Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - John Welbourn on Pushing & Pulling a Sled for More Stability and Power

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

If you’ve spent much time in the gym (especially CrossFit gyms), you may have seen someone pushing a huge, weighted sled across the turf. By the end of it, they’re gasping for air and all they’ve done is move a bunch of weight from one side of the room to the other. What are they up to? Are they training to be one of Santa’s reindeer? Or is this an almost-too-obvious exercise for unlocking massive strength potential? The truth is, there’s no shortage of people doing unconscionable, foolish things in the gym, so is this one of them? I haven’t done much sled pushing or pulling in my day, so I invited an expert onto the podcast to tell us all about it. That expert is John Welbourn, who spent 9 years as a starter in the NFL and is the CEO of Power Athlete Inc., a strength and performance company that specializes in large group training sessions. He was also the architect of the CrossFit Football program, which was the main reason CrossFit began focusing on strength and performance. So, he knows a thing or two about training really strong people. In this episode, John and I chat about . . . Why the Prowler sled is good for you Core strength versus trunk stability How to program sled pushes and pulls The importance of building aerobic capacity Why having good conditioning is beneficial for strength training The value of varying intensity in your workouts And more . . . So if you want to know if you should be adding sled exercises to your workouts and how to do so, listen to this episode! 4:48 - Mike and John’s thoughts on Gavin Newsom’s handling of COVID-19 9:51 - Mike and John’s thoughts on Mark Rippetoe 12:20 - What is the value of pushing sleds? 20:54 - What type of workout is pushing and pulling sleds? How would you program that? Mentioned on The Show: Power Athlete Website: https://powerathletehq.com/ Power Athlete Podcast: https://powerathletehq.com/radio/ John Welbourn’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnwelbourn/ Legion VIP One-on-One Coaching: https://legionathletics.com/coaching/ Want free workout and meal plans? Download my science-based diet and training templates for men and women: https://legionathletics.com/text-sign-up/

Hey there, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. Now, if you have spent much time in the gym, especially in a CrossFit gym, you've probably seen someone pushing a big weighted sled across turf or pulling the sled across the turf. And by the end of it, they are gassed, gasping air. And really all I've done is just move a bunch of weight from one side of the room to the other. Why? What are they up to? I mean, there are many people doing many foolish things in gyms. Is this one of them? Well, that is the topic of today's interview, along with a couple of other quote-unquote functional exercises like farmer walks, for example, that my guest, John Wellborn, says are well worth the sweat and toil. Now,

who is John Wellborn? Well, he is an ex-NFL player. He spent nine years in the league as a starter, and now he is the CEO of Power Athlete Incorporated, which is a strength and performance company that specializes in large group training sessions. And John has also worked with many high level athletes over the years and continues to do so. And John was the architect of the CrossFit football program, which was the primary reason CrossFit began focusing on strength and performance. And last but not least, John is a fellow podcaster who was kind enough to have me on his show, which is called Power Athlete Radio. And in this episode, John and I chat about the Prowler Sled and why it's good for you and why it can enhance your strength and help you build

muscle faster. And not by directly stimulating muscle hypertrophy, but by improving your work capacity, by increasing the amount of work that your body and your muscles are able to do in your muscle building workout. And then John also shares some programming tips and talks about why having good conditioning is beneficial for strength training and more. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my VIP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and all circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger paint by numbers simple by carefully managing every aspect of your training

and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork. So all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week, and month after month. What's more, we've found that people are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the puzzle. And I'd bet a shiny shekel it's the same with you. You're probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there's something you're not doing correctly or at all that's giving you the most grief. Maybe it's your calories or your macros. Maybe it's your exercise selection. Maybe it's your food choices. Maybe you're not progressively overloading your muscles or maybe it's something else. And whatever it is,

here's what's important. Once you identify those one or two things you're missing, once you figure it out, that's when everything finally clicks. That's when you start making serious progress. And that's exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to www.buylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com that's buylegion.com slash vip and schedule your free consultation call which by the way is not a high pressure sales call it's really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you're a good fit for the service and if you're not for any reason we will be able to share resources that'll point you in the right direction so again if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it,

and if you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next few months than you did in the last few years, check out my VIP coaching service at www.buylegion.com slash VIP. Hey, John, welcome to my podcast, man. Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, happy to reciprocate. I think we should open with a question. If Gavin Newsom is allowed to have a dinner party at a three Michelin-starred restaurant, are we allowed to have Thanksgiving?

At the French Laundry? Did you invite me to go to Thanksgiving at the French Laundry? Because I would totally accept on that. I don't know. I mean, I'm a peasant, so the rules apply to me. That's the problem. That's what I've learned. I can't be an uppity plebeian, you know? You know, that's kind of an interesting piece. I mean, I don't know how you dictate to people like what they can do with... I just think it's such a slippery slope. And then the problem is, I kind of imagine Gavin Newsom being like, well, if they're starving, they can't eat bread,

kind of imagine Gavin Newsom being like, well, if they're starving, you know, they can't eat bread, let them eat cake. I mean, it's probably, you know, he's, I'm not a fan at all of Gavin Newsom. I think he's a fucking shitty human being, but that's just me. Well, many Californians would agree with you. And I think every day more and more, I actually would agree with you. Yeah, no, I bet you they recall his ass. I mean, they should. I mean, they just, actually would agree with you. Yeah, no, I bet you they recall his ass. I mean, they should. I mean, they just, I think the blatant kind of disingenuous nature and the things that he's done are like kind of irreversible. And you know, the problem is, is people just keep giving him a pass. And I wonder at which point we stopped giving people passes and being like, you're not a good

person. Fuck you. It just goes to show that like, you know know people don't have the ability to have free thought and they just are kind of regurgitating with the media and you know what their gods put out to them and without looking at the critical thinking yeah yeah it's an interesting time for sure and i think that we are seeing uh this is a very interesting mass kind of social psychology experiment i guess you can look at it through that lens. Well, I'm probably similar to you in that people are really firm with these party affiliations, and I'm like, it all seems like bullshit to me. Yeah, I never get how much people get their identity tied up with a political party,

whether it's the DNC or the GOP. I have long said that probably the death of this country will be due to the two-party system. I mean, I've always tried to vote third party just so that there would be a voice. I was kind of actually hoping that when Gary Johnson came in that he could gather 5% of the vote and start getting a third party candidate. I mean, we haven't had a legitimate third party candidate since Ross Perot. So I mean, it's a really kind of unfortunate thing. And I think what's so strange is people are just okay with it. And they kind of like associate like, oh, I'm a, it just feels so disingenuous that the people that are necessarily leading these two group parties don't really identify with any of the people that I know. So you identify with Nancy Pelosi, who did that amazing interview in front of her $40,000 Sub-Zero fridges, eating $25 a pint fucking ice cream.

