Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 112 - Ian Danney

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

Ian Danney is the owner and founder of Optimum EFX, a supplement company, and Performance Enhancement Professionals (PEP), a full-service training facility at Optimum EFX Formulations, LLC in Scottsdale, AZ. Having over 20 years of training experience, Ian strives to put forth products that will maximize performance and increase recovery for athletes by testing out different formulas by combining research-based ingredients in a controlled setting to ensure that the formulas actually work. Get 20% off Amino Matrix: https://OptimumeFx.com/PowerProject Rewatch the live stream: https://youtu.be/MiFJGn0Ur4M ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

All right, Mark, we're good to go. Where are we going? I don't know where you guys want to go. Did we get a guest? Were you guys able to afford a guest this time? Was it in the budget? It was in the notes up there I wrote down for you. Oh, this guy.

All right. Awesome to have you here today. We're here today with Ian Danny. And Ian's somebody that I learned about through Charles Poliquin and just been talking shop with him for the last couple weeks, months, I guess you'd say. And in preparation for my bodybuilding show, he set me up with some of his amino acids. They're essential amino acids that I utilize during training sessions instead of kind of the typical branch chain amino acids that I utilized during training sessions instead of kind of the typical branch chain amino acids. And so just kind of getting in conversation with Ian, I started to learn that

he knows a lot more about training than I do. I was like, holy shit, this guy knows a thing or two about a thing or two. And so I'm really excited to have you here today and start to talk some shop with you. So those of you that are listening and you like the information to be dumbed down, some of this is going to probably fly over your head here and there, but hang with us. We'll do the best we can to explain it in some simple terms. First off, Ian, why don't you kind of start out by telling us about your facility that you have in Arizona. Yeah, so it's a fully, a full performance training center that has everything there. Steroids?

No steroids. Ah, it's not a full training center. It's not like you're missing some things over there. Yeah, so we do all the strength conditioning training, speed training. Obviously, we do all kinds of therapy, so we fully integrate the therapy into the training. We have medical stuff on site. We even have people that come in and do stem cell injections, IV therapy, all those types of things all sort of in one spot. And a chef on site that makes everyone's meals and kind of control them. And everyone trains in a one-on-one environment.

So there's eight guys in their train. There's eight trainers train. Wow. And, um, do people kind of hang out there all day? Is that kind of the purpose? So you get like maybe multiple training sessions in, you maybe train in the morning and eat and kind of hang out and then get some work done and then maybe train again. It depends.

It depends on the time of year, uh, how close you are at training camp, which I've going on is will dictate a lot of that. Uh, it also depends on how beat up you are because sometimes you need to stick camp, which I've going on will dictate a lot of that. It also depends on how beat up you are because sometimes you need to stick around all day just to get work done. You know, you've got guys that are 14, 15, 16-year veterans, and they're pretty beat up, and they need a lot of work. So they can be there a long time. Yeah. that you've seen in the last couple of years be one of the, um, one of the kind of leading reasons why people are able to have a longer career than maybe, uh, five, six, seven years ago. Um, guys like James Harrison, who you've been working with for a long time,

guys like Tom Brady, what do you think is, is one of the major factors? Well, I think the biggest factor is just taking care of your body. And so I tell people all the time, what matters a ton and the older you get, it becomes even more important is what you do in the other 21 or 22 hours a day when you're not training. And so when you dial that in from all perspectives, from what are your recovery techniques like, what are your sleep habits like, what are your, what's your therapy like, all those different types of things. And you work as hard on those things as you do on your training sessions. That is the key to extending your career and having a long career for sure. So making sure you're getting proper sleep and I mean, all these hydration and

the different foods that you're consuming throughout the day. Absolutely. And also integrating that therapy into the training approach. So the line between therapy and training can be quite blurred in a high-performance athlete, especially in an older one. And just understanding how to use that to get the best out of your training and then understanding how much training really needs to be done. You've got to find the right number, not the maximal number to do that. And you have to use all these other things that we're talking about, supplements, therapy, all these types of things to not allow you to do more training, but to actually do less and get more out of it. Yeah.

And that's where some of the mobility stuff is going to come in. And some of the other therapy that you do, you do like, I mean, it's probably doesn't make sense to just call active release therapy because it's probably so much more than that at this point. Probably evolved into a lot of other things, but all these different therapies are going to allow the athlete and the person that you're working on to move in a more efficient way. And ultimately that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about how to be more efficient. Well, absolutely. We want to make sure that the tissues are able to perform. And we just want to eliminate that as a limiting factor. Especially

in sports that are very cyclic in nature. So running football, those types of things, as opposed to like a cyclic sport, which would be just say a one rep squat or something. It's important in that too, but you really have this component where the tissue quality becomes extremely important because it's so elastic the nature of what you're doing and so um i guess the easiest way to explain that is to uh give you an example so if i'm going to tap my finger on this table like this and i want to tap it as hard as i can as fast as i can i can get stronger and i can do this and i can get my mind prepped and use my nervous system to just snap this thing and go as hard as i can but at the end of the day i'm never going to be able to go as hard or as fast as if i can do this and load that thing and use the elastic

work of doing that yeah makes a lot of sense yeah there's a, there's a lot of training that goes into that component. But also if you think about this loading mechanism, if you think about this being like an elastic band, what happens to that elastic band just came out of the fridge? Wouldn't be that effective. And a lot of guys have tissue that it's like it just

came out of. Or out of the microwave. There you go. There you go. And so our aim is to get the tissues ready to do this stuff really well. And then the nutrition must be a big factor. We hear a lot of people talking about, you know, inflammation and, you know, how this can affect us negatively. How do you get these guys up to speed on the diet and what style of diet do you have a lot of people following?

A lot of people are on modified ketogenic diets, mainly because a lot of people that I deal with already have some issues that could be dealt with by keto, whether that be poor insulin sensitivity, high fasting glucose. You'd be surprised some of these big guys, what their blood work looks like. And they already are at or above the mass that they want to be at. So they don't necessarily need to have the carbohydrates to do that. So getting them fat adapted quickly and getting that insulin sensitivity is a great way to get the inflammation down quickly. So that's usually the first approach. Every guy gets assessed individually, but for a lot of guys, that's what they're using.

And that's interesting too, because these are athletes. These are people that are very active, but their insulin resistance has built up over the years, maybe just from poor eating habits. Yeah, poor eating habits. I mean, a lot of the guys that I deal with come from pretty modest backgrounds, and they grew up eating what they can eat. Then they go to college, and they stuff them full of carbohydrates, carbohydrates, carbohydrates. And it's not uncommon for a guy to get to meet even second or third year in the league, and we're seeing fasting blood glucose levels at 100, hemoglobin A1c at 5.8. Yeah. You know, all types of crazy things.

Pretty diabetic, basically. Exactly. That's insane. globin a1c at 5.8 yeah you know all all types of crazy things pre-diabetic basically exactly you know that's that's insane you know that's a that's a professional athlete somebody moves around a lot yeah yeah absolutely just goes to show how much diet plays a role as opposed to exercise in a lot of those factors and again if we're talking about efficiency how efficient are you going to be when your breast and glucose is that way, right? Right. And if you can improve their insulin resistance through a pathway of something like ketogenic diet, then you can kind of reset these athletes and then you can bring carbohydrates back in for certain times a year and for certain training, right? Absolutely. It becomes that much

more effective. Absolutely. and even when it's a person who sometimes needs to gain weight but they're already sloppy i'll tell them i said no we've got you're gonna have to lose a few pounds first that's unfortunately what's gonna happen we've got to get your insulin sensitivity right first and then we can start to put on some mix then you can put on real good weight because guy and sometimes guys ignore that advice and inevitably what happens is they end up putting on the weight. Next thing you know, their knees are sore. They're beat up all the time. They all send inflammation. I told you, you know, it doesn't work like that. Yeah. All this stuff takes a lot of time. You know, it takes time and you gotta, yeah, sometimes you gotta take

a few steps back before you're able to go forward. What was your experience as an athlete? You were a bobsledder. How did you end up learning so much about the body and learn so much about training? Was it through a lot of trial and error of your own? A lot of it through trial and error. A lot of it through necessity. I mean, necessity is the mother of invention.

When you're not getting things done, you have to try and keep changing and find them. Bumping into good people along the way and just a lot of trial and error. But I think one of the things that I really learned, a couple of key points is that the overarching thing in all this, whether it's the supplements, whether it's training, whatever it is, it's grit and grind. You know, the most talented guys are almost never the guys that are at the top. It's not easy. It's about work. It's about overcoming your fears. It's about showing up every day and

doing all those types of things. Consistency. I'm sure there must have been many, many people who come through your facility that have had extraordinary talent, but none of us would know who, what their names are. That's absolutely right. Right. And then the guys that stick it out, like a James Harrison who has a combination of talent and just grit.

And I think he's been actually like dropped by the Pittsburgh Steelers, like four, three or four times, you know, like, so I mean, that guy's, that guy's got a lot of tenacity.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And quite frankly, for me, the guys who are the undrafted free agents that go from that to Pro Bowl, those are the best testimonies you can have. Those are the people other guys in the locker room take more seriously. Not that they don't take other people seriously, but when you take like the number one overall draft pick and you make him special, people just don't look at that the same way

as when it's just what in their mind is a scrub to do that. But it just goes to show that multiple things go into that. But a big part of it is work ethic, application of that, and just using your brain to help you optimize things as opposed to maximize them, you know? How'd you get into bobsledding it's kind of an unconventional thing did you start out with track yeah i was a track guy i got into bobsledding in a similar way that most guys get into bobsledding is you come this

realization that you're not going to the olympics and track and field you're just not as fast as you were okay but maybe you're really good at accelerating and have no top end speed kind of like me and um so they're usually recruiting you and they'd been recruiting me for a little bit. And I was kind of reluctant at first, but then it got to a point where I wasn't going to get a job. And so I went to, I went to Bob's head and things went really well.

And it fit me because I was strong relative to my body weight and I had to just gain more weight. And all the components of running or that were acceleration based, I was really good at. It was the sort of the top speed is where the really good guys would leave me behind. And that bobsled eliminated that for me. So that worked out well. How much does a bobsled weigh? Well, the, there's a weight limit for the sled and the crew combined. So to simply answer your question, a two man sled is probably going to weigh about 190 to 200 kilos.

But, um, the way it works is if you and I are going to push a bobsled, it's the combined weight of you and I and the sled to meet our, to meet our weight limit. Right. So if we're going to push against two guys that weigh 80 kilos, they've got to take weight bars and put them in their sled to get up to the weight that we're going to have, because we all want to be the same weight going down. So we're all going fast. Right.

So being bigger helps you push a lighter sled. I gotcha. If that makes sense. Yeah. I remember, uh, they were recruiting Herschel Walker back in the day to do some, uh, do some bobsled. Is this around the time that you, uh, maybe ran

into Charles Bullock when, cause he was into Olympic winter sports, right? Yeah. So we met in 1994. This is a funny story how we met. So I was working with Peer Leaders who ultimately won the Olympic gold in 1998. And he was recruiting me. He brought me down to Calgary. And I was thinking, we're just going down there do some training do some stuff and being the kind of guy he is he just

kind of threw us in oh this is like a testing camp guys we gotta do this and do that so the night before this testing um i met charles he was working with the team and uh we talked about a lot of stuff obviously i knew who he was and we just just talked some shop. I was with another guy at the time. And at this time, I was about 174 pounds. Shit. And the other guy I was with was a tall white guy, probably 225. And so Charles left to go to Montreal and do some other stuff, I think with volleyball, the next day. So someone else put us through the testing. So I went, I did the testing and, uh, at about

170, 475 pounds, I back squat at 500. And so they sent the results to Charles and, uh, Charles said, wait a minute. It's a little skinny black guy, the big white dude that squatted 500 pounds. And they said, no, it's a little skinny black guy. She said, give me his number. And then after that, we just hit it off. We've been together ever since oh cool and uh funny another funny story is

uh shortly after that we're working out back in his garage because he's and he still had all his atlanta stuff set up in his garage right and so you know at this point in time uh i'm still getting those shots pretty well but he was in really good shape back. This is 94. And so he's in there. He's got this old teal green Atlantis preacher curl, and he's doing arm abducted offset grip curls like this with a 95 pound dumbbell. Oh my God. And I'm like, this little midget is strong. I got to start. We got to start finding out what's going on here.

Yeah. He loves funny. Yeah. He loves training his arms. Yeah. He also has like an extraordinary amount of equipment. finding out what's going on here yeah he loves funny yeah he loves training his arms yeah he also has like uh an extraordinary amount of equipment uh brian shaw and myself got a chance to go to his house and he was like yeah i got some weights down here he went down into his uh

like basement and it was just like just an insane amount of equipment down there was nuts i mean he had uh all the atlanta stuff and then he had all the fancy dumbbells and everything. We were like, holy crap. And now he just opened up another gym, I think. Yep, in Colorado Springs. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great little facility.

So he's got his custom-made dumbbells that go up by one kilo. It's either one kilo or a half a kilo at a time from the smallest ones all the way up to 100 kilos. So it's pretty awesome. Yeah, he's obsessed with being able just to, uh, like micro load, micro load the weights, right? Yeah. Um, what are some of the differences, uh, we were talking a little earlier today, um, about the amino acids and, and, you know, a lot of people utilize branch chain amino acids for, um, for their workouts. Um, and, uh, a lot of people utilize branched chain amino acids for their workouts.

And a lot of people have more recently switched to essential amino acids. What's the difference and which one makes more sense? Well, the short answer to your question is the essential amino acids make way more sense. So I've been playing with essential amino acids for about 10 years now. The biggest difference between BCAAs and EAAs is really what they can do. So BCAAs in and of themselves have never been shown to do anything that's useful in terms of stimulating protein synthesis or maximum protein synthesis. And the reason for that is BCAAs are themselves essential amino acids. There are three of the nine essential amino acids. And they got a lot of hype early on because of their ability to help with, you know, as a fuel

for endurance activity. And of course, one of those BCAAs is leucine. And leucine has been shown to be a potent metabolic signal for starting initiating the protein synthesis process. And so people just kind of ran to those. But although it is a fantastic signal, it in and of itself is not enough. So if I can explain it to you by using the example of, say, a gun, okay, leucine, which is one of the, again, one of the band chain amino acids, would be the trigger. And obviously you need the trigger that gets everything started. But once you run out of ammo, you're done. And all these other essential amino acids, that's the ammo. So you need a full complement.

