Mark Bell's Power Project - Max & Jo Aita - He Squatted Everyday So You Don’t Have to || MBPP Ep. 845

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

In this Podcast episode, Max and Jo Ann Aita, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about Max squatting heavy everyday for 13 YEARS! We also discuss PEDs in Weightlifting and how it could potentially get removed from the Olympics. Follow Max on IG: https://www.instagram.com/max_aita/ Follow Jo Ann on IG: https://www.instagram.com/joannaita7/ New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #MaxAita #PowerProject #SquatEverday #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Paparazzi family, how's it going? Now, we've been working on straightening our feet for a while now, which is why we partnered with Niboso Technology. These are the mats, these are the balls, these are the things that you see us standing on during the podcast. And the main reason why is because of the texture

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it? To learn more, you guys got to head over to Naboso.com. That's N-A-B-O-S-O.com. And at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your entire order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I've got a very important question to start the show off with. Oh, we do. I think Andrew knows what it is. I do know what it is. Mark, whenever you're ready.

All right. So we brought you on the show today, and both you guys can help answer this question. the show today and both you guys can help answer this question but uh at least sometimes we'll hear people talk about squats and sometimes they'll say a back squat and i don't like that i don't like hearing about a back squat what do you guys think can it just be called a squat when we're referring to having weight on your back and doing a squat? Max? Well, that's like a weightlifting thing, right? I know.

I think that's what it's from, right? They do front squats and then they do back squats. But in weightlifting, like everyone gets these exercise names from like the old Soviet texts and it'll be like, you know, snatch grip, push press from behind the neck with medium grip. And you're like – that's like how the Russians would translate, right? It's like just a literal description of what's happening, not the exercise name. I still say back squat. In powerlifting, I wouldn't. I'd say squat.

I was coaching powerlifting. In powerlifting, I'd say competition squat or high bar squat, low bar squat. Deep knee bend? Something like that? So it didn't come from CrossFit? Yeah. I don't think so. I think it's a weightlifting thing for sure.

There we go. Blame it on the weightlifters. Remember when I first met you and you asked me how many times a week I squat? And I said three times a week. And I said back squat, front squat, overhead squat. And Max laughed at me for calling an overhead squat a squat. It's not. Didn't really turn your legs at all, right?

No one's like building huge quads with like overhead squats, right? So what would you call it? I mean, it's overhead squat, but it's like upper body exercise. Okay. But if somebody asked you how many times a week do you squat, would you include your overhead squat, but it's like upper body exercise. Okay. But if somebody asked you how many times a week do you squat, would you include your overhead squat? No, no.

You've got to pump those numbers up. But you've got to remember, my man over here has done squat every day for like a decade, right? Yeah, I did. I remember asking him because the squat every day thing was getting popular and I was hearing all these people talk about it and I was like,, man, what do you think about squat every day? And he just totally laughed.

And he was like, I don't know. I did it for like 10 years. What do you want to know about it? I was like, what the fuck? You actually did it for 13. 13, yeah. Yeah. Forever.

It was like, you know, it was weird. It's like if you were to take a kid and be like, hey, the secret to getting strong is just train as hard as you fucking can like and you're like okay cool i'm like there's no internet there's nowhere to like look it up and get good information you're like i don't just go in the gym and like you know i would just go in and and squat every hour and just work up to maximum and then you know no down sets nothing just singles i hit like you know 405 and then put the bar on the rack walk out of the gym, come back an hour later and do it again. Like 24 hour fitness, or I guess it was a golds gym there.

But how come no one cares in Olympic lifting? I remember watching those videos and I analyzed one of your videos where you got into a fight with the squat rack. Oh yeah. But like there's people that are just sitting and chilling in the background at Olympic lifting gyms. And like someone could be squatting like 700 pounds. No one cares. There's no music. Yeah. No fanfare.

No one's spotting. And you miss and like you kill yourself and still no one cares. Yeah. I feel like there's a, I feel like there's this thing in weightlifting and this is something that's like, I don't know where it came from, but like's almost like a who can be the most miserable? And people would be like, oh, back in the 80s and 90s and all these secrets in Russia and China and all this. They're training like 50 hours a week and all this. You've got to do the same thing.

And so along with that comes this mentality of you've got to suffer. And whoever's suffering the most is going to be the best. And so there's this weird negativity around weightlifting and like you get into it and you're like, okay, like, you know, I got to drag myself to the gym and like, you guys have no idea how hard this is and it's brutal. And, uh, it doesn't have to be that way. You can go in the gym and train hard and have a good time and smile and love your life and love what you're doing. But that definitely like permeates it a lot. And there's a lot of that, like kind of this weird culture of like,

it used to be. Yeah. I think it's a lot different now. Yeah. It's different now, but it was a weird culture of like, who can be the most miserable. And like,

you'd almost like go into like powerlifting where everyone's kind of happy most of the time. And it's like, you know, cause you're doing stuff that's easy. You're not going to like, you're not going to show up to the gym and like, shit,

I forgot how to squat. So like one guy is like sitting on a bench in some of these videos and he's in the background and you're saying that probably what he's thinking is there's no way that guy's going to be more miserable than me today. That was a weird environment because I was like, it could also have been

that I was doing that every day. It was like every single day of the week I would go in and miss a 705 squat. And it was like, okay, Monday, Monday morning, and everyone's like, I'm fucking Max, going to miss squats again. I'd work up, I'd do 120, 170, 220, 270, 300. And 300 would be like, okay, hit 300 kilos. would be like okay hit 300 kilos and you're like it's pretty good should I try 700?

should I try 320? and then like the next day the same exact thing well it's Tuesday maybe it'll go today and the same thing actually I missed that 705 18 times

before I made it at your meet on my second attempt. So the 18th miss was my first try at it. And then I came back and Jesse, Jesse Burdick gave me some advice and, you know, probably slapped me in the face or something, did something. And like, I was able to grind through it and that was it. That's when, you know, I realized that method's not going to work forever. That's amazing. It sounds kind of scary to get your ass kicked by something so many times and you keep coming back for more and more. Why do you think you tried it so many times? Weren't you realizing maybe it wasn't working?

It wasn't helping? Maybe he's just not very smart. It's like why do people buy lotto tickets or like why do you like when you're gambling because like sometimes you have a little bit of a like oh shit I was close or like so I was when you guys had James Smith on

years ago so I used to live with James I moved out to Redding California that's a whole podcast right there yeah interesting guy the thinker right he got me a job at this Indian casino and I was a blackjack dealer.

And you'd watch people come in all the time and you're like dealing blackjack and you'd watch these people come in and they'd be like, oh shit, this lady just lost 10 grand

just in like 40 minutes, right? And she'd come in the next day and you're just like, some people just, I don't know if they're addicted to it but they just come in and it's the like, lose, lose, then you get a win. Or a little winning streak. You're still down.

Overall, you're down. But you're starting to win and you're like, oh, that's it. I found the pattern. I know it. I'm going to like, this is going to keep going. So I think it was like that. It was like every so often you'd hit a PR or you'd like, oh, man, I hit 300 kilos every all 15 workouts this week. PR is coming.

PR is coming. And then the next week you just fall apart. So this wasn't just some like squat every day where you do a semblance of a squat to a decent percentage. Like this is squat every day to close to maximum. Till you fail every time. And also a question about this for both of you guys. Did you do that type of squat every day for more than a decade? Yeah.

It was only – well, at first, the first like five years, I was doing weightlifting too. So my coach, he was really big on like the Bulgarians because they were like infam know, infamously just like the best ever in the sport, right? Yeah. This era of just undefeated competition. Their system was just like maximum intensity every session, every exercise.

Five or six exercises was it. That's all they did. And so we only front squatted. And so we only front squatted. So the first five, six years of my career, I front squatted every single day, three to four times a day. And my front squat at some point – I never did deadlifts. So one time we decided to deadlift and I had front squatted 230 kilos by then and I couldn't deadlift 230. So I could front squat 500 before I could deadlift it.

I've seen that before with Olympic lifters, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so then the second half when I hurt myself, I hurt my wrist, I just started back squatting as one does. It's like a 570 pounds or something, right? 507. Yeah, 230. There you go. Yeah.

But it was just like, well, you know, this is what I knew and that's what I was doing that I, you know, I, I think to myself like, man, what a stupid way to train. But at the same time it was like, it's kind of neat to have done it because you can look back and be like, well, just to have done that was kind of cool. And to like say, yeah, it's kind of neat, but also like I learned so much and that pushed me to do so many different things and to like actually learn how to train properly, coach people properly. Cause you know, if I could have done that and I've been super successful, I'd have one recipe and I just use that recipe all the time. And for people that didn't work with,

you know, sorry, shit, I luck. But now that I know more about it and learned about it afterward. So maybe, maybe the emphasis was like a little too much on squats in your case for too many years or whatever. But why do you think the squat does have great transfer into Olympic lifting and why do you think it's helped? Because a lot of the best Olympic lifters do have really, really awesome squats, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean it just has a high correlation. So many of the same muscle groups. It's like everything is going to transfer just because the general strength qualities you build in the squat are very, very high

correlation to snatch and clean and jerk. They're very similar movements. You're not going to develop the same speed qualities. You still have to do the Olympic lifts, right? But there's just a huge transfer because high bar back squats make your quads and back and hips really strong. And those are the same muscles and they work very similarly

to the way that the Olympic lifts are performed. If you start to squat with a low bar and you start to squat a little bit more like a power lifter, is there still a good transfer or not? I don't think so. I think that's a really common thing a lot of people talk about. A lot of people ask, well, the argument is like, oh, if you do low bar squats, you can lift more weight and that's going to make you stronger. But if it was true, and this is kind of like the way I would look at a lot of stuff,

just from a very skeptical, through a skeptical lens, like look at what everyone's doing. The winners aren't doing this. The Olympic champions aren't doing low bar squats. Like you couldn't convince me that China, a country that's put huge resources into the sport, didn't try low bar squats. We used to joke, there's probably Chinese coaches,

a Chinese research team that coaches people that bought starting strength and did everything and bought TB12 and they tried that. Just like every single program there is and they've tried it and seen, okay, does this work? But yeah, so the low bar squat stuff is like i don't think you'd get the same results some people can do it and you can still

do it she squatted like low bar squats and weight lifting it towards the end and i kind of had that same philosophy that if i move the bar lower i could uh hold my position a lot better because I'm a short torso, long leg, long femur person. And I squatted 150 kilos at what? 57, 58 kilos body weight. And my whole philosophy was, well, if I can do that and I squatted ass to grass, but the bar was low, then I'm strong enough to clean and jerk my very small clean and jerk compared to that. But yeah, I mean, it seems like it transfers more. And a lot of times with low bar squats, you're not going all the way down. You might be just going just below parallel and you might be squatting slower, not as explosively.

