WHOOP Podcast - World-class athletic performance coach Bobby Stroupe discusses his methodology and training NFL MVP Patrick Mahomes

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

World-class athletic performance trainer and coach Bobby Stroupe, best known for his work with Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes, shares his philosophies on coaching, athletic training, and high performance. He sits down with Mike Lombardi to discuss how he became a trainer (2:50), his work with Mahomes (8:42), why the mental component of high performance is just as critical as the physical aspects (14:18), gamifying recovery with WHOOP (17:43), how to react to red recoveries (19:16), understanding stress (25:08), his advice to coaches (28:37), and learning to accept different philosophies (32:27). 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

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host Will Amit, founder and CEO of Woop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. Happy 2022. It's going to be a great year.

Thank you for tuning in to the Woop podcast as always. We've got a great guest this week with Bobby Strupe, world-class athletic performance trainer and coach. Before we get to him, I want to remind all of you that we've shared a lot of important information on respiratory rate and COVID-19. You can see some of that on our social media accounts at WOOP at Will Ahmed. I just recovered from COVID right before the holidays, but I will say it was very helpful being able to see an elevated respiratory rate on Woop, which we've shown can be a predictor

of COVID-19. So check that out, look at that information because I do think it's very helpful, especially for all of you whoop members out there. Okay, over to Bobby, perhaps best known for training NFL MVP and Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes. He has been working with Patrick since he was nine years old and has played a critical role in Patrick's rise to the top of the sports world. Bobby's dedicated his life to human performance systems and worked with some of the best athletes in baseball and football. at the collegiate and professional level. He sits down with our own Mike Lombardi, a fantastic coach in his own right for a discussion about coaching philosophies, high performance, and mindset.

Bobby and Mike discuss Bobby's journey to the top of the sports training world and what he's learned along the way, why gamifying your recoveries with Woop can be an outstanding motivator, how taking different philosophies into account can help you gain a better understanding of performance, even if you disagree with those approaches. how to manage red recoveries and why focusing on your mental, emotional, and spiritual health is critical. As a reminder, you can get 15% off a W-W-M membership if you use the code will. That's W-I-L-L. And without further ado, here are Bobby and Mike. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm Mike Lombardi. Today I'm sitting down with

Bobby Strupp. Mike, it's an honor to be on. And you know, I've been with World for a long time as far as being a fan of the product and I love what you guys are doing as far as innovation and yeah excited to dig in today let's get it do you want to kind of talk about your athletic background and then how you found your way to building out you know this performance and what kind of got you started down this road of you know exploring human performance yeah i mean i think it starts with like like a lot of stories in this profession and that i wasn't very good so it was a selfish interest and uh that selfish interest like that selfish interest like to a lot of curiosity. It's a, you know, one of the hallmarks of my personalities. I'm a curious

person. I ask a lot of questions. And I don't think that's always been, uh, something people have enjoyed, but it has led me to a lot of interesting information and, and ideas. And, you know, from being a kid that was the smallest kid on the playground, boy or girl for until, you know, high school, you know, those things were important to me. And I was, I was a different type of kid. And that, that turned into, in high school, you know, I had 20 or 30 of my friends staying after school to work out with me and all of a sudden, I guess I was training them and not knowing what I was doing, but I was doing that. And even had a pretty serious injury in my senior year and ended up going to the library and reading books and trying to rehab myself and play college

ball, you know, played arena football, but I wasn't good. I did those things to learn more about the game and came out of that with a training resume and a dozen internships that I did because I was just interested and parlayed that into what seems to be a career. We're still rolling. I think you're just being humble. Playing arena football, you still have to be at a pretty top level to even continue playing the sport professionally, whatever the league. You were basically training 30 people like in high school.

Were you just reading books about training at a young age? Or were you just kind of saying, I see these people doing it. I'm going to go do that. And, you know, it'll make me better. A little bit of both. You know, I'm a classic nerd, so coming up with things and in trying to figure out what people were doing, I remember in middle school, or younger than that, learning that Ricky Williams used to run stadiums and had a weighted vest. So I asked for Christmas for a weighted vest, and I ran every day a mile around the neighborhood and would try to get my dad to time me. And it started with stuff like that.