You want to have a slightly leucine rich mixture of these, but you want all of the essential amino acids. And then once you're, you got the signal, you got the ammo, you've got these things going on. You got to remember, we're trying to build a protein. And so we need all of these amino acids to do that. It's not unlike us trying to build a car. So obviously the engine is extremely important, but if we're trying to build 50 cars and we only have 20 engines, having 400 more like left front wheels does not do anything for us, right? We're still limited by that. And that's why you need all of those essential amino acids to, to make that work. And so the, the difference between having that full spectrum and having just the BCAAs is night and day.

And, uh, how, how are you having your athletes utilize, uh, these amino acids? Well, in two ways, the first way is intro workout. So, uh, it's a blend of all the essential amino acids that's BCAA rich. But in addition to that, one of the things that we should talk about as well is how the too much leucine can potentially have negative brain effects for you. And so the three amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, and valine, along with tryptophan and tyrosine are what are called large neutral amino acids. There's a transporter for those that's used to get those across the blood-brain barrier. And so by having huge amounts of BCAAs present without other amino acids, the idea for a lot of people was then you would limit the uptake of tryptophan and lower serotonin and therefore reduce fatigue. But the problem with that reasoning is that you also diminish the transport of tyrosine. And tyrosine is crucial for dopamine production.

So you have the potential to lower neural drive and neurological output and just optimizing all the great things that dopamine do for you if you have these huge amounts of BCAAs with other things there. And if you're using those exclusively, then the amount in that formula is going to be higher. So to ameliorate the potential negative effects of leucine on the brain, we've added some tyrosine, and just in incremental doses trying to use it

and play with them at the facility, found what will help us to do that. Does the L-tryptophan, does it have an effect on the serotonin levels then? Like in a positive way? Well, yes, but if you're using it in an intra-workout window, we're trying to, in some sense, limit that. But we still have to have some amount of tryptophan there. Otherwise, when we go to start building things we are going to be missing parts of that car going back to the

analogy that we have yeah because i know it's it's i've only seen l-tryptophan as a precursor to serotonin and like uh you know like anti-depression type of like nootropics or stuff like that so to have it in a bcaA or amino drink sounds like a really great idea. Yeah. And it's not necessarily there for its brain effects. It's there because again, we're building these cars. We're going to have to have certain amounts of that as well, because we need to be able to put complete cars together. That's incredible.

And then you were mentioning, you know, the people use it like kind of during the workout and then sometimes people have it just kind of throughout the day or at night or. Yeah. So during the workout, we take this, like, so now we've got this essential amino acid mixture and we've got optimized for the ratios. We've added some tyrosine to deal with it. We've got all these stuff going. So then the approach is, okay, this is great, but okay, why be Pippin when we can be Jordan? Let's add some other things in here, right? And so we add some other products to help drive the amino acids. We have some other things that work with neurotransmitter issues. We have things that transport fat into the mitochondria for energy, all these different

types of things to make this whole intra-workout thing. So now we're dealing with enhancing the urea cycle and turning ammonia into urea so we get an endurance effect. We're working with all these things all at once. So that's the process to do this for the intra-workout space. But if you wanted to use essential amino acids, just say with a meal, that's a fantastic thing to do, but you would not, and you could use all those intro workout things as well, but you could also use just a blend of all the essential amino acids and put it in. And so we use both of them and we use them in both phases, especially for people who are not a real big

eaters. And what are, what are some things that you've seen from your athletes? What's kind of impressed you to not only utilize these supplements, but to, you know, go out and make your own and to, you know, to, you were mentioning to me that you source it from various spots. So it's gotta be like difficult to put all this together. It must be a reason why you're going way out of your way to do it. Yeah. Well, it's getting easier now, but, um, the reason is that's we, the effects that we've gotten in terms of reducing muscle soreness have been drastic, you know,

in terms of our ability to eliminate carbs and still be able to maintain, um, fullness. People like eliminate carbs. We want able to maintain fullness. People are like, eliminate carbs? We want to add carbs. How do we add carbs? Yeah, that's what we're looking for. Yeah, there you go. But those are like two of the biggest factors.

But you don't need to rely on a crazy amount of carbohydrate sources to have energy. Absolutely not, yeah. Right. That's huge. And it's also great for killing your appetite. What other supplements have you found to be effective with training a lot of these athletes? Absolutely not. Yeah. That's huge. And it's also great for killing your appetite. What other supplements have you found to be effective with training a lot of these athletes? Well, again, it really depends on what we're trying to do. Sometimes if you have so much pain and inflammation and irritation going on, then we're going to look at things that

can help us deal with that because that's going to unlock what's going to happen with you. But also a big thing is just whatever we can use in a sort of a pre-workout type of way to prime the nervous system. So blending things together, that would be things like alpha-GPC, acetylcholactine, pimpocetine, huperzine, just trying to get a multimodal approach to affecting different mechanisms that would sort of turn on that whole neural drive concept

is something that we're really big on, especially when we have to do explosive output type stuff. Yeah, especially when you're playing Danny ball. Oh, yeah. That's there, and that's a lot of endurance involved in that game, too, yeah. Yeah, what is that game about? Uh, so basically, uh, what it is, it's, uh, two guys on either side of a, uh, a sand volleyball

court. You got a 10 pound medicine ball. You're throwing it back and forth, but you're not playing catch. It's a game. You're trying to get this other person out. And the idea is you can't take steps when you catch the ball. And so you got to beat the ball, beat the ball to where it's going, catch it and get it over.

And you can't change the direction of your shot and stuff like that. And so, uh, yeah, yeah. It's pretty, uh, you can get pretty intense with stuff that you're doing. Yeah. There's a guy right there, Ryan Clark. It's another, uh, undrafted free agent to

pro bowl guy right there. Yeah. And so it is extremely exhausting and it's such a good drill for footwork too, because you essentially have to be able to beat the ball to where it's going, have anticipation doing all these different types of things. And so, and the great part about it is you're out there absolutely torturing yourself and you don't know it. Right. Just having so much fun. And then next thing you know, you're laying there absolutely torturing yourself and you don't know it. Right. Just having so much fun. And then next thing you know, you're laying on the ground in full body cramps. You're like, oh yeah, I guess we're working.

Yeah. It probably kind of starts out as fun and then it probably gets super competitive, especially with the type of people that you have. Oh yeah. Competitive, trash talking. Yeah. We're kind of kicked off so many courts now too from some of the trash talking and stuff. So does everybody that comes into your facility, uh, they get like blood work done and they get like an assessment done and you, you kind of, uh, you know, see how their body

works and see what's going on with their blood and all these different things. Yes. So everybody that comes has the option to do every single thing that we have. Not all of them opt into every option, but for the most part, yeah, we do that. We do blood work and do all that screening and see where they are yeah that's that's really important is to kind of see you know see where these guys are at and then you can make adjustments uh certain guys are going to need more attention to their diet and other guys aren't right there's no reason to like waste a lot

of time on it um when we've had uh charles fuller qu here, you know, he did some weird kind of voodoo stuff to me before the workout. Do you do that to some of the athletes as well? Like give them kind of like almost like a tune up before they hit their training session? We do a tune up before a training session virtually every time. And so I look at every training session as an opportunity to do another assessment. So when the athlete comes in, how are they doing? Like how have they been? How are they recovering? How's their sleep? What's tight today? What's sore? What's going on? What are you feeling? How can we address it? And how

can we cater that warmup activity to fit that? And yes, sometimes that does include doing, you know, some soft tissue work and stuff that you might call voodoo. And I mean, we also do a lot of tempering at the facility too. So, I mean, guys get tempered all the time, pre-workout, post-workout, all that type of stuff. And we utilize whatever we've got to do to get guys ready on that particular day. What about the psychology of all this? You know, these guys have been, they've been in the sport for a really long time. They've been exercising for a really long time and, you know, they're been in the sport for a really long time. They've been exercising for a really long time.

And they're coming in the gym and they're breaking themselves down every single day. How do you help these guys when it comes to the psychology side of things? First of all, there's two different types of guys. Some guys, all I do is slow them down. They're just beast savage or in that mode. And if I don't slow them down, they're just going to overtrain. I'm not going to be able to get the best out of them anyway. Yeah. That's a different type of guy. And they're like a robot. That's just a pre-programmed with this mission to destroy themselves. Exactly. You got to figure out a way to disarm them, right?

That's exactly right. Yeah. And then you have other guys who, you know, they need to be nudged. They need to, to be pushed a little bit more. And, and sometimes quite frankly, they need to be, have some of their lifestyle choices curtailed. Yeah. So that there are more, they're dialed in and ready to be able to do this workouts and have the capacity to do it. You're like, you need more sleep and less strippers. Okay. We, you know, the strippers are fun, but you know, we need to cut that back a little bit. And don't bring her to the workout.

Yeah. But she wants to work on squats. She told me. Yeah. Yeah. The, um, big, big factor, you know, is, is, uh, people get enough rest, right? A lot of these, especially these younger guys, uh, maybe not, uh, fully understanding, you know, what it's going to take to be a pro and make it on the next level. Maybe some of

their natural talent got them there and now they got to train and they got to actually, you know, get to bed at eight, nine o'clock at night, which might be a new thing for them. How do you kind of deal with that as well? Well, I start off by telling all the guys, I say, listen, the most anabolic substance in the world is sleep. God gets sleep. We got to figure this out. Let's get into some. We talk about sleep patterns and routines and how to get into all of them.

We use different products to help them if they need them. But sleep is crucial. I also tell them, tell this to everybody. The best pre-workout you can do is to sleep well for the two nights before you got to do that workout. Hmm. Yeah. Because that's, that's, people don't like to hear that. Like, here, I just want to take this, give me something that's going to wake up, or here we go, shoot this down and go. But the reality

of the situation is, is getting really good sleep two nights before that workout is probably the best pre-workout that you can do. And then most of the pre-workout things you're going to do are going to work better when you're in that state anyway. I think people would be shocked at what, you know, some proper rest and proper supplementation and the right foods, how quickly it can change your blood work. You were mentioning some guys having, you know, reporting some not such great blood work. How fast can you turn some of this stuff around in people? Surprisingly fast. Like the combination of getting sleep patterns right, changing diet, reducing carbohydrates drastically. I mean, fast, fast. I'm talking, we've seen 30-day turnarounds where guys have dropped their fasting glucose from 99 to 82, 83 type of thing that quickly, which is phenomenal. And then we test fasting insulin

a lot because I find that that's a huge thing to look at even more so than the fasting glucose levels. And that's usually slower change, but we've seen guys drop those really quickly as well. Yeah. It's amazing how quickly it can turn around. I think a lot of times people are just thinking, I can't diet or I can't do this, I can't that. Cause it's going to take so long to see results, but it's like the results can happen inside your body really quick. The changes, uh, to the aesthetic sometimes take a little longer. The strength gains can be seen almost on a weekly basis. Is that kind of what you're finding with a lot of your athletes? For sure. You know, as they get into that system where they're recovering better, they're getting less sore, their soft tissue is getting better, all these things happen. The strength just keeps coming up and up and up and it's going.

And it's amazing because sometimes when they're just first getting on to trying to become either keto adapted or moving more towards that, you would think that they would get less strong. But with all the other things put in, they're not. Their strength is going up and up and up. How are you dealing with their mindset during these training sessions? Because some of the things I'm seeing you have these guys go through seems to be brutal. And then I hear you kind of just making fun of them. Is that kind of your way of, like, does that work with everybody or you got to

kind of strategize for each individual guy? It works with a lot of them, but you gotta, you definitely gotta strategize. Every once in a while, someone's real sensitive, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, I always tell people this, you got to find things that people are able to work hard on and make them work hard. It's not, if a guy is just not a squatter, you're not going to get much out of him by,

by trying to destroy him with squats. But if he can do something else well, that is comfortable that, and you can destroy him with that, then you can get better gains. And even if it might not be something that would be an inferior mode of exercise, if it's something that he's willing to really go hard on, you'll probably get better results out of using that. So that's, that's part of the selection too. Well, and these athletes are just on a different level than your average person anyway, right? So if they got to do a leg press,

uh, instead of a squat or they got to do, uh, whatever it might be a lunge or whatever it might be, uh, that's different than a deadlift or whatever. They're going to respond super fast probably anyway, right? Yeah, they do respond super fast. So some of the guys, um, I'm sure you see this in powerlifting too, where you have some guys who they don't look the part, but they just pull insane weights and they're just strong. You see it all the time. You have guys that are just, their nervous systems are so well wired, you know?

And, but I find with those guys, I call them motor geniuses. Okay. They're a double-edged sword because they're awesome and they can get strong deal as training, but they're also incredible compensators. So when they have like little technique things that are wrong and problems that are off, it's so hard to get them to fix because they're so good at compensating and figuring these things out and then getting ridiculously strong and efficient in that compensation. Even though you're looking at this and thinking this could be some problems down the line,

you know? Yeah. This is referred to as retard strength. That's what this is. These are the kind of people that when you turn your back on them for just a second, they could blow everything apart. Yeah. Like you're like, oh, how'd the exercise go?

And they're like holding their hamstring. You're like, what happened? They're like, oh, I pulled my hamstring. You're like, I was just watching you 10 seconds ago. What'd you do? Yeah. But they're so powerful. They're so strong.

They can just kind of blow everything all apart all at one time. Yeah. And then the thing about that too, is when you look at the old, old gross overall movement of more complex movement, things that they have to do, sometimes the hardest part is looking at something and saying, okay, is that some type of idiosyncrasy that's been adapted that makes them really good at what they do? Or is that really a mechanical problem that I need to worry about fixing? Because the last thing you want to do is undo an adaptation that has made them really, really good. Yeah.

