Christopher Sommer - Creating Excellence through Gymnastics

Full transcript: Christopher Sommer on London Real

5:50 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Christopher Sommer, the former U.S. national team gymnastics coach and the founder of Gymnastic Bodies, a learning platform training 80,000 adults worldwide here.

6:17 You teach the gymnastic techniques learned over 40 years creating champions in order to increase the mobility, flexibility and strength of your students. You’re the author of the book Building the Gymnastic Body, and we’re one of the world-class performers featured in Tim Ferriss’s book Tools of Titans. Coach Sommer, welcome to London Real. Thank you, Brian. Thank you.

6:35 That 40 years made me feel old, but we want to drill into some of that knowledge today, I hope. Uh, first, I was wondering, how do we rank in London, in the UK, when it comes to, I don’t know, our gymnastic prowess, our mobility, our flexibility? What do you see when you come here that may be different than the US? You guys are crushing it. So if we go back 20 years, there was no good gymnastics at all, and then Britain got tired from getting their tail kicked, made a major investment, brought good coaches in, early 2000s changed the entire climate.

7:13 Uh, some of the national team coaches here are my friends, so we’ve talked, and uh, that generation of almost frustrated athletes learned how to be good coaches, and now my gosh, look at you guys now. Multiple Olympics in a row, tearing it up, outperforming the U.S. If you had asked, I wish I would have put money on you guys, knowing you guys were going to do what you did. Back when, we would have cleaned up. How does that happen with a population a quarter of the size?

7:40 I mean, you’ve seen great teams and probably bad teams. You’ve worked with Bulgarians, Chinese, Russians. You know what makes a great team, you guys? The small size of Britain works to your advantage. So they brought a lot of good Russian coaches in.

7:58 You guys had budget, it was all paid for, I believe, out of your lottery, the National Lottery perhaps. So they received funding and it was easy to get everyone together for centralized training because you didn’t have two weeks to drive across the country, you had a handful of hours. So everyone could always get to Birmingham when they need it. It wasn’t, you know, super difficult. They could maintain quality.

8:22 Your national training center in Birmingham is great, little shops, really nice. Okay. And I guess with the US, with people spread all around, it’s expensive to get them together. Okay, it’s expensive. Interesting.

8:34 And our climate though doesn’t necessarily get people training as much, or is that not true? I know you’ve been to Australia, whether it’s just a natural outdoor climate, which seems like it makes them more active, but they don’t have good gymnastics in Australia. They don’t, I think, because country’s so large. In fact, I was giving them a hard time. They were, uh, guys, you know, you used to be 13th in the world and now you’re 27th.

9:01 It’s time to, you know, something’s broken, you got to figure out what’s broken, right? So as a competitive national level, they’re not getting medals? No, they’re going to rebuild. Okay, but as individuals they probably are more active and as a culture, yeah, probably. I’ll say out in the countryside outside London, people with extreme kyphosis, where they’re really hunched, I’ve seen more people who are, I guess from not enough activity out in the countryside walking, with just severe deformity in their upper back.

9:34 You know, they weren’t that way when they were young, you know. It wasn’t the case, it was just between 50 and 70, if you’re not moving, it’s going to get you. Yeah, and I want to talk about that and what you’ve learned about teaching adults later. You know, when I knew you were coming on, I thought back to an incident that happened to me about five or six years ago. I went to take a hand balancing class from someone who one of my MMA fighter guests had recommended, and I went to a place and it happened to also be a gymnastics training center in London.

10:02 Okay. And there was a, and they had the whole, you know, the bars and the setup and the rings, and in the corner I wasn’t using that, and it was like a girls’ class going on. They must have been eight-year-old girls, and I remember towards the end of the class, at a corner of my eye I caught them, and I think they all went and hung on, like, the high bar, and then the coach said, “Okay, give me 10 pull-ups,” or something like that, and they busted out the set, and then while hanging and waiting they went then to the next set, and I looked at these little bodies and thought, what is going on here?

10:30 I know very few adults who can do that kind of an output, and yet they were doing it consistently, and these were girls, not boys. Sure. And I thought to myself, what is going on with gymnastics? What’s happening here that makes them do things that I can’t even see strength training people do in the gym? And so I thought I might ask you a little bit about maybe what I saw and what you could explain to us.

10:54 I recently have now been training kind of weekly in hand balancing. I took up break dancing about two years ago. Did you really? So yeah, I’d love to get your thoughts on that later because that’s kind of a weird, interesting mix. And then I actually just got challenged and finished an Ironman race, so I threw some endurance on top of that, which was just a different thing for me to learn, and we can get to that stuff, but what did I see in that gymnastics class?

11:17 And do you get people coming to you asking you, like, how do they get it? Why? Yeah. It’s one something that helps people to understand is it’s just natural movement. So what’s unnatural is high levels of maximum strength, right?

11:35 That’s unusual for us. So we can take someone, for example, our easiest physical component as adults to develop is endurance. Start for someone from a couch potato, six months later they can run a marathon. Flip that on its side: couch potato, six months later benching 300 pounds? Not a chance in the world.

11:56 Okay, so endurance we build really naturally, easily. Then in between there kind of is where that body weight’s going to fall, because you manipulate your body. That would have been what we did back in the day, right? I’ve got to climb, I’ve gotta swim, I’ve gotta jump, I’ve gotta move, I’ve gotta pick something up and carry it. All right, a little bit of sprinting mixed in, mostly just moderate cardio.

12:19 That’s what we’re designed to do as a human animal. Hunter-gatherer. Exactly right, everything comes from that. Okay, and so I’m seeing young athletes that are being conditioned with kind of that moderate, healthy, healthy natural play with a little structure added to it. Okay, healthy natural play with some structure, and by 10 years old they’re able to do incredible things because it was gradual.

12:45 Because what did they do? That’s that’s a mistake adults make, is they said, “I want to do that.” Well, that athlete is training four days a week, three days a week, five days a week. I’m gonna jump in there. And what they didn’t realize is a human animal is a human animal.

12:58 That child started one day a week and rode that for a while, and that eventually became twice a week, and then that became twice a week for a little bit longer. It was never super hard, there was never a race, they were having a good time, but there was always accountability and structure. And if you put enough time in the bank, now you end up with great sets of 10 pull-ups. It’s just a natural consequence. Um, what is gymnastics, if you had to explain it to people?

13:28 What is the essence of what competitive gymnastics or what we do? Let’s do both first. All right. Competitive gymnastics is going to be high-level acrobatics. It’s going to be the highest complexity of physical movement that a human being is capable of.

13:45 So we’ll get people, they’ll say, “Coach,” they’ll, I get stuff all the time, “Coach, you got to see this,” and I’m like, “Okay, that was great. But now check this out.” Here’s a guy who just did three flips with three twists, all in a single jump. And they’re like, “Okay, I see.” But we’re talking about, uh, the highest expression of human coordination.

14:09 We spent a lot of time working with some of the Chinese Olympic lifting coaches, you know, and we hear all the time, “This is super complex, super complex.” But compared to what we would do for competitive gymnastics at a world-class level, not even remotely close. The loads are high, right, but some of the loads that we incur in training are similar. For example, a round-off back handspring, just doing a simple backflip and Olympic Training Center, we’ve floor plates down, them all measured up, and 14 times body weight.

14:44 So day in, day out, turn after turn, 14 times body weight. What that does to the strength of the bone, connective tissue. But that’s kind of our competitive side. We don’t do that as a business. We don’t do any technical training as a business, besides handstand.

15:00 It needs a professional, a good eye, good facility, uh, someone who can make sure things stay on track. What we do is gymnastic strength training. We remove the acrobatic portion of it. Okay, so no flips and inversions. That’s when things get complicated and dangerous.

15:17 You got to do it right. I saw someone who taught himself, it was a YouTube video, and he fast-forwarded it, but he was so proud. He had taught himself a backflip in eight hours. So he drug a bed mattress out, put it in the back of his yard, and was just all by himself trying to do back flips, landing on his face, landing on a stone, landing on his side, all bruised, all red. And at the end of eight hours he kind of landed on his feet, and he was so proud, and his friends were celebrating, and I was just like, you have no idea the risks you were taking.

15:48 I mean, it was fun when you fell and you got up, but you didn’t break anything, you’re not permanently injured, you’re a lucky guy. And said they were all celebrated. Actually it should be the opposite. This is to show you what not to do. Don’t do that, guys, because even with the mattress it’s highly dangerous.

16:04 Neck, neck, head, brain. What if he had kicked out upside down? I mean, just some, sometimes being young is a blessing and sometimes it’s a curse, right? You don’t have enough sense. Yeah, indeed.

16:16 So you take everything that you learn from gymnastics over, sorry to say again, the 40 years teaching some of these champions, and you’ve removed the acrobatics component and said, what can we learn from the strength training side? Yes. How do we replicate? So my story was, I, I never, so when I started, right back in the Stone Age, we didn’t even have the nice gymnastic floors we had now. We had wrestling mats, right?

16:43 So there’s no spring in the floor, no spring whatsoever. The first time I saw one of those floors, I was like, what in the world is this? I was in college, but from all the plyometric work we got crazy strong, and I didn’t understand why people had to train to run. I had no idea. So I liked a girl who was on our track team.

17:03 So summertime is off season. She was running with two groups in the morning for 12 miles a day. I jumped right in, never noticed a thing. Went right to running 20 miles, didn’t notice a thing. I think we were doing 400 meters for 72 seconds, never noticed a thing, never got sore, ain’t none of that.

17:23 All the way through college, did military time, uh, used to train with all the big giant guys because we used the same weights. Okay, then after all that, stop. The longer I was out of gymnastics training, the more my performance levels dropped. Didn’t matter what I did, didn’t matter what I did. Losing strength, losing mobility, losing speed, losing endurance, and just frustrated.

17:48 So all of this was trying to parse the gymnastics training experience down to its core elements. You know, try to, because I don’t want to be in the gym 20, 30 hours a week trying to maintain old athletic capabilities. How much could I, could I distill it down into so that someone who was older could have a life and still have superior performance and good health? The tumbling on those wrestling mats prepared your body to handle the pounding that goes on in those half marathons, almost full marathons, and even the endurance as well.

