Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Mark Rippetoe on the Good, Bad and Ugly of Sport Training

Episode Date: July 29, 2016

This is the second part of a two-part interview with the always enlightening and entertaining Mark Rippetoe, who you’ve probably heard of if you take fitness seriously. In case you don’t know who Mark is, though, he was a competitive powerlifter for a decade and is the author of several books, including two classics that everyone that’s into weightlifting should read–Starting Strength and Practical Programming for Strength. Mark has also coached thousands of people all over the country on proper barbell training through his seminars, which you can learn more about at www.startingstrength.com. He’s also just a fun guy to chat with because he’s colorful and just shares his thoughts and openly and isn’t one for euphemisms or minced words, which I think is refreshing, really. So, in this interview Mark and I talk about training for sports and why a lot of what goes on in the upper echelons of sports training is nonsensical and even counterproductive and what athletes should be focusing on instead. I’ve run into a fair amount of this just working with people because I’ve heard from quite a few high-level college athletes and some professionals as well that were a bit perplexed by the types of things their strength trainers were having them do (as well as the things the trainers would leave out). I helped many of them simplify their routines and straighten things out and, one for one, they were amazed at how much of a difference it made in their respective sports. So, if you have any desire to be a better athlete, I think you’ll like the interview. Here it is... 5:30 - How athletes should tailor their training for their profession and what they do wrong. 11:47 - Do top athletes perform well because of their training programs, or in spite of them? 22:10 - How trainers who only deal with high-level athletes can get away with not knowing their profession. 33:28 - Why any training will give results to an un-trained individual vs. optimized training. ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS PODCAST: Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training: www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength…rue&tag=mflweb-20 Practical Programming for Strength Training: www.amazon.com/Practical-Program…54/?tag=mflweb-20 How to Make Meal Plans That Work For Any Diet: www.legionathletics.com/diet-meal-plans/ How to Create the Ultimate Muscle Building Workout: www.muscleforlife.com/muscle-building-workout/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, it's Mike, and this podcast is brought to you by Legion, my line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I'm really not a fan of the supplement industry. I've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that basically do nothing, and I've always had trouble finding products actually worth buying, and especially as I've gotten more and more educated as to what actually works and what doesn't. And eventually after complaining a lot, I decided to do something about it and start making my own supplements. The exact supplements I myself have always wanted. A few of the things that make my products unique are one, they're a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored, which I think is good because while artificial sweeteners may not be as harmful, some people claim there is research that suggests regular consumption

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Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Strong, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym grinding away at workouts you hate. And you can find my books everywhere. You can buy books online like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audiobooks like me, you can actually get one of my audio books for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audio books. That's muscleforlife.com forward slash audio books, and you'll see how to do this. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I hope you enjoy it, and let's get to the show. Hello, hello, boys and girls. This is Mike

and I am back with another episode of the podcast. And this episode is the second part of a rather long interview that I did with Mark Ripito, who you are probably familiar with because you probably listened to the first part of this interview. But if you didn't, Mark was a competitive powerlifter for a decade and is the author of several bestselling books, the two most popular and famous ones being Starting Strength and Practical Programming for Strength. And in this second part of the interview, Mark and I talk about training for sports, you know, athletics, and why a lot of what goes on in the upper echelons of sports training is pretty nonsensical and even counterproductive. And then we also talk about

what these athletes should be focusing on in the weight room if they want to get better at their sports. And I'm glad that I had this discussion because I don't think I've really written or spoken about it much, but I've run into it a fair amount just working with people because I've heard from quite a few high-level college athletes and some professionals as well that were a bit perplexed by the types of things that their strength trainers were having them do as well as the things that the trainers were leaving out. And subsequently, I've helped many of these people kind of simplify their weight training routines and straighten things out. And I mean, one for one, they were amazed at how much of a difference it made in their respective sports compared to what they were doing before. So that's what the interview is about.

And here it is. All right. So here we are part two, change the discussion to sports training. And, um, I'm excited to talk about this because again, this is another thing that I don't hear about it as much as the strength versus aesthetics aesthetics because that's more just mainstream and a lot of guys and girls have that on their minds. But I do hear from quite a few athletes. about some of the things that I've said versus some of the things about training and about exercise and some of the things that they'll see other high-level athletes doing with their trainers, and there's a disconnect there. So I'm not recommending medicine ball slams and Russian twists and planks. You know what I mean?