And then I just had, you know, I had buddies. And they were like, you know, I'll do it with you, you know, whatever. And I wore out the old Roger Staubeck pro form machine, you know, that old thing. You know, I probably went through four of those in the garage. And while most kids for Christmas are asking for stuff or when you're in high school, you want to go on trips. I was, you know, I want to go visit this doctor. I want to go learn from, I take this course. And in college, I did some of the same.

That's definitely a different path. I think you were truly destined for this life. So you leave arena football. You've done all these sort of internships. What was the intermediary step from, okay, my playing career. done to, hey, I know that I can create this facility that's going to fill a need. What was the path there? It was a complete accident.

I never had ambitions of owning a business or running a facility. And in fact, from my sophomore year of college on to after reading of football, I had a job committed to a mentor mine in Hawaii. And that was something that I learned a lot from because in that period of time, I had opportunities to go into the coaching the game of football, which I loved. I had some really good positions offered to me, and I turned those down flat. I didn't network the way I should because I was confident in the job that I had waiting on me. And I learned a hard lesson.

I got to Hawaii, and within one month, the place shut down and turned into a tennis academy. And I had no job. So I had no plan. I was humbled. I came back home. I had to live with my parents. I went and applied for jobs. Was a manager of fitness for a lifetime fitness that was the first opening.

didn't know anything about it yeah i walk in there throw my resume down i'm like i'm overqualified the guys like you'd be a great manager i'm like perfect then i realized my first day on the job it's like do you never managed anyone you just because you have a train resume doesn't mean so i'm marriage counseling i'm doing things like this i it was a nightmare and i i was able to get out of that it because some therapists recruited me to tyler texas uh to to do what they called a bridge program post therapy and then they said, we'll just see where it goes. Maybe you do some speed camps, maybe, because had a reputation for running fast, and then maybe even we build a facility. That was the start

of APEC. It is interesting how you don't know what road is going to lead you there. It's very rarely linear. You've arrived in a major way now. What did you see as the sort of mission statement of what APEC's going to be? Well, I just wanted it to be broad and focused on improving lives and protecting futures through the field of human performance. And that was the mantra is, if I can improve people's life like it did for me, like this training changed my life. I was no longer the kid that was getting made fun of. I was, you know, a kid that was competitive.

And then all of a sudden I was, you know, good. And then, you know, all these things. And I knew what that meant to my life. And I wanted to give that. And I wanted to give it abundantly. And so in doing that, that was just the broad scope mission of it. I never had any ambition of working with a certain. level and when i got to tyler texas i didn't have a plan i mean i went to door to door and some

of these grandmothers were like can i pray for you because i you know i can call someone if you need a job i'm like no this is what i want to do you know and and it was you know it wasn't easy but i'm so grateful because i think one of the things that kind of makes us unique is that we built it so organically that it literally grew into something that was never a goal and it did that because we focused on the kids and we focused on what we thought was most important for them even though it wasn't always good for the business and it ended up working and it ended up working for people in a major way and consistently and it just kind of grew and then my job changed consistently and new challenges brought new answers and it just kind of let us you know we're 17 years in now obviously the

prayers worked one day Patrick Mahomes either walks in how did that connection start it was really organic you know we ever built our model around hunting kids You know, I had a relationship with his father due to, you know, we had an MLB program that just kind of started organically from a player coming in post Tommy John that was labeled a certain way. And he made a good recovery. And then all of a sudden, I'm a guy that helps pitchers coming off that. So we had a group of those guys. Then that attracted his father to come and do some training with us. And he was in kind of a comeback type of mindset.

And that formed a relationship with him and garnered the trust of his. family and that led to opportunities with Patrick. And those opportunities with Patrick were in our groups. You know, I don't believe in personal training for kids. And so everyone goes in the groups because I think it is a skill that kids and athletes need to learn to get interested to receive instruction. And I think that there's hormonal advantages and there's physiological and cognitive advantages of taking instruction in groups. And so he was in groups. He was in groups. And then the first time we ever did anything, you know, privately was in high school. You know, we've had a relationship since he was nine years old.

