the good ones and put in the, take out the bad ones and put in the good ones? Yeah. take out the good ones and put in the, take out the bad ones and put in the good ones. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, there's no system to it because in our scope of practice, I like to say that fitness coaches just have to be really good at communication and listening and relationship building. And then things change based upon that. Cause then you ask questions around why you're here, what's your intent and you get conversation on like, tell me about your life. What are your previous behaviors? What have you ever overcome?

How have you ever changed things before? How have you dealt with those changes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That all happens through just conversation. So at the gyms level and through our coaching education, we teach coaches how to have a relationship building opportunity. And when you build relationships, which is not a 10 minute consult, you know, every seven days, we're talking about a 10-minute consult every seven days. We're talking about a robust 60 to 90 minutes in person. When we first start with individuals, we're talking about consistent messaging with them on the floor as they start their exercise program, et cetera, et cetera. You're building up this opportunity to get to know them. know exactly where you need to pull punches on the BLGs. And then you just start with simple pieces and build them towards making those changes in the BLGs, which is the basic lifestyle guidelines. So there's no, you know, self-determination theory, motivational interviewing,

top-down, bottom-up style approach to our idea. We just teach coaches who are regular humans to be good people, ask good questions, develop a great relationship. And then in most times they build their own prescription because through conversation, a lot of things get fixed in those habits that you just mentioned are, because they start recognizing through our questions, like, wow, I've never changed something and had success with it. You know, and the coach just goes, okay, well, that's interesting. Well, how do you expect us to add more protein to your diet? You know, let's talk about those ways. And it doesn't end there with a prescription. We'll go through it.

We'll write it out for them. Let's practice this for five days. I'm going to check in with you again on five days after you've practiced that. So that's a small change, right? In those habits that we knew were important for them, right? Chewing that protein, breaking it down, sourcing, et cetera, et cetera. Five days there, it's like, so how did that go? Right.

And they're like, oh, well, it was fascinating. I shit really good. I just want to recognize my energy mid-afternoon on Wednesday was like next level. I never felt before. This is excellent. Let's see if we can maintain this for a little bit longer. And then we're going to pick on something that's the next change.

But I picked that out because I had a big conversation with that individual, right? As opposed to like getting 20 minutes, not even recognize these people have never changed things before and had habits, you know, result in long-term positive consequences. And then you're just, you know,

again, you're just dancing, like to call it in a relationship, right? Two months later, they're like, oh, this fucking, this didn't go right. You know, what the fuck, you know? And you're like, oh, geez, I don't know. Let's try this. And you just never took an opportunity

to figure out who this person was like and how they how they move how they shake what their perception is of fitness why they're here etc it's insane the level of communication that it takes yeah yeah well i mean just you just think about it you know we we've met for an hour hour and a half and how do we possibly get to understand one another you know as to i. You guys, you two specifically may have spent more time together and the more time you guys spend together, you'll probably know how each of you move and shake and, and are motivated and et cetera, et cetera. And that's the, that's the long-term relationship that should be built from coach and client. Again, back to professional

fitness coaching is just not out there today to, to help those people in those relationships. They're either getting it from a medium on YouTube or an Instagram or an online conversation or a 10 minute meeting with a coach, but they don't get a long period of time to sit down and build that relationship and communicate. You think it has to be almost like a mentorship in some way rather than just, rather than just like, here's, you know, six sets of two or whatever. Yeah, for sure. I love that idea. I see a coach-client relationship as being a definite partnership, but it's like any dyad,

which is a combination of two different units. There has to be some form of tension and a fair trade as to what one person's getting and one person's giving and the opposite. So the coach gets to teach, which is what they love to do, and the client gets to learn, which is what they love to do, right? But there's some growth and challenges inside of that that allows both of

them to persevere. And yes, a mentor would be a great, you know, naming to put on it so that coach can, you know, be out there doing pull-ups, understand what it's like to chew protein well, drink water in the day, be active, love it. Then they give that off so the client has no problem following through with those behaviors as well. Now, you're the first ever CrossFit Games champion. You won in 2007. CrossFit is brutal. It's really hard, you know, and challenging. I'm sure some of the stuff that you guys get into gets to be challenging, but do you guys, you know, try to start people out, you know, just according to whatever level they're at? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, we teach coaches to try to figure out where people's starting point Well, you know, we teach coaches to try

to figure out where people's starting point is, you know? And so those are, those are basic principles of looking at the body, looking at their movement and looking at their work. And then at the end of that, it basically just says, Hey, this is what you're capable of. So this is what you now need in a program design based upon that. Yeah. Cause a lot of people are kind of scared of that. You know, they, they see people, uh, doing, you know, uh, walking on their hands and, you know, doing a lot of stuff like that. So it can be intimidating for a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, a big problem out there is that there's not enough coaches available

who can scale a personalized program. Right. So because the market, you know, in 2002, 2003, intense fitness said, oh, fucking anyone can do this. Anyone could coach this thing. Just open up gyms and turn this on, 60-minute timer, people in, people out, turn style, put the workout on the board, and we're out. And everyone's like, oh, fuck, this is what everyone else is doing, this is what we gotta do.

And everyone forgot to look at, well, what is each of these people capable of doing? Not what the workout is on the board. You wrapped everything around the handstand walking and the shit that's on the board. Sounds like you're starting to talk about our education system. Yeah. You know, public education. Yeah.

I didn't see that parallel, but that's a mind blowing opportunity for me. Yeah. Because I speak about it differently, but I agree with you that that's a similar kind of idea. Right. So it's probably the same, you know, you've, you've stumped me there because I do have some strong feelings about the public education with its removal of physical activity, as well as just, you know, the sit in your chair and do what's do what's do what's there. And I think it's the same idea for, uh, the challenges that are imposed in fitness is that we can't get enough coaches out there who can personalize a fitness program.

Um, and, uh, that's a big struggle and that's what we're, we're attempting to do at least. And maybe it was kind of okay in the beginning because maybe the people that were attracted to it were a bunch of savages and maybe it worked for a while, but now there's a larger pool of people that are getting involved. And so, like you're saying, it's like maybe you need, you know, some more qualified coaches so people aren't getting rhabdo and so forth. Yeah, for sure.

And I think, because, you know, and I'm glad you didn't go that way, but a lot of people use that as the argument for the positivity around these movements of intensity. And I think actually it was a detriment to the entire fitness realm because it made no one aware what the value is of a fitness coach. Like it dropped the value of these leaders in teaching health and fitness. Right. And everyone

forgets that as like, so what happens if you get everyone on board to your point? Like the argument is, well, James, uh, no one was moving. And so it helped them all move. We got a million people moving and that's what they're selling now. Right? Over fat people in the micro gym. This person lost a hundred pounds and are selling an intense program based upon those marketing. Yet actually there's a billion users that are not actually doing that program in the gym, but they're selling this like idea that they're fixing that problem yet they're killing coaches day by day. And so who's going to be the people that, that teach everyone about this longterm with your idea of getting movement. So I'm not,

I'm not a fan of the argument of like it, it helped people get moving. Um, Peloton helps people get moving. Um, curves helped people get moving. Global gyms help people get moving. You know,

there's multiple different mediums of that. For you. How did you like, I was one 68 there. Oh, wow. What are you now? Uh, one 75, 75. how did you like i was 168 there oh wow what are you now uh 175 75 how did you that's a kipping pull-up for those people are not aware of come across like you know evolving that's a half push jerk rep because like when you were younger i mean obviously you were training

individuals but did you you didn't always have this mindset like you saw there was something wrong and you know you you changed it. So what was that for you? Like what changed? Yeah. Uh, for the individualization. Yeah. Cause I could mean, well, it always was that. Yeah. Yeah. So from an academic background, I came out as like having these letters behind my name and a university degree that said, this is what you're going to do. You're strength, kitchen coach professional. And this is how you like, you know, assess people and then put them into their own buckets of what they need to do for exercise. And we really only had great resistance and cardiorespiratory prescriptions. That was it.

There was no such thing as mixed modal fitness or circuits or anyone who was doing that was all just an academic first for performance. So every one of my designs have always been, or I shouldn't say that, a lot of my designs were always individualized based upon where that starting point was for that person. Always, like since the mid-90s, basically. Because it was almost just well accepted that that's exactly how fitness is delivered. then this mass you know wave of appeal for intense fitness got on board where you know you know everyone said well a lot of people said and agreed oh everyone can fucking do this if in 1998 i proposed to the ymca that down in their gym in a little area i was going to offer weight training in circuits intensity for 60 minutes i'd be fired i'd be fired but in 2004 it was well accepted around the globe that we were going to turn this into a fitness juggernaut right so the i got into that i'm reason why i'm mentioning a story individualization i i drank that shit hot like i you know if you're

called kool-aid fans i used to say i bathed in it i didn't just drink it i bathed in it i went deep into it both as an athlete and then I grew or helped grow two businesses that were using it as fitness participation. Because, right? They're like, oh, if I don't get my workout in, you know, then that's going to be a fucking problem. Or you start putting a 5k run up on the board and then 50% of your participants don't show up and they start seeing things like, oh, wait now I go back to my old gym OPT and I see all these individualized designs and go, of course, this is the problem here right i've now tried to go two streets and so i've learned over time that you just can't fix that problem all you have is just people dancing to music in intensity for 60 minutes but still

the intention is not good towards exercise because it's not individually designed for them it's not where they should be going in their exercise. Yeah. And of course we can get, you know, the nuances and the, the arguments are like deep on Reddit for the grayness in there, which I don't want to go into just for time. Um, on like scaling and like personalization in the class.

Cause the bottom line, dude, you just can't sell it to me. You got one coach and 16 people. There's no fucking way you're giving each of those people the correct dose response for their ability, right? There's no way. And if that's the case, then how many fitness users out there are blindly doing exercise, probably getting the incorrect dose response

outside of their capabilities. And it's leading to bad behaviors in fitness, like burnout over two years or an opportunity for them to just not know why they're doing what they're doing over time it's very interesting what you're saying because i have never really thought about it this way but it really has watered things down quite a bit because there used to be like you know paul check and charles poliquin and louis simmons and it used to be like i don't know there, there was like, you know, it's depending on how deep you dug into it, there'd be about 10 people that people relied upon.

Like these are the experts and don't listen to anybody else, you know? And now it's like, yeah, just people with big followings and stuff. They're kind of- Or quads, big quads. Yeah. Yeah, someone who's got a good physique

and there's a lot of, unquote leaders or coaches and maybe they don't have the qualifications. Maybe they have the physique. Maybe they have the strength. Maybe they have some skill sets, but maybe they don't really know how to nurture. It's just, it's one of those, well, it's, we need a moment of sadness because there, there isn't, you know, a well agreed upon. And I don't think it's infighting because that's the, what a lot of people will use is like, well, it's infighting and they think they're better than,

but we're talking about the exact same fucking thing, right? That's in getting people intention on movement. We just have different tools and mediums that we use to get people inspired about it. Right. And at the end of the day, we're fucking not messing people up, right? We're giving them a program that ironically,

what binds us is the iron and some form of resistance every day. Like they got to have some kind of physical mental challenge every day. And that's what we're basically talking about. So I don't think it's infighting. Um, I really do think that that watered down process has happened so deeply now that I don't see a way back unless there is some form of authoritarian you know uh dogmatic way of a new wave that people get attached to um i think that um it may be coming through in bodybuilding or powerlifting i'm starting to see a new wave of like an appreciation for those i call them younger smarter folks or more critical thinkers now. And they're watching this like intense shit

move through for a number of years. And they're like, I'm not connecting to that. Like that's, it's fun for a couple of times a week, but it's not something I can wrap my hands around that I can do for a long period of time. So you're starting to see a large bunch of those people fall in love with the pump, with like doing something resistance wise.

