The Rich Roll Podcast - Brian MacKenzie On Slaying The Sacred Cows Of Endurance

Episode Date: February 18, 2013

According to Brian MacKenzie, most endurance & ultra-endurance athletes are doing it all wrong. The controversial founder of CrossFit Endurance stopped by the garage to illuminate me further on his perspective — one that slays the sacred aerobic cow in favor of championing focused high intensity anaerobic work coupled with technique and functional body strength. Truth or Fiction? Somewhere in between? Thanks for listening and enjoy. Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. Yeah, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing out there? I'm feeling pretty good. I banked a really good week of training this week, and it's been a while since I've been really intent and focused on my training. As I've said before on the podcast,

I pretty much took last year off from serious training. And that doesn't mean that I got completely out of shape. I was still very active and running and biking and swimming and doing all that kind of stuff that I love to do. But it was in a very unfocused sort of way. I wasn't working with my coach and things would intervene or stuff got busy and I kind of let it go a little bit. And now I'm kind of back on a plan, on a structured protocol with my coach, Chris Health, AIMP coaching. If you want to learn more about him, he's the best. And I'm starting to see some early season results just in my data of coming back and it feels good. And it just feels,

it feels good to be accountable, to be tracking my workouts and have Chris looking over my shoulder, paying attention to what's going on. And there's just something about that accountability that really kind of holds my hand to the fire and keeps me going. And I'm, I'm now kind of over the hump of being, you know, really kind of out of touch with real training where I'm finding a groove again and where it's fun again and I feel good in my body. And it just makes such a big difference, man. My sleep is better. I'm more focused and intent upon eating the right foods. Everything kind of comes into snap focus when I'm working a program. So that's been great. It's been a couple days since we've brought you an episode, so we got to get back. I did three the other week and that was

like a lot of work. So I hope that you're enjoying them because there's a lot more to this than just recording it and saying, you know, washing your hands of it. It actually takes quite a bit of time to post-produce it, get it up on the blog, spread it across social networks and the like. So it doesn't happen without quite a bit of effort on my part. And we're running a little pirate ship over here. So it's pretty much just me doing everything. So it would be great that if you are enjoying it, if you're enjoying the show and you're going to buy something on Amazon, do us a huge favor and go to richroll.com. And if you click on the podcast menu item on the upper right on the homepage or on the blog page,

there is an Amazon banner ad. And if you're going to buy something on Amazon, just click that banner ad first. It'll take you to Amazon, buy whatever you're going to buy. It won't cost you a penny extra and it'll help us out by throwing a tiny little percentage into our little can over here and helps cover some of the expenses. Today on the podcast, we have the very controversial Brian McKenzie coming on the show. You might know him on Twitter as at I am unscared. And this guy, he's an interesting guy. It was the first time I had ever met him. I first became aware of him when Tim Ferriss released the trailer video for his book, The Four-Hour Body. And Brian is the guy that you see running who's covered in tattoos. And his knuckles spell out the word unscared across his ten fingers.

unscared across his 10 fingers. And this is a guy who comes from kind of a punk rock background, skateboarder, and now has really been making waves in the fitness world. He is and has participated in some endurance events. He did Ironman Canada and he's run the Western States 100 and the angela's crest 100 so he's done ultras and his whole thing is called crossfit endurance where he's taking principles of crossfit and applying them to endurance training and he's really kind of flipped the equation on what kind of standard operating procedure is for most endurance athletes, myself included, which is kind of a periodized training schedule that involves a lot of aerobic zone training and a ramping up of volume over time, interspersed with some higher intensity efforts,

but really kind of aerobic zone focused. He's coming at this equation from a completely different angle. In other words, lots of super high intensity efforts on the track or on the bike, coupled with functional body exercises in the weight room, everything from core workouts to kettle balls to deadlifts and things like that. So obviously we have very different experiences and perspectives on endurance training and we decided to get together and hash it out. And actually what happened was Brian's been getting a lot of press and like I said, he's a little bit of a lightning rod for controversy. There's a lot of people online that are kind of haters of what he's doing.

And he's got quite the loyal following as well. So, you know, that's a recipe for news and blogs. And he got some interesting coverage in Outside Magazine in January. There was a whole profile on his approach. And the journalist kind of adopted his program and in preparing for a marathon. And I read that article on the way back from Hawaii and I thought that this is interesting. This is something completely different from the way that I approach my training. And, you know, I've never done it his way before.

So I can't speak to whether, you know, I can't speak to its validity because, you know, I'm always trying to just share from my experience. So it would be unfair of me to dismiss it out of hand, although I must admit that I was dubious of his approach. And so I brought it up on a couple of podcasts when I had Ben Greenfield on and when I had Vinnie Tortorich on, I asked them both what they thought of Brian McKenzie and his methods. And if you want to hear what they had to say, you can go back and listen to those episodes. But somebody online on Twitter kind of, you know, leaked to Brian, hey, these guys are talking about you on this podcast. So he got wind of it.

And it was sort of, I think it was presented to him as if there was some kind of hating going on which was never the case if anything I was more curious dubious yes but curious more than anything and Brian kind of tweeted

well you know if they're hating on me then you know they don't fully understand where I'm coming from or something like that so I tweeted him and I said hey man no hate

more curious than anything I've always been a volume guy and we went back and forth a couple of times and I said, you know, I'd love to have you on the podcast. Tell me where you're coming from. Let's have a chat about it and we'll see where that goes. And he was kind enough to agree to that and stopped in a garage today with his significant other and his buddy. They were there in the middle of a surf trip and spent a couple hours at our house. And it was great. And I have to admit, I was a little scared and intimidated to meet this guy. You know, he's covered in tattoos, this punk rock thing, and it's very kind of aggressive CrossFit, you know, perspective. And I was like, well, how's this guy going to be like?

Like, is he going to, you know, I was afraid of him, but he actually was really cool, sweet guy, really nice people. And I really enjoyed our conversation. And what I like about it most is that we can disagree and we can still have a mature adult-like conversation and explore these ideas. And for me, that's a huge part of what this podcast is about. Forgive me if you've heard me talk about this before because I keep talking about it. But what interests me is having on people that have

different points of view from my own. And of course, I'm going to have people on that I share the same ideology or perspective on nutrition, training, whatever. But I think that I would be remiss in not having interesting people on that have different perspectives on some of these things and exploring that with them with an open mind and in a mature way where they feel comfortable expressing their opinions and we can have a healthy dialogue and debate without it turning into you know some kind of crazy you know argument or something like that and i think that we accomplished that today so excited for you to check this out this this interview out, and let me know what you think. Go to richroll.com to the podcast section. You'll see this podcast hosted there. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery.

To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. So without further ado, Brian McKenzie. Did you see that thing in the news about the asteroid that was cruising over Russia? I watched that the day after the Russian guys were posting it on YouTube. I saw Joe Rogan post it because obviously everybody sends everything to Joe related to stuff like that. And so I clicked on it. It is amazing. These Russian cars have all these cameras on them.

I'm just watching that thing just tear across the sky and just dish. Just explode, and like 1,000 people were hurt or something like that? I mean, that's unbelievable. And it was just supposedly like super tiny, too, on the asteroid scale of size. It's a trip, man.

That's for sure. So we think we're masters of the universe and in control of our destiny, but mother nature will fix all of that. Tiny little thing like that, man. And everything changes. All right. So we're rolling right on. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you? Thanks for stopping by the garage to do the podcast. The garage, the compound, man. This place is amazing. Oh, thanks for making the trip. So you guys are in the middle of a surf trip up the coast.

We were supposed to be, but that kind of changed and there's no surf. So now we're just in the middle of- You're podcasting instead. I'm podcasting instead. Sorry to be the default. No, it's all good. It would have happened regardless right yeah no

it's good it's good to have you here and it's it's interesting because um your name has come up on my show a couple times with a couple guests over the last couple weeks because i have uh you know these trainers on and we talk about it you know different kinds of techniques of training and you know i come from a very specific kind of volume-oriented program. And I've seen your name in the news and I read the thing in Outside Magazine. Actually, when I was coming back from Hawaii,

I read that on the plane. And so I made a point to ask, like I had Ben Greenfield on, I don't know if you know him, trainer, and another local guy here who's a buddy of mine, Vinny Tortorish. So what do you think of this, Brian? What do you think about what Brian has to say?

And getting sort of their feedback on that. And so then it leaks out onto Twitter. Yes. And it gets translated into, I'm smack talking you or something. I don't think it was you. I think that they actually got Ben on that one. But it was the fact that it was on the show. And I actually went and I listened to it.

And, you know, it's stuff I've heard on his end before. But I actually enjoyed the show a lot. And it was the first time I had heard of your show. I had actually heard of your book, which is I've actually gotten through some of it. Without vomiting or having a visceral reaction? No, no, it's just because the fact is I'm actually still finishing that one right there. Oh, the talent.

He's talking about the talent code. Four other books on my plate. She actually, Erin gets a little peeved with the way I read because I have like five or six projects going at once with reading. You sound like my wife. Yeah, and we actually have a very similar story, man. Very, very similar. Yeah, so I want to get very similar story, man. Very, very similar. Yeah, so I want to get into your story.

But let's wrap this thing up first. Okay. So, yeah, I assume you meant the Ben Greenfield episode? Yeah, yeah. Right. Where I'd heard that there's just all the faults with what we do and the program we do. And that seems to be the same thing is said for

anybody who really has never stepped foot in that arena right with what we do and you know i'm a guy who has practically other than being a vegan which i actually have a lot of respect for because that is about as hardcore as it gets with the nutrition side of things on the other end of that is the ultra stuff which gets about as hardcore as it gets and so i i have a i have a unique respect for that stuff but i um you know anybody who's really done any real smack talking or you know kind of negative connotation to what we do is usually people who've never even been through it or don't understand it. And from my perspective, I was a high-volume guy as well,

and I was out doing the Ironman, fell into the ultra scene, and I just loved running long and just finding out exactly who I was that day. And that's exactly how long it would take to run a 50K. And then it became 50 miles. And then there was a couple of 100 milers. And then there was me running through the desert with other dudes and guys like Dean Karnazes, who are still close friends and people who I actually communicate with about training and nutrition all the time.

And these guys are actually your type, are, you know, your type of end of volume of training as well, but we still are a very common place and respect what everybody does. Yeah. I mean, I think it's important to, well, first of all, I always try to share, I try to, to limit my, my sharing or my perspective or my opinions to things that come from my experience. So if I say, you know, I believe in this, you know, I try to root that in something that I've actually done that I can speak to. And in terms of criticizing other things, I have to look at myself and say, well, do I really know about that? Or have I tried that? And in the case of what, you know,

we'll get into the, we'll roll up our sleeves and get all geeked out on this stuff in a minute. But, but, you know, I've never done your program. So I think it's easy to like, you know, throw a rock at a glass house and say, well, you know, you don't, you don't know what you're talking about or you don't know from whence you come, but, you know, I guess you've gotten personal results and results with some of the athletes that you work with. And I think it's important, um, you know, no matter what team you're on or what philosophy that you prescribe to, to take a step back and look at things objectively and have an open mind. And maybe you might learn something because if you don't, you're never going to learn anything. You'll just be stuck

on your trajectory. I could not agree more with that, you know, and it's interesting to me that you know a lot of these things that uh because there's four i don't know if you've seen the forums or not you probably haven't because you probably don't spend time with that stuff i try not to i know it's uh i stopped doing it a while ago because people are like do you see what they're saying about you on slow twitch and well slow twitch is notoriously brutal yeah you know and it's just the the internet i i am of of the mindset that the internet has created two things it's created a portal for us to learn and create a higher education platform i think better than what actually exists within the higher education platform right now um that's of my opinion it doesn't necessarily make me right

but it also has created this thing called peacocking that I've deemed peacocking. And it is mostly a male thing because male peacocks are the big feathery ones where you can get on a keyboard and talk as much smack as you can possibly dish out without actually ever having to get up on the stage and actually have to talk with somebody or engage with somebody in any way, shape, or form.