I'm saying, well, if you want to be a better golfer you should probably squat and deadlift and press and then you're going to be able to generate more force and you're going to be able to transfer that to the club face of the ball and you're going to be a better golfer you're going to hit longer shots and so forth but there aren't very many golfers that are doing stuff like that so I know this is

an area that you probably even have more experience and you've dealt with it more than I have so I'm going to give the mic to you. Well, Mike, once again, thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, we deal with this kind of thing all the time because we are primarily a strength program. And one of the most aggravating things in the industry right now is the functional training model. And let me, you know, and of course,

there will be comments down at the bottom of this YouTube thing, which will, YouTube comments are always interesting, aren't they? It's where you go to find out how stupid you are, you know. It brings out the worst in people. Let's just put it that way. Anonymity. It's just amazing, isn't it? So in a nutshell, the whole idea has gotten to be over the past probably 20, 25 years that if you make the strength training,

the strength and conditioning program look like the sport to which the strength and conditioning is going to be applied, then that's the correct way to do strength and conditioning for sports. Right. And nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. It has made a lot of people a lot of money in the high levels of strength and conditioning. And it really, we need to think about this for a little while before we can really understand it. All right.

we can really understand it. First off, let me preface my comments with saying that I don't train one-on-one. I don't train high-level athletes. I train high-level athletes' moms and their dads. I train guys that will never be high-level athletes. As a result of having run a gym for coming up on 40 years now, being in the gym business for coming up on 40 years and having run my own gym for 32 years, I have learned a lot of things about strength and conditioning, and I have learned them by training people who are not ever going to be high-level athletes, okay? This is an incredibly important distinction. Who is on the football team at a D1 school. Who are the 55 guys in the locker room on the football team at a D1 school? They're freaks, aren't they?

They're scholarship college athletes. Who hired them? The recruiter. Right. What criteria did the recruiter use to hire the guys? They're freaks. Yeah, I mean, they can jump. Why can anyone jump that high?

Why can anyone run that fast? They're big. They have 36-inch verticals. They're quick. They're very, very good visual learners. They see a movement pattern. They can copy it with a very high level of precision with very few exposures to it. They're freak athletes.

So if you take a weight room full of these guys and you have them dance around on one leg on a Bosu ball and the other leg up in the air on the back of a bench and three pound dumbbells in each hand and have them swap feet in the air, landing on the BOSU ball and stuff and call this a strength and conditioning program. How are those guys going to perform? Yeah, I mean, they are what they are. They're freaks. Of course they're going to.

They were performing well anyway. Okay. All you're doing with that type of a program is demonstrating the abilities that got them hired in the first place. You're not improving anything because a guy with a 36-inch vertical is extremely easy to get much, much, much stronger. But in order to do that, you have to put some weight on his back and you got to make him squat all the way down and stand back up with. A guy like that can get a great big deadlift real quick. He may only be deadlifted 315 right now, but I can have him to 550 in four or five months. You know, I have a, there's somebody that I

actually don't know him personally. He's a friend of friends. And so this guy, he comes from – his brother is Freak Strong. So this dude – I forget his name. So he never deadlifted once. I don't even know if he ever even really weightlifted. He didn't look like he lifted at all. So his first deadlift ever was 405. His – I mean his form was not very good, but still, the fact that a dude can never deadlift in his

life and walk up to a bar and pick up 400 pounds and be like, yeah, was that good? Those guys are out there, and those are the guys that the recruiter finds and sets in front of the college D1 coaches. Here's my question. It's a two-part question. All right. If you've got a guy that's playing real, real good D1 football, does that necessarily mean that what he's doing is a strength and conditioning program is the reason why he's playing that level of football. Exactly. And the answer is no. It doesn't have anything to do with that. Right. The vast majority of the time, especially in

colleges where programs like the functional training nonsense are being performed as strength and conditioning programs, those guys are doing high-level athletics in spite of the strength and conditioning programs. And just so listeners know, what is functional training? I mean, we've all heard it. What is it supposed to be? Well, I think, and I don't want to misdefine it. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I think that— When you say functional training... When I say functional training, I'm referring to the type of...