I think if people were to look now, they'd probably say, okay, Patrick Mahomes is really what made this guy. But it's cool to hear that it was actually the generation before, maybe even two generations before, that you, you know, were fixing baseball players, not, you know, being a football factory. I will proudly wear the badge as someone that was made by Patrick. Okay, that's fine. I'll change my name to Patrick Malm's trainer. That's fine. But I will tell you that, you know, before. Patrick played a, before Patrick was in high school, we had over 100 professional athletes

at six different sports, and that doesn't make us good or bad. Your client list doesn't make you good at what you do, but we've had a focused mission before him, and I'm so honored to walk alongside him now and support him. But I take all those things in stride, man, and I'll embrace it just so you know. You talked about the group training. How do you manage the challenge of getting people the training that they need, even within the group environment, when people need slightly different things. I think it's a fantastic question.

I think that the higher level you get, the more individualization you need, in my opinion, unless you have injury, history, or some very specific challenges, right? But even with a professional athlete, I think if 25% in your time is one-on-one and 75% of your time is within a group, I think that's appropriate. I mean, there's a reason why Olympic athletes still training groups, they can certainly afford one-on-one, but there's a certain level of neurotrophic growth factor and different types of things that you turn on your senses at survival-type mechanisms that are built in are hardwired in our primal state that can only be activated in a group setting. And athletes

to their core, they true, you know, they know this. And you've worked out players, you know, one-on-one, and then you put them out in practice, you know, like this is a different guy. Now, that can go positively or negatively. But I think that's part of the training process and should be considered. And I think one-on-one time should be reserved for things that are for individualization, you know, things that, you know, this athlete has to do for their physical preparation in the way that they play the sport. This athlete has to do this because of the way that their body works and they have to do these things in order to prevent certain things or to push out certain gifts that they have. And that's my stance on personal training.

I think a lot of times you can become a DVD athlete, meaning you only work well when, you know, your person's there like you pop it in you play if you can't do that then then you're just not effective and i think it's psychologically damning to kids that are overrelying on it interesting i mean i think that's that's a really good point do you still see that same sort of reliance on the individual stuff uh with your with your pro athletes yeah i still try to keep that ratio because i think that you know my quarterbacks need competitive uh type of environment's not necessarily where it's a, you know, it's not a race every day. It's just competitive environments where they're around receivers and linebackers if they're a quarterback. And they're still, like,

in my opinion, they're humans first, they're a male or female second or, you know, their, their biology points to something. After that, there's going to be the sport, then the sport demands, then their position. So we've got to go in that order when we develop them from a training standpoint, holistically. And they've got to feel that. They've got to be a football point. player before they're a quarterback. And from a training standpoint, and so I do like that exposure, and I like to pull them in and out of the groups, and I like to add things in that are different individuals, and then I like to have certain days that maybe it's just one-on-one.

So to answer your question, yeah, I think it can be even worse at the professional level. And I think you probably, you know, you can probably see that with some of the people in the way they receive coaching and the way they act at practice. It matters what they're being told. I don't want guys relying on me. I want to help give them information. give them problem solving tools and watch them work and that's the only way that they're going to sustain the things I'm doing for them. What would you say is kind of, you know, some of the

more fun things that you do? Obviously there's like training. We love training. Like training is fun in general. The other things that are like sort of outside the box that, you know, help keep it fresh. I think we saw Pat Mahomes playing tag or something like that, you know, do you kind of just get back to some of the fundamental things of like being a human? Absolutely. I mean, at the core of it, you've got to have fun with it, and they've got to be able to express himself. There's, there's so many different personality types and combinations and backgrounds and skill sets. So the way I look at an athlete is, is a few different buckets. The first one is that mental, emotional, spiritual. And that is important. So that's

why the player's life has to be in a good place if you're going to get their best play. And that's why that they've got to focus on that as an athletic attribute. Those three things combined form the whole of that bucket in my mind. The next is their physical attributes. Hey, how tall are they? You know, what's their wingspan? What's your hardwired things we can't change? Be aware of those, acknowledge those as your gifts, and then how do we use your talent to exemplify those things in the game that you play?