And I've seen a lot of that, and I've learned to deal with a lot of that, and in no way have I ever on a stage not been able to, not necessarily defend, but have a civil conversation with somebody about what it is we do to where that person walks away and says, you know what, maybe it isn't what I thought it was or what he's doing, or maybe there is something to that. And when I explain the way that it's usually done, people usually catch on to it. And I think the biggest mistake of what people think about what our program is,

is it's kind of like the CrossFit main site where people think they look at that and they go wow you're either going to kill yourself or that's just not enough training for somebody who's going to be a crossfit games athlete and that's what we deal with now because the crossfit games have literally become like this phenomenon and um you know we've got these athletes that are getting paid now to be professional exercisers and know, uh, people look at that and they look at our site and it's like, well, how do you ever think you're going to create an elite level athlete with a program like that? And it's like, well, first off, this is a stepping stone to something in any elite level athlete at any level that I've ever worked with or ever talked to as a coach

and is dealing with somebody who is actually putting together their program for them and i've actually dealt with most a lot of elite athletes in that manner i mean that's how i've dealt with every elite athlete so it's just you and i hear things like i've heard from ben greenfield and what's what's funny is that he talks about a program that he's created that is oddly similar to what it is we do where he's lifting three days a week and practicing in zone three and you know most of the stamina work that we're actually doing is that zone three stuff but if we were to take a look at the actual science behind everything we'd start to understand that actually aerobic capacity starts to begin at about 30 seconds of

hard hard all-out work and you can, there's nothing you can do about that. And, you know, repeated 30 second efforts become highly, highly aerobic efforts. So what we think we actually understand about energy systems, we really don't understand about energy systems. In fact, we could take all out six second, all out sprints as hard as you could go. And after several repeated efforts, they become aerobic and you even after a recovery period because the body just can't sustain that aerobic capacity which starts to lend more validity to what it is we've been doing but we haven't been doing it because some study said that it was the experience and what we were seeing with the athletes and all this that led us

to where we're at. So at any rate. Okay. Yeah. All right. And just to kind of back it up for, hold on, I'm turning my phone off. It was buzzing. For the listener who might be uninitiated into your philosophy and what you do, Brian comes from this perspective, and please correct me if I'm wrong.

No problem. That was sort of born out of the CrossFit movement and with a bat sort of a background in performing in certain endurance events from ultra runs to Ironman, um, started experimenting with high intensity work with, uh, you know, lots of sort of body movement. What do you call that? Like well CrossFit exercise, really. Kettleball work, squats. We like to call it functional movement.

Functional movement. Okay, that was the term I was looking for. So sort of dispensing with this long-held philosophy of incremental volume and building aerobic capacity through lots of miles and a periodized training schedule, which is something that I subscribe to. He's sort of throwing that

out the window and saying, no, here's a whole different way to do it. People are training too many miles. There's a lot of junk miles in there. Let's work on strength and high intensity speed work and get you there in a fraction of the time. Is that accurate or fair enough?

Sort of. I wouldn't say I'm tossing it all out the window. I actually came to what I understood actually before CrossFit with the high-intensity stuff. And I was actually mentored by a guy by the name of Dr. Romanoff, who created the Pose Method. You maybe have heard of it. And he introduced me prior to me even finding CrossFit to – he was coaching me for a 200-mile attempt at a 200-mile run I was going to do.

And so he was coaching me for this. At any rate, the coaching when it started, um, had nowhere near the volume of training in it that I was used to. And so in the first week I was like, Hey, what's going on here? Uh, why am I doing four hundreds and some thousands? And am I, why am I running a 10 K at a speed close to what it is my PR is and he's like am I coaching you are you coaching me and it became that type of relationship where it was like you're just going to shut up and listen and you know so I I followed direction you know and within the first weeks of following this whole thing we I saw results that I'd never seen before um you know on a half marathon I just crushed it compared I mean by like six minutes

compared and this was by myself running versus being in a race setting and then that's not holding water i understand within the endurance world but the fact was is that by by the next time i did an ultra marathon i got about 60 miles on that 200 attempt i had rolled my ankle like a few weeks before um at any rate my ankle didn't hold up but the six but the 100k that i did in that 200 mile attempt was faster by like an hour of my fastest 100 kilometer time um that i had ever had and so i was like what's going on here you know so that made you question i was questioning a lot of stuff like what am i doing and and long and you know oddly enough he also had me squatting every week he also had me doing cleans every week he had me doing box jumps every week i was you

know i was doing a lot of similar stuff my and my my gym that i had just opened was oddly looking exactly like a crossfit gym and i had just heard about crossfit back then and it was about 2005 and uh you know i had internet dabbled and went one foot in one foot out and did what most people do with and they find crossfit if they're gonna play around with it um and most people you know a lot of people come to the crossfit world via the kettlebell movement or whatever and you know that's how i saw found it right um so i continue to play and um we started playing harder with the strength and conditioning stuff because we were getting better results with the running, and it wasn't just me.

It was the athletes I was working with. It was the athletes Romanoff was working with. He was coaching high-level Olympic-caliber athletes in triathlon, all this stuff. all this stuff you know and uh we the moment we decided to toss crossfit into the strength and conditioning program was when everything made another radical change and it was just the conditioning level went up to a whole nother thing and um you know i remember thinking about how fit and how everything i was and the fact that i could go run on you know i'd run 100 miles and hundred miles and this stuff. And I was like, you know, I was lifting weights and all. And you know, when I actually did this workout called Fran for the first time, uh, Greg Glassman has an analogy that he used to talk about when, when triathletes would come into his gym and they would think they were

super fit and they would do Fran or something of that. And they would quickly drop the weight or stop doing the exercise. The, the moment they started turning blue and it was almost like there was no oxygen left in the room for them to you know get in and uh i remember having that exact experience thinking i was going to throw up and my lips had turned blue and my hands were on my knees and i was like in the second round of doing this hellacious little workout that only involved thrusters and pull-ups and I remember wanting to say that it was the weight that I was doing but the weight of the thruster is actually not that heavy it's the fact that I was trying to go fast and I couldn't my my my my o2 output could not keep up with the ability of how hard I was going.

And I was just blown away at this whole phenomenon. And it just changed everything we were doing, and it allowed us to get to another level. And I was already seeing results with lower mileage in what we were doing. And it inevitably got me to a fairly low amount of volume. In fact, I was probably to a fairly low amount of volume in fact about about i was probably about half the amount of running um that i was doing leading into most ultra races by the time we had figured out what we figured right so i guess the question you know for me

comes in when i try to make the connection between you you know, deadlifts or, you know, doing lots of pull-ups or some of these functional strength exercises and performance in a specific endurance discipline. And I understand like, um, you know, core training, which I think is extremely important and, you know, a lot of people talk about it, but I still think it's overlooked. And even I, I believe in it and I know what it feels like when my core is strong and my whole running form changes, my swim stroke becomes way more efficient.

I feel better on the bike. Like everything works way better. There is no question about it because I also know what it's like to be doing a lot of volume and overlooking my core and, and it's not the same thing, you know, and I'm more likely to get injured. And there's a whole variety of reasons why, you know, I believe in that in a big way. Um, but I start to, I start to lose you a little bit when you start talking about doing the huge weight and all of that, because I I'm seeing where, you know, there's

a gap between that and, you know, doing a 50 mile run or doing, you know, an Ironman because in my, in my book, like, it's so funny cause I'm on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from now. And there's a line in my zone too, bro. I know zone two. And I, and I, there's a line in my book where I say, learn how to go slow to go fast. And the reason for that is I think that, and I think you'll agree with me on this, which is most amateur athletes, weekend warrior, 10K, half marathon, even marathon, and a lot of Ironman or triathlon guys get out there and because they don't have access to a good coach or somebody who knows what they're talking about to sort of mentor them or create a training program for them, they do what I did my whole life prior to meeting my coach, which is, okay, I've got two hours and I'm just going to go, you know, I'm going to go out and run, or I'm going to ride my bike and I'm just going to go

hard and try to get out of it what I'm going to get out of it. And I'll regroup tomorrow. And ultimately what that means is that the athlete is spending all of their time in the gray zone where they're not improving aerobic capacity, but they're not going hard enough to get the kind of results that you're talking about with these super intense efforts. So they're in that middle. And spending all that time in that gray zone is what creates that plateau. So for me, I'm always saying you've got to get over your ego.

And if you can have the discipline, it's a different kind. It takes an incredible amount of discipline to do the intensity you're talking about. It also takes a lot of discipline to check your ego at the door and go slow when you're out running at the beach and somebody runs by you that you think you're faster than or what, you know, you know what I mean? To not be competitive and go, no, you know what? I'm going to keep my heart rate under 138 on this run, no matter what. And if that means I've, I've got to walk when I get to that Hill, because I'm trying to build those, uh, you know, metabolic pathways and increase the mitochondrial density and improve the efficiency because in an iron man speed is not the limiter i mean you know if you're you know unless you're a pro a lot of these guys are walking in the marathon and it's like if they could run eight minute miles the entire marathon

then they would rock the socks off their pr but they start out at you know seven minute miles and then they go to nine nines and then they're at 12s and then they're walking right so it's like i go well what's the point in speed work like when you're you're going 11 minute miles work on your aerobic efficiency and try to run eights the whole way yeah um i i agree with that a whole lot. And here's something, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to attack it the same way you are. Right. I mean, that's just the perspective. mentioned earlier, my career, what I did, I got successful at because I actually was able to take a look at a guy like you running and go, hey, here's the problems. Here's what's going on. Whether you were the best runner in the world or whether you were some Joe running by on the highway out here. And I could just go, hey, here's where you're going wrong.

We can fix this up a little bit with a few cues, a few different drills, et cetera. What I would do typically with an athlete is, in what we do, pretty much as a group, but what we do see is we see this gray area, even within CrossFit, even within the gyms we see, where people just become and they just want to go and they just want to get their fast, hard-ass workout on. That's not CrossFit. CrossFit is actually a much broader concept than that.