It's a group of... It's a way of exposing athletes to lots and lots of different exercises. The variety of the exercise is variable, not the load. Most of it is unilateral. It involves the display of agility, balance, and the ability to display coordination instead of the development of strength as an end goal of the program. The goal in a program like that is not to get the kids deadlift up to 550. The goal in a program like that is not to get the kid's deadlift up to 550.

It's to demonstrate the athletics in clever ways with rubber balls and light weights that are, in fact, the traits that the athlete possessed already to get him the job. Right. That may or may not be fair, but we'll read your definition in the comments on the YouTube. So functional training is, has a different thing in mind than the strength of the squat, the press overhead and the deadlift. Right. Okay. The problem I have with it is that it leaves so much athletic potential untapped. Athletic ability is there already in athletes of this caliber. What is not there is strength. You as the strength coach should be making these kids strong, and you're figuring out ways to getting out of having to learn how to coach

the deadlift, how to learn how to coach the deadlift, how to learn how to coach the squat, the press, the clean, the snatch. These things you don't know how to coach. So you coach all the shit on the floor on rubber balls. And, you know, you yell and scream, run around and earn Mr. Pep Rally Motivator and all that stuff. But you're not doing your job as a strength coach because you don't know how. All right. Now, let me follow up on that. Or even if there are squats, I mean, you get to these little half-quarter squats,

you start loading weight and setting yourself up for injuries. Because they think 600 pounds sounds real cool. Exactly. That's not 600 pounds. That's masturbation. Yeah. Half squats are masturbation. That's 275.

That's masturbating in the weight room with a half squat at 500 pounds. That's masturbation. You're jacking off in the weight room doing that shit. And you ought to know that. More dangerous than jacking off. I think the athletes do know that. I think they know. But you're, after all, the strength

coach and you're just jacking off in the weight room. You're not doing your job. Now, how do you get you're not doing your job now how do you get away with not doing your job okay so yeah so that's because that that's a good follow-up because this is i'll get asked what's that this is gonna piss a bunch of people off what i'm about to say okay all right you ready you're gonna get a bunch of nasty shit on the YouTube comments. The worst strength and conditioning coaches in the industry are found at the D1 and professional levels of athletics. How did that come to be? Because they can hide behind the genetics that the recruiter puts in front of them.

Like I said earlier, a guy with a 36 inch vertical is already strong. He's explosive. He's recruiting more motor units every time he makes a contraction than everybody else does. Right, right. shows a training effect on him because of the fact that he is so neuromuscularly efficient that any type of explosive efforts going to make him strong but average kids like you and I deal with Yeah, can't get away with that. We have to actually know what we're doing in terms of training But if you said a group of 55 freaks In front of some guy in a college weight room and all they're doing is dancing around on the floor, doing half squats and throwing medicine balls around on the floor and doing one-legged dancing movements.

Well, yeah, it's going to look like these kids are doing wonderful athletics. Yeah, then they go out on the field. Because they're athletes. Because you hired them for that. Have you made them stronger by taking their half squat from 500 to 600 pounds? And by the way, losing that much depth in the process.

No, you haven't. And bad strength coaching. Why does proper strength training and why I know this is something that you're going to talk about, obviously, why is that the absolute better choice? I mean, how does that translate into better athletics? Because of the fact that force production, strength, force production is the

basis of athletics. Force production is the basis of power. It is the basis of agility, speed. Every athletic attribute that you see displayed by high-level athletes on the field is a function of force transmission. It's a function, therefore, of strength, because strength is the transmission of force against the production of force against an external resistance. That external resistance may be a barbell. It may be the ground between your body weight in the ground. It may be between your hands and therefore the rest of your body and an opponent or an implement that's thrown. All of it involves force production right if your strength program is not focused on increasing force production then it is relying on attributes that the athlete carried into the weight room

with him the weight room is the place to get strong it's not the place to demonstrate that which the recruiter has already seen. Okay? And this is why extremely talented athletes will make any strength and conditioning coach look like they know what they're doing. Yep. Whether they do or not. And lots and lots of them hide behind high-level athletic talent. And I have to say that that is the rule and not the exception. That's unfortunate.