18:23 Oh, it was, it was nothing, because if I could handle 14 times body weight, am I going to notice a couple, one or two times body weight as I’m running? No, it was nothing. I literally had no idea why people trained for it. In fact, most people. So right now I might run, uh, every two weeks go on a long run, every two weeks, and it’s plenty.

18:48 It’s plenty, and it’ll vary mileage of plane, very, I run it usually through a wave, and I’m just getting ready to throw a little bit of sprints in. If most people would take care of their mobility first and their core strength first, do some basic strength enough to allow them to get into some controlled progressive plyometric work, their running performance would increase so much faster, so much faster. So it’s the fountain of youth, really, gymnastics training?

19:14 Well, it hasn’t worked for growing my hair back, so I can’t say fountain of youth, but it could help for performance. You know, I want to hear a little bit more about your story, but I would want to know if you had to explain what your ethos is as a trainer, um, or your principles. I think that’s really important because you know, so many people talk about all these things, and it all comes down, and they get what, flowery and poetic? Yeah. That happens, and then it goes, but it all comes down to the what and the details, and that’s usually about your why.

19:43 And I was wondering how you would explain your, the way, our approach. Yeah, your approach. Pragmatic, patient, no excuses, and a lot of that comes from national team coach, you know, where we did what we needed to do when it needed to be done. I looked at training in one year blocks because that’s how long it took to have a significant impact on a physical structure. You know, anything, anything less.

20:08 I had, I had someone once who sent me and I said, “Coach, I’m your most serious fan. This is my life. I’m so dedicated to it. No one works harder than me. I live, eat and sleep this, but I’m frustrated.

20:21 I’m frustrated with my lack of progress.” So I was like, “All right, well, fill me in. How long you’ve been training?” He said, “Three weeks.” I was like, dude, three weeks.

20:34 So a lot of people don’t realize, they’re kind of used to fast fixes, they’re used to 38. Well, when Tim first reached out, he was like, “Coach, what can we do in 30 days?” Now it’s just Tim Ferriss. I don’t want to tell Tim no, but that’s kind of what I told him. I said, “Tim, there’s nothing we can do in 30 days, there’s nothing at all we can do.”

20:55 As we, we did some assessments, as we got into it he started doing just super basic stuff, right, and then he surprised me on some of our conversations where he said he felt better than he had in years. in just little stuff. What we found with adults is mobility goes first. Just like we’re sitting here right now, what are the hip flexors doing? Nothing.

21:17 Where are the quads? Where the quads doing? Nothing. What’s the calves doing? Nothing except tightening, they’re tightening.

21:25 Our exercises are all going to be linear, nothing is out of alignment. We’re going to do some cardio but not much. We’re not going to walk very much during the day, so at the desk, pec minor’s tightening, biceps are tightening, scaps don’t move. First time we worked with adults, we just tried to do a basic stretch with them. They couldn’t, they couldn’t.

21:49 In fact, what we consider mobility work was almost max effort for them. Just you would watch people, so the scapula can pinch together, you would watch people break out into a quivering sweat as they tried to pinch their shoulder blades together because they hadn’t done it for years, and that was used to be a warm-up for your nationality. We, we didn’t even do a national team, we didn’t even dream about trying it. We did what we thought would be a super basic warm-up, I just super scaled down, like I would do with little five-year-olds.

22:21 Destroyed them, just destroyed them, and we turned around, okay, well, we can throw this training plan away because they can’t even stretch, they feel warm up. Now what do we do? And that was a big aha moment for you. Big aha moment. We never realized how important obliques were for adults.

22:41 We had no idea. So you can’t be a gymnast, for example, and have tight or weak obliques. And where are the obliques located? They’re going to be on the side and they wrap around into the lat. Okay, we have one of our exercises that someone lays on their stomach and they either hold or they rock back and forth, super simple, not a gymnast in the world that’s going to notice it.

23:03 We use as an introductory, we used to use it as an introductory exercise for adults. They couldn’t do it, they couldn’t do it. We would stretch them, they couldn’t do it. Was it glutes? We couldn’t figure out, was it lower back?

23:16 Was it glutes? What was going on? Could not figure it out. Finally after two years it took us, we tagged that it’s an oblique problem. It’s an oblique problem.

23:27 As soon as we started, uh, going in and stretching the obliques first before trying to do lower back work, strengthening the obliques, all that issue went away. So you’re learning still, this is like a new laboratory for you. Yeah, you’re learning, not an inferior being but a differently trained being. You know, I gave, uh, it changed my appreciation for how extraordinary our national team athletes were, because for a long time that was my daily norm. So when I first worked with adults, I was like, wow, these people are almost crippled.

24:00 I don’t understand how do you get up in the morning? I don’t know, I didn’t even know how you get yourself dressed. And then as we spent more time with them and really has started shifting that perspective of it’s not that these people are so far down the food chain, it’s that these other people are so extraordinary, they’re so extraordinary. And they actually one fed to the other as we figured out how to better help the general population and adults and the where and the why, then that in turn helped me increase performance of our senior athletes.

24:30 So it was very beneficial, because everything should be synergistic, right? It’s not like these guys are different breed and have different requirements, they have the same physical being, same body, same requirements. So how did we get there? Some same problem that we have here. Well, now we can head it off on these guys, like right now, Alan, uh, my last elite athlete, in four or five weeks has U.S.

24:55 Championships coming up. I don’t train him personally anymore. I did, uh, 12 years with them, about 16,000 hours of prep before college. Yeah, it’s a lot. We added it up over, I know, 15,000 hours.

25:09 Yeah, of with me. Wow. Not like play time. I’m not good at playing in the gym. What do you like in the gym?

25:17 We tease a lot, we tease a lot, we have a good time, but I’m very much direct, focused. I want your best effort now. I don’t want it next turn, I don’t want it tomorrow. Doesn’t necessarily mean a successful turn, but I want to see forward progress. I don’t want to see the same mistake twice.

25:41 Same mistake twice just means somebody’s not trying, somebody’s not paying attention. I want to see a new mistake or I want to see a little bit better. All right, and then we just do that day in, day out, day in, day out. Uh, I once had someone come up to me, we’d been training Alan, it was me, oh eight, someone came up and we’d been working on parallel bars and we’re just working, we’re not stressing out or anything, and he came up and he kind of tapped me on the shoulder, and I think he was, he was trying to jerk my chain, I took it as a compliment, but he said, “You’re like one of those damn Chinese coaches.”

26:19 Does it, okay? What does that mean? Is that you will just sit here and you guys will work until you get it right? And I remember being puzzled. I was like, well, doesn’t everybody?

26:32 You know where, and as we start working with more, we do realize that a lot of people will set artificial limits. All right, so when we work with people they’re like, “What should my goals be? How long will it take?” And I never care about any of that. You know, it’s going to take what it takes.

26:49 To my mind, you make one decision. You make one decision: I am going to try to do my best or I’m not. If I’ve decided to do my best, then whatever is required to get there, right, that’s what I’m going to do. If it takes three turns, great. If it takes me 10,000 turns, okay.

27:08 But if I make, where these people fall off is they want, well, if it goes well today then I’ll do it again tomorrow, and if that goes well then I’ll do it next week, if that does it well I’ll do it next month. But that means that all along the way, all these series of decisions, they can fall off the wagon. Or if you make one decision, this is what I’m gonna do, okay, and you’re not stressed about it, it’s not carrying on there, no browbeating or drama or any of that stuff, just this is what I’m gonna do.

27:37 All right, well, now if I have a bad day, well, it’s okay, that’s all right, it’s just part of the process. But what’s nice is bad days are usually followed shortly thereafter by a really, really good day. Okay, but if someone stops at the bad day, that really good day never happens. You never get a chance, and it was right there, it was right there. So we learned just patience, just patience, things take time.

28:01 We learned to be honest. Honest. So one thing that I really liked about being a national team coach was just the purity and the honesty about it. There was no bragging required, there was no marketing, it didn’t matter who had a loud voice. You did a great job and you won, or you didn’t, and you were rewarded for that.

28:27 And if you fell short, there was no amount of excuses in the world that could make it go away, right? And you just trained for a year, a year, 30 hours a week, 35 hours a week, and you fell short. Okay, you grieve for a few days, right, you go shake their hand, but then after that everyone, even though we get along, we’re still competitive, right? But now, all right, how are we going to evaluate to move forward into a better job? And there’s no room for kind of cherished dogmatic individual processes.

29:01 There’s no room for that. If something wasn’t working right or there’s something that can do better, we need to change our game. So 40 years of that, I’ll hear people now say, “Well, you know, this is really how I prefer it,” and the first thing to go through my head is, well, is it working? “See, no, it’s not really getting me where I want to go, but I really like it.” Well, why do you like it if it’s not working?

29:25 I thought you wanted to accomplish this, but you’re doing something that’s actually holding you back and not allowing it. Maybe you need to let that go. Like, I’ve known coaches who, in all the years I’ve been coaching, it’s almost like they’ve just repeated the same year over and over and over and over. It’s always if I had a good athlete, if I had a better facility, if the judges liked me better, if I’d been lucky, if I was this, it was that, instead of sitting down and being honest.

29:53 Like we tell our students, be honest about where you are. So we all have ego, right? We all have self-esteem on the table. Be honest about where you are, enjoy it, embrace it. If it means being embarrassed, that’s okay, because we want to encourage them that self-esteem to be tied to the long-term product they’re chasing, not pretend self-esteem where I am right now, I want to pretend I’m awesome, I want to pretend I’m great, I don’t want anyone to see me train, or whether it’s business skills or whatever, I don’t want anyone to see, and they never grow, they never grow.

30:31 And maybe something that helps people is all the heavy hitters that we’ve had a chance to interact with, they all have that attitude. No one’s afraid to come up and say, you know, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” I mean, I have one friend who runs a 700 million dollar fitness company and called me on the phone when we first met. He said, “I have two questions. Will you be on my board of advisors and will you train me?”