But what we do, even with the endurance training, is actually much broader than just going out and running short hard efforts it's actually in and you know aaron talks about this all the time with me is like you know the difference between most cross and we talk about it at a seminar we put on is crossfit athletes when they when they decide to come over the endurance side sometimes and want to go do an endurance event have to learn what pacing means and endurance athletes in our perspective have to learn what intensity is and what i found was the was being able to not only go out and handle a longer run pacing it and understanding where your ability is so if i've got somebody who's going to go do a marathon and let's

just say their average pace at the end of this thing is 10-minute miles. But they started out at 8-minute miles and ended up at 12-minute miles, right? From my perspective, that person needs to first be looked at as how are you running? What are the mechanical flaws you are doing right now? How do I correct that? And the best way that i have found to correct that is through strength and conditioning and functional training because most people do not move functionally and unfortunately even me as an endurance athlete found this out the hard ass way

i agree with that i could not squat correctly i could not deadlift correctly i could not do a lot of things correctly because i was so smoked and just out there running and doing everything i was doing which is in the shortened range of motion okay and i'm not talking about the ability just to drop down into a squat like some you know like i i i'm at a sushi restaurant or i'm at a you know a japanese restaurant i'm talking about a supported squat, knowing your range of motion of your hips, understanding what real flexibility is,

that working range of motion, being able to support yourself in a way that you're not going to break down. And this brings me right into that whole core concept of, well, I wholeheartedly, and in fact, we all believe in core training to a large degree, but the thing with functional training and this whole CrossFit thing is I've never found anything that challenges the core more than what CrossFit has delivered. And that being, which is, you know,

this early Glassman stuff, you know, where he would talk about, I mean, most of their workouts were named after girls. And the reason they were named after girls is because girls were like, they were after hurricanes because a hurricane works core to extremity. Meaning, so we're right in the inside. It's nice and quiet and easy. And then all of a sudden outside the extremity works around that core. So we've got this solid, stable thing. And, and quite honestly, I don't think there's anything really more that would challenge anybody's core than an overhead squat at 315 pounds or whatever the weight that is for anybody. And where it gets kind of shifty is where people start to go, well,

I feel who I'm, I'm, I'm an ultra endurance athlete endurance athlete why the why the hell would i want to go pick up 500 pounds off the floor what's that going to do for me well you're probably not going to start at picking up 500 pounds off the floor and that's probably going to take a long time but if we're actually working to build you as an ultra athlete that may only reach 350 or 380 because of the fact that we're actually doing some sports specific work, a lot, a lot of quality work, but that quality work really starts with that skill training. And, you know, Aaron's going through a lot of that stuff after being like a, you know,

she's a two time Olympic gold medalist. Right. Just tell us who Aaron is. Eric Farrell, my girl, my partner, my girlfriend who's sitting right behind me. Wave for the radio. And then we've got Craig Patterson patty over here to the right um i brought my little entourage and then izzy on the floor but um aaron was a rower and uh you know she she did this for like basically the last nine years of her life and she's now transitioning over to wanting to do other sports and so she's learning this

whole side of what it is we do and and the amount of skill training it actually takes to learn to run correctly or to learn to ride a bike correctly or to learn to swim correctly you know the united states were fortunate with the swimming if we come from a swimming background because what is a swim what what what does swimming start with? I mean, we go into a program, and it's usually skills and drills for the first quarter of it before we even start a set. Then we get into it, and so you've got some coach keeping an eye on you, telling you what to do, and it's a highly technical sport.

In fact, back 10 years ago, you could go look at any major college with the best teams, and you'd see all these names you couldn't even pronounce because they're from other countries because they're sending their kids to school here and then they go back and swim for their own countries and the olympics yeah because we've we've had arguably the top swimming and we look at it from a skill perspective what is swimming also i mean who who in any program goes out and swims 1500 meters or 2000 meters straight i mean when was the last time you showed up to a masters or even a a at stanford did you guys ever go swim 1500 2000 straight it was usually no i mean it was interval workouts and i want to talk about that a little bit i mean to as a preface i would say that i think you're absolutely spot on when it comes to being technique focused.

And I think because a lot of people that listen to this podcast are triathletes and they're time crunched, right? And so they want to get their workout on and they go to the pool. And I was at the pool this morning and I was talking to a dude who's swimming next to me, who's having trouble with his stroke. And all I could say to him was like, listen, man, just forget about fitness. Like you need to spend the next three months working on your technique. If I'm here, I will help you. But just don't worry about it because swimming is about efficiency and you're trying to muscle your way through the water and you're never going to get there. And if you're doing a triathlon, you're going to get out of the water and your heart rate's going to be 170 where you could go faster and get out of the water with a 140 heart rate and set yourself up for a

good race and a good bike exact same page and and and that is the biggest missing link to what it is 90 of the people don't understand about what we do and the concept of it and so i've changed the we've i've had the website you know which is a general public website, CrossFit Endurance. But we've had the website a little bit redone as of lately to where it says you should be doing 20 to 45 minutes of skill and drill work before this workout even starts. That means if you're going to go run 400-meter repeats, you should have ingrained what it is you're supposed to be doing in this new pattern. of ingrained what it is you're supposed to be doing in this new pattern. And, you know, this book right over here that you're reading will kind of go right down that path I'm on right now, where, you know, you aren't necessarily born with talent. It's actually something that you will literally build if you continually work at it like that.

Well, it's the Malcolm Gladwell, Al Myers, 10,000 hours thing. But I don't know how you feel about the 10,000 hours. You're on the Tim Ferriss 80-20 rule, the four hour. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. I think you're saying the focus on, you shift the focus. If I've got somebody doing some skill work for 45 minutes before they start a 400 meter workout that could inevitably, if they they're an elite level athlete go up upwards of 10 400s on 105 right but they're doing 45 minutes i mean you have just there's 700 steps in a 400 meter run i think the problem comes in everybody understands that you swim technique because it's not natural right unless you've learned uh as a young child it's not a rote thing and then when and a lot of triathletes who try to learn swimming properly older in older you know when they get later in life it's it's difficult it's really

challenging it's like learning a golf swing you know you can work on perfecting it forever and ever it's not a natural thing but i think that people think that running and cycling, you just go out and do it. There's no technique to it at all, and there's nothing to be considered when it comes to form and all of that. I think that couldn't be more wrong. I think the same attention to your swim stroke has to be paid to your running stride and your position on the bike and your pedal stroke and all of these things.

We do not disagree. Right. We do. Do you know, um, Jesse Stensland? Yes, I know.

Yeah. She's cool. I mean, she, this is her thing, right? Doing, you know,

proper technique and form and all the kind of strength exercises that you're talking about, because particularly for, you know, if you're a marathon runner or you're a triathlete and you're doing sports specific training all the time, you're getting really fit in certain muscle groups but there are all sorts of overlooked yeah muscle groups that create imbalances i know of her and uh i don't know her personally but i know of her

but you know she's we're on the same page right you know but the fact is is what i've seen is once we've been in your world my world in in that long, long arena, it is a very, very, very difficult thing to let go of and doing that and figuring. I don't know that I want to let go of it. And I'm not telling you. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm not here to tell you you should.

Yeah. No, I know. Yeah. But if an athlete comes to me and says, hey, I want to PR this. I want to do this race. And I'll give you an example of an athlete I'm working with right now. This guy, he was working with a buddy of mine who has this other kind of view of coaching. And he's an ultra guy.

He's done like 11 Wasatch Front 100s, which is no joke. And he's a hiker he barely finished he'll finish at the cutoff but he gets it done you know and um he likes to go out and throw 20 pounds on his back and go out and hike it and you know then he likes to lift some weights and throw it around and my the kid who came to me uh you know had said hey i'm you know i'm kind of tired of the results i'm kind of getting right now i'm'm wondering if you could help me out. And I said, let's do this. And so I started teeing him up.

And I said, I make a lot of the athletes actually send over to me what it is they feel they should be doing for the week. And it was the same thing where it's usually the same thing where it's like he's got a bunch of long runs or longer slow runs. And then he's got these big heavy weight sessions directly like before it the he's got to go run and he's got all these things kind of miss mix mix and matched in the wrong way and you know i we we cut down all the volume and i start making him run 400s at what he's capable of running 400s or 200s or 600s or whatever it is that he's running and he's usually

doing speed work either he'll work and some sort of speed work or a longer effort speed work and shorter effort speed work. And then he's either doing one longer run, which is in the vicinity of him either racing in something, which can be up to 50K or 30K, or he's doing something at a tempo where he's out there holding an effort. And what he's built up to is that about 30 K mark where I'll have him go out for 30 K hard.

And it's not easy. It's, I wouldn't, you have to build, you have to build up to that 30 K tempo so that he can, because the important thing is being able to maintain your technique for that period of time. Absolutely.

Your technique falls apart. This is, and so, but this is what we built up from, from about a 10K, right? So we started a 10K. Here's what the kid can handle. Here's how hard he can go. We slowly progress as he makes the progressions.

His training's changed in a way that allows him to not only recover faster, but he doesn't break down as easy, which is another reason for the strength and conditioning with what we're doing, especially within the ultra ultra world is because it's not about your aerobic conditioning whether you and i like that or not our aerobic conditioning is actually just fine and it won't go anywhere for three or four months literally it wouldn't what will deteriorate is your higher end or your what your tissue is going to start to break down and you're going to start to feel the pain and you know what i'm talking about and anybody who's ever you know decided to venture

outside that marathon knows what that pain is you know knows that deep dark pain that enters and it's like whoa and then you know the moment you're not thinking about it it disappears and you're like how am i out here doing this right right that's your tissue breaking down that is not an aerobic conditioning problem and the stronger that tissue is the better it holds up and you have two ways of dealing with that you can go out and run zone two for very long periods of time and get lost and enjoy yourself and and progress which we all know happens or zone three whatever you want to call it i don't care You can go zone one if you want to, because that pounding, that eccentric loading that occurs is going to start to break you down.

But the longer you're out there, the more recovery you're actually going to need. The shorter you're out there, the less recovery you need, but the more intense, the longer recovery you're going to need. But once we start to develop that strength, once we start to develop that skill, once we start to develop that longer end range, the recovery ability becomes like it's almost like bulletproof. The recovery cycle for super high intensity like you're talking about can be much longer than the

recovery like if you're progressing on a periodized traditional periodized schedule on a volume program and you're stepping that volume up very gradually and you have those rest days and those rest weeks built in or whatever over time then there really really isn't the breakdown that you're getting. And I know this from training for Ultraman, that I got to the point where I'm riding at least 100, 120 miles on a Saturday, and then Sunday, I'd run a marathon at least. I'd run between 20 or 30 miles, and it became as long, And my zone two pace went from, you know, eight minute miles to seven minute miles at the same heart rate. And I would, and Monday I'm fine. You know, that it wasn't at first, but as I progressed through that,

and this is a huge time commitment, right? Like this, and this didn't happen in one year. This is like, this is on year four or three of doing this. So I was willing to double down and put the time in to get there. But it wasn't breaking me down where I was getting into an overtraining thing or I had to take a bunch of time off to recover. And also, I would do that tempo work too, not as intense as you're talking about. Well, let's just say a rich role would say, Hey, screw it.

I'm going to, I want to start, I want to test this thing out. You're talking about, I'm not going to go bury you. And the first week, the objective is not to put you, it would destroy me.

Like, no, no, no, no, it wouldn't because if it's done, right. But if I know,

I mean, if I did just step into the middle of one of your sessions because i don't yeah here's what here's what would happen you'd talk about eccentric loading of crossfit movements on the programming you'd put me in the hospital no i wouldn't put you in the hot that's no and i don't do that and she's seen that and anybody who knows me who's ever worked with an athlete you know unless they bring an ego to me you know i'll quickly fix somebody and make them do unless they bring an ego to me, you know, I'll quickly fix somebody and make them do something they don't want to do. But I will also take somebody and I'm dude, it's a delicate cycle. It's a delicate thing. And it's, I'm not here to bury you. I'm here to make

you a better athlete. That's all I'm here to do. And that takes time. I think you must have this where people, especially because of the press that you've gotten, people coming to you saying, you know, I want to come off the couch and qualify for Boston or something like that. I don't know if you really picked up on the outside magazine article. The dude came to me. He hadn't run a marathon in like five years, wanted to PR a marathon like in a three-month time period that he had never even done was hillier than he thought and was raining. And he wanted to PR a marathon and that's outside magazine. They want controversy, right? They want this whole thing. And here's the guy who writes the article, does the training and actually says, I've never been fitter in my life. I PR the marathon, didn't PR it as much as

I wanted, but Hey, you know, the guy gave me three months, hadn't done anything in five years. And I, we built him up and he went and did it and he crushed this thing. Okay. And then he says, I don't know if I want to keep doing it because I'm just too, so much work. And I'm like, well, yeah, bro, that's what this is all is. I mean, you're more than welcome to go out and run different kinds of kinds of work. Yeah, it's different kinds of work. And he still didn't follow all direction. He still didn't want to go do the skill work that I had shown him, made him go through. And this is one of the things that we've run into with a lot of the people who just don't like the program.

They don't want to spend the time to understanding what is the reality of the way I move. Me, as a coach, I'm somebody who looks at – I look at coaching as this. Somebody is observing the way you move and giving you corrections on how you should be moving. What I think the problem with most coaching at this point is, is that people think coaching is programming for somebody. And nobody's looking at anybody. They're just giving them a number or giving them a workout. I mean, just giving you your workouts. Giving you your workout and going and doing it.