She was like- With like $1,000 of ice cream. There were a lot of pints in there. I was like, whoa, this chick likes her ice cream. Well, I mean, dude, that's like $25 a pint, like a Bristol Farms custom type of shit. But the thing when nobody was talking about was she had two Sub-zero, like the massive commercial sub-zeros. Those things are like 20 Gs a piece. She had that. I was like looking at her kitchen and I was like, holy shit. You know, I mean, just so out of touch with humanity. You know, just on her government

salary, you know, you started doing the math. It doesn't quite add up. So Congress was pretty sharp in that they basically voted themselves in all these protections. My dad ran for Congress twice, and he was a lobbyist in Sacramento. He worked on Pete Wilson's campaign and then also worked on Richard Nixon's campaign. So my dad was a lifelong Republican, was friends with Ronald Reagan. I mean, we had a political fundraiser for Pete Wilson when he was governor of California at our house. And so my dad was always very interested in politics and thought that's what he wanted to do. So he unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice.

It was just pretty interesting. And I remember asking him once, I was like, dad, why do you, you know, my dad was a sharp dude, trial attorney, you know, could speak. And I asked him, I was like, you know, why do you think that you had two unsuccessful bids for Congress? He kind of, you know, thought about it and he kind of gave me a little BS. And then eventually it kind of like boiled down to, he's like, I just can't lie. He goes, it's such an interesting thing that you have to stand up there as a politician and tell people what they want to hear, not necessarily the truth. It's kind of like, you know, you see those commercial or you see those memes of like that dog sitting in like a bar and everything's on fire. And he's like, everything's fine. Like

that's literally what you have to do. You have to get up there and spin this narrative that you know is disingenuous and a lie. And he's like, I just can't get up there and lie. And I'm a terror, you know, like, it just feels disingenuous when I lie about it. And he's like, I think to really go to Congress and to do this job, you have to lie to their constituents and tell people what they want to hear that if they want to hear to drain the swamp, we're going to drain the swamp, you know, we're going to give them free college, let's give them fucking free college. You just have to say, it's kind of like probably when you're young at a bar and you'll just say whatever you can to try to take a girl home. It's kind of the same analogy, man. I wonder at which point when you hoard yourself so many times

that you all of a sudden start losing sight of who you are and you're like Nancy Pelosi standing in your fucking $100,000 kitchen eating $1,000 worth of ice cream know talking about we can all get through this together it's just it's fucking a load of bullshit i certainly agree and have many thoughts that i could share on that but i think we should just hard segue into something health and fitness related i think of you i think of sal i think of mark ripito a few other people who, if we got together, we could probably make, at least it would be entertaining to us, another podcast that is just about this type of stuff. And the idea is enticing, honestly. Have you had Mark Ripito on your podcast? Oh, yeah, yeah.

I would say that I count him as a friend. Yeah, yeah. No, I've known Mark a long time. Yeah, we're buddies. He is what I affectionately refer to as a prickly human being. Prickly is a good word. Yeah. He's a prickly human being. So yeah, no, I've known Rip for a long, long time. So I just saw him probably, geez, I must've seen him about a year ago. He was in Austin. So we

drove over and had dinner somewhere. Nice. Yeah. I like Mark. I think it's interesting because he does have this prickly exterior and he comes across if you were to hear certain audio snippets or maybe catch little parts of his podcast. Maybe he can come across as a very kind of just brusque and unaffectionate, unfriendly person, but he's not that way at all. He really has a heart and he really does care. And my impression is, I don't know him as well as you do, but my impression I've had a fair amount of interactions with him is like, I genuinely like him. I think he's genuinely a good guy. Rip is a, uh, God, I don't know. I like it. I hate to use the term old school,

but like, kind of like, kind of reminds me a little bit of how my dad was raised. You know, like I remember it was funny. We were both in the CrossFit scene and he's like, these fucking CrossFitters always want to hug me. He's like, fucking men don't hug and shake hands. And I was like, sound like my dad. I was like, man, I think I was probably 21 the first time I hugged my dad. So he's a dude, he's just a funny, funny human being. And just one of those rare individuals that you come across that has not had to acquiesce in any way to what he thinks is right or wrong and was never married, doesn't have any kids, runs his gym, sells his books. I mean, he's been very, very successful by being kind of independent in a lot of ways. And that's probably the type of individual-

And he's not going to change now. And like the Me Too generation and this gym, that's never going to fucking... Mark Ripto will fucking turn this thing off before he has to acquiesce so i do appreciate that about him i think people are so willing to bend and to break and uh alter and uh to morph into something else to be i guess you could say like more mainstream and i think he's just been uh prickly texan for his whole life and that's what he's got if you don't like him his his flavor is not for everybody. But I joke with people that I think I'm a bit of an acquired taste as well. And some people just never acquire a taste for my personality. And I understand. I don't hold it against them. Hey, you know what? I would say it's not for everybody.

Well, what may be for maybe not everybody, but for a lot of people is what I wanted to talk to you about the primary topic of this podcast, which is, I guess I'm trying to think actually, how would I classify these exercises or movements? Some people would call them functional movements or athletic movements, but stuff like sleds and farmer carries or farmer walks and other exercises that you don't see many people doing and that many people see people doing and wonder, should I be doing that? Like tire flips or is that just a waste of time or is that kind of a CrossFit thing? I think there's a ton of value in both pushing sleds and dragging sleds. You know, with a simple Google search, if you Google Louie Simmons Westside Barbell GPP,

