Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 900: NBA Superstar Sports Performance Coach Paul Fabritz

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Paul Fabritz, founder of PJF Performance and performance coach of NBA superstars like James Harden. Paul has a fascinating story. A struggling college student, he was able to take his passion for basketball and through hard work and delivering exceptional results, he was able to create a wildly successful business training NBA elite, traveling the world, flying on private jets and even training Khloe Kardashian. His journey into sports performance and what led him to specialize in basketball? (2:50) Who was the first NBA player that reached out to him? (7:00) How to progress programming at the right rate. The difference in approach from the Soviet Union to US when it comes to exercise science. (7:30) Did he use advanced equipment in his transformation? With his athletes? (9:50) What techniques did he use to address performance/mechanics with his athletes? (11:35) Getting you to reach your genetic potential. (14:20) Determining an athlete’s level of conscious and risk vs. reward. (15:50) What is the worst advice/myths he has heard? (19:20) The difference between plyometrics being done the RIGHT WAY vs. the wrong way. (22:50) Creating mental toughness and meeting his athletes in the middle. (25:59) How did he grow so fast and become highly successful? (27:40) Would he work for an NBA team? (29:38) Does he have a favorite athlete he works with? (32:40) All in and getting the results. How he decides who he works with. (34:29) The youth is year-round. How does he reach the student athlete market? (35:49) What is the value in academia vs. learning on your own? (37:18) What modalities has he implemented into his own practice? (39:11) Fat don’t fly. How nutrition plays a HUGE role in sports performance. (43:15) Teaching people to live a better and healthy life. (44:25) How does he filter through all the products/technology being thrown his way? What excites him? (46:47) Picking your battles, letting his athletes be intuitive and knowing your own body. (49:45) What is the biggest challenge working with professional athletes? How he sets the table and lays down the foundation when he first meets with an athlete. (51:27) The pivotal moments where his business took off. (54:45) How to leverage yourself and blow up your brand. His new webinar series to teach potential trainers. (59:07) What was that like when he got the call from Dick’s Sporting Goods and Adidas? The details of his sponsorships. (1:00:25) What are some of the biggest mistakes he made while scaling his business? (1:03:34) What is his opinion of the current state of the NBA? Best rookies coming up? Best passers? Most underrated team right now? (1:05:07) What are some things that he did on his Instagram that caused posts to go the most viral? (1:10:09) How to be a squid to become more self-aware. (1:12:22) What are the biggest mistakes he sees athletes make? (1:14:13) Steps to be a better trainer. (1:17:15) What are some epic moments in his career? (1:22:22) What does he appreciate/admire the most about watching NBA players? (1:26:57) The top 3 things the average person can do to improve their vertical TODAY. (1:29:13) How can the average lifter gain speed? Explosive training and max intent. (1:33:07) What advice would he give kids/teenagers to gain speed? (1:36:15) What are his dreams and goals moving forward? (1:37:39) Where does his work ethic come from? (1:39:30) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Paul J. Fabritz (@pjfperformance)  Instagram PJF Performance  PJFPerformance - YouTube James Harden (@jharden13)  Instagram Khloé (@khloekardashian)  Instagram Links/Products Mentioned: November Promotion: MAPS Anywhere ½ off!! **Code “WHITE50” at checkout** Felix Grey Supertraining - Book by Mel Cunningham Siff and Yuri Verkhoshansky influence of squatting depth on jumping performance - Semantic Scholar Functional Anatomy Seminars MAPS Fitness Products Leaf Group Get Bigger, Stronger, Better, Faster | STACK The secret to a squid’s crystal clear underwater vision - YouTube Squats & Science

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Oh, man, it's just you and I, Doug. It's just the two of us. It's just the two of us? I can't do, I can't do Justin's singing whatsoever. This is actually cool that it just worked out this way.

Boys are often playing and I'm going to intro this episode. And I think it's works out just fine because Paul favorites, right? He is. Correct. He is PJ PJ F performance. And you can find him on Instagram there. He also has a YouTube under the same name. And I had been following him since he had about 500

to 1,000 followers on Instagram. He came up in my Explorer page because I like a lot of basketball stuff and follow Sports Center and ESPN pages. And his page was recommended to me. And I loved, I'll dive through pages like this and just kind of briefly look over and see the type of stuff they're putting out.

And this guy was putting out some really legit science related to sports performance. And especially specifically to basketball, which I just absolutely love. And it's rare to come by this. This is a type of information that I used to seek out all the time, especially as a young kid that was trying to increase his vertical.

And the deep ride dug and his stuff, the more really solid information I found. And so I had reached out to him way back when this is when we were really small dug, when we were in your living room, and probably too small at that time to get any of his attention. And then I kind of like left it alone for a while. And not that long ago, I reached out again and just kind of sent him over our immediate kid to let him know, like, hey, you know, we have a pretty large platform.

I really like what you're doing. I'd love to have you down. And then he responded right away. And we flew him out here to come hang out for the day. And just had an incredible time. We had Danny in the studio also. and so we recorded some great YouTube with him But we dive real this is a this is a sports man. This was a really this is cool. It was different probably We don't I don't think we have an interview like this was all around basketball talk and sports performance

But we get into some some deep talk around that and that was just really really good I think you guys will enjoy this episode. But we also mentioned Felix Gray. You guys know that we're sponsored by Felix Gray. So you guys could look them up. It'll be in the show notes. It'll be a link there. Also, don't forget all month long.

We had the 50% off for our maps anywhere. You could go to mapswhite.com and use the code white50allcapitaletters. And without any further ado, here's Paul favorites. I wanted to start off by telling the audience how I found Paul, so. Tinder. Yeah, Tinder. Totally my type.

Let's get the shoe thing going on. That's what it was. It's the match. You got a soft spot for that for sure. Yeah, that's right. Let's jump together. Yeah. I found him soft spot for that for sure. Yeah, that's right. Let's jump together. Yeah. So I found him on Instagram.

Of course, he's in a basketball. And so he popped up on my explore page and just the trainer in me and what we do, we're always looking for high level coaches and professionals that are out there. And I just at that time, I had not seen anybody else on Instagram yet that was putting out any content

For athletes that was really science-based. How long ago was it? This was I don't know When would you say you had about two or three thousand followers? It was probably five six years ago Yeah, it was right when I when I first started building my Instagram Yeah, and then you passed it on to me and we both yeah, we were watching your progress with it was pretty cool to see Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, no, it's been great to watch you grow. So tell me first of all, because I talked to Danny and he actually said, you started on YouTube before. Is that true?

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your journey into this space and what led you to specializing in vertical jump and basketball players. Yeah, so I was a basketball player and being 5-11, I was always, of course, searching for ways to run faster and jump higher. I had all the skills in the world because I had a basketball on my hand at age 2. And so I could dribble, I could shoot, I could pass, I could not jump, I could not run.

And so there was a lot of college coaches interested in recruiting me in high school, but they all said the same thing. Like, you just don't have the athleticism to play at the division one level. And so right then and there, I got super obsessed with like, I'm, that's not going to be my limitation. If I don't make it division one, it's not going to be, be because of strength or vertical or anything physical. And so I really started to study this stuff and had a lot of injuries and

ended up going to community college. And that's where I started to to study this stuff and had a lot of injuries and ended up going to community college and That's where I started to really transform my thinking and really diving into the science I found some really good stuff from like the 1950s in Russia Really go shansky some smell sift and yes, yes exactly and so I kind of dove into those books books like super training It really started to unrivaled and Yes, that's like the Strength and Conditioning Bible. So I was fortunate to stumble upon some good resources and I started applying this knowledge to myself and to my own game and my own training and my vertical went up 12 inches in a year. Holy shit.

And so the same coaches, the same coaches that were telling me you just don't have the athleticism were now seeing me throw down full-win-mill dunks. And so, yeah. How good did that feel? It was incredible. It wasn't that you just bought better shoes or something? No, no. So I went from barely touching the rim

to throwing down full-win-mill dunks and the same division one coaches said, that's the biggest transformation we've ever seen. We did not think it was possible for somebody to increase their athleticism like that. And so I ended up going to Northern Arizona back to my hometown of Flagstaff and walking on there. Ended up getting some injuries there and I didn't go back for my senior year because I was like, look, I did this to myself.

What could I do for other athletes? So it was either pushed through, come back for my senior year, maybe get planned time, maybe go overseas and try to find a pro job over there, or take what I've built and just spread it. And it started to spread across Northern Arizona. I just trained little kids, and I did it for free just because I loved doing it.

And they were getting good results, and it spread all across Arizona. So I moved to Phoenix and opened up a gym around Arizona State, just a tiny little garage gym. Didn't even look like you should be working out in it. And that's actually probably where you guys found me on Instagram. I was doing vertical jump videos, ball handling videos. And NBA players started to find me through Instagram. No shit. So that's how that happened. That's how everything happened. Nobody knew me. I didn't have any connections.

NBA players started finding me on Instagram and they would fly out to Arizona and train with me. So they would just contact you from Instagram. They would straight DM me. Now would you lie in the DM? Now were you tripping? Were you looking at this like this camp? Yes.

Yes. Wow. Who was it? Who was it trolling me? Yeah. Who was the first NBA player that reached out to you? Malcolm Lee, he went to UCLA, very good player at UCLA, and he had just had a hip and a knee surgery. And so he was trying to rehab and come back. He couldn't get his explosive, his explosive in his back.

And he came to train with me in Phoenix, and we got him healthy, and he gained seven inches on his vertical. Damn, dude. That level, that's insane. Yeah. You might have fived paused you for a second because you mentioned the books that you read that you got from Soviet era, Russia and some of this other stuff that increased your vertical 12 inches. Would you mind touching a little bit on like what was it that you read in those books that was so different from what you had already understood from training?

What was so different about their approach? Well, so I had grown up where you think powerlifting is everything. You get stronger, you apply more force. And I never really understood the concept of plyometrics, rate of force development, produce force faster, a vertical jump. The force production aspect is like 0.2 seconds. And so if you're squat strength, if you're squat last four seconds, that amount of that force isn't going to translate to 0.2 seconds. And so if your squat strength, you know, if your squat lasts four seconds, that amount of that force isn't going to translate to 0.2 seconds. And so it's figuring out how to get better rate of forced development and a lot of what

opened my eyes from those books like super training is really how to train plyometrics and just progress it the right way. It's not like some secret exercise that I stumbled upon. He, Virkoshinsky, just puts into words, how to progress everything at the right rate, because I had done millions of programs, air alert, all these different programs, these plyometric programs, and I never really understood true,

like, periodization and how to progress the program at the right rate. And so it was kind of just learning the basics of plyometrics and applying it to what I already knew with my with my lifting and I was doing a Olympic lifting. And then I kind of went outside and I got into yoga. I got it. I took some principles from Pilates. I started doing pool workouts. And so I kind of had like the perfect storm of all these different methods that kind of hit at the right time. And then I stayed consistent for a year and that's when it really took off.