Then there's a nutritional component. There's their creative approach, which is what you saw with Patrick, and I'll expand on that tag game, but how resourceful are they with their physical attributes and gifts? How creative are they in their approach to play the game and the skills that they can? If Patrick played quarterback like Peyton Manning, it'd be a problem because he's not going to stand on his tippy toes and fire the ball like that. His spine isn't that long. His arm isn't that long. He doesn't have that view of sight and he could never mirror that technique. That's just an example. Tactical sport approach, like what's their philosophy? Technical skill approach, how do they throw comparatively to another quarterback or hit if they're a batter?

their actual biomechanics, the state of their body right now, you know, if they have a plate in their ankle that changed their biomechanics, I don't care what some internet or social media physical therapist tells me about the foot position they got to be in. If they have a hard plate in their leg, they're not going to get there. So what do we do now? We work with the mechanics they have to give them optimal positions. And then neurological proficiency and readiness, I think gets glossed over. For instance, if guys truly get ready and pregame, like they do full speed movements. They prep their body neurologically. They're going to be sharper not just in the first quarter, but throughout the entire game because you set your cognitive responses and your

neurological responses. And that neurological proficiency has got to be checked on more often than some of the others. So those are the things we look at. And when you pull it back to Patrick playing tag and that, you know, I got drug for that video. But what it was was, you know, this guy's coming off a medical procedure. And you go through your testing of the tissues. and how resilient they are, and you go through your testing of the joints, you know, joint order, muscle order, and you start saying, okay, physically he looks okay,

well, then I can run him in a circle all I want, but until I put him in a reactive problem-solving scenario, I will not know if he's healthy enough to go compete. So what that was was the latter stages of seeing if he's gotten back his creative approach to movement. I mean, that was amazing. Tag is basically being the test of, is one of the best football players in the world

able to get back to his craft. So it doesn't always have to be fancy. Simple as effective. You know, let's talk a little whoop here with Patrick specifically. Even all your athletes, because I know that you and I have talked years ago about, you know, anytime somebody comes in, you want them to hop on whoop, you know, it's another piece of the puzzle. How do you utilize that sort of data with large groups, whether it's, you know, within the group setting, within the individualized setting as you're running these training sessions?

Yeah, as you know, I would have loved everyone in APEC to have that on. And it was a challenge back in the day because of the cost and expense. And now it's easy. And I think there's so many things you can do with it. One, this is going to be a silly thing to say on this podcast. But I don't think the accuracy of the WIPP device matters in a large sense for my purposes. And let me explain that because the whole point is if I can gamify the recovery process, then I've already won because I've created a competitive.

environment for my athletes in a space that's never been able to be competitive. I can absolutely gauge and rank where all the athletes are, whether it's adult fitness, youth, or professional athletes. I've got a little alpha group that is the guys that I feel like are top in their sport, and they compete every night in recovery and sleep. And regardless of how accurate it is, and I know it's accurate, and I don't know there's always efforts to make it better. I've already won because they don't want to lose. And because they don't want to lose, who offers that incredibly, it's just an advantage from an interface standpoint. These guys see it and it's ranked and it's pretty objective. If they win or lose the day and sending

the table with that gives me every advantage I need to integrate whoop. So you're looking at the recovery or, you know, they look at their recovery. How are you and your staff also taking and that information to potentially augment training. Obviously, like you said, you build training around any sort of limitation, physiological, biomechanical limitation. In terms of like the actual readiness of an athlete on a day, how are you playing with that in the whole spectrum? Well, there's a few things.