It is unfortunate because it's easy to make them strong. Yeah, sure. And I've come across a bit of it. Like I said, I've spoken with quite a few college D1 athletes playing various sports and some professional and had this conversation. And I've worked with a couple golfers, maybe just because I play golf myself and for whatever reason that kind of is the way it shook out. But they were very surprised to see that just by increasing their squat

and their deadlift and their press, how much extra distance they gained in their golf game. And when you're playing high-level golf, distance is hugely important for scores. And so they gained 10, 15 yards in some cases on their drives without any sort of perceptible change in the mechanics of their swing. It just came effortlessly. Of course, yes. Now their muscles, because the golf swing is driven by the big muscles in the body and those big muscles now can produce more force. Of course, you're going to hit the ball further. And you haven't lost anything from a neuromuscular standpoint. Your body still knows how to make the movements. So it's so obvious. You think, why isn't this a thing? Why isn't

everyone, like every sport, I don't care if it's ping pong i'm i bet you professional ping pong players we better ping pong players if there's a squat every athlete is better strong every athlete is better strong in every sport if it involves anything that can be that it could be construed as force production, every athlete's athletic ability, athletic display ability goes up if their force production goes up. or football or MMA or any number of other sports, boxing, all of these sports are extremely resistant to the idea that I'm, and you're going to read this in the YouTube, what does Ribbentone know? He doesn't train D1 athletes. I'm talking about math. This is an arithmetic problem, boys and girls.

I don't have to train D1 athletes. I don't have to be in politics to know that Richard Nixon was a bad president. I don't have to be a brain surgeon to know that if you cut the brain stem with your scalpel, that you killed the patient. So this is just mad, okay? Everybody, and I have, believe it or not, I have dealt with high-level athletes for a very long time. But that's not how I make my living. I interact tangentially with high-level athletes. Same.

You and I do the same thing our our market our demographic is most other people yeah and and my point here is that people who only deal with high level athletes get away with not learning their profession because they don't have to because and so athletes at that level display athleticism without any help and if you help them if you help them if you help them get their deadlift up then they're better athletes what was it three years ago the number one draft pick in the nhl couldn't do a chin-up yeah you're telling me about that i Couldn't do a chin-up. I don't remember the name because I don't really know anything about hockey,

and I don't care anything about hockey. But if that's the case, then hockey has just agreed that they're not going to be a strength sport. And as long as everybody agrees to stay weak, then everything works just fine, don't they? So if you're in a sport that does that, everybody. Sam Bennett. Sam Bennett, that's the name. Yeah, I couldn't do a chin-up. Couldn't do a chin-up.

Couldn't do a chin-up. But was the number one draft pick. So apparently everybody in hockey has agreed they're not going to get strong. Yeah. Yeah, he's a talented kid. Are you telling me it would hurt him if he could squat 405? Does anybody still really believe that? Do people actually in 2016 believe that strength slows an athlete down? If we're dealing with people that are processing this material at that level,

just turn off the podcast because, you know, you're still making tools out of flint. Okay? You're wearing a loincloth right now. Update, boys and girls. Forced production against the floor increases speed. Everyone knows this. You know, if you're a strength coach and you actually believe that a strength program slows your athlete down, go sell shoes. Okay?

But this is just not arguable. that you somehow believe that if your recruiter sets all these talented athletes in front of you that this silly dance routine you have these kids doing is actually benefiting them. What it's doing is allowing them to demonstrate why they got the job. That's not your job. We already know why they got the job. Your job is to make them stronger so they can hit somebody on the field harder so that they can get hit harder and not get hurt. Right. So that they can perform at a higher level than they are right now. We know they're freaks. Don't hide behind their genetics because that's what you're doing. So then, I mean, you got to figure then this is going to change over time just like how even probably largely thanks to CrossFit barbell training is becoming more and more mainstream and more and more people are taking it up.

You've got to figure that there's going to be a change of – just an overall change of approach that's going to happen. I don't know. It might take 10, 15 years, but what do you – I don't know. What are your thoughts? I think it's coming around. I think people – you see teams – I mean like in golf, for example, you see guys like Rory McIlroy. He's doing some of the Olympic stuff, and now other professional golfers are like,

oh, maybe I should do some of that too. I mean it could be something as silly as that. And then the trainers are like, oh, well, everyone wants to Olympic lift, so I guess we've got to do that now. Yeah, and they need to get busy learning how to coach. Yeah, of course, of course. Well, I think that, yeah, I think that people's opinions about this are slowly beginning to change because the evidence is just, it's right in front of your face.