And there is a positive push there towards that. And that's not happening through leaders, right? That's just happening through being on Instagram, checking out what other people are doing. And they're just experimenting. They're like, oh, let me run for 60 minutes. Yeah. Fuck that. Don't like that. Let me do this 12 minute beat down. Oh, I liked that for a while. Three weeks later, I don't like that. And then they do some bodybuilding or some resistance. Like I can get, I can do this for a long period of time and look at this. Ooh, I feel kind of nice. You know, I don't, I can be mentally acute for hours after, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that there may be a natural movement towards that, which is positively not needing mentors like the names you'd mentioned prior. It's just basically an organization that's happening because people are just experimenting. So that's a possibility. Let's hope that's the case. Yeah. You know, I wonder, people figure it out for themselves. How, how do you help certain individuals? And because like the big part of having anybody stick to any type of movement, whether it be doing a medley of like

powerlifting type movements with cardio is having them enjoy what they're doing. And when you have individuals that like, let's say they just don't like doing stuff in the gym, how do you go about working with an individual that doesn't enjoy it? And if they don't enjoy it, there's no vigor towards it. There's no consistency. Yeah. Well, you got to first talk about the conversation as to why they don't enjoy it. I just don't think there's any time spent there and no one wants to take the time to do it. And if you're, if you take 30 minutes, like, Oh, I still haven't convinced you out next person in like that. That's not how it happens. Right. So the, the, again, it comes back to, and this is not like, it's not present. Right. I'm not saying this is like, you're not going to get everyone come in front of you. Who's not like that. But you as a coach have to recognize people are going to step up with those questions. Right. have to recognize people are going to step up with those questions, right? And then you need to be able to have the tools to ask them, why do you think exercise needs to be fun? Right? Not saying it's not going to be, but who told you that, right? Who told you that resistance is not as easy, right? So now you start tying in things like, give me an example in your life that

you had a really easy time with something. How did that turn out for you? So you got to see that it's just a part of a struggle that exists that we have to partake in. And then people's behaviors, we can't get attached to what people perceive around it, they come in with. Instead, we have to take this time to have a conversation to say that this is just a part of what we're going to do day to day. And you just have to change your perspective of it. It doesn't have to be enjoyable. And whoever told you that was fucking lying.

Right. But I mean, joy, you know, because there's you're never really going to feel great joy in it unless there's some form of sorrow. So you can discuss with them like there's the moon and the sun. Right. You know, you fucking go to sleep at night. you wake up in the day and then you sometimes have great relationships. And sometimes if, and do you understand this? They're like, oh yeah, that's normal. That's what exercise is like. Sometimes it's challenging. And then afterwards it feels better. Why? Because we're physically and mentally challenging ourselves to overcome some of these

limitations. So I'm just like, I'm bubbling up strategies of like conversation that maybe a coach can listen to. And in most cases, time is what a coach doesn't take to fix it. Cause they have a 30 minute block. They're like, Oh, I just got 30 minutes. You know, that's all I got to talk to you about it. No, you need 90 minutes. You could need weeks. And if you don't have the system set up to do that, I fuck, I can't help you. That's your issue. That's not the client's issue for wanting to have fun. So, um, sorry to lengthen that out, but I always get, you know, it's, uh, the thing is we're 2019 and the fact we're asking that question, which is, I'm not reflecting your question based on that, but the fact we're asking that question is a fucking problem. That's a big problem.

You know, when we got to entertain it, we got to make it fucking sexy. Yeah. That's man, that's a lot of behaviors we got to change. And the only way you're going to fix that as a talk to someone and be like, listen, dude, I'm not going to judge you by not liking this. Right. Or let's, let's dig up the fact of who once told you you're supposed to love this. Was this supposed to be enjoyable? Do you think you're going to post an Instagram week later? Like where do you get these behaviors from? You know? And that conversation certainly will help it. Yeah. You know, I think what you're saying, it's like making individualized programs for people is, is necessary. But when people see influencers and people with big followings like Mark and yourself mentioned making these blanket programs and selling it to the masses and making just ridiculous money,

that's what they want to end up doing because that's what they see works financially. And they're like, some people are getting results. If we're getting a majority of these people results, why is this such a big problem? Um, how, why, how would you even convince someone to not go that route? Because the route you're talking about obviously takes a lot of work. The individuals that you're discussing is very few. You know, they're just people that are fan boys. Um, and it's's really that's not the conversation with folks that i really care about in getting like to the like i was talking about the soldiers on the street helping people move they don't know what a fucking template is those people who have

are falling in love with that and have an issue with like the individualization and getting people up and going it that's just that's just behavioral problems of their perspective of fitness i believe it's not as hard as like changing that purpose person my person's mindset. So I'm not sure if I, if I answered your question, but I think that, uh, you know, offering that as just, as just, um, like offering out templates or offering up ideas is creativity. That's just a way to be creative of people being like, Oh, that's interesting. I never know that I could participate in, in that method. I never knew you could do bench after deadlift on some days like that blows some people's minds right he's like oh that's interesting but how would they ever learn that if he didn't put that excel sheet out sometime right so it's just an

opportunity to share creative instincts but again i think that as that you know levels of user i think those are just like people who are really close in these circle circles and i don't think their biggest issue is is motivation around movement i think they just cloud the conversation and getting you know um just all their panties up in a bunch for the wrong reasons honestly okay yeah i hope i'm making sense no no you are some of the positive that can come from that when people do just uh either share a program or even sell a program is it could kind of reinvigorate somebody that, you know, was otherwise maybe giving up on like a bench press or giving up on a squat and it could

get somebody kind of back in the game. I know, I know for myself, especially as a kid, I followed a lot of different programs, sometimes had great success, sometimes banged myself up, you know, sometimes hurt myself, but it was all, it was all a, a, a nice invitation, a comfortable invitation towards like, hey, maybe you should try a five by five. I didn't know what I was doing. I remember as a kid because I got so obsessed with powerlifting at a young age. I was like, oh, the Bulgarian system. This is perfect.

I was like, summer's coming up and I could train three times a day. I could train in the morning, in the afternoon. All the time in the world. Yeah. And so I did shit like that with no idea of what I was doing. But it kept it fun for me and it kept me attached to it, you know. So there was at least that aspect to it. But I understand your side of it where it's like, you know, you want to try to have some real coaching behind it because a lot of people aren't going to stick with it if they're getting banged up, getting hurt.

Yeah. Yeah. a lot of people aren't going to stick with it if they're getting banged up, getting hurt. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm glad you, you said it in that language. Cause to his point that his issue is not the motivation to keep moving, you know what I'm saying? Like by him seeing templated personalized programs, it's not, you know, cracking that nut. I think of the biggest thing of intention and, you know, long-term fitness, he was bought in no matter what, whatever his like, you know, point of reference was like my soccer injury, you know, from that point forward, he never had to worry about motivation towards that.

But I think that sometimes that, as I said, the individualization, if it's because of scaling it for professional fitness coaches, that's certainly a task I'll take on. I'm excited around doing that because those coaches can still really simply apply that to a lot of people. I just still think we're going to be up against a whole bunch of issues to get it out to that market. And you raise some valid points of the perspective that people have on, you know, templated programs, but it may get people moving.

And if it gets them to the point where they realize, oh, wow, which generally has, oh, wow, you know, I probably should get my own thing, then, you know, that may send them to a local coach who's willing to personalize it for them. So maybe a positive aspect of that too. Has any other winner of the CrossFit Games been close to your body weight? You said you were 168 pounds or so? I don't think so. I don't think so. These guys are 20, 30 pounds heavier. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, the, you Well, the sport has changed quite a bit towards complexity and load.

There's more weight. And volume. Yeah, for sure. And so there's an avatar now. I think the girls are probably around that body weight, right? 150. Yeah. That's pretty crazy.

And then walk us through some of the early days of CrossFit and especially the CrossFit game. So I'd imagine you were already doing it for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, before 2007, um, walk us through some of that progression and when they kind of, I guess, first, uh, in I'm correct. I don't really know the history in 2007. Did they have an online, uh, program set up as well where you did the open and everything or no? online uh this program set up as well where you did the open and everything or no uh no no no no this was just uh you sign up and you can come in 2007 to the ranch and compete crazy yeah and uh you know some of this looks like it's like inside of like a warehouse so this is uh somebody's ranch the first two days were outside in a setup um and then the next day was a CrossFit total, which was press, squat, and deadlift. And there was three events.

The first event was that chipper you saw. That's the second event, which was a 7K run. And then, of course, that's the third day for the total. And so three events over that. Where's my boy John Wellborn at? He only came into being for the 2008 games. That's when they did the video of us leading up to the 2008 games. John Wellborn, former offensive tackle in the NFL, like 6'5", like 300-something pounds,

threw his hat in some CrossFit. Pretty brutal. And then so you were training, you know, you were, you were training for this stuff for a while and, um, you obviously just saw this as an opportunity. Did you compete in CrossFit prior to this? Yeah. Well, I'm glad you asked about it because the context people forget that, you know, 2004 up to 2007, uh, remember CrossFit was like the only online free workout that you could do on a three on one off cycle. That's actually really important that people know that that's how it all came to be was through the internet. It was. And it was that prior to what they see, right? That's what

people need to recognize, right? Because the culture around it was largely really varied shit every day that you could do anywhere in the world with the stuff in a garage right that's what people forget and all of us thousands of us competed daily against one another online so that's what we did for years and years every morning yeah you can compare you can compare how you did across the globe that's insane of's like, I mean, that's truly revolutionary, right? Oh, it was. That aspect of it. Oh, for sure. For sure, right?

And needless to say, you know, when I first saw it, there was a lot of positives I saw inside that. But this is important to recognize because for years we did this without any competition in person, right? It was never even on the radar. So in 2006, you were like, you know, what do you think in a year's time? You think you'll get everyone together and there'll be this qualifier? And I'd be like, that's crazy talk. Why would you want to do that? Because the whole premise was to try to get well-balanced in fitness.

We all competed against one another to do shit that no one wants to do today. But you'd start the first day by running a 10K. And then you do 10 sets of a single deadlift the next day. And then you would do this four-minute shit-kicking burpee kettlebell swing workout the third day. And that was it. That's all you did, right? But just look at the beauty in those three areas. I mean, it's the vast array of like what's considered balanced fitness, right?

And it moved away from that because it had to make it entertaining. They had to put people in a certain area. You know what I'm saying? It all goes into entertainment and logistics. So it turned from this online opportunity for people to work out against one another every day. And then soon as the games came about, I was just, like I like to say,

probably one of the more talented guys at the time who was doing it online. And then if they put me in a place with other people, then I was probably going to come out on top just based upon the talent pool and the people that were participating. Yeah. How many years did you compete? Well, every morning from 2004 to, uh, yeah, but for in like weekend competitions, um, it was, I guess till 2014 officially. Cause I came, uh,, it's now third because the top guy, um, was busted.

And so I think I move up to third place as a master, um, for 40 to 45 years of age. Um, but 2010, yep, 2010, 2011, I went to regionals as a 39 year old,-old and didn't qualify to the games after that. And then, of course, by that point in time, I didn't get my, like, you can come back to the games. Because the talent was just way too high. I just got my ass kicked like an old man out there for the first workout kind of thing. So 2010, I was at the games for the last time. So 07, 08, 09, 2010. They don't have the everyday competition available anymore.

They don't do it like that anymore, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's online. Oh, for sure. You can still compete with somebody on a daily basis. Oh, for sure. Even workouts. Yeah, for sure.

How have the workouts changed, do you think? Well, I can't comment over the past, let's say, couple of years what it would look like, but there was a real big fundamental shift which actually pulled me off.com around the wintertime in 2007 going into 2008. Where I noticed, and I don't know all the reasons behind this, but it went from this beautiful mishmash of balanced fitness to looking sexy and wrecking people. like looking sexy and wrecking people. Um, so, and so it used to be, for example, you know, this will give it, this is a clear story of it that, you know, if you go back and look at the data, it's, you know, roughly you'd get 40 to 50% of all the workouts in a month. That would be just strictly CP work on one day. That means you'd come in and do five sets of five press and that's it. There's nothing else, right? That's all that would be on the page.

Or like, you know, another day be weighted, pull up seven sets of three or deadlift 10 sets of one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you look then 2007 up and I would say 80 to 90% of all the workouts were beat downs. Really intense 15 to 25 minute hero workouts, 20 minute AMRAPs because it's entertaining.