And I think you have to be careful because being too reactive, I think, can can really disrupt this process and the purpose of it. But we want to look to see that towards an energy. end of a linear block training cycle meaning if we're going let's just say three weeks towards end of those three weeks the recovery scores should be getting worse and and there's a possibility it will be undulating but overall it should be getting worse and their their scores as far as the stress level should be getting better and as those things cross and then we should reboot on week four and start over and things should improve and then they get worse again

so those things are pretty easy to identify but when you start looking at high level athletes, there's so many factors. So, you know, one of the common things, the questions I get about whoop, I'm sure you guys do too, is, oh my gosh, if someone's in the red, they shouldn't play or practice because they get injured today. And I think that that is something that needs to, you know, I know you guys have spoke on it and it needs to be debunked consistently because all that that means is that you are not at your best from a standpoint when you wake up and you've got an opportunity to utilize your resources to improve your readiness if you have a practice or game that day. From a central nervous system response standpoint, whether it be caffeine intervention, I mean, there's so many things you can do to overcome that.

However, you look at trends, right, and you look at things over time and you see if they're outliers and what you need to affect. So most people will say, well, if they're in the yellow or in their red, you decrease the training volume. It depends. I mean, how many days in a row has it been? What is something we need to do today? Typically, the thing that I would do, if I am going to react to it, which I don't often, is decrease volume but commit to the intensity. I don't want to ever compromise intensity and training, but I will compromise volume and training because from a neurological standpoint, I feel like the body holds on to the appropriate receptive communication from high speed and high velocity movements. for at least three days.

So if I need that to happen, I know they'll recover before the game. I just still need that central nervous system exposure and the tissues will be fine. But if we're running on seven days of red, that's a me problem. I've got to intervene and we've got to, either there's a lifestyle problem

or there's an overtraining problem and I've got to figure out a solution. I just think there's probably too much reaction to poor scores, right? Would you agree? I think how you said it was very well put. a one-day score, barring a jump in respiratory rate, like a big spike, you're probably, something might be off.

You may be eight late, could be just getting enough sleep. It could be a suite of things. It is trends. And the way that most training blocks go, as you said, you're going to see the tanking, you know, trending down. Like that's the progressive overload. That's the expectation that means it's working, you know, that's training. If you do see these, you know, three, four, five days of in the red,

something's probably off and those things that you mentioned could be over training could be this potential underlying illness could be anything but there does have to be an intervention when we're looking at the trends but the reactionary to a single day i i know that so i did the wupod with tom george he's an Olympic rower from great britain he for 2,000 meters you know it's pretty standard distance he went under 540 which is like a 124 split okay for 2,000 meters So he did it once in a barn by himself, and then one day he's like, yeah, I just did it another time, like in the red. I want to see if I could go faster.

And, you know, it was close, but I didn't go faster, but still broke 540. And it's like, you can still do miraculous things with a singular day in the red. If you wake up in the red, it's really an opportunity for you to take advantage of your resources and tighten the screws for the rest of the day. If you know you have a game at 7.30 or 8, you know, what are you doing? how are you hydrating, what's your nutrition, what's your mobility, how do you build yourself into the best possible space to be at your best possible self on that day? Even if you're not starting there, how do you get to the best version of that? So you nailed it. Do you feel like

the people that you work with, understand that? I think they do, especially if I work with them on a high level and our team works with them on a high level. I think that what I tell them is you are really a walking, functioning version of your last accumulative 10 days. So you know, I've had people have great games in the World Series or the Super Bowl in the red. You know, I have. And I think, but their last 10-day average is on par. You know, you have to take care of yourself and you can't overreact to these things. And I think that, you know, communicating that can be tough for some personality types because they don't understand why is this not green today? I play today. But let's just look at the snapshot of a week on a Sunday to Sunday for, let's say, the NFL quarterback. Sunday, you know, they're going to be, their strain gauge is going to be high. And Monday, they should be, they might not have to be in red, but it probably's not going to be perfect. And then Monday is a lot of recovery.

And so you hope to get a good score going into Tuesday. But Tuesday and Wednesday are probably not going to be good because there's a certain amount of volume that you have to do to get guys ready to play. Thursday, it might be better. Friday, it should be better. Saturday, if it's not better, I'd be concerned. Sunday, I don't care. I don't want them to look at it.