30:55 He was not afraid to reach out at all, and all of them have that honest, honest, open attitude where, you know, “Can you help me?” And then also they’re generous, they’re incredibly generous on this flip side of that is okay, thank you, now what can I do for you? It’s been a tremendous blessing being able to, you know, for years. The general public, I think, tends to be a little too short term, a little too short term, and I think needlessly so, and I think they get frustrated without needing to be frustrated.

31:32 If someone could just help them, just, you know, guys, take a breath, relax, be a little bit uncomfortable right now, get a little bit outside of your comfort zone, learn this new skill, and then move forward with a one-year horizon sometimes. Well, one of my, a good buddy of mine, Rob Wolf, does nutrition and he shared with me a Tony Robbins quote, and it was, uh, most people vastly overestimate what they can do in a single day, and they vastly underestimate what they can do in a year because they get bored. They get bored, but if they could just be a little mellow.

32:08 Our athletes, we teach them, guys, if I asked you to go and write me a novel tonight, 365 page novel, is that reasonable? And I want it by tomorrow. Well, obviously not. And I said, guys, what have I asked you to write me, a single page every day for a year? That’s a different process.

32:30 I said one is just so extreme, it’s unreasonable, but the other one is, well, I’m just going to spend a little time. That’s what we learned from national team, long story short. And that’s fascinating, because only by being a part of that national team would you have ever had that perspective. Probably, which I didn’t realize. So I had, uh, when I went outside, so in business there aren’t any world championships, and so that was an adjustment, that was an adjustment.

33:03 Now one of the best pieces of advice I ever had from some of my mentors who are great, you know, one of my mentors, his mentor was US Secretary of the Interior, right, so some very, very bright people. Uh, he was like, I had gone down and we were just starting in businesses since early 2000s. I said, “You know, sir, I don’t, I don’t know all this stuff, I’m not feeling confident,” and he said, “Could you, how long would it take you to, uh, create a national team athlete?”

33:33 I said, “Five years, because it will be hard.” “Yes, sir, but it’s nothing to panic about, I know the process, you just have to do the work.” He said, “Run your business exactly like that.” That best advice I could have gotten. It calmed me down, it made me patient, you know, and it allowed me to get outside my comfort zone.

33:55 So I need to, if the championship is a successful business, then learning marketing is part of that, I’m gonna go learn it. Where a lot of people, I think they paint themselves in these really narrow lanes. I am a mathematician, I’m an accountant, I’m a doctor, and anything outside that lane they’re very reluctant to take a swing at. Whereas national team, we were responsible for everything, whether it was psychological prep, whether it was physical prep, whether it was prehab, whether it was strength training, technical training, it was all on our shoulders, so we learned to be a jack of all trades and weren’t afraid at all to take a swing at whatever needed to be done.

34:40 And so many different events as well, so many different events. Three different events, six for the men, four for the women. Okay, and then thousands of elements. Okay, and for the men, I’m just guessing, but I guess rings and parallel bars and floor, pommel horse. Pommel horse, we got out of order, so floor, palms, rings, vault, p’s, and high bar.

35:03 Okay, all right, so you were used to becoming an expert at all of these things. Yes. So going into business made you more, uh, more open-minded to that approach. We just basics to master. Yeah, I had a guest in here, his name is Mantak Chia, and he specializes in kind of Asian medicine, and he said, “Brian,” he said, “a business is like a child.”

35:26 He said, “They’re seven years old.” He’s like, “Why do you expect them to be, you know, like that a lot?” And he said, “Think of it that way.” I was like, okay, it’s an interesting point. Um, Alan, 16,000 hours.

35:37 You worked with him from he was eight years old until 20 years old. Six to 18. How do you work with someone who goes through all that whole range of emotions and maturity? And sure, and that’s the emotional side. Well, by that time I’d probably done four or five generations of athletes, and so a lot, a lot of time and experience under my belt, so things that would have stressed me out as a younger coach, you know, I had been there, done that.

36:08 When Alan first, his parents first brought him to me at six, he’d already been doing gymnastics for three years and he was kind of the local little mini superstar, right, but it was really bad technique, just really bad, but he was talented enough because his mom was a great gymnast, his dad was a good athlete. He was talented enough that he could get away with it, but I’d been around for a long time and I saw a good spark. I mean, part of it is how do they move, blah blah blah, but part of it also is how do they handle themselves, and almost a glint in the eye, right, a glint in the eye, and he had that, he had that, and so that, they came in, it’s like, you know, I see potential here.

36:56 Uh, he’s six, you know, so, uh, but we never know, you never know. So there were, there were some physical issues that we needed to adjust. His lower back had been improperly prepared, so we, we had to fix that. He’s by nature, people can check him on Instagram, Bauer Power, right, he puts up some good media, he looks like this perfect physical specimen with wonderful mobility, and he was always strong but incredibly tight, incredibly tight, so all that mobility had to be developed.

37:33 Okay, it had to be developed. What does that mean, tight, for people who might not understand that? Well, you see some people who naturally are very flexible, so they can do splits, they can do bridge, they can do all these things, and it’s just what their body is, and then you have other people who are just naturally strong. Once in a while, out of thousands and thousands, once, and I get someone who’s both naturally. I’ve had maybe five, they all drop out every time.

38:05 Why? The people who are supremely talented, everything has always come easy, it’s always come easy, and as soon as a stumbling block or something that’s challenging is set in front of them, their learned behavior is to bail. Now that’s actually for the rest of us who are more mortals, right, regular humans, that’s good news. That’s good news, so that means we can outwork them, because all the talent in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t use it. Doesn’t matter in the slightest.

38:38 Interesting, so you can be over-talented. Oh my gosh, there’s we’ve had athletes come in that I taught him a backhand spring in, I think, half an hour. I mean, just crazy stuff that take anyone else years to learn, you know. These kids are just, we had one of my teammates in high school had a twin brother, twin brother. I’m still emotionally scarred from this, because his tin brother came in and he did a standing front flip, he just tried it and did it, no training, no progressions, nothing, did giant on high bar, just went up and did it, and I’ve been training for years.

39:14 I’m like, okay, that hurts. That hurts, but uh, that’s only part of, you know, that talent is just part of it. Think about the personality type to engage in mindful practice for 16,000 hours, uh, especially in today’s day and age where everyone is so sensitive. You know, and you imagine how many times Alan heard no. No, as in, no, that’s not right, again, again, again, that was better, again, oh my god, that was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, what were you thinking?

39:57 You know, for 12 years, you know, and just layer upon layer. Um, I think that’s why the Olympics, people enjoy it so much, because they, even if they haven’t gone through the process, they know, they know what went into create, they’ve had a little taste and they appreciate it. They meaning who, the audience? You know, those billion people who are watching, we can feel that something has taken a long time, we can feel, we’ve had some workouts and then we hear 16,000 hours.

40:30 Wow, I can’t even make my bed every day, you know, and you guys did what, for 16,000, for how many years? But, well, how about, uh, do you know the author Stephen Pressfield? Yeah, I love him. Art, and I love the concept of resistance, I teach it to all my students. And that’s a great story, this is a guy who loved writing, typewriters on the wall, but didn’t sell anything for 13 years, nothing.

40:59 In fact, people repeatedly told him, “You are the worst writer that’s ever been born, there is no hope for you, there is no hope, you need to do anything but this.” But he loved it and he didn’t care, and he just kept chipping away at it till he was awesome. So he’s awesome. I mean, I personally love stuff like that, I love stuff like that, because the first thing, I’ve never understood people who are just content to be admiring of other people or cheerleaders.

41:33 I’ve never understood that. They’ll see someone do something well and they don’t immediately think, that was awesome, I wonder how I can do that. I’ve always been wired that way, and that’s the kind of athletes you’re looking for at an Olympic level, more so than the genetics and the talent. Oh, absolutely, because everyone at the Olympic level is genetically gifted. I have a good friend who was the Bulgarian Olympic coach, and we would go round and round and round because I’m American, all American.

42:04 Anything’s possible, you want it, go find a way to make it, figure it out, and ruining it. Right. Yeah, maybe we take it too far, right? Maybe take it too far. Forget though, that’s the way we think and that’s not the way everyone else thinks.

42:18 It is not the way everyone else thinks, which is a shock. So Rumen was like, “No, champions are born.” He says you can change a human being two percent. Is it Roman? No, no, we’re Americans, you can put, she’s fine, two and a half percent.

42:36 Two and a half. I never did get him to go more than that. What percent are you favoring? You know, I have seen amazing things. I had one athlete that took me when he was little.

42:50 We had, we had a range of athletes on my team, from our national champions to kids that had trouble walking straight, but what they all had in common were these awesome attitudes. No, no giving them at all, no backing off, 100 percent committed to giving their best. That meant more to me than any amount of medals. In fact, so I had one boy, it took me three years to teach him a cartwheel. Three years.

43:15 I used to joke with him, I could have taught someone in a wheelchair to do a cartwheel sooner than it taken me to teach you. And now, and he wasn’t a great scholar, but what there was was no backing off. So as he got into high school, here’s a kid that was just average academically, average athletically, became one of the best athletes in the region. In the US is broken into nine regions, okay, so he was one of the best athletes in the region, not at Alan’s level for a national or international, but you know what, if it’s not, if God didn’t give it to you, God didn’t give it to you.

43:50 But then the same child, the same athlete, put himself into the hardest, most demanding high school in the Phoenix area, so he would come home from practice at nine, do homework to like two in the morning, but the interesting thing is never moan, never complain. My parents were just mellow as long as he was doing his best. He’s a pilot in the Air Force now. And that’s the mentality of the training that you probably instilled. Well, we try.

44:18 We, I always wanted, I did not want to create athletes. I had no interest in creating athletes. To my mind, the last thing the world needed was another gender, another group of knuckle draggers. That’s not what we needed. We were using gymnastics as a vehicle to create young men, a young man of character, young men of a strong work ethic, young men who knew how to plan and be accountable, young men who could work without being overwhelmed, right?

44:52 Uh, you know, I would, I would send the boys out, we were at a training, we were having fun one time and there was, like, the gym had big bounce houses in there, and the boys were younger and they were running up this huge bounce house and doing back flips off it, right, and another dad is walking through and he’s like, “Guys, what do you think your coach would say if he saw you doing that?” And they just point and say, “Well, he’s sitting right over there.” No, I wanted them to have fun, you know, and I wanted them to go skiing, I wanted them to go wakeboarding, but I wanted there to be balance, you know.