So I think that could be scaled to a facility where people can just follow whatever's on the board. We'll do the.com workout. I'm just going to posit that that's possibility, possibly the case, but something, someone gave up some reins as to what needed to be put on that.com. Um, and it changed me, my perspective, um, on wanting to do it every day because it went away from balanced and more around entertainment. Somebody's paying a certain amount to be at a CrossFit gym and they need an hour workout. Yeah, it's possible.

Right. No, that's definitely a theory. It's a theory. We'll never know, which is also an issue because there's no transparency in the movement around that. Yeah. Which is also an issue because there's no transparency in the movement around that. Yeah.

And so basically it sounds like what you're saying is before that 2007 timeframe, it was almost just like a tester, a test. Like, hey guys, try this. And it was kind of like a roll of dice and it might've be one thing or maybe two things. Yeah. And then it switched into there being like, I don't know, six, seven things on the board. Yeah. Well, every day was a test, but I would say it was just put into different areas that would allow you to love this aspect of broad fitness. That's what, that's, you know, like people will never even think about this, but there was actually workouts we did in 2004 that were like, you know, practice your L-sit for 20 minutes, you know, and people were like,

is that all we're fucking doing? You know, if I tell like younger participants in the sport today, they're like, that's seriously all you did in a session? Like, yeah, that's all we did in a session. Like they can't even manufacture the idea that you would work on skills for 20 minutes. Do you see how the whole shift just fucking, it went down the toilet, right? It was like, how can I get smashed today? How is that L-sit can we do like a heavy med ball carries with it and a fucking jump rope like no you're just going to practice the l-sit or l-sit rope climb for reps which was obviously very challenging

you know it's almost like giving someone a standard load 80 deadlift and saying do one every two minutes you know for 20 minutes it's. It's like, it's challenging shit, right? You got to be precise and you got to do it effectively. Um, and, uh, that's just lost. It was, it was lost. It always blows my mind how this tends to happen on this podcast a lot. We recently had Scott Mendelson on the podcast. He had, uh, the biggest bench press of all time. He did a 715 pound bench press and he weighed, you know, nearly 350 pounds, just an absolute monster. Then when it came to bench press workouts, he said, all he would do is bench press and leave. You know, it's, it's, it's crazy because you're on the opposite end of fitness, but you're

kind of saying the same thing where you kind of had these, this specific skill you're working on. He was like the skill of me for me working on having an all-time world record bench was too consuming. It was a lot that the skill of performing the bench press and the mastery that went into it, there's no need to do anything else. He would, you know, go home, rest up and come back the next day. And if he had to do shoulders or triceps or whatever else he needed to do, he'd get it done the next day. So I think that makes a lot of sense. Do you think,

you know, before, before the switch, do you think they were throwing out like tests and they were like, you know, almost like let people kind of do their own rest of the workout to be prepared for these style, right? So that means that across those three workouts over three days, you could get anything, any number of different things, which we really enjoyed. Cause like, oh shit, you know, I find my weaknesses, you know, I know I can't run for 10 kilometers. It's probably something I want to work on. And I thought that was fairly admirable, right? Cause it makes you focus on like, well, what are the things you're going to need to improve when that 10K comes around the next time? To your point, you may be doing some extra skills on running around your training just because you want to balance that out which i thought was fantastic um but there was you know and then it turned into a sport and then all of a sudden if you go back and look at my post you'll see that

we were adding like pre-workout stuff post-workout am pm sessions because we knew that the game was changing that it was turning more than just this daily competition. And you're going to have to do the extra things to raise capacity and raise strength and exposure and volume. Because remember, we're only doing one workout a day. And that certainly changed with competition because it was like six over a weekend now. Was there any ways to communicate with the other people that were online? So like you saw, like I'd see his name pop up and I'd be like, that son of a bitch, he beat me on that workout again.

Would I be able to contact him or is there an email address or anything like that? I'll just say one word, hotmail. Like that was the hottest shit during the time. So you'd see like Jake Kalipa pop up and you're like, hotmail. That says everything. Well, Kalipa was late to the game,

but when he came in, he was, believe it or not, a young whippersnapper who was working out at a globo gym that wanted to compete against me and a couple of other guys that were on YouTube going back and forth. Bodybuilder. Yeah. But me and a couple of other guys were going back and forth on YouTube, like saying, Hey, I can fucking do this. Can you do this? And then it would be, his name was bionic on the, in the East coast. And then a couple of guys who were underground that won't, we won't mention their names because they didn't want to be a part of it,

but we would just send shit back and forth. And then Cleep is like, Oh, I want to fucking get a part of this. And then he fucking killed us. Yeah. You know, he was doing shit in a global gym with like the horror,

most horrible form and the sloppiest piece of shit in like a squash room with a rower. You could just imagine him doing this right. Oh, I don't know what i'm doing but i can fucking beat these guys and we didn't believe him and sort of like we got to see your fucking videos man and sure as fuck it was like this guy had something serious inside in terms of his ability uh for capacity um that uh you know anyways that that those are the those

are the things you need to see that were part of the sport sport before that, you know, it's not unfolded. It's not sold as being something that we fell in love with, which was just the competitive aspect that was besides the games, you know, besides the competition. So to your point, no, we had like internet, you know, that was like brand new to a lot of us. So emails to come up if we kept in touch was a pretty interesting thing. Ka-ding, ka-ding, shh. Remember that? Yeah. Wait for that thing to load forever. I don't know if anyone was going to know what you mean by that. No. lot of us so emails to come up if we kept in touch was a pretty interesting thing yeah yeah wait for that thing to load forever i don't know if anyone was going to know what you mean by that no was uh kelly stirrett like the head judge or something like that at this one uh this 2008 here

no oh okay well at the one the one that you won uh no but rip a toe was the uh okay it was the uh judge for uh the total and then how did you win? See, like Jason's like- He's a monster. Oh yeah, like at 155, we're all dying per reps. And he's like, oh, his coach is- Deadlift it, curl it. His coach is on the sidelines.

This is what people don't get. You see in the video, in the movie though, right? He's just telling him, pick it up and do it again. And that's all Jason is hearing. He's like, oh, do this. Just pick it up and squat. And then I put it overhead and he was like, yeah, you just won.

Oh, fascinating. You know what an animal, when you talk about OPEX, it seems like what OPEX is now, or like some of the concepts of what it is now is like inspired from early CrossFit, you know,

just moving around, getting a hang of doing different types of movement and improving that over time. Yeah. We've definitely, yeah. Well, I, just cause I, I want to be careful of adding like a, you know, ownership to fitness. It's a fitness thing. You know, I've been, I was around before the CrossFit like craziness. I won't say before CrossFit cause I don't even know what the date would be on the ownership of that. But you know, I, I did more shit. I like to say I didFit because I don't even know what the date would be on the ownership of that. But, you know, I did more shit. I like to say I did more shit in strength and conditioning, you know, before the competition even happened, right? I was a very, I would call it not, I wasn't going to say successful because that needs to be defined.

But people forget that I had a decade in strength and conditioning and personal training prior to winning the games, right? So, you know, and like, if you've ever been a coach before, you know, you go through iterations where you're like, I fucking know everything now, you know, the five years later, like, fuck, I don't know nothing. And then you, and then you're like, oh, oh, now I know everything. I went through that iteration, like four or five times, right. Just to give you an idea. But I went through that thing twice before CrossFit came up. So I had done Westside, Charles Staley, Paul Cech. I was a Poliquin intern.

I was on the DePasquale forums, Dan Duchesne, Body Opus, you know, Conversations, Mel Sif Super Training. Got the same history. Mel Sif Super Training forums. You know, I've read all of that shit. I was on Muscle Media 2000 2000 all prior to this like what people call the evolution of fitness just back to your point that information but i'm being clear i'm being clear on this because people think it was like revolutionary it's just another fucking

tool that's all it is right but because media it was available just like any instagram person today they're like oh you're the shit no actually they just have 50,000 followers, right? Actually 50,000 is weak apparently. Oh, they got 250,000 followers. You must be the shit. And you're like, no, they actually know nothing. They know nothing. So that's the same thing

in terms of that intense fitness movement. So you'll see it inside. And I'm not negating the fact that there's a lot inside because the beauty of CrossFit, what it taught me was this concept that I'll never ever understand this new concept of work i'll probably die before i recognize work and the the whole context of what crossfit did to work because remember prior to 2004 everyone thought work

was cycling or running that was well accepted in academia strength conditioning and people like you want to do conditioning you just do intervals cardiac output on the bike or etc etc and cross it was like no fuck that man you can do power cleans and ring dips you know and run around the building and i saw that right away as like holy fuck this is a whole new concept of work and how people can do it for strength and conditioning and you know improving general you know physical preparedness etc etc etc um and i i love that about it but i've included those plus a ton of other things inside of what you're calling opex and i just call it fitness because no one owns that that shit's been around since bill starr you know and and long you know strong

man and fucking circus acts and and uh people doing that shit years back you know what do you think is responsible for getting people stronger while they're also working on building this tremendous capacity? Because I think before CrossFit and I think before this movement came along, I think that a lot of people thought if you're going to train for strength, then you have to lift heavy stuff and there's long rest periods in between. And that's usually the way people train for strength. There wasn't really a lot of, there wasn't a lot of people doing really high reps,

maybe for hypertrophy, people would do higher reps. But, you know, in CrossFit, you know, for lack of a better term, just a lot of jumping around, going around, people hopping over the barbell and people are deadlifting and sometimes doing a burpee in between. And what do you think is responsible?

Because a lot of these men and women are really strong. Yeah, yeah. They're definitely relatively strong. I think there's a lot of things that are at play there. Today, we can say it's largely self-selection. So you're seeing a lot. You don't see a million people that didn't get strong while doing it. Number two, because that's all they're going to market, right?

Is the burpees over the bar. Then she cleans 220 pounds. Like, oh my God, this sport is amazing. It's like, yeah, but there's a million people thatorganization. To answer your question, they pace really effectively. So whatever task is in front of them to overcome solutions to movement, that's the test or the dot-com workout or whatever, they know better than others how to leave a little bit on the table. better than others how to leave a little bit on the table so what they execute and all these dynamic contractions to you and i feels like a fucking chore but to them in their brain they're just like and then two minutes later they snatch 97 of their single max and they could have won their state championship with that score you see that see that? So I, but, but people, people just think that they're just like, they work harder.

They're a special, and they're like, no, internally, they can't even talk about it, but they have a self-organization ability to not go red line. Right. And the, the beautiful thing that was great around this evolution of CrossFit and going to Carson

was the birth of Rich Froning. Because when he got on media and people were able to watch that guy, it's fucking obvious that he was a man amongst boys for that specific characteristic. That he could look 20 minutes ahead in the future and go, this is exactly how I need to pace this out to save myself, to just get enough points to move myself into Sunday, and then turn it. Now, people don't look at that as saying like, how can he be so strong? the sunday and then turn it now people don't look at that as saying like how can he be so strong it's because he never went 100 and no one you know it's hard and you know i'm not going to put words in rich's mouth because he may not be able to understand it based upon that but they have such great organization for pacing that allows them to be strong so that's why i think you that could be

there's there's some more other pieces to that but like with jason i remember like i showed him you know how to do a sumo deadlift now obviously through through some crossfit movements he's you know he's getting a lot of a lot of variation so he and he's also deadlifting and there's the sumo deadlift high pull and there's uh maybe just regular squats and there's sometimes in a clean sometimes people end up with their feet really wide apart. So he, you know, he's, he's ended up in that position with weight before, but the first time I showed him, I want to say he deadlifted like 545. I mean, a lot of these athletes, you know, Jason is, is about 200 pounds. So a 545 pound deadlift, you know, there's some power lifters like, Oh, you know, and in power, power of things is way different. I mean, a lot of these guys are using performance enhancing drugs and a lot of power lifters are much bigger than 200 pounds. And so I think they fail to realize

some of these men and women, first of all, they don't weigh a lot and man, they're picking up a ton of weight and 545 for your first go of it. It's crazy. That. That's not bad. Yeah, no. But he's a shining example of that, that he grew capacity by not having good technique. So if you lower load, right, and you do all kinds of movements sloppily, it increases your capacity.