And we, you know, then we start over. But the cumulative score should probably be in the middle if I look at the week. And you guys have the ability for us to look at the Monday through Sunday. If we're in the yellow, I feel good about it. If we're in the green, I'm like, well, you know, maybe we could have done a little more. So there's always riding that line and looking at those things and being subjective about, you know, other elements that are stressed that are in their life and understanding, you know, dogs, babies, business, football, you know, win-loss records. all of it matters stress is stress the body can't delineate if it's coming from from what i'm doing to them or it's an external form of stress and you have you have to adapt within reason

how are you also building the mental side of this like you said stress is stress it feels like you have a pretty good grasp on that yourself do you feel like you've been able to get this through to your players teams and the other the other cultures that you're working with obviously have you been able to bring your mentality and culture to these other places that you work with. I think it's a commitment and it's fluid. You know, our ethos is the characteristic spirit of the culture we allow around us. And so I've got to have a certain thing that I bring, but I want, I want to hear those things in the press conferences that my players have. I want to hear those things in the way they interact with their teammates and the way they

interact, you know, on the field with the people they play against. And I, you know, I think it's fluid and it's consistent. You have to have a commitment that that job has never done. And I've got to be committed to constantly investigating what's the best mindset for the individuals that I work with. And so I do find that that is top of mind for me, that that is consistently something to pay attention to, and that I think is a big part of the job at this level. Can you go into these talks and these other sort of videos that you put out there? What I try to always say is that these are the way, this is the way I see it. And I'm a guy that I coached the sport. I played the sport. I am a strength conditioning coach. I did a fellowship in

therapy. This is just the way I see it. You don't have to commit to my thoughts. These are my thoughts I'm imposing on you. And I truly feel that way. I'm fine if people don't agree. I'm just putting out my thoughts in the universe and hopefully that's helpful. And I've had a lot of great feedback from people in a lot of unsuspecting places. And, you know, my takes, a lot of them, I made them up. I didn't do a research study with 12 females that only, you know, they go to church on Wednesday nights and eat soup on Thursday mornings and have had surgery on their left ACL and, you know, take three years to publish them. No, a lot of this is based on experience of, you know, look, I started training little kids and I saw them grow and about 50 times I've seen little kids turn into pro athletes

and these are some things that I think I think. And it's not that I don't find things in research because I do. But some things I do make up from the experience that I have and I'm fully committed to backing those things and I'm fully committed to you know if someone disagrees I'm fine with it but it's difficult when you put things out there because then people in the event that anything goes wrong you're going to get you know chastised and that's just part of the gig so if someone want is you know you work with every every walk of life basically people that are looking to just improve performance wellness what would kind of be your advice to the coaches of people that are doing similar I think

that what happens a lot of times is people, I don't want to say look down on coaches, but you know, it's like there's not the respect that should be there, but a true professional coach can be life-changing and as you have been yourself. What advice do you have someone that wants to get into this sort of space and help people? I think the number one piece of advice I would say is, you know, commit to lifelong education and self-audit monthly and quarterly and deep dive yearly question everything be open-minded and you know the next thing is is keep the main thing the main thing like you got to decide what you really want to do and if if what you write on a piece of paper is I want to work with professional athletes I think that's going to be hard

for you I think I think I think you got to focus on what you know what is it you want to do you know do you want to help people be the best version of themselves you know be the best you as one of our mantras then then do that you know like ours was simple improve lives and protect futures through the field of human performance. That's vast. That's broad. It gives us flexibility. But we stuck to that. And I think you first got to, I know it sounds corny, but you got to decide what you want to do and you got to write it down. Then you got to go find a way to do it. And then when you do it, you got to do it in your own way. I could never train people in some of the ways that I see out there that are effective because it doesn't fit my skill set. It doesn't

fit my personality. It doesn't fit my background. And I'm glad those things are out. there but that's not what I offer. And, you know, in business or in training, I think Blue Ocean and Red Ocean concepts are something that should be grasped. And that is, if there's a lot of sharks in the water and it's bloody because there's, you know, there's stuff, there's competition. What is not being provided for athletes or clients in your market? What is not being provided at all? Do you have what it takes to provide something that's unique and different, does it align with your core principles and your mission, then go do it. And for us, and for us, it does. I mean, we blend a lot of philosophies and a unique track and background