Louie talks about, and I spent a good deal of time out at Westside Barbell and I'm friends with Louie, the idea of, you know, being able to push and drag things for conditioning. And he has a pretty good story about a bunch of Finnish throwers who were lumberjacks and they used to cut a tree down, hook it up to a belt and drag it out of the forest. And these guys had incredible capacity to be able to lift some heavy weights. But I really like pushing sleds for the fact that there's really no eccentric load. So you can just push a ton. And the point there being so you don't get much muscle soreness. Yeah. So, I mean, even though you will get sore from pushing sleds, it's just a really interesting way to push something and not have a ton of

eccentric load. I mean, you got to think when you sprint, there's obviously a lot of pulling and ripping and then eccentric load associated with sprinting and slowing down. So I think there's a really interesting piece with pushing sleds. I really like dragging sleds too, just for the fact that I think it just gets a lot of stuff moving. And then you've got farmer's carries in here. And I think the one thing which people have really fucked up in the training model is not understanding the function of the trunk. And I use the term trunk over core because apples and pears have cores and I don't want to ever be related to those. I want to have a trunk, like a nice Oak tree here in Texas. So what they started kind of realizing or hoping that the trunk had to somehow, you know, be there to show abs or something. And really what the trunk's job is to connect upper body to the lower body so that I can effectively drive force through it. So if I'm sprinting and I'm using my arms and I'm using this force, the trunk becomes the, you know, the connector of those and allows me to sprint. We've seen people all the time that have gotten dramatically stronger when they create more strength and more rigidity in their trunk.

So I think movements like farmer's carries are really good for challenging that trunk nature. And I think when people think about core trunk training, they really picture a ton of extension inflection. And that isn't really what our trunk is designed to do. Our trunk is designed to be this kind of isometric contraction. So things like farmer's carries, if you pick up something heavy, you have to brace in the upper body, brace the trunk, lock everything down and then move your limbs. And I think that kind of isometric contraction and that type of training by overloading in such a way is extremely valuable. And I think the legions of legionaries on your program that are in the gym, you know, doing fucking endless crunches and a whole bunch of like flexion extension of the trunk would probably be greatly advantaged by putting some form of heavy loading, whether that look like farmer's carries or just something that involves some form of isometric contraction under load with their truck. Yeah. I've become less and less enamored with core training or

ab training as time has gone on. And I personally do actually none of it at this point. I don't think that there's any place for it where I'm at in my journey, so to speak, which is really, I'm kind of at the end of my genetic rope for muscularity for sure. And for strength, I can get a bit stronger, although I'm really just kind of working back to previous PRs, which I got around the three, four, five, like three plates on the bench, four on the squat, five on the deadlift, which I've said many times, I think is a reasonable three plates on the bench, four on the squat, five on the deadlift, which I've said many times, I think is a reasonable goal to strive toward for men who are natural and who are not genetically gifted, who weren't always just big and strong, who weren't like the jacked, strong 13-year-old many years ago. And so in my case, I have good ab development. I have a strong core and that

comes from heavy squats, heavy deadlifts, heavy overhead presses, bench presses, maybe a little bit, but I don't do any direct ab work because I just don't see any reason to. And with people who are new to lifting, I've come around where I used to program some abs, not too much, a few sets a week maybe, and do some weighted cable crunches, do something for the rectus abdominis in particular, because this is more for guys than maybe for gals, but guys care about that. And if your core hasn't really developed, core muscles haven't developed, especially the rectus abdominis, if those muscles haven't developed significantly, you can get lean and be kind of underwhelmed with what you see in the mirror. However, now I've kind of come around and realized

that, yeah, that's true. And maybe we can speed that process up a little bit by doing some core work or some ab work, direct ab work. And if it's not too much, it probably won't get in the way of anything. But how much of a difference will there really be if you just kind of leave it out and just keep on getting stronger, increasing your whole body strength? Probably not much. Well, sometimes the limiting factor can really come down from that lack of rigidity. And I think the analogy I've used in terms of the training is like, I've talked about this on our podcast, probably at Nauseam. Years ago, I was fortunate enough through a buddy of mine to get introduced to the oldest sword maker in Japan. And I commissioned a real samurai sword. So thejiwara family you know who's been making

swords for you know the samurai and the japanese royalty since like 800 a.d i ended up getting a sword took like 10 years to get but like it was pretty amazing i had to fly to japan and like go to their where they live up in the mountains and like you know look at their whole operation which was just basically some like little homes that these guys have been fabricating swords for like, you know, for, you know, samurais and other people for a thousand, you know, thousand plus years in the same area. Like that's been their spot. So they moved to this little town in the mountains of Japan called Seki because there was a river that had a ton of iron ore content in it. So they actually catch the iron ore in the river behind the home and then bring that in and smelt that. And like the fucking most amazing process you've ever seen unlike the level

of craftsmanship but what was amazing was they talked about like folding the sword so they heat it they hammer it they cool it they heat it they hammer it they fold it they fold it and they'll fold the metal like you know thousands of times but it's like this heating, hammering, folding, cooling process. And I remember as they were going through this process to sharpen the blade and, you know, all the other metallurgy piece, all I started thinking about was training and the idea of like, you know, how many times you've been heavy under a barbell? How many times have you challenged posture, position and movement under load? And, you know, and those guys heat it up, they hammer it, they let it cool, they rinse and repeat, and they guys heat it up they hammer it they let it cool they rinse

and repeat and they're consistent in how they do it they never let the metal sit for too long they don't hit it too much i mean so there was like this perfect cadence that they had and over time they fold and make these amazing weapons that are just like you know razor sharp and cut and kill everything and like that analogy for training is like you need time underneath the barbell you need to learn to maintain stability under the trunk so that you can effectively load this thing in such a way that you can fold your metal, that you can heat it, you can fold it, and then you can rinse and repeat and do it the next day and you can be consistent. So, I mean, I think a lot of people, when they think about trunk work, they're, like I said, they're thinking of crunches and extension and flexion.

What I think about trunk is I think about about have you maintained or created enough tensile strength within your trunk so that i can put 500 pounds on my back stand erect with it no wobble in my trunk sit down below parallel and stand back up with it or can i pull five or six hundred pounds off the ground you know with a nice rigid back that doesn't break and the only way you get that is by one is by training it and two by giving yourself enough time and enough opportunity under load that effectively it just becomes the outcome. So I think especially a lot of people when they first get into training think like, oh, I have to do all this stuff because of this.

No, what you have to do is you have to follow a smart training model and you have to fucking do this over and over and over again. So that all of a sudden when you get to the end of this journey, you're like, man, the amount of time I have under the barbell is probably more time than people have driving on their car to the gym. Totally agree. IP one-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you. I want to go back to the pushing and pulling of sleds and what type of work is that? Are you looking at that as cardio? Are you looking at that as resistance training volume, so to speak, or just building your capacity for effort and for work?