So it might have something to do with a real upright posture, right? You need an upright posture to be able to receive a clean and jerk properly and to be able to receive a snatch properly and be in good alignment, right? Like you need an upright posture to be able to receive a clean and jerk properly and to be able to receive a snatch properly and be in good alignment, right? Yeah. A lot of weightlifters don't even back squat later in their career. They just front squat, you know. I have a question. Just going back to the squat comment, is it a high bar squat? Is it a squat? When you were only front squatting for all that time did your coach did coach goff say squat max or did he say front squat max i just squat so squat back squat squat could be a front squat just saying squat yeah also where did this like whole the whole squat

everyday thing where did it come from Where did you start doing this from? Why? That's just like, so there wasn't like a squat everyday thing. No one had a squat everyday program until someone started selling it. But when I went to my first coach, when I met my first coach, it was like, every day we train, we squat. You want to be good at these things, that's how you get strong. So we squat every time.

And it started off kind of easy where it was like we would – well, not easy. We started off like, oh, we train. I'd meet him once a day. We'd train. We'd start snatch, clean, and jerk, do those works, and then squat. And then with me, he just kind of went down this road because I had the time and he had been retired. So he was living in Montana. And it was just me.

I'd just drive out there an hour both ways, uphill in blizzards. And I would hit, oh, let's do a single. I'd work up to a single. And then the next day, he'd be like, let's do two sessions. So I'd squat at the end of that and then the end of the second session. And then eventually just kind of built and built and built and we had always seen like sample programs from bulgaria and like you'd see like a week of training in a magazine and it's like you know snatch clean and jerk squat in the morning and then snatch clean and jerk squat in the evening

and so that was just like you just squat every day like it wasn't even a thought like can you squat every day like is someone gonna give me permission to do this you just squat every day it wasn't even a thought can you squat every day is someone going to give me permission to do this you just start doing it but he went nuts and I did too we would squat first then snatch, clean and jerk, squat again

so we started doing four squats a day and then there would be days where hey in between the snatch and clean and jerk let's squat also. So it'd be like six squats in a day. And these workouts were like six reps. It'd be like you'd snatch to maximum and then you'd put 175 on the bar. You'd do that, then 200, then 205.

And that was it. And we'd just do that. So it's like every hour there was some giant squat happening. Didn't you squat as many as like 16 times in one day? No, no, no. Like I think probably 10 was the most, 8 to 10. Okay. That's insane.

Did your body get used to it? Were you really sore all the time? Yeah, like you just kind of feel like shit in general. Like you have a cold permanently. Everything was stiff. It's not anything beautiful to watch me run now, but my knees wouldn't bend when I ran. I didn't actually run.

The first time Joe saw me run, you can tell the story. I was going to say what I said. I had a good running story. Mark's been running a lot. The first time I saw him run, we were first dating, and I think we were in the city. It was almost over with before. No, I was like, oh, we have to catch that bus.

And I ran across the street. And then I turned around and I saw Max. And it was so awkward. I felt bad. Like I felt a little like sink in my stomach. Like, oh, my God, I made this man run. It was incredibly awkward yeah yeah weightlifters like the when you train like that your body just starts to adapt doing that thing right and that

thing isn't necessarily like you're not like this like progressively developing tons of strength you're like just surviving oh shit like today is the day you got it like you're gonna put this weight on your back and bend your knees so like like, let's just, the adaptations you make are like, make your hips tighter and knees tighter. Turn everything into cement. Yeah. And it's just like, there you go. You're surviving. Right. And so it was just like, I, I probably ran, like my hips went in circles, my feet and knees didn't move much.

Kind of like, like wobbling down the street. Yeah. It's kind of hard when you can only put one foot in front of the other, but not the other side. Right. From doing the, from doing the cleans. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the split jerk. Yeah. It's kind of hard when you can only put one foot in front of the other but not the other side. Right? From doing the cleans, right? Yeah. Oh, the split jerk? Yeah, split jerk. This Bulgarian coach I heard you talking about once, I don't know how to say his name, started with an A.

Abhijayev. Uh-huh. And you were mentioning how he would want his athletes just to sit and rest all day long post-training, like almost in a comatose state, right? Yeah. Well, his whole system was like, if you look at the principles of training, right? The two most important principles are specificity and overload, right? You have to do the things you want to be good at in the sport, and then you have to make

training progressively harder to actually make adaptations that are directed at what you want and his whole thing was like what can we delete from the program and so it was like everything extraneous to just maximum intensity snatch clean and jerk and front squat was should not be done so So his whole thing, his ideal circumstance was that you wake up, you eat, you do 30 minutes of squatting, which is, you might work up to maximum. Then you lay in a chair

with your eyes closed, not asleep, but just get your heart rate as low as possible and just rest for 15 minutes. Wake up from that, get up from that, and do snatch to maximum. The same thing. So your whole day, in his ideal world, get up from that, and do snatch to maximum, the same thing. So your whole day, in his ideal world, your whole day would just be mostly almost comatose

and maximum intensity, right? Yeah. You were trying to live that lifestyle? Yeah. It's not conducive to earning an income or supporting yourself or having feelings. You did work your way to, I mean, attempting a 700 pound squat and then you eventually hit a 700 pound squat. When you were training as an Olympic lifter, what was like your body weight?

I know as a power lifter, you did a 705 squat at like 220, I believe. But what was like your training weight normally? And what kind of weights were you able to hit in training? As a weightlifter, so as you can imagine, right? You're all thinking, listening to this now, like what's wrong with that training method? That's great. You got strong. But it worked for my legs.

My legs and knees and hips and back never had problems. Never had a soft tissue injury in any of that doing maximum squatting. I got hurt later when I switched to more powerlifting style training. In weightlifting, the weakness was my shoulders. I would snatch and clean and jerk. You train that heavy and that often and you can't

develop good skill and technique because every lift is a matter of do or die. You have to either make this lift or you're going to – it's like that's all that matters. So you don't have a time to like hone your skill and perfect the technique. And so my shoulders got destroyed. I had two shoulder surgeries later on because the bar would just be in the wrong spot and I would fight it. We did zero general training.

fight it. We did zero general training. Like, like when I might tell people the program, it was for six or seven years, it was three or four exercises, squat, front squat, snatch, clean and jerk, power, snatch, power, clean and jerk, zero curls, bench. I know you can't tell, but I didn't do a lot of like anything else. Right. No upper body strength stuff at all. Yeah. Cause, cause you know, coach golf was like, well, why would we need that? That's not the a lot of like anything else right no upper body strength stuff at all yeah because because you know coach golf was like well why would we need that that's not the sport you know and so so that was just like a huge a huge mistake because it just killed me i just destroyed my shoulders because i you know i was tenacious and i wasn't going to give up but like you know when you're missing lifts you know all day you miss i I missed the first time I cleaned drink 160.

I missed it like 20 times. And I just kept cleaning and kept trying. Within the same session. Yeah. The same day. Probably multiple seconds. Probably took a nap. So for you, your legs were probably strong enough.

Your lower body could execute most of the movement, but your upper body wasn't really on board with it. Yeah. It's kind of funny it's like my legs and back were strong and i was mentally you know mentally tough enough to like keep doing it it was probably the worst scenario because it's like the weak link was my shoulders just got hammered and destroyed i was when i when i you know to get back to your question but like when i when i was still training hard, at some point my shoulders hurt so bad, I would eat ibuprofen and I would take 500 pills in a month. And my stomach was just awful. What milligrams are these tablets?

Whatever, 200 each. Jesus. Yeah. You buy them at Costco, right? Yeah. The Bulgarian pack. It was like a two-month supply specifically for weightlifting. I have a picture of a Bulgarian weight it was like you know two months supply specifically for weightlifting I had a picture of a Bulgarian weightlifting

on there like that's me yeah my best numbers were a 140 snatch and a 170 clean and jerk and I weighed like like a heavy 85

so I was about like 88 kilos 90 kilos yeah not great nothing special not terrible but like just kind of middle of the road i got way stronger and i started to learn how to lift later before i got hurt but did you

guys meet at a competition we met at the gym and uh i did see you at a competition before though yeah i would but we didn't meet there i just just remember like, who is this like Superman looking guy who's really strong? I paid her to say that. How long ago was that? Clark Kent. Was that 2009? We met in 2009. So I think I saw you at a Fit Barbell meet in 2008.

Yeah. But we met out at Cal Strength. Yeah. Yeah. Those old videos out at Cal Strength. Yeah. Yeah. Those old videos. Your commentary is my favorite. Oh, yeah. There it is.

Oh, yeah. Oh, no. This is what made me famous. You know, when Misha Koklyaev came here, you were there. Yeah. Absolutely. I went up to introduce myself. And to me, it was one of those cool moments where he's like, oh, I know who you are.

The 270 squat to zero to 60. And I me, it was one of those cool moments where he's like, oh, I know who you are. The 270 squat to zero to 60. And I was like, oh, that's cool. Yeah, that's pretty wild. Yeah. But this was my normal warm-up. So the guy on the left was like, you should do a video. And I was like, okay, why? And he's like, just do what you normally do, but let's just do it all at once.

Every single day, I would do the same thing. One red, two reds, three reds, four reds, and then miss something. With just whatever amount of break in between to load the plates probably, right? Yeah. Jesus. That one was hard. Getting a little sticky. Yeah.

Damn. Actually, to go back to the first time I saw Joe, Joe has a good story. We started dating, and Joe's a good story. We started dating and Joe's a little older than I am but she's like, hey, look at this. Let me show you this thing I've got. She pulled out a VCR and an old VHS tape

and she's like, this is a... That was the one I made. You finally made it. Is this like a compilation of Max Ada squats? I think so. Yeah. This is brutal.

You know, I was, a little side note, but I saw a video on here. I did like 295, like 650 for five. I don't remember doing that. Like I have no memory of that day. And I saw that video. I was like, holy shit. That happens when you squat every day i really got squat amnesia yeah uh there was another one too i did like a 207 front squat for like eight or something like that 215 for eight which i was actually that was actually impressive

to me because like that's a lot and that's a lot of reps so you guys you guys started talking oh yeah after a competition or something like that? Well, I was kind of... No, we met at Cal Strength. Yeah. Because Dave Spitz was my old teammate at the Sports Palace. And then I wanted to go check out Dave's new gym. I rode out there and met him. I didn't even know he was a lifter for a few months.

I thought she was a lesbian. And he thought I was a lesbian. I was wearing my wife beater and came in on my motorcycle and probably didn't shave my arm. Overalls and... I worked in a bunch of dyke bars. I don't think you can say that word. Oh, wow.

That's what we called them. That's what we called them. She comes from a different time, guys. Yes, I do. My son's always telling me. I'm like, that's what I called them. She comes from a different time, guys. Yes, I do. I do. Yes, my son's always telling me. I'm like, that's what I, you know, I'm bisexual. But anyways, so we started dating and Joanne's like, you know, come over to the house and she's like, let me show you this like this old tape of me.

I'm like, oh, what's that? And she pulls out this VCR and sets it up and plays. You guys might remember like. They're probably too young. Lisa Gibbons. The Lisa Gibbons show. The Lisa Gibbons, like all these talk shows from the 90s, right? Phil Donahue, like whatever. And.