You see teams that go from a more traditional, probably not the best, but a more traditional approach to strength training and switch over to functional training. And suddenly half the team's got an ACL. And this is just because if your hamstrings aren't strong and you're not doing anything to make your hamstrings stronger, you're not incrementally increasing the strength of hamstrings like you do with squats and deadlifts, then you're exposing athletes' knees to stresses that they can't handle. They get hurt. Especially if you're doing a lot of sports. Women's college soccer. Well, women's college soccer, it's a nightmare.

It's a nightmare. How so? Well, I know people that have to deal with head coaches. The head coaches that don't know anything about this are coming and unfortunately, these guys have authority over the strength and conditioning staff. They're saying, no, we don't want to do squats. It slows them down. Bad for the knees. Let's do functional training. Let's live light weights in lots and lots of ways every week. Let's do light weights. And the kids get hurt and lose a scholarship and don't get to go to college anymore free. And, you know, there are ramifications for this outside the coach's reputation.

You're exposing your kids to an injury potential that they shouldn't have to deal with. If the strength coach is allowed to do his job, then he has the ability to keep your kids safe on the field and to increase their level of performance. But if you insist on making the calls, you head coaches. You're getting in the way. That's not your job. It's funny. I ran into this recently, a high school football coach, and he had his kids working at some local gym doing a bunch of nonsensical functional type stuff, new workout every day, a lot of AMRAP stuff and all different kinds of squat variations, blah, blah, blah. And I was telling him, just stop.

And I actually was telling him, just do your program. Just put the kids on starting strength. Just get them strong. Just do it. Look, this has been around for 30 years. Because he was skeptical about me. And I'm saying, who cares what I say? Look at here, here, here.

Come do it. I'm not saying do my program. I'm doing, I'm just trying to tell you, stop doing what you're doing. And he didn't listen to me. And eventually then one of his kids came to me with knee problems. And because the kid is, I know the guy's dad. And then so I put him on your program. And then he started doing a lot better.

Also, the gym that they had these kids going to was all about low-carb dieting. Like that makes any sense for a football player. Low-carb functional training for high school football players. You know, this is a frustrating industry, Mike. Working in this industry, it's a challenge because here is a logical approach to the problem. We want everybody to be stronger because force production is the basis of your interaction with the environment, whether you're an athlete, whether you're a 55-year-old real estate salesman, whether you're a 65-year-old lady, whether you are anybody, your relationship with the external

environment is force production. Stronger is always better. Well, how do you get stronger? Well, we pick a few exercises that allow us to use a whole bunch of muscle mass over a very long effective range of motion and allow us to increase the weight a little bit every time we train it and accumulate the adaptation of strength. We start where we are now and then we go this way. We go up. This process is training. Okay? And what this means is, is the workouts are all the same. We don't have a bunch of variety because we don't want it. We don't want our muscles confused. We want our muscles to know exactly what is expected of them. And that is to produce more force over a period of time. So every time we train, we go up in weight

on the exercises we handle. We pick the exercises and we design their performance to do the job of more muscle mass, long effective range of motion and lifting a lot of weight so that we can get strong. Okay? That's all there is to it and It's simple. It's not complicated. It's hard. It's hard. It's brutally hard, but it is not complicated, and complexity is more romantic. It sells better. It sells better, and that's just all there is to it.

It's the romance involved with doing a brand new workout every time. If you can use the word new, if you can attach new to something, it's going to sell better. New research, new this, new that. Breakthrough. You know, it's marketing bullshit. So what I tell people is that you squat, you press, you deadlift, you bench press, you do power cleans and power snatches, and you do chin-ups. And that's all you do. All right? For a very long time, that's all you do. And the variable is the load.