Wow. So it went from, I used to be like the something guy. Like when I was like 15, I was like, I'm the Olympic weightlifting guy. And I actually qualified for Olympic weightlifting junior meets because I got so good at that. Oh, excellent. Because I thought that that was what was going to get my vertical to the next level and it probably did produce some decent results And then and later on in high school I was the powerlifting guy I wanted to lift as much as I could and then once I realized it's not about being the lifting guy or the weight lifting guy

It's about being the results guy and and whatever whatever principles you have to take to get results you do it And so it was really just, it's putting everything together the right way that allowed my vertical to transform. Well, I've seen, I mean, you're, I've seen like a lot of videos where you're starting to mess with like sports science equipment and you know, really being able to put metrics

to a lot of this stuff with force plates. And now as you're going through that process of testing yourself, were you already doing that personally or is that something that you worked with later? I made my transformation without that stuff. Without the advanced technology, I was working, when I transformed, I was just doing an LA fitness gym. So I didn't really have advanced equipment.

I started to get into that because once I started training NBA players, I realized it's a lot tougher because there already had a really hard already up there. So how do you prove that? Law of diminishing returns, the closer they get to that genetic peak, the harder it is for us to get results. And so I started studying on my own time, force plates, motion tracking, EMG, just so that I knew when these NBA players are coming in, we can test them at a level that's so detailed that we can figure out exactly what it is that we have to work on. So some people, they might come in, we get them on the force plates, we find out they're not

producing force early on in the jump, or maybe they're not producing force late in the jump, or maybe their peak force is high, but they don't hold force for a long period of time. And there's all these different variables that could be the limiting factor. And when you really dial in and tune in on that and then attack that, you can get results a lot faster. So when you identify when they're applying the force,

and when they're not applying the force, that dictates how you coach and train them. Because it's much more specific is what you're saying. Exactly. So it's almost like technique and skill. Mm-hmm, okay. And two, so when you notice those discrepancies where they're not producing force

in a certain part of the movement, do you then focus in on that and create and generate more force with isometrics? What are some of the techniques you used to address that? Yeah, it depends. I got good with using motion tracking systems where we could show the joint velocities. We could say your hip velocity is this, your knee velocity is this, your ankle velocity is this, and then I can compare it to the database.

I could say, well, your ankle velocity is a lot lower than the average NBA point guard. So we know we got to do some work at the ankles. Now that could be improving power, a lot of times that's improving mechanics. So then you say, okay, you're not producing that velocity at the ankle. Well, maybe mechanically you're not doing something right. And like last week I posted a video of how cats jump and how they're very patient with the ankles and they start to ascend But the the heels stay down and at the very last moment the heels come up

So then you're using the ankle as a whip. So not as a force producer You're using it to amplify the force from higher up in the chain Oh, right, and so sometimes you could say well your ankles aren't producing high enough velocity because your heels are coming up too early. So now it's, well, let's get better ankle mobility. Let's work on your technique. And now you're going to use the ankles the way they're supposed to be used. And so all of a sudden they go back and now they produce higher velocity. Now the vertical could be up five in. How common is, like, just address, like, do you look at the feet more than anything?

Like, it would be first get somebody? Yeah, I mean, starting from the ground up, from the feet, I mean, that's where a lot of the issues are, especially we wear these stiff, sold shoes, we've lost the ability to really use our feet. How they're supposed to be basketball, or? Especially basketball, yeah. So that's a huge component, but like I said,

with these assessments, what I got really good at is just using technology to determine what the limiting factor is. When most people, 99% of athletes are guessing and checking. They're just don't random exercise and just hoping it sticks. And what I found is, luckily enough, I guessed enough times to where I could transform my vertical. But if I want to take that and I want to apply it to the masses and I want to apply it to these MBA players who have that law of diminishing return, we have to really tune in. And so that's why I did a lot of self-study

and you can't go get a degree for this stuff. They're not gonna teach this in a bachelor's degree, right? So it was kind of like sneaking into the lab, Arizona State, and just trying to use their force plates whenever I could. And eventually, luckily in my business, I was able to save up and afford this stuff because it is expensive equipment.

But yeah, I mean, I got to the point where now I'm really good at it. And so people are flying across the country to come see me to get these assessments and have me set up their program. That's great. Now, can you, when you meet somebody and you do an assessment with them,

do you have a pretty good idea of how much you're going to be able to help them by the first assessment? Yeah. Not always, but there are times like a quick example would be, you know, standing vertical, you're 35, we get you an approach vertical where you have 15 feet to run and you're still 35 or you're 36. Well, we know it's probably a mechanical issue. You don't know how to use your momentum

and turn it into vertical velocity, right? So something like that, I know I could put four, five, six inches on you quick just by fixing your mechanics. You have the power, like my job is easy. I just got to teach you the mechanics. Sometimes it is a little more complex and you can't just do it from a vertical test. You got to go deeper and deeper.

Eventually, you get into like EMG and finding out like what muscles are active, what muscles are overactive, what muscles are underactive. So you can't always, and I never guarantee anything because it is like, it's really tough to tell somebody what they're going to gain. All I tell people is I think I can get you to reach your genetic potential. Right. Whatever your genetic potential is, I can get you that. Well, I know how hard it is to change somebody's default recruitment pattern.

You know, if I try to teach somebody to walk differently or stand differently or sit differently, it takes a long time because you have to consciously do it over and over again before it becomes automatic, it must be extreme. It must be much more difficult to do that with a professional athlete who's been jumping a particular way probably since they first started playing basketball. How the hell do you get them to change their wiring with that? Because at that level, that's got to be so difficult. It is. It's very, very difficult, especially when you make it conscious.

So the way that I teach it, if I can skip a conscious stage, I will. So if I can teach you how to jump without using words, I'm going to do it. If I can say, okay, look at your feet, now look at my feet, and then they can replicate that, then it's okay, let's keep rep in it, and rep in, rep in, rep in, then we skip a conscious stage.

Sometimes they're not going to get that, and then you have to go to words, and sometimes they're not going to get that, and then have to go to words. And sometimes they're not going to get that and then you've got to really break it down to the details and the more details you break it down to, the more conscious it becomes. And the longer it takes to transfer from conscious to subconscious. And I always tell them upfront, you are going to decrease your vertical and you're going to run slower when you start with me. Because at some level, you're going to become more conscious. It's just over time when we wrap this out,

eventually it's gonna build back into your natural motor pattern. I was just gonna say, because I always use the example of a typewriter, like if I learn how to type with just two fingers and I do that for 10 years, I'm gonna get pretty fast with just two fingers, and if I go and then learn how to use all my fingers, there's a period of time where I'm gonna be slower, but then eventually the potential is much higher.

And one of the biggest fears of trainers that do what you do working with high-level athletes is, because these people are so good at compensating, am I gonna make them worse? Am I gonna, and so how do you deal with that? It's just wrist-versed reward. I mean, some things they might have a compensation pattern or they might have a left-right difference.

And sometimes those actually make them better at their sport. And so, you gotta pick your battle wisely. You gotta pick and choose. You're not gonna correct everything. But there's some things where in the past we've seen, like yeah, if I can get you to stay down on the heels a little bit longer, you're going to improve your vertical jump because it's worked for so many people.

So you got to just kind of pick wisely. Anything that could potentially really lead to an injury, we're going to change. Well, like, I know example I remember a strength coach was telling me, like, you know, in terms of like, valgus, like, a lot of times we're trying to eliminate that, whereas that's where they're producing the most amount of force. So, let's learn how to like, work with that and then build off of that. Exactly. I just had a post about that.

So a lot of the best jumpers have some internal rotation and some adduction. What you're doing is you're winding up the glutes, because if the glutes are external rotators, we can wind them up by getting into a little internal rotation and when you internally rotate, you get a little bit of a forward tilt and anterior pelvic tilt. And then what are the externally rotated at the top? Give generate more power.

Yeah, so then when you spiral effect, sure. Yeah, it's a spiral effect, so you're winding up that screen. Like a little glifters when they're at the bottom. So you not trying to fix that then, you not trying to address that, you leave it. I'll usually leave it unless it's happening on the landing. I mean, 90% of the injuries are gonna happen on the landing. So if you're landing with that, that's an issue.

But if that's how you're producing force and it's not excessive, then we're gonna leave it. Oh, that's interesting. I would encourage it. Now, it's something that's so rhythm and, I should say, timing base that you can't teach it. I can't teach somebody, hey, you gotta drop your knees in words. There's some things that that you can't teach it. I can't teach somebody, hey, you gotta drop your knees in words.

There's some things that you just can't teach. But if they're doing it naturally, I'm gonna leave it alone. And we've assessed some of the best jumpers in the world, professional dunkers. All the best jumpers have a little bit of that internal rotation. Wow.

What do you think, what do you see is like some of the worst advice in terms of like improving your vertical jump or like some of the worst advice in terms of like, you know, improving your vertical jump or like some of the myths out there. Yeah, common fallacies out there. I mean, probably the one that I mentioned before is just the stronger we get, the higher we jump. It's just not true.

I mean, it's true to a certain point, but at some point, how strong is strong enough? You gotta ask yourself that question. So we can get somebody to maybe squat, let's say 250 pounds, and then we get them up to 300 and they jump a little higher. Maybe we get them up to 325, they jump a little bit higher, but then we keep going up and up and up and their vertical doesn't keep increasing.

So we've reached the point where they're strong enough. Now you got to improve the rate of forced development. So now let's not go higher than 300 pounds. Let's stay at 300 pounds. Let's get you to lift that weight faster. So let's you're doing it at, you know, 0.5 meters per second. Let's get you up to 0.6 and then 0.7 and then 0.8. So we never have to go heavier. I just got to get you to lift that weight faster. Now what about range of motion because you are sport specific and there's probably not a lot of benefit I would think for like these full deep squats. Do you train?

Do you train? Yeah, do you train? So we would, even with our NBA players, we start deeper and then as the program progresses, we go narrow, narrow, narrow. So we get more towards that quarter squat as we go on. So the studies show that the quarter squat is better for the vertical jump, but what's better for muscle hypertrophy is deep squats, range of motion.

So a lot of times that could be a limiting factor, especially early on, could be hypertrophy. You get the muscle bigger, comes with a bigger cross-sectional area, more potential for force production. Right, because you didn't do it the way that you described. get the muscle bigger comes with a bigger cross sectional area, more potential for forced production. Right. Because you wouldn't think that if you didn't do it the way that you described, that could be a potential problem in the future. If we just started with the quarter squat, eventually they get in position where their

body isn't as familiar in that and that could be potential for injury. Yeah. For sure. And I mean, you got to build your base. Like, you have to have a base of strength. You have to have a decent hypertrophy long term, even just for injury prevention reasons. And so we never skipped that phase,

but I would say people stay in that phase for too long. They get excited, oh, I'm getting a muscle, I'm getting some strength, and I am jumping a little higher, and then they just keep going, where we would stop them after a couple months of the deep squat, and then we'd get them into half squats,

and then we'd get them into quarter squats and then we'd get them into quarter squats. Yeah, a lot of people have trouble understanding that when you first start out with your training, it's general, but as you get better and better and better, it becomes much more and more and more specific. Exactly. And the problem with that is you have a lot of kids and stuff who watch the advanced training and they want to do the real specific stuff, not realizing that there's a couple years of just regular deep back squats.