Jesse Raphael, Ricky Lake. I remember Ricky Lake. Yeah. Same kind of thing. Same kind of thing, right? So she plays it and it's like the episode is like dangerous dancing moshing in the 90s dangerous dancing in the 90s yeah and uh it's like a whole like setup thing where like oh like these kids died you know stage diving and like this is gonna ruin the

youth of america and so like i guess her friends worked on the show and mine yeah and was like hey come down and like you can get like a stipend and just do this show. And you just got to pretend, not pretend, but just be one of these people on the panel, right? You're a pro-moshing person, right? These are people against moshing. Should there be regulations? Should they have a secured off area for moshers only or what? Yeah, the 90s were a different time but uh

so she plays this and i'm like i think i've seen this like so i get picked to be on the panel and i was 26 yeah and he was 12 And I'm wearing a Catholic schoolgirl dress that comes to – well, let's just say it's pretty short, garter belt, fishnet stockings, laces up here, piercings, tattoos. And they're like, let's bring out the moshers. And me and these two other guys, one friend of mine, another guy, running down. And then we're on the panel. They, yeah. So, so, so I see it and I'm like, I think I saw this when I was like, you know, like 12 years old and like in like Christmas break, it played. I just remembered it like for some random reason.

Like I remember this like, you know, cause it was probably traumatic. Like, oh my God, people are getting murdered in mosh pits. Like, you know, is that going to happen to me? But I remember her from it. And so Joe likes to comment that she was probably in my 12-year-old spank bank. He told me.

So they recorded the show in the fall and they specifically waited until winter break because they wanted the high school and middle school kids to see the show, right? So I know when he said, oh, I remember watching this,

and I was like, you probably did because they specifically played it at a time where kids weren't in school. And he said that he remembers, because he was 12 years old, he remembers that moment was when he started liking like goth girls and girls with tattoos and stuff like that. So, and that was when you were 12 and then we met when you were 24.

So 12 years later, he met me and I asked him to marry me. That's what they call grooming. Wow, dude. It's a long process. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So you were already Olympic lifting, and then you got into powerlifting and did really well in powerlifting as well. How were you as an Olympic lifter, and do you still Olympic lift now?

Nah, mostly just do powerlifting out at Jesse's with Tiff and Jeremy. I was not very good. You were good. I mean, I won a medal at Senior Nationals in 2009 in Chicago in the clean and jerk. I was a bit old. I started competing when I was 34 in weightlifting. So I think I would have excelled a lot more, Max has told me that, if I would have gotten into it when I was younger. So that's the only senior national medal that I got.

But I went to many, many national meets, American Open finals and nationals. I don't know. I think a lot of people think that they can't get into Olympic lifting, but you got into it at an older age. I did. I did. Yeah. And then I kind of I was called myself a master's in denial. So I really didn't get into the master's circuit until the very end of my career when I couldn't qualify for nationals anymore. I got much more competitive. But yeah, I just always wanted to, you know, just be the best or try to make the podium no matter what my age was there was one time where i was at nationals the roller rink year where because i was usually double the age a lot of my competitors but i was actually three times the age of one of the

one of the youth lifters that was uh in my session um I was a 53-kilo lifter for most of my career and then finished as a 58. Yeah. Yeah. I did my last weightlifting meet in 2017 at the World Masters Games. And that was before they switched the weight classes. And I broke the age group and weight class world records for snatch, clean and jerk in total. And I was 47. Yeah, I was 47.

I still have the snatch world record for that age group. But my numbers now for like the open, I wouldn't even qualify for nationals. My best. I finished. I was really happy to finish. Even though I started competing when I was 34, I made all-time PRs at the age of 47. So I like to remind older lifters that you can still make progress. I mean, you might not go to the Olympics, but you can still finish on top. But you can still finish on top. So my best snatch at that competition was 71-kilo snatch and 86-kilo clean and jerk.

Do you guys think that most people should take up some weightlifting or take some sort of page from weightlifting? Like we promote bodybuilding quite a bit. But it's kind of obvious that like kind of anyone can do bodybuilding. Anyone can go in the gym and do some curls and try some push downs and go on some of the machines. I mean, it's available from anyone that's, you know, 10 all the way until you're 70. But the Olympic lifts, they look more intimidating. Do you guys think that people should try or strive or there are particular movements

in weightlifting that you think people should maybe examine or try to get into no uh no i mean yeah i think so i mean like uh you know there's there's been people that have started there was a guy dan takahuchi who started weightlifting he had a 30-year career he started at 50 and so like that's that's exceptional and like i think a lot of people could do some form of it you know maybe not snatch or jerk but you could do power cleans right you could do pulls those kind of things ballistic movements that are more explosive i think somebody could benefit if you're if you're just talking about like your training for the sake of you know longevity and fun and enjoyment um yeah for sure I think it's not like, it seems intimidating

because there's a bit of a prerequisite. You don't need to necessarily have, yeah, there he is, yeah. You don't need to necessarily have a huge amount of flexibility or coordination to do a squat or a bench press, whereas weightlifting is a little more than that. It's less than doing like, you know, a hammer throw or a shot put, but it's, it's a little bit more than that.

So it's a little bit more intimidating, but I think like CrossFit shows us like, you know, people are doing it like, you know, and, and it's also years ago, it was so hard to get into it because you were in a place where there was no formalized, like really good coaching. It was just a lot of like, you know, my coach did it this way and his coach did it that way. And they, they sort of figured it out as they went. Now it's like on Instagram in 60 seconds, there'll be snatch tutorials. Like you could learn how to snatch

for free on Instagram and just watch a video and it'd be pretty good. Like you'd learn quite a bit about it. So it's not as complex as it seems. Um, but yeah, I think, I think, you know, people should try it if it's like frustrating and it's like not enjoyable to you. Yeah. Maybe you move on, but if you can even get a little bit of traction with it, it's worth pursuing. Well, I'm curious about this because you mentioned that there's a phase in your training that you only did four or five different movements and you had an upper body weakness, right? Lifters that are trying to get into maybe snatching or doing any of those types of movements, do you think that there are any ways to physically prepare yourself for the demands of that type of movement? Oh, yeah.

I mean that's like the whole premise of like managing being a coach, right? You're managing a sport career of somebody. The first things you're doing, all the strength work you do with a beginner is basically to because a wide grip overhead strength is important so you'd start off by preparing somebody to just do an overhead position right do an overhead squat be strong in the shoulders be mobile be stable and then same with the front rack you know get the elbows around be able to actually support the weight on your chest and then anything else like low back strength stuff so like a lot of general kind of training, like back raises and hyperextensions, good mornings, kettlebell swings and those kind of things. And then, you know, snatch grip presses and snatch grip push presses and pressing movements.

And then, you know, even some like basic like curls and tricep movements, like just stuff that you basically introduce to somebody if you wanted them to have a strong, stable foundation in their upper body to be able to actually hold the weight overhead. And that's like what most of the strength training should be for beginners, right? Not front squatting to maximum 12 times a week. It should be that. So you develop the foundation and then you slowly titrate in more and more work that's actually specific. And kind of along with that, you know, you start Olympic lifting when you're 34. Most people, when they do think about being good at Olympic lifting, they most people kind of assume that you should, can they become a good Olympic lifter or a great Olympic lifter?

Or is that something where you need to have been doing this since you were like six? No, I think it's really hard. We're in a weird spot here because our measurement, our metric for good is the top in the world. And what the top in the world have done traditionally is an interesting scenario. From my experience actually speaking to top coaches, the general process is take a kid when they're very young, introduce them to gymnastics and other sports and stuff, then they start weightlifting.

They might be 11 to 13. That's when they start weightlifting they might be 11 to 13 that's when they start steroids and then oh yeah that's when they start steroids yeah and then they start training for weightlifting and they start from that day on everything is enhanced and so what steroids are they starting at that age by the way same stuff like like dianabol what steroids are they starting at that age by the way same stuff like like dianabol like this was like what was told to me by by abu jayev basically is like you know be like okay so you start here and like we just progress and you just keep going and like it's like great by the way what country is this i'm moving there i see nothing wrong so great are you in son sixth grade holy fuck this the story we heard was that like you know in russia this was happening

and then the parents of these kids were like what the fuck's going on you know um and and so the coaches like had to change what they did because it's a big scandal so they stopped like just giving everybody this and they started to like like kind of like okay who's okay who's cool who's cool with this and then start you know kind of like okay this person's not gonna like rat on us you know despite going home looking like this at 14. But yeah, so it's like that just taints everything because you have no idea what is good, right? What numbers are lifted that are attainable

by clean athletes, right? And if you look at the women's side of it, so there's been a huge, if you look at the women's side of it, so there's been a huge, you know, if you look at the news the last five years, there's been a huge, you know, doping scandal in weightlifting, all of the Olympics. But like in weightlifting, they nailed like 55 lifters in the last like couple Olympics that were like all of them almost medalists. Right. From a bunch of different countries. Yeah. All over. Yeah.

I think you're bringing up a really interesting point. And I haven't really heard this in running, and I haven't been running for very long, so I don't know shit about running. But in the time that I have been in running, I have not heard anyone compare themselves to somebody in the Olympics. And so you bring up a really interesting point that in weightlifting, it's like, you know, what's your best clean? What's your best snatch? And you're like, well, I'm, you know, a hundred kilos off of the next best guy that made the Olympic team this year or something like that. And you're like, well, that's not, I just meant like, did you improve pretty well for yourself? Did you, you know, do you feel like you did well, but a lot of times people are going to compare to the best of the best. Yeah. It's, it's interesting too.

You look at like an Instagram account, like hook grip and he's got three quarters of a million followers. There's not three quarters of a million weightlifters. So like there's people watching it and it's like, that's like half of the sport. Like when I was starting to lift, you know, what I would do is I'd train eight hours a day. Then I'd go home and we had these like, you know, you could these like iron mind vhs tapes of like training hall footage and i'd watch it and just watch these guys you know sitting in a chair yeah relax heart rate as low as possible

i'd back and back and forth between that and lisa gibbons right and i was just like all you need to do is add in your lateral eye movements and you would have been successful um but yeah so it's like it so it's like you said, right? There's a lot of numbers are so easy to track and to look at. Like, oh, you know, Lu Zhaojun in China, he's doing this number. He's doing 207 clean and jerk and he weighs 77 kilos. And you're like, that's normal, right? And then you start to like, when I had the chance to actually like be exposed to

and meet the people that were like, I mean, Abidjayev was the guy, right? He is the most prolific coach in all of weightlifting and the most infamous as it pertains to like drug cheating. He's been kicked out of the Olympics multiple times. He's gone now, but it's like when they tell you, this is what we did. You're like, oh, okay. Well, that's different than I expected. Like you gone now, but it's like, when they tell you, this is what we did. You're like,

oh, okay, well, that's different than I expected. Like, you always kind of knew it. Like, oh yeah,

they're probably all kind of, there's something, but like, you know, not all of them. No, no, no.