of long-term athletic development, and we prioritize movement, and people know what they're getting with us. You're not going to come to me and get certain things because it's not what we do. And people should know that about you if you're starting this, what you're actually doing and what you are not doing, which is maybe more important. Where was the light bulb moment for you? The mantra is great improve after tech futures through human performance very clear but there had to be a point where you're just like oh man this is it i like i finally put it in words do you remember what that was you know specifically i don't i mean i knew i wanted to do this from a young age as soon as it clicked with me that i got that i felt better about myself through work that i did you know i knew like

i wonder if i could do this for other people i mean that was early thought but you know the apex thing was so organic you know i was really unsure of how how much I was helping people for a long time because, and I'll tell you why, you know, training people to run faster and you time their 40s, measuring vertical jump, broad jump, you know, any of the weight room lifts, we were doing that even in our early years at APEC. And I would get so frustrated because I would go watch a player in basketball or watch a player in football and go out. And apologies for being frank, but they just, they were, they were terrible. They suck. And I'm like, how? I'm like, How is it that a guy decreases its 40 by four tenths?

His vertical jump by seven inches, broad jump by a foot, bench pressed by 60 pounds, front squat by 100 pounds. And he's still horrible, even comparatively to before. At that point, I realized I got to go find more. And I recommitted to learning. I recommitted to, you know, asking why and investigating him. At that point, that was when I exposed myself to some things that changed. changed my mindset forever. And that that was a turning point for training for sure. And I don't

know if that directly answers your question, but that was my light bulb moment. You know I've got to dive deeper into what were those things? It was understanding the therapy side, but even from a different standpoint, I got exposed to some philosophies I didn't agree with. And I had to face the fact that I'm wrong about a lot, not a little bit, but a lot. And I think in training, you don't want to wholesale adopt training philosophies like religions. You don't. It's not an all in or all out. I mean, you don't have to be a certain religion or denomination. You can learn from all of them. I decided to go learn about the things I disagreed with directly. And when I did, it opened me to just changing my world. And the therapy world is vast. And there's people in the Premier League

and people that are osteopaths around the world that have some awesome philosophies that if they stood by themselves, they don't include the principles of human performance that I believe in. And so I think that there can be some people that finger pointed at some of those things. And it's like, but the way I look at it is those are sprinkles on the cupcake. If you try to make those things the whole cupcake, the dessert is no good. So I took those things and I made them a minimal part of what we do. I'll give you an example, Mike. So you've heard the term functional training, right?

Yeah. All right. It's bastardized and it should be because there's people doing functional. training that it's, you know, it's ridiculous. And if you do it, you know, and you've got the, you know, you've got the flexibility of a dandy line. You can also get snapped like one, too. Okay. It's, so, so I went and redefine some of these terms within our own company. So let's take functional training for an example. What is functional training? When inside APEC philosophies, functional training starts with this, movement literacy. What's movement literacy? How well do you

move, how well do you move forward? How well do you move backward from a basic sense? Can you, can you, you backpedal a fly 10 as fast as you can do a form start 10 forward okay that's a that's an objective measure okay we have about 14 different movements that we grade you on how well you do it and can you do it forward backward can you do it in a semi you know a circle curve a linear whatever that's movement literacy next point force absorption that's functional training can you absorb force force transmission pretty easy one can you transmit force can you do it fast how long is it like a 40 inch vertical doesn't matter if it takes you three seconds to get there. Right. Right. So, but these things have never really been defined or discussed. So we decided we're going to make this

a training objective. And like in the NBA, you know, Dennis Robin wasn't the highest jumper in the history of the NBA, but he was the fastest off the ground to the ball. So pattern stability. Pattern stability is important in sport. Why? Because if you don't have stability in the patterns that you play the sport in, you will not have resiliency. And that's another point, targeted tissue resiliency, individualized target tissue resiliency, and problem-solving strategies, nervous system calibration, this is functional training. What we did is we started defining things that mattered to us, to what we felt like we could do for our clients. Because what do you do if your clients already do core lifts at school and they're good at them and they improve all their lifts.