Exactly. In my staff meeting the other day, I gave them an example where I had this small cup and I started filling up the cup and it was overflowing and it was spilling out on the floor and I was like, what happened? I didn't expand the cup. I tried to increase the level of that water without getting a bigger cup. So we're going to get gains for a while, but at some point that water is going to start to overflow. Now I need more general human capabilities, general strength, general movement, not sport-specific. Then that expands that cup. Now when I go

back to the sport-specific, I can fill up that level of water higher. Inclusive potential. Exactly. Yeah, we always fill up that level of water. Increases the potential. Exactly. Yeah, we always say that that strength is the foundation of all other physical pursuits. Yeah. One of the questions I have, one of my biggest pet peeves as a trainer and a gym manager and owner was seeing people use plyometrics like just in circuits as a way to get higher.

Yeah. Like just jumping on a box until you can't jump anymore or whatever. Yeah. Can you talk about the difference between doing plyometrics the way that they're supposed to be done and the way that people do them in gyms all the time and why one is better than the other? Yeah, so that's another one of the huge myths that people think that more is better

and you have to have a burn on everything. So first of all, when a muscle burns, what would be the body's adaptation? Fatigue resistance. What is fatigue resistance? Slow twitch muscle pressure. So we're already getting away from the goal of maximizing our fast twitch muscle fibers.

So for our guys when we're doing plyometrics, the set probably isn't gonna last much longer than 10 seconds. It will probably never last longer than 20 seconds. So everything is short, everything is high quality. probably isn't going to last much longer than 10 seconds. It will probably never last longer than 20 seconds. So everything is short, everything is high quality. We try to monitor everything. And so we go on like a just jump mat and we'll do our plyometrics there.

And if it's 30 and then 30 and then 30 and then 29 and 28, we're cutting the set right there. Because if you're jumping any lower, then we're going after endurance or explosion, capacity, diminishing returns. And so, we're not training the nervous system to do what we want it to do. So, that's probably the one thing that people, the general fitness person does is they do plyometrics for conditioning. And I just see no point in that. Especially for, like, what are you doing it for?

Because that... That's a high risk way to get higher. It's a higher risk way to get tired. Yes, like, go run a hillsprings. Eat, eat, eat, you know, kill yourself. You're jumping Jackson Place. You're better off. It makes no sense, but then, like,

you still have high level trainers, like, NBA trainers that will do that, and they say, well, you know, we need endurance, we need explosion capacity. And I'm like, first of all, that's dangerous, but it's all, it also doesn't translate because like in basketball, there's no sport where you just jump up and down over and over and over.

You sprint, you've got, you walk, you jog, you jump, you slide, and so there's no way to get in shape other than mimicking that. Really, there's no way to truly get in shape other than playing basketball. That's right. Everything else that we're doing is just, you know, we hope that it transfers, Hillsprings transfer,

a little bit, Sprints transfer, a little bit, but if you're doing jumping exercises or like high reps, strength training to get tired, you're probably becoming more slow to itch dominant and that endurance isn't even transferring to the court. So why are we doing it? The way I like to explain it is I like to say, you know, you have a toolbox and you open up

the toolbox and you have a hammer and a screwdriver and a wrench, and people, what they'll do is they'll grab the hammer, and then that's what they use for everything. Wates are very, very good at building strength. Pliometrics are very, very good at making you explosive. Don't use them for shit that they're not good for. Like, you want endurance? Do something for endurance.

I'm not going, I'm not trying to run long distance to get stronger. The why am I lifting weights like that. That's one of the biggest knocks we had on CrossFit was how they put their Olympic lifts and plios in these circuits. Why mix all that up that? What's the difference? Just money's up the water. There's absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now, do you, because you're dealing with some high level athletes, do you see that there's still a big problem, even at the NBA level. For sure.

Well, and the other thing is these elite athletes, they want to feel the burn. When they're coming in for a workout, like they want you to kill them. They're athletes. In so long. So the guys that I have now that have been with me for years, they know that I have a reasoning to everything I do.

So they know if I bring them in and I don't make them tired, there is a reason for that. A lot of times I want them to leave the gym feeling better, feeling like they could go jump higher after the session, but I also got to meet them in the middle and have their days where we do just kill you, because there is still a mental benefit to it. Like we go run sand dunes.

I don't love it from a physiological perspective. I don't love. It's mental toughness. It's mental toughness. It's mental toughness. And at the end of the day, mental is way more important than physical. So I got to meet them in the middle and I'll give them some brutal workouts

to make them burn, even though it's not necessarily going towards the goal that I want to achieve. Yeah, I really appreciate what you're saying because I think if more trainers understood that and understood what the desired outcome was, like, okay, today we're going to train your mental capacity to handle pain and fatigue. That's what the workout is designed around.

Okay, today we're going to train for speed and power. That's what we're going to train towards. Okay, today we're building strength. I think if more trainers understood that, they would be far more successful. For sure. And so you're finding, even at your level, that you're not common, you're a rarity still. Yeah, I think so.

That's great for you. Yeah, it is. It is. It's good business. It makes me, it makes it really easy for me to get more clients. So when you first start it, because I've had gyms and I've had lots of trainers

work for me, all of us have. And almost every trainer that comes out of college with a degree, you know, a bachelor's or master's in some kind of exercise-related field, almost every single one of them's like, I want to work with high-level athletes. And I always look at them and say, okay, that's such a, that's one of the hardest possible parts of the personal training market to do well. And it's just very, very difficult. Yeah.

Once these guys started contacting you, how did you grow so fast and get so successful? You're young. I just asked your age, you're under 30. How did you get so successful so quickly? Well, I mean, short answer is results. So you got to get that one person to trust you. I got Malcolm Lee to trust me. He came back. He put seven inches on,

he made it back to the NBA, and you know, these are small circles. Everybody talks within the, they all grew up playing club all together. They all know each other. So, you know, the word starts to spread, and then I get clients like James Harden, and he's the MVP, and they're like,

well, who's his trainer. And so it really spreads once you're in. Getting in is the hard part. And getting in, you just got to show your passion. You got it every single day, show online, how passionate you are about it, how driven you are, give value value value, ask for nothing, and eventually somebody's going to find you.

You know, if you stay at it, like at that rate, somebody's going to find you, whether that's a coach, like at that rate, somebody's gonna find you, whether that's a coach, a GM, a player, and you're gonna get your opportunity. But the people that say they wanna work with high level athletes, they wanna just like go study more and more and more and get degrees and like think that all of a sudden,

some connection is gonna put them in the place where they need to be or they think, then they make the excuse that it's all about connections and I just don't know enough people. But like in my situation, I didn't know anybody. But I just said, I'm passionate about this. I'm gonna learn as much as I can and I'm gonna put out information every single day.

Have any of the NBA or college level organizations approached you in terms of like coaching or like being involved that way. Yeah, so actually when I started my business, I have a terrible business name. It's my initials, PJF Performance. I created that on a whim. I didn't even know your name was Paul.

That's like, I was. Yeah. So I created that on a whim because I didn't think that I was gonna go super far with my business. I just needed an LLC name, so I called it PJF Performance. The whole reason that I did that was because I wanted to become known.

I wanted to be a go-to guy, and then I wanted to get a team job. I didn't know that being an independent basketball performance trainer was an industry. I didn't think I could really make it. That was more of a way to promote myself to get a team job. In the last couple of years, I started getting offers. Last year, I actually got my dream job offer that I grew up dreaming of my whole life. And I turned it down because I'm actually in a better position. That's so rad. Wow. That's that feel, man.

Incredible. Yeah. Incredible. That's a tough decision to make because you're like, well, I dreamed about this my whole life. Like I'm here. But then you realize that, you know, I'm able to help an NBA player. I'm able to travel whenever I want and go to clinics and Panama and Philippines and give back and do charity clinics and do a lot more freedom. And there's no cap as far as earning. I would hate to have somebody tell me you're going to earn this much and that's all you can earn. Even if it's a high amount, I want to, I grind harder, I wanna be able to make more money.

And so I'm in a good position where I don't think I would work for an NBA team right now. I have one interesting situation. If they offer me a backup point guard role and strength, that's it. Somebody offers me that, I'm gonna do it. It's like with some vessels alone, wrote the script for Rocky, he's like, I'll let you buy it, but I gotta buy it. Yeah It's like what's the best of the alone, real, the script for Rocky, he's like,

I'll let you buy it, but I gotta do it. Yeah, I gotta be in the move of the guy. You know what I'm saying? So what is that dream job or what was that dream job? What does it look like? Can you share like, I can't share the team. Okay, that's fine. I figured that out.

Yeah, I don't wanna like disrespect this. Of course not, of course not. But I mean, it was the perfect situation. It's a historic franchise and and It's the team that I've that I've always wanted to work with and when you just as a kid you're growing up And you're just dreaming of where you could be as a professional as a trainer and like this is it but I'm able to train the players from this team and I'm able to train players all over the NBA and all over the world, so it's actually a better position.

So are you able to still work that out where you could work directly with them but still maintain your independence? That was the issue, is I couldn't do any NBA training. So I could keep my online training business, but I wouldn't be able to train other NBA players. Oh, that one I see. Exclusive.

Yeah, I'm so dedicated to the clients that I've been working with. And I look at it as a marathon. I don't want to just get you results for two years. I want to be with you your whole career. Right. And so it would kind of kill me to let down all of these guys. Mm-hmm. Well, that's integrity.

Do you have a favorite athlete that you work with? I know that's a really tough question to ask, but... It's tough. I mean, they're all unique in their own way. I learned so much from them because you look at how rare it is to be at the NBA level. So they have so many mental traits that I can learn from.

James Hardin is fun. He's so dedicated to the game and you look at somebody, there's never been somebody to go from six man to MVP. Most people would be satisfied with six man. You make it to the finals somebody to go from six man to MVP. Most people would be satisfied with six man. You know, you make it to the final, you're the six man. That's pretty baller and on a legit team, on a legit team. And you know, he gets traded to the rockets and people say, well, he's overpaid and he's not a superstar. He's just a role

player. And then he becomes like a top three player in the NBA and he's last year's MVP. So like that's, he's really cool to work with just to see how he's never satisfied, how he's motivated by legacy and not by happiness. And that's like all of the best players. If you're motivated by happiness, I made it to the NBA. I'm rich. I'm done. What else?

Yeah, what's next? But the ones that are really motivated by legacy, they're the ones it's like, it's never enough. It's Kobe. It's like there's always something else to do. And so he's one of those guys, so I can kind of steal a lot of those mental attributes from him, and then it's also fun with him because you're just private jets and yachts and whatever you wanna do.