45:24 We held them accountable for their school grades, you know. “Guys, you have to maintain at least a B, unless a B is just beyond you, you know. If you can come in and you can show me that you’ve been putting in the work and it sees the best you can do and you show me, I’m okay with that, I’m okay with that. But what’s not okay is if you’re capable of mourning your skating, I’m not okay with that.” And so now we’ve got, you know, that last generation we’ve got kids that do special projects for the president of Ticketmaster.

45:53 I’ve got two boys right now, who one who’ll go to med school soon and another one who’s working on pre-med, and we, we haven’t one who’s going into neurosurgery. So I looked at it as a, yeah, it was great, we and we loved the gymnastics and we loved the competing and we loved winning, but it was about so much more than that. It was about so much more, we just used it as a vehicle to accomplish that. So many people will be surprised to hear that, you know, they would, because I guess that’s what they see, they see the Olympics and, you know, they see the medals and the points and they assume it stops there.

46:25 I guess it can. That was a concern as I was, as I was coming through the system, I would see people who had won an Olympic gold medal and the expectation is that, I don’t, I don’t want people to think I don’t appreciate the Olympics, we do, but the expectation was that it was going to be like Cinderella’s slipper, that this event was going to happen, you were going to get this medal and it was going to change your life. And, you know, the reality is if you were prepared, educated, articulate, if you happen to be in the right position at the right time, it could have a significant impact on your life.

47:04 If you hadn’t done any of those things, okay, it was gonna have zero impact. And I mean, the bottom line, if you were a good person before you got the medal, you were a good person after. If you were a schmuck before you got the medal, you’re a schmuck after. All right, and I just saw too many times where people base their whole life around it and that was unacceptable. Now I used to be the same as everybody else back in the day, who was winning, that’s all we were about, who won, and it was all points, it was medals, it was this, it was that, and then maybe early ’90s, I don’t remember exactly what year, finally one day I was sitting there and I realized if I have a group of 10 athletes and one wins, that means I have nine losers, and for whatever reason, just a flip switch, and that was unacceptable to me.

48:01 That was unacceptable that someone could do their best effort, leave everything out there, and now they’re a loser. So I changed everything in terms of coaching my teams, I changed everything. It now became measured on best effort, so we would go to meets and I wouldn’t look at their scores, didn’t look at their scores. It was, I would track, we would go hit and miss. A hit is you did your best effort you were capable of and you stuck the landing.

48:29 That’s a hit. You didn’t do your best effort, that’s a miss. Six events, however, whoever gets the most hits, right, they get to line up in the front of the line, because we’re boys and we’re male and we’re silly and we’re motivated by stuff like that. The front of the line for the next practice, front line for next practice. So, you know, a lot of times an athlete of Alan’s level might end up in the middle.

48:52 Now is he doing much, much harder skills? Yes, but he’s also capable of more, and what it did is it allowed me to level the playing field, because someone may be not quite as athletic but work just as hard. Now I could reward them. I used to tell the boys, I said, “Gentlemen, you need to understand something. Inside these walls, okay, best effort is rewarded.

49:15 I always want your best effort, okay? Understand, outside these walls the rest of the world does not care about your best effort. They don’t care in the slightest. Okay, and I’m not telling you that’s not important, because that’s what it is, but now we’re going to use this as an opportunity to find out what you’re made out of. We’re going to prepare as best we can in order for you to compete successfully later.”

49:38 The year I made that switch, I think we won 50 state titles, all different age groups and levels and events. So by not chasing winning but by chasing their best effort, everyone relaxed and their performance levels exploded. I was like, wow, and then I just, we never went back. Fascinating. Yeah, it was fun.

50:01 Tell me about other countries and what you learned from them or saw in them, or what you learned not to do, because you must, you competed head-to-head against the Russians over the time, Chinese and Bulgarians obviously had some skills, and learned some things from them. What did you learn from? They don’t love their training like we do, okay? They don’t love their training. Theirs is someone came through, walked, saw him on the playground, saw him in gym class and said, “We like your body type.

50:30 You’re gonna be here at the gym at three.” Is this Russia, for example? Russia, China, both the same. Okay, so the state decides you will, and you want it to, you want it to life, you’d get a good life. It would change, uh, your family’s housing, your family’s job, where you went to school, opportunities, education, everything changed because of it.

50:53 So they were like, okay, but then after they’re done training, so they don’t train with passion, right? But when it was done, then they’re like, okay, I’m good. Whereas we love what we do, and even as a team we have a vest, they’re, they’re always coming up to our Olympic coach saying, “We know, we don’t understand you, you know, you guys are so into it, you guys cheer each other, you support each other, we don’t have that. We don’t have that.” That’s probably our biggest difference.

51:24 Yeah, I just thought of the, the women’s gymnastics, and maybe because they’re maybe more emotional, but they always seem like they love being out there. Yeah. And like, you know, the work they’re doing, their work is so, in fact the, the girls have to work harder than the guys. Really? Why is that?

51:40 Um, the psychology. So if a guy goes out to compete, okay, we’re guys, we’re worried about one thing, what we want. When we go out to compete, we’re there to kick butt, that’s it. When a girl goes out to compete, yes, she wants to do well, but she’s also worried about are they going to like me? Am I going to disappoint my coach?

52:02 Am I going to disappoint my teammates? Am I going to disappoint the judges? How is my family doing? She has 10 times more emotional pressure on her than any male athlete will ever have in their life, because guys, where it’s water off our back, you don’t like me, okay, whatever, that’s nice. But for the girls it’s hard.

52:20 We would watch girls in, uh, training do balance beam like it was a sidewalk, like instead of four inches wide it was three, three feet wide, just like a rock, like a rock, where it’s like, oh, and routine after routine in a row. Oh my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding me, this is amazing. And then they would go out to compete, all full of errors, mistakes, falls, and we’re just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s, what’s going on here? And then a little out of a time, when we learned, you know, over the years that it’s just because they’re far more sensitive than we are, they’re far more nurturing, they’re, they’re much more aware, you know, kind of the social implications than compared to a guy.

53:02 So, so much harder to be a female athlete. Interesting. And anything you learn from the Russians or the Chinese? Patients, patients. So, uh, one, uh, at one time at, uh, some Chinese training or even in Japan or they, um, someone was working on parallel bars and doing a super basic drill.

53:27 I was like, okay, well, that’s nice. That’s nice, and then came back a little later and he’s working another drill, a little later and he’s working another drill. Over the course of an hour he went through, like, every drill you could do on peaches there was to do. Now it started off, well, that’s cute, he’s working basics, this must be new for him, but at the end it was world class and it was just calm, methodical, turn after turn, not afraid to do basics, where a problem we have in America is, what’s fun?

54:02 I need some excitement here, I need some adrenaline, you know, uh, which is fine. I mean, the play is super important, don’t get me wrong, the play is super important, but it has to go hand in hand with progressions and basics. There’s always fundamentals, whether it’s personal life, whether it’s business, whether it’s your training. There are some things that are essential, right, have to be addressed, have to be. One time I heard a concert pianist talk and he said, “You know, if I miss a day of practice, only I notice the drop in performance.

54:39 I’m the only one who notices. If I miss two days of practice, my wife notices it. If I miss three days, everybody notices.” Okay, they’re just basics that have to be done, has to be, and a lot of times that gets overlooked, like it’s overlooked. Uh, I will say that I think it’s universally applicable that anyone who has achieved success in any arena, I haven’t met an exception, has embraced that concept of do the work, get the basics.

55:16 So if it’s special operations, you would think, you know, gymnastics coach, I’m not going to get along with special operations guys. Okay, we do a lot of work with them. No, we speak the same language, you do what needs to be done, you know. Well, you would think business would have been much harder to transition to. No, it’s the same language.

55:37 Uh, you would, uh, a good friend of ours is one of the best sculptors in the world, Richard McDonald. Richard and I, my wife just sits on the side and just laughs because we’re such a cut-up when we get together, but at the bottom of it, right, we bought the reason we cut up is we both have this innate appreciation of basics, fundamentals, do the work, and then everything that’s excellent comes from that. In fact, the higher of level that someone aspires to, right, the better those basics have to be, and I’ve never found an exception to that, even artists.

56:10 Isn’t that fascinating? Musicians too. You think they’re just, people think, yeah, that I’m just inspired one day and I create. And I even think Pressfield talks about that, it’s just so not true. It’s not true at all.

56:22 I was, when Prince had passed, an interview I came across, I read everything, so I brought my Kindle today, I probably have 3,000 books on my Kindle. Okay, it’s kind of excessive. Yeah, it’s a little crazy, but, um, in this interview his, uh, chef shared a story where Prince’s kitchen was right next to the studio and he waited Prince all the time, and he said it wasn’t uncommon at all for him to be in there cooking, and Prince had been performing for over 40 years by that time, would be going through a song and would come to a section he didn’t like, and he would repeat the same little two to three second section dozens of times, just dozens of times, until he was satisfied, until he ran into another little spot, and probably only he could hear what he wasn’t happy with, and he would just do that over and over and over, and then people see the performance, they’re like, oh my gosh, that was flawless, and they don’t, they don’t really realize that it was that minute attention to detail that led to that incredible quality.

57:26 Right. Good. I want to talk a little bit about your adult training and how this trans-transmitted. While we were on the Russian thing, when this recent doping scandal came out in the movie Icarus and all that kind of things, just curious on your thoughts in general if that was a surprise to you, and then do you think it ever affected the gymnasts? It’s a good question.

57:48 We, for those who haven’t been part of it, so in the States it’s USADA, right, kind of does takes care of our stuff. It’s ridiculous, it’s just completely ridiculous. They can knock on your door at any time, middle of the night, whenever, uh, you know, “Guys, time to pee.” Uh, they give you almost no guidance, but they give you lots of things that will happen badly to you should you mess up. So this is on the allowed list right now, but if it’s comes off the list later and you’ve been doing it, you know, we’re still, you’re still in trouble.