Like that guy, he's a good guy. He's definitely not like, oh no, he is. Yeah, they all are. And so,

yeah, it's like, you're watching, you see numbers, it's so easy to compare, and it's so much of like, that's the top of the sport, so everyone compares themselves to that.

I don't know if everybody does though. I mean like I never even really watched the top athletes when I started. I was watching the people in the gym, and I was happy if I placed at a local meet or I won at a local meet. So it's also what are your expectations, right? Like not everybody is looking at the Olympics. Or I have a lot of followers like masters women who like look up to me. And I'm lifting like half of what they're doing at the Olympic level, at the senior level.

So it kind of depends on what your perspective is. They're doing at the Olympic level, you know, at the senior level. Yeah. So it kind of depends on what your perspective is. And I think that's important, right, to be realistic about who are, you know, what are you trying to achieve? I had Erica came to me. She said people in her gym told her she was too old to do Olympic lifting. I think she was like 25 or something. And I was like, well, what does that mean? five or something.

And I was like, well, what does that mean? Like, do you want to be a gold medalist at the Olympics or do you want to like compete at local meets? Do you want to qualify for the American open series? You could go to the Arnold, you could go to masters nationals.

You could go to, I mean, she's not masters yet, but I mean like you could compete for 10 years. The master starts at 35. You could probably be a great lifter. I mean, now she's qualified for the American Open Series.

She's going to go to Arnold. So like I think it depends on what's your perspective. So Max was someone who looked at the Olympics from the start, but he also was inspired to start lifting by watching Suleiman Alou, right? Yeah. In the Olympics. And so I – and I think that more people probably do now that it's more accessible to watch people on hook grip and see these videos but like when I was lifting I literally

like when I would watch the Olympics I thought it didn't even it didn't even register it looked like this completely different animal because we weren't doing drugs you know and my numbers weren't anything like that there's a definite like one I guess caveat to that is like I don't anything like that. There's a definite, one caveat to that is

I don't feel like a lot of women consume weightlifting content as much. We've done some market research where you discuss with women what kind of weightlifting stuff do you watch. You don't watch YouTube? How many hours a day of YouTube weightlifting are you watching? Zero. But now, today, there are different role models for sure. like 12 I mean how many hours a day of YouTube weightlifting you're watching like zero but like now today there are different role models for sure there's a lot of very good female

US lifters like that have won medals in the Olympics which is you know amazing and like world champions which didn't exist before right so this huge blowout and all the drugs and everything and countries got crushed and they're just gone whole programs just decimated but now you have like you know western athletes that are you know we assume are clean right as clean as as you know much cleaner than

whatever's going on i mean it's a it's a shitty argument because like i hate talking about that because it's like people will always be like oh they're they're all passing tests or this or that and it's like no amount of past drug tests will ever convince someone that you're clean if they don't believe it so it's like you can't win that argument but we all probably can agree that a lot of the top u.s lifters are tested so often and so regularly that for the most part we assume most of them are clean on some level right definitely more than like you know eastern europe was but yeah it's a uh it's a different world now it's like you just have like totally different people to look at so young girl coming up in weightlifting or you know maybe a crossfitter or gymnast comes in sees it like oh wow there's a

girl who won the world championships i could be be like that. I could follow that instead of looking at, you know, whatever Georgian lady who's like, you know, her jaw is, you know, a little bit bigger than most and, you know, a little bigger arms than you. Right? Yeah. Who do you think is the strongest athlete of all time? Man, that's a tough question. Because you've done body, you've done powerlifting and you've done Olympic lifting and there's some crossover there

where there's some great athletes that have done both and done a great job at both and there's even some guys that have done strongman Olympic lifting and powerlifting. Yeah. Like Mark Henry.

Yeah. I was going to say, Mark Henry may be the strongest drug-free athlete of all time. 900-pound deadlift. Yeah. I'm thinking he was like 20 years old or something. Yeah.

He didn't train a lot. That was the thing. He didn't like, he trained for like a year for weightlifting. Like maybe, he didn't train like for 10 years doing those things. It's a tough question, right? We talk about this like Lasha, right? Everyone knows Lasha is the best in the world in in weightlifting i don't think he's the strongest weightlifter has ever lived like he's the best weightlifter his his numbers like when you add up

his technical skill his athleticism and his ability to do weightlifting all of those things his strength all those things make the best weightlifter in the world, right? He lifts the most weight, but he's, he's not going to be as strong a squatter or in static lifts, like squat and deadlift as some other guys, right? There's for sure dudes that have just been like, not as good a weightlifter, but stronger. Um, like Lasha's not squatting 400 kilos. Maybe he could, but there's probably guys out there that are doing that you know some other lifter uh and then same you know like so he wouldn't be the strongest his best lifter then you have guys like misha right koklyev who's like everything he did he was great at but he wasn't necessarily the best in any one of those he's the only guy that i can think of that snatched 210 kilos and had a 900 deadlift.

Right? Maybe some other guy out there could. Maybe Lasha could train and get to a 900 deadlift. But that's a remarkable feat. Yeah, and he was a hell of a strongman competitor. I mean, he might be the strongest guy ever. Yeah, and it's also funny, too. He played the guitar and he could sing. He might be the cutest.

He had an amazing personality. He played the guitar and he could sing. He might be the cutest. He had an amazing personality. He was so funny. He was really cool. He was great. He was just one of those guys, when you watch him, there's a lot of great lifters out there that are super boring. And you're like, dude, that's the greatest power lifter

in the world, but that person has no... I don't watch that and feel inspired to be like that. But then you get guys like Misha or... Ilya. Some of these guys are just like, holy shit, I want to be like that dude. I want to...

That guy is amazing. What he's doing makes me want to be a part of the sport. They may not even be the best. You got like Klokov, right? Klokov's one of those guys that he could pull people into the sport. They may not even be the best. Like you got like Klokov, right? Klokov's like one of those guys that he could pull people into the sport. He's like charismatic and exciting and it's fun.

He's doing stuff and it's just like, this guy's a stud. This is super cool. Whereas there's other guys, you know, and it's like, they're just,

there's no personality. There's nothing. They're incredible athletes, but it's kind of, you know, you're like, that's awesome. Why do you think that happens a lot in Olympic lifting?

I think you have to be a little more extrovert, right, in weightlifting. I think those kind of people are going to be a little bit more, like, a little bit more at the top, like a little bit more extrovert, a little bit more like- Cerebral, maybe? Yeah, there's more like action happening, so you can be excited about it. You know, in powerlifting, it's there, but it's so calculated and a lot of people in powerlifting, it seems very methodical.

It's so focused on maximizing this thing where it's like we just become the absolute best and what can we millimeter can we shave off here and change our technique here and do this. We have things a little bit more like there's a little more chance to it. A little bit more like there's a little more chance to it,

you know, a little bit more of like a, if you, if you kind of say wing it, but like sometimes you do, sometimes there's like, you're out there and like guys just fucking go for it and make some lift that is just crazy. They're just walking all over the platform or stumbling or fighting. And yeah, it's just, there's athleticism to it that I think makes it something that you can get excited about.

Now, Mark, were you asking about why it is that they're cerebral and more mellow or the opposite? Just why is it so fucking quiet? Oh, I think you were answering the opposite. And everyone looks like a nerd. Yes. Is it because of the drug testing? I would say it's different.

Being at these international meets and being at some meets, we were at a meet, the first meet that Lasha snatched 220 kilos, 484 pounds. There was two Iranian super heavyweights going up against him. Anaheim. Yeah, Anaheim. The Iranian fans were in the audience. It was insane. What's the little horn they have? they have oh yeah the vuvuzela

or whatever yeah yep they were like they were going so fucking hard on like trying to get everyone to fuck up i mean it was like imagine like you're at a golf match you're watching someone play golf like everyone quiets down when someone's putting imagine everybody in the audience is fucking screaming profanities in another language at this person. And it was like crazy to the point that like one of these guys goes out. So the Iranians are going out. They're getting cheered on, quiet when they left. Georgian guy comes out, Lasha comes out, and they're just going nuts. And they're screaming, trying to get him to miss.

This other guy comes out like a, I want to say he was from like Estonia or something. And they kind of threw him off and he missed. say he was from like Estonia or something. And they, they kind of threw him off and he missed. And so the audience is like the, the Iranian sector of the audience is loving this. And then the entire rest of the audience is all like probably American kind of get into the zone of like,

fuck this. They're not, we're not gonna let these guys like screw this guy up again. So everyone in the American side starts to drown them out by cheering for this dude. It was this awesome moment of like, they got him to miss his first lift and then everybody on it stands on their feet, starts screaming and cheering for this guy to make his lift and he does. And it was just like this moment where you're like, yeah, we did that. We helped this guy.

We didn't, but we never – I can believe that. Remember when the Iranians pulled out their flags? It was like everybody else had a flag about that size. It was like a 20 foot by 20 foot flag. It was just like, you know, it just took up the entire bleachers and this flag came down. It was pretty intense. So once every

50 competitions, there's an exciting one. Well, there are a lot of weightlifting competitions, but they're not, I was talking to Josh, they're not going to be in the next Olympics, right? We don't know yet. We don't know yet? They're in this Olympics, but it's tentative after that because there's been so much scandal. So the IWF had a president for, I don't know, it was like 30 or 40 years, the same dude.

And he'd obviously just get elected because they – what they would do is every country gets to have a delegate. And even if they have no lifters. So every federation does. So what you do is you're like, oh, you're the president. You need all these votes to win. So you go to these 15 different African countries with a guy who's just like, I'm the president of the Congo Weightlifting Federation, which has like nobody.

And they fly him out to, you know, whatever, Zurich. And they're like, hey, you know, here's a week vacation, you know, let's hope you vote for me. And they would just buy votes and just like basically everything was controlled that way. So he was around forever. But him getting booted out and all the drug positives and stuff coming out really just like put this everything into this big upheaval where the Olympics are basically like you got to prove to us by december of this year like probably the next couple weeks

like if you guys are actually going to make changes to to test people at a competition and does that come down to each country to test the athletes that they're planning on sending to the olympics and giving them tests back there's a international body called wada yeah that does the testing and so like north korea just retired all their athletes and pulled out of weightlifting basically. And we think it's because there's a new rule in place that states that if drug testers can't get into your country, you're out. And so that was like a strategy for a lot of these countries. They just wouldn't let the drug testers through visa testing at the airport.