Well, are we just strength coaches? And I think not. I think performance is an umbrella that is health performance and player development and there's there's a thousand attributes you can train so that that's where we started with it what was your training philosophy before that when you said i got to go face these things and what were some of those things that if you don't have to give me everything obviously just give me the functional training version but what were you kind of thinking as this is what my training philosophy is now before you have this great shift and sort of enlightenment You know, I had to follow the track of studying some people that I think are still brilliant. I still use them in the majority of our training.

But, you know, Tudor Bompah, Dr. Michael E.S. were, you know, mentors from afar, read a lot of their books. Vern Gambetta, Jimmy Radcliffe, a lot of philosophies there that I still use as the majority of the training that we believe in. But I was doing a lot of plymetrics and probably too many plymetrics. without working on biomechanical proficiency first. We kind of labeled ourselves as a speed development company just because I was a fast athlete. And as you know, you can't pair your background with your profession beyond a start.

If you try to take it all the way down the road, there's going to be a point where people have more experience to you or that we're better than you, and it's probably just because you were good at it doesn't mean that you're good at teaching it. It doesn't mean you actually know about it. So we had to expand outside of speed development. And while I had a power lifting background personally,

strength was something that was being provided for a lot of our athletes unless they were professionals. And so I had to go back and rethink what is an element that we can affect there instead of trying to, like, because we do stupid stuff like this. Okay, you do squat at your school four times a week. Well, I think you don't squat very well. So we're going to teach you how to really squat up here. Well, looking back, that was just ignorant.

You just leave it alone. provide value in a blue ocean space. And so what we started doing is targeting power development, like 20% loads. How fast can you move this? Even back in the day before you can measure it, just go fast. We're going to do lightweights here and faster and less reps because it wasn't a linchpin of what they came to us for. It wasn't a mark for them.

And those are just examples, but, you know, we were deep rooted into some things that were very rigid. And it was more less, you know, my thinking was, this doesn't work for you, it's because you're not doing it correctly or you're not giving me your best. It was very arrogant and, you know, I had to learn. I had to be humbled there. And it was a good thing. I think a lot of coaches go through this as they make the shift from athlete themselves to coach. So obviously, you were a player in the arena football league. You were known for speed and all these other things. How long do you feel like it took for your shift to be like,

all right, I got it. I'm humbled. And I'm not the focus anymore. Everyone else is the focus. It took about four years of running my own business. About four years in, I was pretty miserable because the business was growing financially, but I felt like I wasn't really doing a great job for people. And while I could show you on paper that I was, I knew in my heart that they weren't that they weren't that much better. I was showing objectively that I was improving the things that I said that I would. But I wasn't, I wasn't happy with the, the total development of my athletes and my people in my company. And it just, it really made me go critically think and investigate things on a higher level. Bobby, I think that the sort of like growth aspect of

really looking inward and changing over time, like we've never fully arrived, you probably keep working on it, like you said, this sort of self-audits and all that, very, very important. So I think hopefully a lot of people can take a lot away from this, even just starting with that sort of internal review process of what am I about? What am I believing? Am I living it? And then how do I measure it and get better? So thank you for being here today. Where can people find you on the internets? And I'm most active on Instagram. And it's just my name. And then Bob, so Strewbob, at Strupe Bob is my handle there. And on Twitter, it's just my name at Bobby Strupe. But on both of those, I love to interact. I love to answer questions.

and just banter and have fun, but I do a lot of lives on Instagram if people want to find me. Always climbing, baby. Hey, I appreciate it. And if we ever want to nerd out, some more, you know, I'm always down, so I appreciate it.

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks to Bobby for coming on the Whoop podcast. Make sure to drop us a rating or review. Please subscribe to the Wooop podcast. Check us out on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed. And you can get 15% off a WOOP membership by using the code Will.

That's W-I-L. All right. 2022 is off and running. As are you. Stay committed to those goals, those resolutions. Stay in the green. Watch that respiratory rate. Keep it flat.

And we'll be back next week. Thanks so much.