58:30 So we, we get a lot of oversight with the gymnast. It’s not an advantage because the steroids in that will tend to increase muscle mass but it doesn’t increase the strength of connective tissue. So for us, where everything depends on connective tissue health and power, right, we would actually get hurt, we would get hurt. It wouldn’t do us any good to have all this muscle mass and then you snapping Achilles, that’s the last thing in the world we want. But on more sports that are more power, you know, or endurance, swimming, I remember, you remember this Chinese women swimmers from the early 70s, all of a sudden there are these women that came out that had a heavier beard than me and looked like these massive truck drivers and were just destroying the world.

59:24 You know, what’s it, natural? Yes, I’m not, true, no, I don’t think so. So certain sports, certain sports, uh, it works better for, uh, Russians was Russia’s was systemic, obviously it was systemic. Now the athletes, I doubt they had a choice, I doubt they had a choice, especially in that environment, you know, “Here’s your vitamins for the day.” And I doubt they even ever asked, I doubt they even asked.

59:53 Your choice would have been, “Take your supplements as we’re telling you to, or don’t be on team.” They probably gave it to the gymnast not even knowing any better. You know, that’s a good question, I don’t know if the gymnast ever tested, I’d have to crawl through. Yeah, and I did, I did hear of some stuff, and this is just pure rumor, that they might have had some protocols they did with young athletes prior to puberty and then stop at puberty, but I’ve, that was just rumor, visiting at training camps and that, I don’t have, so it could have just been completely our world’s just different because it’s so skill-oriented, so scale, so think Alan, 12 years, 16,000 hours, there’s just, and he’s world-class talent, that might be something to consider, he’s world-class, one of the best in the world talent-wise, and it still took 12 years and 16,000, and that was before college and another four years of these, uh, 30-hour weeks, whereas what was it, Ben Greene watched one Olympics, a sprinter, watched one Olympics in the stand and then made the next Olympic team.

1:01:10 That doesn’t happen in gymnastics, that doesn’t happen. Different game, different. Do you think in the long run the steroids and performance enzyme and drugs maybe don’t necessarily provide an advantage, because maybe they chip away at the in our sport or overall, maybe overall, I don’t know. I think overall it’s been shown to, uh, you know, it’s, uh, it’s unquestionable there’s an advantage, uh, it’s just at what price. So they’ve done psychological exams on people, high level, you know, national team athletes.

1:01:46 If there was something we could give you that would guarantee a world-class performance, maybe even a world championship, but you would die a year later, would you? 80 percent yes. Part of it’s being young, but part of it is that super competitive personality, you know that, just whatever. I, I was never in that boat. I was never willing to allow an athlete to train hard, in fact, one of the, one of the few ways that an athlete could make me upset would be to hide an injury.

1:02:25 That, that would just make me angry, because I knew I’d make him stop. You know, not today now, it doesn’t mean we would necessarily leave the gym, so maybe it was a wrist bothering them, well, let’s go work something that doesn’t stress the wrist, let’s go do something else, but to my mind, I wasn’t, I was never interested in someone who could be national champion only at 12 or 13 or 14. When Alan was six, I was worried about him being healthy at 18. I was worried about him being healthy at 22, right, where we’re at now.

1:02:58 So he’s in a month, he’s going to be at U.S. Championships, and we’re hoping to do World Championships this year. He just barely missed world team last year, and we’re getting close to the Olympics, we want to be as healthy as possible. That was, that was my nightmare when he was six, is what am I going to overlook in terms of preparation? All right, what weak link will I have not addressed that’s going to break down right when training matters the most and there’s no time to heal?

1:03:29 And that’s your job as a coach, to be thinking long term always, even with your athletes might be thinking short term, let me hide this injury and get through practice. Exactly right. Yeah. Okay, and then learn a, learned behavior for them that, uh, you know, guys, isn’t, I, I pulled Alan out of competition once for an entire year. He shoulder flared, his shoulder flared, and uh, could he have pushed through it?

1:03:56 Yes, but shoulders are finicky, shoulders are finicky, and it just wasn’t. Now I, I took a lot of grief from some of the other national team coaches, and it cost Alan, you know, a year on national team, but uh, I think it’s shown that it was the right call, because a lot of those athletes who beat him that year he was out, writing, had a bit of a head start, he’s long ago passed them up and he’s still healthy and doing his thing, and you know, they’re either done or had so many surgeries that they couldn’t compete now if they wanted to. Yeah.

1:04:32 Let’s talk about adult athletes and all the people that are watching and listening to us, thinking, uh, well, I’ve been looking through, uh, Coach Sommer’s, uh, uh, Instagram feed and I see these gymnastic bodies, um, and I want to get started right away and I want results in 30 days, you know, the typical thing. And I know you did a 90-day challenge with Tim Ferriss, but what are the, the biggest things they need to know right off the bat if they want to go down this path of gymnastic training, rebuilding? Yeah, think of it as rebuilding, think of it as remodeling, that it’s not a matter of the perceived effort or how hard they’re going to work, but that they’re trying to create physical change in their body.

1:05:18 So how much time does that take to grow new muscle tissue, to recondition their joints? You know, something that Tim and I talked a lot about was that most injuries aren’t to the muscle drifter to joint, almost all, it’s very rare to get a muscle belly injury, it’s almost always joints. But as adults, our training, we like the pump, we like the sweat, those are the things we love, and it can cause us to over extend and start training harder than we should before joints are ready.

1:05:53 That’s why most people, they train for a few months and they stop. You know, or if it’s a young guy, we’ve, we’ve had some people, even people, you know, who loved what they were doing, some were CrossFit, some were other stuff, so guys, you know, you need to slow down, you need, you do what you love, that’s fine, but these other things are essential, you’ve got to address, you’ve got to get some healthy mobility in your shoulders. Most, most of the people have maybe a two-year shelf life if they’re incredibly tough and can handle just immense amounts of pain, super high pain threshold, maybe they can push it three or four years, then they’re done, that’s it.

1:06:31 Irrecoverable injuries and they’re not going to be doing this kind of training. Recovery? Yeah, they’ve just beaten themselves down to the point, and it was because they’re not being patient, weren’t patient, and they’d never had, because this is kind of an unusual time in the world, right? We can have this conversation, it can go around the world right now, but back in the day, if someone wasn’t a national team athlete, I never had a chance to have a conversation, and then they don’t get to learn everything that I know, I don’t get to learn everything that they have to share about their situation and how we can merge, right, and have some synergy and some good results.

1:07:09 It was impossible, never would happen, never would happen, whereas now, now we can share. Now there’s structure, now there’s, uh, a way to, uh, present and quantify this information, so even though I’m not there on a day-to-day basis, guys, here’s what you should do, here’s how you do it, here’s the steps you’re going to do it. All right, and all it’s going to take is a little bit of patience, and we ask them for six to seven months, I want you to be bored.

1:07:41 Not a good sales technique there. It’s not, it’s not. But you talk a lot about connective tissue, which is 200-plus days, and I think that’s that six to seven month piece. And again, of all the injuries I’ve had in my life, I think I tore a muscle once, that was on my calf muscles and everything else, and calves feel slow. Yeah, it was a pain.

1:08:00 Um, but everything else was joints always, and I’m sure it was because I was rushing things, martial arts, rushing. Or what if, what if we didn’t rush, what if we didn’t rush but our training didn’t address joint preparation? So even if you were, even if you were being patient but you weren’t doing appropriate, so something that Tim enjoyed was the difference between flexibility and mobility, right? Flexibility is just, I can move my arm here, okay, that’s fine.

1:08:31 Mobility is under load, how high can I move my arm? The larger the gap between flexibility and mobility, so the larger the range of motion that you is unable to generate strength, is that’s the, that’s a huge risk of injury. That’s huge. But if we can, how about on the field of play, how many times do we go out of alignment? How many times do, whether it was American football, it was soccer, I mean rugby, I mean you name it.

1:09:00 I just, I just worked with a guy who was semi-pro rugby this, this last weekend. He had, uh, torn biceps, torn Achilles, uh, shoulders were messed up. All rugby guys can get their arms to about this high, the pros, and uh, and they stop, they just stop. It’s like, “Guys, you’re messing with me, you know.” Our, we work with some NHL hockey players, they can’t barely squat to parallel.

1:09:25 I was like, “Well, guys, just go all the way down.” “You know, Coach, we are, you’re messing with me, you’re messing with me, it’s not possible to squat and stop right there. I swear, Coach, I swear.” And then these are the kind of things where then we do some basic mobility work and they hit the ice the next day and they’re like, “We haven’t felt this good on the ice in years, in years.” So even Tim, you know, how, how quick did it kick in?

1:09:52 What, what people think is, you know, are we doing contortionism and we want to join the circus? We want to do ourself, we’re not trying to do any of that, we’re just trying to get our natural range of motion back. That’s all we’re trying to do, we’re not trying to do anything fancy. I’m not trying to grab my foot and pull it around my head and stick it in my ear, I’m not doing any of that. Just knees are meant to articulate, and that you have an ACL and an MCL and a meniscus for a reason.

1:10:18 Your knees are supposed to move and pivot side to side and forward and back and rotate, they’re made to do that. You have to, but if all your training is always straight on and then you go to use it, all these other materials have just been withering away and atrophying, and that’s where people get hurt. The sad thing is, it’s an easy fix, you know. It might take someone five minutes, ten minutes, once or twice a week to make sure their knees are healthy.

1:10:51 Why, why wouldn’t you do it, right? But you gotta do those basics, you just do the basics, you know. We did, uh, our knee series that we do, I learned it from my friend the Bulgarian coach. We did those for well over 10 years, you know. We have an Achilles series that we do, you know, just the nature of the Achilles, what.

1:11:16 So maybe we’ll back up a bit. The stronger someone is, the more essential it is that they spend time at least once every two weeks, maybe once a week, but there has to be a time in there where they do high-rep work, and it’s not that we’re trying to build endurance or anything, it’s that there’s no capillary system through your tendons, they’re ligaments, they don’t, there is no blood flow there except what they get through movement and gravity. So if all you do is high-rep, high, low-rep, high-intensity work, you’re just slowly starving that tissue to death, and then the stronger you get, the more high, high-impact stuff you do, right, the worse and worse and worse it gets.