Yeah, but it was. I mean, it wasn't beautiful movement, right? He definitely refined it over time. But you can just imagine how much, how much capacity you can build by going outside of your, your ranges with lower loads, right? But when it came to really high loads or complexity at the time, ironically, he wasn't necessarily the best for that. Internally, he had the ability to express that, but it took lots of technique and refinement in order for him to see exactly what that would look like over time. So it's a, it's a good example. It's interesting. As you mentioned, like the, the ideal avatar for the CrossFit athlete, because when you were talking about the pacing aspect of things, I wasn't really thinking about that. I was thinking about like their general build, their structure. Cause you know, the top athletes, they generally have like

this typical height, a typical amount of muscle on their frame. They all generally look the same. You don't see many guys that are super tall. You know what I mean? So the pacing aspect of things makes a lot of sense. Didn't really think about that. Yeah. There's a number of other factors that I believe dictate that. Resilience and pace and knowing culture of the sport, um, having lots of early age movement solutions. Um, there's a lot of things that lead into people being successful, not just the avatar that you're seeing. I think just physically, physically, it just makes sense over time based upon what you mentioned on body weight too, is like, yeah, physics do play a part

in this. Right. Um, and there is the unicorn examples. There are some taller people, both male and female. But when it comes down to it only being one or two events, if it was only one or two events, those people would become average when it comes to challenging their height. Like strict handstand pushups, if the volume got so high, they turn into average folks.

So they're not just unicorns. Physics still has a big part to play in that. Because there'll be a ton of people with lower capacity at shorter forearm length who are just going to beat them no matter what. It's just physics. But because the test becomes so long and broad, it allows them to figure their shit out and raise capacity to the top with good efficiency. The difference in movements is crazy too. Because when you do a deadlift versus a burpee, the range of motion of a deadlift is very, very short. And how much movement goes on in something like a burpee is a tremendous amount. And it's,

I think people forget that that volume is kind of attached with, you know, how the distance that you're moving as well. And so that ends up being tremendously taxing as well. You're doing other exercises like that in between. Yeah, the burpee is the, I would call it the highest metabolic costing body weight scenario activity. And when you add a certain task to it, it just changes it into a monster, you know, depending upon how you want to put it. And they become multiple iterations of it today that are very challenging because they make them go over boxes today. So you've got to jump over a box and do a burpee on the other side and then repeat that. I mean, just think about the heart's position and the range of motion and the total work. I don't care who you are.

That's a lot of work, right? That's a lot of work. So it is fairly impressive. They just keep making it worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More challenging.

So when you first walked in here today we were we were talking a lot about poop and we were uh before we got on the air and andrew uh was having some questions andrew always sneaks in questions for himself you know he kind of like no no he always pretends he's like on the behalf of you know the audience hot conversation that's going on in the live chat right now everybody wants to know yeah this guy bill in particular yeah bill from wisconsin is wondering it's cheese bill that's yeah yeah now he's curious about uh like if someone like mark were to down a ribeye steak and someone like me downs the same exact steak um is it possible that like his digestive digestive system can handle that way better he can uh get more out of it versus someone like i forgot his name uh we'll just say his name

is andrew now yeah because like when i eat something like like that you know it'll i it'll just fly right out of me it's it's gotten better recently but still like that's usually the case like um uh we had a gabrielle lion in here she said you definitely have something going on in your gut you know and it's so it's like i don't know it's coming from a different perspective what are your thoughts yeah no it'd be this it'd probably be the same answer i know gabby's uh perspective on it she actually helped a number of our clients actually in some of our opex gyms with um sibo or dysbiosis or hormonal issues yeah yeah parasites um and uh but as a fitness coach you have to say well i mean i can't do that testing

so what do i do day to day and i just like to get people back to thinking about concepts of biology and just meat in general and recognizing that we shouldn't be looking at meat as being the issue but and people want to put it that way the food be looking at meat as being the issue, and people want to put it that way. The food is never the problem. It's the human that's the problem. And until we get everyone on board with recognizing that we have to have a certain kind of terrain to naturally digest all those things, you'll never change your perspective on what food

should be. Back to your point, it'll always be like, well, when I eat this, I have this. When I eat this, you're focusing not just you, but Bill in Wisconsin. Bill needs to focus on recognizing how to fix his terrain, right? He needs to focus on saying like, what do I need to investigate to figure out how I can set my gut and jejunum and duodenum and entire colon up for success to absorb all these nutrients? Not like, what kind of food stuff do I need to change so I don't shit my pants in a half hour? So then it makes you just ask more questions like, okay, so let me just answer your question. It's not the steak, right?

And it is the human. And then if you say, well, if it's the human, then where do I go from there? And that's where you're probably going to need, like we said offline, you're probably going to need something more than basic lifestyle guidelines. If you were a client in one of our gyms, that's where we directly would go after food hygiene, which means that we'd say, are you stressed out with your eating? Are you on the go when you're eating? Are you like smelling your food and chewing it 40 times per bite? Are you drinking water before and then drinking water after, not during?

How do you source your food? Like we're going after all those things to honor the process of the basic lifestyle guidelines, which is chew your fucking food so that you can at first least figure out if you can digest it. Right? And then if we try that along with hydration and sleep and low stress and it's still not fixed, then we say refer out. You got to go out to someone who knows more than what you do as a fitness coach, because that's not our scope. We can't handle that.

You just said water before and after, not during? Yeah. Well, if people are drinking lots of water during their meal, they're using it to wash down food. That's basically it. So to even have the argument on, should I drink during or during after? It's like, that fucking just makes sense. Like if you can't create enough saliva to digest your food, unless you have some specific esophageal or, you know, swallowing issues, that could be a problem.

Right. But if you're like, oh, you know, I, you know, I just fucking need to wash it down. Well,

then you're not chewing your food to a bolus that's going to be absorbed effectively. And most people's digestion is fixed from saliva in the mouth and mastication. You break in that food down, right? So in a lot of cases, we just lost that behavioral, you know, that feedback loop. And that's why I asked you questions about your childhood because a lot of things can come from the growth of the digestive system in certain phases of your life that lead to these complications down the road. To my point that people have gone on decades of having colitis and never and never recognized they have this problem right they've been having diarrhea

for 30 years right and it's just been a modium or medicined up and what they really just never had a conversation with was the practice of food hygiene and just calming down yeah so anxiety stress too much you know uh stress can lead people to have a really poor digestive system yeah and then you can't absorb anything. So, again, it's not the food. You got to fix the system, the person. I had a guy reach out on Instagram and he was like, yeah, I kind of have similar issues like you. What you need to do is go on an Imodium fast.

I'm like, I don't think that's going to be a good idea. Just duct taping it. Yeah, yeah. That sounds terrible. So, then what kind of tests should I be looking for? Well, anything that Gabby recommended I'm sure would be first. I mentioned there's different companies out there now that can actually look at your stool and you can take a shit very easily and clean, cleanly, and get that investigated. No, because you do want to investigate if inside the terrain you do have some kind of issues,

whether it be inflammation or any invaders. You could do urine and saliva tests as well with a functional medicine doc. There's a number of them here in California that would be able to look at that. Doctor's data is one and biohealth is another.

Different kind of name brands. You can investigate those things. And those people will at least be able to look at your terrain because those are going to give you feedback of what's happening, not just live time like serum tests would do, but exactly what you're presenting with. So they'd be able to give you like either a supplementation regime or a lifestyle regime that's going to repair. But you need to do that because otherwise you'll go fishing for a new diet for months and months, carnivore and vegetarianism and imodium and neuro cleanses and detoxes.

And it's still not going to change things because you didn't figure out at the base level what needs to be taken care of. And that's outside of our scope to fix that. Yeah. And I think as we're having the conversation, it started because Candice was just like, he's actually going to be the man you want to talk to if you want to talk about poop specifically.

So when did that start? When you started tinkering, not tinkering, literally with poop, you know with the conversation well ironically it did start with my own shit because i was doing a cyclical ketogenic uh when it was when it was cool to try and it was kind of underground um and i would eat like in a this will just be humorous for people who started this back in the day but you you had to do it cheap because protein at the time you know to do it throughout the week. And then you were given this beautiful award on Saturday from 6 a.m. till night to basically eat your face off, eat your way out of a cake cream pie, pretty much. But I would have like ground beef and cheese all week. And there'd be some versions

of other things, but that was pretty much it. And then loaded myself with so much sugar that I could barely walk around on Saturday. Um, and then Sunday start back on a regular diet. And there was a training program and hydration, everything that went with this. And dude, I was fucking ripped and jacked. And so, and this is my own perspective, but I just want to give you an idea that I, I didn't, I wasn't just like, you weren't being a power lifter. No, no, no. I was bodybuilding, but I fucking looked real good. Right. And this was after even a number of years of it. Does anyone who's practiced it and really done it, if you get deep into it-

Talk about bodyovers, right? Yeah, yeah. Then, I mean, there's some powerful things inside of that that I still think are very positive for thermogenic responses and overfeeding, et cetera. But the downside of it, I'll just stop there, but the downside of it is that I started shitting myself around noon when I'd have a salad, like a green salad with very low carbohydrate total but some fiber. And I would just have these episodes of diarrhea in the afternoon. And so I was like, well, I'm knowledgeable enough to know that a doctor is just going to say you need medication for this. So I went searching for a naturopath in the Calgary area. And I came upon Dr. Jeff Drabot. He was local and he was a new whippersnapper. I knew

he was out of the West Coast group of this naturopathic group, which I had done my research on that. Anyways, he just sat me down. And after an hour, basically, I figured some things out of what I would call functional medicine that was withheld from the strength conditioning community or the fitness community that answered like so many questions for me that I went on. I basically, like I like to say, I followed him around to every medical conference every couple of weeks for the next five or six years, trying to learn about functional medicine as much as possible. Um, Institute of functional medicine, traveling to anti-aging conferences, just basically following him around. So he'd be the doctor listening and I'm the, I'm the strength coach going, holy fuck. Like there's a lot of stuff here that I've never learned about. So that's where I went on like, you know, understanding digestion and then trying to get into understanding people's poop and, you know, farting 35 times a day is not normal.

You know, shitting six times a day after meals is not normal. Things that people are like, oh, you know, that's not normal. It's like, no, that's not a normal occurrence. And this is what it could be telling you, right? And then it leads back to, of course, the BLGs and food hygiene and correct food sourcing. So it just helped the process. I remember that conversation with Mark because he would be like, you know, so like this has been a long going conversation. Yeah. But he's like, you know, so like what like what happens when you do X, Y or Z?

And I'm like, oh, you know, just walk around the house. I'll fart every now and again. Just normal stuff. And he just stops. He's like, you know, that's not normal. Like what? Like, hold on. I've been doing this my whole life.

What are you talking about? Yeah. But yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So, well, best of luck. I hope you can fix it. Cause that, you know, the downside of it, I don't know if that it, it leads to some, you know, help for you or kind of inspires you to get it done and take care of it. But, you know, that's going to have long-term cognitive complications. Oh. So that's the downside of it is that the gut and the brain connection, we start with that. And then long-term when our gut falls apart, we'll have cognitive function issues long-term because our gut helps us make and keep a lot of those very powerful hormones that keep us

cognitively aware and keep us basically using fuels appropriately. So if anything doesn't get you off your seat to kind of like get you on board is like in 10 years, you did not want to start having some cognitive dysfunction. That's crazy. That's the first I've heard of anybody making that connection, at least that, that made the connection that clearly for me to understand. Well, brain gut, the brain gut connection, that's it. And it's, it's always going to come back to haunt one another with uh with over time which is why they're putting so much you know effort now into looking

at alzheimer's and long-term cognitive dysfunction and trying to find you know that we're on the precipice of it but they're connecting definitely some gut and and uh you know food aversions and and issues of lifestyle to that and so anyways i'm just trying to find ways of getting you like connected to more than trying to find a diet, but get you off your seat to get it fixed so you don't have any issues long term. Yeah. Because I think Mark, you've brought up a couple of times that somebody else had said like the gut is like the second brain or something like that.

Yeah. Now there's a lot of people even refuting that saying it's the first brain. Yeah. Damn. Yeah. I mean, think about it. Like actually, you know, in primal times, we would kill somebody for food. So that right there is overriding your brain, right?