So yeah, I mean, there's a move to that. It's like if they have to basically have WADA coming in and doing unannounced testing. So they show up whenever they feel like and they do a drug test on you at 4 a.m. or something. Power Project family, how's it going? Now, we know that strength starts from the floor, which is why we want you guys to build strong feet. That's why we partner with Vivo Barefoot Shoes. And we've been wearing these shoes for over a year now. Not only are they flexible, zero drop meaning they're flat, they have a wide toe box so your feet can do what they need to do inside of the shoe. They also look great if you go on their website they have a lot of amazing options from casual wear to in gym wear to running. With the old Vivo Barefoot you can't go wrong and your feet will get

stronger as you wear the shoes. So if you're interested in checking them out, head to vivo barefoot.com slash power project. And at checkout, use the code power vivo 20 to save yourself 20% off your entire purchase. Enjoy the episode. Now, this kind of makes me curious in terms of like, you know, Mark mentioned that there's a lot of Olympic lifters that choose to do CrossFit. And there seems to be a lot of it seems to be if you're a good CrossFitter, you can really build something with that. Now, as an Olympic lifter, it's still a huge sport, but do you see athletes transferring into other things because of where the sport's going or is it still big enough and the future looks bright enough where athletes are sticking to the sport?

big enough and the future looks bright enough where athletes are sticking to the sport? That's a good question. I feel like what we see now is like everything becomes, people become a personality. And so if you can just become a personality online and you have like, you're like a, not to knock anybody, but there's lifters that are just like, they were like C-session lifters,

not the top person. But they capitalize on it to become a personality they get sponsorships they get put into videos and maybe they have a youtube channel right and they just become a personality that does that and that escalates them up the ladder and then you just kind of like it feels to me like a lot of the way this stuff goes for most people is to just become an icon that then you can sell products. If you have a huge following, you can sell stuff. You can parlay that into a business. Some people have, for sure. There's definitely lifters that have done well with that.

As far as lifters that stick into the sport and stay a long time and, and support themselves through sponsorships. I don't think there's a lot, you know, your, your stipend from the U S government is going to be, maybe you're making 80 grand a year as a lifter, which is really good. If you're like the top one or two,

uh, but then your sponsorships are where you'd make money. And a lot of these people are getting sponsorships that are probably pretty poor, you know, maybe, maybe a thousand bucks a month or something. So I don't think people are really like sticking into it as for a longterm.

But there are a lot of CrossFit athletes that had, have switched to weightlifting. And, uh, I mean, that's what popularized, uh, Olympic lifting in the U S I mean,

when I started in 2004 and i would go to a meet in the bay area there would be three to six women competing now every local competition we go to is usually more women than men and they're almost every meets like sold out how many lifters were at yasha's yeah Yeah, it was like maybe 100 almost. Like 100 lifters in one day, 60% women. So that's been because that was actually why I met Max because there was nowhere to find platforms and bumpers back then. So I had to drive from Oakland out to San Ramon to find somewhere to train.

So I've seen more of the shift usually that way. That's how people have found weightlifting. And if it stays an Olympic sport, if you are a great CrossFit athlete and you're really good at the Olympic lifts and you want a chance to go to the Olympics as opposed to the CrossFit games, then there's that. Or if you're at a disadvantage by your weight class in CrossFit because if you're too small, like Alyssa Ritchie is a good example.

She was a great CrossFit athlete, but she weighed 49 kilos and she just never would be at the top level at the CrossFit Games. She's just too small. So if you're too small or if you're like a super, you're going to be at a disadvantage at the body weight exercises in CrossFit, then Olympic lifting might be a better sport for you. So we have seen a lot of that crossover. I don't know if that will change with the Olympics,

but I mean, it's like how many, I think, how many people does that really affect? It's such a small percentage of people doing weightlifting that are going to be affected by whether it's in the olympics i think uh tia clara to me right yeah she compete uh for what australia yeah big lifting right yeah she did she did the olympics for australia and now she's like multiple crossfit games champ right yeah super super good there yeah i think there's like top people too

like alexi tarakti he's he's obviously doing really well, making money doing seminars, and Klokov and those guys. And then there's people up and around it, coaches. There's a lot of successful coaches, people that run gyms, those kind of things. There's a lot of success around it and financial reward for those people. But from the athlete's perspective it's like such a hard thing to do anything with if like you were just an athlete and you didn't have like the ability to turn that into a business you couldn't get popular enough maybe you're just you know you're just not as exciting or whatever it is like it definitely

does not favor people that are not like able to really quickly pivot and do something with the fame olympic lifting is a huge part of crossfit and it seems like matt frazier and rich froning not favor people that are not like able to really quickly pivot and do something with the fame. Olympic lifting is a huge part of CrossFit and it seems like Matt Frazier and Rich Froning and a lot of these people, it's been like a staple movement. How do you think those guys fare like in terms of their Olympic lifting prowess? I think Frazier was an Olympic lifter for many years, right? Yeah. Yeah. He was good. He was a junior lifter. He was good. He got hurt. I think he hurt his back really badly. Their numbers are good. I mean, they're not, yeah. He was good. He was a junior lifter. He was good. He got hurt. I think he hurt his back really badly. Their numbers are good. I mean, they're not, you know,

they're not top of the class, but they're not like, they're not low. Where are they for like nationals? They're, you know, I don't know exactly what their numbers are. I think they both snatch in the 300 pound range, clean and jerk, like, you know,

shy of 400, you know? So like they're very solid lifters and they would be maybe top 10 for sure, top five in some of those classes, some competitions. And if they focused on it more, they'd probably be better, you know? And then how well do you think

it transfers into other sports? Because we hear a lot of people talk about that for football or basketball or other sports where you need to be able to jump, you need explosiveness. How do you feel it works for that? Yeah, I mean, from a strictly theoretical perspective,

I don't think there's any major benefit to doing Olympic lifts for sports from the perspective that anything a field sport does in the weight room is very general in nature, right? You can't squat your way to being a good wide receiver, right? And the same is true. Like, you know, if you're not super explosive or whatever, doing cleans and snatches isn't something that's going to turn you into that. But, you know, that being said, because it is general in nature,

it's fine to do, right? It's a fine training modality as long as you can do it in a safe way and as long as you can do it like and teach people properly. fine training modality as long as you can do it in a safe way and long you can do it like and teach people properly the the cost benefit of doing it is that how much time does it take to teach someone what kind of coaches do you have to have on staff that can actually do that and keep people safe and is the risk worth it you know and and there's plenty of good programs university programs have built themselves around it so it's definitely viable But from a standpoint of, is it a game changer for something, like for team sport or sports performance stuff? It's probably not, versus any other method that's weight room related.

For you now, since you still can't front squat, or you do front squat a little bit? I've done enough front squats to not need to do another one. I'm interested in this because you have been Olympic lifting almost your whole life. Right. And then you had that injury and I don't know to what extent you do any type of Olympic lifting. Not anymore. Yeah. Not anymore. How does that feel for you with that being your sport? Like I imagine, you know, I played soccer for 16 years when I had that, when I got injured in college, that fucked me up. Right. And I could imagine if jujitsu was taken away from me for some reason, I'd feel fucked up about it. But how do you feel now?

You coach a lot of athletes, but you can't do it. What's it like? So first I said, don't take your shirt off because my wife's here. Now you're asking me this question that's making me feel real bad. No. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me, Mark. Appreciate it.

No problem. Anytime. Hey, Mark, can we start over, just the three of us? Get my Lisa Gibbons tape, Joe. You have VCR here? Yeah. I mean, Misha actually talked to me about this when we did that seminar. I mean, like, Misha actually talked to me about this when we did that seminar.

And it was definitely like the worst time in my life. Because I hurt myself, so I dislocated the lunate bone, and it took, you know, 13 months or whatever before I could have surgery. So I couldn't do the lifts anymore. And there was a long period of time where I was like sitting on a couch super depressed drinking all the time and just like I had no idea what I was going to do because that was like from 12 years old

the first time I saw weightlifting and like that's what I'm going to be and like I even in my mind had this vision of myself as an old man like I'll still do cleans and snatches like I'll still do that for the rest of my life one of my old coaches like he's still lifted even he's still to this day he's like in his probably late 70s he still does some of the lifts and so that was always like oh I'm always

gonna do this like this is a thing in my life that just exists there also so much of my personality and and identity was wrapped up in it and then as it's gone, you're just like, what do I do? You know? And it's like, for years, there was just a lot of bitterness about it. Like a lot of bitterness about like, you know, how it happened, the injury, like angry at myself. And, and it took me time to kind of get over that and to get on beyond that because I had to basically get to a place where I could be involved in it and I could be part of it and have it in my life and enjoy it, but not day to day think to myself like, oh, I'm going to snatch a PR again or I'm going to do this again. And that all just came from coaching. So, you know, on one level, like getting hurt was the worst thing that happened to me,

but also the best because had i not gotten hurt i was telling mark this earlier had not gotten hurt i i might have just been like another guy another lifter you know and like like oh you know do whatever numbers that are you know kind of okay but like maybe i would have just kept chasing that down and like ground myself up like you know never like tried other opportunities, never done anything else, never would have gotten to powerlifting, never would have,

you know, I wouldn't be here. Um, and so like, I have to look back and be like, yeah, I mean, that was actually maybe one of the best things that ever happened to me

because it pushed me to do something different and to like, you know, kind of like, uh, it's like you have to, you have to position yourself in life. I believe in a way where you're, you're able to focus on the next most important thing, no matter what's happening right now.

What's the next most important thing. I can't look down the road 10 years and be like, well, I'm never gonna be able to snatch a clean drink again. Like I gotta just figure that out. It's like, well, what can I do right now? I got to make money. So I'll coach, you know, i'll coach you know i'll coach and like like i was saying before like with a powerlifting meet like i'll squat i can squat

i'll do that and then you know lo and behold there's a powerlifting meet in pleasonton so i went and did it met jesse met mark and so yeah it's like it was super painful and like to this day like i still get this like sometimes in my my mind. I think about how much fun it was just doing a clean or doing a snatch. It's just enjoyable. It's cool. And I miss that. But it's definitely, yeah, it definitely was not easy in the first few years. Can't we just get a prosthetic or something?

You know, so I thought you had one over here. Get like a Darth Vader that was my hope that's my hope right my hope is like Elon Musk is going to invent a robot arm that I can have I think that's what's in the Tesla glove box yeah there's one in there but yeah like

my doctor this guy who did the surgery he was like I've never seen anyone i researched this i've never seen anyone who has the bone dislocated for more than like three to four months yours has been out for 13 and he's like putting it back in he wanted to write a paper on it because i had never seen this before the bone died so it's you know um we had a funeral and everything um so so it's it's it's the surgery didn't technically work but he was like you should just go

as long as you can and maybe in the future there'll be some surgery or some kind of technique or something who knows stem cells or something so that's why I never had they wanted to just fuse it and fuse all the bone, all the wrist so it wouldn't bend and I could just have my fingers

but I was like okay yeah I'll just't bend and I could just have my fingers. But I was like, okay, yeah, I'll just do that. And I started lifting. I started training on it and I started bench pressing and dead lifting. I never actually went back to him. I should go back at some point and show him what I've done with it because I think he would be super impressed

or totally angry. Do you think bench pressing helped it? I think initially it did because I think everything got stronger. My wrists and my forearms and my arms got stronger. It it just made the pain everything and it feels so much less like I just ignore it you know if I do nothing with it it hurts a lot more remember when we first went to see it was Dr. Mazur right yeah he said he was shocked that Max was walking around and could open doors with this like a doorknob with this hand for that

many months. And we walked out of there and I was like, you better not tell him that you snatched 130 kilos on that broken wrist. Yeah. Because at some point he was just so tired of waiting for it to heal because it was misdiagnosed. So he thought it was just a sprain that was like taking forever to heal. He just wrapped his wrist up and he couldn't bend it back and just snatched 130 right like this and he was commenting on how he couldn't believe he could walk around and open doors yeah i

was like i was like well just start i gotta start training right so i started lifting went the bar 60 kilos and just over like a week or two it got to like 130 and uh the next day i went to snatch as one does and uh i caught the bar and i felt this weird zipper, unzipping feeling in my forearm. And I was like, I jammed this wrist on a huge clean and now I'm doing this and everything hurts all the time. Maybe something's wrong with this. So what they told me later was that because the bone, the lunate's like a half moon-shaped bone. And it sits like this and it popped out this way. And the edge of it was rubbing on all the tendons in my forearm that connect to my fingers. And he said if it had rubbed any longer, then I would have lost the use of my fingers.