And there's nothing wrong with that. That's the engineer. And the engineering is not the real hard part here. The hard part is actually fixing what is the problem. And I don't actually fix that. I actually tell people what's wrong, and i don't actually fix that i actually tell people what's wrong and they're going to have to make that depiction they're going to have to correct that whole thing whether when you say what's wrong are you talking about technique or

technique in anything so i mean you have to be on site to be able to observe that yeah yeah and any athlete who works with me from afar they they're sending us they're sending me video, they're sending us all that stuff and I'm looking at it and that's a poor way of dealing with it, but that's the way that's unfortunately what it's come to with a lot of this stuff and the growth of it, you know? Um, and that's where the gross misinterpretation of a lot of what CrossFit does is, is a lot of people think we're CrossFit endurance is what they think is that it's all about a bunch of people going out and just blowing their minds out and some work out and doing a bunch. In fairness, it's easy to come to that conclusion because a lot of the press kind of makes it,

it's sexy, it sounds sexy to do that. Absolutely, it sells, dude. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, there's a reason, I don't know when it started, but it seems to have come out of nowhere and now it's this huge business all of a sudden. It's funny.

There's a lot of marketing behind this. How long have you been involved? How long have you been in CrossFit? Ten years. Ten years. Yeah, he was around when basically they were doing one seminar maybe a month. I don't even – One affiliate.

One affiliate, and they would have five Navy SEALs there and a bunch of other people, and they'd just beat them up for like three days straight. It was still, we were trying to do a real training. I was going to turn into a group exercise class. Uh huh. Sort of.

Right. So when, when Ben Greenfield was on the show, he and, and Vinnie Torter said essentially the same thing. I said, what do you think of this? What do you think about what Brian is espousing?

And, and they were, their concern was, uh, that they were fearful that, well, it's sort of being advertised or promoted as a way out of this LSD, long, slow distance that's causing a lot of people to have these persistent running injuries. And it's a new program that's a a fraction of the time. That's not easy, uh, but could more likely, you know, can fit into a busy guy's work schedule or whatever and avoid a lot

of those injuries. And the response from both Ben and Vinny was, well, I'd be concerned about other kinds of injuries at this kind of intensity and, and overtraining issues. So issues yeah i mean what is your reaction to that simple running is the most dangerous sport in the world and and in what way shape or form is something else that is that i mean if we look at the sheer number of running injuries a year we're looking at about 80 i think it's at 79 right now where they're we each 79 of all runners in the united states alone which is over 45 million okay 79 of that are experiencing an injury of some sort every year so we've got a sport that literally neither anybody who's really ever challenged what it is i'm saying has never brought any other option out other than saying well they just need to slow down and go a little easier versus no, no, no. I'm not even saying go out and, and, you know, we're not

saying even just go out and run hard. I'm saying, let's look at the way you move. Let's fix what's going on with you. Let's fix your mechanics and let me expose that weakness and let's change this, make it stronger, make it better. And by the way, you have no business running further than a hundred meters because you run like shit after a hundred meters. So what we're going to do is we're down with that is we're going to go 50 meters and we're going to go a little harder and you're going to run it right. And then you're going to recover. And we're going to the next week, maybe we'll come in and we'll do 75 to a hundred. Then maybe the next week we're going to do two hundreds. And then maybe the next week we're going to do 400.

If you're making that progression, if you're making that leap, but you have no business going out and running a 5K slow because you look like you're wogging. And fit fat exists within not only the triathlon world or the ultra world, but even this whole 10 K or whatever you're talking about. And I mean, these people are going out and they're not doing themselves any favors by just running slow and easy. Right. I'm, I completely agree with that. And, but I would add that it's not even their fault because there isn't enough education about this. And if they go

to their, if they get, you know, an injury, their knee hurts or whatever, and they go to their orthopod, they're going to, that guy's going to look at them and put a sliver in his shoe and say, you're good. And it goes to this whole – the way our entire system is set up, which is to treat these symptoms and not get at the underlying cause. Which is also why I have a job. you know why i have a job is because and why i've why it's grown and in the way it has is because i actually look at your feet and i know that you use your feet and i know there's no way you'd ever put something in your you know and you know i i mean i can just look at the way somebody moves and go hey i know what's wrong with that i know what we could do to fix it and it ain't a band-aid and it ain't taking a pill and it ain't that it's you actually taking personal responsibility and saying no i need to

change that i need to work at this and it's not going to be going out and running 5 to 10k slow like shit that's going to look like you doing some 100 meter repeats correctly and looking good and by the way it's probably going to hurt a little because we're going to crank up the intensity which you'll find out in that book. But at the same time, not just looking at somebody's form and saying you need to lean forward a little bit more, but going, all right, the reason your form is poor and you're looking the way that you look is because this muscle group is underdeveloped. And we need to work on that and get your posture better or whatever. And then dial it all in until you have all of those things in balance because if you're running all the time,

that's not necessarily a balanced athlete because, like I said before, you have underdeveloped muscles and overdeveloped muscles. So, yeah, I'm in agreement with that aspect of what you're doing completely. But I don't necessarily disagree with anybody or even you with how you want to train, dude. I know that you can get up the mountain with what you're doing.

As long as, as long as you're not violating a lot of these principles, like these movement print, these things that we're talking about. And I put, don't get me wrong. I probably, if you were to look at my form,

you'd probably find a hundred things wrong with the way I run. I'm sure of that. Cause my coach lives in the Bay area. Maybe, maybe five, but I'll tell you what, I probably could help you out further than more than you, more than you thought.

And it's not, and I'm not just going to say, Hey, Rich, guess what? The only way, you know, you've got to follow this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, I'm going to say,

Hey, here's what you need to do to fix this. And by the way, the fastest way to that is actually going to be slowing you, like taking away a lot of that volume, cutting the distance, making you run a little faster because at our highest neural outputs, we actually start to develop that skill better.

It is not at our lower neural. It is not at that lower intensity where we develop that high skill. It is at the higher level when we put that stuff out. And that doesn't mean that you cannot go out and run some long distance because, dude, our athletes go out and are doing long distance races. So they're still doing long distance. But how are you planning your race season? Are you just, I mean, we've had people who have decided to just follow CrossFit and go attempt a 100-mile run.

And it's like, dude, I'm looking at them shaking my head going, are you out of your mind? Like, it's just a recipe for disaster. And a lot of this comes directed right back to me because i'm the guy who created this and that is not what this is about this is about actually moving correctly running right riding right swimming right then developing a strength and conditioning program that's centered around your weaknesses that will develop your weaknesses that'll make those weaknesses strong which is everything crossfit is about by the way right it all's crossfit is is exposing the weakness of what

it is you do like sure you might be able to squat but how are you with a bar on your shirt you know up front is your school is your front squat do we see anything different going on with that front squat than we do with your back squat you know do we start to see some of these movement flaws that are occurring because i can correlate most most movement flaws i can correlate with your running will show up and what i'm going to have you do with a squat a deadlift a power clean or anything else they're just they're going to be exposed right there but the easiest way for me to fix it because we aren't those olympic weightlifters we're not those power lifters we're endurance athletes is i'm going to fix it with that because it's a new thing it's intense and it's helping me develop what it is i need to correct with what you're doing

outside what you really love to do right interesting um i would think that that it would work it would it would work ideally with athletes that come to you that already have a huge endurance base from the past of what they're doing. Yeah. Because you know that endurance base carries with you. I mean, it's there. It's forever. You may get out of shape.

It's like I just said. But you can tap back into it. And I know that part of the reason why I was able to be relatively successful at Ultraman is because I was a competitive swimmer forever. And even though I took 15 years off and did nothing, it's still there. So I could tap back into that. I know. It is the strength that goes away. And I'm 46 right now.

It's not necessarily the strength. I think it's the fitness, man. I really think it's the fitness. That skill, your understanding of how to swim never went anywhere. It's like riding a bike. Yeah, no, that comes, that never goes away. That's not really going there because it's been developed. That's been completely wrote. Exactly. And that base is not real hard to get. That's not really, that's not the hard part. What's hard to get and what's hard to develop. And even you've even said it, it's taken three, four four years something like that to develop the ability to run these seven minute miles in a marathon or in a double marathon out at ultraman and be able to sustain it dude that's hard work

hard long it's hard work and i'm not no matter which way you slice it to get there i'm not saying i'm going to take and chop that in half what I'm saying is I've actually got something that's going to help you develop the ability to get there a little cleaner. Like, hey, if you ran like shit, I'm going to clean that up, and we're going to progress you along these lines of what we understand. We're going to make you stronger along the way too. And I'm not going to turn you into – my goal is not to turn you into a power lifter. It's not to turn you into a bodybuilder. It's just to make you a better athlete at what you want to do. My fear comes in because as a swimmer, so in high school and in college, I mean, we're talking about this is the late 80s, early.

I graduated from high school in 85 and college in 89. And at that period of time, and it's been a long time since I've been a swimmer, so I'm sure it's changed a lot, but it was very volume based. And that's how I was raised as an athlete. And I also realized that I was not the most talented swimmer, plenty of other swimmers, more talented than I, but I was willing to kind of put in more work and that work meant more volume. And I swam, I swam butterflies from toner butterfly. So I would just do like, you know, I do like 10 times 400 butterfly, you know, like ridiculous sets in high school. And then, you know, when we're in college peak training times, we're going upwards of

20,000 meters long course a day over Christmas training, incredible amounts of volume. Um, but I, but I, I know that when I was doing a very volume oriented program that I would perform better. And because I was not, I'm not a fast Twitch guy. Um, you know, the 200 butterfly is hardly, and it's a minute and 47 seconds. It's not like it's on the longer side of swimming events, but it's like compared to even the shortest triathlon it's apples and oranges. Uh, but my strength, I could never get out fast. I just never had the innate speed, no matter how much time I spent in the weight room, but I could that third 50 and that fourth 50, I would come home strong. Right. And that was like the way that I would win races against other guys that probably because they weren't doing the kind of volume that I was doing or weren't as fit, quote unquote, in that regard.

But then as I went to college, we did a lot more kind of high intensity stuff, less volume. And, you know, I didn't do as well. There are other reasons for that. I talk about it in my book, but I got distracted a little bit i did but um hey i did too but that's my fear my fear is like i rely on the volume because i know it works it's trusted and it's true and i'm scared to let that go and try something different and my coach uh chris health you know he's open-minded too and his the way that he coaches me has evolved and now it went from you know the first two years it's like or the first year and a half he's open-minded too. And his, the way that he coaches me has evolved. And now it went from, you know, the first two years, it's like, or the first year and a half, he's like,

I'm never letting you get out of zone two, dude. Cause you like, you're coming off the couch. I don't want you hurt. You got a lot of work to do. And it was all about like putting the cap on me. And now it's like, okay, you know, now you're, you're out of that world and we're in a new world. Now you're out of that world and we're in a new world. And so we are doing more high-intensity stuff and also doing strength stuff before endurance. Like his partner, Craig Upton, who coaches a lot of pro cyclists, says traditionally the idea would be do your base work and then as you get later in the season, start doing the strength stuff.