1:11:58 So in order to stay healthy, we have to have some high-rep work, essential, the stronger you are. So there was a world champion out of China, Ming Young, beast, beast, little dude, little tiny dude, maybe 112 pounds, had a 286- pound bench press. Yeah, just, he had to spend two hours a day doing joint prep and mobility work just to hold his structure together. He was so close to the edge of what his body was capable of doing, it took that much maintenance.

1:12:33 Now most people, if they’ll just get themselves to 70, maybe 75 percent of their potential, they’re golden, they’re golden forever, they’re going to feel great, they’re going to move well, quality of life is good. What does that high-rep work look like? Oh goodness, so the load is going to come down. So there’s several ways we can do it. It might be a single high rep, so it might be, you know, 75 reps or more, or it might be multiple sets of 10 or 12 reps, right into another exercise, right into another exercise, kind of your traditional circuit training, okay, you know, not super complicated.

1:13:10 Where, uh, people mess it up is trying to treat it like strength training. You know, so, oh, I bench 100 pounds, I have to do 100 pounds? Well, no. On this you’re probably going to be doing 30 pounds, all right, because the purpose isn’t to get stronger, the purpose here is to flush the joints, just flushing this, almost treating it as a recovery day. Okay, is this prehab?

1:13:32 Could be. Well, prehab, we would call prehab, or we would also refer to it as pre-strength. Okay, so, um, kind of preparing the body for the loads that are to come. So we would, uh, we found with adults, because they’re already so tight, that if we do loaded stretching, loaded mobility exercises that build strength throughout range of motion, all right, so a nice one is a Jefferson curl. Yeah.

1:14:00 Okay. Uh, so after my, after my podcast with Tim, I’d been a little, I’d been a little hard on Dr. McGill. I’d been a little tough on him, and I had, I had a call from, he’s like, “Coach, can we talk for five minutes?” So I knew what was coming, I knew it was coming, and I was like, “Sure.” And we ended up having a really nice conversation for about 90 minutes.

1:14:24 And what have you said, so people know that? Well, what Stu had said was, uh, he was a huge, is a huge proponent of neutral spine, okay, so no, no flexion, no extension, and I was critical of that. I was, in fact, I still am critical of that, but I think, um, and the Jefferson curl is he’s going to be loaded flexion, so that’s the one that just Stuart wakes up in the middle of the night with a nightmare for, uh, athletically. My, my viewpoint is with a neutral spine there is nothing you can do athletically, you can’t move your body, you can’t, you can’t do jiu-jitsu, you can’t do Thai boxing, you can’t do yoga, you can’t run, swim, climb, throw, there’s nothing you can do with a neutral spine, there’s not a single thing, so why train like that?

1:15:15 Well, and then so we, we just, I just knew that instinctually from my background, all those years, this can’t be. Now Stuart’s background was having people who were chronically damaged coming to him, structurally compromised, right, things have been blown, and they’re trying to minimize back pain. So for them neutral spine made sense, but that was like me only working with national team athletes, how that skewed my viewpoint. For the general public, these chronically damaged patients, in my opinion, and I told Stu this, skewed his viewpoint to the general public, because what the conversation we had, and I think he came around to, I was like, “Stu, you got to understand, you’ve got everyone terrified that they’re made of glass, and they’re not made out of glass.

1:16:00 They have a healthy physical structure, they’re just fat, lazy and out of shape, but the structure is healthy and will respond with proper training, but they’re afraid to do that proper training because they’re afraid they’re gonna, they’re just gonna shatter.” I said, “It’s not the case, it’s not the case.” And so it was a great conversation, I enjoyed, he’s a bright man, he’s a bright man. But we found, Jeff, in fact, what we never saw coming was our work being adopted by, uh, therapists around the world.

1:16:35 Never, never saw that. The things we would use to increase physical performance, would, which kind of make sense now looking back, would have an impact on daily quality of life. And the nice thing is, a therapist, because it’s completely contrary to what they’re taught, they’re taught neutral spine, and they would first use our protocols in their own trainings, “Hey, I feel better, I feel better.” So for example, instead of neutral spine, we would like to see some flexion in the spine, and we’re going to do some work because those joints are meant to articulate.

1:17:08 If they don’t articulate, just articulate means move, right, they’re going to break down. Okay, and then we have to extend back, we have to arch, the thoracic’s meant to open and rotate, it has to. So when they felt better, then they started doing with their older clients who had had years of back pain, suddenly their clients are feeling better, they’re like, “Wow, you know, this is finally going away.” It’s kind of like Tim’s, right, Tim had suffered for years that he was always just going to have back pain and he was always going to have shoulder pain, and his shoulder pain was because he had tight biceps and he had tight pec minor.

1:17:47 Well, all the shoulder work in the world is never going to address that, because that wasn’t, the shoulder wasn’t the problem, the pec was the problem and the bicep was the problem. For us, all the strength work that we love to do, because what part of our body do we see in the mirror? The front of the body, back of the body doesn’t exist, that one’s gone, right, that one doesn’t exist. So we just started loosening here for him and we started opening up that back, getting some thoracic extension, and it only been a few weeks.

1:18:14 How do you loosen the biceps and pec markers? There’s some stretching, some weighted exercises, um, shoulder extension. Yeah, will work really well. So shoulder extension is hands going behind the torso, right, just kind of my hands were narrower here and just lifting. We had one Olympic coach who said he was getting people coming to him with shoulder pain and he had found, he was asking my opinion, he’s like, “Coach, if they’re standing instead of their hand, right behind their back, you know, if I can get them to 10 degrees they feel so much better.

1:18:45 This is what, what do you think?” I said, “I think you guys are all cripples.” I said, “If you can’t do 90 degrees, I don’t even know that you’re, I mean, come on, guys, seriously. 10 degrees, that means you move this far off your butt? Really, I want to see 90 degrees, I want to see your hands up shoulder high, that’s healthy range of motion.”

1:19:02 And is it ever going to be maximum strength? No. For someone who’s advanced, they might get up to lifting 20 kilos, you know, and different movements and variations, but they may start with a half kilo, a quarter kilo. I, I almost don’t even care what the load is they start with, I care that they’re not straining. We should tell them, we want to see you train, not strain, right.

1:19:28 Okay, and so if an adult comes to work with you, first of all you’re going to want to dial back their training probably a little bit, maybe they’ve gone in really hardcore and I want to get that adrenaline rush, and sure, and then you’re going to say, look, we’re going to go to six to a seven-month time frame, and I’m going to introduce all of these exercises that are going to strengthen your joints and connective tissue, and that you might not find the most exciting, but the, this is paying the dues, paying the dues for having a body you can use for the next 50 years. Well, it took time to break it, it’s going to take time to fix it. Now we don’t cut them off from everything, you know, you’re going to be a monk, you’re not going to have any fun, you know.

1:20:04 Guys, here are some basics you need to do and then after that, go do your thing, try to put it on maintenance if you don’t mind, you know, dial it back, don’t try to set any world records, you know, let’s try not to increase the damage. All right, try to focus over here. So, you know, that’s when we work with special operations, they’re not calling me in to restructure their training, and their, their studs, they know exactly what their training needs, I’m not going to teach them anything about how to do their job better.

1:20:36 What, what they’re bringing us in for is how to make all these aches and pains go away, you know, because a lot of times people are just tough and they’ll put up with it and they don’t realize how badly they feel because it’s become their daily norm until you start correcting it, and then they realize. Oh, we, we get people who are right all the time, our students will write in, said, “You know, I didn’t realize how bad I felt until I didn’t feel bad anymore.” Yeah, I know what that’s like.

1:21:10 Um, what do you think about CrossFit, and has that changed in the last five years? That’s a good question. CrossFit, so originally I was like their original gymnastic guy back in the early 2000s. I left, they were moving too fast for me, they were moving too fast, and it’s kind of Greg’s fault, and it’s kind of not Greg’s fault, because the, the marketplace shapes the product, and the marketplace enjoyed the high metabolic work, that’s what they wanted, that’s what they were demanding.

1:21:43 So Greg simply responded to that demand. Okay, I get that, I get that, that’s, that’s much more fun than me sitting there saying, slow down, slow down. I mean, the workout of the day is almost by definition high volume, difficult to do, sure, anaerobic, cardio probably, and they’re going to be designed to be a slap in the face. It was designed, uh, to really get your attention, okay. Uh, where I was exactly the opposite, you know, guys, we instead of crushing you and then picking up the pieces afterwards, why don’t we just slow down a little bit and then we’ll come.

1:22:20 Now the premise of CrossFit is awesome: one-third gymnastics, one-third weightlifting, one-third sprinting. Okay, notice the sprinting fell by the wayside. Gymnastics got cut back to five or ten minutes of skill training. All right, so we get people, “Coach, I want to learn a muscle-up.” Okay, and first they had been educated that it was a skill while not a skeleton exercise.

1:22:45 A double backflip is a skill, right, a cartwheel is a skill, a muscle-up is a pull-up and dip mixed together. There’s no skill there, you’re physically prepared to do it, you’re strong enough, you’re flexible enough for it, or you’re not. There’s no skill, but they weren’t giving it honest attention, so they were in fact last year, their lack of shoulder extension, right, in the mobility, so shoulder extension is going to be my elbow moving behind my torso.

1:23:15 They had 42 pec tears last year as people were doing their qualifying moving into their Games. Okay, and what had happened is they had spent all these years doing their kipping muscle-ups, and in between the chest and the chin is where all the strength is built, so the kipping, by swinging up, they skipped all that, they skipped it, it never got trained. Okay, so they felt strong, and Greg’s approach was, well, they’ve done more. What did he call it, work, you know, more force pounds per inch, blah blah blah, he was racing, so the more, more reps you did, the more work you had performed.

1:23:51 That’s well and good, except if I’m not training the muscles that I was supposed to be using the movement to train. Okay, which they weren’t, so last year then they started trying to do dips, they weren’t allowed to kip them, they had to do regular dips, full range of motion, so they measured them going down and measured them coming up, they had insufficient mobility and they were trying to go fast. Tears, 42 tears, and it’s unfortunate. Uh, I don’t know that the lesson was learned or they know why it happened.