You're not sure if it's a genetic mutation that makes them better. Cause I mean, some guys, uh, some guys are like really pigeon toed, you know, both toes are pointing right at each other. They can barely walk. Their knees are knocking together and then they get timed in a 40 and they run a four two and you're like, uh, you're like, I can't make any sense of that. Meanwhile, you were trying to have them point their feet straight or, or whatever the case may be.

Right. Absolutely. Right. And that's part of the problem with trying to do an assessment, you know, and a lot of people, a lot of the assessment tools that are out there, they're really good at testing what you can't do and not testing what you can do, you know, and simple movement screens, like some of the best guys are the worst on those movement screens.

Right. You know, and then the other thing is a lot of the movement screens that don't have any significant amount of speed and load. These motor genius type guys, they get better with speed and load, not worse. So when you test them on a really basic static movement and they look, ah, that's not so great, but then you test them in a real world stuff where there is a lot of speed and load and they actually get better. You're scratching your head. You're like, how is that possible? But there are guys, these super wired guys that are like that. I started training when I was like 12. And I

remember I was probably about 16 or so. And, uh, we were squatting in a high school, uh, weight room. And, um, one of my brother's friends he's a little older he's probably like a senior and um you know i was in comparison to the other kids in the school i was pretty much the strongest kid and so like when we deadlifted and bench pressed and stuff i'd always destroy that most of them but when it came to squatting i wasn't a very proficient squatter but i could still outlift most you know this one kid is a huge kid great genetics and uh he and i are squatting and i'm trying to show him i'm like oh you're only going like quarter of the way down you know and he's like i'll just i'll go down further like when i get more weight

on there and i'm thinking these squats are terrible like is these squatting highs knees are coming in like this is this is just uh just horrible backs rounding over and everything but we kept going up and weight and I think I did like three plates and maybe a little bit more and then he went on to do like four plates and when he got five plates on there he he squats quarter of the way down and he goes all the way like ass to the floor and he looks at me and he's like is this about how low i should go and then he proceeded to do like four or five reps you know just like a genetic anomaly here i was training and working my ass off and and uh training every day and trying to learn the proper form proper technique and here's this guy you know just banging out reps with five plates here's

not keyboard warrior back then exactly yeah i was a uh in in-person keyboard yeah um some of these athletes they're they're at the elite level that you're working with they've probably been groomed to be pro since like junior high and whatnot and then eventually it comes to fruition they become millionaires um is it hard to work with some of these high profile athletes like such like maybe like egos or something like that uh yes and no it's not hard in the sense that you'd think that uh that they're all dicks or anything like that it's not at all like uh but you do have to understand that let's say i've got you know it's precamp, we have 40 guys in town getting

ready for camp. So you have 40 millionaires who basically are pretty much all alpha males and they think they should get what they want whenever they want it. And so you're definitely managing egos. There's no doubt about it. Um, and it's sometimes it gets tiresome trying to manage the egos, but, uh, for the most part, if you approach it right, it's doable. And there, uh, also it's, I'm in a situation where they're coming to me, so it's not like I've been forced to be there. Um, which that makes it easier. And then once you get buy-in, guys will accept a lot of things. That's a key concept. You just have to get, get their trust, make some gains with them so they feel things and then once they buy in

you know it's a lot easier to manage that stuff and you did mention it's like one coach per yep person too right yeah i think um probably the thing that would you know be the most worrisome or give you the most anxiety would be you know you show up to this facility everybody's working out and the music's loud and everyone's all fired up and, and they're having these great workouts. The anxiety would be shit. Maybe I'm not going to get mine in today. Cause you know, everybody like there's people squatting and you're supposed to like, you might kind of think like, oh, people are in the way, but if you probably slow people down and say, Hey man, done with the other guy focuses now on you. you. We're going to be working together. I'm going to make sure you get a good workout no matter what.

Right. For sure. It's always like that. So it's slotted and it's scheduled and it's always one trainer, one athlete. And so there isn't that issue. It's a matter of, well, I want this therapy at this time. Well, that can't happen today. You know, stuff like that.

Yeah. That could be problematic because as you climb the ladder, you want more shit that, that, uh, it gets more and more complicated. Yeah, no doubt. And the more you realize it works and you want it more and more, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then you're getting the therapy all the time.

Um. We call them therapy whores. Well, you get addicted to it. You get addicted to like the foam roller and getting work done. And like, it yeah it definitely feels a lot better than sitting in the damn squat rack all day right yeah yeah there was a couple people asking on the the live stream like basically can you overstretch before workout absolutely you could overstretch before workout yeah and so the the pre-workout stuff it doesn't

necessarily have to be stretching it doesn't have to be stretching that mobilizes that soft tissue. For the most part, I don't believe in stretching that does not have a soft tissue component associated with it. Because most people are not going to get the effect they want from that muscle because it's already too matted up and congested to be properly stretched. two matted up, congested, three properly stretched. But if you do some, some type of soft tissue component to loosen it up and then use some stretching, you have fantastic effects with that. And so. An example would be like, um, let's say, uh,

you're trying to loosen up your, uh, your lower back and you go to stretch, but all you feel is your hamstrings. Like you just do the traditional, like you toe touch, right? And you're like, that's all I feel is my, I'm not even feeling my lower back. So now if you would take a minute and do some work on your hamstrings, let's say foam roll or just roll around on a softball or whatever. If you took a second to work on your hamstrings, then when you go to stretch your lower back, it might be more effective.

That's kind of some of the stuff you're talking about. You're trying to get some of these kind of sliding surfaces to slide and move better so that whatever it is you're trying to actually hit, you're actually stretching. Because I know for me, like if I try to stretch certain things, I have to get into other muscle groups just to even stretch that muscle in the first place. Absolutely, for sure. So getting warm and getting loosened up. I have to get into other muscle groups just to even stretch that muscle in the first place. Absolutely. For sure. So getting warm and getting loosened up.

So those, so exactly those sliding surfaces are moving and everything's working independently and you can, you can get that stretch better. Right. Tempering works great for that, by the way. Temper your, temper your quads and stretch them out. It's a big difference. Just put a ton of weight on them, basically. Yeah. Just the Donnie thompson stuff just get a big cylinder roll them and get them get them crushed out and then do some

stretching on it's it's fantastic yeah you need some uh kind of heavy weight for that though too right like uh i guess it depends on the person but uh you know 30 40 pounds something like that right 130 pounds there you go yeah yeah so we've got probably 12 different type of tempering devices various weights we've kind of put handles on some of them to make them like rolling pins because if you're doing that all day long it's really heavy rolling the 135 around right all types of different things for sure i saw you know some of your athletes uh you know kind of hands on their knees and just dying during the workout and you uh referring to that as an Academy Award. Yeah.

Cause they, they start to learn. Which I thought was great. Just wearing it. Yeah. Yeah. They start to learn the little techniques and, you know, so what, there's one guy in particular who will remain nameless, always use the, uh,

the technique if you have to tie his shoe up. So you'd undie, tie his shoe. Oh, that's the best. So what we started doing is. I love that technique. Look at that. It almost fell right out of my shoe. I'm working so hard.

There you go. So we got smart. So what we did, as soon as he got in his cleats, we duct taped over the stuff, locked his laces in so he couldn't use that. And it was such a habit. He would stop and go down and then realize, oh crap. My shoes are taped up.

I need to tie them up. That's amazing. Yeah. I, I, uh, you know, in our gym here at super training, I try to make sure that, especially when I'm seeing people warm up, um, I try to make sure they're not wearing it, you know, like just getting this crazy tense face and they're squatting like two plates, but it's somebody that can very easily squat five plates or six plates, you know? And I think we have a tendency to think that stuff's going to hurt worse than it is, or,

but a lot of times the, the face that we're making is going to be a lot of the feedback that we're giving to our body. And so it's like, Hey, let's, let's save that painful face for when things actually get painful, when things actually get to our body. And so it's like, Hey, let's, uh, let's save that painful face for when things actually get painful when things actually get to be hard. Yeah. And some days that's part

of your assessment. You realize, okay, we got to do a whole lot more to get ready today than we would on another day. So let's do it. And you know, it's the old concept of if you give me an hour to cut down a tree, I'm going to spend 55 minutes sharpening the X. And so you got to take that approach into the workouts too. Like you have to be ready. Everything has to be prepared, firing, going all the way back to the night before and all these different types of things to get ready for that workout. Right. And that's, that's what I like to do. I like to, you know, a try to make sure that I get enough sleep, uh, B make sure I wake up early enough to feel good for the, if it's going to be a morning session, you know, I'll, I'll wake up two hours before the training session to make sure that I eat

and make sure I kind of just, I'm just awake. Just, you know, I'm lively when I come to the gym and I don't, I don't need to do a bunch of warmup. I can just start with whatever I can just start with whatever I want. Cause I already kind of prepped myself mentally, physically. I feel good coming through the door. So it's not like I need, you know, an hour to foam roll and, you know, run around with a sled or whatever it might be. Do you ever chart that stuff? You know what? Years ago, I used to spend a lot more time with some warm-up stuff.

And I found that the thing that works the most, the thing that works the best for me, uh, is usually just to come in and take the movement that I'm going to do and just start moving on it. Um, it is important when it gets colder out for me to actually get warm though. I noticed that. So, uh, in the colder months, uh, I will probably move around with a sled. I'll utilize the hip circle. I'll make sure my body temperature's up, make sure my heart rate's up, and then I'll kind of get into, uh, the workout. But, um, I also kind of have like a, I get annoyed if I'm, I get annoyed if, if I'm not like into my workout kind of quick, you know? So that for, for me, I get kind of frustrated.

I'm like, shit, man, I, you know, we've been going at it for 15 minutes and I'm nowhere with my workout. I kind of get like, uh, almost like an anxiety about it. You know, I want to get some stuff done almost before my body really realizes exactly what's going on within reason though within reason of like you know i'm making sure that elbows are warm enough and knees are warm enough you know i'm not going to hurt myself but i always like that kind of aspect of like jumping on it quick and uh my nervous system and stuff will uh get kind of woken up as i go quick and, uh, my nervous system and stuff will, uh, get kind of woken up as I go. And I don't have any problem with taking the same weight

multiple times. I mean, I could, I could, uh, hang out with 135 for five or six sets. Sometimes it just kind of depends on the day. Right. So you're doing a day-to-day assessment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to get a little feel for it. And, you know, some days you unrack that weight and for whatever reason, it feels a hundred pounds heavier. Yep. And other days you unrack it and it feels a hundred pounds lighter. Yeah, for sure. Um, what I've noticed too is, uh, when something feels good and this might be something that

you may have recognized in your own training or training other people, um, when something feels good, just keep, just stick with it. You know, there's really no reason, like, you know, you had, had it set recognized in your own training or training other people. Um, when something feels good, just keep, just stick with it. You know, there's really no reason, like, you know, you had, had it set out in your head that you want to do three sets or four sets or five sets. There's no, uh, law that says you can't do seven sets, eight sets, nine sets, 10 sets, 12 sets, 15 sets. If it's feeling good, just keep, keep riding out. Now, if it's not feeling good, it might be wise to move on to another exercise so you can lift another day, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You got to pick and choose. And sometimes it's you need to walk away. Right. I see some really skilled coaches do this sometimes too where they're working with an athlete and they're working them through and he's having some problems and they're, they're tuning them up and they're getting them right. And they spent like an hour literally trying to get them going. And he finally is hitting stuff and he's doing, and we usually see this more with running

activities and sprinting and things of that nature. And then at the end of the whole day, it's like, okay, he's run better, but like, uh, he's sort of, he was able to run and he looked good better, but the stopwatch wasn't really any different. It wasn't like it was that improved. So when I asked them about it, like, well, you know, we were seeing these mechanical changes and this is happening. He's doing this better and he's freer and all these different things are going on. I'm like, well, yeah, but the watch hasn't changed. Well, it's, it's a fatigue. It's this, it's that. And like, well, then maybe you should have just rested them to begin with then if it's a fatigue thing. Right. So you can,

sometimes you can overthink things and overdo stuff and not realize that it's just rest. You just need rest. This is what you're seeing is fatigue and what you're feeling is fatigue. And sometimes you just got to stop. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing worse than feeling tired and that's, you know, going to that bodybuilding show. That was something that became, you know, very real to me was like it almost didn't matter how much sleep I got to a certain point because I just got wiped out. Like I was just energy levels were just they were just low. And that was just because I've never done anything like that before. I've never. And, you know, uh, is coaching me remotely.

So it's not like he's with me all day or, uh, it's not like we're in such constant contact that he's, you know, overseeing every move. And so, uh, for a few days there, I was like, oh shit. I was like, wow, I need to get, I need to get, I had come in and lift and I'm like, I need to get more sleep and it didn't help. And the fatigue was so bad that it was, uh, even several days after, but this was just for a really short period of time. I mean, this was about, this is probably like about a five day span, but I was

like, wow. Like I just, I didn't feel like moving. I didn't feel like doing anything, much less trying to work out. Um, but the day of the show and everything, everything kind of normalized because I got brought some food back in, brought some carbs back in. Um, but yeah, I mean, fatigue is, uh, is a real, is a real thing and you gotta be, you gotta be up, you know, you gotta be up on it and you gotta be paying attention to it. Yeah, for sure. Fatigue makes cowards, cowards of us all. Yeah. Yeah. That's a legendary saying from, uh, lombardi what have you uh kind of noticed with the mindset of some of these guys that you're training uh over the years um kind of not just from like an athletic standpoint but just in a general sense of like what makes these guys

successful obviously uh there's genetic potential becomes a huge factor when talking about being a professional athlete. But what are some of the nuanced things that you've seen that make these guys what they are? Well, one of the biggest things is they're fearless. So in terms of some of the little hangups that lesser athletes, just everyday guy that or that we might have in different aspects of our life. They don't, that the sort of the fear of failure, it's, it's not there to the same extent.

It's, it's go, it's take advantage of these opportunities. It's, um, and usually the backgrounds that they come from kind of force that as well. But that, that's a big factor.

Just being fearless and doing that. And I think also, uh, just rushing into getting stuff done, even if it means, you know, you're going to fail. It's almost like the faster you can fail, the faster you can figure out what caused you to fail, fix it and go again. But as long as you fear getting to that point, you're not going to be able to have success. And I think that really, whether they, most of them don't even realize that they have that mindset, but they totally do have that mindset.