Yeah. Overriding, like, what we should probably do and not do to people. But if it came down to, you know, one person versus another, you know, eating. Got to survive. Yeah, you got to figure it out. Yeah. You know, a lot has been made more recently about like the gut microbiome. Do you practice any of these things?

Do you think any of these things are valuable enough yet for us to kind of implement in terms of maybe, I don't know, absorbing more protein or just trying to get more out of the foods we're eating or anything like that? Yeah, I think it's definitely something that is gonna take a little bit more time for us to like wrap our hands around what it means. But I think the investigation of it in the conversation, I would say is very positive, which means that it's not being thwarted by medicine. I think too many people are talking about it now to turn their back on it.

There's so many connections now to cognition and gut issues. There's just way too many practitioners and people talking about things like, I removed this food aversion. I'm so mentally acute. Like you can't have 6 million people say that and then everyone turned their back on it. So I think it's moving in a positive direction, but I think there's a lot more to go on it. Um, and I think long-term, like I remember Nigel Plummer, who was one of the leading advocates back in the day for the microbiome or probiotics and this whole investigation into the gut. And he said that we need to think of it a different way that

we live on top of bacteria, right? Bacteria don't live inside us. And if you see that as, if you change your perspective on it, you need to see the importance of balancing out all that bacteria inside and making sure it's well taken care of. And how do you take care of that? Rhythm, sleep at night, drinking water, chewing your food, right? It all goes back to, again, the basic lifestyle guidelines and good food sourcing, et cetera, et cetera. In most cases, that's not going to lead to disarray. So I think it's positive. Adding probiotics or prebiotics or something could potentially help somebody. But if you're

just have a general healthy lifestyle and you're doing all the things you mentioned, it's probably sorting itself out pretty good. Yes. Yeah, for sure. And probiotics would be a supplement in there that is, you're right, for some people at the right time, it could be certainly helpful. If they're doing like a replacement re-inoculation or they need to like fix some things. But a lot of people just pulling it off the shelf and doing it because it's a new thing is probably more of a detriment than it is a help, possibly. We don't know what that's going to mean, but I think that, you know, to make it sound very generalist, but if people would just stop stressing as much, it would make a massive impact on their absorption

of nutrients. But stress leads to so much anxiety of the entire system that we can't necessarily break foods down anymore. The fact that we can't eat bread anymore is not bread's fault. That's why I like to say it's our fault. There's something wrong with us. We're not as resilient and we can't handle those things anymore. And the way you fix that is not by duct taping it by gluten-free bread. You got to figure out why you can't handle bread back to his point, which is, you know, you just got to stop stressing out. What does like your nutrition look like right now? Um, uh, so I have a protein and a fruit after I exercise in the morning time. Um, I generally have leftovers from our supper with my family, uh, at noon that I bring in. I largely like to make that protein-based as possible.

If I have like starchy carbs or potatoes or anything left over for lunchtime, you know, I generally feel a little bit more tired in mid-afternoon. And then I sit down to meals with my family every suppertime and we vary that across the board. Generally a protein and vegetable and some forms of starch most times. And I just rotate that over the board. Um, generally a protein and vegetable and some forms of starch most times. Um, and, uh, and I just rotate that over and over. So you eat whole foods throughout

the day pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, if you asked me that question, you know, 20 years ago, it probably would have been something different and same thing 25 years ago would have been something different. 25 years ago would have been, uh, um, rigatoni pasta with a can of tuna, um, mixed together because, you know, that was like a, um, you know, a daily routine meal replacement shake, you know, twice a day, uh, for added calories. Um, you know, you'd have a whey protein shake and then like an oat cake as well. Cause you had to watch out for the fat, you know, content, you know, so over time it's just evolved based upon like what we know and what's connected to fitness. But I found over time, this is what works well for me right now.

Okay. And how does like OPEX, you mentioned like, you know, they, you get into the habits of, you know, chewing your food, et cetera. So how does OPEX teach? Do you guys work on nutrition with your coaches? Yeah, yeah. We have a, I guess a concept that we don't really have a system in mind of what the ideal looks like for food, for the continuum. I think there's still a lot of questions out as to what that is for individuals, but we do connect biology to what people should be doing and then try to put individuals on a continuum as to where they should be for their foods. So what I mean by that is that we'll say like there is some form of ideal as to what people should be eating and us and the client have to agree upon that. And if we can't

agree upon that, then we just like have lots of conversation until we get to the point that they agree upon what an ideal diet would be. And if all of us were to be polled and ask questions that are generalized, we're all going to get to this whole foods perspective on eating, right? And then there's like just to the left of that, there's a little bit of differences on like legume amount and sprouted grains. And there's, you know, let's call it the nuanced areas, right? But I would still say that's okay in a whole foods, healthy diet and a balanced approach of protein, fats, and carbs, right? And so that's what we talk about in terms of what an ideal would be. And then we ask clients specifically and talk conversation with them.

Where do they sit on this continuum away from that ideal diet that is going to be helpful for their goals? And we just pick on whatever behaviors are needed to move them slightly forward, just like in program design for where they currently sit. So someone comes in, they're eating two pieces of white bread in the day. Then we're going to move that into eating two pieces of spelt toast in the day. And then that's going to move the two pieces of whole grain food in the, you know what I'm saying? So it's little pieces moving forward based upon where they're starting to get towards that, you know, ideal long-term. And that ideal, remember, for what you're saying, OPEX, is always connected to longevity. And longevity of eating is different than performance eating, right? That's a fucking clear delineation. So longevity eating should be

focused on mental acuity, actually low volumes of foods over time, and great food hygiene practices. So there's enjoyment of food, and it's not for performance or gluttony or like recovery purposes. And you can see how that clouds like up the argument in case people come in with the behaviors like, I thought I was supposed to be doing, you know, focus on macros. It's like, well, it might be important for you, but this is where you sit right now. And then over time, we'll want to move you towards what that ideal is, which is actually challenging, more challenging than performance, to be honest.

Yeah. In performance, you can lock it up with challenging than performance, to be honest. Yeah. In performance, you can lock it up with numbers and like actual measurements and scales and shit. It's like, oh, okay, this is moving in that direction. But for behaviors of living long and prospering, that's a, that's a different one because it's still in our generation that looking good is dictating that you're eating good. And that's just not the, that's just not the case. Well, and from a performance standpoint too, you can also say, you know,

you're going to do this for the next eight weeks or you're going to do this for the next 12 weeks and then we'll switch you out into something different where you can pig out for a while or, you know. So, you know, there's a little bit more light at the end of the tunnel with the performance stuff. And maybe it's probably already playing into that person's psyche

because they're probably already into the extreme. So you're like, all right, you're not going to eat carbs for the next three weeks. A lot of people, a lot of people that are extreme would be like, okay, cool. And then when it's done, you know, you get to has unfortunately crept into like daily people's exercise and nutrition is that they, they think they have, they have these behaviors, like you'd mentioned, or exercise not being fun. They're like, well, when do I get to like pig out? Or when do I get to like cheat? And that, that fact that that's being asked in itself, you know, you need to have education around that, right? So take away from the behaviors of like, this is not a reward system, you know, and that of, takes many, many weeks, just like teaching good patterns of movement. But secondarily, you got to get them to the point where they recognize that they may get to the point where they're resilient enough where they can do that. of just eating their face off leads to inflammation, poor sleep, et cetera. Do you see how I'm moving away from what they told me they wanted to do? Live long and prosper, cognitive function,

and feeling good. And then if I can say, well, if this is a glimpse into your Monday morning, how is that connecting to you living long and prospering? So then they're like, well, I mean, there's a bunch of other people that do it. It's like, well, ask them what they want to feel like on Monday morning, right? Or what they want to do forever. And if it's, well, they're going to look good naked or, or lift big, that's a whole different conversation. Cause that's not your goal. So tie in that thing, I think is important to make people recognize that mental acuity should be the thing we're focusing on in what people should be eating and not necessarily how they look. I think back in the day, that's what got me into flexible dieting. When I first started

doing that, I FYM thing, you know, I can look in shape, but I can also eat all this crap that I've been told I couldn't eat. And yeah, I was in shape and eating crap at the same time, but it wasn't healthy. It wasn't leading towards longevity, which shifted everything in terms of what I do now. Yeah. It's tough because it's intuitive eating that you need to have. You need to have great intention. And then you need to, and it great intention. There's a lot of science out there that's pushing a lot of evidence to say that it really doesn't matter, that the macros are very, very important. And they're not clouding the argument, but they're making a lot of people confused, forgetting that there's a lot of behaviors that go with a macro. So you got to

forget that, that there's some basic elements of not even looking at the macros, that if people at the end of the day, no matter we're taking out the whole conversation of looking good naked, if at the end of the day, they sleep good and they had great blood sugar balance the whole day, that's probably something, whatever's inside of that, that's good for them, right? So if it ends up, it's being higher or lower on macros over time, that's fine. But there's something about quality that has to be inside there and not just macros. And that's what generally gets missed if you go on just numbers or the thermogenic solution for it. Yeah, it seems like we always end up with the same problem all the time, you know, some form of control.

You know, how do you get some sort of control in your diet and then how do you, you know, avoid overeating? I mean, people just tend to overconsume. And how they overconsume is, youconsume could be a lot of different ways. But I think that that's usually the culprit. And then for me personally, I've always been an advocate of a lower carb diet. And the reason is, is because my own experience has been really good.

And so I will communicate with people, this has worked really well for me because the combination of carbs and fat together or the combination of um uh you know something sweet and salty or something um like pizza you know carbohydrates and fats together or something like a donut where it's fat and sweets together you know i i'm not going to be able to eat a slice of pizza i'm not going to be able to eat just a donut or half a donut. I'm going to want to be like, okay, it's donut time. You know, like let's get a box of donuts and let's just have at it until you feel sick. So that's why the lower carb stuff has always, uh, worked really well. And then kind of to your point,

I've noticed that when, once I kind of gained that discipline and once I changed my palate, which that was probably one of the harder things to do, that once I kind of changed my taste for what I knew was good food, you know, steak is, you know, tastes wonderful. Eggs taste wonderful. And once you kind of relearn that a lot of these things have a lot of flavor, even something like spinach or arugula or basil or tomatoes, I mean, they pop with tons of flavor. arugula or basil or tomatoes. I mean, they pop with tons of flavor. But when you're eating Doritos and Oreos and things like that, you don't even recognize these things to have any flavor at all. I mean, I've pointed this out in this podcast before, you know, eat a couple Doritos and

then go to a place that has the most expensive steak, you know, in your city and try to eat the steak. You just will totally not be interested. You won't even taste it anymore. So kind of retraining the palate and the lower carb stuff has helped me because it just prevents me from overeating. Yeah. Your story is excellent of how people heard that as you changed behaviors over time, but it was the, it was the blood sugar mismanagement thing that the low carb thing helped you with. Right. But then you also heard in your story that it took weeks and weeks, not a couple of days for what you're calling developing a palate. It just

end up in you being great mentally acute. So it made you allow you to make better decisions and behaviors of your food, right? And then you get to the point where especially the satiety and the taste thing, that's a pure indication that your gut's in better health. So now you're at the point where you're digesting a food appropriately and your brain is giving you signals that you need to have that food. So it's a beautiful story of evolution as to what people can go through multiple mediums of it. But nowhere in there did you say that you dropped calories or you went to a certain macro score of that, right? It was based upon intuition and taking care of blood sugar balance. Because in the end, you can wrap it up wherever you want in macros, but if people are up and down in the day and they're just withholding themselves from eating simply because

that's all the macros they're supposed to eat, they're just going to turn into a neurotic, right? Honestly, because they're just trying to stick to a number. Yet instead, they're like, oh, wow, I'm chewing my food and I'm satisfied. Then that's fine. You're doing good. I usually tell people- It's a great story. It took me 10 years, you know, because I've, I've, I've lost, you know, about a hundred pounds. I used to, you know, at my heaviest, I was like three 30. Jesus. And it didn't literally take me 10 years. Wow. Where do you put a hundred pounds? Yeah.