So like I was, So they take you with them on the, Sometimes I, yeah. Yeah, usually I'm too busy. To sign like an NDA, like I'm not gonna say anything. No, like with James, I go on vacation with him a lot. So like I went with him to Barcelona this year,

Ibiza, Turks and K-Cost, like incredible offseason with him. And you're training for an hour and then the rest is just hanging out and just enjoying your life. So it's always fun, it's always fun to work with him, but there's all of our guys are so much fun to work with. Do you recognize like just, is there a whole other work ethic

with these professional athletes? Or do you see more of it just their genetic freaks? Or is it like a combination of the two? It's a combination. I've had guys that are genetic freaks who just don't have it mentally and I don't train them anymore. I mean, they either come in and they just realize they can't hang with the program and they drop out

or I have to respectfully let them go because we're not a good fit mentally. Because everybody that I train, we have to be a fit. I'm not just going to train you because you're good and I can get paid. We got to be a fit because I'm all in and I want to get you results. So there's been guys that are, you know, top five draft picks that people think the world of, but I can tell right away that they just don't have that work ethic to get to that next level. So all the people that I currently train, they are like straight dogs, like they really want it and they have the genetics to go with it. And then it's also fun to see the guys who are such dogs

that they don't have the genetics and they're still there. Like I train Shabazz Napier and Ty's Jones who are my size. These guys are like listed as six two, they're like five, 11, you know, 170 pounds. The shoes, yeah. And you know, they're not freak athletes and they're still there because mentally they're just on a whole different level

They're work ethic. Yeah, well, do you see a huge market because we have a The marketing guy that we work with used to coach Football but he liked to coach kids and he's always talking to us about how massive that market is Yeah, student athletes and building and designing programs for them and he's always trying to talk us into getting into that space. How have you looked into that space? How big is that space for what you do rather than just working with the NBA in terms of parents kind of purchasing your programs for their kids?

Like tell us about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, it's he who's like, that's if you're a business owner, if you're a trainer, like that's the market. Really? That's the market. I mean, you want to, if you're a trainer, like that's the market. Really? That's the market. I mean, you wanna, if you're fortunate to get in with pros, that's great. And if you can make a lot of money,

training pros great, but it's still very sporadic, like MBA offseason, you're getting them for three months. And so what happens the rest of the time? And so you gotta be able to kind of leverage that and leverage where you're at in your career and then get younger kids to buy in because the youth is year round. And so we at our gym in Anaheim,

we train a ton of kids. I mean, we'll train hundreds of kids every year. I don't personally do it anymore because I don't have the time, but I write programs and I have trainers and physical therapists under me that take the programs. And then what I do for the youth is also my online program. So we have kids in every single country on our online training

platform. How big is your staff now with your with your company? So we have three trainers and then a physical therapist and then a couple of videographers. Wow, that's awesome. Now you said earlier in the in the podcast that you a lot of the stuff you had to self-learn. And I'm also assuming you have formal education as well.

That's related to this field. Yeah. When you're talking, for the new trainers listening right now who really want to be on the cutting edge, like, what's the value in the academia stuff and what's the value and you got to kind of learn a lot of stuff on your own? Yeah, so I mean, it's great to have a degree.

It just, I mean, it's great for credibility purposes, but like, the stuff that I'm using from my degree right now is very, very little. Like, where I learned all my information is just grinding, getting out and talking to trainers, guys that are getting good results with athletes, I would fly out and I would talk to them for a day. I'd take them out and for coffee and just talk shop and, um, you know, getting in the lab and just training people and getting experience. That's where it all comes from. But it is nice. I have an exercise science degree

and your typical CSCS certifications and all that. So that stuff is good, but people do rely on that too much and they think that that's what's going to take them to the next level. There is no certification that's going to take him to the next level, there is no certification that's gonna take you to the next level. It only comes from you like getting now and actually getting like real practical knowledge. And so like people will spend $30,000 on a bachelor's degree, but a successful trainer puts out a webinar

for $100 or $200 and they don't buy that. You know, like that's the best thing you can do is learn from people who are already successful in the industry. So you got to kind of shift your thinking and realize, like, if this trainer is putting out any information, I have to buy it. Yeah, we agree. I mean, that's all of us learn most of what we know. And then we have people who host certifications in here. And the information that you get with some of these certifications is just, it's priceless and you can't compare to what you would get at a university.

So we're a huge proponents of that. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that because there are a lot of modalities that have popped up recently. Are there any that you've paid attention to or like vested your money and efforts in getting more educated in a certain direction? The most recent one was FRC.

I really love functional range conditioning. That's one thing that I think is not a fad. We've gotten some good results with our players. How do you apply it to the players? What do you mean? Well, and when do you apply it to the programming? Yeah, in the programming. How do you apply it?

So I mean, like, as an extension of our warm-up, we usually do some type of FRC. Like a primate. Yeah, yeah the programming. How do you apply it? So I mean like in our as an extension of our warm-up We usually do some type of got a far-se like a primate. Yeah, yeah exactly like a priming and it depends on You know what their specific limitation is normally we can see how they move on the cord and figure out what joint needs more range of motion And then what actual modality we apply to it But I mean I've spent years going through the typical static stretching. You think it works, it doesn't. And then you get into dynamic stretching. It works a little bit, but long-term, it doesn't make huge changes. And then you get into functional range conditioning and training at end range and that kind of

stuff. That stuff actually lasts and really can change joint range of motion. Yeah, that was mind blowing for me as an early trainer when I realized that, you know, just having more flexibility without control or connection to it, just meant you would have more instability. Yeah, that was mind blowing for me the first time I learned that.

For every degree of range of motion that you gain at a joint, there's an equal responsibility to stabilize that those degrees of range of motion and that's what people forget about. And it leaves you at risk for injury, but it also can decrease your explosiveness because you look at how important the stretch reflexes

for jumping. So if I'm lowering into my jump, I need my quads to sense stretch. As soon as they sense that stretch, they're gonna kick in that stretch reflex and I'm gonna get a more explosive concentric. But if I'm so flexible through the quads that I don't sense that stretch, they're gonna kick in that stretch reflex, and I'm gonna get a more explosive concentric. But if I'm so flexible through the quads that I don't sense that stretch,

I gotta keep going lower and lower and lower to the point where I'm probably down in a deep squat to get that stretch reflex. And we don't have the time to get to those positions and games. And so there's times where you're increasing range of motion or flexibility, I should say, far more than what you actually need in your sport. Yeah, there's a correlation to tightness and explosiveness.

There's a little bit of a correlation there. How do you work with someone who does have a shit ton of range of motion? How do you improve their ability to activate that stretch reflex, or at least maybe compensate for it? Well, we get away from a lot of stretching. It's funny because I do have a couple guys. The guys that I've had that have been injured are guys that are just super hyper mobile. That's funny.

Usually they can sit there in a hamstring stretch and get their chest down to their thigh and it's like ACL injuries have come from these hypermobile guys. So first of all, their team still have them stretching. They're still doing static stretching with the team, and it's like, why are you adding to their problem? So it's getting away from stretching, and then just getting stronger. Heavy load strength training is a good way to stiffen up the tendons. The best way to stiffen up tendons is heavy load strength training. And then doing a lot of shorter range of motion stuff,

like think about like a single leg RDL where you would normally go really low. We'll go like a med ball overhead and we'll go fast on the way down and then I want them to stop like as soon as before their torso even reaches parallel. So they're teaching their hamstrings to just rapidly create tension. Oh, I got it. Yeah, so that's what it's all about. Whoever can create tension faster in the muscle, that's what you were talking about. Yeah, yeah.

Tension correlates to rate of force development. And so we want them to rapidly develop tension and get rid of that muscle slack. So we do a lot more partial range of motion stuff instead of deep range of motion stuff and we get them away from stretching and add the heavy strength training for tendon stiffness. Fascinating. Is there anything that's non-training related that you have found that will increase explosiveness

in the people that you work with? Like maybe nutrition or supplementation? Oh, yeah, nutrition is huge I mean that's half the battle right there like body composition at the end of the day is step one our body composition has to be you know where we want it fat Don't fly so if you have if you have extra fat like you have a t-shirt Fat don't fly so So that's number one. We got to make sure that you're probably under 10% body fat. The best jumpers are.

Not to get into that too much, but there is elite performance and health are in different ends of the spectrum. So there is times where we get somebody too lean and to maintain that, they have to be in this huge Kellorag deficit and then other systems are compromised like your immune system. And all all of a sudden they try to play 82 games and they're sick every other month and they're missing these games.

So there is a balance. I'm not somebody who says leaner is always better, but we do want them generally below 10% body fat if possible. So nutrition obviously is the majority of body composition. So getting their diet right is huge. Do you notice a difference in abilities to generate force when somebody is lacking sleep or under high stress? For sure.

That's so big. And so a lot of what I do is just generally teaching people how to live a better life. I almost become like a life coach so that we can improve. Yeah, so if you're good, that's an advantage of an ability. Yeah, you end up like a life coach so that we can improve. Every trainer. That's what you're good at. That's an inevitability. Yeah, you end up becoming a life coach and figuring out what makes you happy. Do walks on the beach make you happy.

Great. Let's do that for recovery. Stuff even down to the music that they listen to. What basketball players do is you get done with your workout, where you're sympathetic, you're drive, you're go, go, go, right? All recovery happens in parasympathetic. We don't recover anything if we're still in the sympathetic.

We get in our car and then we listen to rap music, which is like, pop your head. Sympathetic. And then you might go to the club and you're sympathetic and like your whole day is sympathetic. So like, can you lay down on the couch and do some belly breathing for 10 minutes and get you into that parasympathetic zone? Or like after the workout, can I get you to do 5-10 minutes of breathing and then get you to listen to some slow R&B that doesn't get you hyped up and just allows you to kick into that recovery zone? Interesting. So there's so many different ways that you can get athletes to just relax more and just figuring out what makes you happy. Like, study a show, just like seeing the color green,

like going out into a park can put you into that sympathetic. And so like, can we get off the video games and just go for a walk? Something that I learned recently, relatively, we have a sponsor Felix Gray and they make these, these glasses that block a lot of the damaging blue rays that we'll get from electronics. And so I'll put them on, especially at night,

and it helps my brain realize that it's night time and I get better sleep. And I notice better performance in the gym. Now that I've been wearing them for a while, do you have any of your athletes wearing blue blockers? No, no, but that's something that I would definitely look into. Anybody that has sleep issues, we just kind of go to the basics of,

could you make your room a little cooler? Can we make your room a little darker? Can we get away from using your phone 30 minutes before bed? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so little steps like that. Usually we don't have to go to the extreme of bringing in technology

because they have such bad habits. We just got to get rid of them just watching YouTube and then falling asleep. I was gonna ask you about that because it seems like you're in the sports science world of it too. So there's lots of these devices and things

that I'm sure are getting thrown at you too to try out and mess with your athletes with. How do you filter through all that and determine, well, this actually has some potential versus this is another fucking distraction. Yeah. I mean, some stuff we can just do, like I said, better sleep, like we can do that without technology.

Now, if we take the necessary steps and we get rid of the phone and we get the room cooler and darker and they still can't fall asleep, okay, now let's go to the next step and let's try to bring in technology or whatever. You know, so it's always just like, you just go through kind of the important things. Do you have the basics covered?

Are you still not getting results? Okay, well, then let's move to technology. And I'm fortunate that I still play basketball and I can still like hang with these guys at that level because I can try everything on myself and I can be the guinea pig instead of having to try something randomly on an NBA player. So that's one benefit that I have is that every method that I come up with, any technology that I want to implement, I can do a trial period on myself.