But he's saying do the strength stuff early and build your base when you the season start doing the strength stuff right but he's saying do the strength stuff early and build your base when you're tired after doing the strength stuff so we're experimenting with a couple other things and it makes me nervous because i i know it works and like i don't want to try something new yeah um so to go back to that swimming thing in the volume um for the last i'm in my second year right now, I was consulting with the San Jose State women's swim team. Last year, they went and won a WAC title, which was like a first. This year, they are the first time without ever having an injury on the team. And they are, I'm not going to say they're going to win the title again, but they are now, for the very first time in school history,

ranked within the top 25 schools for swimming. And this is following basically a program on how we do it. And the coach, the head coach, who's actually a good friend of mine, and actually just got. Who is the coach, sir? Seems Sage Hopkins. He actually just got a scared tattooed on his rib cage, which which some of the girl that's what i have on my knuckles um i kind of started and by the way we should probably point out like if you've never heard of brian or

you don't you're not sure who he is you might have seen him in the trailer for tim ferris's four-hour body book he's the guy with the unscared uh knuckle tattoos and yeah the runner with the unscared knuckle tattoos. Yeah, the runner with the ink. The runner, exactly, yeah. At any rate, Sage just got unscared tattooed on him. And last year, a few of his girls, actually I think a handful or so, actually ended up getting it tattooed on him. And it's this whole thing of deciding to make a leap to a different type of training. And Sage did that a couple years ago and it wasn't because of me but it was because

he had seen what we were doing, understood what we were doing, understood to a degree and he's working with the team and they're still swimming every day but the fact is the program isn't what it used to be and he has to warn girls who he's recruiting if they decide to come to that school

this is going to be a lot different than you understand. It's going to require more work out of you than you've ever put in. And it's because it's a different type of work. And it's not necessarily that it's more, but it's going to be intense. And there's girls who can't make it and don't make it. The analogy would be kind of what Dara Torres did did i mean she's my age and you know i knew her growing up and swimming and uh you know the fact that she's been able to do what she's done is because she's worked with coaches and has been willing to experiment with completely different training techniques and yes she's a spreader she was a 50 free so it's not an endurance event no

but you know when she came back to Stanford and was working with Richard quick, they were doing all sorts of crazy stuff, you know, that was very core and strength oriented. She wasn't swimming that much. And for a swimmer, that's anathema. I mean, you got to live in the pool and it's, it's kind of crazy. If you think about it, it's like you swim the 50 freestyle, you're in the water for 19 seconds. I mean, that's it. So why are you swimming four hours a day yeah you know i mean i understand you know technique strength and like just that shift that that that sort of um center of gravity moving away from the pool and into the weight room or doing these other kind of uh strength oriented exercises i think it's interesting yeah i think

craig has a question i think you can work hard. You like to work hard. You need to have something to work hard at so you can get ahead of everybody else. Is there a hard work? Yeah. Just work hard at something different. I know. What if I hate the gym, though?

Look at it. We look out the window. We've got these trails out there. Man, I just want to be on the trails. See, that's the thing, too. I like that long run. And when I get a certain, you know, there's a certain, you know,

outside the physical, kind of the mental and the spiritual. I mean, you know how it is. You do these 100 miles. You get lost in these trails all day. And there's a purging and a cleansing that comes along with that that you can't replace. My back was my experience at Western States was what I came to. It's a big totem that starts from the bottom of my neck

and goes down to my ass, you know. And it's what I's a big totem that starts from my bottom of my neck and goes down to my ass you know and it's uh it's a tote it's what i experienced out at western states and it was like this whole vision and this whole thing and it's what i've experienced anytime i've gone out and gone over probably about 50 miles where it's just you finally you get right into that place where you're just like here we are again me it's like being on dmt or mushrooms or so you have these weird experiences that you're not going to get in any other sport. I've seen as much. I mean, because I've experimented with all the same shit you probably have.

And I mean, I've been clean for 15 years, dude. I mean, I've been straight edge for a very long time. And I have experienced in ultramarathoning exactly what I've experienced on any hallucinogenic. And it's been a very – that was been, that was my trip, dude. That was my trip. What do you think that, because I get this question all the time, shifting gears a little bit, what do you think that attraction to ultras is

for the sort of recovering addict alcoholic mentality? It's exactly that. I think it's that, it's not necessarily the hallucinate, but it's that, hey not necessarily the hallucinate but it's that hey i'm getting to know myself even deeper right now and what am i it's because ultra really doesn't i mean it ultimately it ultimately doesn't okay if you're trying to win the race it might come down to the conditioning but it most for most of us at a point it's about what's going on in my head. It completely becomes mental at a certain point. It's a complete mental check.

And what person did I bring with me today? And how can I get over this? And how can I beat this? And that was every time. I think some of my best ultra experiences were actually when I actually had to pace other guys. Like when I paced Dean Carnas, about 90 miles through Badwater one year. And we were, I think, 75 miles in, almost to the end. And he just looks at me.

And we had gone through some hellacious shit. I mean, we yanked toenails off. He was having meltdown after meltdown. And it was epic Dean stuff, but nobody really knows his stuff. Right. And for people that don't know or aren't familiar with the world of ultras i mean the true character comes out at you know two in the morning or or you know whatever and people act and you know they the because you're so you're beyond depleted and exhausted and and you become the athlete becomes very very irritable and difficult

to manage and so as a crew member it's your job to kind of reel them in and keep them in check. Yeah. And that was basically what it had. I mean, he just looked at me and he was like, what, what the fuck are you still doing out here? Why are you still out here? And I'm like, Oh, we got to get you through this dude. We got to get you through this experience. And lo and behold, that's my experience of, I just spent like a day, you know, a, a full day, a full night, seeing a sunrise out at Mount Whitney. And I just did this epic with you and got to experience with you.

And I got to do that with a lot of people, dude. And I think those were some of my best experiences but you know to tell you the truth what uh angelus crest was probably the best ultra experience i ever had was when you know i finally we'd put it together and i'd finished the race and i did fairly well at the race and i'd not expected it to go the way it went i expected to stop at about 50 or 60 miles and have called it because we didn't do enough volume because we didn't do enough stuff and that was not't do enough stuff. And that was not what happened. My head was there, and I was willing to go, and it was a blast. And I saw things that I didn't think I'd see. And do you think, I mean, do people say to you,

oh, you've transferred your addictive personality onto this? You've moved it away from drugs and alcohol, and now this is the new addiction um i'm just interested because i get that question all the time so i think maybe my my parents might have said that a while ago especially with the ultra marathoning um but at this point in my career um you know i'm not my i i really wish i had the time to spend working out like i used to um there there was a transition that had to occur about four or five years ago where it was like do i make do i still try and be this athlete that i really want to be that you know uh or do i pursue a career

at actually coaching and progressing this business and it it was, you know, it was the coaching and it was the business. And that's where I, you know, I really had to make that decision. So, you know, it's, I still work out. I still do my stuff. I'll get on my bike and I can go for, you know, two or three hours and I'm, it's, I haven't been two or three hours and I don't know how long, you know, but I can go do it and I can put out a fair amount of wattage and it's no big deal. Right. Um, and I have fun doing it. Um, and I can get on my bike and I can go harder. I can go do it, and I can put out a fair amount of wattage, and it's no big deal. And I have fun doing it. And I can get on my bike, and I can go hard, or I can get in the weight room. I'm usually working out once a day, doing something, blowing it off.

I haven't heard the whole, you're just switching addictions in a very long time in my camp. Well, because you're not going out for an eight hour bike ride. Yeah. I mean, it's a different, it's a more balanced, less addiction oriented, you know, both being addicts or both, you know, whatever, you know, it's, uh, the guys who brought me into the triathlon and ultra world were not alcoholics. They don't, they've never really drank. They never really participate. They were always athlete types.

And the first guy to ever get me to do a triathlon, the guy has done probably, I don't know, 30 Ironmans. And I'm like, dude, that's what he does. And I mean, you understand. It becomes your identity. And this is what you want to do. It's like yoga people become yoga people. And now you're seeing crossfit people become crossfit people yeah of course and people are going to hate on it because it's new and what it does and you know we got these freaky athletes and you know

dude i i think the general understanding of what cross it actually is people don't know what it is it is something that that can basically change It identifies weakness and what it is you do and just exploits it. And that's what we like to do is because it makes you change and get better at something versus, hey, this is just a high-intensity thing. That's not what it is. One day you're going to come in and run a 5K. The next day you might be doing deadlifts and push press. Or the next day you might be on the air rowing 500 meter repeats with

lunges in between. It can change. For the most part, any serious athlete, we're looking at your deficiencies and we're programming like that. We're programming around your weaknesses. We're identifying what those weaknesses are. Whether that be long

distance, short distance, in between, whatever. Because if I've got an athlete who can run 400 – here's a story. I had a typical soccer mom, Newport Beach, or you can probably have them out here in Malibu too. But they like to go run, do class you know the whole shebang you know each day is set where you know and this this gal patsy was she's a great friend of mine but she was teaching spin class three days a week she was running seven miles another three days a week and then one day a week she was coming to the gym to train with me she could run a 345 marathon she wanted to run a 330 marathon at new york that year and i'm like

and she's like i need you to coach me and i said i don't know that you're ready for me to coach you and she goes what do you mean i said you can't teach spinning anymore and you can't run seven miles every other day what do you mean i can't do that and i'm like if you want me to coach you these are the parameters by which we're going to follow and she said fine send her out on the track to go run 400-meter repeats, like one of the first workouts we did. She calls me after two, literally laying on the ground, kicking and screaming, and I had her going out at maybe a minute faster on her pace per mile,

on her 400s versus what she holds for a marathon. And she was literally crying, screaming in pain, agony, and I'm like, all right, we need to rethink this whole thing. Right, and I think that that goes to if you're going out and doing one thing all the time, you develop a certain level of aerobic efficiency with respect to that. But you try to go one gear higher and you completely fall apart. Fall apart. And you can't just go out and run. Every workout needs to have a purpose, whether that is a super high intensity workout

to build strength or power or whether that's an aerobic workout to develop your you know aerobic capacity and your running run form efficiency or whatever it is there should be a reason you know we're all busy yeah you know this isn't we're not getting paid to go train you know we have lives i got four kids you know you're running a business it's like if you have a specific performance goal that you're trying to achieve then why would you just go out and go well i'm just gonna go run seven miles it doesn't make any sense for anybody this so here's where the great dilemma comes in and this is the great dilemma and this is what we're seeing within CrossFit right now.

People go and look at what Chris McCormick does, and they read it, and they go, I'm going to go do a 400-mile bike week. I'm going to go do a 500-mile bike week, and that's going to be awesome, and I'm going to be elite, or I'm going to be great at what I'm doing because I can go do a 400-mile bike week. He's been doing 400-mile bike week since he was like 13 years old. Yeah. But, but where did Chris McCormick start?

Here's like, where did Chris start? Like, and this is just an analogy. Chris was a sprint triathlon champion. Then he progressed up to Olympic. Then he went to half Ironman and now he's went. And now he's an Ironman guy, right? Right.

You don't ever see somebody who goes and is Ironman champ or Ultraman and say, I'm going down to sprint distance. Oh, there's no way. And I'm going to mop. And now more than ever. I mean, the guys are so insanely fast at the shorter distances. But back to this whole thing of like, here's Joe Schmo reading the magazine

or your weekend warrior guy, and I'm going to go do what Chris McCormick does because he does it and I want to be like him. But dude, you don't understand how long that takes to develop. You got to train where you're at, not where you want to be. Reality check. Look, and we have elite level guys in CrossFit right now who are doing,

and women, who are doing things that are mind-boggling. And they have pretty high volume. But they can handle and they've developed that, okay, for the most part. But then we've got regular Joe Schmoes in the gym who show up at, you know, who want to do two- and three-a-day workouts of CrossFit. And it's like, yo, you cannot handle that. Well, you have to, I think you have to pick your program. You know, I, I, you can't go on the, this sort of cafeteria plan. You know what I mean? Like, I think you're either going to do it your way or you're going to do it my way. But if you try to do a little bit of my way and throw some of yours in there, then you're going to get hurt. You're going to get overtrained. You're, you know, you're going to do it my way. But if you try to do a little bit of my way and throw some of yours in there,

then you're going to get hurt. You're going to get overtrained. You're going to cause problems. But that being said, I think for me, I'm listening to this going, all right, what am I going to take away for my own program?