And so that makes them a little bit kind of risk takers, but risk takers in a good way. I mean, that's a huge factor. And the other thing is just focus, being able to have a focus that where you can dial out distractions and really zone in and get stuff done. And it's amazing. It's got to be tough for them to drown out the noise, you know? Oh, for sure. Because they have so many people pushing and pulling everybody from family to other people and different things but it's amazing even some of the guys that are like such bad add that when you're talking to him you're like how does guy when he

gets into that mode of doing his thing it's amazing how focused they are and i'm like dude if we could get you like this for all the rest of this stuff you know you'd be like on fire but they just have this uh innate ability to be able to do that like those are the probably the two biggest things yeah i think uh you know just wanting to get stuff done and uh kind of diving into things and figuring out a way to make the decision correct uh after after it's already been made is, is kind of the fun part. Uh, you just, this is what we're doing and you're, uh, you know, a couple of weeks into that process and you're, you're working on it. And ultimately I think what that does is it, it, when you're trying to be a winner, it makes you make that decision. Correct. How are you going to make that decision? Right.

you make that decision correct. How are you going to make that decision right? And the decision may not have been that good of a decision. You know, the, the, uh, investment that you made or the product that you tried to make or the new thing that you're trying to do, um, it might not be great, but can you make it right? And I think that's kind of the fun of it is that you kind of put it out there and you're going to like, uh, let's see, let's see how we can make it right. And if you have a team around you, if you have other people helping you, which may be the case with some of these guys, they're going to figure out a way to make it right by the time the product comes out or by the time, whatever it is that they're trying to produce.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great mindset to have now a lot of people don't know you know when whenever we get uh successful coaches on here um you know we don't always get a chance to talk like business but let's let's shift gears a little bit and uh we'll shift away from the performance stuff and talk about your business so i'm sure like it didn't start out as like, I I'm going to, you know, train, you know, 20 plus NFL athletes or 30 or 40 plus NFL athletes and, uh, all these kinds of rich and famous athletes. And I'm going to work my way to this situation.

It probably didn't necessarily start out that way, but it kind of evolved into this and you grew along with the business. I'm sure you, um, your business you grew along with the business. I'm sure you, um, your business sense has grown with the business. Now you're making, uh, supplements. Um,

you mentioned that your facility does everything, the blood work and all these different things that that's probably taken decades to get to where you're at now. Right. And, um, where did some of this start? Like what was the very beginning of all this in terms of you being like a trainer or coach?

Well, as far as business goes, I've made some terrible business decisions to recover from. Essentially, uh. It's going to be hard to recover from this. Yeah. So I just kind of looked at it in terms of, I knew that I didn't necessarily have the right business mindset, but I also knew just from a thought process and from my experience that if I just did it, one thing, I got one guy in front of me now, I need to turn him into a freak. He needs to explode. Other people need to see it happen. And then the rest will come. And when they come, I got to repeat the process, the same thing over and over and be just focused on that individual that I have in front of me, what I can do right now. And I figured everything else would take care of itself.

I just want everybody to kind of hone in on that. Like he just said, he just, the main thing was for him to be good at his job, basically, you know, in short. And I think that's a great, that's a great spot to start. Okay. I'm really proficient at my job. I took this guy who came to me who wanted to be better and I made him better. And now there's other people around that saw it.

And, uh, someone from that group is going to say, well, I want you to make me better too. Right. And that's the idea, right? Yeah. That's, that's exactly what happened. And I, you know, working with a lot of amateur athletes, um,

they're phenomenal people and they're ridiculously great athletes. You'd be surprised how awesome these guys are, but they don't have the funds to pay you. So a lot of the stuff that you do in the beginning with that type of stuff, at least the way it was in my career, you're not being compensated. Andrew, you hear that?

At all. Yeah, I hear it. Yep. Andrew talks about that all the time. Like, actually, Andrew, the way that we met is he came to the gym, and he was like, hey, I was just curious if it's okay if I snap some pictures. And I'm like, shit, that'd be great. And it was just him, you know.

He liked bodybuilding, he liked powerlifting. And he just kind of wanted to be around it, but he was, you know, he, he, he liked, uh, bodybuilding, like powerlifting and, um, he just kind of wanted to be around it, but he was, you know, uh, going around to some different places and different people and doing some stuff for free. That's how you get recognized. That's how you get noticed. Yeah, for sure. And, um, I just, uh, well, one of the things that kind of catapulted me, it was quite funny

is that, uh, one of the guys I was working with, I was, uh, he was decathlete and I was obviously training for track stuff and doing all the strength conditioning, doing the whole everything. But, and he was a relatively mediocre decathlete, but he made a massive transformation in his performance and his look and all this type of stuff. And, um, he basically came from a small town and in that small town, one of the guys came out of the small town was a phenomenal hockey player. And he went back home on a summer. The dude looked at him. He's like, what have you been doing? So he told him about me. He started working with him. I started working with him. He kind of made the same type of

transition. And he went to training camp with the Vancouver Canucks the next year, and a bunch of guys in that locker room said, what have you done? And it just kind of grew like that from one thing to the next. And then with all the speed work background that I had, once that started happening with football, that was a great transition for me because there were just so many more things that I could help with.

And it was just a matter of, um, keeping that same attitude of, okay, I know I got a lot to learn. I want to be humble. I want to try and just keep learning, keep adding on, keep making sure I'm doing this right. And just do the best I can do for who's in front of me right now. And let that be my testimony and let that attract everything else. So marketing, well, I never did any of it. I mean, so that and just being blessed, I guess. And the aesthetics probably play a huge role into it. I mean, seeing someone be faster that you're playing with or against, obviously that's going to be a factor.

And in hockey and some of these physical sports, feeling that someone's stronger, like, oh shit, okay, this guy took his off season serious. But without even being able to see anything on a court or on an ice rink, if somebody's just more jacked, that's a really clear thing, right? And so the aesthetic side of things, I'm sure, factors in there as well, right? For sure. And sometimes the aesthetic is, obviously plays into the performance. Right. Charlie Francis used to say, if it looks right, it flies right. And so sometimes you just, guys come

back and they're changed. You're like, wow, now you look like you can run or just right away. What was the guy on the Arizona Cardinals? He's got like, I think Charles worked with him a lot. He just got him insanely jacked. What was the guy's name? David Boston you're talking about. David Boston. Andrew, you ever see David Boston?

I'm going to look it up right now. Oh my God. I trained David for a long time. It was like Jay Cutler running down the field. Yeah, he was a monster. Have you been out in Arizona most of this time? I've been out in Arizona since 2003. Prior to that, I was in Edmonton, Alberta.

Yeah. And then, so nowadays, do you kind of run the day-to-day operations of your facility or you have like a manager or you got somebody helping with the business side of things, or is it pretty much just all you? Well, I got a great team of people that helped me in terms of the training and the therapy and all those types of stuff. Uh, in terms of the business side of things, I'm building that team. So I'm doing way too much work there to be perfectly honest that I should be doing. It's kind of a process to do that, but that's the, the good and the bad of what I did is the good is what we

talked about, how just working to get good at your job and doing that. The bad is, is being so hyper-focused on that, that you did not stepping back, stepping away from the business to work on the business rather than in the business. And so that's been a transition that I've been trying to make over the last couple of years and, uh, it's getting better, but if there's a spot that we're lacking, that's definitely where it is. Yeah. You know, I've had a friend of mine, um, years ago and, and these were all things that I, these were all things that I kind of knew anyway, um, just from talking to other trainers and coaches over the years. Um, and so I took the mindset into, uh, some of the products that we've created here at Slingshot. And I,

I've always known that there, there would have to be, I'd have to step back, you know, from certain things. But a friend of mine asked me probably about two or three years ago. Um, and I've been setting things in place from that time, but it's a morbid thought, but he's like, he's like, dude, what would happen if you died tomorrow? You know? and that's, that's a great thing for any business person, uh, or just even just forget about business person. Just people should walk through that process. Uh, anyway, um, if you have anything to leave behind, whether it's your job, an invention, children, a loved one, anything, you should really think about that.

What does that look like if you're just wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow uh because you got no car accident or or whatever these are all things that suck to think about um but you do need to think about it and the more people that you're responsible for the the more thought that needs to go into it so for me i have a wife and kids and then then I got, you know, an army here of like 20 people or so. So what does that look like? You know, it's, um, it's almost unfair to them and an injustice to how much time I spent building this company. If I don't take the time, cause it won't take that long, you know, it'll probably take, uh, I don't know,

maybe a week, a week's worth of time to kind of figure out like what would happen to all this shit if I was to blow up. Right. Um, or, or my wife, you know, we kind of own, we run the business together and it's again, it's horrible thoughts, but, um, you don't want things just to dissolve, you know, when you're, when you're not around and you don't want things to, uh, uh, go against some of your desires and the stuff too. So it's like, you know, yeah, what the hell would happen? And so my friend kind of put that question on me years ago. And since that time, that's, uh, I've been working on, uh, having a lot of things in place, uh, all the

way to the point where like, you know kind of smaller things i deleted my social media so i don't see you know some of the parts that suck of that is like i don't always see like what some of my friends post i might mix miss a post from a friend that uh you know post a baby picture or something like i might miss something kind of cool that my friend posts but uh all the positive that comes along with that not kind of seeing all the bullshit that's out there and not having to put so much thought process into like each post and some of these different things has really freed up a, uh, huge amount of bandwidth for me. And I get to focus in on other things that are more important. And so, uh, in the case of yourself, um, some of those really strong ideas and those strong pulses that came to you anytime you had some, and you don't have this anymore, but anytime you had some downtime, you kind of think back to those days of when you sat in the gym and you're

waiting for another client and maybe someone canceled on you or what, all these different things happen and you're in the gym hours on end and these ideas are pinging in your head you're like i wonder if i took that chain over there and then wrapped it around that band and then put it on that bar like you think of all these crazy weird things and that's where some of your best uh ideas kind of come from well now those ideas can grow again when you start to as you're saying you're working on building this team, building this squad behind you that allows you to be out of the gym a little bit more.

Maybe it allows you, rather than even thinking about the business at all, maybe it allows you just to spend more time with your wife or whatever, right? Right, yeah. And then what's crazy about that is how much that time re-energizes you. And so when you come back,

you're actually so much more productive than you were to begin with. And until you actually take that time re-energizes you. And so when you come back, you're actually so much more productive than you were to begin with. And until you actually take that time, you don't really realize that. And I'm real guilty of that. It's like, so then when I finally do and it comes back, I'm like, why don't I do this way more often?

You know, so I just got to. We're really pretty dumb is what it boils down to. Andrew and I were training and training and training and training and training. And like just a few weeks ago or just like last week, actually, I'm like, okay, we're going to have Wednesdays and Sundays off. And he's like, what? And I'm like, what?

Yeah. Like why? Like we just, we love it. You know, we want to just keep training and training. But even just that one day, that one day out of the gym makes you so hungry to come back and kick some more ass the next day. That one day out of the gym makes you so hungry to come back and kick some more ass the next day. Because he and I end up in here, you know, for work purposes and for lifting. We're in here every day.

Just one day out. That's it. Just one day. One day out of the gym and you're ready to, you know, chew the tires off a bus next time you come in again, you know. So it's just that little break that makes a big difference. It feels like every time we take a break, the weights are going to like come back heavier for some reason. Like they're training because they're in the gym right now and we're not.

Losing ground, baby. Yeah. Yeah. They're training for us. Assholes. What do you think of some other supplementation? Like there's a lot of options people have and I know it varies from person to person when it comes to, uh, you know, kind of matching up with the blood work and some different things. What are some things that you've kind of have just seen

work time and time again, almost regardless of the person, are you a fan of like fish oil or magnesium or zinc or, or, you know, what, what have you seen? I'm a fan of all those. All those. Load up on everything. So, um, fish oil is a big one. Definitely use a lot of omega-3s and, um, they're crucial in terms of brain health, especially with, uh, all the concussions and things of that nature that we deal with. So I'm a minimum nine grams a day of omega-3s is the recommended. Most guys are pretty compliant with it. Um. How do you get the nine grams in a day of omega-3s is the recommended. Most guys are pretty compliant with it. How do you get the nine grams in a day? Just usually like in a capsule form or?

I like off a spoon. It's easier to do. Don't have to worry about swallowing as many capsules. It's easy to get down. It's pretty simple to do. And it's also way more cost effective to get it off a spoon than get it in capsules. Traveling with it is a bit of a pain. Um, so that, that's some sort of liquid form of it.

Yep. Liquid form of it. I like that a lot. Magnesium is huge. Uh, it's one of the most under appreciated products. So we were talking about a junky soft tissue and how bad that is and stuff you do pre-workout and things like that. Well, I've had instances where people's soft tissue were just that gross

because they were that magnesium deficient. And now it's to a point where I've seen it enough times. I can, when I see it and I touch it, I can say, okay, this guy's probably magnesium deficient. We actually had one example. Could you make a, like a topical magnesium supplementation? Yeah, there are magnesium oils. A lot of companies make them that you can rub them on.

Epsom salts are basically topical magnesium. You could do that. They won't get you as big a load as what you really need. Right. So we've actually had a couple of instances at the facility where, in one instance, it was another coach bringing in his athlete. Like, we're not getting anywhere with this. And, you know, highly skilled coach and highly skilled therapist. we're not getting anywhere with this and you know highly skilled coach and highly skilled therapist after about two three minutes of looking over this guy my something's good this guy's got mineral

issues there's no way and we're not getting through any of this so we had our naturopath there that day so we did an IV an IV push of five grams of magnesium holy shit so basically over about six minutes just sweating out laying, laying there, you get it done, let them chill for about 20 minutes later, you go back to the same tissue, you start working on it. You can actually already feel a difference in that tissue quality and we're able to work through it. That's insane.

Yeah. Maybe, uh, does it maybe somehow help the muscle to like relax or hydrated or what do you think it's doing? Well, it's definitely dropping the resting muscle tone of the tissue for sure and uh muscles kind of like hypertonic it's tense for whatever reason and and for whatever reason the magnesium is allowing it's gonna just open up and relax a little bit exactly right yeah and it works on there and um again like uh going towards uh sleep is a big thing so i I like to use a mixture of a lot of different things. The thing about the nutraceutical industry is that it tends to be very kind of magic bullet in some ways.