Well, now what excites you in terms of like, so have you messed with HRV, have you messed with like any other like technology you thought like wow this is breakthrough I'm gonna use this. Yeah HRV I use for a couple years and it worked really well We started using the whoop watch I don't know if you're familiar. Yeah, they use HRV and track sleep and Our guys like that because of the simplicity and It made a difference, I think,

but it can also be misleading in a way. Sometimes you come in and your HRV scores look good and your workout still sucks. Like it doesn't always correlate directly. And so the great coaches are the ones that are super intuitive. And they know like the way that the player shakes your hand something's a little off That's right and I can look in your eyes and based on how you're talking to me

I know something's a little off and so I can kind of tailor the work out a little different Maybe we go and maybe we don't do playoffs this day because your nervous system looks completely burned out Maybe we just go through mobility and get a little aerobic work to re-boost that nervous system There's so many factors that will affect somebody. Well, yeah, I imagine a kid, and this was the flaw that I saw on HRV, was that, imagine you get this amazing sleep, and it says green, go kick ass, but then on the way there, you get a phone call, and you find out that your girl's cheating on you. Right.

Like that mental space, that athlete has got to be so fucked, and this workout's fucked. But yeah, great sleep last night, HRV says go, right? Absolutely, there's so many factors. At the end of the day, you wanna be entrenched in the technology and you wanna try this stuff out, but you don't wanna become reliant on it. At the end of the day, you gotta be intuitive, and you gotta work with athletes,

and like I said, be able to look in their eyes and tell if they're tired or not. Is your goal when you're coaching? Because one of my goals when I would train clients, I used the word intuitive, and that's what brought this up for me, was to get people, because no matter how good of a coach I was, or how good of a trainer I was, I could, my potential to coach a person is never going to be as high as their potential

to coach themselves in the sense that they're in their own body. They know what, how they feel. It's just getting them to teach them to understand what those signals are. Do you do that with your, with your trainers, or with your clients as well? Yep.

I mean, I look at everything as like, this is a partnership. This is an addictatorship. I'm not telling you what to do. Like, let's work together. And let's figure out how you're gonna get results. And so giving them a little bit of ownership is huge from the mental standpoint because they know that you're not like results. And so giving them a little bit of ownership is huge from the mental standpoint

because they know that you're not like talking down to them. So you get the buy-in from that, from giving them ownership, but also you're gonna get the best results when you allow the athletes to kind of move, how they wanna move to a certain extent. And like I said before, you pick your battles. So like this I wanna change,

but that you move however you want to move. And so like I noticed when I follow a program, like when in the past when I followed programs, I felt intuitively like I should be going in a slightly different direction. Today I feel like I should skip this exercise because my knees are a little sore, but the program says to do it.

So if you push through it and you do it, you end up harming yourself. But if you can really be intuitive and you can let the athlete have ownership, sometimes they can be like, okay, this is a great program, but I'm gonna skip this and that. And so you can't be the trainer that's like, oh, you're soft, like you're not gonna do that.

You got it, you got to really trust that the athlete does know what they're doing because they know their body better than you do. What's the biggest challenge with working with professional athletes? Because they're different, a whole different class of human. Yes, they're a whole different class of human. Ego is the one thing.

Really? You know, part of me thinks that the reason, for some of them, the reason that they're there is because the ego is so big. And they feel so strongly about their abilities and like they just want to grind so bad to be noticed and be the best. And so like their confidence and their ego is kind of what got them there, but then that's also the downfall of like they have to maintain a relationship with you and they have to maintain

a relationship with their family members. And so, sometimes that's their downfall. And so, I'm trying to kind of help teach them to limit the negative sides of the ego and then benefit from the positive sides of having a big ego. And so, for me, it's just basic things like communication. If somebody's five minutes late and I text them and I say, hey, like, you gotta get here, you can't be late,

you're risking at the NBA level that they could be like, well, there's a thousand other trainers I just go. And so luckily, the ones, the guys that I trained, they're all bought in and they trust me. And so they'll put their ego aside if I get on them. But for the majority of the majority of trainer, that's what they're gonna struggle with,

is like you can't say anything to them because they're so high up. Yeah, I can imagine that you have learned over time to probably set the table before, like when you first meet, walk me through a conversation, I'm an NBA player, it's the first time we meet and you talk to me, what are some of the things you're laying down

to me what we're gonna get into? Yeah, I mean, you have to lay down a foundation. And just like, I'm not a big believer in rules. But up front, I'll just say, like, look, there's a lot of players out there that would like to work with me. And I don't do this for the money. And I don't do this because you're a big time top 10 NBA player. I do this because I'm so passionate about this,

and when my guys get results, I'm happy, and when they don't get results, I get depressed. And so they know up front, like, wow, this guy really cares, I can't just mess around. I can't just randomly show up when I wanna show up, and I do let them know that I drop clients if I feel like they're not a good fit, and we're not getting the results

because they're just not consistent enough that I will drop them. And you had a drop in NBA player? Oh yeah. Oh shit, what's that conversation? I'm not too. You're fired. Yeah, usually I just respectfully,

say, I know a trainer down the street. Oh, I think is pretty good. I don't know if he's as good as me, but he's pretty good. And I think that he'll put up with your shit. Like, I'm not going to put up with your shit upfront. You have to. And as a trainer, you've got to put your ego aside and just catered to everything in the first couple of years.

But once you have a certain level of client, you can then say, well, I really don't need you. And so I do this for the passion. And, you know, if you're not a good fit, then go down the street. Now that takes years to get to that level. I remember that progression, even as a trainer myself of you,

when you're first building, you kind of just take everybody, you put up with all the shit and whatever. And then eventually you reach this period where you can be selective on who you want to coach and train. Now, talk to me from a business perspective, like, do you remember very pivotal moments that you felt in the business where it's like, you know, you talked about this, which I thought was such a great point.

You talk about adding value and adding value and adding value and just not asking for anything and eventually comes. Do you remember those pivotal moments where you had breakthroughs in the business started to scale more? Yeah. I think even when I was a senior, as like a week before my graduation, when I launched my first vertical jump program, and it just took off. We had thousands and thousands of sales.

And I was able to scale really big before I even graduated college. And so that was one milestone where I was like, wow, this is like- Did it surprise you or what? Oh, big time. Because I was like, you know, through college, you know, I'm in debt, $30,000, $40,000, and I'm living like a lot of college students,

meal to meal, like you're planning out your budget, like how to go get a Chipotle burrito. And at the time, I was actually, I couldn't make quite enough off-training, and so I was doing fitness writing. I found this content mill where you write them articles, like a couple pages, and they get you in with like eHow, Houston Chronicle, live strong,

and you get 20 to $30 per article. But each article has to be very well researched and very well written, and I had no idea how to write. I was a terrible student, like I was a C student in high school. So I had no idea how to write, but I had to make money. And so I was just cranking out articles, and then the editor would get back to me and be like, yeah, this sucks, you can't write.

Like we are now dumber after reading this. And so, yeah, a simple no would have been okay. But yeah, you can see all that. So I had to get really good at writing. And so I just taught myself how to write, and luckily my fiance is a good writer, and she taught me how to write. And so I was just pumping out these articles. I would do like three or four a night.

I would stay up all night and then I would go train all day. And so I was just grinding, but still barely making it. And then that's when I kind of realized like the power of social media when I started building that following and I launched that program. All of a sudden my, you know, I went from like 20, $20,000, $30,000 a year to like $200,000 a year. While I was still in college and it just shows you the power of social media and what you can really do.

What are those platforms that in terms of like sports, specific training, like stack TV or like what are some of these platforms? If I'm a trainer and I'm sports specific, you know, where could I look at trying to write articles? Yeah, so I started actually on stack. You're not really, I didn't get paid at least through stack, maybe like a couple of cents, but it was good exposure. So stack is a good one to start at and then there's these that this content mill they switched the name of it I think it's called like it was demand media. I'm sure you could search it, but basically you write these articles and then they'll get you placed in like, live strong in these different places,

which is great as a trainer, because it gives you credibility. Right, so that was actually probably a pretty big step. I took as a trainer in getting like, parents to buy in, because kids are like, oh, you can jump 40 something inches. I wanna train, but you gotta sell the parents. And so with the parents, it's like, well, hey, I'm in live strong, I'm in this are like, oh, you can jump 40 something inches. I wanna train, but you gotta sell the parents. And so with the parents, it's like, well, hey,

I'm in live strong, I'm in this. Like I could send them the fitness articles that I'm writing. And so, you're building up that credibility. So, you know, finding these different content mills, stuff like stack, like any opportunity you have to like go and write for an established website, do it early on. Even if you're not going to get paid a lot.

It seems like you've acquired the trifecta. You have the authority and credibility through writing and then just from providing value, an MBA player came and gave you that as well, more authority in that direction. It seems like you start in one direction, build that, and then it sort of goes from there. Exactly. And it just starts with passion and consistency. That's it. I had no direction.

I didn't have a detailed plan of how I was gonna get here, but I just knew if I provide a lot of value, and I ask for nothing in return, and I do it every single day, something good is gonna come. And then, like you said, the trifecta thing starts to come. That's great. That's an extremely true statement. Have you thought

about doing anything for academia? Have you published anything for them or are you ever going to go in that direction? Yep. So that's what we're working on right now. I have a webinar series. We launched our first webinar, which is actually what we're talking about, how to become a performance trainer. And basically it is, I don't know how to teach you how to blow up in 1990, but I know how to teach you how to blow up a strength and conditioning program in 2018-19-20. And so, kind of using social media and what we're talking about right now, how to leverage yourself and blow up your brand so that you can eventually train high-level athletes.

Because I know I'm enjoying my life so much, I love my job so much, I want more people to experience this. And so the webinar series is really good for trainers. We're gonna try to launch a new webinar every month. And then I'm also working on an official certification, which I don't know when that will launch, but I'm hoping in the next year

and I got some really exciting people to go in with me on that, some of the top minds in the field. And so in the next year, so we're gonna have a strength in conditioning service. Like a national certify? Yeah, that's a nightmare, right? To go through all the... It's not gonna be accredited up front.

It's just gonna be something that supplements like your normal CSCS or whatever. Okay, okay, yeah. Very interesting. So tell me what it was like when you got the phone call or email From Dix and Adidas. What was that like? Yeah, so I had been I had been sponsored by Adidas basically

The night that hardened signed with Adidas is When I started to make that connection. Okay. So it's funny because he called me, I was leaving a camp and James called me and he's like, hey, I need you right now. It was 11 p.m. He's like, I need you right now in L.A. And so I drive into L.A. And we train at this high school. And I didn't know why he was training, but like, it turns out he wanted to get a session

right before he went and signed his $200 million contract with Adidas. And so that was kind of cool to see. He let me know what he was doing. And so then I made that connection with Adidas through him. And they started sponsoring me. So I had been with them for about a year. And then they started kind of introducing me to their partners like East Bay and Dix. And Dix called me up and said that they want to do this activation.

I'm like, cool, whatever. I think I'm just going into do this clinic at a mall and I walk in and my posters are everywhere on the wall. Oh, shit. Everywhere. There was the windows as my face and it was really cool. That had been a surreal moment for me. It was a surreal moment. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I was actually standing in the doorway

and my pictures were on the side and these dudes drove up and they were smoking blunts and like I could smell it and they're like, do wait, is that you? Like wait, how did you get from the poster? You're huge. And like it tripped me out that I was on the poster, but for them to see it, they were like, this is crazy. So yeah, I know it was a really cool experience. And we've actually done a lot more since then with Dix. I've done a lot of photo shoots with them and a lot of photo shoots with East Bay content shoots.