On my face basically. Wow. Um, you know, some of it was like, you know, just for certain goals and powerlifting and stuff. And then I got kind of stuck because I retrained my palate to eat all that junk food for a long time because I was having trouble getting any bigger at a certain point. And then to back my way out of it was really, was really, really brutal and really hard. But I just, I knew I needed to change. I needed, I needed to, uh, you know, kind of head in a different direction. What was the, what was it that? uh, you know, kind of head in a different direction. What was the, what was it that just, uh, you know, I getting crushed with 1,085 squat. So I, you know, I went to do 1,085 squat and my knee caved in and, you know, I, I fell with the weight. Luckily I didn't get like pinned

under the weight or anything crazy like that, but there you see, uh, a nice chunky, chunky picture of me right there. Um, you know, getting, getting, uh, you know, getting hurt like that, you know, changed my powerlifting career forever. I never squatted like that again and just kind of kiss that, kiss that part of my life. Goodbye. It was time before that, but I wasn't willing to, uh, wasn't willing to admit it. I just kept wanting more and more. Okay. You know, I wanted to squat a thousand pounds. I wanted to bench press over 800 pounds and I, I did all that stuff, but I just kept wanting to go more and more and more. And so, you know, it was good. It was good that it happened. And it's, uh, you know, I, I, I had a lot of great experiences while I was still able

to lift. I think that's a, like a thousand, uh, I forget what that weight is, maybe 1036 or something. Yeah. So at the end, I think it's the 1080 of this one. Oh yeah. At the end of this one. Yeah. So this is, uh, like pretty much the best squat I ever did. And this is, you know, I'm in a squat suit and I got knee wraps on and, you know, you're trying to just, just to cheat in as many different ways as you possibly can. But, you know, I, I kind of needed a body weight on me, you know, needed to slap body weight on me

as in seem as mentioning there's certain body types with um crossfit and there's certain body types sometimes in mma certain body types and powerlifting and for me particularly uh at my height i needed just to try to get thicker and maybe other people don't need to because maybe other people are able to tap into the nervous system better or whatever but for me personally i that was kind of the route that i decided decided to go you had to get a mechanical advantage yeah mechanical strategy well this is a good story it's good you went through it and i also you know the reason i i said that i tell people it took 10 years is because it happened in stages you know i didn I didn't, you know, I'll hear people say, oh man, you know, I've been doing this diet

and I lost 20 pounds, but I've been stuck. I'm like, hold on, let's just back up a second. Let's celebrate that you lost 20 pounds. Okay, you're stuck. And sometimes that happens, but let's just be okay with being stuck. It's fine. You're stuck, not a big deal.

Let's talk about some strategy on how we can, you know, get you to weigh less, but we don't want to just continually eat less food and we don't want to continually try to eat less food and exercise. You know, that's what people do. People are like, that's it, starting on Monday. Yeah. You know, starting on Monday, I'm not going to eat. Yeah. And I'm going to train my face off. Yeah. And you're like, well, this is, you know, that's, that's not a very good

strategy. Yeah. That's performance behaviors of nutrition. Right. And that gets locked again. As I said, that's the shitty thing that that's entered into the exercise for health and fitness area arena. Um, and we, well, you remember too, back in, back in the day that there'd be withholding of calories to look good naked too. Right. So you would manipulate calories to look good, but that's still performance. And so that's my point that if we can get people all on board on recognizing that eating should be for best mental acuity possible, I think it'll get people's alarms on and they'll start becoming more intuitive as to what they should have. So they'll start doing things like, I should probably calm down and take 10 breaths before I eat my meal.

I should probably think about how this is sourced. I should probably chew it really well and not be on my phone during it. And then I want to have some kind of feedback loop 30 minutes later. And if every time I do that 30 minutes later, I need to put an X next to that fucking food that I just had because it's not appropriate to helping me be mentally acute. And for some people that may be white potatoes, right? For some people that may, may not be white potatoes. So you get, you gotta be able to do that. And then like you said, it'll take a period of time, but you'll get to the point where you're like, this is my lineup. This is what works well for me. I don't shit my pants. I don't fart. I sleep good at night. I have great mental acuity. I can play with my kids after school. I'm not starving, you know, et cetera,

et cetera, et cetera. And then you start getting people on board to eating to survive and thrive. Um, sorry, sorry, eating to thrive as opposed to eating to survive, which is what performance is, right? Performance is all about, you know, just, uh, getting the macros in to help you like perform or to giving you enough fuel fuel so you can go and crush it, you know, or the reward thing, right? Let's go smash arms and then have a big post-workout sugar bang. You know, I remember that, like dying to work out for 45 minutes so I can get that sugar hit after. You know, that's just reality. So it shows you the power of sugar, right?

Do you guys work with performance athletes? I mean, I'm assuming you do. Yeah. Right. Yeah. OPEX does through CrossFit athletes and fitness athletes with Big Dogs, which is an online remote coaching program for people who are, it's called really serious about competing in fitness. And at that level, yes, it's more specific to performance variables and not looking good naked and living long and prospering. It's about doing a shit ton of work and volume and then competition nutrition nutrition specifically do you have uh several people in the crossfit games this year uh one thus far that we could claim to be um as part of our team uh colleen fosh oh there we go yep huge fan she was just yeah just a couple of days ago well we kind of we kind of indirectly may have known weeks back but just a couple of days ago and uh there's kind of indirectly may have known weeks back, but just a couple of days ago.

And there's others. We have some other Masters athletes as well. And another, yeah, some age group athletes that are going. And possibly, I could be wrong, but possibly some people that are on teams. Yeah, I do know actually Tommy V is on one of Invictus' teams, and he's a big dog client. And he's going to the games on a team. Are you going? I always have some. I'm not going. No. big dog client and he's going to the games on a team. So are you going? I always have some. I'm not going. No. I'm in Idaho in the summertime with my family.

Are you banned from CrossFit? No, no. Just maybe not welcomed? I don't know. I don't know, honestly. Has there been some heat in the past? I saw like online, they showed like videos and then there was, I don't know, it seemed like there was a lot of like kind of controversy, like saying that you cheated, but it was a long time ago and the rules were different and so on and all that weird kind of stuff. Yeah. No, the cheating thing was, uh,

was probably, uh, what was called plate gate. It was kind of an interesting, we, we, we made the plate smaller and we thought we got the okay from the regional director, which we still have evidence that show that we did, we did get the okay from that. To put the weights on, in which obviously you didn't have to clear the barbell and jump as high for burpees. They're like, fuck it,

this is what we're going to do for the overhead walking lunges. And I mean, why would you want to jump extra couple inches, right? But anyways, we got a lot of, we got a heat for that, which we took,

we took on chin, you know, and it was good. But as far as the tension, I think that was always manufactured from both sides just for drama, honestly, and storylines and to make things seem. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I've got a lot of gratitude towards everything that I've learned inside of the whole, let's call it the world of fitness.

I always loved, you know, the coaches and the athletes, you know, I've never met anyone within the sport who wasn't, uh, um, very cordial with me or professional. It's always been some loser online who's some dickhead in a CrossFit gym somewhere who wants to make a comment about something they have no business making a comment on. Misinterpretation of what happened or whatever. For sure. Right sure, right? They just have no idea. They haven't done the research. So, no, I have nothing, no ill will for that. I mean, we're all fighting the same battle really, is putting fitness out there and exactly what it looks like in the market. Trying to make people less fat.

Yeah. Yeah. What do your workouts look like nowadays? Do you still bench and squat and deadlift and do cleans and snatches, things like that? Yeah. Yeah. So I would call myself the true generalist in that I do, I'm not the best at any of those things, but I can do all of it. And I just do different shit every day, honestly.

And whatever comes to mind when I get there in the morning in the morning time, um, I do it. Um, I work out every day. Um, I change it up every day. So it allows me to self-regulate again. I want to be able to do this forever. I'm keeping a running total as to how many sessions I've probably done in a row or continue to do in a row as my own, you know, thing that I do for my own like tracking. How many is that? you know, thing that I do for my own like tracking. How many is that? I'd say it's probably thousands, but I've only been counting 478 since I started on, cause Instagram basically, I was like, oh, this is a great way to track my workouts. This is what I thought about it as a fitness user. Right. So I've been doing that for, you know, thousands of them in a row. What's the least, what's like the least amount of working out that you've done in a day just to get kind of through one?

Like what's the, just walking or something like that? Yeah, yeah. A long, well, a long, I guess short, a long walk or hike is the lowest intense version, I guess you could say.

But I've done some little workouts with my girls in the backyard that were only a couple of minutes that were just, you know, moving around. But those are still considered like movement sessions for me. Right. And then the next day I might do something that's far more around. But those are still considered like movement sessions for me.

And then the next day, I might do something that's far more intense. Yeah. How old are your kids? I'll do fun shit with my girls. That's Hannah. She's 12. And Chloe is 10. That's a floor press.

Yeah, buddy. So at this point, you don't really feel like the need to compete in anything. You just want to, you just enjoy movement. You enjoy feel like the need to compete in anything you just want to yes you just enjoy movement you enjoy training and you want to keep that consistent yeah for sure i'm not going to lie to you though that the demon will never leave me i'm kind of happy that that that's still there of wanting to have some form of you know competition and um i'll jabber jibber

jabber with young whippersnappers like carl or other folks are like yeah i might still be able to take you in this specific workout it's just the the, that demon, I don't want, I actually don't want to leave. I think it's something a part of me that I really appreciate about myself. Um, and I'll never regret having those times of digging into the hole and going really hard to compete. Um, I find there was, there was a lot of, a lot of in that, that I just don't want to turn my back on. Um, But no, no competitions now. I just do my own thing. Again, I want to do this forever.

I want to be a role model too for what fitness coaching is like so that people see that you're going to continue to do movement and learn about it. I mean, I'm learning new shit all the time still. You know, like little things that people may take for granted, but you know, when you combine, you know, a salt bike with burpees, you know, there's like, you know, and that's just two examples, you know, but there's things that you learn in there of pace and effort and et cetera that, you know, I'd never experienced before. Right. And you can't put a book on that. So you got to actually go through it in order to speak about it.

about it. And I want, you know, coaches and people who are fitness users long-term to fall in love with that idea that you should be able to do movement all the time if it's going to be connected to your function long-term. What's a salt bike and burpees look like for you? Like what style of- It's aerobic, man. It's completely sustainable. What reps and stuff are you using? Oh, it just could be, I was using context, just could be a bunch of different versions of them, you know, combining them in a 10 minute piece in a, in a back to back power session, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. But you do love the Assault Bike. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like what, what does that look like? Because you made a full program on your website for the Assault Bike. We were talking about it out there and I was just kind of surprised that you made like a full program of, I don't know what it looks like, of just like the importance of it and what you can do with it.

Yeah. The, uh, well, the assault bike was just a medium for me to explain energy system training. Okay. Uh, it's just that the bike is just such a fantastic tool. You know, you can just do so many different things on it. And a couple of things that are really positive about the bike is that it's no eccentric contractions. Um, and then you can get a shit ton of people who can use it. Arguably, even you can't get a lot of people to use an erg or a rower

because it's too technical for some individuals or that hinging squatting pattern for them that's not going to work in a seated position. But you can't get anyone to show me that can't get on a flywheel bike and move the arms and legs. But it is hard work. That's why you're not going to see it in fitness facilities across the globe because like the rower, the VersaClimber, you know, it's hard.

So people are not going to sell it. Yeah. So I just use the course as an opportunity for people to see what energy system training is. And then you could take all those principles and put it into any modality, running, rowing, swimming, et cetera, and kind of get some benefit from it. So that's why we just put it into an air bike, I need to check that out.

South by course. Yeah, yeah. I think it's some good information in there. Is there something specific that you guys do in teaching coaches about the energy system? Like, do you feel it's important to kind of hit all the different energy systems in your training? No.