Take this and do that. And I think you've got these two extremes between sort of the pharmaceutical and the nutraceutical. And so the pharmaceutical is kind of in that one target. So you've got like we're targeting the specific gene or the specific pathway or whatever we're targeting. It's just one very specific thing and just like target practice trying to find it, you know? thing and just like target practice trying to find it, you know? And then what comes out of that is this sort of pharmaceutical determinism type of thing. So we think this should do this and it always has to do this based on this target that we're doing. And it's so narrowed in and you've got this complex, but most of these things are complex dysregulations of multiple systems and you're just trying to hit one target. But then on the other end, the nutraceutical industry, what we're really bad at doing is thinking that because we know one thing works for this, it's going to work for everything. So it's like, I've got a brain issue and this is a brain supplement. So every brain

thing you could possibly have is used by this. So I've kind of termed that nutraceutical liberalism, the kind of opposite of that,aceutical liberalism, the kind of opposite of that, you know what I mean? And so if the one thing that you want to use for your brain, it happens to work because it's a acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, that's great if you need to get more acetylcholine. But if you have other problems, it's not going to work. But we tend to say, oh, if it's good for your brain, it's good for this. Whatever works for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and sleep, it all works for the same thing. So I think what we have to look at in supplements is we have to be smart about what we're doing, but we can borrow a little bit from what the pharmaceutical industry does, which is

be more targeted with stuff and take multiple components, multiple different supplements that work all on different mechanisms and put them together in a formula that works well, as opposed to just trying to have like a one shot, one target type of a thing, you know? Yeah, I agree. And I actually noticed some of these holes that you're talking about. Um, there's, um, there's companies, uh, that are in like the fitness industry and they will produce products. I'll just call them bodybuilding products, even though they could be for bodybuilders or crossfitters or whoever, but basically just bodybuilding products. And you look at their advertising

for it and you look at what they say, and they'll say this product, uh, produces vein busting, uh, workouts, you know, and you're like, well, who's, who wants their veins to burst? You know, shit like that's a little over the top, but you know, those are some of the examples you see, or like in this real bold print, it will say, you know, increases your bench press by 400% or it just is real kind of almost hardcore, uh, look into what it is they're trying to produce. Uh, this product will help you get bigger arms or, or whatever, whatever it is they're trying to produce. This product will help you get bigger arms or whatever it is that they're trying to promote. This pre-workout is going to wake you up and get you fired up for your workouts. So there's that segment.

There's the fitness industry, and they kind of have a specific thing that they're going after. And a lot of times the fitness industry is riddled with a lot of times the fitness industry is kind of is is riddled with like a lot of junk there's a lot of just junk products um with uh for lack of better term just kind of garbage in uh in some of these mixtures that they're making um some of them have great intentions and stuff but they have a lot of artificial sweeteners there's a lot of other just fillers in there and they don't really have your health in mind. Now, if you cruise on over to the health department and health section of, say like a whole foods or something like that, it will look a lot different than what you see inside a GNC. And I feel like just what

you're saying with the pharmaceutical, I feel there's a large gap between those two. And it'd be nice if those things were merged together a little bit more. Yes. We want to have a great workout and yes, we want to train hard and yes, we'd love to get a pump, but we also want to be healthy. We also want to feel good and feel strong and not just for the day. Like it's not about the day. Right. It's about the week.

It's about the month. It's about the year. It's about five years from now and 10 years and 20 years and so on, because we want to be doing this shit for a long time, because the only way to get good at anything is to have some consistency over a long period of time. And so I recognize some gaps in, uh, in some of those things. And, um, even like when I search out, like you ask someone like Charles Pullo, when you ask someone like yourself, like, Hey, where do I get this magnesium source? Like maybe your company currently makes it.

But, uh, a lot of times you're going to give me some weird company that like most of us in this room probably haven't heard of. Uh, maybe it's something that you actually had like tested and you know, for sure. Like, Hey, it has no heavy metals. We tested it in our lab, but most of the general public doesn't have access to any of this knowledge. They don't know any of these things. And so they're just running out to GNC and buying, you know, whatever X magnesium that they're there, they can get ahold of.

And they don't realize that, you know, when Ian Danny's on Mark Bell's power project, talking about magnesium, that you can't really just run out and buy any random magnesium because there's some magnesiums that will make you sit on the toilet all day no doubt and there's uh and and there's um some magnesiums that the body really has trouble absorbing and uh you know charles put out a product recently that has like five or six different types of magnesium and there's a lot of other products on the market that are like that. They're a little bit easier to absorb, but it's like, holy shit, man. Why does all this have to be so complicated all the time?

Yeah. Well, it gets complicated because they are certain pervers of these supplements who are either A, cutting corners cutting corners or be just spraying disinformation and, and it gets clouded and people don't really want to do the research anymore. They just kind of want to have an infographic to tell them what to do. And so good marketing will kind of lead them that way. Um, but I think, uh, one of the big things that's happening now is the supplement industry has been cleaning itself up quite a bit.

And there's a whole lot more regulations that are coming now. It's a lot harder to sell junk now than it used to be, which is really good. That's great. And I think the next big step is making sure that you've got clinically validated, effective dosages in these products. Because a lot of these products, they'll put in a couple of really good key ingredients, but they'll put them in at a dose that really makes no sense. And they're basically putting them on there for label claims. Right.

And essentially they want to use that as one or two of their anchor type ingredients because they know people are smart enough to know, hey, this is great. This is curcumin is awesome. You know, this is that, let's get this on there. But it's not at a clinically effective dose. And that's an education thing. That's just asking the right questions and having the people that you're buying the stuff from be able to answer those questions for you.

And I tell people all the time is you have to take charge of your own health. You have to be your own ambassador for your health. You can't rely on someone else telling you something. I don't care if it's a doctor or whoever it is. You've got to do that. And you've got to spend the time, not necessarily to become super educated, but to be able to sort of sort through the noise. Doing that is a wise investment.

Right. That makes a big difference. What kind of magnesium is absorbed well? Does your company make one? No, we don't make magnesium for sale. So at the facility, I have a sort of benchtop lab that we can put all types of things together on an individual basis for the individuals. So we'll have bulk ingredients that we can put things together with.

But, uh, unfortunately, unless you're at the facility, you don't really have access to that. Right. But, uh, I'm a big fan of magnesium orotate. Uh, I like glycinate and, uh, I like citrate as well. Right. And, um, good absorption. Citrate's the one that make, make you, can make

you poop. Uh, it depends on. In like large doses in a certain person. Yeah. Or, or, orotate's large doses in a certain person. Yeah. Or it's really good for not doing that. All right. Three and eight is great

in terms of blood-brain barrier stuff. But as long as you're staying away from magnesium oxide is a big factor. And as long as you're understanding how much actual elemental magnesium

that you're getting. So depending on how they write the labels, they may tell you how much of the total weight of that magnesium product is not the magnesium itself. And some of the best magnesiums are only 12, 13, 14%, sometimes less magnesium. So you got to, sometimes if you want to get 200 grams, you got to take a thousand milligrams of elemental magnesium. Right. Yeah. Is it,

is it actually poop that comes out when you take magnesium like that? Cause I know I have taken a little bit too much before in the past and it's just like straight water. I'm like, where's this even coming from? Yeah, no doubt. It's, uh, it can be pretty nasty.

Don't, uh, start up on a, on a magnesium protocol while you're also trying to figure out how to use MCTs cause that's a nasty combination. Yeah. We have the, uh, the talks talks with many keto experts and whatever, and we always talk about the MCT poop and it's just, it's all bad. Yeah. And some people just don't get tolerance to MCTs at all. Like for most people, after a time you get used to it, it's okay. But there's a segment of people, at least that I've dealt with, it just doesn't matter. It just does not go away. It doesn't

work for them. Yeah. With some of the guys you're working with are there any obvious common themes amongst all of them you know like necessarily like uh you spoke on it before a little bit about having focus and whatnot but do they all wake up super early or is there like a certain protocol that they all follow no in terms of that i mean you've got owls you've got larks you've got all okay everything in between it's not some guys are get up get the day started to work out early and do that other guys no chance they're just that's just not their MO they don't operate that way they'll work out much better later in the day um you know in terms of that they're all they're all over the place really yeah and then so with the night owls, how are you monitoring their sleep or not monitoring,

but how are you like trying to get them to still maintain their, uh, their hours? Well, with the night owls, they don't train early. Okay. So they just sleep in. Yeah. We bring them in, you know, for two reasons. One, cause they need their sleep. And two, we don't want to screw up anybody else's schedule. Cause if you schedule you at eight and you don't show up at eight. Yeah. And then now everyone that's coming after you is getting screwed up.

So, yeah, we'll just, we'll bring them in later. We do our best to encourage them to get to bed early. But let's be honest. It's a battle in a lot of ways. I mean, you give a 23-year-old kid $15 million and they're going to be doing some things that, uh, yeah, I don't want to be doing.

I mean, if you'd given me $15 million at 23, I'd probably be dead right now. Yeah. I wouldn't be able to hold it together either. So, I mean, there are some of that stuff that you're dealing with too.

And there's just some growing up and stuff that has to happen. But, um, no, so it's asking a lot of questions, you know, and I find that's a, but, um, no, so it's asking a lot of questions, you know, and I find that's a, that's a common theme with training and learning how to train people and doing all those types of

things. It's, it's a matter of learning how to ask the right questions. And, uh, I find that now in, uh, in learning to be a strength coach and say, taking internships and following people and doing all those types of things, what those things have turned out to be is somebody just giving you a bunch of answers. And I think it's the worst possible thing that can happen. I think mentoring with somebody, doing internships with somebody, doing those types of things, this should be teaching you how to ask the right questions and how to learn this stuff not barfing out answers and systems to you that's not a good way to go but part of the problem we have now is just the way we get information so fortunately for me i wasn't able to get information in that

way when i was coming up because if you want to be really good at all of these things you want to be able to to learn, apply them. First of all, it always helps when you do them yourself. But then secondly, if you can be with the right people, learn from their mistakes, get guidance, go through and do all those types of things, that's ultimately how you're going to be really good. But that's a 10-year internship. And what people want is a TED Talk. Okay. internship. And what people want is a TED talk. Okay. And so at the end of the day, if you, if your background is 50 TED talks versus your 10 year internship, at some point in time,

you're going to realize that just, you have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. And people that are coming up in the strength and conditioning world now, they have this awesome opportunity to get lots of information really quickly, which is good. But a lot of them are not doing it themselves. And a lot of them haven't absorbed it over a long enough period of time to understand what's garbage, what's not garbage, what really works, what's tried and true, and put that together.

And that's why you see so many different um methodologies that in my opinion are questionable flourishing how important is it to be able to go yourself you know how important is it for you to be able to like flip a switch and and lift some weights yourself it's a huge difference and there's there have been times where crazy travel schedule, all types of work going on that I haven't been able to do that. And it, you, I personally function so much more poorly when I can't do that. And, um, sometimes you get in this mode where you don't even realize that you're

functioning more poorly until you get back to it. Then you're like, man, this is what it's supposed to feel like, you know? But for me, uh, as an athlete working through all the different things, having the struggles, having, helping other athletes through struggles and, and different things like that, it's, it's allowed me to do a couple of things. One, it's allowed me to empathize with some of the stuff that they're going through. But then in addition to that, it's also allowed me to realize, uh, when somebody's telling you something that is pure BS,

you can recognize as pure BS because it flies in the face of so many principles that you know to be true and you don't need it. And a lot of times people use this. And it might help you recognize when something is more legitimate. Absolutely true. I'm under a lot of stress because I'm having a kid or whatever and you're like, oh, well, I've had kids before. kids before whatever the case is if you kind of been through it before or uh maybe they say you know i started this new business and you're like shit okay well no i was starting my new business yeah i was under stress but i didn't lift like a pussy so this is not a legitimate yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah for sure i think what happens is, um, over time, all those experiences add up. And if you're smart

and you're learning from all those experiences and you're trying to stay humble so that you're open to that, you may be doing things wrong so that you can learn and do these types of things. You just, you continue to grow and you're, you're practically implementing that implement, that information and getting results from it, as opposed to just trying to get a system and how should I do this? And what can I do that? And it's, it's funny because if you look at what happens in the strength world, people already know this, but they don't recognize it because environment and culture trumps just about everything. Oh God. Yeah. So if you look at, um, a place like say West side versus another big training place versus

this place versus you're going to see people that have multiple different training systems, but they still can produce pretty strong athletes all the time. And the one thing that they have in common is the culture and the environment that some people would call meathead environment, wherever you want to call it, but that work, that grind that goes. And it's, that's so much of it, you know, like, and protocols are important, recoveries, all these things are important, but having that culture and that environment is huge. Well, remember the kind of culture that, um, like Jimmy Johnson used to create

when he was with the Miami hurricanes and when he was with the miami hurricanes and when he was with the uh dallas cowboys i mean if you remember first of all the hurricanes anytime they played any team that was worth a shit they just absolutely annihilated them it was like they're like excited about the occasion and they got more fired up and they got more firepower than the other team they just kicked the crap out of them. But from what I remember, being a young kid kind of at the time, watching some of those games and watching some of the lead-up to some of those games, I think the game was on like a Saturday, and it was Thursday practice,

and they'd show the Hurricanes in practice, and they're going full speed. They got full pads on, and they're killing each other. And it was more of just like to send a message to the other team, like we're not letting off the gas pedal at all. And the other team would be defeated by the time they hit the field. And I think that the mindset is a critical aspect of all this, trying to make sure that you're creating an environment. You don't want to go so over the top

all the time that you hurt yourself. We can't ignore certain things because we're just going to get hurt. But at the same time, you want to have a culture that is building and breeding success all the time. If you go into some of these different facilities, if you were to go into an MMA facility, or if you go into a powerlifting gym and you were to observe, and if you just know anything about winning and being successful, you would be able to, and the people that are at these facilities on a daily basis, they would be able to, and the people, the people that, uh, are at these

facilities on a daily basis, they would be pissed at you, but you would be able to write down five or six things that they could do even better than what they're currently doing. Because you would see that even amongst this group of savages and this really good culture that was created, there's still a couple piss poor behaviors that are happening just because it just happened, right? Like you just get slouchy or slumpy. Like you could go to do a lift and you, you know, you're doing this with your shoulder, which that, that, that doesn't help heal your shoulder.