Now what does all that intel? Like what, there's certain, I know you mentioned like you're always suited up in Adidas now and what can and can't you do? Do they pay you a flat salary? I have no idea how that would work for someone. No, it's basically per event. Okay. If we wanted to go in the direction of a flat salary,

it would be a lot more strict. I mean, I always wear Adidas regardless, but it would be a lot more strict where I would have to probably work with strictly adidas athletes and that would really limit my brain. Oh, I see. And so it's more so a loose agreement

where I can kind of train anybody, but I'm gonna rock adidas, strictly adidas, and then they just set up different events, like monthly events, and I get paid per event. And so that gives me the flexibility where if I'm super busy, I could turn down an event. If I was signed full time, you'd be obligated. Yes. Whatever I'm doing, if I'm in Turks and K-Cos with Harden like they, and I got to get

to do this adidas, I got to fly out. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. So it's good as a trainer to, I mean, we all dream of having these shoe deals and stuff, but you still want to keep your flexibility because you're going to be super busy as a trainer, and there's all these different opportunities. Right.

Now, I love sharing when people ask us a lot of like, you know, the success of Mind Pump and the growth of that, like what are some of the biggest mistakes that we made on the way up, and we share a lot of those things that we made on the way up? And we share a lot of those things that we made, or we could go back and say, oh man, I wish we would have started the YouTube channel sooner, or I wish we would have started an email list sooner. When you look at your business where it's at now and all the success that you had, and if you were to be talking to someone who's wanting to follow in your footsteps,

what are some of the mistakes that you made that you could probably share with them. Probably the biggest mistake is just what I call ISOBall doing it all by yourself and just not trusting anybody, not learning how to delegate early on. Which luckily I'm figuring that out now and I'm surrounding myself with brilliant trainers who I can delegate and I can pass clients off to. I now have trainers under me that even are pro players trust. And so when I travel, they can take care of these NBA players and they have their trust, which is a huge step for me. Early on, like I would hire interns, I would hire people,

but I wouldn't trust them with anything big. I felt like I was the only one that could do it. But at some point, you got gotta throw people in the fire. You gotta throw your employees in the fire and you gotta really get them some good experience in it. Now we're at the point where luckily, I can just travel wherever I want and things are taken care of.

So play as a team, don't go ISO ball your whole life because it's gonna really limit your growth as a trainer. No, that's really good. It's really good to see you too. Now, I've got to get in, we've done all the trainer talk with like that, but we gotta fucking talk about the NBA right now. Okay, so, and I don't wanna hear your bias bullshit.

Yeah, the rock hits are biased. Don't give me the bullshit. Don't give me the bullshit rockets talk right now. It's not about the warriors. No, I wanna hear it right now. What do you, so let me back up. So, as a kid, I played basketball. I only played in high school.

It was an average player at best, but I followed the sport forever. And I kind of, it fell out of favor. I didn't watch it for about, right around the Kobe era, I watched less and less of basketball. And it's not because of Kobe. I just felt like the NBA in general turned into this ISO ball. And it just I grew up in an older and I like team ball. I think

probably because I wasn't very athletic. I appreciate the passing, the screening, all the other fundamentals, right? Yeah. So I fell out of I fell out of love with the game a little bit. But in the last 10 years and especially with teams like the Spurs and the Warriors, I feel like the game is coming back to that. What's your opinion of that and what do you see? Yeah, I mean, it is like the game has changed so much just in the last three years of everything. You have to be a shooter now.

Even like seven footers have to be able to shoot, and the game is just rapidly changing. But, you know, it's interesting because the league is in a state where you could be a successful team that operates more off isolation. Like, you look at the rockets last year, they work together. But for the most part, it was James isolation and then Chris would come in and ISO and they just kind of take turns. But they drive and kick so well that they can ISO get in the lane and then set up teammates.

And so you play as a team, but it's initiated off of ISO ball. Right. But then you do, you have teams like the Warriors who it's, you know, very, they can all ISO if they want to because they're all like the best in the world. Yeah, it's just unfair. I don't watch, I don't even watch them anymore.

Don't hate Brawl for what everybody says now. But they play as a team, they move the ball so well. They're also on selfish. It's so much fun to watch. And the spurs, I mean, they're incredible as well, playing team ball. So it is kind of interesting where there's not just one way to succeed as a team now.

You can initiate off ISO or you can just run a good offense. I feel it's totally different right now, man. I really do. It's been one of my favorite eras of watching basketball over the last 30 years of my life watching the game. Do you have any favorite rookies this year? Like, dude, do you have any predictions on who's the one? The ones that I train. I don't like anybody else. No, Mo Bombay, I worked with him and he's, so he's got the longswing span in the history of the NBA. Just, yeah, free, Catholic. He can move at 7-1. He's gonna be really good. He's raw right now, but he's playing in Orlando. He's gonna be

really good, I think. I love Trey Young. Trey Young is incredible. Six foot, not a genetic freak, but he's like the next step. He shoots like that. I mean, he's got handles. He's got the full package. I like Deandre Aiton from Phoenix. He's just a grown man, seven, one, strong. Can step out and shoot a little bit. And then the overseas dude, Luca,

Luca, I don't know how to pronounce it last time. I won't even try Don't catch or something like that. For Dallas, he's incredible. Just court vision. He's kind of like the modern guard because he's like 6'7, 6'8", and he can pass so well. So when you're 6'8 and you're coming off a pick and roll, you can see over people. So you can make these overhead skip passes and it's so much more valuable to be a big guard in the NBA now. So he's kind of like that next modern, modern point guard.

Who do you think is the greatest passer in the game right now? Uh, well, James Harden. I always say James Harden. He is. He's top two, for sure. He's incredible. Right. The things that he sees are just incredible.

But LeBron is great. Like I talked about, he's so big. He can see over people. Um, RondoBron is great. Like I talked about, he's so big he can see over people. Rondo is still a great passer. Ricky Rubio is a great passer. But the players that can score become the great passers. So like, if I'm playing defense and LeBron's coming off a screen, I'm backing up because every now and then he's going to miss shots.

If Hardin comes off a screen, I can't back up. He's pulling it. So you know, you got to get on him and then it opens up so many passing lanes. And so now he has Lobs to Capella. He's got kicks out to the three. So that's why like guys that can score, like that's why Steve Nash was such a good passer.

It's because he could really score. Yeah. And so he's a threat on the pitch. You have to be a threat. Who do you think is the most underrated NBA team right now? I like Denver. I like Denver a lot and I like Utah a lot. I actually love Utah.

Utah is the business. I put out a preseason ranking, which I always do. It's just a biased ranking of whoever I work with. But I put Utah at the three seed in the West and everybody gave me shit for it. But I think it could come true. They're really good. They're really, really good.

You know some of my favorite videos you do when there's a game on and there's a highlight and there's like a very specific move somebody does and you sort of show everybody exactly what you break down the skill of it. And I think that's great. Can you ever see yourself maybe doing that on a segment or something on ESPN or something like that?

For sure, that'd be cool. Yeah, I think that'd be rad. Yeah. Was that part of your formula to grow? What are some of the things? That's a good question in those lines, Justin, is what are some of the things that you think you did on your Instagram that really made it explode?

Because I've been watching you back when it was really small and you were, you're just doing, you know, dribbling techniques and stuff. Like what were some of the pivotal things that, oh shit, when I post that, that shit goes? The posts that go the most viral for me are things that are visually appealing. So like, really cool, like, dunking stuff,

where I also give a good valuable tip. So I tried to separate the two where I would give this good valuable tip of me doing an exercise and people would like it, but it doesn't have the visual appeal to the 13 year old kid who's kind of interested, but they're not all in on doing this exercise. But if I do a video of Zion Williamson doing a windmill dunk and then I describe, you know, this is the exercise that can work on this trait. It's the best of both worlds because you get the average basketball fan interested So they're gonna click like and they're gonna comment

But you also get the high level basketball player who wants to do that exercise to engage And so it's the best of both worlds. So like I just I've been posting actually I've been posting some stuff that's been going super viral recently where I'm showing a dunk I'm showing I'm giving a tip like a mechanics tip and where I'm showing a dunk, I'm showing, I'm giving a tip, like a mechanics tip, and then I'm showing like an animal comparison. Oh, I saw your tiger like a tiger jumping and I'm relating it to how elite jumpers are jumping and people go on and they'll talk shit and say you can't compare the two because they have different structures, but there are similarities and it's cool for humans

like to have a reference point in the brain. So anytime they think of this mechanic tip, they're going to think, oh, like how tigers jump. Right. So it's those have been going super viral, like millions of impressions for those videos. We've been looking at animals for thousands of years. Your Chinese kung fu is based on how animals move and you know, how to say, do you learn stuff from watching, do you actually use that sometimes?

Sometimes. Do you learn stuff from watching? Do you actually use that sometimes? Sometimes, I mean, I wouldn't come to a conclusion just based on how an animal moves because we are so. You mentioned the cat earlier. Yeah. But like if I notice a trait in elite jumpers, then I can go and I can see that this isn't just specific to humans, this is just a biomechanical truth. I can see, oh lions do this too. Oh it's cool to go that way. And then you can learn a lot from animals.

I've been on a big squid binge lately. I've been like squids. I've been studying squids. Yeah, I love squids. Those are aliens. I call them calamari. So I just went on this binge because they're super intelligent. And so now I tell our athletes you got to be a squid. So squids are like super self-aware. They did this study where they put this squid in a box. And they put like this tiny little hole. And it would crawl up in this little ball and then get through the hole.

And then they made the hole like a half an inch smaller. And the squid is so self-aware that it knew it couldn't fit in. It didn't even try. It was like, I would rather just die here and then not then go through that hole because it knows how big it is. And so like at the NBA level, it's not just about the talent. It's about being self-aware of who you are and not going outside of your abilities. So we all try to train these like dreamers and just like, go be the best player. But yeah, sometimes it's like you're a 3-in-D guy. That's your role. Become really good. Go all in at that. And so my reference is be a squid. Be self-aware. Know what you're good at. I was going to go out to football player. That's where I ended. I knew that.

You're watching the Octopus videos where they're in a jar and then they unscrew the lid from the inside and get themselves out. Yeah, they're super smart. That's pretty smart. It's like a squid binge lately. That's hilarious. Not to look into squid. What's some of the pet peeves you have right now with modern training?

Like, what are some things that you see that you just want to rip your eyes out? A lot. We got time. Like biggest mistakes, I guess, that you see. With just general training, your vertical jump, all of it, whatever. I think in athletics, it's in obsession

with how your body looks. We should be training for performance and the physique comes as a byproduct of that. It's a good point. And so many people are training for physique and they're doing like isolation curls and they look better and then they post these transformation pictures on Instagram and it goes viral.

Everybody's like, this guy is such a hard worker and then they go in the next season and they suck because they didn't actually improve their performance. They just improved their hair to body coach. Yeah, it went all the hell. Yeah, so that's, I so that's one big thing. One thing that bothers me in basketball specifically is guys making fast transformations,

especially when it comes to muscle building. So like pre-draft guys come in and they're like, I gotta put on 25 pounds. And we're over here putting on five pounds. Like I want you to put on five, if you're under size, I want you to put on five pounds this year, five pounds next year.