And it wouldn't heal. And they couldn't do anything. So I just had no fingers. Like I just would have had, you know, like chubs from Happy Gilmore. Which, you know, maybe as a coach wouldn't be the worst thing. But yeah, he's like, yeah, you're really lucky. Is that the coach with the wooden hands? I would have been known.

Happy, you can do this. You could make this snatch. You just got to try it. Right? But it's got to be a little longer too. Like it comes out here. Turn it over. But yeah, so then they went in and he's like, you know, they had to like dissect the nerve.

So the surgery was insane. They put me under and he cut me open here on this side. They pushed the bone in. Well, first they had to dissect the nerve out of the scar tissue, like sheath that had formed over the year. And he said that was like super difficult and took forever to do. Then him and the anesthesiologist, he said he got the biggest guy that he knew was an anesthesiologist to help him. They pushed the bone back in and it took like all of their effort right they push it back in then they sewed me up turn the hand over cut me open here and the

bone popped out and so they had to redo the entire thing and then push it back so it's just like he said i gave you the largest legal dose of of novocaine or lidocaine that i could give you because there was so much trauma just from the surgery but all these pins in it actually a video that I'm taking the pins out on YouTube but uh yeah and and I was you know bound in this this thing with these pins and yeah it was it was insane how many years it's been now that was 2010 they had the surgery 2010 yeah and and now like what can you do and what can't you do?

I used to be a really good guitar player, but I can't anymore. No, that's not true. I can do pretty much everything. It's awkward typing. Like, some of the fingers don't move as freely as this hand. You know, and, you know, feels like a very different person. No. That's fine.

It basically, you know, for what I do, it's fine. I mean, like, you know, feels like a very different person. No. That's fine. It basically, you know, for what I do, it's fine. I mean, like, you know, it's weaker. When I deadlifted the 705, like, this hand just rolls open. Like, it was so hard to hold stuff. But I mean, I did it, you know. Like, it's just, like, weaker than it was. It affected the bench press, as I said to Mark earlier. Like, I was pretty strong. Like, I was pretty strong,

like I got pretty strong with it and then like things just started to deteriorate and there was, it felt like almost like a nerve kind of like, I just couldn't generate any kind of drive

in this arm anymore. And so like, it just, my bench would just kind of slowly decline no matter how hard I trained it. And so like, it definitely affects that,

like grip strength and like it's, it's probably like maybe like 40% weaker than this hand. Okay. What was your best squat? Best squat in powerlifting was 335, 738. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And that was at 220, right?

Yeah. What do you think is harder? Power lifting or weight lifting? I mean, power, weight lifting is harder because there's so many more variables for sure. And like, if you just don't have certain tools, you're going to get to a certain level and that's it. Like, you can keep getting stronger in power lifting, right? We see a lot of best power lifters, Stan, you know, I mean, some of these guys that are, uh, Goggins and then, uh guys are Goggins and then Dave Ricks.

These guys are in their 60s squatting huge numbers. Because there's no speed component that's essential in powerlifting, definitely you can get way further and go for longer. In weightlifting, if you don't have the speed qualities or they deteriorate, you're always playing this game of like getting to your top level before your physical qualities start to decline, right? At some point, you're going to start to get a little bit slower and it's going to be harder, you know, like early 30s, mid 30s. So weightlifting for sure is harder. I usually recommend that if people are interested in both weightlifting and in powerlifting to do weightlifting first like when you're younger. I mean not if you're a beginner beginner, right?

You might have them do general strength or powerlifting movements to get strong enough to hold a position in the Olympic lifts. But as far as like the sport or training it, I'd say do Olympic lifting first. Sally is a great example. So I have some super total athletes that do both sports and you know, Sally was asking me what should she do? Cause she keeps going that like she and tiny Tiff, I coached them both to do soup, super total at the Arnold. So they compete in both the Olympic weightlifting competition and in the powerlifting total at the Arnold. So they compete in both the Olympic weightlifting competition and in the powerlifting competition at the Arnold, which was super fun last year. Or I guess that was earlier this year.

But she was asking me what should she focus on, and I said, which do you love more? She says, I love weightlifting. And I said, well, then you should do weightlifting. We'll just do a little bit of bench press. And if you want to do a powerlifting meet, we can throw in some, you know, a little more comp deadlift, whatever. But if you love weightlifting, do it now while you're younger, if you want to excel at it, and it's going to be easier on your body. And then you can continue to get strong. I mean, in 2012, right, you coached me to you and Jesse coached me to

break that all time world record. And I was 42. And that broke the, you know, for all ages. So like, you can continue to get strong into your 40s and 50s as a powerlifter. I do want to talk about I feel like we talked about some sort of like sad, like, things in the sport and ways that it doesn't help you in other sports. But I want to talk about the things that we love about Olympic lifting because it's fun. It's like explosive. It's fun. Like when I compare weightlifting to powerlifting, like I retired from weightlifting just because

I knew at some point after 47 years of age, I wasn't going to continue making PRs. And I was too passionate about it at that point to like do it and not try to make PRs. So I wanted to switch to powerlifting where I was able to continue to excel. But if, do I love powerlifting as much as Olympic weightlifting? No, I don't. And I know I'll do it again someday. But it's super fun. If you get bored when you go in the gym doing squat bench and deadlift or just doing bodybuilding, it's like it does draw really cerebral people to the sport because it's like doing a snatch. You want to perfect it. You want to get it better. Like you want to look at like these little details. And so for me, it was just so exciting to do the sport. And, um, cause you're

just always trying to dial in this little thing. So it's not always about like the weight on the bar. It might be like, wow, that felt like a great snatch. You know, like I just like, you know, put it in the pocket basically. Right. So there's a lot of things about the sport of weightlifting and training weightlifting that can be really great for someone who doesn't want to go in the gym, you know, and any kind of strength training, in my opinion, is better than no strength training. So if you can do it safely, and it's much more accessible now, like then when we started, If you can do it safely and it's much more accessible now like than when we started, there's so many like different avenues to go to like learn about how to do snatch and clean and jerk and how to do it safely and good programs out there, right? And good coaches.

So I mean I love the sport. I love it for other people even when I'm not doing it. I love coaching people in it. And, you know, like Max is a great example of someone who took his love for it, his passion for it, and like now coaches like some of the – has coached some of the top people in the sport. Here's so many people talking about technique kind of over and over again how uh how strict are you guys with technique or do you let people just you let stuff just kind of happen because sometimes a weight just needs to come off the ground yeah i mean like it's it's you're always like that's mostly what you're practicing right most of what you're doing you pick exercises that

are designed to like exemplify or isolate a technical error right and so you work on those to build those things up you're you're fundamental like the foundation of all of all sports is technique right you have to do the things properly in order to be successful at them so you know the goal as a coach everyone's affected differently because everyone is a little bit you know you get tired you get bored Whatever. Is to basically try to perfect it as much as possible. There's also this kind of practical side to that, which is like, am I going to stop and stifle this person's progress because we can't fix this tiny little error? Or is it like, that's okay. That's except it's within, it's within tolerance, right? It's like, okay, it's a little bit rough, but we need to compete.

You need to do these things. You need to enjoy the sport. So you can't just constantly be suppressing someone's enjoyment of it and suppressing someone's ability to actually lift weights by like, no, that's not perfect. If you hit someone that's young, and that's a big benefit of being early on, is that if you're nine years old, like nine to 16,

you can spend a lot of time on technique and really dial it in because ultimately like there's no need to to worry about pushing that kid that hard yeah you know it's it's an interesting thing though because like with power lifting the movements there is a lot of technique involved don't get me wrong but the movements are quite straightforward in terms of the way they're executed. But with weightlifting, with certain movements, it's like if you're an adult doing it, you should ideally be patient enough to try to get that technique down. You know what I mean? Like as a kid, you don't think about the patient side of things because you're a fucking kid.

So you're just going into what you're supposed to do. But as an adult, you think about how much you suck. And that like especially for you starting at 34 that must have been kind of tough um i had really bad technique but i just didn't know any better yeah ignorance is bliss in that case yeah yeah but i was when i Max, Max was the one who started teaching me how to lift properly. How many years in? Five or six years in. I mean, I was competing at nationals and American Open finals, and the bar didn't touch me. So if you know anything about a snatch, there should be some body bar contact at some point.

think about a snatch, there should be some body bar contact at some point. So when I met Max, actually, I walked in the gym and Dave said, go fix Joanne. So when I started learning and understanding proper technique, then it was a very obsessive process, I guess, and a difficult process to change those movement patterns and patterns. And I was even up until the end of my career, I a pretty rugged lifter. I'd say I had a lot of extra strength over my technique. So, yeah. So yeah. But we're a perfect example of like him coaching me is that race against like my age and what am I going to do in this sport? And I was a competitive athlete and I wanted to keep competing.

And so I would get frustrated because I was like the bar always crashes on me in the clean. But my clean was 10 kilos more than my jerk. So he would say like, well, let's work on your jerk, right? And so, or just your technique is good enough to not get hurt. So let's just keep training it and get you stronger. And that's pretty much what we did. In fact, at one point we went the other way because my squat was so ridiculously strong. Like I front squatted 120 kilos,

but I could only jerk 86 kilos. So why am I squatting? And my numbers like either stayed the same or like went up when we took back the squatting and worked more on like pulling and just doing snatch and clean and jerk. That's like the foundation basically of like good training, good coaching is that it's a management game. You have to look at all these variables, all these differences between people. Where are you strong? Where are you weak?