That's not a, that's not an active release technique that you're breaking up fibers in your shoulder. That's just you kind of whining, right? Like, or, or your knee or whatever it is that you're breaking up fibers in your shoulder. That's just you kind of whining, right? Like, or, or your knee or whatever it is that you're doing. And so I agree a hundred percent when you can create a culture where there's a lot of positivity, um, and where there's people competing, uh, then it's gonna, your five sets of five or your 10 sets of 10 or your 10 sets of two, uh, a lot of that starts to go out the window when you get people to be competitive with each other. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that if we were to make a pie graph

right here and we're going to outline, let's say what it takes to be a big squatter, we would have, we could take all of our protocols that we put together and all of our techniques and put all these things together, your recovery, and they would make up about this much of the pie graph. And the rest of it would be, what is your willingness to die? Like, am I really willing to go down with this weight knowing that it may crush me and I'm going to stand up with it.

And then I'm going to try it one more time after that. Like that ability to do that with your brain will take you farther than any protocol will take you. Not that the protocols aren't important. Yeah. But that is important first. Well, and mix a little bit of that mindset in with just training with somebody else. For sure. You know, like let's forget about the sets and reps. for sure you know like let's forget about the sets and reps uh because you can probably mix up sets and reps every single week and change um if i change the exercise completely you probably

can come to the gym and someone could say uh we are going to uh use a safety squat bar and we're going to do lunges until we can't do lunges anymore next week we're going to squat with the safety bar and we're going to squat until we can't squat anymore. And the week after that, we're going to leg press. And you'd be shocked. You probably still have these major improvements. But just as long as both of you are willing to go to whatever edge that was that, you know, whatever distance that you have to go to, to create, you know, the gains that you're looking for, then you're probably going to continue to get better and better. Yeah. I made some of my best leg gains ever when I was much younger,

and we played this game called Spin the Plate. And they had these. They were basically Olympic throwers and a couple other guys, big guys mixed in. You take those old-school heavy plates that had the, like if Banco used to make them, they had that little triangle separation thing on them.

So they made three different spots and they used to write on the plates, three, four, and five. I just put those numbers on there. When I was younger, I, when I wanted to join in with these guys, we had to drop it to two, three, and four. But what you do is you'd spin it, whichever

one it landed on. That's how many plates you put on each side of the bar. Okay. You put them on. We just went, you go, I go. And it'd be a group of five guys. Sometimes you just start banging them out.

If it landed on. And when these guys were probably, you know, some of them were 80 pounds heavier than me. So when I have to come in and have to go two, three, four, they hated me because landing on two for a guy that squat 600 was absolutely torturous for them. It just weighed too many reps.

Right. Yeah. But whatever it landed on, if it landed on a floor, you just put four plates on each side. We just started going. You rest while the other guys are going. You start again. You just keep going until somebody quits.

So, so like if, for example, if you did four plates and like one guy can just do it one time, but the guy after him can do it five times, you just go with whatever rep range you can get. Yeah. Yeah. No one was only doing one but yeah yeah that's definitely how it goes yeah that's great yeah it sounds sounds brutal

though yeah yeah it does sound brutal i i mean when you're going through these uh these tough workouts that's why i think it's really important you know for the coach you know coaches that are listening to this and people that are listening to this that want to aspire to work with athletes you know please you know, please, you know, make sure you're doing your research and make sure you're paying attention to, uh, all the latest and greatest things that are coming out, but make sure you're working out like a badass, you know, make sure that you're training hard because if you don't have the training

behind it, I just, I don't think that you're, I, you personally, I don't think you're gonna get the attention of James Harrison unless you like look substantial, unless you did, did something. Right. Do you feel same way? Yeah. I think that, um, looking the part is obviously helpful. Um, I also think.

Doesn't mean you have to be a pro bodybuilder by any means. Absolutely. But you should be able to do something. That's absolutely right. And having gone through that experience to know what it takes and what it does to a body is also extremely helpful. You know, I would also say that when you're looking at some of the studies and the evidence that comes out, weigh that against what you've already known to be true and what you've seen borne out. And keep in mind, the things that these people are studying quite often just have zero implications for what is going to happen in the real world.

Or they're just so overly obvious. So now we're going to do a study to see whether or not grass is green. I can already tell you this from what's going on in your waste system. But then they go from there and they say, well, but why is the grass green? Then that's the study, but why?

And so that's the way some of the science, just the science community goes. And if that's all you rely on, you will be 10 years behind what's actually happening in the real trenches. So you've got to take what's coming out of there, understand it, process it, but then line it up with what you see happening in the real world and say, yeah, this makes sense because it agrees with these concepts we already know about. This could be an awesome way to enhance what we're doing. Let's see how we can incorporate it, but also be able to say, okay, well, no, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense

because we've seen people do the exact opposite of what you're telling me to do. And this is not going to work. Like classic example is years ago, it used to be squatting below 90 degree knee angle is the worst thing in the world. And you should never do this. You should never do that.

You know how many coaches I had tell me do that? If it wasn't for the fact that I was around Olympic lifters and my dad told me. Your knees can't go over your toes. You're going to die. Yeah. But I've seen guys do this a million and one times that are awesome and doing great and having no issue. So it was pretty easy to say, I don't believe that. It doesn't matter what I can do with that.

20 years later, they don't say the same thing anymore, but it's things like that. When you have the experience and you're working and you're doing it and you're seeing, you can eliminate some of the crap before. We talk a lot on this podcast about like absolutes and how, you know, you gotta be really careful with them. When it comes to movement pattern um

your body moves certain ways for certain reasons and you know if you're 20 years old or 30 years old your body has moved into that movement pattern for whatever reason and it may not be the right movement for playing uh defensive end in the n, because you might need certain steps and you might have to step a certain way and do things a certain way, but it doesn't mean that your body can't go into some weird, strange positions when you're lifting. And, uh, what I've noticed with strength and, and building up muscle, uh, is, you know, sometimes people say, oh, you got to have a flat back, you know, when you're, when you're doing these deadlifts, you know, and again, uh, is, you know, sometimes people say, oh, you got to have a flat back, you know, when you're, when you're doing these deadlifts, you know, and again, uh, yeah, uh, it's great to have a flat

back. It's advisable to have a flat back, but do we need to have a flat back all the time on everything? Absolutely not. Um, can we intentionally round over with lighter weights and can we go through those movements to feel what about with a newer athlete who doesn't really understand the flat back? They don't really understand how to arch into it. Have them do some reps again with much lighter weight than what they would normally lift, but have them use lighter weight and have them intentionally lift like shit and say, that's what it feels like to do that exercise wrong. Did you feel the way that felt? Versus, okay, now we're going to use some legs

and we're going to actually bring our quads and our hamstrings into this deadlift movement rather than you just using your lower back the entire time. And when it comes to bodybuilding, when I had the opportunity to train with some really high-level bodybuilders, they'll do some really unconventional things. They're twisting their bodies around and moving in some different directions, maybe rounding over the thoracic spine, um, on something like a row, the round over the thoracic spine,

real hard, shove the shoulders real far forward. And then they'll pull the weight and they'll pull the weight down kind of towards their stomach and, uh, push the elbows towards the floor. And it has a certain training effect on their lats or their mid back or whatever it is they're trying to work. So things don't have to always be so black and white. You do want to be safe. You do want to make sure that you kind of have your general things intact.

But there's a lot of different ways to do all this stuff. Absolutely. And exploring them and learning how to use them is key. The more tools you can put in the toolbox, the more variety you can have to accomplish the same thing, especially when you're going to be training multiple different people. I mean, that's just huge. When it comes to the actual lifting, what is something that has surprised you over the years, you know, in terms of something that has been really effective that maybe you

thought otherwise wouldn't have worked out well, like maybe it's super high reps or maybe it's real short rest intervals, or maybe you've adapted something from bodybuilding, powerlifting, or CrossFit. I think for me, what has been surprising is, uh, I guess not surprising anymore is the high reps on leg training and how the high reps actually translate well into explosive type movement stuff. I never really thought that would happen. So the, the slow twitch muscle fibers, um, they're starting to think now that they actually may even have more potential than the fast twitch muscle fibers. Is that, is that kind of what you're talking about? I think what you're talking about is their potential to hypertrophy.

Right. Uh, what, what I'm more talking about is, um, we used to think, okay, and it's still definitely true. We've had this neurometabolic continuum and down here you have rep one, that's purely neural. Over here you have rep, say, 20, which is highly metabolic, a little outside of your hypertrophy range. You've got 100 over here, which is all metabolic, right? And that basically, if you want to get strong on this rep one, and that's it, once you start getting above the six to eight region,

you don't have a real good carryover to what this rep one is. Or if you want to be really dynamic and explosive in terms of say running 10 yards, whatever like that, once you get away from this, you don't have, you don't have the carry over. But what I'm surprised about is when you do the remarkable changes that someone can make down here on this explosive stuff by doing reps that are way up here and that are not necessarily of an explosive nature you'd be shocked how much that actually does carry over and um i talked to people about this like no it can't be true it can't be true i'm like try it yeah try it you know and um i think it's because people who are after that train in that zone so much that the the metabolic

shock that they get the hormonal changes that happen, all those things carry over to make them stronger in that area. And then I also giving your nervous system a break to do that helps. You know what? That's, you hit the nail on the head right there. Sometimes just because you're not doing what you were doing before, sometimes is enough, like reprieve that when you go back to whatever it was you were doing, you feel better and feel stronger, which is, uh, feeling better is a huge part of being stronger. Like if, if stuff just doesn't hurt on a particular day, you'll probably lift a lot more. Uh, what I noticed a huge impact from was exactly what you're saying. Um, higher rep ranges and, uh, and slower movements. Um, I know Charles has

always been a huge fan of tempo training, but I never really realized that, you know, the more that you can kind of control a weight and the slower you can move with it, it also seems to some extent, and maybe to some degree it might get out of proportion, but the slower that you can move around some of these weights, the faster that you can move around some of these weights the faster that you can move around some of these weights the more that you can the slower that you can descend with four plates or five plates um and uh and really control that weight probably the stronger you are you know in a lot of cases and what i've seen um and this is from getting injured many times over but uh and having uh and having James Smith come to the gym before, the thinker. He used to be on Elite FTS.

And James shared with me strength aerobics, which was kind of almost a little bit of a bodybuilding technique where you never lock anything out all the way. If you're doing like bench press, your elbows aren't going to lock out all the way. If you're doing like bench press, you're near elbows, aren't going to lock out all the way. Never touch the chest. Just kind of keeping a, a, um, uh, a range of motion where you're keeping constant tension on the muscle. And, uh, these sets would last for a really long time. And then in addition to that, uh, the reps were usually kind of high and sometimes the reps were 10, sometimes they're 20, but the tempo was really, really slow.

I was surprised at how quickly i was able to come back from injury uh with with training slow like that and then also how strong i got from it i was like holy shit i got stronger than i ever was before when i came back from some injuries uh because of that style of training well absolutely and because it was such a new thing to you and you got it shocked you and you made that gain and the gain carried over to all these other things. Now, if you were to continue to do that for a long enough period of time, you would go far enough down that rabbit hole where it would have negative consequences on your explosive strength. But it's the poisons in the dose, right? It's always how much of this can you do?

How much of it can you get away with? How much is this going to make a difference for you based on either shocking your system or some new stimulus or whatever the case may be. But you just have to be careful that you don't run down the wrong rabbit hole for too long and you kind of switch back and come back to what is kind of tried and true. What about shorter rest periods? Have you noticed shorter rest periods helping quite a bit with strength? I mean, I've seen some people in the CrossFit communities that some of these athletes, they're 200 pounds or less. They're drug tested athletes. And a lot of the men and women actually are both putting up tremendous amounts of weight.

And they're doing so with with short rest periods. What have you seen with your own athletes? With short rest periods, what have you seen with your own athletes? Have you noticed any difference by having kind of short rest intervals in terms of increasing strength or increasing muscle size? As far as muscle size goes, decreasing the rest period tends to help with that. Because it tends to force you to compensate by nutrient storage mechanisms. So you want to store more glycogen, more water, more intracellular fat in that muscle. So you have the energy to do that. And the short rest periods tend to do that. As far as strength, for the most part, that shorter rest period decreases your strength output. But by carefully planning what you do, you can get the effect of having a short rest in terms of the density of the work that you do.

But if you're alternating motions and body parts, then you could still get a longer rest for each body part or each specific motion, but have the rest short. Super set and opposing muscle group. Right. Yeah. That would be the opposing muscle group. Right. Yeah. That would be the classic way to do that. Then even though the rest between the two might only be 90 seconds, the rest between when you're actually working each body part or each motion. Right.

Would be double that plus the time due to the exercise. And then a bodybuilder a lot of times is going to use a shorter rest period kind of for what you're talking about with the substrate storage and then also uh the hormones in your body as well right your north hormone and stuff like that will go up when you're using shorter rest periods correct absolutely that's definitely right the other thing that's really cool that i will sometimes like to use that for is when i just want to have something that's so different and so wild out there that's that we've never really done that you know once you do it you're going to PR. Because this is what happens.