1:24:27 Hopefully, hopefully they do. Okay, I think this is the first time I’ve talked about why it happened publicly. Okay, and so the gymnastics third soon became just kind of one or two functional, kind, a little bit, and then it went into the kipping, which is just again has lots of flaws. From what you’re saying, sure, people can keep it as good as the last step. Okay, not a first step.

1:24:49 Okay, not a first step, because the kipping is going to be multiples of body weight, and because of that load it’s going to articulate the spine, so either the thoracic or the lumbar past their comfortable range of motion because they’re tight, and it’s going, they’re not strong enough to do it with- out kipping, so now they’re bouncing off connective tissue, but the connective tissue isn’t strong, so it’s not mobile, it’s not strong, and we’re bouncing off it, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire. Okay, all right, other aspects of the CrossFit training that you, I like CrossFit, I think if they would just, and I’ll notice a lot of the individual locations are addressing it, just step back the intensity, do exactly what you’re doing but just step it back, or, you know, the way the Chinese teach Olympic lifting is from standing down.

1:25:45 So yeah, you don’t have full ankle mobility yet, you don’t have strong ankle flexion, so the reason people can’t do a good full squat almost always has nothing to do with their knees, nothing to do with their hips, nothing to do with their back. Okay, we can take almost anyone and have them do a beautiful, perfect vertical squat by just elevating their heels, boom, done. Has nothing to do with their knees, their hips, not, it’s that Achilles is so tight that ankle flexion is lacking, but they don’t understand his ankle flexion, so by trying to force themselves into bad positions and under more and more and more load, they’re injuring knees, they’re injuring hips, they’re injuring back, and they’re not quite sure why.

1:26:29 They’re almost trying to use the weight to crush themselves into the proper position. Okay, it’s like Olympic lifts that they’re doing to cause that, uh, or other sources, that kind of impatience. Okay, right, you know, instead of, why don’t we, before you do full versions, fix your ankle mobility first, and then you want to do weight, that’s fine, but let’s choose appropriate exercises where you’re not compromised. And if you want to compete, and I get it, I mean, it’s fun, I’m human just like there, if you want to compete with a contest, you want to put stuff on a whiteboard, that’s cool, but let’s choose exercises that don’t hurt you, right, while this other’s being developed.

1:27:06 You still have a good time, we just have to play appropriately. Right, maybe take another extreme. How do you feel about yoga, and has that changed in the last five years? Because the general practice probably has changed. It’s, it’s changed huge.

1:27:20 So, um, I think we’re responsible for single-handedly retooling yoga. It’s, it’s amazing. If I go and I go on Instagram and I look up hashtag yoga, you’re going to see so much joint prep now. You’re going to see our wrist work, you’re going to see scap work, you’re going to see shoulder flexion work, shoulder extension work, you’re going to see them talking about protraction and retraction, posture, your pelvic tilt, anterior pelvic tilt, all these things that they never, ever mentioned before we started doing ours.

1:27:57 They were just getting taken too big a hit, so now I got to give you, no, hats off to them, I wish they’d give me credit, but hats off, started putting the stuff out there in 0.203. Right, yeah, after you wrote an article that you, that got a massive response. Oh my gosh, I got buried. So a friend of mine started the kettlebell craze, Pavel, great man, great man, sad Celine, and, um, Pavel, uh, and I had met at a seminar he was teaching, and somehow early 2000, 2000, I got called out in the middle of the room for some single leg work, and so I was on in the bottom, he doesn’t know me from Adam, and I go to the bottom of a single leg squat and someone asks him a question, and that was, you know, a long time ago, I was still in decent shape, I wasn’t an old foggy, and, uh, pistol squat, you’re doing?

1:28:49 Yeah, pistol squat. Yeah, and he walked away to answer a question and I just stayed there, and he came back and said, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I stood up on that one leg and he was like, “Oh, really?” And then he found out, you know, who I was and what my background. So we, we kind of ignored people for most of the day and him and I just played, we just played, well, I can do this, well, I can do this, I can do that, and I can do this too, what do you think?

1:29:15 We just had a great time. So then, uh, all I cared about at that time in my life was national team, didn’t care about anything else, had no interest whatsoever, and, uh, Pavel asked me to write a chapter for one of his books. Naked Warrior was going to come out. I was like, no, I’m busy. No, he said, please.

1:29:40 No, but I have a soft spot for friends, so he kept asking, so finally I caved. So I wrote up, I wrote up this chapter for him and I walked out in the gym and I shot some stuff with my athletes, some photos to support it, sent it off to him, and I wasn’t on the internet, I didn’t do all the email stuff then, and, uh, he sent me a notebook, says, “I like it too much, I’m not going to use it as a chapter, I’m going to publish it by itself. She says I need a name and some contact stuff for people.”

1:30:09 I said, okay, and then one day my email box has, like, 300 requests for additional information on this article, as I, I call Paula, so what have you done, dude? What have you done? And that’s, that’s kind of how we started. Wow, wow. And with him you were just at that, at that seminar you were just playing around with just different landscapes.

1:30:32 Yeah, always looking for an edge. Okay, always looking for an edge, you never, I never knew where I was going to find a nugget. Okay, so like we took Powell’s, uh, that’s that pistol squat, that single leg squat, which for us was insufficient, it was insufficient as that, but if I tweaked it, it became very valuable to us. So how did we tweak it? So when the boys could do 10 single leg squats, then we added a weight.

1:31:02 When we added weight, then they, we would do, uh, jumping single leg squats. Okay, when that was too easy, then we’d go jumping for height and for distance, up onto boxes. That worked really well for us, so we took that basic and then, all right, now how do we increase it? It’s like a Cuban press, you know, if you go to, for its rotators, if you go to a therapist, right, they may give you a kilo, two kilos, but it’s a great movement, okay, but for us, as strong as our athletes were, that’s not going to cut it, so we use, gosh, 20 kilos, 30 kilos.

1:31:40 That’s, that’s the level of strength, but the movement still applied, or for us, like a dislocate, you’ll see people doing them with a belt or a towel or a dowel. Well, that’s great, but that’s not enough shoulder stability for the strength that we have, so we, and we’ve had athletes that use a 20-kilo bar on those, you know, we need, and I’ve had conversations at our Olympic Training Center with the head of therapy, she’s a PhD, and she’s like, “I’ve never seen such in my life,” we, they didn’t even know the human body was capable of such. But to my mind, why wouldn’t it be, because that those rotators are going to be the weak link in the shoulder.

1:32:19 So if I can do just, for example, body weight, body weight and a half press, but my rotators can only have, handle a couple of kilos, it’s not those primary movers that are going to get hurt, it’s going to be that rotator cuff, and all that other muscle I have isn’t going to matter, it’s not going to matter in the slightest. So we just, we plan ahead, or what if it’s tight, right? What if it’s strong but I have insufficient range of motion and on a field of play or I fall, right, and now I can’t control a fall or an accident or I’m skiing or whatever and it gets pulled a little back, well now I’m done, right, because you hadn’t practiced that movement and practice had, hadn’t strengthened the weak link.

1:33:04 Right. Interesting. And so on the back of that article, Gymnastic Bodies was, was formed. Yeah, over the next few years I did, like, 600 articles. Wow.

1:33:15 Just no one had ever quantified gymnastics strength training before, it had never been done, and it it was hard, so it took all those decades of experience prior, and then back in the day in, in the military, I was, I was an analyst, so I’m really good, for military intelligence at NSA, I’m really good at pattern recognition and synergy. Nothing I did special, my head just works that way, I can find odd pieces here and there and just coalesce them together, it works for me. So I was able to just kind of break everything down into patterns, which are commonplace now, but back in the day, you know, body weight was just pull-ups and dips and, you know, some push-ups, and that was really as far as it went.

1:34:01 No one really understood the musculature and skeletal and all the different planes of movement that you did. We didn’t, in fact, back in the day we, I didn’t even know the right terms for those things. We knew how they worked and why they worked, but I didn’t know that retraction was retraction and protraction was protraction. I knew your shoulder blades had to be in this position in order for the muscles to activate, and then as we grew and we worked with more medical professionals over the years and they’d come in and they’d be excited, they said, “Coach, protraction, right there.”

1:34:31 So, yeah, what’s that? And they show us, “Oh yeah, we called it this.” And gradually, because you want, we always want to define our terms, right, so that we’re all speaking the same language and we’re not confused, so rather than trying to use our gymnastic base terms, right, what are the proper medical terms, so we all, we’re on the same page. So you’re constantly evolving. Always, always.

1:34:52 And you’ve even said that even if something works today, that’s not proof it’ll work tomorrow. Oh, if someone shows me something that’s better in some aspect, an exercise, a stretch that’s better than what I’ve been using, oh, and it survives testing, we’ll replace it in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat. My ego is not on knowing everything, it’s not, my ego is not to sit here and be the authority of all. My ego is on producing the best possible product, to always be open, to always be searching, to always be evaluating, and that’s includes everything that I do as well, just relentless about that, in business, in your personal life, always.

1:35:35 That’s why you got three thousand books on your Kindle. Yeah. Um, I want to show a couple other practitioners and practices, give you a, Portal. What do you think of him and his methods? Uh, what a lot of people don’t know is Ido was my, my personal student for, like, seven years.

1:35:51 Yeah, so, uh, from, gosh, I don’t have the exact dates, I haven’t looked at it forever, but early 2000s up to 2011, 2012. Uh, I like, I like, so Edo, Ido, Idol’s approach and my approach are different. Ido’s entertaining, which I like, he’s irreverent, which I like, he’s kind of gone a different direction, kind of the movement, movement, and so I don’t think I’m ever going to have national team guys walking on top of a fence juggling, but at the end of the day, if it gets people out moving and doing their thing and being a little healthier, I’m fine with that, I’m fine with that.

1:36:42 The only thing that I would prefer had been done better was original source material had been credited back there. There was a lot of that that wasn’t, but, uh, you know, other than that, I like what I see. Okay, to you or to the people you learn from? A lot of their base material, especially in the day, was verbatim out of our material. It was verbatim, but, uh, he was a brand new name, and so if he said this came from Christopher Sommer, it doesn’t have quite the same aura as if he says this is my material.