Yeah. So there's a couple of different ways. I remember, who's the guy who's Triple H's trainer from New Jersey? Joe DeFranco. So I was at a talk Joe DeFranco did for Elite FTS. He trained some combine guys and Joe stood up there and said, I don't know shit about sprint training. But when we had athletes push really heavy sleds and then immediately transition over into a sprint, they sprinted faster. And so I didn't necessarily think that his approach was that scientific. He just found when people push something heavy and then went over and did something fast that they got faster, which is just classic French contrast or PAP training. But I think that there is a very real kind of, I guess, strength required, but I wouldn't necessarily say that pushing sleds is what I would call a strength builder. If you're like, I want to get

strong, I'm going to push a sled. I think there's other ways to get strong, but I think pushing a sled fits in there. I think you hit it right on the head when you said capacity. I think that there is a level of capacity that's needed to hammer yourself into performance shape or the physical shape that you want. And that comes at a price. And I think if you want to do a bunch of prowler pushes and make it pretty awful, it's going to get you where you want to go. I mean, I've never heard anybody push a prowler and be like, that was great. We should do it again tomorrow. You're like, no, it was fucking awful. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that I've done them here and there, but I've never consistently done them. So I really can't speak firsthand about it at all,

which is why I was asking. And I guess my follow-up question is then how would that look in the way of programming? What I like to do is normally we'd put, you know, maybe two days a week if we were going to, let's say we squatted and I guess you could say like a lower type of deal, maybe some squatting, some heavy pulling on a Monday, and then maybe some upper body and, you know, something more dynamic on a Tuesday. I'd probably put them into like a Wednesday type of situation. Or if I wanted to do some kind of contrast training, like post activation potentiation, you could always do something heavy and then push something fast, you know, like a lighter sled. So we've done them both ways where we've overloaded them, where they were super heavy. We've done medium ones where we've sprinted as fast as we can. We've also done some kind of stuff where you put it on super light,

you try to move as fast as you can. So I think it really just kind of fits into the context of the greater training model, but really what you're training for. I think the one thing that kind of gets lost in translation, I think that there's this kind of like cardio bunny kind of mentality where I'm just going to like cardio, cardio, cardio. And then there's guys on the other side. They're like, I don't want to do any of that. I just want to lift heavy weights, which is fine. But what allows you to recover and allows you to get stronger is having a very, very capable aerobic system. And so there has to be a balance, man. You got to be, and I wrote an article years ago on Power Athlete. It's probably my talk to me, Johnny blog called, do I need to be in shape? And what I found is that the higher the GPP,

the better shape you were, the faster you recovered in between sets and the more workouts I could get in a week. You got to be in shape. You don't need to be like so far on that spectrum that you're like basically cardioing your gains away. But I really believe that there needs to be a balance of conditioning. If you want to push sleds for conditioning, I would recommend that to anybody. You want to get on and do something, you know, assault bike ish or, you know, stair climbers or Jacob's ladder or, you know, step mill. I think there's a very real dose for that, but I think sleds are an important deal, especially for young athletes. I actually, I wrote an article and recorded a podcast on that topic. I'd have to pull it up to get the exact title, but it was essentially like, it was answering the question, should I

do cardio if I'm mostly just interested in getting big and strong, basically? And maybe while you're talking the next time I'll pull it up for people who want to go find it. And my conclusion was exactly what you just said, that if you want to perform as well as you can in your resistance training, in your strength training, your weightlifting, then you probably should be doing some cardio. And there are other reasons to do cardio as well. There are health reasons. There are body composition reasons. That is one of the easiest ways to maintain a lower body fat level, for example, is more activity. I mean, oh wow, big surprise, but some people are surprised at how much it actually helps to get that extra calorie burn that comes with cardio. Of course, it makes cutting easier. And it also though has this,

and particularly in between sets, right? Your ability to just recover and coming back to that work capacity. And my conclusion and my recommendation was probably a combination is of intensities is best. So doing some low intensity stuff, some moderate intensity. And I talked about a scale you could use just based on how winded you are basically like at moderate intensity, you're going to be a bit winded. We wouldn't be able to sit and chat like this, but we probably would be able to have a conversation. We just have to catch our breath. It wouldn't be a very smooth conversation, but we could still talk. And then of course, high intensity is truly like there is no talking, but including some high intensity as well for this purpose, again,

of just maximizing performance in weightlifting. And I wouldn't do probably more than 30 or 40 minutes a week because it can be a bit rough if you are also lifting heavy weights four to six hours per week and doing some low and moderate intensity cardio. What are your thoughts on that in terms of the different intensities as it relates? I think it's like anything. I think that there's a law of accommodation. I think if you train over 90% on the same movements is what the Russians said. I know Westside Barbell talks about that. I think the one thing that CrossFit did get right was a little bit of the constantly varied idea of like, especially in conditioning type stuff. Like if you're going to get on walk, then I think you need to walk fast. Some days I think you need to put on a heavy vest and walk, you know, differences. I think if you walk the same thing, it's kind of

like if you go in and you do the same movements, the same weight at the same reps game, you'll see a tremendous stall out in your progress. Having some varying different forms of intensity is pretty sharp. I think, you know, pushing sleds, I think I like the echo and the assault bikes, I like Versa climbers. If I'm going to do something, I try to change it up and then create some kind of relative intensity, like set some goals. Like if I'm on the assault bike, can I get 300 calories in 20 minutes? Great. Can I get 300 calories on the echo bike? And I try to set different goals. And sometimes, you know, I think that there's definitely a need for some kind of low to moderate. Like you look at some of the maps of where like, Hey, I'm going to train within a certain zone in terms of building my

aerobic capacity. But I think other times you got to just build that overall capacity by trying to set yourself on fire a little bit. I think as long as you're not going in the gym every single day and trying to set yourself on fire, which I think happened in the CrossFit deal. And we tested that and we found that it breaks a lot of eggs. Yeah, no, it does. It breaks a lot of eggs. You know, the age old, you got to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet. But the problem is, is you start frying people out. And I think you start to find some genetic outliers that that stuff works for. But I think being able to vary some intensity and vary the movements and kind of change up and do a whole bunch of different forms of conditioning. I think the one reason that I've really seen why I think a lot of people want struggle in the gym

