Weights and Plates Podcast - #93 - Training Like An Athlete v.s. Recreational Lifters

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Jesse Vezina joins the show to talk weightlifting, training like an athlete, the trade-offs of pushing your limits, coaching, and more.  https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/ Follow Weights & Plates YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf- Instagram: @the_robert_santana Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/weightsandplates Web: https://weightsandplates.com  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host. And today we have a very special guest. Allow me to introduce Mr. Mr. Mr. That's right. I hope so. I hope so. Well, almost doctor, right? As about as close as I could get. About as, yeah. ABD. Yeah, about as close as somebody can get. Mr. Jesse Vezina, or Vezna.

Vezna. Vezna, yeah, always fuck your name up. That's right. Mr. Jesse Vezna, he is a weightlifting coach here at my gym. He coaches a few lifters. Volley, what are you, about 25? 25 training here. I think across the country, everything everything we got about 40 who are looking for us right now

Yeah, and he's a good friend of mine fellow Midwestern that I met here at ASU years ago and We've been having some conversations here at the gym and I wanted to hit on a podcast topic about athletics Versus, you know just coming in the gym and fucking around about athletics versus just coming in the gym and fucking around. But we'll first kind of introduce you and tell the audience about your background and how you kind of got into this and what exactly it is you do.

So anyway, yeah, like Robert said, Midwestern guy came out here for grad school back in 2009, man, it's been like 15 years since I've been here, 16. Got it, came out here for exercise science, started teaching, got into the sport of Olympic weightlifting and absolutely fell in love with it and started coaching that in 2015. So I've been coaching the sport now for 10 years competing in the sport. I actually won Masters Worlds, the over 35 world championship in 2021. So had some success in the sport,

had some success coaching it. Eventually left academia as few people have, I don't know, you and I talked a lot about that. That could be another episode. That could be an entire episode. But left academia. And now I am coaching also to real estate, too. But that's a different one.

But that's a different podcast. That's a different podcast. But yeah, also, but yeah, started my gym, started sanctuary barbell along with my wife, and she and I have been coaching it for since 2017. So seven years, eight years going strong with that one. Should I get a third mate with her on to see? Well, maybe one day she should love it. Shit, I should get a third mate with her on too. See, well, maybe one day. She'd love it.

Yeah, I think she'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. So you've learned a little bit about what I do. So we met about, I met you about 10, 13 years ago at Reno. That's right. Yeah, you don't remember, but I remember. I do not for the life of me remember. Yeah, apparently I made a's right. Yeah. You don't remember, but I remember. I do not for the life may remember.

Yeah. Apparently I'm in a big oppression. Yeah. Well, you're the only jack dude there that looks like he did anything. I'm probably the only person who actually ever entered a weight room. So in academia, they try to tell us that you don't have to lift weights to study lifting weights, which is like the silliest fucking thing. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're literally all talk and no practice. And sitting in academia, I was actually in a meeting where they were getting mad that a grad student was out trying, I think the grad student

was out trying to like run a 10K, and they were getting mad that she had enough time to train for- Oh, they got furious at me because I was trying to pull 500. Yeah, yeah, how dare you actually practice what you state that you're interested in. No, that's not what we're doing.

No, absolutely not. We're just writing papers and. Yeah, let's sit in a lab and try to lab and pretend that we know. And try to sound like a fucking thesaurus, you know? Yeah, that's the best way to accomplish anything. So, yeah. How much like realistically, though, I know you and I talk about this all the time, but What do you learn in a textbook that as far as exercise science goes?

you go in I learned more talking to you sitting around in a In a weight room just spit balling with you spelling with other coaches than I ever did reading the ACSM textbook or or anything else That was one of the things that bothered me I'd sit with these guys and I wanted to study lifting. And first of all, I tell people all the time, in academia, when we were coming up, everybody in there was a marathon runner, a cyclist, a triathlete, some sort of endurance athlete.

And I feel like a lot of those guys have now retired and what has replaced them are Joe Weider fanboys that want to study bodybuilding. Yeah. And people think this is science and it's, you can't study humans effectively because we have a lifestyle to account for. Right.

And you can ask questions about it and try to assume honesty, which is an assumption. But there's the problem of that and we'll kind of go into some of the other things you and I have talked about. But we've talked about sport and athletes, right? Yeah. Athletes, right? Jesse is a sport coach. I'm a strength coach. I train the general public. You've kind of seen that over the years. We met, like I said, 12 years ago, but then we

started working together about six, seven years ago. Sounds right, yeah. 2000, when did I get in that room? 16. I got the room in 16. I don't know what point you trickled in there, but- Probably shortly after, maybe early 2017. Yeah. So for the audience is not aware, when I was in my PhD program, we rented out a racquetball court. The department rented it out from the fitness center, which was Sun Devil Fitness. And they converted it into a weight room. They put rubberized flooring, a few racks, and I gave them a list of things I needed

and wasn't the best of the equipment, but got the job done. And I was supposed to train participants in there for my lifting studies. And then you saw it, and then you started just training in there. Yeah, absolutely. You had all the equipment and none of the hassle that I got on the other side of the- I don't remember how you ended up there, but I'm like, I remembered you, so I'm like, cool. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun.

It turned out you were from Illinois too. I didn't know that. Yeah, another Midwestern guy, grew up in Champaign, so just downstate. I know you're a Chicago guy. Yeah, Chicago guy, but then I lived in Macomb for eight years. Right, so yeah. I got to know Illinois,

because I tell people there's Chicago and there's Illinois. I have to explain that I'm from the not Chicago part of Illinois. That is the better part. I enjoyed it. I drove to where you were, to Champaign, but then I drove to St. Louis too. I drove to Iowa, Peoria. I think at one point we drove to St. Louis too, I drove to Iowa, Peoria, I think at one point we drove to Wisconsin. So I saw all these non-urban parts of the Midwest.

I saw when I was living in McComb. But you had mentioned that you were personal training there. Oh yeah. See, I didn't know that you had that background. I mean, yeah. It's not surprising, we just never talked about it till you were here. No, I started off personal training.

I hated personal training by the way, absolutely started off personal training. I hated personal training, by the way. Absolutely. Does anybody enjoy personal training? I know I've known some people who really enjoy it, who really like it. But the thought of well, one, you're booked from 530 a.m. till seven and you may have six hours of actual work that you're getting done in there. So 13 and a half hours of your day is gone. But also so many of them just want a status

of having a personal trainer. They just want to do that. They're not actually pushing toward anything. And it drove me nuts because- You know, I'm slow to this party because, you know, I lost a client, I think about a year ago, because we got into a dispute about what needed to be done. And basically, in so many words, I was like,

get fucked, it's my way or the highway, right? And she wasn't too happy about that. She was kind of woman, she wore the pants in her relationship and you could see, cause I think the husband was involved too, but she was like dictating what he was doing and she kind of communicated that to me. And at the end of it, I was so frustrated

and I was talking to a friend of mine who was also an Olympic lifter, by the way. And she also hates training people. See? And if she's listening, she knows who she is. She's a very good friend of mine. But she's like, some people just like the status of having one.

And I'm like, huh? Like this was over my head. But then I started thinking about it. And I'm like, you know, I haven't seen that enough, I guess. And those types of people that I've had, I've probably had them online because you've seen what comes in here in person. Most of these people are either familiar

with starting strength or want something like that. They're there for an outcome of some sort. But explain that to me because this is new to me in the last year. No, they just want the status symbol. And I mean, where I was, we were at a, it was a higher end studio in Illinois. And so most of our clientele was, was higher in population.

They were very well off, but I would have people who they didn't even want to work out. They didn't want to train. They just wanted the status of saying, and being able to tell their bridge friends or everyone else that they had a personal trainer and this personal trainer would come and yeah. But then nothing happens. So people say, hey, your guy sucks. No, I guess I don't know what they're. I guess they're all doing the same scam.

I think that's what it is. They're all doing the same scam. They just want to be able to say, hey, we're doing this. I have my personal trainer. They come to my house or I go to their studio or whatever it happens to be. And yeah, but it was just, they didn't want to work. I had a guy who literally, he just wanted to come in. I would go and I would just hang out with him for an hour. He would, maybe I could coax him to like literally stand up from his chair

five times. That would be his workout for the day in an hour. And I'd have to talk him into it. And he didn't even want to do that. He just wanted to talk. No, he just wanted to talk. He wanted to hang out. But this is a real thing. I had people who just wanted to have some people just one company. And they would literally hire a personal trainer just to come over and spend time with them.

Oh, so you went to the house. Yeah, there's a few of them. Well, the few of them. Some of them came to the studio. That's interesting. You know, there's a lot of people here that there's aspects of that. They come here because they want to be around us, you know?

But, you know, they're obviously lifting, you know? So I think gyms, there's that community aspect of having a gym that draws people in. But I never understood that. You're literally going to sit there and do nothing? Yeah. They would literally sit there and absolutely do nothing. They didn't want to actually train. They just wanted to have that status symbol that they can afford a personal trainer. And that's interesting. How special to them.

Interesting. Yeah. So were you weightlifting this whole time? Like how'd you kind of end up doing what you do now? No. So I mean, I've been in a weight room since I was 13 years old. So I grew up in the weight room. I didn't start competing in weightlifting until I was 30 years old. Really? Really. So just before I met you then. Right. So a friend of mine wanted to do a competition. She had found this USA weightlifting and she really wanted to do a competition. So asked me this USA weight lift thing and she really wanted to do a competition.

She asked me if I would do it with her. I'm like, yeah, absolutely. This sounds like fun. I went out there, I did my first competition. I had an absolute blast and I'm hooked. Okay, this is what I wanna do. I wanna keep doing this. I've always been an athlete.

I always enjoyed competing. I also always enjoyed and loved being in a weight room. So now I get to put them both together. I get to be an athlete and enjoyed and loved being in a weight room. So now I get to put them both together. I get to be an athlete and I get to be in a weight room. This is literally perfect for me. What sports did you play before? Everything. I had a conversation yesterday with one of my guys.

I was, I did club soccer, club baseball. I played school football, ran track, karate. I played basketball for a little while until I realized I was five, six, and that probably wasn't the best choice for me. I wrestled. I literally did everything. Only offers I got in college were to go and wrestle,

and I had made up my mind I didn't wanna do that anymore, so I turned those down, decided that I just wanted to stick with the weight room. I kept training, I kept pushing. And then once I found this, like, all right, now I have something I can keep going with. So yeah, so that's interesting. So from a young age, you just wanted to fucking do things, right? Oh, I love doing, yeah, I love being an athlete. And that's kind of why I brought you on here today, because a lot of people that listen are not natural athletes. They don't have this experience. We get a lot of people that work in IT or engineers

and have jobs like that, have never done a sport, never even fucked around the weight room in their life. You know, I got some people on here that are listening that they brod out like I did. They just went in the weight room. They wanted to be jacked, you know? But I've had a lot of clients over the years that this is their first exposure to anything physical.

And when I'm talking to people, especially those who have been in a commercial gym before, I have to explain this to them, that there's a clear difference between someone who is an athlete and somebody who is doing things that athletes do, right? And it's a clear delineation. And then even if you're doing things that athletes do,

you can do them competitively. But there is a difference between somebody who competes recreationally and somebody who is a pro. And I would consider you a pro. Oh, thank you. I would say maybe about as close as you can get to being a pro and then what is basically an amateur sport. Yeah, exactly.

And I use the word pro because to me, somebody who's a pro is somebody, it's basically their job. There's scheduled things they have to go to. And the concept of a deadline applies. If you're recreational, there's no deadline. You can push yourself and work hard, but there's no deadline.

You get hurt, you heal up, you try again, right? An athlete has a deadline. You have meets you have to go to, you have specific competitions that will allow you to go to other competitions. There's medals you wanna win, there's records you wanna break. And if that's the game you're playing, maybe pro's not the word for it,

but that's the word that jumps to my mind. It's more like a job at that point. You could push yourself real hard. It's a different level at that stage. Yeah, it absolutely is. And so, I mean, yeah, in that sense, I would say that, yeah, in that sense, I am a pro. It's an amateur sport. I mean, obviously we're not making millions of dollars like these guys who aren't there. In fact, the weightlifters who actually make money are probably making money because they're Instagram famous

and not because they're actual athletes at that point. But yeah, but we do, we have deadlines. We have, you have to be ready for this meet. And if you want to go to the bigger one, you better be ready for this first one in order to qualify for the next one. Right. And that adds another level of risk.

It's a huge level of risk. And it's a huge level of, okay, you got to push through and we're going to have to fight through and you're going to have to find some uncomfortable situations and you better find a way to get through it because it's coming whether you like it or not. So you and I have talked about this concept of lifers. Yeah. How you said 50 years ago, and I think this applied to any weight room contest, whether it was bodybuilding or the sport of weightlifting, sport of powerlifting.

50 years ago, people that did this, you refer to them as lifers, this is what they did. Yes. This is, they lived for it. Everything was about the next training session, lifting more, getting stronger, getting bigger, you know, winning another medal, winning another meet, right? Absolutely.

Everybody was a competitive athlete that was either on a show if they were on stage, if they were bodybuilders, they were on the platform if they were power lifters or weight lifters. They weren't in there fucking around doing CrossFit, asking if they could do BJJ on the side. This is what they did, right? Yeah. You were talking about that, so kind of elaborate on that. Oh yeah, so I mean, you go back 50 years ago,

and you probably don't have to go, you'd probably go back 30 years ago, into even the 90s, that if you were doing this, you were a lifer. You were somebody who you were going to find a job that allowed you to continue training on a regular schedule. You are someone who is going to move across country to work with a coach that you wanted to work with.

This was what you were going to do. That's not the case anymore. Now you get people who want to dabble and, okay, I want to do this, but I also want to dabble and okay, I kind of want to do this, but I also want to only do it twice a week and I want to, yeah, I mean, it's not nearly the same. They want to be okay. They want to learn, but they're not lifers. Right. Yeah.

They're here to dabble. So how has that influenced your coaching over the years? Oh, influences it a lot because you have to be able to identify the differences. You can't push someone who is I. This is really important. You know, we'll say, you know, my my mentor, Bob DeCano, you know, Bob, very well. I trained Bob's gym. Yeah. And Bob refers to them as dilettantes. The dilettantes are the ones and they're going to come in and they want to, yeah, they want to

train and they want to get better, but they don't really want to be pushed or maybe they don't even want to. Maybe they just want to say, maybe they're back to these personal training clients. Maybe they just want to say they're a weightlifter. Right. And I've had a couple of those too. I think there is some of that. I could see that. I've seen some of those too. But they want to come in and they want to experience it, but they don't necessarily want to push. And so you have to treat them different. You have to understand that your lifer, they're going to get hurt.

They're going to have a little ache and pain. They're going to fight through it. They're going to push. They're going to find a way to do it. Your dilettantes, your people who are just kind're going to find a way to do it. You're dilettante. You are people who are just kind of there to dabble. They're not right. They're going to have a little ache and pain and well, okay, I'll see in three months and that'll be it. When's your med student come back? That guy's a lifer. Oh no, he's a lifer. He is absolutely

a lifer and he's a, he'll be back in. I mean, he has managed to continue training through life or through med school. And so that enough stuff. And I, and I do know a few people who have done that. Surprisingly, it's, it's really not uncommon in our sport. And I imagine probably in yours too, we get a lot of very highly educated people who come into the weight room and want to do this. And I think for high achievers and highly educated people, one, it provides a physical outlet that's very useful for them. And also I think it gives them, somebody else gets to tell them what to do and they don't have to make decisions for a little bit. And so I think they enjoy that. But no, he'll be back around. I know he'll still pick up a bar at least once a week just to make sure that he can. As soon as he gets through his rotations, he fully intends to come back and do nationals again. That dude was totally a lifer.

Oh, he's absolutely a lifer. So I've talked to the audience before about the Marty Gallagher interview with Rip, part three. So this young man was in here with Jesse. This is my first impression of him. We're talking. And then I don't know how I got on the topic of this interview. It's my favorite interview that Rip has done with somebody else. And I decided to put it on and this guy's just locked into it. He's like, that's right. He's like, everything is about the next training session, lifting more, getting bigger, new P more PRs. Like that was my life for two years, bro. Yeah. Oh yeah. And, and he would still be there except that right now his life PR is

finishing his MD and doing that. But he's still hanging on to that barbell and he's not going to let it go. And I guarantee that is the moment that he's done with his rotation and has the, as he'll be back in here probably five days a week and pushing and trying to get back to, trying to get back to winning national medals. That motherfucker is an athlete. Oh, he's an absolute athlete. He's fast. Yeah, oh, and he is absolutely one of the fastest lifters that we've got. Yeah, it's incredible watching him move.

So let's talk about this. So I wanna kind of hit a few themes here. So you're what? You're 5'6", you're about 175-ish. Probably around 170. 170? I competed, well, currently I competed at 160 pounds, 73 kilos, I think it's about 160 pounds.

Yeah, 175 is 80, that's heavy for you. I keep reading that. Yeah, that'd be actually really big. Yeah. Yeah. Weight classes are changing, so we'll see where I'm gonna be here in June, but right now that's it. So you're about 170-ish, plus or minus?

Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah, if the weight class has changed, then you'll be 175, that'd be fantastic. I'd love it. I'm ready to start maybe putting on some weight, and doing something different. So we talk a lot about this concept of weight gain on this show.

And we get these fucktards on Instagram that sit there and write comments about, oh, you're telling people to be obese and unhealthy and this and that then, but then you get guys that will straw man and they'll pick a guy who's really lean and really strong. And like you said, you've won some national world championships.

You're 40 years old. You're probably 9% body fat, right? Nine to 11, somewhere in there? I imagine right now probably, yeah, probably around 10, 11 right now. Right. Yeah. But as we've discussed, so we've discussed this several times, this is why I wanted to do this episode.

This is one reason, because we're on top of other topics too, but you're about nine to 11% body fat at 170. So, you know, these guys that aren't quite as athletic as you are, are gonna, they'll pick someone like you out and say, well, look at this guy. How many calories do you probably eat if you had to guesstimate to maintain that? To maintain, right now I'm maintaining

and I'm in the area typically about 2,800 to 3,000 a day to maintain. To maintain. By the way, at 40 years old. Yeah, at 40 years old people. This is not normal. This is not middle of the bell curve. Okay. And you heard what the man said.

He's played every sport under the sun since he was young. Okay, this is what we call an outlier. So for you to gain weight, you probably have to eat 4,000 calories, right? I need to eat like a minimum 3,500 to 4,000 calories. And this kind of segues into the second part of that, right? So when you are competing, you're trying to win meats, set records, get medals, right?

Yes. You want to be a champion, right? Absolutely. Is that the same, I know the answer to this, but I'm gonna ask you, is that the same thing as trying to lift the heaviest weight you could possibly lift? Not even close.

Absolutely not. So you would agree that if you put on some more weight, which would include more body fat, you'd probably lift more, right? Oh, absolutely. So explain that to the audience. Oh no, because if, I mean, it's quite simple, right? Mass moves mass, and you and I have talked about this a lot.

You want to get bigger, you want to lift more, you're going to have to put on more weight. You need to get stronger, you need to put bigger, you have, or you want to lift more, you're going to have to put on more weight. You need to get stronger. You need to put on more muscle mass. You need to be able to move muscle mass. That's not what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do is lift the most weight that I need to while weighing a specific body weight, which is vastly different than trying to move the most weight humanly possible.

So how is that different? Well, because you're in one scenario, I want to lift the most weight I possibly could. I'm just going to start eating 3,500 to 4,000 calories a day. I'm going to start training. I'm going to start recovering. I'm going to start trying to just move more weight. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to prepare myself for a specific competition and I'm trying to lift more than somebody else

who weighs the same as me. I don't even care what I lift in the competition. I care that I lift more than the other guy. If I don't have to take my third attempt, I'm not taking my third attempt. I'm gonna go home with my gold medals and I'm gonna enjoy my championship. So you wanna win.

I wanna win. Yeah, I'm competing to win. This is a sport. I'm competing to win. This is a sport. I'm competing to win. I'm not necessarily competing to lift the most weight that's humanly possible. I'm competing to win a sport. So this is one of those things,

this is another one of those things that differentiates a athlete who competes in a sport versus a recreational athlete who's trying to best himself. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, what does, and some of the, so I want to get into what that looks like, right? So you've talked about, you're in a weight class, right?

Yes. You know, some guy might say, well, you lift more if you're heavier, just go up to the next weight class, but you might not win, right? Absolutely. If I go up to the next weight class, I mean, you got to think, okay. Explain that weightlifting, power lifting, similar,

but explain that. So. Explain that weightlifting, power lifting similar, but explain that. So in terms of weightlifting, I walk around maybe 76.5 kilograms. I don't know pounds off the top of my head. I know my weight in kilograms. That's like 167, 168. Probably, so I typically walk around somewhere in that area, maybe a little bit heavier.

I said I'm probably about 170 right now, so a little bit heavier. If I tried to move up a weight class, I'm going up to the 81 kilo weight class. It's like 178. It was about 178. I'm going up against guys who walk around at 84 kilos. And those guys are coming down and they're naturally sitting at 84 coming down to 81. I'm trying to eat

my way up just to make 71. It's not the same thing. I'm trying to eat my way up just to make 71. It's not the same thing. I'm giving up a lot of mass to bigger humans to try to do that. So instead, I get to be a big 73-kilo athlete, and I get to, well, basically wipe the floor with the guys who are trying to come up to 73 with these guys who weigh 70 kilos who are trying to eat their way up. It's really not the same thing. And I mean, so yeah, that's the big difference is I'm not trying, if I wanted to lift more, sure I could,

but I'm still not lifting as much as these guys who are already 10 kilos heavier than me and trying to come down a weight class. Right, so you're strong, but you're not as strong as you could possibly get. No, absolutely not. I could, yeah, I could start eating and I could put on a whole, and I could put on mass,

I could put kilos onto my lifts, but I'm not necessarily going to win. Right. And that's what my focus is. My focus is trying to win. So why would I? So yeah, so there's two things there. So number one, you don't have to starve yourself

to be that lean and compete at that weight class. You're eating plenty of food that allows you to recover, set new PRs and win, most importantly. You're not getting earth shattering PRs for yourself because obviously you're restricting your weight and the nature of the competition, but you're still getting stronger than you were and you're winning,

which is what you are trying to do as an athlete. Yeah, that's it. So to these fucking skinny kids that do not wanna gain any fucking body weight, the man just explained to you that he's holding himself back intentionally. Absolutely. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah.

Now, what about these guys? Have you ever tested your vertical? Not for years. What did it used to be? In high school, I got 36. Yeah, that's pretty damn good. I would think the last time I tested it probably, and this was whenever I was still teaching at ASU

and we were in there, I think I got like 32. Yeah, so that's an athletic person, right? So mine's 24, I'm slightly above average, so I'm able to do something, right? But a lot of the guys that walk through the door aren't that athletic, they might be below average. And they see guys like you doing what you're doing and they think that you've gotten on some sort of program

to look the way you do and that they can reproduce that because that's what muscle and fitness told them in the 90s and 2000s. That's what Instagram is telling them today or TikTok or fucking Snapchat or whatever fucking app they're on. But they're being told Jesse's ripped any weight lifts. So if you weight lift, you're going to look like Jesse. Oh, I love it. So this is one thing and my wife who I get coaches with me. So she also, she does nutrition for, she's a nutrition coach and she has people all the time

who like, what do I have to do to look like him? And they'll ask. And the answer is actually pretty simple for me. Spend 27 years in a weight room, play every sport that you can for the majority of that time and eat good, eat well 80% of the time. And that's really what it is. I eat better than most people

and I've been in a weight room for 27 years. And have a 36 inch vertical jump. And I have a 36 inch vertical jump. Yeah, so I add all of that together and you'll be great. Right. I mean, you do all the right things, but at the foundation of that, you have a genetic makeup that allows you to do that. It is. And so genetics play a huge role throw in the fact that I spent again, 27 years in a weight room, putting on muscle mass. I used to talk to another friend of mine who was also a very, very good weightlifter.

And he and I kind of came up with this idea that there is no substitute for having spent a decade, 15 years, putting on muscle mass before I started this sport. Absolutely not. Yeah. I spent, I mean, I started this sport when I was 30 years old, but I had spent 17 years packing on muscle, trying to lift as much as I could. And then I started in this sport. It's going to be a lifetime difference between somebody who just starts whenever they're, yeah, whatever, and tries to just go with it. Or once now suddenly look like they've been in a weight room for 15 years.

They wanna look like they've been in the weight room for 15 years without spending 15 years to do it. And the way to do that is you either pick really good parents or you take drugs and you have a really good liver. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah. And that's what, you know, it's funny, you know, I say that, I say that in a joking manner,

but I used to see a lot of that when I was in college, and by in college, I mean, when I was an undergrad, I was 18, 19, you'd see these guys come in and they're doing a fraction of what you're doing, or they're doing more than what you're doing, but it's bullshit, you know, like you look at it and you're like, how the fuck's that working? And if, you know, it took me, I was naive.

I wasn't around drugs and sports, you know, I swam. So it wasn't really a drug sport. I mean, people I guess could take EPO, but at the high school level, I don't think they were doing that in the 90s. You know, I didn't see any of that. Right. I know one guy was taking creatine.

I heard a rumor that one guy took Andro and that was legal. Okay. And protein powder was becoming popular. one guy was taking creatine. I heard a rumor that one guy took andro and that was legal. And protein powder was becoming popular. Swimming is not one of those sports where putting on a bunch of mass is going to necessarily help. Creatine didn't hit until like the thing that was the big thing whenever McGuire and Soosnick had home runs. That was 98, 99. Wait, no, 2003 was when they went, the Cubs went to the series. But I think 98 was the home run race.

Yeah, that has to be right. Yeah, because when I was in, I was still swimming. So that would have been 98 or 99. And people started buying protein powder and creatine. And then I think one guy took Andro when you could still buy it at GNC. You see it all the time. And probably college weight rooms and Globo Gyms,

these guys just blow up. And then, you know, I was naive. I wasn't around that stuff. Right. Right. So I'm like, what am I doing wrong here? I was, I wasn't taking steroids, you know? And I learned from my cousin in high school, a lot of the kids that he was

around, they were just juicing, you know? And then I found out from one of my buddies, our whole football team when I was in high school was on a bunch of shit. So were the wrestlers and, you know, there's a lot of drug use and these guys that use drugs, especially in bodybuilding and even Hollywood. I mean, there's no incentive. They have every incentive to use drugs for a movie. You know, you're not getting rewarded for being clean.

It's like, look this way. I need to look like a fucking superhero. Absolutely. So if you're in Hollywood, why are you not? You're not interested by you, Sada. Yeah, exactly. Looking down your door. How you know? It always cracked me up when people would,

by the way, crowd, I'm fucking, I was had nasty pneumonia earlier this week, so my voice is all fucked up, but I'm doing my best here. But yeah, like you're gonna virtue signal a fucking actor. He's in a movie. He's a caricature as it is. So, when I'd see that, that didn't bother me so much. What bothered me was they'd say

that I did this training program and I followed this diet and I now look this way and it was all in three months. A colleague of ours at ASU used to say, you know why all these programs and studies are 12 weeks? And I'm like, why? And then he'd say, cause that's the length of an academic semester. It's actually 16, but you gotta recruit,

do all these tests and do all these other things. So, yeah. Yeah. So that's a pervasive problem in the gym business, you know? And that's typically, I don't know how much, cause you know, you said, like you said, people aren't all lifers anymore. So you probably get, you get a fair number of people

that aren't athletes. I don't know how much of this you deal with, but some people, a lot of people come into a weight room expecting to look like somebody else in the weight room. And that could vary from one sport to the other, one gym environment to the other. Absolutely. And how have you dealt with that?

Oh, I mean, whenever someone comes in, we try to, we try to temper our expectations. I would say we don't deal with as much about people trying to look like somebody. Okay. Most of the people who come to us know. CrossFit didn't do that to your business? CrossFit has not necessarily done that to us. Most of our people come in understanding that this is a sport. However, the unrealistic image that we get is people expect to be lifting national level numbers within like two to three months. We get that too. Oh, that I'm sure that happens

just everywhere. And, but we get the people who were athletes. And I think that's what it, one of my, one of my athletes, one of my assistant coaches, and he's been in this forever, he's another Lifer, he's here with me. He's kind of marketed himself as, whenever someone first comes in, his first question to them is, what sport did you fail before you chose weightlifting?

And he's, but it's real. Like a lot of these people are athletes to begin with, but they just expect that coming into this sport, they're going to get to be athletes and they're going to get to experience great amounts of success because, well, they were athletic before. They played football, they played something else. They benched three plates in high school. That's my favorite. Yeah, on the lifting side, we get people that, we're kind of responsible for this because we tell people, oh, 500 is not that heavy, any man can do it. I've never done it.

Yeah, that's because you don't train the fucking deadlifts. That's true. But we'll get guys that will come in and they wanna squat 405, they wanna pull 500 and they want to, you know, squat 405. They want to pull 500 and they want to weigh 185 and be 10% body fat. And, you know, the guys doing that are like yourself. They're fucking athletic as fuck and can exceed those types of numbers. Yeah. Just because they have vertical jumps over 30 and lots of muscle mass, lots of type two motor units.

And they don't understand this. They just see a body, right? They're like, this lean jacked guy did it and I want to do what he did. And I'm like, well, fuck, I want to do what Michael Jordan did. I'm not going to get to six six and have a 42 inch vertical and, you know,

have Michael Jordan's genetics. It's not going to happen, you know? Right. But it amazes me because then you go on the internet. You probably don't deal with this as much. You probably deal with versions of this, I'd imagine, because in any organization or sport or institution of any kind,

it's like when you hire contractors, they always shit on the other contractor and say they could do it better. Oh, of course. So I post something up and they'll say, you're not even that fucking strong. How dare you give advice? And I'm closing in on a deadlift that's near,

I'm probably gonna hit 585, things go well, hope things go well. Thanks for moving well. Yeah, you've been watching it. I'm in here cheering for you. And I get it, it's not competitive. Power lifters, the top five are pulling, I mean, forget that, Eddie Hall and Thor pulled over,

what, 1,100? Yeah, 500 kilos. Yeah, with straps and a suit, I guess, and powerlifting, it's somewhere around 1,000. I don't think, I don't know, I think they broke in 1,000, but I believe it was Sumo, so I don't count it. But, okay, so I'm pulling little over half

of what the top guy is pulling. But most people that go into a gym aren't trying to compete in fucking powerlifting, you know? I'm not a powerlifting gym, you know? I'm just trying to get regular people to get more out of the weight room than what Muscle and Fitness and all these bullshit magazines have offered them, you know? Like you consume probably a lot of the same content I did when you were younger. It was, you have to isolate every muscle, do a bunch of

exercises, eight to 12 reps, short rest periods, deadlift, what's that? It all sounds so familiar. Arms and chest. It's led to people thinking that they have to go in the weight room, beat the shit out of themselves with reps and volume And that lifting weights should be an endurance stimulus And this is something that I go off about all the time on here and I've talked to you about it Yeah, and the idea that lifting something heavy using lots of muscles and joints For a handful of sets a handful of days of the week, seems foreign, seems boring,

and they think it's not enough, you know? And this goes to your sport, anything with momentum does nothing for you. That's the new, that's not a new thing, but bodybuilders believe that. Oh, I've heard that so many times. Well, younger bodybuilders. Right.

Arnold used plenty of momentum in the seventies. Arnold used to do weightlifting movements. He used to clean in his off season. Yeah, he depressed like 250 or something. Oh yeah, he was actually very athletic. Yeah, oh yeah, I'm sure his vertical jump was high. Probably. He was just tall, so it's not his sport, you know?

Right. But yeah, we'll get people, we'll put them on a linear progression and they think they're going to squat 500 by the end of it. And we'll get that or they'll just want to keep squatting forever because they want to keep adding five pounds or they want a 300 pound bench. And when you're not a competitive athlete that's in a sport and you're just trying to build muscle and get stronger, you're going to have to grow, you know, and you're going

to put on body fat and that's all there is to it, right? Absolutely. And the thing we tell these guys is that by not doing so, they're setting themselves up for injury, stagnation, lack of progress, and to kind of segue there, you know, they're setting themselves up for injury, stagnation, lack of progress, and to kind of segue there, you know, you're pretty lean. And one of the trade-offs to that is shit hurts, right? All the time. So even this guy who's really athletic,

you're training with heavy weights, you know, I mean, they're not, in academia, we laugh about this, they call it maximum maximorum. Absolutely, let's add a definition to everything. Let's just make up a word, add laugh about this. They call it maximum maximorum. Absolutely. Let's add a definition to everything. Let's just make up a word, add definition to everything. So what that really means is you're maxing out. Yes.

You don't do that, but you're still lifting a decent amount of fucking weight. I mean, tell the audience your PRs. My best snatch is 124 kilos. Again, I did that at 73 kilos. Take 275, people. Oh, yeah, about 275. And then my. Again, I did that at 73 kilos. Take 275, people. Oh yeah, about 275. And then my best clean, I did 159.

So that's 350 pounds. Yeah. Just over. Yeah, so these aren't fucking, this isn't 135. This isn't lightweight. It's light compared to a max squat or a max deadlift, but you're handling some weight in 165 to 170 pound body, right? And shit hurts.

All the time. So, this is another thing that we've run into. People don't want to gain body weight because they don't want to be fat, right? Absolutely. But mass moves mass. Yes. If you're trying to lift the most you can lift, you have to gain weight. And if you're weak as shit and you remain weak as shit as a lean, unathletic person, you're also going to

have to gain weight just to get less mediocre or to at least go from below average to average. Yeah. You know, like the guy who's struggling to bench 135 at 150 pounds, he's going to be a fluffy 185 to get that thing up. And at the end, he's still going to probably be mediocre. But just like you could probably clean a lot more if you were, what, 80, 85, something like that. Sure.

Let's just throw some numbers out there. Absolutely. We always joke about you being 100. Man, I can't even imagine my frame carrying 100. Dude, Ed Cohen was about your size, but he was 100. That's insane. That's fucking crazy. Yeah.

He got to 110 at one point. There's no way. Can you imagine being 110? I can't imagine how much I would have to eat to get to 110. 242 people. I don't know how many metric system people are listening, but if you gain more weight, you lift more weight.

Absolutely. But these guys don't want to do it. And I'm like, I'm sorry that you're not athletic and can't lift a bunch of weight lean. And getting fat would make you an elite person. You know? Yeah. For me, I'm would make you an elite person, you know? Like for me, I'm slightly above average. What's the average vertical 20?

I think. I think, yeah, like 18. Yeah, 18. So I'm like slightly above that. So I'm able to do decent, right? But even in that, I've had to gain body weight, get quote unquote fat, you know, and then lose it and do it again, right?

And that's what a lot of people have to do just to get decent numbers. But then the other thing that I run into is, you know, when you're a novice, you get in a linear program, you get strong, honeymoon phase, newbie gains. Remember newbie gains when you were young? Oh, I love those.

Yeah, I got a girl who's literally hit a PR every week for the last like six weeks because she started six weeks ago and that's what you do. And you don't have to do a whole lot. Right. It's fantastic. Yeah. But once you get past probably that first year,

you have to start thinking about your lifestyle. It starts to affect your lifestyle. You have to eat a certain way. You have to sleep a certain way. You can't party. You can't be a fucking frat boy on the weekends. I mean, you can, but you might miss that snatch. Inevitably, because at this point, your body's changing, you're pushing limits, your tendons, your muscles are handling more.

The risk of injury gets higher and I'm not gonna say it's a high risk of injury, but something inevitably is going to hurt at some point and the severity of that's going to vary. You might have a back tweak where you can't bend for a few days. You might have tendonitis where it's just kind of annoying the shit out of you

and it's there. Or it could be so bad that you can't bench because your fucking arms are so tight. I mean, you don't bench, but you know what I mean? Absolutely. And that's just a byproduct of pushing limits. Yeah. Now, when you add in competitions,

like formal competitions, medals, records, all those things, what happens when you get hurt and something's on the calendar? You suck it up and you find a way to deal with it. There's no other way around it. You got stories. I wanna hear these. I've got all kinds of stories.

I mean, you mentioned tendonitis. You mentioned those. I mean, I've had tendonitis so bad that I couldn't sleep unless I literally wedged my knee so that it was locked and completely extended. If it would bend at all, it would just start throbbing and wake me up in the middle of the night. I'd have to get up and move.

Like it was, it was that bad. But what did I do is I found a way to modify my training just enough that I could get through it. And I still competed two weeks later because that's when the competition was. And I had to be ready. Um, one of the first things that I make my athletes do whenever they come in, one of the first days I'm going to push them to failure on a back squat, you just back

swags. That's a pretty easy one. It's a pretty simple one. Most of them pretty familiar with it. Um, I'm not teaching them a snatch. I'm having to put anything overhead. This is somebody who squatted before. This is someone who they've experienced it. But I don't care how much they do.

I'm not trying to get them to do a one RM. I'm going to have them. OK, we're going to. I want you to hit like we're going to maybe search for a five arm. It's not a real fire. Yeah, it's not a real five arm. But also, remember, then, it was our sport. We don't use stoppers. It's not a real five arm. Yeah. It's not a real five arm, but also remember then it was our sport. We don't use stoppers. We have rubber plates and we drop. Yeah.

Yeah. Dump. So I don't care how much they do. I want to see how much they're willing to fight. Right. Because that tells me what I need to know about them as an athlete. Right. If they go down and they refuse to give up and they keep trying to fight through it.

Like, okay, you know what? I can work with this person. This person's got a, they've got a career. If they go down and the first sign of fatigue hits and they're like, I'm out of here. Like, okay, you're the Dilettante. Now, here we go. You're the guy who just kind of wants

to say you're a weightlifter. Now let's elaborate there. So first day, they can't do a real 5RM. Oh, absolutely not. They're not doing a 5RM. Their face isn't exploding and turning purple and veins coming out and taking tensing. No, they probably don't know how to brace.

Yeah. But a 5RM on the first day, if they just do it, that last rep, they're struggling, but they're standing up. But then you get those guys, they come up and it's clearly moving and they just dump it. That's what you're talking about, right? That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah.

Like the guys who, they could do this, they're just not. Versus someone who they're, even though they don't know how to do it, they don't know how to get their hips under them. They don't know how to just drive out, but they're trying and they're fighting. And that's what I want to see. I don't care how much weight they're doing. I care to see that they're fighting through it because this is not, I mean, what we do,

even what you do, if you really want to hit your absolute peak, you want to hit your absolute maximum, it's not for the faint of heart. It's hard work. It's going to push you to the absolute limit. It's going to hurt. And especially if you've got someone like us who aren't necessarily eating enough calories to always recover the way we need to, especially we got a competition coming up, it's going to hurt. Of course.

And you better be willing to push through some of that. I should have asked this to let into this topic. Are athletes healthy, Jesse? Oh God, no. Absolutely not. I used to joke around with my students whenever I was teaching and they looked at me like, oh, man, you must be so healthy. You're doing all this. I guess on any given day, I've had 500 milligrams of caffeine and 800 milligrams of ibuprofen by 7 a.m. This is not

a healthy way to live. I'm coming in here and trying to push my limits. And it's not necessary, that's not healthy. No. No, it's just what I had to do to sustain the training that I was putting myself through. Yeah. And really the people who make it the furthest, at least in weightlifting in our sport, the people who make it the furthest are the people

who can push through those little nagging injuries the longest without having a big catastrophic injury. Right. And they're able to continue training for the longest period of time. Those are the ones who are gonna be the most successful. You know, I always think of Demas when you talk about this. Yeah.

You heard a story about 04, right? Yeah. Fucker, I think he had wrist and knee surgery leading into that and he was shooting painkillers in the back. Yeah. And then he still clean and jerked what over, like what well into the mid 400s.

Oh yeah. I mean, he was- 205 that day? Yeah, he was just over 200, maybe in 205. So like that's 450? Yeah. Yeah, he clean and jerked 450 with what most of these, most of our audience here

would consider excruciating pain. Oh, absolutely. He just, he had his wrist worked on, he had his knee worked on. Yeah. I mean, and I often go back, I remember one year, and this was, I was probably, I think I was coming off of my Masters World Championship in 2021, so this would have been 22. And I'm in the gym. And, you know, quite honestly, for me, I'm definitely kind of feeling sorry for myself and my back had been bothering me.

I wasn't quite where I wanted to be and I'm getting ready for nationals that year. And a friend of mine walks into the gym and a friend of mine, he actually won world's strongest firefighter at the Arnold in 2021, same year I won World's. And he comes into the gym and he just kind of looks at me and goes, Jesse, when do we ever feel 100%? And I look at him and go, you know, you're right. I need to shut up and just get back to work. And so I shut up, I got back to work

and I went out and I competed about a month later. Do you remember your first injury? My first real, it depends on what you consider an injury. Where you're your first injury? My first real, well, it depends on what you consider an injury. Where you're like, oh fuck, something happened. What do I do about this? Well, say the first thing that I would say was a real injury, because again,

I differentiate between pain and injury, right? We all do. We all do. My first injury was whenever I tore my tib fib, my ligament in my ankle, and I couldn't run. And so I literally could not run or stand. And that was when I was in high school and I managed to, you know, rehab came back, wound up.

I finished, actually happened in track of all things. I played football and wrestled in high school and never got injured in either of those, but track I managed to. But running is, you know, the thought of youth. Absolutely. It's the thought of youth. It's great. But that was the first injury that I would say that I had. And even then, I, but I pushed myself, I rehabbed and I was back before the season was over and I came back in and finished that season.

Did it hold you back in the least? No, absolutely. And I was determined to get back. Your initial instinct was, I got to figure this shit out. Yeah. What am I going to do? I mean, I will tell you right now, my most recent injury, right? I tore my ACL when I was 39 years old. And 39 years old and you tore an ACL and you're in the sport, most people are probably, you

know, that's that's enough. Eleven months later, I did a competition to qualify for the North American Open. OK, and I came out and finished top ten in the open division at the North American Open this year at 40 years old with one ACL because that it doesn't occur to me that this means that it's over. It just means, OK, now I need to figure out how to train through this and how to push around it. And with one ACL, 40 years old, I hit PR lifetime PRs on my back squat, front squat and clean last year. And so I'm I'm still managing to push through because if you want to compete, if you

want to hit that level, that's what you do. You find ways to train. So you felt great, right? Oh, wonderful. I never had any pain. My my knee still bends the same. I'm not sitting here right now with it stretched out because I can't sit with it bent for too long. I've noticed.

You just find ways to compensate for this shit. You do. You find ways to compensate. And if you want to hit those maximum limits, and this is power lifting, weight lifting, anything, if you want to hit those max limits, you have to literally be comfortable being uncomfortable. A little bit of pain is not an injury

and you better be able to train through it because pain is just an obstacle. You're going to hurt. It's not going to be comfortable. I've never back squatted what you have under bench press what you have. I can't imagine that whenever that bar is sitting above your chest and you're trying to prevent it from coming down and crushing your neck. I can't imagine that's comfortable.

No fuck. No fucking dude. You've watched me with the damn elbow tendonitis, benching the fucking thing crooked for months. Yeah, absolutely. So like, it's not gonna be comfortable. You want to hit these maximums. You want to push yourself to your limits. It's not going to be comfortable. It's going to hurt. You know, I don't know what point this was because I didn't read the earlier Weider publications in the 80s and 90s. And one of our members here as an anesthesiologist, you know who I'm talking about.

He was a consumer of that content in the 80s and 90s. I got into it in the 2000s. And at some point it became about health too. And I don't know what point that was. I don't know if the bodybuilding magazines made it about health. I know that Arnold was on Bush 41's committee or what, you know, those bureaucracies they make for health and fitness or whatever. So at some point they made lifting weights and being jacked about health. And as a result, it drew in basically the dilatants, right?

Right. You're a run of the mill person that is trying to use this to be healthier, but typically what they'll ask for is more muscle mass, more strength, to a level that requires that person to work very hard and take more risks than he thinks he needs to take. I think that certainly when we were in high school, a lot of the magazines started moving towards guys that were about, you know, five, six to five, nine, five, 10, 150 to 170 pounds

low body fat, you know, men's health, men's fitness, remember this shit? And my old co-host Trent and I used to talk about how we think this originated from the movie Fight Club. Remember that? I love that movie. Yeah, it's a great movie. Remember Brad Pitt was like 150 pounds and ripped? And he's shredded.

Yeah, apparently he was benching 275 too. People don't mention that part. But he was benching almost 300 pounds. So he's another one. I bet his vertical jump is decent because he looks athletic. Yeah. Oh, have you ever seen the movie Snatch?

Love the movie Snatch. Yeah, what about it? It's another- Oh, the Pikey. Yeah, it's another Brad Pitt movie where he comes out and just beats the shit out of people. Yeah, yeah. He was the Pikey. Yeah, I love that movie.

I fucking, maybe I'll watch it when I go to bed tonight. Say you should. That's where I learned that if you really want to dispose of a body, you get a pig, right? The pigs will eat it in what it was like, 10 minutes. What do you say, they would chew through that bone like butter. Yep.

He's like, you gotta starve them for a week or whatever. Yeah. But I guess that he's probably an athlete. I would imagine. Because he's probably an athlete. I would imagine. Because he just looks that way. Right. You know?

Yeah. I know they had him work out and they had him do these crazy workouts that he probably didn't need to make him look that way. But I don't know that he took drugs to look that way. I think he's naturally lean and they just made him work out. Right.

You know? And probably didn't take much, you know? Well, and you look at him, he's not, I mean, he's naturally lean. So you put a little bit of muscle, it's going to show. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Just like I remember this much more darker film member, American History X. I do. Edward Norton, he got fucking jacked in that movie.

Yep. And when I was younger, everybody was big, you know. So I was like, he must have taken drugs. I watch it now. I think I actually believe that, he just started lifting and novice effect because he was scrawny, low muscle mass, but also fairly low body fat. So if I put him under a barbell, hit him lift, I'd expect him to look some version of that. And then you add lighting and it was also black and white

for most of it when he was with his shirt off. Yeah, I think all the shirtless scenes were black and white. So yeah, when I watched it recently, I'm like, no, he wasn't that big. Why did I believe that he was on drugs, you know? And now that I've been around powerlifting and shit, you know? But where did I go with that?

Yeah, no, so in the early 2000s, just as we were finishing high school, going into college, this is what was being sold, that you go to the weight room to be healthy, but being healthy is visible abs and muscle mass. And when I did what was necessary to achieve that physique, like I actually am capable of doing that. I have a small waist, I'm small frame,

small wrists, small ankles. And I got my squat up around, first of all, I gained weight. So I had been lifting for years and my upper body was just not really growing much. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wasn't deadlifting or pressing. Yeah. And then when I found starting strength, I was 29,

I started deadlifting regularly. I started pressing overhead and I pushed my body weight up to about, I don't know, 205 that year. Well, 192 the first time, 205 the second time. Okay. And then I, yes, you know, I got sick of the weight gain and then I just, this is when you met me. I'm like, I want to get as ripped as I can. Right. And I cut my calories down and I was about 165 pounds or so, you know, give or take. I think the lowest I ever saw was 162. And I was probably like 10% body fat, you know?

But when I graduated high school, I was 17% body fat at that same weight. I was just, you know, I was bottom heavy. My legs were always strong. I did a lot of biking, you know? I responded well to squatting when I introduced it into my life. I didn't know how to train my upper body well.

But I do not have a vertical jump over 30. I'm not naturally muscular and strong up top without doing anything. Like you and my step brother, my ex step brother, you know, they're built like that. You know, he was built like that. He would just touch weights and people would say, are you on drugs?

You know, my friend Nick in college, he was, you know, a Greek guy. they're built like that. He was built like that. He would just touch weights and people would say, are you on drugs? My friend Nick in college, he was a Greek guy. You could see every muscle in this dude's body. He'd start touching weights and he'd look like he was getting ready to go to a bodybuilding show. And he's like, I should just fucking take it because people think I'm on it.

That was not my trajectory. I had to get fat, get fat. I was probably what, 25% body fat's the highest I ever get. And that's considered super fat. And yeah, if you're a couch potato at 25% body fat, yes, that's fat, you're a fat slob. But if you're a strength athlete, that's not that fat. That's probably the upper limit, you know?

And you're absolutely not fat. And you see it in your sport. You know, once you get past, what'd you say, 100 kilos? Oh, I probably, maybe you can get the anomaly 96 is who are still pretty ripped. And that's like two twelve. Yeah. And maybe you can get those guys. But once you cross that hundred, those guys aren't shredded.

The guys winning or not. Right. No, absolutely not. The I mean, you're yeah, you're bigger guys. They have mass and they have bellies because they have to eat in order to sustain. You have to eat in order to sustain the training they're doing. Yeah. I mean, there's no way you're surviving. A lot of those guys, especially if they're getting to that really top level, these guys are doing some of them are doing multiple sessions a day. some of them are doing multiple sessions a day and you're not sustaining that level of training. If you're not eating, they're going to have bellies and they have to. You know what? They're still

moving lots and lots of weight. They're still athletes. And the funny thing about that is because they have bellies, their mechanics are completely different than yours. Very different. And that you'd argue, and I don't know, you could speak to this, that the pull is less efficient when you have a belly, but yet, you're lifting more fucking weight. Oh yeah. By far, I mean, well have you ever seen Lasha lift? Oh yeah.

I mean, this guy's a monster, right? Yeah. And he's, granted, he's inhuman. I mean, this guy's like six, eight, 400 pounds. He's an absolute monster. But, I mean, he walks out and he's got a belly and he's got to move the bar around it to get it. If you actually want to see someone who the one that has always baffled me, there's an Iranian lifter, his name is Sorab Maradi.

And watch this guy. The first time I ever saw him, I think it was the 2016 Olympics and he's coming out in Brazil. And he was a 96. So he's a this guy. The first time I ever saw him, I think it was the 2016 Olympics and he's coming out in Brazil and he was a 96. So he's a big guy and all of these and you do, you get these anomalies, you get these shredded 96 guys and they come out and they lift. And after everyone has done, every other athlete finishes, out comes lumbering this guy who looks like he just got out of bed, smoked a cigarette and had a beer on his way to the thing. Hey, walking out with just a big old pot belly. Like John Daly.

Just like hair, hair, all a mess, big old pot belly. And he kind of lumbers out to the bar. And if you're the last lifter, that means you're the one lifting the heaviest weights. And he walks out here and on his opening attempt, wins the competition because he was just he was the strongest one in here. And no, he did. He didn't look like he was shredded, but he was the one who's moving the most weight and moving around his little potbelly. But it's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like John Daly in golf.

It's like the same thing. Same concept. Yeah. Smoking cigarettes hungover, still drunk. This guy, he looks like he was, I swear, go back and if you can find this, it was the 2016 Olympics and he did, hair is disheveled, he looks like he rolled out of bed, smoked a cigarette, and then stepped

onto a weightlifting stage. So that brings up a good point, because like you said, you run a sport club primarily, so I don't know how much of this you deal with, but I'll get people that come and they will get wrapped up in every piece of my new show. Oh man, man, maybe if I didn't have that drink or maybe if I slept an extra hour and like all these things. And I'm like, all that matters, you need to sleep good, you need not be a drunk, you need to eat reasonably well,

but if you drink once during the week, you're probably gonna be fine in the grand scheme of things. If you miss the protein shake one day, you're probably gonna be fine, and all that. And they get wrapped in the minutia. And then I have to point out, I'm like, when you go to fucking meets and you see people that are like performing,

they're getting away with all sorts of shit. You know, and I get it, you know, genetics is a big part of that. But also it should affect them too, you know? I mean, alcohol affects your nervous system. Yeah, absolutely. But we live in an interesting time where I'm sure you do run into this. People like to major in the minors.

Oh, 100%. And you probably saw this as an instructor. Were you a professor, technically? Technically, I was a professor. Okay. Yeah. So you were a professor. Yeah.

Because, you know, so people don't know this. In academia, you got these, these elitist pricks with PhDs, you know, so people don't know this, in academia, you got these elitist pricks with PhDs, you know, and then there's people like my ex-girlfriend, she has a PhD and she's not elitist, right, but there's like a whole caste system, right, so if you have a PhD and you do research, you're like a first-tier citizen, right? Absolutely. And if you have a PhD and you don't do research, you're a second class citizen. And if you don't have a PhD and you teach, you're a serf. They kind of forget you exist.

You don't even exist, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I didn't know what to make of it when I first met you, because you were pretty much fucking done and you're like, fuck this, right? I had already come to that conclusion.

Yeah, yeah. I wasn't surprised, because when I first first met you in 2012, you were like, yeah, I don't even know who did this project. You're like, my mentor said, do whatever projects you need to graduate, then do the one you want when you go to work.

Yeah, that's about it. Did I remember that conversation correctly? Welcome to academia. Yeah, that's about it. That I remember that conversation correctly. Welcome to academia. Yeah. You don't remember the conversation. I really don't. Does that sound like something you would've said? It sounds like something I would say.

It sounds like a conversation I would've had. So I was a little peon on the outside trying to get on the inside, right? And you were the only person I remember fucking talking to. I think I talked to Zach Ziegler too. Okay. Yeah. But I talked to you and you were the only person that looked like they trained.

So I think that's probably why we started talking. Probably it. And you just looked totally fucking burnt out with it. Fast forward, I go there, you're working there and then I hear that you just got to the very end and said, fuck it. You know? But yeah. Why did I, how did I get on that again? But yeah. In academia, if you don't have a PhD, you don't exist. No, no, you, you're a peon. You don't exist. They forget that you're even there. You're, I mean, you're the one who's actually talking to the students and doing all this, but your opinion doesn't even matter. Even though a lot of these people have the most sense most of the time, that's what I've noticed. Honestly. And as I look around, I think the people,

the people who are actually taught teaching and talking to students, I think the people who are actually teaching and talking to students, they're the ones who probably actually care the most that are trying to do this. Some of my best instructors are community college. Yeah, absolutely. So when you were a professor, and I'm sure you deal with this in here, you get a lot of people that major in the minors. They want to know all this minutiae, but then are they even doing the basics? Like what, talk about that. Usually not. This is, we see this all the time, right? You get these people and they

come in and they want to ask, okay, what, what supplement should I take? When should I be taking it? Should I be taking this? Should I be taking that? I read in this magazine that this guy is doing this thing. And the bottom line, you have to look at it and be like, okay, how much sleep did you get last night? Yeah. When did you go to bed? Oh, 3 a.m. Okay, what time did you get up? Eight?

Like, okay, all right. So five hours of sleep. That about, yeah, that's about average. All right. What about water? Do you drink water? Well, I had coffee and I had an energy drink. Okay, so no.

If you're not hitting these, if you're not hitting, if you're not drinking water, if you're not getting the right amount of sleep, if you're not eating your protein, the rest doesn't matter. Why are you focusing on this last little 2% when you're missing 98% of the picture and not getting it right? But we see it all the time. The number of students I had when I was teaching who would ask, what type of stack should I be taking? Or the people come in here, should I need to be? Should I be taken creatine? Should I be doing this? You've been training for two weeks.

Stop worrying about if you should be training. It goes beyond supplements, too. I even get it with like gear. Should I should I be getting this gear? Should I be get a pair of weightlifting shoes? Right. And train for a couple of years and then we'll start talking about the rest of the stuff. But no, they want the they want this fancy gear because it's going to make a difference. They want this supplement because it's going to make a difference.

If you're not if you're not sleeping, if you're not hydrating and if you're not getting your protein, it really doesn't matter. Right. Those three and hit them 80 percent of the time. And you're going to take care of 90 percent of what you need to take care of. And then it's not going to matter if you want to, if you want to have a drink, it's not going to kill you at the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I mean, I will say I go dry, a hundred percent dry a month out from competition because it's time for me to focus on that. Make sense. I would do the same. Yeah. It's time for

me to focus in. I'm not going to touch anything.'m gonna go 100% dry. But until then, if I wanna enjoy a drink, then I'm gonna go and do it. I mean, say a cold beer and a hot bowl of ramen is a treat for my wife and I quite often whenever we get out of here late at night, and we wanna go in and do it. So yeah, absolutely, enjoy it. I'm not gonna turn that down.

A burger and fries is my go-to meal. I mean, I love it. We just had that. I love In-N-Out. I will eat that three times a week if I... I'm like, this will put him in a good mood for the show. So I bought us some In-N-Out right beforehand. It's a great bribery. Works every time.

But yeah, so people always assume that I'm like, no, I'm going to eat a burger when I want a burger. I'm going to have a beer if I want a beer. It's just that 80% of the time, I'm going to get eight hours of sleep. I'm going to make sure that I'm hydrating, getting the right amount of electrolytes and doing all of those things. And I'm going to eat my protein. And you hit those big three and then yeah, you can step off every now and then and be perfectly fine. Yeah. It's not going to make or break you. No, absolutely not. Time and place for it. Yeah. But I do. I see the hairless from people all the time, especially whenever they're first starting, right?

So it's always the people who are in their first like six months and they're really excited and they're really gung-ho and they think that this is gonna give them that advantage and that edge. And the longer you get into it, I think the more everyone eventually comes to realize, it's just hard work. It's just fucking hard and it's repetitive too.

Well, and that's the other thing is people who think that they're gonna come in and it's gonna be like CrossFit and you going to do something different every day and you're going to something like, no, the best people. And this doesn't matter what it is. If you're powerlifting, if you're weightlifting, the best programs and the athletes who are making it are the people who are doing the same boring things over and over and over again and getting really good at them. And that's how you progress in sport. It's anything like it really is. If you're going to play a musical instrument, it's the same thing. Yes. You know, it's repetition. Dorian Yates talked about this in bodybuilding.

He's like, you know, had five or six exercises that worked. Yeah. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You just do the same thing over and over and get really good at it. I've noticed you know, I've Developed several skills of my life, you know Academia was something I fucking hated but I figured out a game, you know, yeah and It was a lot of repetition, you know, there's a lot of repetition I was a DJ that was a lot of repetition

And at some point it got better, right? And then to take it further, I didn't care enough. Like I never got into scratching and shit. Cause I got to a point where I'm like, oh, if I beat match a song and it sounds good, I make money. And I'm like, well, I want to produce. Then I didn't want to produce.

I'm like, I want to learn that skill, you know? And I walked away, you know? But it would have just required me to, you know, sit there on the computer every day with a key. It's different skill. I think I liked the performance aspect of it. And I wanted it to sound good enough to be better than the jerk-offs

at your typical college bar, you know? Basically, the basics needed to be there to go further. Obviously, look, I'm doing something different now, right? But just working through all these different skills, dog training, you've watched me do that, right? You've been watching me with a nine to 11 week old puppy. She just turned 11 weeks this week. When I got her she was nine weeks.

Yeah, she's the cutest damn thing. It's gonna break my heart to give her back. But for the audience, I signed a contract with a dog training company. I'm fostering one of their police dogs and I'm also learning the training. I meet with them once a week, well actually more than that

because I train my other dogs there. So I end up getting a couple sessions a week with them. If I can get more, I will. But just learning all these skills, right? This is dog number six for me. I got my first dog, my ex-girlfriend took her. Then I got my second dog. She's here in the other room and your wife loves her.

Oh yeah. The whole team loves her. Then I got a third dog that that one was intentionally purchased from my ex-girlfriend. So I trained it for a year. Then she got to keep her. That was the plan. The first dog was not on plan. She took her, we're on good terms,

but damn that dog. I love that dog. But then the fourth dog was a wash, a police washout from the company that I'm training the puppy for. And now actually this is not number six, number five. And now this is the fifth dog. And I've agreed to take her for a year and help develop her for either police work or personal protection, depending on what, how she develops as a puppy. Well, first dog drove me insane. And a lot of it was repetition

once I did get some formal training, but there were a lot of gaps there, right? Second dog, I almost got rid of her. Natalie almost never met her. I almost got rid of this, because it was my first dog that came from a working line. She's a German shorthaired pointer. So I didn't know what I was dealing with.

I had a dog with a lot of drive that didn't seem to care about getting filthy. She would have poop accidents in the crate and then not even be ashamed of it. So she was what they call a dirty dog for those people who are not dog people. That's a term, dirty dog. That's where getting crap on yourself literally is a vice.

And when she was a puppy, she was like that. And she doesn't have accidents now, she's an adult, but I dealt with all sorts of, I was going crazy and I was finishing up my dissertation at the time. So I hired this company that I now work with. They trained her up and then they taught me, they're like, look, this dog wants to find birds,

bring them back to you. That's her job, that's what they're bred for. If you want dog does more things, then you might want to get a Malinois. That's when I got my boy. Well, now that I'm training this Dutch Shepherd, Malinois mix, I believe she's a Dutch Shepherd, Malinois mix, she might be get a Malinois. That's when I got my boy. Well, now that I'm training this Dutch Shepherd Malinois mix, I believe she's a Dutch Shepherd Malinois mix. She might be a pure Malinois, but the Brindle,

I think the mother's a dutchie, but maybe not. Anyways, I got this dog from a line of working dogs, and it's not stressful at all, because it's just repetition. You're on a schedule. I got to let her out every so many hours. And then I just got a worker, and it's all stressful at all, because it's just repetition. You're on a schedule. I gotta let her out every so many hours. And then I just gotta work her, and it's all movements at this point.

There's no commands, there's no corrections. She's a puppy. Let her out for 10 to 15 minutes, back in the kennel, do it again three hours later, and then make sure she gets out at night. The point is it's repetitive, it's boring, you know? It's not the fun flashy stuff you watch in these dog videos, you know, that comes later, but even to get that dog there,

that's just repetition. So the point is it's repetition. It's repetition, anything's repetition. You wanna get good at something, you gotta repeat. You wanna get good at writing, you have to write lots of articles or write books or whatever it is you're writing, right? If you're gonna sing, you gotta sing a lot.

You're not gonna become a better singer by playing the drums, you know? I try to explain this to people all the time, right? If I wanted to, so I can do the clean and jerk and the snatch, if I wanted to get good at it, I'd have to specialize in it and do what you guys do. And I've been flirting with that idea since I met you. I think after this training cycle, it's gonna happen

because to go further with what I'm doing, I gotta get heavy and stay heavy. And this really took it out of me two years. I'm heavier than I've ever been. It's like what you were saying and the reason I wanted to do this episode, I feel like shit, man, you know? And it's different.

So like in your case, you're a lightweight competitor. You're considered lightweight, right? I am considered, yeah, right? I am considered. Yeah, I guess I would be lightweight. Yeah. Yeah. Because when does it get heavy? 120?

I would say you're probably starting to get heavy-ish at about a heavy, maybe middle heavy at 89, 96 is heavy and then 102, 109. Right. So you're lightweight and you're competitive and you're lean. So shit hurts all the fucking time. Yes. On the other end of the spectrum, we talked about this. We were talking about this the other day.

The fat guys, they've, he not hurt so much from an orthopedic standpoint, right? But they get sleep apnea. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. These are the guys who are going to have a CPAP when they're in their forties. I mean, I haven't interviewed a super heavy weight weightlifter, but I would suspect in the powerlifters too, that there's probably a fraction of them on CPAPs. Oh, I'm certain of it.

Yeah. I know a lot of the strongmen guys and yeah, they have a lot of trouble. My wife coached a strongman. She was a nutrition coach for a strongman athlete. He had an event coming up and she had to grow him. And this is a guy who is already huge. Right. And they had to get him. They wanted to get him over 150 kilos. That's 330 people. This is 330. And they so they started eating. And I think at his top, they had him eating somewhere between 12 and 13,000 calories a day.

Yeah. And he had sleep apnea and he literally had to get a CPAP to make it through training to get to his competition. And he went to the competition, he did fine. And then afterwards decided he didn't want to do that anymore. And so she's actually continued working with him. He's down to about 118 kilos now, which is for a guy who's six, four actually pretty, pretty, pretty built guy. So very healthy now, but he, but this was a trade off and he knew what he was doing. He knew I want to get as big as humanly possible. So I'm going to do that, but I'm going to have to deal with

having these other health problems, having breathing problems and all of those things. So I am not on a CPAP and I don't have sleep apnea so far as I know, but I know that based on the last time I gained weight, I was still in a relationship and she said that I snored louder when I was heavier. And you know, I'm sure if I kept gaining more weight, I'd probably get sleep apnea.

And I know guys that have gained weight and not gotten super fat and have gotten it, right? And some of them have taken CPAPs and others have not. They're like, fuck this, that's not worth it, right? I knew one guy, he got so muscular, he needed a CPAP. His traps got really big and he couldn't breathe. Because he didn't get, he got quote unquote fat. The guy was still probably like 19% body fat.

You know, like he was another gifted athlete. He squatted close to 600 at 198 pounds. He's six foot one. He was, he was really athletic. Um, and I'm going to get him on here at some point, but, um, our viewers and listeners here are not, they're not competing in sports, they're not in this for competition, but they want to go from point A to point B. They want to train, right? So it starts with, if you go down to the lowest level, you're exercising,

you're going in, you're moving weights, you're maybe doing some cardio, and you're getting a health benefit from that. And you're not necessarily pushing any of that up, right? You're just kind of showing up, you're doing something, going home. Then you introduce training. Now you're trying to go from point A to point B. And if you're novice, that happens painlessly, low risk. Nothing should really hurt if you're doing things correctly. And by that, I mean your form's good, you're gaining the proper amount of weight, you're eating good. You're not necessarily getting super fat, but if you're too skinny, you're gaining some weight. If you're too fat, you're losing some weight, et cetera. We're not getting into extremes yet here.

Then at the next level above that, now you're trying to either achieve additional, you're trying to push your performance to a much higher level that's now gonna require months and years. And then the highest level is what you're doing. Now you are introducing deadlines. The difference between you and I are deadlines.

That's really it. Yeah. Is because you will, and again, you can continue pushing, you can continue growing, you continue eating, you continue just progressing. I progress as far as I can up to a certain point and then I'm gonna have to start losing weight and you're not putting on, so you're taking that step back. So it really is its deadlines, right?

You can continue progressing unlimited. You continue eating, you continue pushing, you continue progressing. I have to cut it off. At certain points, I cut off and prepare for competition. And, I hated meats because it would interrupt the PRs. Yeah. And for me, it was always about PRs. I wanted more muscle mass, more strength. And I know that I need to do a powerlifting meat

to get that fucking pathetic total off my record, just for nothing else. Just self-ride. I mean, if you look me up on whatever powerlifting watch, there's a website. It shows a meat from 2017 where I was 160 pounds because I think I was hanging out at 165, but I didn't know I was in the afternoon session. So I fasted for 17 hours and it was in California and it was raining and I was too lean.

So I was shivering and I grabbed the barbell and I could barely feel the bar. My fingers are so cold that day. It was a horrible meet. My total was embarrassing and one of these internet trolls is like, Oh, look at this guy's total. Even though I got a bunch of videos showing that I can do more than that, but that's irrelevant. These people are single celled organisms. They're fucking amoebas. So I got to do, I got to just check.

I can probably walk into one of those and fix that total, you know, without peeking. But I digress. Yeah, for years I hated meats because of that, you know. I'm just like, well, if I go there and it's not there, then I don't get the PR, you know. Which is a different mindset. It puts me in this weird category.

And a lot of my clients are in the same category I'm in where they want to get to a certain point, which is good. Training is good. I think a lot of people should be exposed to training where you're going from point A to point B. I think you all should. Yeah, everybody should.

It builds character. It's something. If you don't want to do it in the weight room, go learn an instrument or whatever and get past the point where the easy stuff is done. Because working through it, like spending four years on something teaches you things. And it teaches you patience, it teaches you to stick with something. That used to be what a degree really meant, that you show up somewhere every day and finish.

Did you see Tulsa King yet? He talks about that. He's like, look, you think your degree means your employers that you show up to work every day for, or that you show up somewhere every day and do something for four years and something, something, something. It's a good move, it's a good show. But I think training is important.

And a lot of people that hire me wanna train, but then they don't understand that when you train past that novice phase, you're introducing risk. Things are going to hurt. If you push it far enough, and I mean, if you're past that first year, it's not about health. No. It's still about health, but it's not about health.

Right? Like, even if you're not beholden to deadlines, records, and metals, right? Even if you're like me and you're trying to continue getting to a new point, it's no longer about health primarily. And I try to explain that, right? So if you're a guy who had a fight for a 200 squat and you really want a 300 squat, I'm sorry to say, dude, shit's going to hurt. You're going to have setbacks. You might get sleep apnea. If you're somebody who needs to gain weight. I'm not saying you will, I'm not saying you should, I'm saying these are the things that have happened to people that have

pushed it, right? And this upsets people because they think they can be healthy, pain-free, and make this kind of progress and I'm sorry that your vertical jump is 16 fucking inches. I'm sorry, you know? It doesn't mean you're fucked. I mean, you're fucked, but not in the way you think you are. You know, you could still make progress, but you're gonna have to do the things that Jesse does or that I do, probably more of what I do

unless you go into competitions. And just to get to where this motherfucker was a baseline. Yeah, right. And that's real. And you talk about timelines in general and overarching timelines. One of my again, my assistant, my assistant coach, he once told me, he goes, I like telling people when they start off, it takes five years to learn how to weight lift. It takes five years to learn how to get good at this with just the repetition and then you can start getting strong.

And for the average person, that's really what it is. It's going to take you a couple years at least, maybe not five, but it's going to take you a couple years to learn what you're trying to do. And then you can start getting good at it. Once you've mastered it, now you push past that novice phase. Now you get to start getting in here. And now you're going to find out what's your mental fortitude. Are you able to push through this? Are you going to be able to deal with knowing

I either have to put on some weight and get stronger and push myself through this, or I'm gonna have to deal with this pain and I'm gonna have to push myself to this new limit. And again, I mean, your lifers are gonna do it because they wanna do it, but a lot of people aren't. Right. Yeah. It's not for them.

They're gonna give up. They're gonna move on and find something else to go be a novice at so they can feel good about making gains quickly. There's a lot of program hoppers, you know. Oh, a ton of them. Or activity hoppers. Yes.

You know, they go from one thing to the next because they keep chasing that high of something new. Yeah. But you know, I got, I get a lot of people that want to train that will keep doing this, but understand it's not going to come without risk. No. You know, in the beginning, sure.

You know, for a year, you'll have, you should be able to have a good year without any interruption. Yeah. But once it gets fucking legitimately hard when it gets heavy, there are things that are gonna happen that might be at odds with your health to some degree.

It might be a low degree, it might be a high degree. I don't know, and I'm not gonna speak to individual situations, but some of the things I've seen is, if you stick with it long enough, you might have a tweak here and there. I haven't seen anybody require surgery because of the weight room.

What you do, there's impact involved. So I would expect that that could happen because you're jumping and landing with weight essentially. But with what I do, we're standing, lifting weights, laying on a bench. I know that people have had rotator cuff repair, benching fucked up, you know, we teach people to bench in a way where that should not happen. I have not had a client need rotator cuff repair with the way that I've taught

them on a bench, thankfully knock on wood, nobody fucked themselves up please. But, uh, you know, this idea that you're going to be pain free and in perfect health while you're trying to push the limits of your body. Think about what that means. You're going to push the limits of your body to set new limits, right? Think about that. Which means that you have to stress your body to the point to make it adapt. Yes.

In the beginning, that stress is low, but as you do this longer and longer, it gets higher and higher and higher. And at some point you gotta decide, okay, I had to work my ass off for a 225 pound squat. And I don't know if you've had these people in weightlifting, 100 kilos is hard for some people that I train. Yeah. If you've experienced that, yeah.

Yeah, quite a few. And when I was a younger lifter, before I was a coach, I'm like, that's absurd. You must be doing something wrong. Some people just have shitty genetics for that. But they're very smart people sometimes. And they have other things that they're good at. But sometimes I've seen 100 kilo squats that were hard.

But then they want 140, which 308 to you, 315, 143, right? They want three plates on the bar. And I'm like, well, to do that, you're probably gonna have to be fat for a while. Such shit might hurt, you know, then you'll lose the weight, et cetera. But at that point, you know, once you're past that first year,

you've now introduced a competitive element to it. Would you agree with that? Oh yeah, you're starting to compete. Would you agree with that? Oh yeah. If you're not competing against other people the way we are, you're competing against yourself. And you're trying to train. It's now, you no longer have that novice effect and you're going to have to push yourself further and further and try to push yourself harder to get this.

Going back to academia and our terminology, you remember the law of diminishing returns? Yes. Yeah. I like that one. Yeah. And that one, it, but it makes sense. That one's actually practical. Exactly. The longer you go and the more advanced you get, the harder you have to work to get the smallest little increase. I added my last, so I PR my back squat this past year, actually in November. Right.

Right. The time before that, the previous PR that I had was in 2022. In about three years. It was about three, it was actually a little over because it was July of 20, well, July of 22, came back in November of 24. So about a little over two years.

In that time, you know how much I added to my back squat? Kilo? One kilo. I went from 200 to 201, and I couldn't have been happier. That was two years of work. It was rehab from an ACL. It was everything else, but putting that one kilo on my back squat, I'm good for a year.

I could get, I don't need another PR for another year. I'm going to be great. But you have to work harder and harder. And after about that year, like you said, after about a year, you have to be willing to push yourself to those limits to be able to see smaller and smaller returns. And a lot of people don't have the ability to push

through that discomfort, that little pain. And you know, most people aren't gonna do what you're doing. Right. You know, so they have it easier in some sense. Like I don't have deadlines to worry about. Exactly. And if I'm hurt, I just rehab the injury, you know? That's that.

That must be nice. Yeah. And so the point is that, you know, after a year, the amount of risk is not super high. You're not gonna fucking become handicapped, but this is not gonna go smoothly is what I'm saying. And I don't think this is spelled out well. Bodybuilders are the worst with this

because those motherfuckers are so inflexible and everything hurts and they don't mention it. Unless you talk to them in private, they'll tell you, yeah, my elbows, my wrists, my fucking knees, everything fucking hurts because they're training everything in isolation. And people will look at them and just based on their appearance,

oh, they're lean, they're muscular, they must be in good health. It's not about fucking health at that point. You know, they're not a bunch of steroids and they fucking are training in such a way that's gonna piss off your tendons when you're doing that much volume and isolation, you know?

So I think that the, what I'm trying to, I'm kind of trying to summarize here. You know, if you want to use lifting weights for exercise, I think that's appropriate, that's fine. You know, and you'll get strong real fast in three to 12 months. You know, you'll get strong pretty fast. But to 12 months. You'll get strong pretty fast. But if you're not satisfied with where you're at

after a year, then now it's no longer exercise. No. You know, it is now training. Yeah, you need to find a training regimen. Yeah. Yeah. And there are gonna be risks with that training. Obviously, if you are drug-free, have good coaching and move well, you're minimizing those risks.

And these risks pale in comparison to legacy sports like soccer, football, et cetera. I mean, what we're talking about, when I say risk, we're talking about tendonitis, a back tweak, a knee tweak here and there. I mean, your sport's higher risk than mine again, cause there's impact. Impact always adds risk. Yeah, it's ballistic. It's very different.

But even then, you are in better shape than a soccer player. Yeah. The injury risk is like a quarter of what it is. Right. Yeah. But it's not zero. It's never zero. No. You start pushing your body, it's not zero. No. And go ahead. Oh, no. And it shouldn't be. If you're trying to progress in anything, there's always going to be some risk. You mentioned before, we are trying to adapt. You have to stress the organism. You have to push it outside its comfort zone. What's this saying?

Growth doesn't happen in your comfort zone? No, absolutely not. And so you have to push beyond your limits. If you want your body to adapt to those, you have to push beyond. Look, your 80-hour-a-week job is not healthy either. No. And you want your body to adapt to those, you have to push beyond. Look, your 80 hour a week job is not healthy either. No. You know, and you don't, you know who you are. Your 80 hour a week job is not healthy. Um, you know,

I had a guy here who was a physician. He, uh, you know, we were talking about drugs and he's like, why would somebody take drugs that, you know, uh, why would somebody take drugs and damage their body to make money? I'm like, why do you fucking not sleep and work crazy fucking hours to make money? And that he's like, well, I'm trying to do better. I'll never forget that we're cracking up. So, you know, it's funny when people are worried about all these risks and you think about other lifestyle things that

people are doing, right? Like long hours, that's risky. Having five fucking small children is risky, right? That's gonna fucking make you lose sleep and increase your stress levels and all sorts of other things, you know? But, you know, it can be great too, you know? Just like there's trade-offs with everything. Risk reward. Yeah, there you go.

And the only person who really knows the answer to that ratio is the person doing it, right? Like if it's not worth it, you know, I totally get it. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that, hey, you're going to come in here and I'm going to get you to a 500 deadlift pain, painlessly. It happens sometimes, you know? And some people may just walk into your gym and just,

they, they're an athlete and they're built for it. And they've got the proper body dimensions and just so happens they can do this. Right. You know, then I have people, I have a, I think of this example all the time of a 26 year old girl and you would think, oh, young girl, I could just beat the hell out of her. She'll be fine because she's young, right? Fuck no. She tweaks her back like that. So she's on a program similar to my 65 year old man. Yeah. I don't know if you've ran into that too.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it happens with everything. And athletes adapt to different stimulus. And you have to figure out what it's going to be. But yeah, you'll have athletes who you would assume, you mentioned you had a young female. Young females typically can handle a lot. And they recover. That's been my experience.

And that is traditionally true, but it's not always going to be the same. You're going to run into a couple who just don't. And if you saw her, you would think, oh, she's going to do great. You know, she was, she's thin, she's in good shape, you know? Yeah. And she eats, you know, she put the weight on. Yeah. Nope.

She tweaks her, she has bad back. And she said that it, and you know what? She had a bad back before she left it. She says in high school, she had back tweaks. Yeah. Nope. She tweaks her. She has bad back. And she said that it, and you know what? She had a bad back before she lifted. She says, since high school, she had back tweaks. Yeah. And so you're going to run into those athletes and then you have to figure out, okay, what do you do? How do you change things and how do you modify the variables to fit them? Like you said, you'd have to train her like she's a 65 year old woman. That's, that may be just be what, what happens to work. Yeah. I mean, her upper body, you know, like anybody else, but her squat and her deadlift,

I can't train her like a fucking young 26-year-old woman who can handle anything because she can't. She'll tweak her back. She'll get it better than within three to four weeks, she'll tweak it again. So she pulls heavy every other week, she squats heavy every other week, she doesn't do both heavy in the same week,

and that seems to work. And by work, I mean, yeah, okay. She's young, her muscles can adapt quickly, but her joints aren't cooperating. So you gotta adjust to that stuff, right? So I think the moral of the story here is, I think as many people as possible should lift weights. Everyone.

And get some exposure to training. But if after about three to 12 months of serious training you're not satisfied, you've now committed yourself to specialize and you are now like one of us. If you add deadlines, medals, and records, you're like Jesse. But if you are simply pursuing PRs, you're like me. Now it's competitive. And now you've accepted a level of risk above baseline.

So I think that's really what we wanted to hammer here today. You know, there's, this stuff is fun. It's very rewarding, but it doesn't come without headaches. You know, it doesn't come without headaches, you know, that those headaches can come in the form of, oh, my elbow's bugging me, or I tweak my back and I can't fucking bend for a week,

or I got sleep apnea and I gotta get a fucking CPAP because I want more PRs. We're not saying that you should do any of these things. We're just saying that these things may happen over the course of trying to push yourself to higher and higher levels, right? But you should be fine in the beginning. You should be fine in the beginning.

And no matter what, I think you would agree with this. Some form of strength training should be done as routine maintenance. Oh, absolutely. I think everyone should. I mean, regardless of age, regardless of affliction, I think strength training is super healthy. Older adults, especially, I think, get this idea that they shouldn't do anything.

My oldest athlete is 65 years old. She's still competing. She's still doing what she can. Even super proud of my mother recently, who she used to tell me all the time, oh, you old lady shouldn't do this. No, you absolutely should. And at last week, she actually gave me a call and like, you know, I finally, I finally did it. I let she goes to curves. It's like

I finally took the took it and I let them teach me how to squat. And I'm going to tell you, my knees have not felt this good in probably about five years. I'm like, but squats are bad for any. This is what I've been telling you forever. They hear this, they're like, oh, you shouldn't, it's going to, no, it is absolutely good for your knees. And she is in the least amount of pain that she's been in, in probably the last decade because she finally started squatting and let somebody teach her how to do it. Weight training, at least in some form, absolutely everybody should take it. It's great for health. It's great for just quality of life.

So yeah, I think, uh, I think, I think that's a good stopping point. What do you think, man? All right. Sounds good. Well, let's close out here. Uh, where can people find you? Uh, people can find, they can find me right here at weights and plates and Arizona. Or you can check out, um, our Instagram page, sanctuary barbell orbell, or my own Jay Vesna. Check me out on Instagram or again, contact Robert. I'm here at Weights and Plates and my team is in here training all week. So. They made it a whole lot of fun here. Yeah. We, we're enjoying it. It's a, it's a great environment. So yeah, if you guys

have ever, obviously if you're following Robert and been following it for a while, great environment, great gym, and we're continuing to compete and thankful for him for opening his doors and letting us have a chance to do that. Cool. And y'all know where to find me, but if you're new to the show, you can find me at weightsandplates.com or if you're Metro Phoenix, here at Weights and Plates Gym, we are south of the airport on Broadway Avenue between 32nd Street and 40th Street. Call the gym if you need directions. On Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana.

The gym is weights double underscore and plates. And we're also now on YouTube where you need to smash that subscribe button. I'm going to get good at this at some point. youtube.com slash at weights underscore and underscore plates. Thank you and tune in for the next one.