And I'm thinking, well, I trust my coach. I know it works for me. I'm going to continue to do kind of what I do, and I actually enjoy that. But I do need to put much more focus on fundamental strength because I overlook that way too much. There's no question about that. And when you're saying that, I'm like, I need to do that. I need to do that. I need to do that. It's body weight core training has no, I mean, doesn't even compare on a scale to throwing weight on your back or over your head and what you have to stabilize in order to understand what the core actually does and and

through that i can make an athlete a better athlete than just doing some sort of body weight core training which is a lot of what the stuff what we see in the endurance is like it's it's almost like i look at it and it drives me nuts because i'm a strength and conditioning guy and it's like dude you, don't be so afraid of the barbell. Don't be so afraid of the dumbbell. It doesn't mean you need to lift 500 pounds today. And in fact, it might start at 15 pounds today. Well, I think part of the barrier too is particularly for runners and triathletes, they're trying to be lean. And a lot of guys will come into triathlon and like me, they're overweight.

They're trying to trim down. They're trying to get thinner. They're trying to get that light chassis, the power-to-weight ratio on the bike, and all that kind of thing. And they're afraid, and I consider myself, I include myself in this group, if I go into the weight room and start doing this stuff, I'm going to put on all this shoulder mass and all this kind of stuff that is going to, you know, I'm going to put on like eight pounds that I don't want. Uh-oh, but what if that eight pounds makes you faster? Yeah, but that's the unknown, you know?

Actually, that's not. I won't know that until after those eight pounds are gone. You don't know that, but that's the same story I've gotten from every endurance athlete I've really ever worked with. And Patsy included the one I was talking about, who inevitably we sent to New York. And in the last two months of training, she literally was running four times a week. But the four times she ran that week,

she was doing a Tabata protocol, which is a 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, on a treadmill at her 5K pace on a 12% grade, which is a gnarly, gnarly little workout. I hope you put a bucket next to that treadmill. No, she had developed to this, but those are the only four runs she was doing, and she was crossfitting, and she went and ran a 3.32,

and the only reason she didn't run a 3.29 was because some dope fell down in front of the finish line, and she decided to pick him up and carry him across the line. And she called me crying not believing what would happen or how it would go down you know and and not understanding how it just happened and it was and it wasn't just about the tapata protocol or her running short distance it was about the fact we worked on her skill we made her stronger she had always had that aerobic base she's going going out and running, you know,

three times a week, seven miles, and doing spin class for an hour. Right, but that's different from doing the 20-mile run on Sunday and the tempo runs during the week or whatever. So her base was, she probably fell into that camp of somebody who's gray zoning it all the time

and was at a certain plateau, right? Exactly. So, and that's a big difference from somebody like, let's say, Ryan Hall comes to you, or somebody who's an elite, and who has been training and winning races and fastest American marathoner of all time, right? Has been running a certain way.

And you're going to say what to a guy like that? He heel strikes on one side which is a burden to him whether he likes that or not he also has four inches of vertical travel okay you know what the you know what the kenyans have or the african runners have that are running right next to him that are beating him four centimeters what do you think that four inches of vertical travel every time he goes, every time he takes a step, is going to have an effect down road at 26.2 miles, it will have a big one. So what would you do with that? So you're saying he has run form inefficiencies

that could be worked on. But compare him to you and I at 26.2 miles? It's not even worth talking about. No, but me as a coach, I can look at that and go, brother, here's what we need to clean up. We know what we need to do. By the way, here's the best way I know at doing that. You're going to need to learn how to deadlift and you're going to need to learn how to back squat a little bit. Right. And he's going to go forget it. Yeah. But that's why his leg flares out and why he has no stability. He's got a valgus knee or whatever's going on because his hips don't work and they don't stabilize him correctly.

And he's picked up all these, which we can correct and we can still make him faster. And we can still do all of this stuff. But because he's so afraid of the weights or this unconventional thing that's occurred. But if you've observed that then then you're probably not the only one who's seen this well i'll tell you what you watch any football and i don't even know one by the way like i don't even know one i'm not i don't i wouldn't even consider myself no able to pick up on that here's the problem i don't think there are actually people around him that are telling him this stuff um and and here's an example is you've got a guy um rg3 this football player who

has just torn an acl and the guy had a non-impact he's arguably one of the greatest quarterbacks that's ever going to exist and he has a non-impact acl tear there's a picture of him in his subway commercial jumping and when he jumps his knees dive, and he becomes very valgus. What does valgus mean? Valgus means the knees. So my knees coming in like this is valgus. Outside is varus. So he doesn't stabilize his knees with his hips, more or less. And it doesn't matter.

But the point is that we know he's in a compromised position. We know that's a poor position to jump from. But RG3 has actually become so good and efficient at that that he can actually jump his verticals 49 and a half inches i believe in that poor shitty position that same poor shitty position when he took the snap his knee dropped valgus which means we are in a compromised knee position so that that uh acl runs over the top here like this and when you come in like that that unwinds and it can tear okay he comes back that knee dives in because it's his

go-to no position and it snaps and he blows his knee out and how many people do you think are around him going hey bro we got to change your position. No. They're, hey, let's inject him real quick. Let's get him to surgery. We'll get him back. As soon as we can get him back on the field. It doesn't matter. No. These guys are surrounding.

Ryan Hall's probably not paid as much as Hardy 3, but he's got his own life, and he dictates his own thing. And how many people are around a lot of these elite-level athletes? Because it's not their conditioning that's the limiting factor here. That's not what's the limiting factor. It's not what's the limiting factor it's the movement it's the skill of that movement it's the greatest violinist or it's you know which you're going to find out in this book over here you're going to read about it is it's it's this talent and this in this ability to continually develop develop that skill of what it is you're doing and work on it to no end.

And that's the missing point with a lot of what we do. Right. And where do you come down on recovery? What do you mean? Well, I mean, I've read that you're sort of anti-periodization. Yeah. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're against recovery. I mean, I would imagine you're all about recovery when done properly.

So I just wanted to give you a chance to kind of explain where you're coming from on that. I'm definitely an anti-periodization guy, but I'm not like, hey, it doesn't work. Sure, it does at about 30%. The last I checked, at 30% on the elite level of periodization. In fact, we did a little write-up on this where we looked at Olympic track, we looked at sprinters, that out of all the sprinters that go to the Olympics in four years, literally 30% might have a season PR or even a race PR, you know,

which is very, very, very small number compared to everybody following some sort of periodized program. But with that said what we do is we like to take a look at exactly what the athlete's capable that day so what what is rich capable of putting out today and we know he can get back tomorrow and and do what it is we need him to do and as as that grows it goes hey we look at a day we look at a week we look at a month what we look at a week, we look at a month, what type of volume or what type of energy can this human being handle with training? And when we know we're reaching that upper limit, we know when to recover them.

But isn't periodization just sort of a more structural definition of that? I mean, at its core, it really just means, you know, train and release. I think most people actually aren't even following what periodization really was intended for. Because if you're a good coach, you're actually monitoring what's going on with that athlete almost daily. Well, periodization can take place on the macro level and on the micro level. So yeah, it could be what are you eating right now? Are you eating to recover or Are you eating to, you know, check out?

Yeah. So if I, I look for signs, um, for the athlete not being ready for the next day, we use things like resting heart rate or, you know, heart rate variability.

Um, I look at what's happening in performance, but that, and that's the biggest key is weak because if I'm, I'm training somebody, if I because if i'm i'm training somebody if i'm actually coaching somebody i have specific numbers and things i want to see that athlete hit and the athlete will send me the program and i'll look at the program and they'll tell me what they're doing daily and what's happening and hey by the way i just shit the bed on this workout

and i look at that and look back and what was happening and what'd you eat that day and what's going okay guess tomorrow we're just gonna we're gonna kill that we're not gonna do tomorrow you're gonna take it off that basically removes out the plan that i had had planned for three months down the road for the race because now we've got to go back you know and that's why like oh i took this person here thinking they'd be okay at this point but they're obviously this is too much for them or they're getting worn down we got to figure out a new plan yeah oh being flexible i just went out for a 10 mile run which is the first time i've gone out or hey maybe you're doing 20 you know i just went out on that 20 mile run and now my i've got a calf strainer i've got something going on oh okay what did you notice you were doing when you were out there why Why did the calf light up? What's going on?

You're either pushing off. You're either landing wrong. Something's going on. I need to know what that is, and now we're going to have to stop something and correct it and go from there. Right. And I would imagine you get a lot of reluctant athletes

because they're, wow, I'm finally starting to get fit. I don't want to interrupt, but it's like if if they get injured there, you know, then they're on the couch. Yep. It's, it's not necessarily on the couch. It's, it's, uh, we need to correct this. So you're going to need to do this instead. Um, or you're going to need to, um, you're going to need to do something else, or we're going to, you're going to have to take some time off or we're going to have to fix that movement and what's going on and why at 10 miles or why at 20 miles you're starting to run funny you know that it's not making sense so we need to fix that right you still have your athletes use heart rate monitors when they're running right no no no oh come on man

toss that one out why i mean that's a it's a it's a great you know it uh marker of fatigue yeah to a degree to a degree well it's in there's a lot of variables that play into that there's too many there's too many and if you start really going down the road of heart rate you start to understand the heart rate variable the the change in heart rate the the best thing i can say with heart rate is looking at resting heart rate in the morning of an athlete and what happened from the night before looking at your heart rate when you're doing a run or doing something has become this. Hey, bro, we got to slow down. I'm going to blow up.

For the audience, he's staring at his wrist. Dude, coach, we have to slow down. I'm going to blow up. My heart rate's at 166. I'm going to blow if I heart rates at one 66. I I'm going to blow. If I go to one 67 or one 68 and I'll look at the athlete and go, if you were going to fucking blow, you wouldn't be talking to me right now. It becomes a synonymous thing of,

I am grading my intensity off of my heart rate. And it's a poor thing, especially if you take a look at like, let's just take a look at race car drivers. What can they hold their heart rate at in a four hour, five hour race? Roughly 80% of their max heart rate. Even some of them have been seen to go 110%. Yet they're sitting in a car driving around a track. Granted, there's a different type of stress in there, but what if that type of stress enters the athlete or I'm a little bit different that day? It's where we're correlating something versus, Hey, here's a

number. Here's what I know you can hit your 10 K on. Here's what I know your PR is. I know the intensity I need to see with that so that we're actually making some progress with you which is probably in the maybe 85 to 97 percent range of that number which actually isn't it's actually not very hard to hit that type of stuff but it teaches the athlete pacing through not looking at the heart rate and where they're getting attached to that whole thing and that's what i found with all of our athletes that were you and dude i used a heart rate monitor for five years no i would shout done without it right okay i think that you're you're you're right in that athletes become too attached to it and it becomes a crutch in the same way using fins and paddles are at the pool for a lot of master swimmers and triathletes you can definitely uh lean on it way too much but where i i think i differ from you well here's an analogy when i was a swimmer you know just as it becomes so

rote and you're just swimming so much we would do you know let's say we were doing you know i'm 19 years old and we're doing 100 freestyle repeats on the 115 or whatever like i could tell you when i touched the wall without looking at the clock what my time was every time and i could tell you what my heart rate was yeah with and we didn't have watches we didn't have any you know like but i just knew my body so well because you're doing it so much yeah right and then when i kind of picked this ultra endurance career up i needed a heart rate monitor to tap back into that to go, all right, this is what 145 beats a minute feels like right now at this level of fitness. And I know because I go on and I do formal lactate testing, I know where those thresholds are. And I know the intensity level that I need to be at to train my body to burn fat and become more efficient.