in terms of performance gains isn't necessarily from the training aspect. It's probably from just a lack of conditioning. You know, I did a consult with a guy on Tuesday, pretty strong dude, you know, we were trying to like fix some of his lifts. So we're zooming in, which is kind of a new telestrink deal we've been working on. He's like, what do you think? I'm like, I think you're fucking out of shape. I mean, like, you know, I think you need to have more capacity. I think you need to be able to, you know, bang some weights, but I think you got to be able to add a little bit of aerobic capacity so that you're not so smoked in between these sets so we can get some higher quality of work. And I think there's a real interesting thing where all of a sudden people start getting

fatigued and the quality of work goes down. And I think when the quality of the movement deteriorates, you know, I'm kind of a fan of like, Hey, if it looks bad, we're going to stop. Well, how do you make it look good? You've got to be in better shape. You have to be in good enough shape to survive your training. And I think if more people looked at it like that, I think they would probably make more and more progress. And for people wondering on that article, and it's a podcast of mine, I pulled it up. Should you do cardio if you lift weights? Question mark, science says, yes, that's the title. And I don't remember how long, maybe 20 minutes or so of me talking specifically on this point. And what I can speak to firsthand is, so before COVID, I would do about an hour of cardio per

week. I would do some biking on the weekends when I wasn't lifting. I would lift weights Monday through Friday, 30 minutes or so of moderate intensity biking. I'm trying to remember if I did work in any high intensity stuff. Probably not. I would really only do that when I was cutting just to burn some more calories. So it was just kind of moderate intensity. And then when the lockdown started, the two weeks to flatten the curve, that is now it's eight months, but we've been in and out of lockdown to be fair, but it was not two weeks to flatten the curve. When that started, I no longer was driving to the office, which the gym was in the same complex actually as the office, but I had a little bit of extra time. So I was like, all right, I guess I'll just, I'll do some more cardio and I'll use that time. I like

to, I just hop on my upright bike in my exercise room and I'll read or listen to a podcast or an interview or something. So I started doing a bit more cardio. I just started doing 25 to 30 minutes a day, just moderate intensity. Again, no high intensity stuff. And I did that for months and I didn't really change the way I was eating. So I lost about eight or nine pounds of fat, which is expected of course. But I also was a little bit surprised when I got back in the gym and got back training the way I was training previously, because at home I'm limited. I have dumbbells that go up, I have some adjustable dumbbells that go up to 90. I have some bands and I can make it work in terms of effective volume, not losing muscle, not losing maybe potential for strength because I'm not

losing muscle. But of course, when I got back onto the bar, it was like pretty awkward. However, now that I'm back in the groove and my training, it involves some higher rep, not too high rep, like the highest rep mesocycle is sets of 10 on the primary lifts with about 75% on the bar. I think I'd have to look in my spreadsheet. And what I noticed is those higher rep sets are now less taxing, just less metabolically, less cardiovascularly taxing than they were before. And I'm getting back to the weights. So it's not just because I came back super weak and that explains it. And I attribute that to just my cardio getting significantly better. Dude, I will co-sign on that one. A couple of years ago, we did one of our programs. It's called Jack Street on Power Athlete. And as I was designing that program, we kind of did this kind of like friendly wager with

the guys in the office and like all the people that work for us. And so we did a little bit of a challenge. And so we kind of drew and some guys had to gain 10% of their body weight and other people had to lose 10% of their body weight. And we did kind of before and afters and put this program. So we all did a similar program, obviously pick some different nutritional approaches. The one thing, you know, like the training was going really well, but I wasn't losing weight the way I thought I was. And, you know, if you're not losing the weight, you think you probably got to add some more,

you know, conditioning in to try to, you know, burn more calories so I could get in that caloric deficit. So I started hitting like after the workout, just maybe 20, 25 minutes on the step mill. And I was kind of mixing it up on different stuff. You know, I started doing that, you know, five, six, seven days a week. And, you know, all of a sudden my weight started coming down and it's sort of moving in the right direction. And at the time I was kind of, we were working a ton of rep maxes and I always kind of quantify every rep max with like, I'll cut it back like 20% and do like one set of max reps. Not necessarily a Wendler-esque approach, but I always like to kind of like, Hey, if I squat 500 for five, if I cut it back to 80% at max reps, I kind of have an idea of how many reps I should be able to get based off of what, you know, it's just kind of a checks

and balances that I've used for years with myself. Yeah. I actually do something similar in the program that's in the newest book of mine that I recently released called Beyond Big Leaner Stronger. So there's a 16 week macro cycle and the 16th week might actually be a deload, either that or that's week 17. But the last training week of each macro cycle, it involves an AMRAP set on the big lifts with 95% just to see what has happened over the last, this is four months. And then you update your training maxes. And of course you have an inkling along the way because you start to notice that I had put 85% of what was my one rep max at the beginning of this macro cycle on the bar. And it calls for a set of four and I probably could have

gotten seven. That's a good sign that when you get to that and wrap, you've probably gotten stronger. But I think that's a smart way, especially as an experienced and an advanced weightlifter. Because when you're a newbie, it's easy. You just add weight to the bar every week, basically. And you just get stronger, stronger, stronger. But then as time goes on, especially after years, it can be very hard to know if anything got any better unless you try it out now and then. Yes. So I mean, I started doing these rep maxes. And I think like on the deadlift, I remember I went in and I did like a backup set. And I think like on the deadlift, I remember I went in and I did like a backup set. And I think it was like, I pulled, I think it was like 585 for like a set of eight, eight or nine, and then backed it off. I think whatever, 80%. So it was.

80% of that. I think it was like, yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Mid to high force. Yeah. It was like four, 465, 470 put on on straps and I think I pulled it for like 20 plus reps. All of a sudden, I started kind of like checking these kind of rep totals. And all of a sudden, I was putting like four or five reps on every, on like kind of what I've historically done. And all of a sudden, started setting some like pretty amazing PRs.