You get stuck in these modes where things aren't going well. Everything you do, you're hitting a wall. You're doing this. You're doing that. And for the purposes of your mind and your mindset, you just need to do something that you can win at. Yeah. And so sometimes I'll create stuff for these guys where they're going to win

because it's so unique and so different than what we've done. We don't really have a standard to measure it against. So they go, they do it. It's, it's gut busting. So they feel like they're killing themselves and they feel like they won. Right. And then at the end of the day, that mindset now feeds back in. And a couple of workouts later, some of these things that they were having issues with, they're now getting passed because they had some success and they felt like they made

some gains. I've always referred to that as winning the invisible balloon. When I was doing seminars, I'm like, tell them what they won. He won an invisible balloon. What about pre-fatiguing the muscle to help get past like that initial, so that way you're not having to do a hundred reps of one movement yeah so you can pre-fatigue the muscle for sure there's multiple ways to do that you could basically like let's say for instance you want to pre-fatigue your lats you can do something that

would require you to have a straight arm type movement on a lat like a pullover or a straight arm pull down those type of things and then go into something where you bring your biceps back into it like a pull down or chin up and kind of, there's that type of kind of overloading it pre pre fatiguing it that way. But then there's also the, the idea of pre fatiguing the muscle by doing something that could be really dynamic beforehand as well, or just, um, doing a, uh, a completely different exercise, but that would still cause some pre-fatigue

for the existing one, but would allow you to do it with much lower weights so you don't kill yourself. Like as a classic example, if you have a guy who's having trouble overhead pressing because some shoulder issues and things like that, you wouldn't necessarily just stop overhead pressing. But if you make him do a whole ton of lateral raises and bent over ladders, all these other things before he starts his overhead pressing. But if you make him do a whole ton of lateral raises and bent over ladders, all these other things before he starts his overhead pressing.

Now the weight that he can use for his overhead pressing is still enough to completely torture his shoulders, but not enough to irritate the little injury that he's dealing with. And so instead of just giving in to, okay, I can't do any overhead pressing because my shoulder is not ready to do it and make it really work. You can work around it and get a way to do that. Just another example.

I love that kind of stuff. And that's something I shared the other day during an arm workout was, you know, we started out with some close grip bench and we were super setting back and forth, just like you were mentioning the antagonist muscle. We were doing some just regular barbell curls. And then we went into some other exercises but i saved the tricep extensions for the very end dumbbell tricep extensions and the reason is is uh you know i used to do those like you know as a second movement or something and i'd do them with like 80 90 100 pound dumbbells and i'd go crazy on them but then i ended up with a lot of elbow problems you know over the years so you know now i with a lot of elbow problems, you know, over the years. So, you know,

now I share with people, you know, Hey, look, you know, uh, it might be smarter in some cases for you to, uh, you know, looking at a different option, you know, instead of, uh, starting out with the tricep extension, instead of going so hard on the tricep extension, maybe utilize some other exercises, just like you said, to kind of pre-fatigue you're going to end up using less weight but you'll still get a lot out of the movement right and that that that to me is an example of okay you've done this enough and you've got enough experience doing it to yourself and to other people to know okay i can do this right other people who all they know is that oh i read on instagram but the long head of the tricep

is better worked by doing a lying tricep extension. And it tends to be more fast twitch fibers. So I need to train it earlier and with heavier weights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they don't understand everything that you just talked about because they haven't been doing it for 10 years. And so then those, when those people start making protocols without that full understanding is when you kind of run into problems. How do you utilize, I see that you utilize a lot of different methods in your training.

I saw some videos of you using bands and chains and also the weight releasers. How are you utilizing some of this accommodating resistance with your athletes and why? some of this accommodating resistance with your athletes and why? Okay, so for me, the accommodating resistance does two big things. One, it allows you to overload an end range. So let's say we're talking about, say, a squat, for instance. So you want to be able to overload the end range. And what the traditional way that strength conditioning coaches in those fields have done that is, let's do quarter squats okay the problem with doing a quarter squat is then half so the percentage of a lot

of issues with the quarters there's a lot of issues causes a lot of a lot of people to get upset on the internet yes it does it does but what happened let's say i'm gonna like explode through you on the field i'm gonna jump i going to take off my the biggest speed that i have is going to be at the end range when i'm taking off and i'm living right so when we do something like a squat or something like that we have to slow down at the end so you get this co-contraction of agonist and antagonist stopping and doing that to you right so the percentage of time that you're doing that for on a quarter squat is way bigger than on a full squat. And so once you start doing that, you're spending so much time doing that.

You don't really get that extension of going. I see. If you put a band on there and you have to run through that and you can keep going all the way through the end because the resistance is going up, you get something that's closer to that feeling of actually going through that end range of motion at full velocity like you would be doing if it was a real jump or something. It's producing like a more optimal option for the particular intent that you're, you're putting to this this movement. So the way I've always explained it was, you know,

take a, a baseball, a wiffle ball, and a shot put, and which one would hurt you the worst to throw the hardest, right? And it'd probably be the wiffle ball, just because it just doesn't have enough weight to it. The baseball would feel somewhere in between that, and maybe if you're older and you haven't thrown anything in a while,

the baseball could kill you too. But the shot put would probably feel the best because you can put a lot into it and it's going to kind of move slower. The bands and the chains, you're still going to move kind of fast and you're trying to move fast. But because the resistance is there through the whole thing, it's a little bit more gradual and it just hurts a lot less. Yeah. Hard to explain to people. gradual and it just hurts a lot less yeah hard to explain to people but when they when you do something like the bands or the chains rather are very clear when you uh go to do like a bench press almost all the chain weight is completely off the bar at the bottom of the lift and then at the top

of the lift all that chain weight hops back on there at least you know three quarters of it or so hops back on that on that bar and when And when you think about, you know, what hurts and where things hurt in a bench press, a lot of times it's at the bottom, you know, you start to feel your shoulder, your elbow and reversing those weights gets to be hard. So it kind of makes sense. You know, again, you know, the slingshot was invented with this intention where it's a quote unquote, like zeroing the weight out at the bottom of the lift, um, giving you some, well, the most support that it can at the bottom of the lift, uh, and then helping

you kind of propel back up. And as your triceps start to catch up to the exercise and as your body starts to catch up to the exercise, more and more weights coming onto the barbell. Yeah, for sure. And the throwing example that you were talking about earlier, we'll come back to that, but that's kind of something of understanding the difference between intra and intramuscular coordination. And then also how angular velocity affects things that we can come back to. But staying with the bands, what's really neat, we talked about the concept of overloading that end range. with the concept of overloading that end range.

But what I found personally, when I started working with bands a lot is it helped the bottom more than it helped anything because neurologically your brain starts to realize, if I don't outrun these bands, I want to get crushed. So you actually explode faster out of the bottom to try and outrun the bands. So, um, that should have been real obvious to me, but until I started really, really, really working on the bands, I didn't really realize how much of an effect that would have.

Um, so we use bands, we use chains, we use, uh, eccentric releasers and all different types of combinations to achieve what we need to do. And I think for us too, it's a lot of it is you can do quite a bit of unloading and still get really good speed work with bands. And we'll use bands on a belt squat too. So we unload that way and still and get the double effects of it you know and um i'm always playing around with some kind of creative way that we can figure out to to use a band in some way shape or form a lot of this too is to you're able to elicit a great response um but also uh minimize the damage in the gym, right?

I mean, maybe if you're a competitive power lifter and you've been competing and you have to do a bench squat and deadlift, that's how you kind of like, quote, unquote, make your money. That's the sport that you compete in. Maybe it makes sense to not use a band or chain, um, in your, as you get closer to the competition, but for a football player or any athlete, it makes tons of sense to utilize box squats. It makes tons of sense to utilize, uh, bands and chains. I personally am in favor of the bands and chains, even, even competitive power lifter just because that's my background i trained at west side barbell and i have a good understanding of

of how to utilize the bands and chains but some people get kind of apprehensive and they get uh almost like an anxiety about you know if i squat with the bands or chains that's not what i'm asked to do on game day and so they get kind of worried about, it's not the same, you know, but yeah, in my opinion, if you're an athlete or even a bodybuilder and, uh, you're not getting judged on your squat and, um, you're not getting judged on your bench press and on your deadlift, then why wouldn't you utilize some of these, uh, devices? Yeah, absolutely. And I love to do high rep stuff with bands for guys that are injured and for just killer and for getting ligaments and tendons strong. And it's great. We have a plow swing at the facility.

How high are the reps? Five by 25, sometimes five to 25, banging them out. And so that's a little bit of a rehab. Absolutely. Rehab, prehab type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Guys with, with, uh, knee issues, it does fantastic stuff for stabilizing the patellofemoral joint and takes away a lot of pain.

Yeah. Andrew and I have been doing, you know, quite a bit of bodybuilding stuff recently. And, and, uh, we've noticed like the therapeutic effects of just getting, uh, uh, a crazy amount of blood to the area, you know, doing like something like a lateral raise and you try to hold it for five seconds at the top and pumping out a ton of reps and doing drop sets and stuff. And, uh, when we got done with a few workouts, I'm like, man, like I, you know, I, I always knew about all this stuff. I've done all this stuff before, but I haven't done it to this degree. And man, it feels good. I mean, it feels amazing on the joints.

It's not the same wear and tear that you get from a typical body or powerlifting workout. Yeah, absolutely. And the frequency, you can come back a lot more often and use it as a rehab tool. tool and that I see so many guys who come in with, um, issues that are, have been pointed out to them by MRIs and, and other types of medical imaging. And there, you can't doubt medical imaging. It is what it is, but whether or not that's the actual cause of their pain in more cases than not, it is not. Right. in more cases than not, it is not. So we've got this thing where people are blindly being told

by particularly surgeons that you have this pain issue because of this, it can only be fixed because of that. But there's no real proper clinical correlation to figure out if that's really what's causing your pain. And so at an alarmingly increasing frequency, I'm seeing this all the time and we're just going through and doing stuff and guys are feeling phenomenally better when they're being told oh you're nearly bone on bone here or this is that or this is that and they just they feel incredible

and part of what we're doing with that is some of these high rep things with the bands but we're changing a lot of of guys and what they're doing. And it's tough because in that sporting world, the top guy is a surgeon. Like he's the orthopedic guy, he's the top guy, and he's the one that makes all the stuff. But they are even the most highly skilled guys. That's what they do, they're surgeons. And they don't really see enough stuff outside of there

to correlate what's going on. And so it's kind of a, an alarming trend that you see throughout all the professional sports where it's 95% of sports medicine is non-surgical and the guy who's supposed to be the top dog is a surgeon. Tell me that's not a setup for disaster. Yeah. No, it makes, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I I've had, you know, elbow or tricep or whatever thing going on for a long time. And I've been to a bunch of different doctors and had x-rays and MRIs and every different thing. And ultimately, they really didn't tell me anything, which was

kind of crazy. But one doctor thought I should get surgery. The other one just thought it wouldn't be worth it and uh we just left it at that and i don't i mean in my elbow doesn't feel uh it doesn't feel like it's totally free of pain but uh that was like a year and a half ago and like most most of whatever was bothering me seems to be gone and a lot of it has to do with this the way i've been training the way i've been eating, um, you know, cleaning up the diet, I think is a huge part of it. Trying to pay more attention to sleep, I think is a, another factor in there for sure. And then, uh, yeah, the higher reps with the training and, and figuring out different ways to, uh, really stimulate the muscle, you know, work in the muscle rather than just kind of like work in the body. Do you utilize some bodybuilding with some of your guys as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess when you say bodybuilding, I think more of bodybuilding exercises, so to speak. And absolutely. So I think there's a, there's a lot of people in the specialized sports strength community who poo- bodybuilding and for that matter they poop who power lifting and they think that it's uh it just it's sometimes ridiculous when you go to ask like an athlete you're like how much do you bench and they're like i'm not sure my coach never has me bench and you're like okay well how much how about a squat like what do you squat and they're like i'm not sure our coach doesn't have a squat. Or they'll say the coach doesn't let them squat. And then you're like, okay, a deadlift?

Like, you guys have a weight room, correct? Do you lift weights? Yeah. I'm not expecting for the guy to say I squatted 775 for five reps. I'm not expecting that at all. But you're just like, what the hell are you guys doing? Yeah. And so a lot of them, they look at, they say, well, take powerlifting, for example.

It's not really what we do. And those guys are- Trying to be explosive. Yeah. And those guys are just, you know, they're big and they're, they got all these, they're wrapped up and they have suits and they're the rage of most of us. I was just going to say they're fat. All this type of stuff.

And my response is usually, okay, let's back up for a second here. I don't care if you're wrapped up like a mummy. If you can put a thousand pounds on your back and bend your knees and not end up on the floor, I got to respect that and I got to understand some of these things that you're doing. You know what I mean? And so I see it completely opposite of that. And, you know, it's tough when you're dealing with that mentality because that's a guy who just doesn't want to learn.

You know, it's a lot of strength coaches are sometimes, oh, I don't want to use Olympic lifting. It's too complicated. We don't have this. That doesn't work. I don't want this. Every single strength coach that I've ever heard say that is a guy who can't limp and lift for the most part but at the end of the day you have to be able to take things from everywhere and incorporate it and that that includes bodybuilding if bodybuilding things work right and um i'm not opposed to any system of training or modality of training that works and i try to

incorporate all of them i think the only time you go wrong is when you start thinking that what you have is the be all and end all and other things can't work and can't be incorporated. And you have to let the athletes have fun too, right? Like if somebody comes from a background where they've done a lot of plyometrics or something, let's just say that, that maybe you're not the biggest fan of, of doing excessive amounts of that or whatever, but within reason, you're going to have to allow these athletes to do some of that. Maybe they, maybe they really love, um, to power lift or maybe they really love some bodybuilding. It only makes sense from a mental standpoint to say,

Hey, you know what, uh, at the end of this workout last 20 minutes, have that, you know, you and so-and-so go back and forth on some curls until you can't curl anymore. Have some fun. Absolutely. So I've got a rule about certain gyms and that quite frankly, it pisses off some of these performance coaches. But I say, okay, if you drop me in the middle of the neighborhood and I don't know anything, there are certain signs that I know. So if I want a block and I see a payday loan, a liquor store, a BL Bonds and a gun shop on the same block, that's not a place I want to be. That's really not a place I'm going at night.

Okay. If I walk into a gym and I see a whole bunch of speed ladders on the ground, nothing but air machines, signs that say no chalk, those little adjustable dumbbells all over the place. I pretty much know there's nothing really happening here. It's time to get out. It makes you just as scared probably, huh? And it doesn't smell. It's all clean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't have that. It's got to have a little funk to it. No doubt. Our boy Emilio asked you this earlier, and I thought it was a really good question, so I want to bring this one back up to you. These NFL athletes, they have access to the best facilities money can buy, the organizations they work for.