And so guys come in and they just transform their bodies, they put a ton of muscle mass on, and then I just wait for the injury to happen because it's coming, because muscles grow at a certain rate, tendons don't grow at that same rate. And so tendons are, you gotta be more patient with it to catch up. The last thing you wanna do is get heavier, bigger muscles your tendons are, you gotta be more patient with it to catch up.

The last thing you wanna do is get heavier, bigger muscles without increasing that tendon strength. It's like holding a big, heavy bowling ball on a thin string. If you keep getting that bowling ball heavier and heavier and bigger, that string is gonna break, right? So when you make gradual transformations of five pounds this year, five pounds next year, your whole body makes a transformation along with you. It's not just the muscle, so the fascia's getting stronger, the tendons are getting stronger. And then you're, you know, you have

the structural support for that added muscle. And so that's the huge mistake that people make is they they go through pre-draft process and they gain all this weight and they're all proud of it. And then they go into training camp and they fracture their foot or they have some sort of tendon injury. It's also body awareness. Like, you know, we've had this question many times on our show where people ask us, you know,

is there such a, is there truth to old man's strength, you know, like when old guys are really strong. And it is true and the reason why they're strong is they've been in their bodies longer than you. They know their bodies very well. I experienced this one, I used to train in Jiu-Jitsu a lot, and if I gained weight, my technique was off. And it wasn't because I was muscle bound

or anything like that. It's just, I knew how to move well at a particular weight. And once I gained weight, it was a new body. So you put 20 pounds on an athlete who's high level, timing's gonna be different, how he moves it, bracing his body when he changes directions is going to be different. Exactly. That also plays a massive role in, I think, in the injuries and the loss of performance. 100%. Yeah, so. Now, I want to, I want to peer into your, your coaching a little more, because we, probably a good majority of our listeners are other professionals and trainers

and coaches. And I think the, the webinar direction that you're going is really fascinating. And I think it'll appeal to a lot of people that are listening to the show. Can you kind of like give us a little insight on like, what does that look like? What if I, if I hired you and I want to become a performance coach, what are like kind of the first things that you guys are teaching them? Like in the webinar series. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we actually start on the business side. Okay.

Because I don't want to teach you the specifics and get you really good at training. And then five years later, you realize you don't know how to run a business and then it all comes crashing down. You know, you got to have that structural support. You got to be able to understand finances. You got to understand how to grow a business. I don't need you to be an expert.

I need you to know enough. Right. Because I know so many good coaches that just can't... That's actually more common than not. It's more... We're very passionate about that. This is why we did Mind Pump Media was

all the smartest people that we ever met in the space. Nobody knew who the fuck they were. Because they weren't the best business people. They got so good at their craft. They're not good communicators. Yeah, they weren't great best business people. They got so good at their craft. And not good communicators. Yeah, they weren't great at actually getting themselves out there. So that's pretty awesome. Well, then it actually makes you worse at your craft because what happens,

like I was never interested in business. I'm strictly interested in training. But once I realize, if I want to make this, if I want to get really good at this and become the best, I got to do it full time. I can't go have multiple jobs. I got to be able to support myself. So I got to get pretty smart with the business side so, I gotta do it full time. I can't go have multiple jobs. I gotta be able to support myself. So, I gotta get pretty smart with the business side

so that I can do that. And the problem is, the people who don't do that, they barely scratch by and they're stuck and they're running their business and they might have to go get a different part-time job. And now they can't study for four hours a day, they can study for 20 minutes a day. And so it actually ends up limiting your craft.

It's not just like you being passionate about the business, it's if you wanna take your craft to the top level, you have to have a structural support and you gotta really understand finances. So that's what we start with is, first webinar is just how to get into the industry, how to be smart with finances, how to build into the industry, how to be smart with finances, how to build a gym because people go about that backwards.

Explain that. So when somebody wants to open a gym, they say, okay, how much does it cost? And then they go borrow that amount. Or they're insecure and they say, okay, all of our friends, yeah, let's go. Like five of my best friends, let's go into this together. And then, So calm it.

Right? That's what everybody does. Because they're just insecure. Like, it's really scary to go start a business. I know that it's lonely. Entrepreneurship sometimes is kind of a lonely journey. But that's, in my opinion, the way to go about it. So then you got these five friends and you got this huge alone to pay off

and then you get in and you're gonna struggle for five to 10 years, right? And at some point, all of your friends got to get paid and so everything starts dropping out and relationships are ruined. This is just the experiences that I've had of people that I've mentored. Their gym goes under right away because they start in debt

and they start by like owing everybody a certain amount of money and you're just not gonna generate that much. So higher based on demand like, okay, I can pay myself this salary, I'm paying my gym rent, now I can bring on this trainer. And then he's paid for, he's eating, okay, we can bring on another guy. And so just higher based on demand and start lean,

lean out the company as much as you can and then build from there. So everybody goes backwards on that. But also just build organically, like you don't have to start with a huge fancy gym. Like I started renting space out of this little garage and somebody else actually owned it and I just went in and I paid a percentage of my profit

and that way it's low overhead so if I failed I'm not out a bunch of money If I succeed I end up paying a little bit more but that's a good problem to have and then once your clients are at a certain base And so that's actually the second step. First step is no overhead and then low overhead So go train up parks. Make sure that you have the ability to get clients, to get people results. If it looks like it's going to be a legit thing, then go in and do low overhead of like, you know, a couple hundred dollars a month or like I did 20 or 30% of your income and then build your client base that way and then you go, okay, I could afford a gym. That's a couple thousand dollars a month and then you go in small and you just gradually build.

And everybody does that backwards because on Instagram, they see the big fancy gym, they're like, I want that. And so they go into just massive amounts of debt and they're just never able to get out of that. Or they get investors and then they owe these investors for the rest of their life. Like if you can do it organic, do it. Do it by yourself.

Like I've never taken a loan. I funded everything out of my pocket. And again, I didn't start with money. Like I started like everybody else, 40,000 in debt. But everything that I did, I just saved a small percentage, five to 10% and I put it away for future gym and future equipment. I wanna hear a couple highlight stories of this career. I can imagine

one of them would probably be since you have helped James Harden. I'm sure when he got MVP that had had been a fucking out. You had to feel like you won the MVP at the same time. What are some other like just epic moments that you've had now that you've you've reached this level and you're dealing with this level of athletes? Yeah, so I mean, that's a huge one. At the same time, we're such a small part of the overall process. They're the ones doing the work. Like, we can't take credit.

If he's the MVP, I can't take credit for that at all. But it is still cool to know that I had a very small part to do with that. So, stuff like that, that's a victory. When you get somebody who is like a high school athlete who probably has no business being a division one athlete and they end up getting a scholarship, that's huge. Oh, yeah, that's life changing.

That's a life changer, yeah. Some, I've had guys that are borderline MBA, you know, in pre-draft, they're not on any mock draft, they shouldn't get drafted, they go in, they kill the combine, they start dominating their team workouts and all of a sudden they get drafted. That's somebody that could have gone broke the rest of their life and now they're multi-millionaires. So stuff like that, those are kind of the more emotional, like satisfaction type of situations for me.

More of the fame type of realizations are like when I was training Chloe Kardashian for a while. Oh no shit, you're kidding me. She was dating James Hardin. And so I went on vacation with him and she needed a trainer. So we were in China and I trained her.

And then she went to Houston and she brought me out there for a couple of weeks. Really? And so I was like, Is she cool because I don't know anything about them except that they know the fuck on the magazine. You can shoot it. So I almost feel like it would be a nightmare

but you obviously did it with somebody. She was super cool. She was so down to earth. Yeah, so down to earth. So that's one of those moments where you wake up like, wow, how did I get here? I was on a private jet with her and I was like, this is insane.

And I was only like 25 probably. That was crazy. It's crazy, it's crazy. It's been a while. So stuff like that, there's a certain moments like where you're at dinner and it's like James and Russell Westbrook and you're sitting at dinner with people

that you just idolize. And it's like, wow, how did I end up here? So there are certain moments like that that are pretty cool. You ever get to play one-on-one against some of these players? Yeah, I do all the time. Oh shit, what's that like? Oh shit. I'm going as fuck, I imagine.

Yeah, I don't play James. He's a whole another level. He's so good at bass, why wouldn't he even try? Uh, but other guys I'll play. His footwork is insane, dude. He's nuts. I mean, he's so strong, he's so big. To be a point guard with that level of handle, that level of shiftingness, and he's just so big,

he has like a frame almost of like car'm alone, like a step down from carmen. Is he that big in person? He's an amazing. He's an amazing shoulder, big hips. There are these. He's so... Yeah, there's the...

Basketball players are... I tell people this whole the time, I go to games all the time and I'm like, you know, I've been to all kinds of professional sports, but I think the most jaw dropping is basketball. There's just a bunch of giants. Well, when you see like a point guard on TV, they look small because you're comparing them to the center. So in your, your mind goes, oh, he's probably five, five or six, but there's like six, six, when you get there, yeah, realize they're massive. No, they're huge. Um, so like, he, I've never played him. He would dominate me. I wouldn't even want to try.

Um, but some of the other guys I hang with them, uh, I must be good for you. Yeah. There's, there's been, we go by summers now. So it's like this summer, I want X amount of games. I just talk shit to each other. Like I'll them text like remember I beat you 60% of the time There's been a few NBA point guards where I've been able to like win 50% of the games. Well, I'm pretty good One-on-one. They put it together better in a live game They have a mental component that I don't have and And that mostly comes from growing up playing against high level competition. Day in and day out, you're playing other high level players. I grew up in Flagstaff where I'm the top dog in all of Northern Arizona,

so I don't see other competition like that. And so there's certain levels of a mentality and certain perceptual things that you can't develop when you're not playing against high level players. So if we isolated the skills, ball handling, shooting, passing, I'm right there with all the NBA point guards. That's cool. But they put it together better than I do in games because they have better experiences early on in childhood, I think.

Now when you watch the game, Danny and I last night we were watching the game and, you know, it's probably the first time him and I have ever sat down and watched the game together and he can probably hear me making all these weird noises. I get into the game so much. There's, uh, what is it when you're watching that you just love? Like what, like a, what kind of play or what kind of ball handling or what is it that you go, fuck, I just appreciate that so much.

I love athleticism, of course. So all the details, like stability, things that people don't see. Yeah. So I mean, I know you have a different eye. I have a different eye too. When I watch it, you're looking at different things. Like, when I'm watching James, like, his stability is so incredible. His ability to, like, spin step back off one leg, get balance and go straight up and down. People see that as something is easy, but you go out and try it. You're flopping all over the place. Like, his dynamic stability is incredible.

His balance is incredible, deceleration ability, I love a good decelerator. If you could stop fast, that's like the number one trait that I would take. So everybody's obsessed with acceleration, but if you can get going and just stop on a dime, you create so much space. It just opens up your game. So stuff like that, I'm obsessed with, I geek out over that kind of stuff. But I do it like skill wise, I love a good ball handler.

I love somebody that can finish. Like if you're like Kyrie and you can go up and come down and spin it with the wrong hand and that type of stuff is incredible to me. I love watching Mitchell do you see that young guy? Yeah, his footwork and handling good. Yeah, he's so good man. He's explosive, he's skilled, he has a little bit of everything. Yeah man, and he's a dog. Yeah, he's a beast. You could see it, bro. He's young, man.