And I was laughing at it because I'm like, well, dude, I'm in caloric restriction. I'm doing a ton of cardio to try to burn and get my body weight down. But I ended up, I think I weighed in like on the final day at like 268 or like right around seven percent body fat in the bod pod i think i'd stop maybe like three or four days before i had set like prs in every single lift i had attempted it was one of those things where i completely went back and like had to like revamp the way i looked at building an aerobic base you know then i found a ton of research on like building mitochondrial density and the fact that like, you know, a big wide aerobic base allows you

to give, you know, the same effort on set three or four that you gave on set number one and really forced me to go back and really understand the value of building an aerobic base, especially in the strength program. I had always subscribed to this idea that if you just build a massive fucking glycolytic engine by lifting weights and sprinting and moving as fast as you can, that you'd be very, very successful. And I think I was very successful for me in my twenties and thirties when I was in the NFL. But all of a sudden, when I got out of the NFL and I started, you know, didn't have the need for that type of glycolytic capacity, all of a sudden lifting heavy weights, being able to get max

motor unit recruitment, banging heavy weights and building, you know, a big aerobic base and building a mitochondrial density became huge, huge, and still is a big component in my training. So my deal is like, man, I got to be in shape. And even when I don't want to do it, I still got to do it. I mean, I noticed it has benefited my isolation, my accessory, my bodybuilding stuff as well, because I'm starting, let's see. Yeah. Every workout of mine these days is starting with one or two big barbell movements. And then I'm doing some accessory stuff around it.

So I've noticed that I perform better on the big movements and they are less draining. So I actually have a bit more gas to give to my isolation stuff. So it's been interesting. So anybody listening again, if you're not doing much in the way of cardio, I recommend checking out that article that I wrote over at legion athletics.com. I have a podcast by the same title and John, I want to go quickly back to pushing and pulling sleds and programming. So if people are listening right now and thinking, okay, you've sold me, I'm going to build my aerobic capacity. And you've also sold me on pushing or pulling sleds. I want to give that a go. You mentioned a few things regarding the

programming. So for example, if you're going to do the heavier stuff, give a day of recovery or two, maybe even between your heavy barbell squatting or pulling your heavy lower body weightlifting and the heavy sleds. If you want to do some lighter, more explosive sleds, you could work that into maybe the end of a heavy lifting, lower body lifting session. What though, in the way of distance or is it time, like what does a set look like of pulls or pushes and then how many sets is reasonable? how do you think about those things one that i really always liked which i called four by four which was i would do four 20 yard prowler pushes that's about like i whatever the weight i picked like if i threw

i think it was like four maybe five or six plates on a prowler so we pushed that on the high handles so down for 20 yards and then it was a rest 30 seconds and then push it back and you basically rest 30 and you so you do four pushes okay and then i would rest two i'd have to look it up as either two or three minutes in between those different bouts and i would get four of those so i would just like hammer four give myself a longer rest hammer four and what i would do is obviously the lower handles, when you look at a Prowler, there's high handles and there's low handles on the front and how it's kind of set up. The low handles are dramatically harder.

So it was kind of an interesting one where you kind of have like one, you're moving faster, the lower ones moving a little slower, moving fast. And so by necessarily just changing handle position, you can kind of change the intensity of the movement. The limiting factor definitely became the low handles, whereas on the high position, you can kind of change the intensity of the movement. The limiting factor definitely became the low handles, whereas on the high handles, you can push fast. So that was kind of just one of the basic workouts we did. We did a lot of them too on the minute, every 30 seconds, depending on distances.

Somewhere in that like 15, 20, 25, maybe max 30 yards. If you're pushing a sled longer than 30 yards, the quality and effectively the turnover at what you're doing, it's going to deteriorate. It's not hard enough, right? To be able to effectively do it, you wouldn't be able to put enough on there. So that sweet spot's right around 15, 20, maybe 25 yards. If you can push a heavy prowler that distance, you will add a lot of metabolic distress in your life. When I retired in the NFL in 2009, about that time when I got reached out by CrossFit, I mean, we started putting out free programming. And I think like I

programmed something like I forgot. It's like we've worked with like, you know, tens of thousands of athletes and programmed millions of workouts over the course. And, you know, we've worked with Train Rogue to do our programming through their app. And I've been able to aggregate all this data. I mean, we've had something like 18,000 people go through our programs, you know, and there's like thousands, tens of thousands of workouts. When I get that data, the people that consistently train the longest, when you look at like PRs and this and who's gotten stronger and everything, it's the people that trained the most consistency or most consistently over the longest period of time had the best progress which i know everybody listening is like well yeah of course but like think about that one so if you go in

the gym and you do something like i'm gonna burn it down and you end up putting yourself into such a hole that you can't train for two or three days and then you get in there and you you know recover and the quality of the work is bad opposed from like going in and doing like the minimal effective dose that i can recover and come back the next day and continue to train and then add another effective dose so that I can be the person that consistently trains longest over the longest amount of time. That is the person that ends up having the greatest experience and the greatest success. So I think with a lot of times people go on the gym. And then there's not getting hurt, right? I mean, if you're too zealous,

then you also raise your chances of getting hurt. And then that can put you out for weeks, months. Yeah. You know, you see people like, oh, I went in and destroyed myself in the gym. And then they don't train. Like I had clients like this, man. They'd come in like two days a week and wreck themselves. And I didn't see him for like a week.

And I'd be like, I would rather you give me less effort and come four days a week than fucking burn your city to the ground and only give me once a week. I think with this stuff is there's a minimal effective dose, like come in. If you never pushed the sled, you know, load it up, push it 10, 15, 20 yards, do it a couple of times, make it so it's hard enough. And then the next time you come in, do a little bit more, you know, use a progressive overload approach and be smart and be like, Hey, I want to continually do this for 10 weeks and see what happens opposed from coming in once and just annihilating yourself. And then never wanting to like go near one or you see one feel like you're going to throw up in your mouth. You know, I think of it's Jeff Bezos's thing. I think he used it actually for

his blue origin. Like it's their motto. It's Latin for step-by-step ferociously. I think it was a Latin saying, gradatum ferociatura. I don't know how to speak Latin. I don't even know how to pronounce anything, but it just means step-by-step ferociously. And I just think of that concept as something that I liked when I first came across it because it's one of those pithy things that applies to many different things, including what we're talking about here is like you're saying one step at a time and with determination and with intention, but not going so far as to just blow yourself up or you can't take the next step. It's a gradium for us to tear. There you go. The only Latin I remember is Ave Caesar Mori Turi Te Salutat. And what is that?

Which is hail Caesar. Those of us about to die salute you which is what the gladiators would say before they would you know walk into the coliseum into certain death so it's the only thing i remember from latin we could use a caesar about now another discussion he's just one of my favorite people in history. So I'm biased, but. Who, Julius Caesar? Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, dude, I always wonder, you know, how great an individual must be to have their name echo through time. Like, that's something I think about a lot.