They hire who they consider to be the absolute best in coaching and strength training and whatnot. What separates you from an NFL strength coach? Well, one of the things is that I have total control. So a lot of these guys that are in that situation, they don't get to do what they really want to do anyway. So there's a lot of politics that gets involved in how much they can really do.

They're limited to the time that they can have with these guys. And if you're in a, and you're taking care of a whole bunch of guys that you don't really have the staff to deal with properly, like you're just never going to be able to do some of the things that can be done when you have a guy one-on-one for long periods of time. So in some cases, their hands are tied. And in other cases, they may be just tied to certain dog uh, dogmas or traditions and things like that that can limit the scope of what they do. And then sometimes they're also limited by how much they can really integrate, um, therapy and other things like that. Cause there are very, you know, only, only the therapy room guys do this. Only the strength

conditioning guy, guy does this. And, and so there. And so it's not always the left hand talking to the right hand and nothing's integrated. There's a lot of issues that go on. Yeah, you got it all under one roof. Yeah. And so that definitely makes a big difference for us. That's awesome. And then so the guys that come to you, you said earlier, they're basically, they're already at the elite level. Does anybody come to you before they, you know,

break into the NFL or anything like that? Like they go to you to kind of get the last push to really get them to that level? Yep. We get a lot of guys like that, or guys are coming up for the draft, or we get like undrafted free agents who are just trying to make it.

Those are the funnest guys. And the most rewarding to take them from that to like a Pro Bowl or something like that. But yeah, it's, they're relatively elite when they come, but there's a ton of room to go and improve. Um, it's, it's kind of interesting because, uh, although they show up pretty elite at their sport, they can sometimes be extremely unconditioned. And, uh, so that represents some interesting challenges

because you have to be able to say, okay, some of what he's doing has gotten him this far. And so we've got to be careful what we undo or don't undo, but we want to implement some much better training strategies and protocols that we can use. And you're kind of walking a bit of a tightrope there. But as you get to know that person and you're doing constant assessments

and evals on this person, you kind of know what needs to be done and how that works. Yeah. Who have you found to be the most hungriest? Oh, it's definitely those undrafted free agents. Or someone who has a chip on their shoulder for whatever reason that might be.

But it's typically those type of guys that they just, they've kind of had to go through some adversity, you know? But sometimes you get a kid who's, he was a blue chip kid in high school, went to a major college top 10 pick and he's still hungry. Nice. Still wants to kick everybody's ass. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Then those, those are the ones that make it because ultimately the

super talented guys that aren't hungry, they don't last long. Right. Um, what's, um, what's it like, uh, you know, training, uh, James Harrison, I'm a huge fan of his, I've been a huge fan of him for a long time. He's got that a hundred, uh, a hundred yard touchdown interception, uh, in the super bowl. I mean, he, he just seems like a maniac and I I've been following him for a long time, but like, especially as he started to come towards the end of his career doing all this crazy training. i didn't realize a lot of it uh uh was done with you i didn't i didn't know that you uh were training him until you know we started to uh talk a little bit more um what's this what's this guy like on a daily basis uh he's driven uh thank you so much for getting me an

autographed picture too by the way that's amazing yeah this play is so much for getting me an autographed picture too, by the way. That's amazing. Yeah, you're welcome. This play is so much fun to watch. Yeah, there he is. Yeah. There's another one of my guys coming in at the end trying to make a block there, Ryan Clark, 25. Yeah. Yeah, no, the thing about him is people are not going to really understand this because they see kind of what james is like in the media and

different things like that but he is awesome about boundaries like if you tell him to do this and do that don't do this and do that that's that's kind of like what he wants you know and um he's good at uh executing what you tell as long as you get long he buys in he'll execute he'll executing what you tell him. As long as you get, as long as he buys in, he'll execute, he'll do what you want to do. He'll, he doesn't want to think about stuff. He's like,

this is what you told me to do. This is what I want to do. Let's grind. You know, which is great. It makes it, makes that person easy to coach. Of course,

he'll talk a lot of shit and he's nonstop on you and everything else like that. But that can be fun too. It's not that big a deal. Sometimes he may not want to do it. That's kind of the vibe I got from the, from, from the video of you guys,

of you guys training. Um, you told him to have kind of a slower eccentric on the bench and I kind of see him. He was like, I almost kind of gave you that look like I'm going to kind of lift whatever way I want to lift type thing.

But then he proceeded to do it. You asked him to do. That's exactly the way he is. It's got to be his own idea. Right. So you got to present it to him, take the shit that he's going to throw, and then he's ultimately going to go and do it. Right. But I mean, he's a, and he works out super early in the mornings.

You've kind of seen that the way he's brought him in. Yeah, he wakes up at like four in the morning or whatever, right? Yeah. So we're generally working out at six right and um i don't necessarily love the idea of doing that and uh and i think that in some ways it has compromised his sleep and some of his recovery over the years which we've had multiple discussions about that go nowhere but for him it's a first things first mindset so he gets up he does the most important value producing thing of the whole day first it's out of the way right the day is accomplished nothing can distract you all this is going to happen it's done and it works well for him and his mindset and that's fantastic but for other people it might not work that way right but that is his mindset and it does work well yeah life is a lot of give and take you know

different parts of the day i i've been forcing myself to wake up later lately and i i hate every second of it i really do i i enjoy waking up early i i like waking up earlier than the sun you know i just it's just like a kind of similar thing. It's like a mindset. Um, and the only reason why I've shifted it, uh, for now is, um, I just want to see what kind of impact it'll have. I just get better sleep. I'm kind of curious. I'm usually getting about seven hours now and I'm working towards getting eight or nine. And I just want to see what it'll look like if i consistently get eight hours you know i'm just going to make it just as black and white as i can be if i can consistently get

eight hours for a period of time like am i improving am i getting better because if i am and i'm going to continue to figure out a way to get eight hours of sleep right you know i like to i like to live my life that way when i I try something and it has an impact, then I'm like, shit, okay, that worked great. I want to, you know, keep this in my toolbox and use it appropriately. You know, that's what's always felt the best to me. I had one more question that may have slipped away from my fat head. Oh, no. may have slipped away from my fat head.

Oh, no. I guess, oh, yeah. What are some things away from the business, away from training people, what are some things that you enjoy doing? That's a great question because pretty much what I do is business and business. That's your life. That's your life, yeah.

Working out would definitely be one of them. Spending time with family is another one of them. Um, but, uh, for the most part, uh, the gift and the curse that I have is that I love what I do.

Yeah. You know, I'm the same way. I don't have any other hobbies. I don't, I'm not into guns. I'm not into cars. I'm not into,

I'm not into anything. I'm into lifting. That's it. I don't have anything. I, it's. That's it. Like, I don't have anything. It's what I think about pretty much 24 seven. Um, I, I do, you know, I, I like movies. I like going to the movies. Um, obviously like I love spending time with my kids.

Um, but yeah, I just, it's mainly just, uh, weights and, um, I used to like video games, but my kids kind of stole that away from me. So I don't mess with that anymore, but I'm kind of in your boat, man. Just, uh, if I'm not thinking about training and I'm thinking about like supplements, and if I'm not thinking about supplements, I'm thinking about food. I'm not thinking about food. I'm thinking about sleep, you know, it's just, it's just a constant, uh, constant stream of like training and things to do with training, working with all these people and recommend, recommending, uh, different food and different supplements. You got any good poop stories for us?

We talk, uh, quite a bit about poop on this podcast. That and also, uh, experimenting with different supplements. You know, you've probably had a couple of batches that are like, ooh, this might not be the one that's going to hit the market. Yeah, just end up on a toilet all day. I've got a few. I mean, well, first of all. Are you always the guinea pig, right?

Oh, yeah. I pretty much guinea pig everything. The problem is, is I don't, my taste tolerance is pretty high. So when I'll mix something up, I think, oh, this is not bad. Then I hand it to someone else to try. They're like, oh, that is garbage. Go back. That is the worst thing ever.

I can't possibly drink that, you know? But yeah, no, back in the day of the 1,3-butan diol when the ketone stuff was just coming out, I first tried that. I drank 40 cc's of that straight up, just necked it and put it down. And I'm telling you, that was some of the most god awful stuff I ever did. And it was, it hit me everywhere. I mean, I was sweating. I was on the toilet.

It was, it was pretty bad. Yeah. That's, that's a, that's a brutal spot to be in when you're like, why did I do this? It's like, it's self-induced. It's different if you get sick. You're just like, oh, man, I'm sick. I don't know what to do. But if it's, yeah, you kind of put yourself in that position.

That's a rough one. You were talking to me earlier about a new supplement that you have coming out. Can you talk about that? Or is that kind of top secret for now? Which one were we talking about? The one with the exogenous ketone with the amino matrix stuff in it? Yeah, so basically it's the amino matrix product, which is all the EA stuff that we were talking about before and all the complementary nutrients and all the stuff that would be

that we talked about in that. But it's also adding a full 11.7 grams of beta-hydroxybutyrate to the mix. So it's really ideal as a great energy source when you're fat adapted. Or some people are using that along with carbs to have sort of a dual energy source, especially if you've been a little bit fat adapted and then you're going to add back in some carbs to kind of have that metabolic flexibility and have a sort of dual energy source. Right. And, um, it's ideal when, uh, when you're dieting hard or when you're, uh, in hard ketosis and it's a great addition to that, uh, that the amino matrix,

and we've been doing it now for years at the facility, just adding it in, but now it's going to come out as a full blown product with all of it together in one scoop it and go. And, um, the aminos that, um, you were, you were given to me, um, you had an unflavored kind and, uh, you were like, Hey, these are going to taste like garbage, but if you want to be the best, this is what you're going to do. Yeah. And I was like, hell yeah, I'm on board with that. But yeah, the, the unflavored ones are, yeah, that's a's a real treat what's it like it's bad yeah it's bad it's kind of hard to describe but like i i think most of those amino acids kind of have that similar uh that similar taste to i mean there's

like um kind of burns your throat a little bit some of them are bitter some restringent then of course when you have all the AAs, you introduce sulfur into there as well. So it can be ugly, but the ones that you have that are that flavored now, that's all natural, all stevia based, I like those. I like them a lot. Yeah.

They taste really good. And are all your products made with either unflavored or made with stevia? You don't have any artificial sweeteners in anything? Yeah. So we're currently in the middle of a sort of a rebrand and redoing some things. And so we've had a couple of products in the past

that had some sucralose in it, but we've eliminated all that. So now we've moved completely to all natural everything. So natural sweeteners, natural flavors, natural dyes, everything. It makes sense. I mean, because as you mentioned earlier, some of these other supplement companies, they make products and then they kind of skip out on the amount that you need. Right. And so if you're kind of promoting, hey, like you need a pretty good dose of this stuff, you don't want to be flooding your system with a bunch of junk. of this stuff, you don't want to be flooding your system with a bunch of junk, with a bunch of stuff that just is not in any

way, shape, or form going to help your performance. If anything, maybe it could hurt. That's absolutely right. And if you're going to have to take a lot of it, it becomes even more important. The other thing that we are now with all the amino acids, they're all fermented. So all vegan source, a lot of amino acid companies are still using a lot of amino acids derived from hydrolysis. So you're thinking, talking about duck feathers, human hair, those are the types of things that are the starting materials for some of these amino acids. And, you know, five years ago, there were some amino acids that they just, the technology to get them by fermentation just wasn't there. You didn't really have much choice.

Now we've got choices so we can have all, all fermented. So it's fantastic. Any, uh, body hacks that you're into? Anything that you've seen that, uh, you know, has really worked well for some of your clients or, um, or somebody listening, uh, to help them get, uh, you know, better sleep or burn some fat or anything like that? Well, I think some of the things that I'm really playing with right now for sleep is basically Iranian saffron and some extracts from that. It's a really good balancer of brain chemicals. It works almost like an adaptogen.

The stuff that you gave me helped quite a bit with sleep. It helped me stay asleep, which is kind of the biggest pain in the ass for me. Right. And that's a combination of, it's got ashwagandha, it's got glycine, which helps with attenuating overexcitation in the nervous system. It's got some valerian in it as well, a small dose. It's got fenugabh, the one that you have in it as well small dose it's got fenugabed the one that you have in it as well right yeah and so what we're doing with that again it's a multi-modal approach it's multiple

different mechanisms that affect the excitation of the nervous system your ability to sleep and your ability to turn off and turn off or erasing mind all those types of things but instead of using hey this is the one ingredient we use multiple different ingredients and I've hit five different pathways all at the same time. Have you seen anything about in terms of like food and helping with sleep? Like if you stop eating at a certain time, certain amount of hours before you go to bed, does anything like that help? See, I find that to be very individual. So for some people, they will sleep much better when they have an empty stomach. Other people just will not sleep if they have an empty stomach.

They need to have some type of slow-acting protein generally before they go to bed, and they sleep much, much better. There are camps out there that are at extreme opposite ends of it. You need to stop four hours before you go to bed and they sleep much, much better. There are camps out there that are at extreme opposite ends of it. You need to stop four hours before you go to bed. Your digestive system is empty. There's no clear literature saying one way or the other, really. No. And I think that any time you get that dogmatic about something

where you're that far apart, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. And usually what happens is it's an individual thing and you have to play with that. in the middle. And usually what happens is it's an individual thing and you have to play with that. Right. But I think generally speaking, too many carbs before you go to sleep will help you get to sleep, but most people don't stay asleep when they do that. So I would curtail those. Yeah. It'll kind of hit you in the middle of the night and you'll be, you'll be up. Anything else over there, Andrew? uh yeah just in regards to the um to the essential amino acids uh ian and optimum effects are going to offer 20 off of the amino matrix which is what yeah it's what uh what's what they've been talking about today and the uh the website is just optimum

efx.com slash power project it's in the uh the youtube show notes and uh on itunes as well just whatever app you're using just click down and click more info and the link will be right there in the description that's awesome man it was great having you here on the show man appreciate it yeah thanks for having me man strength is never a weakness weakness is never strength catch you guys later