There's, again, it's, I think, just for time, there's buckets of performance where it gets really nuanced and specific for conditioning. I think there's still decades of work to be done in there, let me tell you. Um, and then for, for fitness though, um, it's, it's pretty generalized that we got to keep remembering, number one, what are we primarily set up to do and not start with like, well, what is this going to fix? It's going to make me leaner or is going to make me get trashed for a half hour. If that's your starting point on what your conditioning should be, you're already at the wrong end of the spectrum. our time curve and like CP glycolytic and aerobic work, which is still an academic format, right? It's ex academia that basically is looking inside the mechanical system and going, oh, this is what people should do for energy system training. And we never once asked the question, number one, where we primarily set up to do that, which is going to lead to long-term function. And most of that is largely not sexy enough and it's long sustainable aerobic work for long-term fitness. And the faster that gets from long-term sustainable work back to your point of walking, right? The faster that gets, the more you're moving towards more metabolic challenge, which people love because they can

fit it into a 60 minute timeframe where they can wrap science around it to show how it like increases thermogenesis or improves VO2 max. And then we can sell it like a banshee for four minute workouts, right? You can see where it goes. But I don't think any of that like multi-pace model, complex general conditioning stuff has any place to play in people's long-term fitness. And I mean, I can argue that till I'm blue in the face as to where that fits in. And most times the coach will say they're prescribing it because they read it in a book or because, oh, well, this is all I can fit into the class. Well, you know what I mean? That's, those are wrong answers to give conditioning. And I think we need to approach it that way. Then if your answer is, well, that's not what people enjoy. I fucking don't care.

You know what I'm saying? Like that's the wrong argument to come back to saying that's what they enjoy. Cause otherwise you're like, well, you're're just dancing you're not a professional fitness coach you're not actually giving them what they need to get for long-term fitness so the answer is most times in a big bucket it's sustainable aerobic work that's what's going to be helpful for people um and not oxidative stress marathon aerobic work i'm talking about constant sustainable work so what that looks like for people it varies for everyone for dan john it's putting something on his back and walking for 60 minutes. For someone else, it could be getting off the couch and walking on a treadmill at home for 10 minutes. It's something that's sustainable, right? And not going after it with like, oh, what is it going to burn fat? I fucking don't care,

right? Because that's not leading to longevity. What is leading to longevity is you performing something that's somewhat challenging. That's a cardiorespiratory challenge that's going to be sustainable for you. So again, back to like primal points of resistance and long-term, long sustainable aerobic work. And I only think we throw in like the sprinting or glycolytic thing and we add like primal patterns. And we used to, we used to sprint when we were hunting down animals. That's garbage. That's garbage argument for that, you know, because it exists. Cause ironically, if you do get fucked up in two minutes, like Jason Bourne style, which he didn't get fucked up by the way, he was, he was able to make things aerobic,

you get killed, right? If you go glycolytic, you get fucking killed, right? If you, you go glycolytic and MMA, you get killed, right? So I just don't think that there's really a necessary, uh, uh, necessary argument for it, um, for the practice of it. The body's pretty much designed for walking and lifting is what you're saying. Yeah. Pretty much. Right. Yes. And then how, so how do we. Locomotion and doing any kind of, uh, hard resistance or a challenge. And we largely needed to do hard resistances, um, in very fast formats to either hunt or to basically move things or build things. Outside of that, you know, it's, and I know how tough it is to reduce it down because we're like, oh, but I've seen kipping pull-ups. So we're capable of that.

It's like, just because you saw kipping pull-ups doesn't mean that it's leading to longevity of that joint. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, that's a pretty shit poor argument. of that joint. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, that's, that's a pretty shit poor argument. So maybe almost going back to what you said in the beginning of the podcast about being able to pace yourself, like maybe we should all have that ability, right? We should all have that ability to be able to pace ourselves a little bit better, be able to organize what we're about to do a little bit better. And, um, maybe you just shouldn't like, you know, the level of, of how hard something is, as you mentioned, Dan, John might throw on a, you know, weight vest and go on like

a hike and that might be, uh, his, uh, long duration aerobic work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Uh, and then, you know, for somebody else, it might, it might look like just them walking and versus, uh, you know, somebody who's lifting, they might be, you know, and they're just doing sets of 10 and working on form and they're newer versus, uh, someone else, you know,

squatting three 15 for sets of 10. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you, you keep on asking the question, like, how is this connecting over to long-term function? That's what you got to keep asking on every rep and then every time they're trying to sustain work. So yeah, just keep that whole idea in mind. If you're doing stuff today, that's going to allow you to sustain forever, you're probably going in the right direction. And if you get caught up on like, but I can't fit it in and I need to be intense because I'm not doing anything if I'm not flying flat on the ground, then that's the wrong place to start on what people should be doing for conditioning. In general, should it always look pretty easy? For conditioning? Just period.

All of it. All of it? No. No, there's going to be – there's going to have to be some challenges to move you slightly forward from where your capability is. And then how people perceive those slight challenges, we're all wired differently. You know what I mean? Some people perceive like parking in the wrong place as their fucking end of their day.

So, I mean, there's, everyone's going to have a different perspective on how they perceive challenges. But again, this gets brought up in the conversation where if someone comes in, they're like pissed because you didn't have a specific parking lot for them. The chances of you giving them something really challenging and them overcoming that in a session is a fucking, it's a shit show. So you see me, I'm picking up on, you know, where they're coming on those challenges. We all perceive them differently, but no, wherever you start, this is your like level of resilience. I'm going to move you just slightly to the right of that. And this is where we want to put people though, right? They want this over here, way over here because it's sexy and you know what I'm saying? And it does get some real savage thermogenic response, right? And of course it looks really cool. But really what they need to do is something just slightly to the right of that. And we got to be okay with that. What they need to do is something just slightly to the right of that.

And we got to be okay with that. Is there something that made you realize or shift to working out in a way that would promote more longevity? Because a lot of people that listen into this, even if they don't compete in powerlifting, they still have the goal of being absolutely as strong or absolutely as big as possible. Yeah. It's being around long enough. Yeah. But they do want to live long. It's like they're doing all these things not so that they can die at 55. They still want to live long. So it's like they're doing all these things not so that they can die at 55 they still want to live long so how does that shift look for an individual even for yourself well it's it's tough i will say that's not easy to have the conversation

depending upon your age because at 18 you're like i don't fucking care about living long you know what i'm saying so there you obviously have to be able to be mature enough to have the conversation to understand like well let's think about short-term goals to where that's going to be and that's going to eventually lead to your appreciation of long-term. But you take centenarian studies. So you look at individuals that are around at 85, 90, 95 and say, you know, well, what are you doing? This whippersnapper is 85 going down the street and you ask them questions. No, I'm saying if you actually look at that and not look at someone as to how they've been held up and sitting in a chair from 70 to 95 with medication in a chair in a quasi hotel room being taken care of.

That's not the model, right? And that's what we're connecting the models though, because that's our model of like living long is based upon that ideal. That's not my ideal. So because we can't find the 85 year old who's hiking today doesn't mean that that's not the ideal. So there is lots of those examples out there. And in most cases, those people were not doing intense shit from 23 to

40 years of age. They were not. And anyone who was doing intense shit from 23 to 40 years of age, especially now when we look at them, they're basically, or a lot of them would be, I'm not going to classify, but they have a lot of orthopedic issues, a lot of autoimmune issues, and a lot of metabolic issues. Largely due to, of course, you're pushing yourself past what you're physically capable of during the peak period of your life. But then no one wants to talk to them because it's almost embarrassing or they don't want to tell their story from 55 to 80 years of age when they're decrepit and they can't move and they really can't function or they have cognitive issues, right? And the whole conversation in there is like, yeah, but do you regret it? And that's the wrong place to go. Instead, you should be saying like, what would be the ultimate program from 18 to 85 that

will allow you to like, keep doing everything you want to do up until that point. And so I think there's enough data out there and enough experiences now to see that to what you use your words, there's a sweet spot in exercise and it should be just to the right though where your capabilities are right now and then eventually everyone will get to whatever their physical potential is right but then we can't be attaching it to performance or the 1rm or like aerobic capacity because then we go down and hold another route of peaking and forgetting about what it's like at 95 yeah yeah you mentioned uh rich froning you know and i keep thinking about like the russian lifters that i've seen over the years um and then even things that ed cone has said ed cone's strongest

power lifter that ever lived squatted over a thousand pounds weighed 220 which is ridiculously strong 900 pound deadlift just a mutant but a lot of these guys, when they, when they lifted, they, obviously a 900 pound deadlift is, you know, on the top end range of intensity. However, when he did it, it was still flawless. And some of these Russian lifters that are squatting these big weights and deadlifting and benching these big weights, it's kind of the same thing. Maybe here in America, a lot of, a lot of us get, you know, excited and we crank the music and we're buttoning up our chin strap and really getting after it. And I like what you're saying because if you go overboard, just as you mentioned with sugar, you mentioned with carbohydrates, kind of like the next day you have like a hangover.

Well, if you go in there and bust your ass so much, you're probably going to have a workout hangover that's going to kind of bleed into the next workout. It's going to compromise the next workout. And, you know, maybe your legs are tired. And then maybe the next day you try a deadlift and then you hurt your back. And then it's like shit starts to unravel and slide downhill really fast. And if you have to do that road, though, to do it for performance or you have to walk that line, if you don't walk the line performance, it's not even worth it first of all. But secondly, you're not going to win at anything. But for, especially for resistance expression, it should be, you know, you should be able to express it first and then you got to be able to recover from it second. And if you can't recover from it secondary, then you probably shouldn't have expressed it. And then if you can recover from it, then you have to adapt and grow. So that means that whatever you did, you're able to like move on and continue, right? Which is an actual evolution of like our day-to-day living and function, right? Cognitive behavioral therapy, right? You hate fire, you watch a video on fire,

and then you see a burning house from afar, and then you get 20 feet from the burning, you know what I'm saying? You get closer and closer to being able to do it, but now I can adapt to it, which means that I'm growing and I eventually can move forward in resistance. So I think that's what, you know, should be the, um, should be what we should be going after for the ideal for resistance over time and not necessarily performance. And I didn't, I didn't know if you were mentioning the mechanics of it because there is a part to play in there of like great quality movement during this maximal expression, I would still argue that there's thousands and thousands of people who still had great movement, who pushed

themselves past physical expression in their peak for good reasons that still on the other side are having a hard time cognitively or mechanically. So it's just, it's just, just think of it. It's very unhuman, right? And you know, we can, there's so many different examples, gymnasts, female gymnasts from 14 to 20 years of age. We can look at wrestlers that are really intense for 10 years of their life. We can look at a NFL linemen. We can look at boxers. Like you can add so many things to it and say, you know, are we going to regret any of their expressions? No. If you ask them any conversations about regretting, that's the wrong questions to ask. Instead, we should say, if there's fitness out there that are going to give you these same fucking issues at 40, should we be doing them? And my answer is no.

And there is a lot that's being done out there currently for 20 to 40 years of age that people think is cool, but is going to lead to long-term consequences mechanically and metabolically. You know, I mean, it's a fact, right? It's a fact. No one is just doing bodybuilding and walking anymore because of all these other factors and why they're doing fitness, but those are the wrong things. They're not connected to longevity. And what you're, what you're mentioning here is really important because the majority of people that do a lot of these sports and maybe do competition, I mean, most people aren't getting first place when they do compete and they do like, they're trying to aim for that, but majority aren't going to get there. So it's like when they really have that conversation and weigh the pros and cons,

it's like, do I really, like, I love being strong. I, you obviously want to get stronger, but do I need to put myself through this if I'm not going to attain that? Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing wrong with trying to achieve maximal physical expression. That's what I'm glad you brought up. Cause I want to be clear on that. I mean, obviously I did it. So I think to go after that is very admirable.

But as soon as you enter into the conversation of like, how is this leading to longevity? I immediately have to stop it. Like there's a clear delineation between athleticism and sport and doing movement to live long and prosper. Right. I think there's a very, very clear delineation between athleticism and sport and doing movement to live long and prosper. Right. I think there's a very, very clear delineation and it all goes back to intent. Right. So if they intend on maximally physically express themselves for whatever reasons they want, I commend you. And I would say you're going to learn a whole lot from that.