Like when you think of these people, like we were talking earlier about Genghis Khan or, you know, Julius Caesar. I mean, like, what's the effect? Like, what do you have to accomplish for your name to echo through time? You know, is Jeff Bezos accomplishment that, you know, a thousand years from now, they're going to be talking about Jeff Bezos? You know, is Donald Trump the type of individual who is going to be forgotten in 10 years? We're like, fuck that guy.

You know, Calvin Coolidge of, you know, some lesser known presidents. Everybody remembers, you know, Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy, because of these, you know, monumental things that happened while they were in office. And I always wonder if there were other great leaders that aren't remembered because they didn't live in interesting times and there was no great strife. There was no Cuban Missile Crisis. There was no Emancipation Proclamation. There was no Declaration of Independence to sign. Is that why we remember these great men? Or were they really great men? Or were they just men that made the right decision in the face of tyranny?

So I don't know. That's an interesting piece. And I always hear a lot of this bullshit. We're like, history won't remember this well. And I'm like, fuck. History is written by the victors. So who's ever in charge is the one that gets to write the history. They're the ones that remember history.

Very true. And to that point, I think you could find some good cases just among US presidents of exactly what you're saying of people who were presidents who were very intelligent, who were very competent and who actually did a good job. But because nothing particularly interesting happened in that period, they're just forgotten. But maybe nothing particularly interesting happened because they were good at their job. We didn't get into any major wars and there was no economic calamity of any kind. Things just kind of were cruising along. And what though many people, what we don't see, we see things are okay, but we don't see is what actually goes into maintaining okay. There could have been potential catastrophes that didn't happen

because this person made the right choices i sometimes wonder like when you said like do the right thing that's kind of an interesting piece like you can only make decisions based off of the information that you have available to you while i would never advocate for the job of president of the united states i think you have to probably hoard yourself in scrutiny and there's no way anybody would want that job. But my only advocacy for that job would be, can you imagine the information that you would have at your fingertips? Can you imagine the information, like the briefings? I would just love to plug in and be like, tell me everything. I want to know what's happening in Syria. I want to know what's happening here. I want to... But I mean, you saw that headline, right? That Pentagon

officials were withholding information from Trump. So I totally get what you're saying. It sounds great and interesting, but then at this point, you would have to wonder, unless you are on board with the establishment, if you want to call it that. Some people would say with the deep state, there are machines, there are apparatuses of government that are running in a certain way and are moving in a certain direction. And if you're going to try to change that, you are not going to be viewed favorably. Trump's presidency would have been more or less the same, even if he wasn't Trump and if he would have been more of a politician and if he would have been a better PR person. But the fact that he wanted to change the way that certain things were going and these things,

there's so much momentum there. Dude, but the thing is, I think that there is an intelligent way to navigate this stuff. That I think, I mean, there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger with him and like, you know, narcissistic personality disorder. I mean, like, it's pretty fascinating to like, you know, just see some of the classic things like the Dunning-Kruger, like, what do you mean? I'm the best at everything. So, I mean, I think there is a little bit of that with Trump, but I think as a intelligent, you know, somebody who's read Machiavelli's The Prince numerous times, who was a rhetoric major, I think sitting there and realizing that there is a very real opportunity for the cunning individual that can somehow get in and navigate those circles. And unfortunately, DC doesn't like outsiders. That's why they're

probably so happy to get Joe Biden back in there because he's one of the boys. He's one of the crew. He knows where the bodies are buried and they know where all his are. So I think that there's a feeling of returning back to normalcy. But I think for a guy like Trump as an outsider, he tried to come in and thought that like he could make changes and do this. I think you got to go in there and you got to play the game and you got to get in there and see how this whole thing works. But I think the fact that you have people in his cabinet and the people that are in the government that weren't giving him information is indicative of how they didn't trust him. You know. I don't know what was in that. I mean, we're not privy to this stuff. And unfortunately, you never know the value of somebody's presidency,

how good or bad it was until many, many years after the fact. People talk about Obama did this, but he's like, Obama? I mean, shit, he's putting out a ton of memoirs, but then nobody unfortunately wants to remember a lot of the shit, but they're trying to blame all these kids in cages. I'm like, the Obama administration built all those cages. Yeah, I remember. The pictures, the famous pictures that were going around were actually from one of Obama's. Well, I mean, where was the outrage when Obama was doing that? Well, there wasn't.

It wasn't an outrage until they needed the outrage. And I'll tell you, the one thing that I think is the valuable lesson of anybody that wants to attempt to ascend to something like the president of the United States, you need to have a serious back alley deal with the media. You can't go in there and kick those people in the teeth and fucking set them on fire and do everything that he did and basically called them out and not expect them to come and try to kill you at every stage. I mean, if you want to think like the American people didn't necessarily vote Trump out, the US media fucking eviscerated him by running just nothing but negative, negative stuff 24 hours a day. I mean, shit, even the good stuff

he did, like, you know, you hear about the peace deals. I mean, he put together three landmark peace deals and they nominated him for a Nobel Prize. Shit, you never heard that. Many people don't even know about that. They're just confused right now that you're like, what, what are you talking about? Well, yeah, because why? Because the media, like the US media fucking sucks. You know, you turn on the TV,

like do you ever hear about anything in the Middle East? I mean, dude, when the whole yellow vest riots were going on in Paris, shit, you didn't hear anything about that here. The only way you're going to get any international to know what's going on in the international stage is you're going to have to look at like the BBC, you know, Algiers. I mean, you're going to have any international to know what's going on in the international stage is you're going to have to look at like the bbc you know algeria i mean you're gonna have to reach out to some other news stations because if not they don't have anything you know which they haven't for a while what are they going to do they're going to run the kardashians or they're

just going to be like donald trump like i'm almost interested and this is purely just out of like curiosity trump loses biden comes in what the fuck is the news gonna talk about they're probably already worried about that themselves ratings are about to decline precipitously i know you're on the east coast but like the como brothers are you fucking kidding me like those two dipshits like what are those guys like what's was it chris como that's the weightlifter as uh tucker carlson says he's the the pundit and his brother but like those guys like? What was it? Chris Como? That's the weightlifter, as Tucker Carlson says. He's the pundit and his brother. But like those guys, I mean, every single moment, you know, on all these news stations is like painted Trump as the antichrist.