I'm excited to see this. He's like a future. He reminds me of a young Dwayne Wade. Yeah. A lot like Dwayne Wade when when he was his first couple of years in the league. What, what do you think about D Rose dropping that 50 the other night like they're coming back? How cool was the nuts? Like I wanted to cry watching the game because I just know how much he struggled. Everybody wrote him off. After his injuries, nobody thinks about him anymore. He's just like, we think about him as a good backup point guard. Then he goes out and you see the flashes of the old D-Rose and score 40.

The other night he scored 30 or 32. He hit like five threes I think It's so cool to see just knowing the battle that he's fought through to get back. It's incredible Now I know we have a a lot of listeners who are just your typical Jim rats I like to work out like to play pick up basketball on the weekend What are like the top three things that they can do just the average person that they can do to improve their vertical. So it depends on your age. So when I get a lot of people like 30 to 45 who are like, I'm just going to play in a mensley, I just want to get back, you know, in high school, I was pretty athletic, but

I'm just not anymore. The approach is very different. It's more of a restorative approach of let's get your facial health back. Like sometimes over time you've lost so much facial elasticity and the fascia's dried out and the muscles have lost elasticity. So it's like, my Achilles. Yeah.

So sometimes it's not like, let's go harder. It's, can we get that back by introducing some low-level bouncy movements. Get out, go for a 10-minute jog where you're just bouncing on the balls of your feet. That's a very simple way to just get some basic elasticity back in the Achilles and restore what you once had. Because we're all athletes, it's just we lose some of those traits over time. And so stuff like that,

you know, general movement, mobility, foam rolling, if you can get in with a massage therapist, a lot of those kind of things can really restore that elasticity. And I think that's the number one thing that you lose as you age. Okay. And so sometimes it's just restorative of just take care of your body better

and try to get that back. But other than that, I mean, if you want to jump higher, the fastest way to do it is to learn how to jump to study mechanics. Every single person that is listening to this probably runs, if they're going to try to go dunk, they run up to the rim and they jump with a square stance with their chest facing the rim. If we simply got them to turn, so instead you're planting right left,

you're turning your chest to the right side of the rim, and you're jumping from a turn stance, all of a sudden now you use that momentum and you turn it into vertical velocity, and you could put on five inches. Wow. So it's very simple stuff. Just spiraling into that cremator.

Yeah, kind of. Yeah, kind of. That's like that pulling. You did a post-site that where where their hand placement is in the turn, right? Yeah, I thought I just saw you do spiraling into that. Yeah, kind of twerk. Yeah, kind of. That's like that pulling. You did a post like that where where their hand placement is in the turn, right? Everything. Yeah, I thought I just saw you do a post on that. Yeah, so all that stuff, like just figuring out timing.

And it is, it's hard to learn because it becomes conscious. But that's the fastest way is just to learn how to optimize your mechanics. So simple tips like that. Learning how to utilize the arm swing, how to get the arm swing, how to get the counter movement arm swing higher, you should at the back of the arm swing, pinky should be about even with the earlobe.

Most people don't even swing their arms back, and the arms could be up to like 20% of your approach jump. Oh wow. And so when you actually get arm swing timing down, you become a way better jumper. So those are the easy ways to do it. As far as like the general guy who's already probably lifting, chances are good, they're probably, they probably have enough strength. If they've been lifting for a while, I would challenge

them to start moving weight faster. And even if they don't have like a velocity tracker, like we use, I think it's called squats and science, but it's a velocity tracker where we can know how many meters per second you're moving the bar. That's a couple hundred bucks, but like if you don't want to get one of those, simply time your reps. Like have somebody sit there with a stopwatch

and let you know how long it took you from the bottom to the top. Is it going to be inaccurate? Yes, but you're going to get max intent and you're going to start to get that idea of stand up faster. Sure, sure. And it's funny you said that about the arms too,

you know, in the old, in the Olympics, way back when they would do the long jump, they used to hold weights in their hands and use their arms to, and it was legal to swing their body. Right, so. And so, I mean, you don't have weights in your hands when you're running, but your hands, definitely in your arms, definitely will give you some of that momentum.

You were talking about moving faster. Let's say hypothetically, and this again, this is just for the audience, because I know it's going to happen when this airs. I'm going to get a shit ton of DMs of people asking this exact question. Let's say my max squat is 200 pounds. That's my max. I can do one rep with that. What weight should I go to hypothetically and then try to work on speed?

Yeah, so it's really tough to answer. So there's like different categories. There's like absolute strength, accelerator strength, speed strength, strength speed. And so like there's all these different categories that you do wanna hit. Typically I would say like 50 to 70%.

So 100 pounds. 130 pounds, oh yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and just move it as fast as you can. So like, if you do have the velocity tracker, 0.8 meters per second is like optimal power. That's where we're getting our highest power. So you want them to descend, control,

and then it's not necessarily slow. Okay. Descendcend control. Yeah, but I'm not doing like a slow eccentric or anything. I don't want to get tired and really train the muscles on the eccentric. I mean, that's a different way to do it. But yeah, go down, go down controlled. We're not thinking about dropping as fast as we can.

But once you reach that bottom, it's about transitioning out as fast as you can and getting up as fast as you can and getting up as fast you can. So you know you went too light if your feet can leave the ground. So sometimes we'll say, okay, like let's go 50% of your max. And then they go as fast as they can and they actually jump a few inches off the ground. That was too light. Yeah. So go heavier, go, you know, pick a weight where you feel like you can explode up with max intent and your feet don't leave the floor.

And then, and when, you know, disclaimer for people, and we always say this on the show, explosive training, for the average person just trying to get fit, probably something you want to stay away from, it's just high risk. Yeah. But if you want to be able to explode faster, then this is something that you gotta do. There's always levels. You gotta be able to control your body weight. Your mechanics have to be perfect. Yeah. I mean, there's always levels. You got to be able to control your body weight. Your mechanics have to be perfect. Yeah. Whenever you exercise before you add load and you ask me. Thank you for saying that. That's my pet peeve. I go to the gym and I see

all these people doing explosive movements. You can't even do a body weight challenge on decelerate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's so many levels to it. But that would be the thing I think max intent actually a better general piece of advice is whatever you're doing go max intent. So even if you are going heavy, even if you're at 80 90% of your one rep max, you're still trying to get up as fast as you can. And the study is back that whether you're going right or whether you're going heavy. You know, the rep might not move fast, but you're trying. You're trying. Yeah. If you're getting max intent, we're probably gonna get the adaptation that we want.

Now it's all about intrinsically producing that force. Yeah, it's coming in. Yep, it's, anytime you're max intent, you're activating those big, high threshold motor units. And the other thing too is, like, people will do this and they think, oh, I'm gonna do like a million reps until I get tired. No, no, no, as soon as you start losing that,

that ability, stop your no, no, no. As soon as you start losing that ability, stop your set, right? Yep. I mean, we rarely would go over six reps on that. Okay. Now, how does this advise change if we're talking to a young teenage boy or girl that are getting into of talking 15 to 19 range?

Well, build some general strength. You don't necessarily need to go fast, let's control everything, you know? As I do start people on some slow e-centrics, just because it's good for teaching body awareness and positioning and teaching them to really own positions. So we'll actually start with more isometric, especially for the young kids.

We'll do like some long duration split stance holds. We'll go rear foot elevated, split squat and just hold at the bottom. And I'll just start them at 30 seconds and then 35 seconds the next session 40 seconds We'll go all I mean there's some stuff I Forget the the trainer. I think Jay Shreight Schroeder some some like that he goes all the way to five minutes We've never gone that long duration, but it's super valuable when you can get them to own those positions Isometrically and then so if you can go through like a block of like two weeks of isometric stuff,

even just basic hip ridges, single leg hip ridges, hyper extension holds, rear foot elevated split squat holds, then you progress to more of the dynamic stuff where you're still not super explosive, you're controlling on the way down two to three seconds, maybe one second on the way up, building technique, and then you would get into more of the control down explode up later on, as long as you mastered the mechanics. You build that communication pathway. Yes, yeah, yeah. Incredible, I love that.

Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future for your business? What are your dreams moving ahead? Yeah, you already turned down your first dream. Yeah, well, as a change, what does it mean? That's a thing, I mean, that's a good point is like, sometimes it's more about just building good habits and seeing where it goes.

I feel like I've nailed what I wanna do. Now I just gotta scale what I wanna do, bigger and bigger and bigger. And so, I started without specific goals and that's kind of how I'm still living. Like if you if you're trying to lose 15 pounds, once you lose 15 pounds, great. I'm happy. Now what? You know, now I just gain it back. But if I just teach you how to develop the habits to lose 15 pounds without setting that exact goal, I mean to me, it could lead

to bigger results long-term. And so for me, I don't know, I'm a big believer in goal setting for some people, for athletes. For me, I'm better just freestyling and just going balls to the wall every day and just seeing where it ends up. Because I could have never imagined me being here today. You know?

Like if I was 19 years old Thinking about how can I create This field or how can I blow up in this field? I would have said man It'd be great so you know train youth athletes and maybe someday train a professional player That'd be huge and like I surpassed that and so you know You you really never know where you can end up in the field adapts to. So like this field is growing bigger and bigger and bigger. We have no idea how big trainers are gonna be in 10 years. There's a good chance that the normal trainer is gonna have a million followers on social media.

Sure. You know, like it's gonna keep getting bigger and bigger. This is just the very beginning of it. I agree with that. When you don't know where the field is going, you almost limit yourself by setting us in exact goal. So I just want to grind and see where I am. Where do you think that work ethic comes from?

What's your childhood like? Where did you get that from? I think I mostly got it from basketball. Just being so obsessed with sports and just realizing if I want to get better at a skill, I got to rep that skill. And if I want to be better than him, I got to rep it more than him.

And if I want to be more confident than him, I got to know that I'm preparing a little bit different than him. And so I think a lot of the traits that I've developed come through that. And then also I was raised by a single mother who has three kids and she's a nurse. And so she was just grinding.

And like got me to every big basketball camp that she couldn't even afford. And she's kind of just a grinder, just figure it out and get shit done. And that's where I got a lot of the traits that I have today, I think. Oh, how's that been for her to see where you've come now? It's kind of so excited about it. Super excited. Have you been able to take her to any games or do anything like that?

I mean, not really. She's going to be, she's's gonna actually meet a lot of our clients for the first time at my wedding in August. So she's all excited for that. She watches all of our clients' games, she knows their stats and everything. And so she's gonna be able to meet a lot of them. And that's gonna be pretty cool for her, I think.

That's very good, very cool. Yeah, you have a unique combination of the knowledge, understanding the science and how to apply it, with the intuitive ability that typically comes from being a very, very, very experienced trainer and the ability to communicate it. You rarely see that combination. Usually it's one without the other,

so I think that, I appreciate that. That probably speaks to why, I mean, I've worked with trainers for 20 years and I can see the intuitive ones and the ones that can communicate well. And they're the ones that typically succeed. And then you see the smart ones, and they don't typically have that.

And you combine the two, then you get someone like yourself. I appreciate that. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Yeah, it's been awesome. It's been great. Doing great work.

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