And if you'll think about it, like any other adaptation, strength accumulates over time. So if you start here and you go up a little bit every time, then you end up here. See that? Yeah. That's good. And even if along the way you have two steps back, somewhere you have a step back, two steps forward, I mean, that doesn't, yeah,

that's going to happen, but it doesn't happen for a long time. Right. A long time. You could do just a, add five pounds to your squat for months and months and months. Yeah. And before you get stuck,

you'll be two and a half times stronger than you are right now, and that's beneficial, but it's not romantic, and as a result, these high school college strength coaches, professional strength coaches, professional coaches have an interesting problem. Their primary function is to not get anybody hurt, right? Like D2 college programs really do waste a lot of potential because those kids need to be stronger much more because they don't have the freak genetics they don't walk in with the same freak genetics that that end up in the college in the pros yeah and it is a gigantic mistake to think that if you want athletes to perform at a higher level, then you have to copy what high-level athletes are doing. Exactly. Because it may not be right.

I mean, you see that in the bodybuilding we were talking about in the first part of this where same type of people look to these freak bodybuilders and just go, well, I guess I'll try to train like them. That's the type of people look to these freak bodybuilders and just go, well, I guess I'll try to train like them. And then they wonder why, you know, they're not really seeing much difference in their body. Or they can't even do the workouts. They can't even finish them. Yeah. You know, it's the oldest problem we've got is matching a novice athlete with an advanced program. It doesn't work.

I wrote a whole book about it. Practical Program for strength training in his third edition explains this phenomenon. But why does it appear to work? Why does it appear to work for untrained individuals to do all this crazy shit? Because in an untrained, unadapted individual, anything will cause an adaptation. Anything. If you have not trained at all, you can ride a bicycle and your bench press will go up because any type of stress causes a beneficial strength adaptation. Now, is it optimal? No. Our job as strength coaches is to figure out what is optimal and apply that in the optimal programming method. What are the optimal exercises?

But you can get away with doing everything wrong. That's why P90X works, right? Until it doesn't. For six weeks, anything works for six weeks, right? Things may work for three months because to an athlete at a low level of adaptation, anything will cause a performance increase. Anything will. As professional strength and conditioning coaches, we are supposed to know what is optimum, what works best, and how to apply it over time. And more importantly, how to change it over time as it becomes necessary. time, and more importantly, how to change it over time as it becomes necessary. And a different workout, bouncing around in the floor on one leg every time you come in the

weight room is not the way to do it. And it may look like it's working because you've got 55 freak athletes in your weight room, but I assure you they'd be better off getting their deadlift up, getting their press overhead up. And you've surely probably come across examples, good and positive examples in your work of this, right? Oh, certainly. Yeah.

Of course. I've been teaching people to get strong for- I mean, even with high-level athletes. For 40 years, I've been doing this. High-level athletes, we hear them on the board. Baseball players have written in and said they've adopted programs and they're all doing a lot better. But their strength coaches are not interested in adopting another strength coach's methods,

especially if that other strength coach is not using exercise selection as variation. Yeah. Because that's the big one. Yeah. I mean, if the philosophy is fundamentally at odds with what they are trying, why they have their job. They are not. There's a quote, and I forget who says it,

but it says it's hard to make somebody believe something when their job depends on them not believing it. Right. That's absolutely true. I don't have any illusions about penetrating that particular market. But by the same token, we have sold half a million books, half a million starting strength, and we've sold another probably 250,000 practical programs.

We have penetrated this market. Yeah. And it's perfectly logical and people are using this program. And whether or not the boys at the D1 level are going to use this program or not, it doesn't make any difference to me. Right. That's not my target demographic. Sure.

I want to make their mom strong. Yeah. I want to make their dad strong. I want to make their mom strong. I want to make their dad strong. I want to make their little brother strong so that he can get a good shot at a college scholarship too. I'm not concerned with talking to high school, college, or professional coaches. I've said ugly things about them here, and they're probably not going to be receptive to what I have to say. And I really don't, you know, I really don't care. I wish they'd listen to reason.