You know, I mean, like the fact the fact that they're trying to like remove freedom of speech and yet calling people Nazis, like I'm just like, this is so confusing to me. Like I was thinking the other day as I was just seeing this endless barrage, I'm like, I'm just curious to know if Trump leaves. Well, maybe he goes and starts his own media company so he can still play the antichrist role for them by just trying to grow the MAGA movement. You know what I mean? They did say that if Trump loses, he's going to announce his campaign for 2020, or 2024, rather. I mean, realistically, if he was- I didn't hear that. That's one of their things. But I think if he was intelligent and was well-backed,

what he should do is probably step aside, let Biden go, start funding and raising money for a super PAC, and continue to be involved in- Start the media company. What I read is there were just rumors that if he did that, that Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson would consider leaving Fox, which would implode their ratings even worse than what's happening right now, and go and work with Trump. But yeah, I mean, you think it would be smarter to do that. Exactly. You'd play kingmaker, basically, and look for somebody who is, I mean, if you're just going to be practical, somebody who is younger and somebody who's well-spoken,

somebody who has a better understanding of how the political machinations work, like how the system actually works, how the bureaucracy of government works and how things actually get done. And to your point, why you can't just come in and shit on everything and everyone. And even if you have good ideas, it doesn't matter because you need buy-in from a lot of people who you're not going to like, who you're going to have to pretend that you do like them to get anything done. If you were just a dictator, then yes, it would be a lot easier. But our system is very inefficient in that way. Yes. And it's very slow and it's very complex. And there are a lot of things that don't work, but to make it work again, that requires, I think, a skillset and.

Well, it takes a politician. You need to understand like where the levers are and what they do and where the buttons are and what they do. And it takes a politician. And I think what Trump tried to do is, you know, Trump's a tyrant. I mean, he really is. I mean, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that, you know, hey, he was. I mean, tyrant is a bit of a word. I mean, it's almost like he like as if he's CEO, like this is what we're going to do.

I want it to happen. Make it happen. So that's what I mean. Like kind of iron, like rule with an iron fist and how he ran his company. You know, hey, this is what we're doing. This is how we're going. I'm going to bring these people in. I mean, to be fair though, that's probably how you run it. And I don't mean this necessarily as defense of Trump. I mean, a good CEO ultimately does just say, yeah, this is what we're doing. And I'm going to explain to

everybody why, and I'm going to try to get buy-in, but if- I don't have to ask anybody's opinion, right? So he's in a situation where, hey, I'm running this company. These are the deals we're doing. This is how it's going to go. I don't fucking acquiesce. I don't bend. I use that term like he's running it like a business. He's in charge. This isn't a democracy. This is, you know, fucking my way or the highway. And like, you know, a little bit of that tyranny is probably how business effectively runs. But unfortunately, when you go to DC and there's a big difference between being a politician, a politician's not a businessman, the ability to, to politic, you know, to glad hand to, you know, win boats and to cut deals and to go there and to not tell everybody, like, think about this, right? So he goes in under the platform of draining the swamp

that DC has turned into this swamp of humanity with these swamp creatures. And we got to drain this thing and clean it up. If you're in DC and he basically paints you the picture, what, depending on what aisle, if you're a Republican or a Democrat instantly fucking I'm in the swamp and whether or not you are or not, you don't want their constituents to know that. I think that there was an easier way to go into this thing, you know, not trying to burn it to the ground. I think the only way you're going to change the system is from the inside. I think a dude like Dan Crenshaw, I'm a big fan of. He's a congressman here in Houston, in Texas, former Navy SEAL. I don't know if he's the guy

that has the eye patch that SNL made front of. Super eloquent, SEAL team commander. I mean, just a sharp dude. And went to Harvard after grad school school he's done a good job i think putting having a guy like trump with a pack and having like he said starting his own media company having a pack you know having a lot of you know that power for that kingmaker but unfortunately that's not trump trump wants to be in the forefront he wants to be the dude he really i don't think he could take a back seat and realize like you know the age-old cardinal richelieu where true power rests behind the throne kind of a deal yeah no well put well put and i'm sure we could again this is the kind of thing we probably just go on for hours and hours about this stuff but hey i really appreciate you taking the time to do this interview and if sal and mark i mean i've spoken

to them about about that idea and they do like it. So you would definitely be on the roster. I think it could be a lot of fun. Yeah, well, let me know. I'm always down. It'd be good. It'd be fun to do it in person, but it'd always be good on a podcast. Other than you just have to wait for Mark Ripto, who talks so damn slow.

Got that Texas draw. And continuously. I'm always, when can I jump in? I got to time my interruptions just right or we're off to the next tangent, which is great. I mean, I'm the same way. If I don't consciously pay attention, I will completely hijack a conversation and never shut up.

So I totally get it. But hey, let's wrap up with where people can find you and your podcast and your work. And if there are any new things coming that you want people to know about or any things that are currently popular that you want people to know about or any things that are currently popular that you want people to know about? The easiest way to find me is at John Wellborn. I'm on social media. You can find me at johnwellborn.com. My company is Power Athlete. Our URL and the way you find us is just type in Power Athlete or our URL powerathletehq.com. Social media, Power Athlete. We do a ton of stuff with Eat the Weak, Be the Hammer, a lot of our taglines athlete we do a ton of stuff with you know eat the week be the hammer a lot of our tag lines we do we do a ton of some killer merch but really where i think we have added

a pretty amazing deal is with our online programs four or five thousand people a day checking programs around the world we have a bunch of different archetypes for those programs and you can find all those at power athlete and we And we have a pretty detailed list of all the programs and also a week or two free trial if you want to give it a shot. We do a bunch of nutrition. We do a podcast, which is Power Athlete Radio. So if you go to your favorite place for podcasts

and type in Power Athlete Radio, I think we got like 420 episodes, some great guests and have a lot of fun doing it. So yeah, we're real easy to find. We're not hiding in any way. And Power Athlete, which is my company, is based on the idea of ramping up people's performance and helping people reach their goals and really just be a more badass human being. Awesome, man. Love it. And we'll have to do another one. We'll have to think of what's another topic we can pontificate on. Anytime. Always look forward to it. Thank you.

pontificate on anytime. Always look forward to it. Thank you. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility. And thus it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn't like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscleforlife.com, and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism. I'm open to it. And of course, you can email me if you have

positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. That is the best way to get ahold of me, mikeatmuscleforlife.com. And that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon.