WHOOP Podcast - Marcus Filly, Revival Strength Owner & 6-Time CrossFit Games Competitor, on helping his clients make smart health and fitness decisions, plus optimizing his own performance as an athlete, coach, business owner and father.

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Revival Strength owner and 6-time CrossFit Games competitor Marcus Filly discusses his first exposure to CrossFit and rapid rise to the top of the sport (9:40), why he became a coach (12:07) and what his practice entails (15:57), functional bodybuilding (19:19), cold showers (24:11), his current performance goals (32:09) and how they relate to his WHOOP metrics (34:42), advice for picking the right trainer (41:41), individual coaching vs personal training (43:05), community and coach-client relationship (50:18), social media and building a voice (53:41), using WHOOP with his clients (1:07:57), maximizing his sleep efficiency (1:09:40), and self experimentation results seen in his WHOOP data (1:22:14).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. At WOOP, we measure the body 24-7 and provide analytics to our members to help improve performance. This includes strain, recovery, and sleep. Our clients range for the best professional athletes in the world,

to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? We're launching a podcast today. deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop podcast. People are killing themselves by eating the wrong stuff and by not moving,

and we can fix all this stuff. Totally. What we're doing in the hospitals, you could alleviate a tremendous amount of the strain on this economy and the healthcare system by just working a little bit of prevention or a little bit of just lifestyle improvement for people. What's up, folks? Today on the podcast, we've got Marcus Philly, a six-time CrossFit Games competitor, and the owner and founder of revival strength training.

Marcus also has a degree in molecular and cellular biology from the University of California, Berkeley. He left medical school to focus instead on helping people be more fit and live healthier lives. That was a balance I touched on with Marcus that I love, the idea that he comes from a medical background and is now applying that to health and well-being in the fitness space. We talk about Marcus' background in athletics from his time as a college soccer goalie to his rapid ascension to the top of the CrossFit world and how that led to what he does today. We talk about functional fitness versus bodybuilding, how he looks incredibly good with his shirt off, but also has made for functional gains across fitness. Everything he does related to fitness over time, the tests that he does, recovery techniques that he prefers. diet and nutrition, sleeping habits.

And we talk about how Whoop helps him be a better athlete, a coach, a business owner, and father, and how he's been using it with his clients. Whether you're an athlete or not, I think you'll find Marcus's insight into healthier living to be really, really helpful. Without further ado, here's Marcus. Marcus, thanks for doing this, man. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, and thanks for just continuing to be, yeah, keep me part of the Whoop family. it's been a couple year journey now it's been great yeah so you've been on whoop for how long

i want to i mean i even looked up my logs or anything like that but i want to say it's been almost two years uh it's awesome yeah early kind of like an early test group of athletes from opex uh wasn't like an opex athlete and they you know got us in touch with you guys and just started playing around with it well we'll talk a little bit about about whoop but i want to just start with you like how do you like to describe yourself if someone asks you know hey hey hey Marcus, what do you do? I definitely start with fitness professional. I'm a health and fitness professional who is probably a coach first, athlete second,

and my journey through fitness in the last 10 years sort of switched that. I mean, I went from coach first, athlete second, and then athletes sort of took to the forefront. But now it's like I'm a coach and an educator. And I use my history as an athlete and my continued pursuit as an athlete to inform what I'm doing with my clients, what I'm teaching other people around the world and the message that I'm sharing. So trying to walk the talk, so to speak. And you are super fit, man. I mean, I don't throw that around, but I've seen your Instagram page and everything else. And you look straight out of Troy, like Achilles, you know, which I think it's like maybe the greatest compliment I can give another man.

Well, I appreciate that a lot. So, you know, your background as an athlete. Talk a little bit about that for our audience. So I read here that you were a D1 soccer player. How did you get into soccer? Well, I grew up in nearby San Francisco Bay Area. And I think with, yeah, with the community that I was, you know, raised in, soccer was kind of like the, I don't know, the main recreation sport, that in Little League. Baseball, you mean?

Yeah, Little League Baseball. So they had kind of the biggest influence and, you know, my parents, I was really active as a kid and they just kind of allowed me to just kind of choose what I wanted to do. But soccer just started super early. I had some friends. We all put together a little rec team, you know, and I think we were like seven years old, eight years old. And then from there I just kind of stuck. But it wasn't really about soccer as like a passion. It was about being physical.

being active, being, um, competing. Yeah, competing to some degree, but I loved more like the training in the process of just being a physical person. And I needed a physical outlet. I wasn't like a rowdy kid that was going to like, you know, beat up other kids if he didn't have a physical outlet or something like that. But I just, I just was drawn to anything physical. And I had a little talent for soccer and I got kind of connected with a team early on that

was very successful. So, like, when, when competitive youth soccer was really just kind of getting going in the U.S. I mean, prior to my generation, like, there wasn't really like just these elite level, you know, club soccer in the United States was just not a thing. You know, club soccer and around the world is it. It's everything. So I just got, I just kind of fell into a really good program with a good coach and we had some success. And then my group of, you know, teammates that I grew up with, many of them went on to be national level players, playing at high, high levels professionally. It's just a kind of a weird group of us that just all, from a small town that just found each other and went on to do some really cool things.

And, you know, today, I mean, you look like, you look more like almost like a wrestler or bodybuilder, right? Like, what was that transition for you physically? Yeah. I imagine you're significantly stronger today than you are as a college soccer player. It's funny you mentioned that. Or is your physique similar? It's actually somewhat similar. When I was a sophomore in high school, this is the case with many, many people that end up in this position.

But I was like the athletic type that could do anything. And when the goalkeeper got kicked off the team, they're like, Marcus, we need you to go step in the goal. So basically since I was a sophomore, I became a goalkeeper. And so as a goalkeeper, you know, the physique of a shorter staff. your goalkeeper had to be someone who was like pretty built because I wasn't I wasn't six foot four I wasn't you know able to leap over everybody I kind of had to leap through people and you know had to be able to muscle people you know outside of in the box and get people off me to take in crosses or whatever it was so yeah I always had somewhat of a muscular physique and

I think I remember being in in high school no like junior high we went to a like a sleepover soccer camp it was called like two river soccer camp and they let me and my teammates in because we were all really successful and with our you know our our state championship whatever but we were the youngest kids there and i remember there was this older guy who was in high school and he was super ripped and he had like back muscles that you could see like the traps you know and people called him a christmas tree because he had like the tree back and i was like that's what i want to look like i don't know why that's stuck out of my mind. Yeah. And so I started hitting the weights when I was like just like barely old enough to go to the gym. My parents like, okay. So how old were you when you started lifting weights?

I think I was like 12 to 13 years old. Oh, so you got in early. Oh, super early. I was like me and my brother would go to the gym after after school. Any part of the year where I didn't have like soccer or something else going on after school. It was go to the gym and just, you know, hit the weights, machines, whatever. I didn't know what I was doing really, but I was lifting weights. and at some point on this journey you get exposed to CrossFit yeah yeah that came kind of shortly after college which was uh you know college i also got a huge exposure to to resistance training and strength and conditioning you know division one schools the teams get paired with a strength conditioning coach they get some education on lifting weights and i took to that um so then

after college when a friend said come do this crossfit class with me i was like sure i'm all about it like what's what are we doing and we did like deadlifts and running or sprints i was like this is totally up my alley this is my speed i like this thing and that sort of uh transformed really the next like 12 years of my life for sure you you jumped right into competing in it pretty quickly yeah it was it was a short uh there was actually probably like a from the day i took my first group fitness class in crossfit to my first competition there was actually like a two and a half year gap i i actually found crossfit in my deferment year for my enrollment at oh house at university from medical school so i was like uh i got accepted took a year um to defer so i could

travel and i found crossfit and then i enrolled in medical school did a year a little over a year before i left, at which point I kind of really sunk my teeth into the CrossFit community and coaching and then competing. Well, I mean, I think of two and a half years is a fairly quick transition from learning something to being like a professional competitor. It's interesting. I've now met enough of you guys who are like super alpha crossfit people. And you seem to think of the transition as being like a much more natural or much faster

transition. There's something about CrossFit and the people that attract. Yeah, well, I think today, the landscape today as opposed to 10 years ago when that happened for me is very different, you know, somebody who just like wakes up on, you know, this week and says, oh, I'm going to go try CrossFit and then try and make that type of, you know, entrance into the sport is going to be like totally, you know, thrown off and shocked by the level of competition, the professionalism of the sport these days, the amount of training hours that people put in. Whereas back when I did it, I mean, I kind of, you know, I got a few group classes in. I played around with sort of some online CrossFit.com training at my university, you know, at the Ohio State gym. And then when I showed up and was like doing class workouts again for about a month straight, I went to my first competition and I did pretty well. It's like that doesn't happen now for people. They don't just show up to group classes.

And after a month, you know, they're going out and competing at a high level. at what point did you decide okay i want to i want to be able to be a coach i mean you said when we first started today you think of yourself first as a coach second as an athlete yeah i think it was uh it was it was it was totally in line with hey why did why do you want to go to medical school in the first place i mean so many admissions uh essays and interviews that i did were based like around this concept of what's your why are you interested in health care And I was interested in health care for more of like the reason of I know we can make dramatic, profound changes in people's health through the stuff that we have access to any day of the week, which is quality food, hydration, sleep, movement, just life relationships, the things that we surround, what we do every day. Right.

And I was, I was a little unclear as to how do I make a career out of that. It was more like, well, I'll go to medical school because I had like family that were in medicine. I was, I'd already put in my pre-med years. I was very talented in math and science. Had a great understanding for physiology. And I could talk to people about health in a way that they could digest and understand. So I was like, okay, I'll go to medical school and I'll figure out a way to approach health care the way I want to do it, not in necessarily treating diseases of, you know, in the way that it's,

mostly done in the medical community. So that was kind of like, had somebody said, hey, you could be a fitness coach, and you could do this for a living, and you can help people, and you can make an impact, and you don't have to go to medical school to do that. I probably would have done that.

But that path was not really clear, and it wasn't really paved before me by too many people. And so, yeah, that's what I think ultimately drove me to being a coach was that once I got into medical school, once I felt myself headed down more of a, wow, this is like a system that churns out people that treat symptoms as opposed to help people fix chronic disease through what they do every day. And I saw this growing community of CrossFit happening, which to me was like this massive amount of individuals that were showing up to talk about nutrition, work hard in the gym,

make positive improvements. I was like, okay, well, that seems like a community I want to be a part of. I want to get involved in that and see what my talents and what my skills as an educator as a health care enthusiast could do. Well, you're smart. I mean, you're talking about preventative care really versus curative in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah. And that was funny.

I talked about that a lot of my admissions essays and my interviews with medical schools and just the blank stairs I would get from from people sitting across the table for me who were physicians and like on the admissions board and that's shocking isn't it though yeah it's really shocking it was like well how are you going to do that how you're going to like you know I was like well I don't I don't have the answers yet but don't you want to find out like what the answers are with me yeah she I think there are more people should be excited about the idea of taking what we already kind of know and now we know it like with back by by tons of research, but we were starting to understand it, you know, in the early 2000s,

like, you know, people are killing themselves by eating the wrong stuff and by not moving. And we can fix all this stuff. And what we're doing in the hospitals, you could alleviate a tremendous amount of the strain on this economy and the health care system by just working a little bit of prevention or a little bit of just lifestyle improvement for people. And your coaching practice today, what does that entail? The coaching practice today is a combination of really two different things, but predominantly it's individual, we call it individual design or individual coaching, where clients that work with us, both in person and virtually, they become, we basically become their health and fitness guides. So, you know, we do a comprehensive intake evaluation on them.

We understand, we really try and understand what the purpose. that this client has in not just in their fitness but in their life and then we do the you know comprehensive fitness movement screen strength evaluation take all of that into account and construct a fitness plan for them that's very customized to their lifestyle so you know busy working professional that has one hour four days a week to train at this time a day okay we help them set up a plan for in the gym a plan for out of the gym, talk about nutrition with them, what's going to fuel them the best

so that they have the best energy, and then keep the stuff that they're doing for their exercise very appropriate for their skill level and what they want out of life. If they're like, hey, I want to just feel strong, be able to have energy on the weekends with my kids, and not have chronic back pain,

then we're not going to be doing Olympic lifts with them. We're not going to be doing high intensity, you know, puk your guts out workouts because that just doesn't fulfill their purpose. So that's one side of our coaching business and then the other

side of the coaching business for me is sort of being like a thought leader and educator in the space of something I've termed functional bodybuilding. Functional bodybuilding was sort of a way that I classified my training that I showcase

on social media, the way I've approached, the years that I had of being kind of a gym rat and doing bodybuilding and then also my years of being competitive fitness athlete and saying that, you know what, there's some value and some benefit to both worlds. We don't have to be so polarized. You're either all into, you know, functional fitness, high intensity fitness, or you're in the, you know, gym doing bicep curls and, you know, tricep extensions. Like, they're not separate worlds. We can blend them together in a really fun and sustainable training practice, something that, because we certainly hear a lot of

people getting burnt out from the high intensity fitness that they do. And I got injured doing that or I did it for a couple of years, but it was just kind of getting too hard on my joints and I didn't like it anymore. So finding something that's like a hybrid in the middle. And I got kind of known for functional bodybuilding as like a training practice. And now I put out online training programs and course content that allows people to understand how to use it for themselves better. And that's been, you know, one of the more exciting parts the last couple of years for me is having a real global impact with that.

Yeah, you've got a large following. And I think a lot of the content you put out into the world is really positive. I want to clarify on something you said there. So when you say functional bodybuilding, you're, in essence, you're saying that also there's some elements of, you know, traditional bodybuilding that aren't functional, right? Like, when I see someone who's on the cover of one of these magazines and it sort of looks almost a little unnatural, right, what's happening to someone's body when they put themselves to that level of stress, put on that level of muscle, are there certain inefficiencies

that take place? Yeah, I mean, the word function and functional is something I, you know, can get debated a lot. And I think that really, unless you talk about one person and define one person's functionality, you really don't have an answer. It's like everybody's function depends on what they do in their life. So somebody who's a bodybuilder competitively at a high level in the sport and making money off of that, then, you know, they don't really have, I mean, they don't really have function outside of that bodybuilding spectrum. You know, they need to be big, massive, tons of lean tissue, really lean, be able to step on stage and look good and win.

But I think what you're asking, which is like if you are just in pursuit of hypertrophy, taking your muscle cells and growing them bigger. Yeah. And you pack on a lot of lean muscle mass to a frame. There are things that you will start to not be able to do very well. You know, there. Like what? Like cardiorespiratory fitness will potentially diminish a certain amount.

I mean, just carrying more mass on a frame is difficult. Yeah, I mean, that's obvious. Yeah, if you have your skeleton is only as big as it is. I mean, those massive, you know, bodybuilders, you take an x-ray of them, their skeleton looks just like yours and mine. They just have three times the amount of body weight or two times the amount of body weight on. Now, this might not be true, but I actually read that as you put on more muscle or even more weight, just generally, it can make your bones denser. It can make your bones denser, absolutely.

I mean, resistance training in general can make your bones denser whether you're... That's one of the reasons why it's better to do as you get older, right? If you're a 60 to 70-year-old woman who's potentially going to experience, you know, lean muscle mass loss and osteoporosis and you start lifting weights, it can help your bone density. But, you know, my point of the X-ray, you know, comment was like, you know, you see these really wide frames, like this guy weighs 300 pounds, his solid muscle, his shoulders, you know are three times the width of yours you would assume his bones are three times the width of yours but they're not you know so it's just uh and then anybody who and this goes for

anybody that's over fat you know or high body fat or obese um you know moving around that much much extra body weight is cumbersome it's uh you know it makes it harder to just move in life especially in a world that's you know we're set up for big individuals but you find yourself being big and getting into small spaces. I mean, you know, a big bodybuilder sitting on a plane and coach doesn't, you know, isn't loving life. That's not going to go super well. No, I'm not super soaked on that.

Okay. Well, I want to talk about your, like, I want to talk about a name the life of Marcus because obviously you're super fit and I'm sure our audience would love to understand all the little tricks and tips that you have throughout the day. So, yeah. When you wake up in the morning, what's the first thing that you do? um typically it's at this right now it's feeding my daughter so we have a three months have shifted recently yeah they have but no first thing in the morning i am um i'm going and having

tea or coffee and um starting my day with sort of a you know just like a quiet reflection or like a stretch or something that just like allows me to just sort of chill and you know drink a warm hot brett beverage that that to me is always like super calming and a great way to start my day. Then oftentimes that just segues into me getting into the hot tub. We have a hot tub at our house and I soak. Oh, great. I soak for like 20 minutes. You'll start with a hot tub in the morning. That's how I like to do it. I like to soak and then I go immediately for a really cold shower. Oh, this is good. So I've gotten super into cold showers recently. How long, how long you've been doing cold showers? Probably just over. I mean, I have a couple years, but I, I, I,

stopped for like three months with our first daughter just because the sleep deprivation was it really took a toll on me and like the thought of getting in cold water was just too too much for me kind of and this time around i stayed committed to cold showers despite sleep deprivation so tell me what is your cold shower practice uh simply i mean it's after after i soak in the hot tub I just, I'm in the shower, it's on cold, and I don't, I mean, I don't start it warm or anything like that. I just start freezing cold and I stay in there probably anywhere from two to five minutes, depending on. So that's pretty long. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's enough time for me to, you know, soap and lather my body and, and then I kind of hang in the water a little bit longer until I kind of start to feel like, okay, getting a little bit of a chill and that's when I stop.

Now, after you work out, or we'll go through the day, but after you work out, will you take cold showers as well? We have a shower at the gym, and certainly in the months where it's, like, warmer and I'm sweating. Like, I feel like I need to shower afterwards, and I always do those cold as well. But, yeah, I don't always make a point to shower after training. Okay. And it sounds, though, like most of your showers are now cold, or they end cold? Yeah, they are all cold. I don't, periodically I have to, like, convince my daughter to, like, take a shower with me because she needs to be bathed.

Yeah. So I don't put it on cold when she's in there. She'd probably flip out. Yeah, but, yeah, just cold these days. And what do you think are the benefits of cold showers? Well, I mean, I notice, I can't speak to, like, the immune system benefits and the nervous system benefits that I know. guys like Wimhoff and many other people out there have I started reading Wimhoff and that's what got me interested in it oh yeah I listened to his podcast with Joe Rogan a couple years ago and that just totally hooked me I was like this guy you have to at least look into it totally I mean you can't ignore this guy what he's been able to accomplish plus the scientific research that he's backed himself with and now this global community yeah it's totally legit but I I absolutely feel like an energetic boost immediately after I get out.

So do I. I mean, totally. Actually, at this point, I wouldn't say it's like uncomfortable anymore. Like, you know, there's always that first like five to ten seconds that's a little bit. Unpleasant. Unpleasant. Yeah.

But, yeah, as soon as I'm out and I've dried off, I'm like, oh, I feel, I feel great. Like, I can almost just, I can feel like the, my circulation is just kind of better. And I don't know. It definitely is a much better and faster start to the day than starting. with something really, really hot. So if I finished my hot tub and I just went on with my day, I think I'd feel groggy and a little bit slow. Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to the hot tub element of it, but for me, just, I now

exclusively end with cold showers. And I'll often start warm and then I'll try to go cold for, I probably go cold for about two minutes, but in Boston, when you go a full blast cold. That's different than California. It's a pretty special cold. And, I mean, the first thing I noticed is in doing. doing it is how much better my mood was, immediately getting out of the shower. And I feel like there's like a 30-minute, you know, maybe mood benefit just exclusively, where you're just

floating a little bit. The other thing that I've noticed is my immune system feels stronger. And I also seem less concerned with the temperature outside. Oh, that's, yeah, I could see that for sure and i've sort of i've just been paying a lot of attention to this because i you know looked at the wimov stuff and then you know from my background it would but like to experiment with things of course so you know i i feel like it used to be if i went outside in boston and boston's weather's weird for the record anyone listening to this in boston knows what i'm talking about some days it'll just be freezing cold and then every once in a while it'll be like a little bit warmer than you were expecting or even in the spring all of a sudden it gets really cold again and so it's just

you're inevitably going to have sort of the wrong outfit one day. Yeah. And then on top of that, I travel a lot. So if you're going from like East Coast to West Coast to East Coast, it's just inevitably you're going to have sort of the wrong outfits at moments. And for me, ever since I started doing cold showers, it's sort of like didn't matter. And again, it's hard to know whether that's a placebo or not. But my gut is it's not.

It's just that my body is more comfortable with different temperatures. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know that when I began the cold shower stuff and I was really consuming a lot of Wimhoff material, I started to just look at cold weather differently because I think when you're talking about like having the wrong outfit on it. It's more about like being unprepared and cold. Because like you can always shed layers when you're in hot. But being unprepared when you're in cold, that's when people get uncomfortable. That's when I would get uncomfortable. But now I'm like, it's cold. I'm like, it's cold. This is good. I'm not going to freeze to death here. Like I'm always like. like two steps away from some place warm where I can go and get funneled up. So I do recall like in that first, you know, the first phase of me doing my cold showers. I was also getting to the gym early, you know, it would be 7 a.m. and it was pretty cold outside. And I'm like working out in the freezing cold with my shirt off because I'm like, yeah, this is good for me. Right. I'm like just embracing the cold. Yeah. So having just a different, that mental shift I think

also adds to sort of the indifference like, yeah, it's cold, whatever. Okay, so you start with the hot bath and the hot tub and then cold shower. And then where do you go from there? Then it's starting to prepare food for the day. So making breakfast for myself and the family, making sure all my meals are prepared. And you'll make your meals for the whole day or for? Usually the meals are all ready to go for most of the week. Everything's prepped on Sunday, and that usually gets us all the way until about Thursday,

at which point we have to cook a little bit more to get through the rest of the week. And describe what you're preparing. Yeah, it's pretty simple. You know, my whole family is pretty much on the same plan. Me and my wife, and then, you know, our daughter, she has some things that she kind of prefers, but we generally prepare, you know, several pounds of meat on the Sunday, grilling it, slow cooking it, roasting it, whatever. We prepare a whole bunch of vegetables that we kind of just slightly undercooked so that

when we, like, reheat them for the meals, they're perfect. And then, you know, for my training and for my wife's training, we prepare, you know, some starch, a potato or rice, something like that, that goes in those meals that kind of follow immediately after we train. And then that's kind of our meal prep for the week. And then those just get divvied up into, you know, glass container. we're big on using glass containers and not plastic. And then I'll take two or three of those with me each day to the gym to work.

My breakfast, I cook hot every morning. That's something that, you know, has been nice. Like, I used to just eat breakfast alone because my wife would wake up later. But now with the kids, like we're all kind of waking up at the same time. So we get to kind of breakfast together, which I think is. What do you eat for breakfast? It's usually some, you know, it's some meat and a couple of eggs. and then a bunch of vegetables and, you know, coffee or tea with, you know, butter and

MCT oils in it. So I'm kind of protein and fat heavy in the morning right now. As my training has been like kind of lower than normal, I'm not doing these like super high intensity, high volume training days like I was maybe six months ago before the baby. So I'm not really requiring as many carbohydrates in my training. So I used to have oatmeal every morning with all that, but just kind of cut that out. good point you often have to tie or you have to qualify what someone's diet is alongside what their goals are right so for you right now in life what's what are your goals physically or from a performance standpoint yeah from performance standpoint i i still love the uh the sport of fitness so crossfit and in all different you know competitive outlets that are there i still look at those movements becoming a uh more refined in the ability to do

that type of fitness at a high level but I don't I don't have like all the physical resources or the time resources to dedicate to doing it at the highest level so what I do is I'm like okay well within my 90 minutes that I have almost you know five days a week I'm going to you know continue to try and stay as refined as I can in the movements of fitness continue to experiment and explore functional bodybuilding so this blend of both and you know I want to I want to feel healthy in the way that like I don't have injuries I don't have nagging pains like competitive athletes in the sport of fitness crossfitters yeah they're all they always have something that's hurting right and that's you just accept that that's part of being a competitor

I don't really want to accept that that's part of being a dad and a business owner and someone just wants to you know enjoy training right now when I get back to competitive competitive sport, if that happens for me in the future, which I hope it does, you know, I'll accept a little bit more of that aches and pains, but right now it's like I'm not going to push myself that extra bit to, because it's just not worth it for me right now. So right now it sounds like you've got more of the mindset of an executive and a father than necessarily a full-blown competitor. Now, obviously you're on the spectrum of being so fit that your daily workouts and whatnot

probably seem extreme to the average executive. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, it's, it's all relative, right? Yeah, it's all relative. But yeah, I'm definitely more in the mindset of I want to be, I want to continue to run this successful business and I want to be able to show up for my family, but I don't want to lose touch with like the part of me that loves to be an athlete too, because that's, that's sort of central to me being to my, to my business and to my life as a father.

It's like if I lose that identity, then I don't feel like I'm going to be as effective in the other areas. Yeah, that makes sense. So at this point in your day, if we go back to your day, you've now had breakfast with your family. Yeah. Now, will you have checked your whoop data at this point, like sleep and recovery? Yeah, no, it'll have been checked. You know, as soon as it shows up on my phone, that's like I just go and usually just evaluate kind of my sleep patterns. And my recovery score, I think I'm, you know, most days I can pretty much tell you, like,

okay, I think this is where I'm going to end up. And I'm usually, you know, most of the time pretty close. Yeah. Periodically, I'll have some days where I'm like, oh, I feel, I think I'm feeling pretty good today. And it'll spit out something that's a little less recovered than I think. And so what will you do on those days? well because again i'm i'm i'm not being as you know my training is not as uh aggressive as it was and i'm not as you're more focused on being optimal yeah i will go i will continue to train like

even if i show up and i'm in the red yeah um i'll go into the gym and i'll still train uh but i'll just use that as kind of a cue for myself to dial it back dial it back and that's and usually i dial things back in the way of just perceived effort and intent within parts of the training. So it's like I was going to do front squats and I wanted to do, you know, four sets of heavy squats for three reps. But I was read today. So I'm just going to do my sets of three at a moderate weight and just focus on quality positions and think about this as like a, it's definitely thinking more in the long,

longevity, long game piece of it, which is now become sort of the message, my key core message that I teach on my social media platform and with our clients and with my coaches. It's like most of our clients, for the vast majority, unless they're competitors that want to be successful this year or in the next couple of years, this is a long game and you win by being consistent. And if you are, yeah, if you come in today and you're in the red and you get the work done at 50 to 60 percent effort, it's going to set you up for a better day tomorrow. It's going to set you up for.

And then so in the course of three months, how many days were you successfully doing movement? Well, I was 100% successful because I listened to my body and on the days where I shouldn't have pushed it, I didn't push it. Versus the person who's like, I'm going to push it today anyway. I got to get to my goals faster and then they get a tweak or they set themselves back and then they can't train for 10 days. You know, the person that listened and went a little bit lighter wins big time in the long run. Well, what you described is, in part, what makes me so proud of whoop is just the fact that you're able to now understand things that you otherwise might not be able to feel, right, and which are these sort of secrets that your body's trying to tell you. And by harnessing that data, you now have another perspective on what you should do, whereas, you know, previously the animal inside would have just forced you maybe to do that hard workout and not to do 60% because, you know, You know, you've got the, you've got the mindset and the ability to push through.

It's just that it might be the wrong day to push through. Yeah. I would be really curious to have this tool now when I was like at my peak competing and see, okay, well, how hard is it to kind of detach, you know, the ego and the, and that mental kind of pressure that you place upon yourself to constantly be pushing, you know, those levels. and I think that that's a challenge for a lot of athletes within CrossFit, where the season is not so linear and mapped out correctly. It's like, it's very chaotic. It's like, I'm going to compete this weekend. I'm going to compete in four weekends from now.

And then I'm going to compete three months later. And there's no, like, very clear periodization for most people that compete. Yeah, maybe for the games athletes that are making it to the, you know, they have. Right. But whereas in other sports, you know, there's a very different. find season. And so if it's off-season time, you know, you should be really paying attention to that, you know, your data. And you should be tracking it very closely. And there's no point in pushing anything close to, you know, red when you're seven months out from your season. But if you're

two weeks away from playoffs and, you know, you're in the season and you're going for it. And it's like, yeah, you're going to be fatigued. Like probably a lot of athletes that are in the, you know, the playoffs for NBA. Right. Totally. Totally. It's like they're. We work with NBA players there. Yeah. They're under recovered and it's like, yeah, but it's game five and you've got to go. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's the thing I also tell people about whoop is that it's not the end of the world to be read, right? Like you can still exercise. You can still perform. It's just all things being equal. And if you're going to have to put a maximal exertion of your body, you'd rather be green. Totally. Yeah.

From the standpoint of a day in the life. So after breakfast, you're off to the gym. Off to the gym, drop my daughter at daycare, and then once I arrive at the gym, I typically spend the first few hours doing some form of work, which is either writing programs for clients, doing consultations or on the computer or in person with clients, meeting with my coaches, so I can support them in their continued growth, and then or writing content for. social media and things like that, before I get into my own training, which usually happens closer to like 10 or 11 a.m. Will you work directly with clients, or are you mostly training the coaches who are training the clients? For the most part, I'm training the coaches who are training the clients. I still carry, you know, a group of individual clients myself, which I really still, you

know, value that coach-client relationship. I value being in the trenches, so to speak, as my, you know, I'm here to try and mentor and support my coaches to be better professionals by still having a connection to that myself with clients is really valuable. I still spend some time on the floor coaching one-to-one, you know, or not one-to-one, but doing kind of like, in our business model, it's, you know, floor coaching entails, me being on the floor and monitoring all the individual clients that kind of, into the gym and are doing their own thing.

So this morning, for example, from 8.30 to 11, I was the floor coach and we had about 15 clients come into the gym, each one with a very custom tailored plan by their coach. And then they're sort of doing their own, they're sort of putting themselves through their own workouts. And I'm there to sort of support them and make sure everyone's moving well and giving them coaching cues and, you know, creating community and all that. So it's... For someone listening to this who has a job.

trainer or is thinking about getting a trainer like what's a good way to identify a trainer who's who's right for you or even just someone who's good at their job yeah i i think the number one thing is somebody who can first listen really well to you and then basically have good communication skills i mean the other stuff is uh the training knowledge i mean that's yeah you're going to find tons of different degrees of that you're going to find people that are super you know smart tons of books smarts they know every training concept out there but that falls short of creating success with clients if they can't listen to what you want and or listen to your needs and communicate with you effectively so i always say that that's kind of the place to begin it's like

do you have a good feeling about this person did you get a good vibe from them when you spoke to them did they ask you more questions than they told like then they were just talking about themselves like that's key yeah like if someone sits down with you to do an initial consultation and the coach spends 90% of the time talking i would just go find someone else like you should be doing 90% of the talking they should be doing 10% of the talking because they should be really wanting to know like what do you need what does this person need from you um and then also just thinking about you know we're we're really pushing this new model of fitness uh because this individual coaching model versus personal training, because I just believe it really has,

there's so many aspects of it that make it more sustainable and more valuable for the client. Explain that distinction. Yeah. So personal training is you and I go into the gym and we book an hour session and I coach you through a workout. And I don't want to say like I hold your hand, but I'm there every step of the way to make sure that you're doing and you're just more or less listening to me. And most of those relationships turn into that where it's like, coach tell me what to do. And then the individual coaching side is we sit down, we have a consultation, I do a physical assessment on you, and then I write you a plan, which you go and execute on your own. And then we touch base, you know, weekly, monthly to check in how things are going.

And in a perfect world, you go and execute that on your own in a space where you have some, trained eyes on you that can give you in the moment feedback. And the difference is that one relationship, the personal training relationship fosters more of a, you know, it turns into somewhat of babysitting. I don't know, I hate to use these words because it sounds so demeaning to the, to the profession. But it's just with clients that are reliant on you as a coach to do anything successful in fitness versus individual coaching where we teach our clients over time how to be autonomous with their fitness and health and fitness. They make good decisions.

They know what they're doing when they go into the gym. They have tools. And somebody long term who's in that path is going to have a heck of a lot more success because personal training relationships oftentimes end for some reason. And it's like when that relationship ends, what is that person left with? Do they have a way to navigate their lives without their coach? and then there's the you know the fact that personal training for most people is not affordable for the frequency by which they need to move yeah people need to move all the time they

move every day yeah right you know they need to do some focused training probably three to four days a week but they need to move so there's not a lot of people i think that can afford you know a small percentage of people that can afford three to four times a week of personal training but they can afford having a coach that develops a plan for them that lets them go and train three to four times a week well that piece i think is really smart the piece that you said about you know the fact that people need to move every day in order to and if you have any real fitness goals you can't just do something one hour once a week that's totally so yeah like the idea of um you know it's teaching someone how to fish versus

giving them a fish right isn't precisely yeah that's a lot of it i want to lose 20 pounds and I'm going to hire a personal trainer to help me. It's like, okay, well, so you're going to work out four hours this month? And then, you know, and like, that's your plan. And, yeah, I mean, and I don't want to say that that never works for people because there's plenty of people that are making great progress with personal trainers. It's just where, I just want to see where they're going to be at in two years and four years and six years, you know, further time points out.

Yeah, I think I actually personally fit into the category. of someone who is totally fine going into a gym and just having my trainer. I've now worked with my trainer for like two, maybe two and a half years. And he, you know, knows my body really well. And he'll just, you know, tell me what the plan is for that day. And maybe we'll have a quick check in. He'll look at my recovery before I show up, my recovery and whoop. And the reason that works is because I also do like four or five other things throughout the week

that actually aren't always weightlifting related. Yeah. So it's filling in a gap that otherwise I would have in my, you know, personal workout schedule because I play a lot of squash still and I'm in soccer league and whatever I run. So for me it almost works. But like I'm just thinking back to if I didn't have these other activities, like what you're describing would be so valuable. Yeah. So then I would categorize you as somebody who has like, you know, you have like health and fitness sort of, you know, fundamentals in place. You're active, you're motivated, you are engaged in sport, you move, and now you want to go get specific coaching in weight training and resistance training, then, you know, that's a different situation than somebody who comes in who has nothing.

It's kind of like, I'm sort of a health and fitness beginner, and I want help, and they don't have a way of putting together the whole plan. and you know the the personal trainer is totally focused and attentive and gives them 100% for 50 minutes to 60 minutes and then when they leave they don't necessarily have a bridge that gets them back to next Monday when they come in for session number two yeah and I'm actually shocked by how little big gyms seem like worried about this like to me I think that if you just look at what's happening right now in the fitness market there's a bit of a digital revolution where gyms are going to, over time, I think, get replaced by artificial intelligence and all sorts of different forms of communication directly with an individual because if you're not building that, you know, that life coach that you just described, that you obviously work with your clients on, they're going to find it elsewhere. And it's not enough to have a one hour a week or, God forbid, one hour a month, touch point with your client if your business and again i'm speaking from the point of view of like gym

chains yeah if your business is in the you know is in the uh revenue business of having people keep coming back every month yeah no it's it's uh i don't know but at the same time it's like there's been some there's been some things that are broken in that gym model for a lot of years yet they're still out there and people are still showing up and or paying you know membership fees. Well I think paying and showing up are sort of two separate things. Oh, really. Yeah. Like

I think that the magic of any gym membership or any membership in general is that there's a long, an extended period of which a gym is probably making money that they're not really delivering value for. Yeah. You know, but I just mean in terms of like creating real

value ad. Oh, of course. You look at what a business like Peloton's been able to do, right, where they've just put a bike in your home and brought the cycling class into your home. If I'm running Equinox or something, I look at that and I say to myself, like, this is a real threat. Oh, completely. Yeah. You know, because that scales, by the way. That's not just a bike. That can be a lot of different things. It already has become other things. Yeah. And you see these products like mirror and tonal and, you know, gone down the line. Yeah, definitely. I think that it does come back to that, that coach client relationship or somebody who's really, you know, a support to you that I think

we have found is really what our business is. Like we're not necessarily writing fitness programs. We're developing relationships with clients and supporting them with, you know, a training plan that goes with that. But feeling like they're connected to somebody who's actually caring for them and looking over what they're doing. Totally. You know, cares about what's happening.

to them outside the gym too and and really somebody who can look at all the different aspects of their life so sort of like this holistic coach that says well what you know how did you sleep tonight and what what are the relationships that are going on in your life where are you feeling stress in that world and what's what's happening at work and you know what's happening with your family and what did you eat today and all of that being those are inputs into what actually gets spit out in the workout calendar well physical locations have an advantage over digital experience and that they can really foster like a very genuine feeling of community like i think community is one thing that every gym must be super focused on like and it's one thing

that's impressed me about crossfit the community around crossfit is very cultish and it's very closed arms like you know people want to be there they want to be sweating together it feels like there's a great camaraderie around it yeah would you agree with that yeah absolutely i mean you don't see that kind of community in big box gyms no you don't that's my point yeah these uh and that's something that i you know i formerly owned a crossfit gym and um that was one of the most powerful things that i you know i learned from that experience was really just how impactful that community feel could be now the model by which the fitness was delivered and the type of training in the hey let's give one size fits all to this whole group it stopped resonating

with me as much over the years and you know kind of developing a model where there was this individualized approach felt important but i was like how do i do that without losing that community aspect and so we sort of have been we found that you know essentially with with what we're doing now with clients that come in and we're doing big group classes essentially with people that all do their own their own thing i mean obviously all the stuff you're doing is totally in line with what i'm talking about yeah although we do have an online community which is something that we're you know it you're right there's some there's definitely something different about developing a an on-site physical community where you can have people in the same room together versus being online and saying

oh i'm part of revival strength global i work with but social media has helped a lot with that and just strong branding and a strong consistent message amongst everybody where people are now they're wanting to share what they do online. Totally. It's like, hey, I'm part of Revival Strength. And I did my Revival Strength workout with Coach Brianna today, you know, but they're in Panama. And they're posting about this. So it does, it can grow that way.

It's just, you're right, it's slightly different. So let's talk about how you think about social media. Yeah, you've got a big following. A lot of people turn to you for fitness insight. You know, how do you think about using platforms like Instagram and, you know, and again, delivering a lot of this value that you give to individuals who walk into your gym, giving that to now the masses? Yeah, it's been a really interesting growth and journey for me with seeing how it's become really central to my business

to my you know my brand platform um i think i signed up for instagram in 2013 and you know i was like oh you know there's one more thing i got to add to the list i was like very heavily on facebook at the time and instagram was something i just didn't pay much mind to um but certainly it has grown you know to be this sort of number one platform chuggerna yeah and in particular for fitness right where it's like people just want to consume videos of exercise. Yeah, totally. But I kind of got my start in writing about fitness and posting videos before Instagram

through just a personal blog that I wrote in the 2011, 2012 range, which didn't have nearly the audience I have now, but it was sort of me honing in on a voice, which was this is my personal fitness journey this is what insights i'm getting from my own training and competitive uh experiences and this is also how you guys out there listening or watching can use this for yourself not like you need to do my workout but this is the point of the workout maybe you can learn something from this so i started doing that and then when i realized that i could just make this transition to instagram and post that in the same way just a lot easier than putting a WordPress, you know, blog together. It was very natural for me. And then

that sort of was my guiding light for many years was like, I just want to get content up on social media. It helps me process my own fitness journey. What am I learning about myself? What am I learning about this? And always trying to use my athletic pursuits to heighten my skills. as a coach and to elevate my role as a coach and an educator. So that continues to be something I really try and strive to do with social media, with Instagram in particular. And it's kind of been, you know, the last six to 12 months, there's been a little bit of a shift where I also realize, okay, I've built up this big platform and I have a lot of

people that have eyes on what I'm doing and I'm continuing to give away a lot of great free content because I really still care to do that. And it's an opportunity to like promote things that are within my business to sell. Sure. So how do you strike a balance between that? Because I just as much as I want to just be able to wake up each day and go into the gym and write content for free for the rest of my life. I mean, I want also, and I also need to, you know, create a healthy business that makes revenue and pays everybody. So that's always kind of like the part that is a challenge to like strike that balance. What's the right amount of, you know, continue to do the stuff that feels really good and authentic?

And then the stuff that also feels like, okay, this is important to show people how they can actually take the next step within our business to, you know, receive services from us or buy some of our training programs. I mean, that's one balance. I imagine another balance, too, is how, I mean, U.S. someone who's very health conscious and probably who's focused on sleep and recovery, which we'll talk about maybe a little bit later, like how you balance using your cell phone, even just in your daily life, right? Because every time you open that app, there's going to be all kinds of dopamine hits and rushes and, you know, you could get caught up in the flywheel of followers or anything else. Like, how do you balance that? Because, sure, it's, for you,

it's actually tied directly to your business. The bigger your online profile, the more you could justify that you're you know maybe your business is succeeding or yeah more seriously people will take you uh but at the same time you know that's obviously pulling you away from your real life pulling away from your family pulling away from your clients you know who are in your office so how do you balance that and do you think you're good at it too i don't know that i'm i wouldn't i'm not ready to say i'm good at it what i'm what i am very confident to say is that i am keenly aware of how big an impact it has in our lives and in my life in particular about I'd say right around the beginning of 2017 I sort of had this like catapult in

Instagram um I don't know start them or whatever awareness awareness right just a lot of growth in my social media channel for about a year and a half was like aggressive of growth, right? And with each little bit of growth, with each bit of dopamine hit that I was getting from seeing the followers go up, I was pouring more energy into it. And I was just like, I was glued to it. And it was also, we were experiencing some success, you know, business-wise, revenue from online sales. And I just was like, I was in that flywheel hardcore. And my wife and I, you know, I'd get some pushback from my wife. And she was just like, hey, you're, you're kind of on that thing all the time.

And I'm like, but it's so essential to like what we're doing right now. Like I can't get away from it. And there wasn't like, I wasn't at a place where I was like, this is bad for me. I was just like, I got to keep doing it. I want to keep doing it. I was totally engaged. You know, fast forward 12 to 18 months. And I was kind of like, well, I'm getting pretty burned out on this.

And my responsibilities and other aspects of life are going up too. like my business responsibilities not social media related are increasing my family responsibilities my uh you know my responsibilities to my other coaches that work for me so now it was like this thing that was there and i i don't it almost didn't know what to do about you know how do i separate myself without jeopardizing the health of the business without you know uh losing trust with the followers because i'm not putting as much energy into it um and then also just reclaiming some of my own just like freedom freedom from technology or freedom from from that you know feeling of like i got to track the you know what's happening with the with the likes and the followers

and the comments and so forth um and it uh i think i'm kind of i kind of have been swinging the other direction where it's like okay i'm going to try and pull back a bit and see what what that looks like and how that impacts my life my personal life and my professional life because it had kind of gotten a little bit out of control and there's just a limit to how many hours in the day I have to be, you know, answering messages and, you know, writing new content. So it's definitely a puzzle that will continue to have to be, you know,

worked on piece by piece for some time, I think. As long as it's out there and as long as it's, you know, the biggest tool to communicate to the worldwide audience that I have, what's your advice to someone who's actually on the early end of that flywheel and saying to himself or herself like okay i'm trying to start something i want people to know about me or you know some kind of an entrepreneur or whatever and they want to build a following and they want to build a voice like what do you say to that person that's advice yeah um because you did it i mean true yeah i would i i don't think that i think you have to put in that kind of time to to to generate that following yeah you get it in or you get out yeah um but i also think that it's important if you're trying to create a message like are there other ways that you're outside of social media once you pull people into what you're about you know how are you are you creating other ways to speak to to the audience that are not just social media posts um you know do you have a an email list where you actually communicate

directly with you know subscribers and provide them a different type of content different level of content um and yeah or podcast or so as you know other channels um because with with instagram like any day they could just change the algorithm or change something about it and it's like you know i've or even instagram itself i mean yeah you're on facebook before instagram and totally that you know maybe people were on twitter like yeah it can the next one it can totally change fast and um yeah we if you if you have all your eggs in that one basket and it's this thing that's kind of constantly changing and you don't really have insight or access to like what's really happening with it. It's just, it's kind of a scary world to be a part of.

Right. So, all right, shifting back to a more positive note, you're, you're in the gym, you're doing personal workouts. How for you, this is something I always find interesting. Like, as someone who, you know, it seems like from me, at my standpoint, you're someone who's like just always been really fit. But how do you evaluate, okay, I'm a little fitter now than I was yesterday or a year ago? Or like, what are certain tests that you might have in your life that sort of help you evaluate that? Is it as simple as like, you know, your maxes and weights? Are there certain tests that you'll actually do?

How do you think about that? Or do you not think about it? That's another way to look at it. No, I definitely think about it. I think spending enough time in the competitive fit. world. It's just a constant measurement of fitness. We have benchmarks within the sport that let us know if we're improving in different disciplines, different disciplines like weightlifting or gymnastics or cardiorespiratory, you know, fitness. There are certainly benchmarks that I can put myself through that will let me know, okay, my numbers are going up in a particular lift or my numbers are going up in a particular type of gymnastics movement and those I try not to attach too much to now because I I do believe that to a certain extent I've hit my physiological maxes you know just given my age at 34 coming up

on 35 and not training to the level I did three or four years ago I just don't foresee myself like hitting big personal records going forward so so now you're reframing a little bit of what those goals are. Yeah. Reframing what the goals are, what the numbers I want to be. But something that does, and this is more of like a,

you know, a personal, like a subjective measurement. It's how well am I recovering from training and not necessarily just with like scores on my whoop, but like, you know, how much,

how much work did I do in a given day? And then how well did I, how did I, how did I feel afterwards and how did I feel the next day ready to come in and do more of the same you know type of training that's literally one of the best measurements of fitness yeah it's just how how well you can bounce back and how how fast can you recover from something strenuous exactly so that that's more of like and that i can feel because

i'm just a very aware of my body from a day to day and you know so much in my life is rhythmic where i mean everyone's lives we are rhythmic animals but i i have you know pretty scheduled days where, and, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday have a very similar look and feel to them. Saturdays and Sundays, similar look and feel. So from Monday to Monday, after doing a similar training session, I can say, okay, yeah, this, I feel different than last Monday. And coming into Tuesday, wow, I'm waking up a little bit more chipper on Tuesday than I did last Tuesday. And, okay, after three hard days of training, you know, it's Thursday. Okay, this week i'm actually i could come into the gym and do something i'm feeling like doing something so

that's how i can start to feel and notice that and and and with training journals and writing down comments and notes and i can look back over the course of several weeks and be like oh look at i i was kind of feeling a little bit better ready to attack what do you write in your training journal um i mean everything from results within you know elements of my training from the weights that i use the times that i got so you'll benchmark everything that you did that day yeah yeah And do you write this down or just someone else write it down while you're doing it? I'm writing it down just, you know, all my workouts are on an app on my phone that a... Okay.

So it's an app, not a... Yeah. Not like a journal. Yeah. And then I put, you know, comments. What app to use? It's called true coach. True coach.

Yeah, true coach. And then I have a coach or, you know, I mean, I'm actually in between coaches, but, you know, I typically always have a coach that's writing my training for me, just like I believe our clients. need to have coaches too uh so the comments are that's interesting yeah the comments are to sort of tell my coach a little bit how i'm how the day went for me um but also to sort of you know put a label on it like i felt really fresh today you know i was able to put forth a lot of effort or today i felt a little bit tired a little sluggish on this or i cut the weights short on this one because i just wasn't feeling strong include anything around whoop data in that um i have i had have in the past with my coach, for sure.

And some, like, our, our clients are all on, you know, we have our WOOP team. Oh, cool. I think we've got about, you know, close to 40, 40 of our global clients that are on there. Oh, oh. So all of our coaches have, you know, are able to, they're on there as well so they can just kind of check in on their clients. And, but more, those end up being conversations that, like, when we have consultations every month to check in with our clients, we can reference that data. Pull up the loop data. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's really cool because that's in large part of how I hoped it would be used. Like, do you find that, you know, back to what we were discussing earlier with a coach being there on closer to a 24-7 basis than a one hour or a week basis, do you find that that team element helps, you know, like a whoop team helps pull people together and understand, you know, hey, checking in? I think so. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, coming back to like the community building, uh, conversation and how you do that with like a virtual business it's having different things like a whoop team or having a Facebook group or having some way that people can interact and I know that you know we get new clients that ask to get put on to our you know team and yeah I'm sure they're on there just scrolling through like oh what is Marcus is you know strain today and oh my god my coach Brianna like oh she oh she had a high strain and right who's this guy Danny he's

always like at 17 every day yeah right yeah um and i think it's also good to see that our coaches are sort of they have to be accountable to their own like their own sleep in their own recovery it's like they're telling their clients to sleep eight hours and you know one of my coaches shows up and they only got four and a half hours of sleep last night it's like hey what do what are you doing why aren't you you know taking your sleep as as a priority right now right i mean even me i'm getting up two three times a night with a baby but i'm getting to bed at seven 15 and I'm not getting out of bed until about 4, 30, or 5 in the morning. So I'm accumulating my hours.

I'm doing what I have to do, even though I have about an hour to hour and 15 minutes of awake time during the night. But, you know, people like, oh, your sleep must be terrible. I'm like, it's not great. And it doesn't feel like I'm getting as many hours as I'm getting. But look, look, I'm actually making the time for it. You know, when the baby's not waking up as much at night, I'll stay up later with my wife and we'll watch shows and we'll have like but right now so you're actually finding that you're

dedicating more time to bed knowing that you're going to be yeah my my in bed time is is way up but my total sleep hours are similar about yeah about similar so uh how much time are you spending in bed now and how much time did you used to spend i mean bedtime for me was usually like between eight and nine because that's like you know the kid our first daughter would go down at 630 and my wife and i would have a couple hours to ourselves. But now, as soon as the first one goes down, we're kind of like on, you know, it's like, okay, it's your turn with the newborn, and I'm going to go to sleep. And so I usually try and get to bed at seven, between seven and seven 30.

Okay. And then I'm, you know, my head hits the pillow, and I'm pretty much out. Like, my latency is like zero. And then. Sleep latency is how fast you fall asleep. Yeah. Yeah. yeah um and then and then i'm up at one to transition into like more of like the on-duty parent

and um there'll be like two or three wake-ups between one and when i actually get out of bed which is like four 30 so that's whatever nine so yeah so you've effectively added an hour hour and a half more in bed exactly and then on whoop you're still getting the same numbers hours of sleep yeah between like seven and a half and eight and a half that's good it's it's it's better than i mean for a guy who's training at your level it's also like i think required oh definitely yeah i mean it's not it's and the quality of an optional thing if you want to make the gains that you're trying to make yeah and the quality of that sleep because it's interrupted isn't as good as you know my eight eight straight um but i'm also you know it also isn't allowing me to train at the level that i

once did. I can't come into the gym and put forth that kind of effort. I'm, I think the accumulation of like, you know, we're almost at four months of sort of a sleep debt that is just sort of, you know, I'm just low level tired all the time. Yeah, it is a form of hazing. I mean, we've seen that. It's brutal. Across the wood population. Yeah. Yeah. What's your pre-bed routine? like are there certain things that you like to take or you like to do yeah do you have any like things about your phone not being near the bed or the room being cold yeah no those okay great great direction on that yeah we have we have a totally pitched black room um and we keep it cold uh what's cold for you well we we just got air conditioning last year in the house so we keep that

like in the summertime we try and keep it around like 68 at night and then but i also have a fan near the bed that i kind of blast on me too which can make it double duty yeah um we do white noise and that's something that we kind of started with the baby when the what machine do you use it's like uh no i don't but it's like the one that everyone uses for their baby oh okay yeah there's like two that are when i've gone into people's homes that other parents i'm like yeah you guys we're all on the same page here. And then, you know, take like a, you know, pre-bed I'll take, right now I'm doing some melatonin supplement just to ensure that I'm like really staying

kind of like out throughout those, you know, I like melatonin. I like, I think, at least I try not to take it every single night because I think it has better benefits if you can every once in a while not take it or, you know, You know, but to me, it definitely improves the rate at which I fall asleep when I get into bed. And I feel like the quality of that first hour or two. Okay. Yeah. Well, for me, it's like something that I was looking for something that would allow me to continue to stay in a drowsy state, even when I was getting those wake-ups in the middle of the night.

Because initially with the baby, it was like waking up and then getting these like cortisol and adrenaline surges that would be hard to go back to sleep. especially if your body's used to just getting up exactly um magnesium before bed um that's very popular amongst uh high performance people yeah yeah for the uh muscle recovery benefits and the sleep uh aid um like a like a cortisol manager uh general kind of uh pre-bed thing for me and then uh yeah like I have blue blocker glasses, so if my wife and I want to watch a show, I'll put those on before bed so that I'm not like... What kind of glasses to use, too? I think the brand, I don't know, something I got off Amazon, they're not like a well-known

brand or anything like that. And then other than that, it's kind of just like try and get into just a relaxed state with whatever I'm doing. So lately it has not been hard for me to like... fall asleep yeah not at all like when 630 comes around and like i put my daughter to sleep i'm just like how quickly can i just find a pillow because i'm ready in the days when you were competing as a crossfit competitor or um i mean maybe as a college athlete but i imagine you had less routine at that time like what uh what would you do when you're you had kind of that adrenaline

before bed because you were thinking about tomorrow yeah that i did i actually you know when i was that was not as much an issue with being competitive athlete. I mean, certainly around like competitions, I would feel that. Yeah. But there weren't really like ways around that. It was just like you're just going to be anxious and nervous. Yeah, you just kind of have to deal. But when I was starting to have issues with that was after the first baby and I went

through like all these many months of like sleep disruption and she's, started sleeping through the night, then I was having like a hard time getting like back into a good rhythm and winding down. So, you know, there were, uh, everything from like trying to meditate before bed and to, um, you know, doing like Eps and salt baths and then. Oh, interesting. Did that work? Yeah. I mean, there were a few things that helped a little bit, but I think it was just like making, you know, just getting into the mindset of like, look, I have to, I have to quiet myself down. I have to like slow things down and probably mostly just the phone putting the phone away and putting technology away you know at least like an hour and a half to two hours before the bedtime was going to happen i think

that was probably the biggest thing for me and i would imagine too social media for you that's super important because if you go into that warm hole close before bed you're just going to be yeah yeah now that's that's definitely if if i could if everybody if everybody had to shut off social media for like the night time and we could all just disengage and I did not feel like we were missing anything. It's like the airplane mode, but for social media. Yeah, we use social media airplane mode. Well, that's great.

So tell me what benefits have you gotten out of Wook personally? I think for me predominantly being able to sort of have insight into what's happening at night for me to sleep. That's something that I, you know, when people ask me on social media, they messed me like, hey, is this, should I make this investment? And I'm like, I say for a number of reasons, yes, but definitely if you're going to start to take like a, you know, an honest look at how you're sleeping and what you're doing to like optimize that part of the recovery process and the training process. Yeah, I mean, if you want to lens into a third of your life, that's right now a black box. Yeah, completely. You got to measure it. Yeah, which I never did before.

I didn't really have a way of measuring before. So that's been a huge value add for me. And then I've always appreciated this concept of like, you know, you have to fuel yourself to perform. And like eating good quality food and eating enough food definitely was always like the thing that could impact performance the most within CrossFit training. I saw some people, you know, take that to the extreme and just like, I'm just going to constantly get an, like, eat food and just eat a bunch of calories every day. And that's going to ensure that I, you know, perform my best the next day. But I'm, but at the same time, like, you sacrifice some body composition potentially if you're just consuming a lot of energy without like a real, you know, you're not thinking a lot about like the energy output. that are fluctuating throughout your week or throughout your training cycle.

So all that's to say, like, to me, I try to really keep a balance between, like, yeah, on high training days, I want to, you know, I definitely want to consume more energy in the way of food so I can recover for the next day. But I also don't want to, you know, overconsume or underconsume on any given day. So I have a general sense of, like, my needs, my baseline needs. but allowing myself to have like data on not necessarily just like what are my what's my calorie output for the day but yeah more like what's my calorie output on whoop relative to a normal day like I know what a normal training day is I burn this many calories according to whoop now if

I felt like I had a really hard training day and I see that it correlates to like my energy output along with my strain on whoop then I'll be like okay this is I do need to make up some nourishment in the evening time. So I'm using it kind of like as... Recommend almost to eat more. Yeah. Or at least to know when my body's signals are actually things that I can trust. Now, I'll take this another level here.

Yeah, because in competitive fitness and in like high intensity fitness, there's this, I think there's something that people will experience, which is like they go and they do something super intense and it can disrupt like appetite centers and just your perception of what you need to eat. You know, your total energy output of the day on a really short and intense 10 to 15 minute workout isn't really that much greater than a normal day of your life. I mean, 10 to 15 minutes of high intensity training has great potential impact on your body, but not calorie output.

Yeah, a lot of other benefits. Yeah. So people are like, I got to go and eat a bunch of food because I just, did the super hard training session, and it's like, I like to have a little bit more of, I enjoy having that metric to sort of say, oh gosh, you know, yeah, really, according to the data from today, like I did have like a pretty high energy output day. You know, my strain is high, my caloric output is really, really high compared to my normal, and I'm feeling those hunger signals. Now, there's days where I'm like, I'm just, you know, I think I'm really hungry and I'm

I'm like, actually, I haven't really, like, work that hard today. And I'm like, I think I just need to hydrate more. I need to do something else that's my body's obviously interpreting as hunger. So, anyway, that's kind of a long-winded answer, but I use it in that way. And that helps me to sort of manage this, like, I want to perform well, but I also want to look good. And I want to have, like, the aesthetic that, you know, feels right to me. And I want to feel like I'm in balance and not just, like, consuming, you know, endless food to try and recover from, you know, training. any uh any one thing that i like about who personally is that it allows you to experiment with

things like cold showers whatever did it up is there anything that you found um that you experimented with that had like a positive or negative effect on your whoop data yeah recently uh i got back like i did the viome test have you heard of them no it's like a stool sample test like an in-home thing you just send it out and then they like spit back this whole database of foods that are ideal for you like these are your ideal these are your superfoods these are the foods that you should avoid completely and then this sort of the middle ground foods anyhow I got my data back and it was like black coffee is like your number one thing you need to avoid oh wow and I love coffee and I'm like a big coffee guy and so it was like that's a wake-up call yeah totally and I think

honestly it was and it was relative to like my microbiome you know not handling stress right now very well because I've been under the stress of sleep deprivation so forth so I'm like okay I'm just I'm prepared to give this a shot. So I took coffee out like maybe almost two weeks ago. And I saw off immediately, like within the first week, like my recovery scores were much higher. My HRVs were much higher than they had been. And nothing else really was changing. So, you know, I've still drinking tea and doing green tea every day and not doing coffee.

I'm going to stick with that for a little while. I'm not writing off coffee forever, that's for sure. but yeah i stopped drinking coffee for about two years i want to say yeah uh in part because i felt i was drinking too much of it and in part because i think like maybe you know just where i was in life i was too anxious about stuff and the coffee was amplifying it yeah yeah yeah and uh and so i convert completely over to tea and then for some reason over the past like two months i've found myself wanting to bring it back in yeah and i've just naturally let coffee come back into my life yeah and and yet now it doesn't have any it doesn't feel to have any of the negative effects that it had

before so maybe it's that my body's evolved or my mind's evolved a little bit or i'm drinking it healthier but even if i look at my whoop data now versus then like again it looks fine now it didn't look fine then so i wonder how much of that test that you did um is good at like understanding a local issue versus a perpetual, you know, like it's sort of the difference between a food sensitivity test where, you know, I'm lactose intolerant. If I take a food sensitive, oh, it's always going to tell me I'm lactose intolerant. It might be that if I take that test right now, it'd tell me black coffee's okay. Sure.

Whereas two years ago, it might say it wasn't. I don't know. It's interesting, though. But these are why, this is why you have to, anyway, that's a big takeaway for me. Are there, are there any things we haven't covered that you want to, you want to jump into? um no man this has been pretty we covered a lot i yeah this has been great no it's been awesome having you on now uh where can people uh where can people find you um i do you know i do still love me some instagram so marcus philly at marcus philly on instagram is uh my channel and then my business revival strength uh revival dash strength dot com and uh and we'll put all this in the show notes so people can find it easily.

Yeah, but just the heading over there and signing up for our email list. I mean, we have a different kind of level of connection that we have with our email list. That's where I like to share a lot of my training concepts and training ideas with people. So sending out free training content all the time on there and keeping you guys informed in ways that you can kind of interact with our business. in different ways. But that's been a really awesome way for me to sort of carry out the blog that I used to have in a different format where I can write kind of long form content for people. Well, I highly recommend it to everyone listening. You've done a phenomenal job,

I think, marrying sort of that like medical intelligence level, but bringing it into a way that's relatable. And obviously, you're living it on a daily basis. So I think you're an inspiration for a lot of people, and I highly recommend people look you up. I appreciate that very much. Well, thanks so much for coming on, man. Yeah, it's been great. All right, cheers. Thanks again to Marcus for being our guest today,

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