But if you add anything to the conversation that says, and how will this do for me long-term, then I need to say, this is not good. This is not good. Like, I don't know what to tell you. You might be lucky enough, right? You might be a survivor, but we just don't have enough, you know, stories or conversation around the 50 to 80 years of age, right? Like, what do you want to be doing then? Do you want to function really well? Do you want to move around? Do you want to like do shit with your kids or even grandkids? And what is that going to look like? And I think we may, we may reshape that 20 to 40 years of age of expression in the future once we look at that. Because there's a ton of people out there who went through the seventies and to the nineties just doing bodybuilding in the YMCAs and walking,

and they're fucking doing okay. They're okay. Maybe some people that aren't exercising, maybe they're onto something. If they're just eating meat and walking, yeah, possible. Yeah. Practicing Jiu-Jitsu a couple of times a week. Right. You know, for myself, you know, when I'm training in the gym, you know, the hard thing is to kind of detach myself from, you know, some of the stuff I used to do. Do you ever have that problem? Oh, for sure.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know, every day. Yeah. Yeah. But I, but I enjoy it. I used to, I mind fuck it sometimes, you know, based upon intensity. Sometimes I'll spend 20 minutes not even knowing where I am and like what I'm doing for this session, but I get some good positive things out of that. Um, I flow between this massive joy and real sorrow in terms of experiences, but I think that's the beautiful aspect of, uh, of understanding fitness and, you know, and how it serves us. So I'm all for that. It keeps challenging my brain. So I'm okay with that. Good. Puts me in my spot too. You know? Yeah, for sure. Sometimes when I'm lifting,

uh, you know, with training partners or I lift with my brother here and there, um, you know, I, I, I feel like I do a pretty good job of kind of staying in my own lane because I, you know, a lot of times people say, well, why do you box squat? I typically will do a box squat rather than regular squat. And I'm like, well, I want to be doing this for the next 10 years, 20 years. Like I want to be able to continue to do this. So sometimes not only will I squat into a box, but sometimes I'll even squat high and the weights that I'm using are, you know, they're, they're not related to anything that I used to do, uh, by any means. Um, maybe even like 30, 40% of what I used to do.

And so I don't have any problem with, uh, you know, kind of staying in my lane, but every once in a while I get a little froggy and I want to kind of like leap towards something heavy. But, you know, having the experience under my belt and like kind of knowing, you know, what that's done to me, you know, the next day, I'm in total agreement and see your point. It makes a lot of sense. And even if just those of you that are listening that are lifters, you know, that do get excited in your workouts. I mean, if you're going to compete, then you got to go for it, you know, at certain times. But I do think you can ride that line a little bit. I do think you can kind of rich froning it where maybe your capacity is growing.

You're pushing just enough to get the results that you want. And again, I would agree, like maybe it's not going to have you live the longest life that you can live, but maybe is allowing you to live a life worth living because you're going for some of the shit that you want to go for. But if you just don't go for it overly too much, then that should set you up in the best possible position because when you go overboard is when we end up with injuries, when you end up with just kind of overreaching. Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, I'll tie into that and just in my language for it, I'm just saying it so I can understand it. When the intent is correct, so when people have correct

intention, right, they're not doing it for fame, they're doing it like for true maximal expression. And I would say that a lot of people who can, what you're calling, walk the line, they are really good self-organizers though. They have this intuitive sense inside as to how to go up and down. If that's aligned with great intention, I totally agree with you that they possibly could connect to being in the game, loving it, learning a lot of shit from it, and then moving on and being a master truly as of a human and in sport but there's so many so many people with incorrect intention that don't know how to pace and like do this up and down and walk the fine line that there's thousands of them that get spit out that don't that don't get to that master

and the other side anything else over there andrew uh yeah coaches that are listening to this how do they learn more about the opec system i just like the fact we've all of a sudden started calling the opec system i think it sounds kind of cool oh my bad is that not what it's called it is now you're like the opec system i would like some form of payment for that later you well you fix up your digestion first when i can see your when i can see your blood work and all your scores yeah you send me two two pictures of your shit per day as to what it looks like in the toilet then uh i can just add you to the thread i do that every day yeah no for sure i'm down with it anything that keeps you uh honest and trying to fix that yeah no

honestly uh um i think it's really important thank Thank you. I've lost some friends who have been clients who had Crohn's and colitis and didn't make it through the medical aspect of it and were thrown in the system and exercise and fitness couldn't help it. My wife has it in her lineage. Her grandma passed away with that and kept that secret for decades. It's a really serious thing that you can't just add like a tiny story to it and think that it's not going to have long-term consequences. Yeah. So it is important. My aunt has Crohn's, so I don't, I don't know exactly how far that. Yeah. It's not cool. Yeah. It's not cool. So you probably

have it in your lineage as just a guess as well, but something to consider anyways, uh, opexfit.com. We have lots of information on there. Um, thebigdogs.com, opexgyms.com. Um, you could see me on Instagram and my daily workout routine at jfitsopex. Um, as well as on Twitter, I just post only the podcast that I listened to, um, just as, you know, conversation piece or like a tracker for me. Um, yeah. Cool. Anything else? And then what's your, uh, you have a gym, right? You got a gym. You have a gym, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I got multiple gyms actually, uh, 70 of them around the world now. Um, OPEX gyms. I have my own awesome home gym though, up in Coeur d'Alene. Um, I also have a home gym in Scottsdale and we have OPEX North Scottsdale, uh, OPEX HQ. Um, but we, our gyms are growing and, uh, you'll see

that as a beacon for, uh, professional fitness coaching and, uh, a really inspiring, uh, place, uh, where it'll, it'll be structured long-term. I can see it as like a playground where it turns into this spot where people just go to move every day and it becomes just part of their lifestyle, like breakfast. Um, and you have coaches in there who are living a life and being professional doing it. Um, and I think I'll sleep well at night when we have more of them and I start seeing that happen more often. Cool. That sounds great. Where does somebody start? Like if they, you know, wanted to kind of, I know you mentioned

the website, but like, where do you kind of start somebody out when they kind of come into your system? Not from a training perspective, but more so as a coach. so many talented people that work with us today, giving people a good lane of, you know, what interests you and what kind of things can we teach you right off the bat that could put you into an area of showing your interest. Um, and we give, you know, away lots of different free, uh, product on information as to where to get started, uh, behavioral food or exercise things to make them think about their own fitness in general. Um, and, uh, from there, it'll lead them into some areas that, um, that'll eventually get them in front of me, hopefully for OPEX CCP and our education. Cool. And then from there they can just, uh, they can open up a gym

once they get a certain. Yeah. Once they go through the education, just think of it as like a, um, an academy or university. You finish all the five modules. Um, and then we basically teach you how to open up an OPEX gym if you're interested in going through the OPEX gym process. Yeah. And what, uh, what are you doing with his wife? There you go. What are you doing with these, uh, these brand X guys? They came in here. They're nothing but bad. They're nothing, they're nothing but bad news. Oh yeah.

I'm, uh, I'm pumped about that. That's, uh, you know, I feel really, uh, I don't know. It's all, it's a feel good story for me. Cause it's a, it's a, like a decade when we were apart, you know, we say we like, we, you know, met each other way back in the, in the starting point of CrossFit and that kind of idea. Um, and then it just kind of went awry and we all had our own struggles and, you know, I now have two young girls. I see the issues that are proposed within

physicality for youth. Um, I have a background in physical education and motor learning and, and, uh, um, so I'm, I was always really a big advocate of that. Now it all comes out. Yeah. So I- Making more sense now. Yeah. And so it just makes sense that, you know, we kind of aligned and what I saw with them. It's a long story. I'm sure it's probably either offline or online. You've discussed that with them. But I just really think they got a bad crack, to be honest. I think that things. There's no question. They're great people, period. Great people with a great idea. And I think some people just got a bad crack. And I felt that that's not the only reason, but I felt like there was something that they had to give to the fitness market that was being thwarted that I could have a part in raising and helping them come to fruition. And I went all in basically in helping them organize a new education protocol

to first go after coaches. That's our initial starting point here is to teach coaches how to put that kid out of diapers up to 18 and to get them to fall in love with fitness. And I think they have so much great principles inside of resiliency and grit and taking care of kids with an awesome base, of course, of absolute strength that I think, I mean, it just has to go out there. And so I've helped them organize the education with our background and added my little flavors

to it for motor learning and skills and like development and coaching prowess, et cetera. Um, and we now have, you know, um, uh, released their PYCC, which is education for youth coaching for fitness and a bunch of other things that we're into. But that's basically the premise of my involvement. It's super cool on how they're helping, you know, some kids that normally, you know, people aren't paying attention to. These kids that are, you know, unfortunately, they're basically morbidly obese. You know, and I thought that was incredible because a lot of people don't want that challenge. Yeah. You know, that's, uh, it's not, it's not easy. Yeah. You know, give me an athlete. Like that's easy. You know, that's not hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. But working with somebody that, that like that, it brings up a lot of challenges. Yeah, it does. Um, and on the other side of it,

it feels just so good. It's gotta be amazing. You know, the change of kids' perspective on fitness and self-confidence. And I see it in my young girls, you know, it's an N equals two, just to give them some confidence of their own body and awareness at this age. If we could scale that out and make physicality a big part of the process again, you know, it just feels fantastic. It's not interesting. part of the process again, you know, it just, it just feels fantastic. Again, to change that generation, right. Just to get them back on board with what I had as a young kid. I think that's also a burning thing inside of like loving, you know, the opportunity just to be able to move and phys ed or being a part of activities and not having any judgment to anyone based on how they did in that. I think, uh, there, there needs to be a room for it again. It's pretty interesting as a young kid, you think about, you watch your own kid. How many times will they get out of the pool and go off the diving board and say,

look at me, you know, check this out. Oh, I'm going to do a can opener. I'm going to do a cannonball or I'm going to, I'm going to try to dive or I'm going to do like they, and they'll do it like time after time. I mean, you're like sitting there counting. You're like, man, they must've gotten out of the pool, like probably a good 50 times by now. And they'll do that for hours sometimes.

It's, it's insane. And that's a crazy form of exercise right there. But somehow, you know, we kind of, we, we, we lose that enthusiasm to like, you know, go and express ourselves in a physical way. Yeah. And that's what we're, you know, putting it in again. It's, it's still the adult model, unfortunately is in place. This is, this is still one of the's what we're putting it in. Again, it's still the adult model, unfortunately, is in place. This is still one of the biggest things we're trying to figure out. Let me do that to you in the gym. Be like, look at me, Encima. Check this out.

Try some push-downs. Encima, look. Encima, try some push-downs. Look, look, look. No, no, look at me. Try it this way. Look at me. Try it this way.

Yeah, I thought it was the look. I didn't get the look at me thing, but yeah. Dad, watch this. I just got that a hundred times in a half hour. It's the same issues we're trying to deal with for trying to put this in place. Because the adult model is slapped, of course, on top of youth fitness. slapped, of course, on top of youth fitness. And we just really need to have some great people out there who are willing to take it on and do what you said is try to structure kids to fall in love with overcoming solutions to movement. This was always something that they did as play, right? In the park or on the field or in the pool or et cetera. And now we actually have to,

which is kind of sad, but we can be adults and talk about it. We actually now have to structure this, right? Because there's just not the opportunity anymore. So we have to put it into a package program to teach coaches how to structure this for individuals. And ironically, within the program, that's what it talks about is basically getting them early age movement solutions, which is certainly going to help them for so many different things down the road. So yeah, we're excited about that. Cool. Where can people find you? Uh, JFITS OPEX, Instagram or Twitter, uh, OPEXfit.com, all the information for what OPEX is doing. Um, thebigdogs.com for information on being a client if you're remote and want to work with one of our coaches for intense fitness. Opexgyms.com if you want to see exactly what we're up to there and growing that around the globe. Secondarily too, I guess the side note to that, the Brandix method, if you want to check that out and see what we're up to. IF3, which is International Functional Fitness Federation, where we're trying to govern the sport of fitness and move it into an Olympic ideal, long-term goal strategy.

You want to check that out. That's also something I'm involved in. Yeah. And any events coming up? Anything in particular? That the market is listening in can participate in. Not really. Um, but, uh, you can listen to this podcast. Uh, but, uh, yeah, no, I'm looking forward to seeing a number of my coaches over in London. We're going over there for an immersion where all of our coaches

gather after doing the education, get the talk, talk shop for a couple of days and kind of analyze what's going on. Obviously work out. Of course. And then outside of that, you know, opexfit.com for all the stuff that we would love to share with you as to what we're up to. Great. Thank you so much.

Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.