What exercises are going to be beneficial for you? How should you train? How much volume should you do? How intense should the training be? And as a coach, you have experience. So you draw on that and you look at somebody like, okay, Mark's got, you know, strong squat, but his back is kind of weak. So he should be doing more volume dedicated to that. If he's got really good skill, but he's weak, when we shift that around, if it's the other

way around, we have to shift that. And that's kind of the, that's 100% the foundation of like the app that we made, the waylifting.ai, is that we use all these variables, all this data we pull in to look at like, what are clusters of people that are similar and how do they succeed in training? And so we can say, we can write programs, you know, any number of programs for individuals based on those factors and then use that like a coach would to infer what's the next step in training so you have programming that's individualized to you but also draws on the data we have from other people that are similar to you to make better programs and so you have this like

kind of in my opinion like the best of both worlds where you've got your training and programming it's designed by basically a computer at this point, but with my logic. So the things I've learned over the 20 years of being in the sport, 25 years almost, being in the sport and having worked with top Bulgarian coaches and Russian coaches and all these people, and what we got wrong was like, oh, you should squat 15 times a week, right?

Because like, well, I should probably get my shoulders stronger. You know, it's like, it's easy to know that's the right answer, but it's hard as a coach to like, how do I, what's the difference there? Like, that's obvious when we see it. Oh, you're squatting too much.

When it's more subtle, like with her or with other athletes, like, oh, I'm doing a lot of squats, but not doing enough pulls or not doing enough pulls or not doing enough snatches or doing more clean and jerks and so that's where you know to plug the app but that's where like a lot of that benefit is is that like we can look at a lot of data and say hey this is the best way to make the training to get you better progress and with it being so like just

curious about the app with i mean powerlifting is technique driven too, but with weightlifting being so technique driven, you can't just, in powerlifting you can chase a high deadlift with shitty form pretty well. I don't think you can chase a high level snatch with shitty form. There's going to be a place where your technique just gets fucked. Yeah. So with the weightlifting app, is there a way for people to see the form of the individual doing it? Are their eyes on that? Or is it set up programming based off of the way they're progressing with their volume?

So from a product roadmap, in the works we have computer vision stuff being developed, which we will be able to do things like that and actually look at different joint angles and say, hey, this is the position of your hips when the bar is here. that's wrong. It should be like this right now we have, we're using basically coaches to do that. So people will post videos and we use feedback and coaching to,

to drive that. Yeah. A large part of it though is in proper exercise selection, right? Because you know, you could, you could bench press for example, and, and think about using your pecs a lot. Once you get past a certain intensity, you have very little control of what muscles are doing. The muscles just work based on the exercise you're doing. So if you do a safety bar squat, it has a definitive impact on the way you squat and the muscles that get worked because of what it's doing. It's the same in weightlifting, right? When you start doing different types of movements, different types of exercises,

they have an impact on local areas of the body and they have an impact on certain aspects of technique. So just the proper exercise selection makes a huge difference in technique development. We have a lot of people that have used the app that have improved their technique without any eyes on coaching simply because we can identify that the top portion of your snatch pull is weak because of these four things that we know are true. So we should select these exercises

for that and it would do that. And then people would actually improve their skill as well as their strength. Cool. Yeah. I have two or three remote athletes that I switched them to the weightlifting AI and I used to write their program individually. And without coaching cues, their technique has improved and they've performed really well. I mean, Sally won American Open Series and then Erica went six for six and made like a 14 kilo PR total. So I was really excited because it's the idea that you can tell someone to stay over the bar and be

patient all day long but if their back is a weakness then they will constantly get behind the bar and try and use their legs, right? So the algorithms with Max's logic have figured out what exercises to give every individual and their technique improves. Like it was pretty crazy to watch. So I don't want to talk too much about that or they're going to stop paying me.

But, you know, I help them dial things in and like, you know and there are certain things that a coach – that the app doesn't have the personality touch, but it literally is like a coach coaching you. It will give – I'll look at their programs and it's giving them the exercises that I would normally give them. Yeah, I think a cue is just that, right? Yeah. We place probably too much value in it. Stay over the bar. It's like until someone does that and they experience it for themselves,

then they say, oh, that's what they were telling me for the last three years. But then for them, their interpretation, they might have different words that they would choose or they would say, oh, he didn't really mean for me to stay over the bar. He just meant like I need to pull the bar up maybe a little bit higher before I start to drop down underneath the bar,

whatever the thing is, right? Yeah. That's the like the bane of every coach's existence is like you tell somebody something for five years, you're like, oh, you got to pull like this or do that. And then some other coach walks in and says the same thing differently. And then suddenly that's like, oh, you're worthless. Fuck that. This guy's better. You know? Right. Yeah. That's the,

it's the, yeah, it's, it's super frustrating like that. And weightlifting, you get a lot, people to get that, like, like the epiphany moment you're talking about where like they chase that and like that, that's a lot of epiphanies in the beginning. And then they start to dry up. You just don't have them, you know, 10 years into the sport. you're not going to like suddenly like oh now i get it you know or oh that's so so different but some people get stuck on it and they don't move past that and they get into this phase of training where it's just like everything they're doing it's like trying to discover something new i move my feet in the start position an inch or i change my grip or i change that or like they just constantly are searching for it and it almost like prevents them from being you know making progress because they're just like oh he's doing something a little bit differently what do you think about that in terms of olympic lifting has that

viewpoint changed at all because it sounds like you sounds like you had so many failures you failed at 700 pounds many many times um has your view or vantage point on how often a lifter should fail, has that changed much in Olympic lifting? Because Olympic lifters, you see them miss and miss and miss and miss, and you're like, what kind of fucking training session is going on over here? And I don't know much about Olympic lifting, so I always kind of was puzzled. I'm like, why do they keep missing?

Why don't they lower the weight and maybe do it the right way? And then maybe go back up again? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I would say, like, if you were to, like, chart on a graph, like, the number of missed lifts 10 years ago was way higher than today. Like, I think a lot more people are just smarter about training in general. This is the case for across both sports, really across everything. The YouTube has created so much. She's rubbing off on me, right?

Just renewed our AARP card. Grandma over here. But yeah, it's like the amount of good information that exists now, you have power lifters that come in. It took me years to get good at squatting, to squat big numbers. They squatted like an idiot for so long. Just doing a program that was not the right program.

Now you have people like every 15 minutes there's some kid who's 12 years old squatting 450 or whatever. They're training smart and they're training well because there's so much good information. In weightlifting it's definitely trended that way where there's way more just quality coaches out there and way more good knowledge.

So like you don't get those like insane programs that exist where it's like, Oh, we just train as hard as fucking possible. And like, yeah, 25 misses is like a sign of like, yeah, you're doing well.

This is good. This is, you're on the right track. Um, you know, people are just way smarter. Yeah. And if those, and if you miss with 60% because

you're trying a bunch of different stuff, that's probably quite different impact on the body than if you're at like 88% and you continue to miss. If you're missing is composing most of your training, that's what you're going to be good at. You're going to be great at missing.

I think in the gym, we rarely let people miss more than a couple times. Yeah, 20 or 30 is the limit. Like twice. Because in a competition, you get three attempts, right? Hopefully you make all three of each lift. You get three at snatch and three at clean and jerk.

So we rarely, you know, if somebody's really close and they're going for a PR, you might let them take one or two attempts. Also, a plug for the AI because the AI is interactive. So it tells you when to go up. Like you get to rate it. You rate every lift you do with like three white lights, two white lights, you know, three reds if you miss. And then it'll tell you what to do next.

So it tells you. It's kind of neat. It's like having a coach there where, like, sometimes we go off program because somebody's, like, hitting, like, they're just three whites. Like, every time their technique is on, they're making every lift, it'll be, like, strike while the iron's hot and they'll have them go up.

How about those overzealous lifters, though? Yeah, so it's an interesting system because what it does is, one, it records it, right? So you have a record of what you rated, right? And what you can do is look back at somebody's results and be like, what happened here? You got a lot of, you're rating these wrong. Like you can actually show somebody proof that like you're an idiot. Okay. Right?

Which I think is like when you talk about it, right? It's an idiot proof. okay right which i think is like when you talk about right if you just in my training if i had to write down in a journal how every set felt and why i went up like what was the decision for going up or down like you know i mean it's like there's a lot of denial there yeah i grounded it out my eyes popped out of my head but i put 20 kilos more on and missed it know? Shit myself a little bit. And then below that, no one watched. People were disgusted that I was in the gym. But yeah, it's like when you basically

force somebody to just take a moment to actually internalize and assess what just happened and how it felt, it makes a big difference in training. They become invested in it. They become aware of whether they're being honest about their rate their ratings and their assessment of the lifting and if like if you're just training you're just

like hammering your head against the wall and you're you're in you know you're giving it good ratings like obviously you're you're in a you know you're in denial yeah well if you miss and you don't give it three reds then you probably need to go back to school or something. So you guys got any fear of Skynet becoming fully realized like in Terminator, like where the AI starts to take over. That would be the hope at some point. Just get rid of some kind of AI just kills us all. It takes over for you guys and just generates money. Yeah,

that would be the real hope. It runs the whole business, not just the algorithm of lifting. The first thing you would do is fire both of us. Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, it is algorithmic, like lifting programs are pretty cool because like when you think of different sports, when you think of track and the level of intensity they have from session to session or jujitsu or whatever, or all these different sports that are so variable. It seems like with powerlifting and weightlifting and pretty much any lifting kind of sport that it's rated by numbers,

an algorithm could figure out how to help somebody get from point A to point B based off just purely off how they're progressing. It's interesting that lifting progress can be taken over by AIs itself. Yeah, I think what you're going to see is like, this is true of a lot of Olympic sports that are successful in countries

that you wouldn't expect. Like China is successful in sports that you can train, right? There's one Chinese dude who's broken 10 seconds in the 100 meters, which is an absolute feat. Like it's a miracle. It's insane.

But those are sports where you must have certain physical qualities that you're right there's there's so few people that possess those specific you know genetic qualities to run like the hundred i think that guy has the fastest 60 meters of all yes he does yeah um i think there's like one white guy ever that's broken 10 seconds which is insane right it's got to be more yeah it's like the french dude i think there's like one white guy ever that's broken 10 seconds which is insane right it's got to be more yeah it's like the french dude i think oh yeah marcel whatever yeah but like sports you can train like gymnastics where like it's highly technical and it's it's mostly a byproduct of training and the amount of training you can deliver to somebody weightlifting like these are sports that are dominated in these countries and the same i think like you're saying

for like something like an ai where like you can gather enough data to give you the prescriptions that are like this is what's going to drive things forward if we look at like a lot of stuff you know pelopon's table right that was basically put together by you know some research that was done on about 800 weightlifters and they they put it at this table. Imagine you had 10,000 lifters and the data was actually accurate to the populations you're working with, which are regular people. What kind of awesome data can you draw from that? What can you use in that? So I think over the next few years

we'll just see more of that stuff as things like ai become a service that you can actually just get involved in and purchase and actually like use as a regular small company you'll see a lot more of that start to actually trickle into more like low-level sports yeah it's fascinating it's pretty much just kind of mathematics yeah in terms of getting better at lifting yeah yeah it's all yeah of mathematics in terms of getting better at lifting. Yeah. I mean, in terms of getting better at maybe like, I guess certain sports get to be more difficult. Like when you get into like something like soccer or baseball or basketball, like those are how you train for those. It's like, it seems like it's all over the map. And then people have very specific ways that they think that you should.