He's laughing at me right now. I'm not laughing at you. I'm not, dude. And I know what intensity I need to be at so that I'm not in the gray zone and I'm working on my speed and my strength when I'm doing the more intense efforts. This is awesome. And I still use a heart rate monitor. awesome and so so i and i still use a heart rate monitor every and i also know that it's not that accurate if i didn't sleep right the night before if i've got a lot of stress in my life if julie's upset with you there's a lot of yeah believe me i can definitely throw my heart rate monitor off

there are a lot it's not a perfect science by any stretch of the imagination but i use it as just a tool that i can go all right well this is kind of it. And also when I'm on my bike and I look at my Watts, which are a much more reliable predictor than heart rate. Whoa. You just threw out a very big word. But I know kind of where my heart rate should be in correlation to whatever Watts I'm holding. And when suddenly there's a separation there, like, well,

my heart rate's way too high for these Watts or my there, like, well, my heart rate's way too high for these Watts or my heart, I can't get my heart rate up. Then those are things that play into how I adjust my program because you know what? I'm really tired right now. These there's a, there's a, they call it a, what is it? Decoupling, I think. Yeah. Um, if you're going to race with heart rate, if you're going to, if that, if that's going to be your MO, um, I don't know. Racing is different.

Okay. But then I know the most accurate, the most accurate thing on the planet beat any science. It is science for understanding all of that and its performance. And when performance isn't met, something's wrong with the training or with the athlete, for that matter. And when we really correlate what it is we're doing

with something like when I said, you know, used a big word, I didn't mean that like you used. I mean, that's a big word. The cycling world is pretty aware of how to train. That's Watts. Because Watts don't lie. Watts is actual work. But also, the bicycle is a machine in which you can extract all sorts of data points that aren't possible in other disciplines.

I can extract that data from you running if i really want to well you can't you can't extract the force with which my foot is pushing off on the track or well i'll tell you i'll tell you what if usain bolt and i were to run 100 meters um the force output the the the watts that he would be generating would be much greater than me. Would they not? Would they not? All right, here's your PhD. No, yeah, right? And it would not only be because he outweighs me,

but because he not only outweighs me, maybe he outweighs me. He's probably 205, 210, which he outweighs me, me being 195 pounds, but because I'm slower than him. And it doesn't matter, but the time it took from the start to the finish, that is a correlate. That is a measurement, and that can be measured. That is what people are missing is what the measurement is. I know what an athlete should be.

So I don't know, but how does that play into being an argument against using a power meter and a heart rate monitor? Like I'm missing something. If I, if, so if I've got a three minute watt test I do, which is something I standard I do with a lot of athletes on the bike. I know what that wattage, like if I've got, if I'm going to have somebody doing some three minute efforts and three minutes spin between or two minutes spin, whatever,

I know the rest that they can handle i also know that the the percentage i also know basically what the percentage is or i can find out what that percentage is that they could hold for however many i need to do still gaining that ability of understanding the performance indicator versus hey i just want you to go and hit your heart i don't want your heart rate to go this high, but I need you to match these wattage. I need you to match the wattage with that specific heart rate, but yet you can't do that. And yet if I can get an athlete who can actually perform like that and show me they can form like that, then we can progress that way because it's all based on performance versus taking something and just saying, Hey, identify, I'm identifying an exertion level

or identifying what this feels like. And today, coach, I could only get two of these at this wattage before I felt like I was tanking. That's it? What's going on? Yeah, but that's fine. I understand that. But it's using these tools to set parameters for a workout.

And I think we both agreed a workout needs a purpose. So the purpose of this workout is you, you want to be at this intensity for this amount of time or what have you, or do these reps and you can use the power meter and the heart rate monitor to help establish that. If the athlete then goes and attempts that and can't meet that or whatever, then that's just information that you can take to then adjust whatever they're doing, right? Are things better, more complex, or simple? Well, I don't know. I mean, I like to geek out on the data.

I mean, maybe that's not, you know, maybe it becomes too much for someone. Or as a coach to like be looking at SRM files all the time. I know this, is that if I'm looking at, whether it's somebody's wattage on a bike, or times on a track, or times on a run that if i'm looking at the basic performance level of that versus looking at heart rate versus looking at you know lactate levels which i've owned lack i own a lactate machine i own a vo2 max machine i've

spent more money on all this shit just as much as anybody else. And it all meant nothing because when it all came down to me understanding what performance was, what was happening with performance, if I just paid attention to the performance of what was going on, if I could get the athlete in a certain window and in these workouts, knowing what they can handle each week based on each day, then I'm right in that zone. And when something starts to fail, something's going on. I've got to readjust the programming. And if it inevitably isn't the programming, maybe it's the nutrition. What are we doing with nutrition?

Which that's the other huge thing with what we deal with, you know? And it's not about eating all this crap that most of these athletes are eating. And it's not that I'm going to go on a tangent about how we eat. But, I mean, you're somebody who is who is dude you are on the extreme of everything but you are dialed on what you do right you know and most of these people don't understand they think just shoving down goo and you know and and sucking down all these drinks and doing all this crap is okay it's like well dude no that's not you know right there's a lot of confusion about that and it's like, well, dude, no, that's not, you know? Right. There's a lot of confusion about that. And it's, it's hard because you see all the goos are everywhere in the gate.

You know, people think they should be drinking Gatorade all day and, you know, and there aren't a lot of healthy alternatives either. Um, and people don't really know what to do. I mean, they're well-intentioned, but I think there's just a lot of misinformation about that kind of stuff. Yeah. Well-intentioned and, you know, just not taking enough responsibility to really understand that stuff. And I think people do need to be more—they need to take more responsibility for what they're doing.

So what do you tell the athletes when you tell them to get off the goos? What are you telling them to have in lieu of that? First, they've got to clean up the diet. They've got to be eating, one, more vegetables. I'm not a big fruit guy. I just don't like high glycemic carbs at all. I'm a low-carb guy to a large degree, but that means eating the highest quality vegetable that you can.

You can consider me a meat-eating vegan. I've had a couple of those on the show. We beat the low-carb drum last week, so we need to go down that route. Whatever. And I'm not going to sit there and – you can eat any way you want, but I'll tell you right now that when you're bonking, it's not because you're eating – it's not because your body is burning fat at that point. Your body is too used to burning glycogen.

That we agree on. Yeah, and if you are sucking down goo, guess what? That's the only thing you're burning. You're not burning fat at that point. Right, that's the thing I think that people get confused on because even if you are in your fat-burning energy utilization system because of the energy level that you're putting out the level of intensity is is well within your aerobic capacity so you're meant to be metabolizing

fat for fuel if you're eating gels that's gonna that's gonna be the thing that your body's gonna use first i mean you're gonna it's gonna hijack that pathway right and your body's gonna burn the glycogen which is why you're gonna have the insulin spike and then it's going to burn the glycogen. Correct, which is why you're going to have the insulin spike. And then it's going to pull that sugar out. And then you're going to have issues. Not to mention the GI problems that happen when you're, you know. Anybody who's done an Ironman has seen it, where the dude or the woman sitting on the side of the aid station puking up whatever, you know, seven different types of gels and stuff

they decided to suck down. You hear it all the time, like, oh, I was doing great. Then I had GI problems. It's like, well, you've had 12 gels in the last four hours. If you were sitting on the couch, my buddy Vinny says, you sit on the couch all day and eat a gel every half hour, you're going to vomit in a couple hours. It's crazy.

every half hour you're going to vomit you know in a couple hours it's it's great it's crazy you know i mean we taught i push a diet that is going to get the athlete to burn to utilize fat i want the athlete to and we can get that through nutrition alone if training i see i that's where i think we differ because i think training has a lot to do with that as well but then if we were to go take a look at any Ironman, how come half the field is overweight, right? I mean, you're looking at people who are out there training. Well, for sure. Okay?

But that's the thing. You cannot outperform a poor diet. It's going to catch you, and it's going to be as obvious as anything. I mean, we were just, Aaron and I were driving back through the canyon in Orange County, and there were just all these cyclists. But there were, I mean,

there were a ton of just overweight cyclists. And sure, they're out there getting it, but how long have they been out there doing that? And how long have they been overweight? And I see the same people doing the same thing going, I used to see it in spin classes. The same overweight people going into spin classes at the gym I worked at who were overweight for three years. I think what happens is the workout justifies the big meal or the poor eating habits.

Like, well, I'm doing my ride so I can eat whatever I want. Or I should be sucking down the Gatorade. And the caloric intake far outweighs the caloric burn. But then again, we could take a higher, same caloric density, 5,000 calories of different types of food and yet one person's going to gain weight and

the other person's going to lose. Because their body's going to be signaling to burn fat. I think this thing's more about hormones. It does have something to do with calories, but it doesn't have as much as we think. I think it's about hormones. I think it thing's more about hormones it does have something to do with calories but it doesn't have as much as we think i think it's about hormones i think it's about keeping those hormones in check and i think it's it's you getting the body to trigger and be able to burn fat more efficiently not only through nutrition but but through the training and when you can teach the

body to do that that's when you become more efficient as an athlete especially an ultra athlete i mean look at the guy who finished uh who won western states this last year you know right low carb guy doesn't mean that we need to go all start going low carb but the fact is is hey here's a guy who's showing you at the ultra distance you can be low carb it was why we developed the product that we did was because we were so tired of that there was nothing really out there that really could help people in our situation like who ate the way we did and who were training the way we did and there was no other healthier you know alternative so we created you know three fuel which is the product that we you know do which you can't use but it's a way it's got way in it right yeah it's got whey protein but it's

you know it's a grass-fed it's the highest quality grass-fed whey protein it's got whey in it, right? Yeah, it's got whey protein. But it's a grass-fed, it's the highest quality grass-fed whey protein. It's got baby coconut milk in it, which is a medium-chain fat, which is an immediately usable fuel, which most people are not aware of. Yeah, I actually just wrote an article on my blog about coconut oil because there's such a big debate about that right now. And I evaluated both sides of it. Yeah, it's the lauric acid that becomes a very available. It is a saturated fat, but it becomes very bioavailable for you to burn as fuel.

So it's a good energy source when you're in that fat-burning zone. And we've got a resistant starch in there, which actually doesn't start turning on the glucose meter for two to three hours but once it does that whole engine is just running and it never stops so you're calling i mean i've we've had people go out five six hours on it and just be just fine pushing the so is this something you put in your bottle like on the bike or when you're exercising or it's a post workout no No, no, it actually, yeah, yeah. It's a,

it's either a pre or, or post, like for somebody who was like lifting weight or crossfitting or doing something like that would be a pre, um, you know, and you could take it anywhere from two hours to two minutes before you worked out.

Um, or if you're an endurance athlete, it'd be something you'd be using along the way and you just won't run out of energy. But if you decide to suck down a gel, you just change the whole structure of the way everything. Right. You can't do what you can't do both. Nope. Yeah. Yeah. Right. All right, man. So we've been, let's see, we're at an hour 37 here. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I think, you know, I always want to have some takeaways for

the people out there, like things that, you know, maybe they're not going to call you up and hire you to be their coach they don't need to but what are the things what are the most common mistakes that people are making without even knowing it and and things that they could change in their training or in their maybe in their nutrition um that could have a huge impact on what they're doing i i think training wisewise, it's the ability to understand that pain is the penalty for violating the principles of nature. And I'm not talking about going out and running an ultra and getting into pain that way. I'm talking about like you've got some sort of injury thing coming on. This is an indication something's wrong and you're doing something wrong. And moving correctly is actually my goal. Like that's what

I'm like, that's why I'm a coach. And that's why I'm good at what I do because I can see how people sit, walk, do run, ride all that. And we can correct that and we can fix that. And it's all about posture. It really is. But it's finding somebody who can actually do that and getting a coach to look at you or getting somebody to look at you and do that is huge. Yeah, I agree with that. And I talk about that in my book a little bit. But I think that if you have some little injury and then you take time off and you let it heal and then you just start doing what you were doing before, hoping it won't happen again, I mean, that's not a solution. That is no solution at all. That is why it's something you should be. We have so much re we have so many resources that we put out on our website

and you don't need to go follow the training, but we put out stuff for skill, skill ability, you know, skill training, all that stuff. I mean, my book power, speed, endurance, it's pretty much a skill-based training book. I mean, that's the, you know, it's called power, speed, endurance much a skill-based training book i mean that's the you know it's called power speed endurance a skill a skill-based training approach okay so it's probably four or five chapters basically on skill and then it talks about programming and a little bit about fueling we don't get too deep in the nutrition because i'm going to do that with some other stuff but you know treating anything any movement anything you do as a skill

will change the athlete paradigm for you for the rest of your life. By anything, you literally mean anything? Yeah, literally mean anything. Like sitting at your desk at your computer? Yeah, you probably shouldn't be sitting. In fact, we were talking about this yesterday. Aaron and I were working with some people, and sitting needs to be looked at as a privilege, not a right.