We have people at the college level and that are doing very, very well. I'm not going to say that we don't have, you know, exposure at that level because we do. Yeah. Same. I mean, my program. If we don't have any more i really don't care yeah uh these guys have have built themselves a little business model all the functional training boys who are actually physical therapists they're actually don't have to work as hard and you know we're just going to do lighter weights and it's not necessary it's dangerous to do the heavy weights. This is my point. These guys are physical therapists pretending to be strength

coaches. That's all there is to it. They're doing physical therapy and trying to pretend as though that improves performance. If everybody agrees, like I said earlier, everybody agrees, we're not going to be strong. It'll work just fine. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, uh, and this also all applies to, uh, just people that sports for fun. If it's a hobby of yours to play really any sport, you're going to be better if you get strong. Sure. Period. And I'm sure everybody's put that together, but you know, this is just, and that's just like yes day follows night that's absolutely true it's it's it's obvious stronger is better yeah what what's hilarious is the standards to which these people are being held uh steph curry basketball guy watch either. But I'm told that Steph Curry is brutally strong

because the geniuses at Sports Illustrated go on and on about him being able to do a 405 deadlift on a trap bar. And he's brutally strong because he can deadlift 405 on a trap bar. Brutally strong. Brutally strong. Do you people at Sports Illustrated not understand that any intact male can deadlift 405 in about nine months of training? Do you not understand that 405 for five should not be even baseline strength for a professional athlete. Do you not understand that? Apparently you don't because you keep lauding and writing these bizarre glowing articles about a guy who is not as strong as two-thirds of the guys in my gym.

And he's a professional athlete with freak genetics. If all he's doing is 405 for five, his strength coach should be fired. That would be cause for termination as far as I'm concerned. If I was the manager of that team, is that all you can get out of him? He's a freak.

Yeah. Why isn't he doing 505 for five once a week? Yeah. That's not... See, they have this bizarre dumbed down functional training idea about what strength actually is. Because after years and years and years of nobody being strong,

they don't understand what it actually means. And this is not good. This is not good. Right. Well, I mean, I guess it's going to require a new generation of strength coaches to make it in. And it probably comes – it probably starts in the high schools. And those high school guys turn into the college guys, and those college guys turn into the professional guys. So it's just one of those things that it probably – it's just going to take time because the guys at the top, like you said, they don't want to hear any of this.

They have – they're going to be set in their ways for the most part. And, you know, if they were to dramatically change their protocols and their programming, then there might raise some questions as to what they were, what have they been doing? Why they waited so long? What is, uh, I think the, I think, and it loses the mystique, It loses the like, well, I'm on the cutting edge of all this. Oh, yeah. I've got new shit every day. Exactly. As opposed to – New shit as opposed to heavier shit.

We're going to squat again like we've been doing for three years. It's just to the layman when he's got to sell himself to the owner of the team. He goes, yeah, I have him pick some heavy stuff up and put down and like squat it up and squat it down. We just do that a lot. That doesn't sound as good as, you know, I have myself invented seven different exercises that are just revolutionary. And. Revolutionary ways to display the ability the athlete already has, but that absolutely lacks the ability to improve any aspect of that capacity in the athlete. Right, right. It's an interesting industry. It certainly is.

Yep. Well, I think I don't know if there's anything else really to say on it. I think that pretty much covers all the points. The key takeaway is – We've pissed everybody off, so let's just quit. Well, I mean it's also good though because people that are receptive and they just want to be better athletes, this is encouraging because they don't have to have any special insider knowledge on this type of twist or slam. If they just work with the basic exercises and get stronger, they're going to be better. All you have to do is get your squat up. Get your deadlift up. It's

not complicated. It's just hard. And you have to apply yourself to it. You have to grind through, do the work, lift more weight every time, and you will get stronger. And stronger is better. And you already know that don't you well said so all right mark so if you want to check out i mean obviously there's google but where can they come find you and more starting strength.com obviously starting strength.com is uh our big website we've got uh youtube channel starting strength at uh starting Starting Strength at YouTube. We've got our famous internet forum collection of places for you to discuss all this stuff. We have new articles up five days a week at the homepage, startingstrength.com.

New content five days a week. And if you haven't checked this out, we invite you to look there. Our books are for sale at Amazon.com and on our website. And we welcome your participation. Awesome. Yeah, definitely. Everybody head on over. I mean, again, I've been promoting Mark and his stuff since the beginning of me being in this industry at all. And it works. There's no question. My own program. Thanks for your support, Mike. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Well, thanks for coming on the show. And I look forward to next time we come up with

something interesting to talk about it. I always like talking to you. Thanks for having me, Mike. Talk to you soon. Definitely. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did, go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com, where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day. Actually, I release kind of four to six new

articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.