People have very specific ways that they think that you should. People have very specific ways that they think that you shouldn't. But in these sports, it seems like there is some, a mathematical equation to figure it out a way forward. Well, I feel like the money ball stuff with baseball. Right. And then it was like,

it's like, that's not people, people hate it on it. Cause it's not pure. Right. Well, you get, you know,

the, the old scouts, not like, you know, finger in the testicles of every player. Right? Like he's a good one, right? Uh, uh, I don't know if that actually happens, but you know, that's my, that's my only, yeah, it's my only understanding of baseball. Um, I had a strange coach growing up. That's what happened when I played baseball, T-ball. Uh, if I got to edit that out.

Nope, that's staying. Just open with that. That explains a lot. Max, why don't you see me in the ballroom later? Bring your bat. Anyways, yeah, so back to artificial intelligence.

It's like the moneyball stuff. It's like you start to use whatever tools are available. So you can start to analyze, like, what's the best strategy for playing this? It's very similar in, like, weightlifting or powerlifting, where it's like, what are the principles we understand about training, right? Like, very simple things can be like, how do you manage fatigue? Well, after hard training sessions, you should do easier training sessions. Right. And from a principle based approach, you end up with a lot of like very simple questions like how do you manage your fatigue? How do you overload that require complex solutions because they're not as straightforward as they seem. It's like, how can we train as hard as possible without risking injury, but also not like stepping over our own feet or stepping on our own feet, like training maximum squats every single day? What's a smarter way to do that? Well, what about every other day? Okay.

Well, if we're doing it every other day, the next logical conclusion is, well, what about the volume we were doing on the off days? Well, we can add that to those press sessions. Then you start to ask, well, what if we had one day that was heavier and one day that was lighter? And then this is like this constant asking a simple question, then finding an answer, and doing that thousands of times to basically say, if this happens,

what are the most likely successful outcomes for the next thing? What's the probability of success with a different choice the next day of training, right? Or the next week or like, how do we structure this? So that's where it's like coaches do this because they've seen it a million times. You can just watch somebody walk in the gym and you know how they're going to respond. The first question I ask everybody as a coach when they walk in the gym, how do you feel?

And it's not, I don't even care what the words they say. I'm listening for the body language and for like the tone. Like, oh, I don't even care what the words they say. I'm listening for the body language and for the tone. Like, oh, I don't look okay. Or like, oh, you feel great. Or they just don't know. Or you watch their mood change as they start warming up. And so it's like those are the things that, well, what could we learn from just looking at all the logs and all the training they've done up to this point to make a similar judgment? And can we be correct about that?

Or I like to say, I stole this from Elon, but be less wrong. We just assume everything we're doing is wrong, but how do we be a little bit less wrong about it? How is the program less wrong today? Or how are we making this app better or less wrong than it is? Now, with all the people you guys see hitting PRs with an AI-type program set up, how do you think that this is going to affect the foot on the ground coaches in gyms that are trying to work with athletes?

Like, do you think that because overall this is going to move it forward because now most people who couldn't get a coach can work with an AI and hit PRs. ours. But in the grander scheme of things, will coaches just need to be there for eyes on technique or is there going to be like, how's it going to evolve, you think? I mean, the goal is to grow weightlifting, right? The bigger weightlifting is, the better it is for everybody, right? So if the sport grows, then that's the number one thing. Coaches are necessary. There's no replacement for a coach because you could have great technique. You could train perfectly. When you're at the meet, what are you going to do? Who are you going to turn to behind you?

You have to trust that person and believe in them. I tell this story because this exemplifies what a coach is. My coach, Steve Goff, there was three guys. It was me and two other guys that trained together. We rented this apartment in Bozeman, Montana, that's where I grew up. So it would be like fucking 20 below in the garage that we trained at.

There was no heat. And me and the other two guys, one of them was kind of this kid who was always kind of talking about going on missions and like, I want to be like James Bond, right? Kind of like, okay, whatever. We would train and our coach was a Marine and he was this super hardcore, hard-charging kind of guy.

Ex-cop in San Francisco. He would always be like, why don't you just join up? Join the service. And he'd be like, oh yeah, I'm going to. join the, join up, like join the service. And he'd be like, Oh yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to. So one day, uh, the, like the kind of heart and soul our coach put into us was like unbelievable. And so he like took this kid and he, him and the other coach, took him to the Navy recruiter, dropped him off and said, you got to sign up.

Like they just dropped him off there and sign, you got to sign up. They just dropped him off. They're like, sign up. And he did. Then he went into Bud's, and he graduated first in his class. Then he became seal of the year. Then he became a sniper. Then he became a sniper instructor. And so this dude is one of the most legit, badass dudes in the world. You don't know who he is, right?

He's just a guy who works in the world that you don't know who he is right just a guy who works on this in the teams but he did all of that because our coach was always there for him and always like talking to him on the phone and emails and like even to the day up until like a month or two before he passed away yeah he was like the glue that held together 50 or 60 guys from around the country that would like he would send emails out to people and talk. He was the kind of guy that was like, you believed when he told you, you could like run through a brick wall. And so like that's something you can't replace. No one's trying to replace that. You're not trying to like

use a computer or use a clever thing to do that. You need that. You have to believe in yourself. You have to find somebody who actually like really, really cares about you. And that's what a coach is to me is like someone who cares about your goals more than you do, or as much as you do, because they're going to be there every time. I would talk to him. He would call me, he would call me on the phone before I drive to go train with him. And we talked for like

an hour. Then I would drive for 50 minutes to go train with him. And then we'd train for six or seven hours. And then the next day, the same thing every day. And I found out later he would do this with everybody. He was on the phone or emailing like probably a hundred people on a regular day, like regular basis, just like he was that guy. And so it's like i see it as like what we want to try to build is tools right his ability to get people to believe and to motivate them could maybe have been augmented a bit by having tools that could do something more be like hey here's a better decision right maybe try this tomorrow or maybe this is a better exercise right where it's not like we're replacing that person right because

you have to have somebody in your life like that as an athlete to get through it but from a standpoint of like what is the math problem we can solve that try to solve that as much as we can then bring somebody in and make a pairing of like an athlete and a coach and and a system that can actually generate you know fantastic results what you got over there andrew i'm really really curious do you guys know if there was ever any follow-up done to some of these kids that were given steroids at like 12 years old just because you know uh depending on what side you're on it's like steroids are the worst thing ever or steroids have been around forever and you know there's got a track record where you can do it like on a healthy side but we don't have the one person or one group that started really early and then been able to track them throughout their whole life.

And so I'm just, yeah, that blew my mind hearing that. So I'm like, well, shit, where are these guys now? I mean, so I would say there's a lot of factors in that. I know a lot of maybe half a dozen guys that maybe a dozen or more dead before 60, 50s. But there's a lot that goes into that too. Most of those are Eastern European guys, so they were all smoking and they were all drinking a lot. Their lives were pretty rough. I can think of two guys.

There was a guy who won the 94 class in the Olympics died at 30 another guy who was super heavyweight got a silver medal died at like 34 my friend's father died at 56 he was a bronze medalist in the Olympics so there's a lot of that it's also the question is like

Naeem Suleiman the best wafter of all time he died of a heart problem I want to say, 50s, early 50s, you know. Abidjayev, the old man himself, said he took everything he gave anybody. So whatever they had, he was taking some of it, even like Viagra or whatever. I think I may have heard that Olympians in general don't have long life expectancy. Yeah. It's really hard to like, there's so much data there to be like,

what is it? You know, they also like, you know, what's the life expectancy of like the average Russian man, right? It's like in the 60s. So it's like, there's a lot of factors, but I mean, I'm sure that, I'm sure that like, you know, what Abhijayev would say was everybody else goes into the gym to gain their health, but we go in the gym to give it away. And so it's like, that's performance. That's like, you know, high performance sports, high performance, anything.

It's like you're sacrificing something to gain success in this. And so, yeah, it's like taking that much. They would take a shill of drugs they were taking like 200 milligrams of dianabol a day jesus yeah that's a lot of dianabol a lot of dianabol right they called it biannibal because it was in bulgaria yeah there's a lot of shit like that i mean you're just like fuck like these guys and some of them were like they would take everything too it was like all the anabolics then you know amphetamines like in the 70s with amphetamines you know they're doing cocaine on on like the heavy days like ephedra like everything it was just like one story they told me

uh the bulgarian team found out it's so weird found out that that the Russian team was injecting vitamin E into their penises to make them bigger. So they were like, fuck that. Get the vitamin E. We're not going to be fucking beat by these guys. So they're like, that was a thing, right?

So it's just like, imagine. Yeah, right? There was a great fucking photo. Does it work? There's a photo of Max. No, no, no. This is a different one. There's a great photo posted.

I just saw this. The Kazakhstani way of seeing team, they're all standing there in their singlets. But when you look, you're like, they all have a pair of fucking wool socks. Like all of them, there's this package sticking out. Yeah.

There's a famous picture of you. Oh yeah, that one. With me and Cindy at the super training, the old super training at Midtown. The shorts are laying just perfectly. Perfect. Looks like there's like this like tube going down to my knee,

like giant anaconda. Yeah, yeah. But it's, I gotta find it for you. It's crazy crazy it's like the perfect outline too maybe you're excited about the meat i love it it's a good day so the vitamin e doesn't work yeah i don't know i mean apparently it did they just tell me also i mean they had so many crazy stories like that where it's just like this hyper competitive like every yeah yeah that might be yeah look if you just like

let your eyes let your eyes drift down to like hip height and it's just like that dude on the left in the middle there he's tucked that singlet back he's really emphasizing not everybody in there in the middle with the thumbs up he's fully aroused right he's fully erect

yeah also also one of the most awkward photos i've ever seen the weirdest like yeah for so many reasons you would never see an american football team posing like this right right just like the weird like thumbs up you know i love it yeah that's funny take us on out of here andrew sure thing thank you everybody for checking out today's podcast. For everything podcast related, make sure you guys head over to PowerProject.live. Make sure you guys like today's video and drop a comment down below. Let us know what you guys think about today's episode. Subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already.

And please follow the podcast at MBPowerProject on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndrewZN. Simo, where you at? Discord's down below. Devil PussyMugs on the website. AtNsimaYinYing on Instagram, YouTube, atNsimaYinYing on TikTok, Twitter, Max, Joanne, where can people find you guys?

You can find me on Instagram, Max underscore Ada, or you can check out WayFting.ai. On Instagram, JoanneAda7. You'll probably never figure out how to spell that, but that's okay. We'll link it down and then our uh our website is teamada.com team a-i-t-a.com awesome thank you guys so much

appreciate it thanks for having us good catching up with you guys for the smelly tip of the day i'm stealing one from max aida do it perfectly or do it whatever way you can he said it in a lifting sense of lift it perfectly or lift it whatever way you can. He said it in a lifting sense of lift it perfectly or lift it whatever way you can, but I think it's a good life motto. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.