Your ass does not have the same skin structure that your hands and your feet have. Therefore, it's not something you should be really in contact with the ground with. It is weird that we've evolved as these creatures that spend most of our time sitting down. Because if we were to go to like Asia and places like that, it's not as prevalent. But the fact is, if we were to look at sitting as a privilege and not a right, that would change a lot of stuff. In fact, we like to stand, our desk at home is

stand-up desks. My buddy Kelly Starrett talks about, is kind of on a mission to change that stuff. He runs a mobility wad, which is another great resource. You can learn about a lot of this stuff and mobilizing and understanding what stretching really is. And he's arguably the biggest, strongest, most flexible human being I have ever seen in my life. Yeah.

And he puts most yogis to shame, just the positions he can get into. Because he understands his stuff, and he's worked his whole life at it. With that said, getting stronger is key. Being strong doesn't mean you need to look like a bodybuilder either. There are guys who have back squatted 1,000 pounds at under 200 pounds. You know, strength is not necessarily bulky, okay? But getting strong is key for a lot of people. And getting strong is going to help you get into better positions as well.

In fact, it's weird that when you get stronger, you sit more upright, you stand more upright, you do things more upright. So I think those are some key things. I think nutritionally, cleaning up your diet. If you're a meat eater, if you're going to eat meat meat trying to get the highest quality meat possible grass-fed you know treated well and you know animals that are treated well that aren't coming from some you know messed up slaughterhouse but the key the key is eating i think for me is eating high quality vegetables um really the most potent high quality vegetables you can get your hands on, and eating a shit ton of fat.

Lots and lots of fat. The whole fat thing here. Yeah. All right. Well, we can disagree on that part, but the other stuff I agree with you on. I mean, you know, with the way you eat, it really wouldn't be, it probably wouldn't work so well. No, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work so well no it wouldn't work it wouldn't because if you raise it's just

it's the way the diet works you know the thing but with the way we eat you know it's like dude that's my fuel and i lean out and you know i can sit somewhere between four and six percent body fat at any given time and still go out and compete and not bonk and it's like right how do you just do that but i think that there's a difference um there's a difference. We can go around this, Mary, go around. I do this all the time on the podcast. But I switched my diet not for performance reasons, but because I didn't want to have a heart attack. It's always been about long-term health.

And we are in a health care crisis. And there are people walking around that are ticking time bombs for heart attacks and they don't even know it. You know, 935,000 people Americans a year suffer heart attacks, 600,000 of which are fatal. And just last night, actually I was at a benefit for a foundation called the heart view global

foundation. And it was started by this friend of mine, Jonathan Schwartz, who founded this, who created this foundation to honor his buddy, like his high school buddy, who died of a heart attack. And what happened was Jonathan,

who'd always been a runner, like a marathoner and stuff like that, thought, you know, my buddy died of a heart attack really young. I should probably go get checked out. Like, I'm thin. I'm active. I feel fine.

You know, but just for peace of mind for me and my wife and whatever. So he goes to the doctor and he has like a special scan, CT cardiac scan. And the doctor says, you have almost 100% blockage in this one key artery. Like, we need to deal with you immediately. And had you not come in you know you were very likely going to have a fatal heart attack very soon so the point being that a lot of guys that think they're fit um or there's no you know a lot of these heart attacks happen without any symptomology whatsoever you think you're fine and it happens and so that's always kind of been my um kind of marching order

and you know this at this benefit last night all these cardiac surgeons cardiologists who were getting up and speaking um from cedars-sinai and great hospitals and you know the the the the mantra was you've got to get the saturated fat out of your diet. And I know you're coming from a different place on this, but I've heard way too many cardiac specialists talk about the ills of saturated fat when it comes to heart disease. And that is a completely separate discussion from athletic performance completely.

And I get that or weight loss for that matter. But that's the thing I can't, I just keep coming back to. But see, I think most of that stuff is misinformation. And, and I don't, in fact, I've never seen a study or anything that's shown high cholesterol has caused any heart attacks. In fact, it's the lower cholesterol people who are the ones who are having the heart attacks. Although the arteries might be closed, but the fact is, is it's the type of cholesterol. And unfortunately that cholesterol, the density of that cholesterol is what the problem is. And when that cholesterol level is dense and plaque-like, when it packs in there,

that's the stuff that's dangerous. We find that insulin levels are usually a product of that, that we're seeing higher levels of insulin, that we're seeing people who are eating higher carb diets, that they're crushing carbs, any type of carb, especially high glycemic carbs. And so there's a direct relationship with not only eating the fat. In fact, the worst combination of food out there is carbon fat, something that's sugary and has fat in fact the worst combination of food out there is carbon fat something that's sugary and has fat in it okay so that that hormonally changes the body in the worst type of way versus somebody

who's eating low carb or or not or eating carbs that are you know that are that are complex with higher fat and protein. We don't see any of that stuff. In fact, show me, if somebody shows me that there's actually high cholesterol people who are the ones who are having the heart attacks, I'll read the information, but I haven't seen it. In fact, people keep sending me stuff of people with low cholesterol who are the ones who are having the heart attacks, and they're the ones that go on the medication and all this other crap that they buy into this stuff that these doctors are talking about and it's totally wrong it's totally different from everything we're hearing

in mainstream which if mainstream is talking about it it's usually time to change what it is you're doing at least that's been my experience all right right. Well, I'm going to dig into some of the research. Whoops. I didn't mean to have that. That's supposed to not be there. Hold on. Sorry about that. We had a little relic from a other episode on there, the outro. All right, man. Well, that's a, you know, that is a lightning rod, you know, absolute position to take for sure., you know, if there are people out there that want to leave a comment on the website, my website underneath where this podcast will be hosted, feel free to point us in the right direction in terms of research. And I'm going to poke around that as well. But I think I, you know, I just, I can't get around to say that I understand

that sugar and processed foods are gigantic culprits in this, you know, war of heart disease that we're in. There's no question about that. I don't dispute that at all. But I think to say that everything you've ever heard about dietary saturated fat is completely wrong. And all these cardiologists that have been cutting open hearts and doing this research forever who are saying this are also wrong. I don't know that it's all wrong. And neither of us are cardiologists or research scientists either. Well, I don't know that it's all wrong, but I will say that there's a lot of stuff that may not be right. But I will say that there's a lot of stuff that may not be right. And nobody's solved anything yet other than the fact that the blood work I tend to see and what I've seen not only with myself but with other people who are eating the exact same way

and doing the exact same thing, it's telling an entirely different story. But are they getting CT cardiac scans? Because I think sometimes the blood work, the cholesterol and the blood pressure doesn't tell the whole story. And in the case of my friend Jonathan, I believe his numbers weren't bad. So it wasn't until he got the scan,

and his whole foundation is set up to try to get more of these scans and make them more available to people because it was really the only indicator that can show you whether you have a blockage. I mean, taking a picture of your heart and seeing that artery like having an angiogram. I think stuff like Gary Taubes' written is probably the closest we've seen with a lot of this stuff and where we see these relate, you know, this, this stuff, a lot of the stuff I'm talking about.

But if we, what would be great is to actually be able to do these CT scans and show, well, hell, let's see what's going on with this person. Let's see what's going on with this person. That would be good. Yeah.

I don't know if that research exists, but if it doesn't, it should. Let's get, you know, I know a few docs. I'm sure you might know a few docs and i do you know i mean i know you know the one study that i always point to is dr esselston's study uh where um he was able to reverse heart disease on a on a uh a low-fat plant-based diet but um the reversals actually only took place when it was low fat like when he started having the oils and the nuts and all that kind of stuff in there he wasn't seeing the

same results so that tells me that there is some connection there but you know that's a protocol where you're allowed to have you know some whole wheat and fruit and things like that that are kind of verboten from the the program that you're coming from. Yeah. I just. So, you know, but neither of us went to Harvard Medical School, so. No, we didn't. The debate will go on.

I am opinionated for me, as you are for you. That's true. All right, man. All right, dude. Well, that was cool. How do you feel? I feel good. Feel all right?

I feel great. Anything else you want to say? No, I'm glad we could do this. We did it, man. We did it dude. Well, that was cool. How do you feel? I feel good. Feel all right? I feel great. Anything else you want to say? No, I'm glad we could do this. We did it, man. We totally did it. Yeah. And there was no war. No, there's never a war with me, man.

You know, that's the thing. You have people on with different points of view. If you don't do that, then what are you doing? You know what I mean? You just have the guy on who agrees with you, and then you get the audience of people that agree with you, and then nobody grows. You build your team, but you know, expand your horizons,

entertain new things, check out the other side. All right, call for it. All right, man. So, uh, so if you want to learn more about Brian and what he's doing, you can go to crossfitendurance.com. That's, is that the main website? Yeah, it's the main website. You have Brian McKenzie too, which is a Tumblr, and you throw stuff up on there. Yeah, I just throw some Tumblr stuff.

I just throw some brief stuff up on that. I'm more just posting information via Twitter, which is the at IamUnscared or Facebook. Right, IamUnscared on Twitter. Is it the same on, what's it on Facebook? No, it's Brian McKenzie. It's a fan page. I think it's Facebook anaerobic, facebook.com forward slash anaerobic.

All right. And the book is Power Speed Endurance. You can find that on Amazon. If you're going to get it on Amazon, it would be huge. If you could first go to richroll.com and click on the Amazon banner on my blog page. It won't cost you anything extra, but it'll throw a couple pennies in our jar and pay for some of the expenses of the podcast. But check out his book. Keep the podcast going.

That's right, man. You know it, dude. Click that link, people. There you go. What else? Anything else? You got anything coming up? You're on tour, right?

Where are you showing up where people might want to come and check you out? Aaron and I are going to Columbia. I'm going to do a seminar down there. But I'm coming back out. We'll be back up in NorCal and bouncing around. I'm bouncing around with different projects. Got a new show coming out. What's that, man?

We didn't even talk about that. It starts, I believe we start filming next week. got a new show coming out which what's that man we didn't even talk about that um it starts i believe we start filming next week and uh my buddy and i kelly starrett will be doing a 30 45 minute live show where we're just gonna go at it and talk about movement and stuff we see with the athletes we've seen or even stuff like you know rg3 you know and like hey look look look what's going on here something nobody's ever really seen um where we're just sitting there talking about movement and what we see and letting the world see things the way we see it and is that um like a pilot project that you're doing or is that set

up it'll be a pilot yeah well we've got a being produced by uh by another company but um it's the pilot will be shot next week i believe or the or the, uh, in a week and a half. Yeah. Cool, man. Dude, we didn't even talk about like the skateboarding and like the punk rock and all that kind of stuff, man. That's the stuff I usually want to like to get into the background next time.

We'll have to have you back. Yeah. All right. You'll come back. Yeah, for sure. All right. Maybe I'll come to you next time.

Yeah. We'll have you up anytime. All right. Anytime. All right, man. Thanks for coming by. Peace. Plants. we'll have you up anytime alright man thanks for coming by peace

plants Thank you. you