1:37:15 So I get it, I understand it, marketing-wise, I understand it marketing-wise. Uh, I used to be far more ticked off about it than I am now, but that was a long time ago. Okay, you guys speaking a while or no? You know, we haven’t spoken in forever. Okay, we haven’t spoken forever.

1:37:31 Uh, my, my family background has, uh, some, some Southerner in it, and we tend to have a little prickly sense of honor. It’s hard for me when someone insults me like that, it’s hard for me to let it go. I’m getting better as I get older. Okay, I’m maturing. There’s hope, because I guess I was saying earlier, kind of the why affects the what, and you’re saying his why has gone maybe more to the brain and mental practices, which maybe leads to the, the juggling and the, and the balancing.

1:38:07 Sure, the neural training is good. There’s a very good book on whole brain training that’s fascinating about, uh, and being ambidextrous and the impact that doing ambidextrous training has on the functional brain. You can go in and see people who are being ambidextrous at golf, ambidextrous tennis. Interesting to see what that physical training has done to some people’s drawing, their ability to draw and create art. Fascinating, fascinating.

1:38:37 I’m, I’m interested in the neuroplasticity. So neuroplasticity, they used to think the brain was set, right, and if you had a brain injury it was done. Neuroplasticity, though, they found that the brain continues to adapt and revolve, even if their part of the brain got injured, right. They used to think, well, maybe, and they regain function, maybe it had re-regenerated. It didn’t, it just rewired around the damaged area.

1:39:04 I, I think there’s going to be some amazing things coming out of that as the years go on. Yeah, I’m extremely interested in that. Yeah, and talk about this movement, movement, um, you know, and like kind of the movement and that kind of things. I mean, look, I’ve had, you know, a few times, and I, I, I consider him kind of different than a lot of people that seem to kind of get on the natural movement bandwagon, but I’m curious what you think of that and how is that different than what you do?

1:39:31 Well, actually they’re doing what I do. So I actually had some people go to, uh, a MovNat, you know, big seminar and that, and they came back afterwards, this is a few years back, I don’t know if it’s still the case, but they said, “Coach, all the instructors do your material,” because at the time there was no structure, there were no progressions, it was go out, run, swim, carry stuff, jump. Okay, but outside a very basic level of development you can’t go farther, right.

1:40:00 And notice how their presentation has changed over the years too, and I’m not slamming them as a product, because it had to go the direction it did, but now there’s classifications, there’s movements, there’s instructionals, this is how we’re going to climb, this is how we’re going to pull, we’re going to do this exercise. It’s necessary, it’s necessary, it had to be, it had to be. And you know, if it gets people out and about, what, what always happens is people will start with something that’s more basic, okay, totally fine, totally fine, and they’re going to run that as far as they can, right, and when, then when they’ve exhausted that program, right, then they’re gonna look for something with more complexity or a higher top end.

1:40:39 That’s usually when they’ll end up with us, or they’ve been severely injured and nothing else has worked. So we have, we have one young lady who had severe back injury, neurosurgery, lost function in her left leg before I had her, uh, lost calf, foot was drooping, she’s regained full function now. I mean, she’s super strong, she’s not in a wheelchair, I mean, she was supposed to be crippled, right, and we rebuilt her with our back protocols and Jefferson curls.

1:41:08 Right, she’s, you know, do I ever have to tell Ashley to do your stretching? No, right, no, never. Getting on these Jefferson curls tomorrow, by the way. Gently. Yeah, but absolutely gently.

1:41:21 Um, so that’s the movement. Um, what about diet? I’m sure everyone asks you about diet and eating, and I know you’ve said things about, you know, the training and exercise and diet and eating. How do you feel about what your athletes consume? And then I’m curious what you think of things like veganism, you know, famously calls out the vegans, and I know, cracks me up, and a few people do, but yeah, just curious what you think about that.

1:41:47 Uh, the, the biggest mistake I see with eating is people over-consume. They over-consume. I always try to figure out things of what is, what is our body meant to do, what was the environment that we did, we involved in, and we didn’t evolve eating three meals a day, you know, we didn’t evolve eating steak three times a day, it just wasn’t possible. I’m sure they would have if they could have, but a lot of those buffalo weren’t laying down just waiting, you know, to chow down on.

1:42:19 It wasn’t happening, so we were meant for feast and famine. I evolved over the years into, if it’s a hard training day, I’ll probably have two meals that day, okay, I’ll have, I always train fasted, okay, since I was young, could never train after I eat, and, uh, but I know other people, and then if it’s a non-training day, I’ll do a single meal, okay, and it’s natural, it’s easy as soon as, part of it might have been getting older, okay, but it’s interesting to look at how many diseases are actually diseases of excess. So trying to, here’s a system that’s trying to digest and eliminate material that we’ve just ingested, and before it has a chance to complete that process we’re putting more in, it, more in, it, what happens?

1:43:18 Why do they get indigestion? Indigestion is the easiest thing in the world to fix, you take hydrochloric acid, done. A friend of mine was a Navy SEAL, I was like, “Man, I can’t, I can’t handle that protein in that beef anymore, I must be older.” He’s like, “Coach, you’re just getting older, just got to reset your hydrochloric level acid in your stomach, boom, took.” I said, “Well, how many do I take?”

1:43:39 He said, “Start with one, okay, and if you don’t feel anything, he said take two, if you start to feel a little burn, okay, step off.” you know, your dosage for your stomach. Sometimes he does two or three, I’m a one 500 milligram tablet guy, right? In fact, I have a hydrochloric in my, uh, in my pocket right now in case I have a big meal later, but, and I might do that, I find myself where I might have to do that for a few weeks and then it’ll be reset and I won’t have to do it again for a month.

1:44:11 But think about what they do for antacids, they’re doing the exact opposite, right? They’re taking something alkaline, they’re trying to reduce the level of acidity in their stomach when it’s exactly the opposite. The reason their stomach hurts is they can’t digest what’s in there, the reason they can’t digest is they’re eating too often. They’re eating too often, the stomach hasn’t had enough, it’s because it’s easy, right, it’s fluid, well, it’s not had enough time to regenerate that yet.

1:44:38 All right, I had, I had breakfast, I had lunch, I had dinner, I had a snack in between and I had a snack after dinner, they might have eaten five, six times in that day, and that hydrochloric acid is every single time, every time. So too much frequency, too much eating, too much frequency, too much volume, too much processed food. It’s interesting, I think I saw this on, uh, Joe Rogan with Rhonda, where she made a comment that all ethical considerations aside, but people who eat the most vegetable matter are more centrally located around equatorial regions, right, there, they’re wet, moist climates where things grow.

1:45:25 People who eat the more meat are, you’re either in a very, very cold environment or a very, very hot environment where things grow. Like, I had friends who are doing the gathering and they’re on our forum, they’re collecting all this great stuff, they’re in Montana, they’re in Michigan, they’re gathering, these guys, some and some of them are bright people, right, well, they’ll go out and harvest their own food, not just hunting, right, but it might be they’re going to get wild rice, all right, and they’re going to process it in store, they’ll go out and get their own vegetables and stuff, and they’re putting up photos of this awesome-looking banquets, and it was killing me. They’re like, “Coach, what do you think?”

1:46:04 I said, “I can’t do gathering, what am I gonna eat? I live in the desert, I’m gonna eat rattlesnakes and cactus. You know, no thanks, I’m good.” Yeah, I’m good. But, uh, so I think that could someone in terms of veganism, we, it’s something we can do now, uh, interesting to notice that the hunter-gatherers, whether it’s the Hudson, whether it’s in South America, whether it’s in Australia, they are never vegan by choice.

1:46:39 They just aren’t, never, never happens. So it could be, it was hunt, it was the season, but as soon as they can get some meat added into the diet, they do it. And for the other people who aren’t, try going a week without much protein, all right, just, just kind of do regular, and then have some nice buffalo, have some nice beef, and watch your body just digest it like that and feel that warmth spread through the body. You mean a week without animal protein?

1:47:10 Correct, vegetable protein. All right, so you’re not convinced that the vegan diet is the thing that’s gonna, well, it’s not natural, right, it’s not natural, but with today, in today’s day and age, with supplements and the way we can mix and everything, I think we can get around a lot of the restrictions that it would have been, because how is a vegan going to have starches and carbs in the middle of the winter? Not gonna happen without all our industrial, uh, base that delivers all these products.

1:47:43 Right now I’m just talking, you know, historically in terms of evolutionary biology. Now as a personal choice, I have no issue with it. Now if it works for them and they feel better, I’m great with that. If a tool is there, there’s nothing wrong with exploring it and seeing how it goes. Is it optimal?

1:48:03 I don’t think so. I don’t think so, uh, but it’s not something I worry about, right. Interesting. I asked the same thing, Charles Poliquin, um, and he, he, you know, he works a lot with Olympic athletes, and he said no, he’s like, he’s like, “I haven’t seen it happen.” And when I did my Ironman this, this year, I got challenged to do it on a plant base, because you did do plant-based, right?

1:48:25 I did, I went on it for four months, you know. You know, in the, in the beginning, Chris, I was under-eating because I was used to more concentrated calories, so the training was hard and I realized I needed up my volume, but the truth is I had an amazing wife that was cooking literally three or four meals a day for me, and again sourcing all the latest, let’s call it technology, in all these fascinating plant-based proteins and foods, and so I had an amazing amount of choice, with that choice and that engineering with some supplements and things like that, I felt great. You felt, and and it seemed to work well, my joints and everything work well, you know.

1:49:01 That being said, probably not an easy thing for everyone to recreate without someone really doing. Yeah, I mean, if I had to do it alone as a single man living in a one-bedroom place, it would have been hard. All of us single men would starve to death, right? Right. Yeah, that’s true, but, uh, but I found it interesting and, uh, just, I definitely feel my joints, everything else was good.

1:49:24 Now maybe that has to do with some of my, I’m listening to you now and I was doing break dancing for 12, 16 months, a lot of high-rep stuff, a lot of, like, stressing, a lot of impact, it might have helped me on this, these long runs and these other pieces, so, you know, it’s interesting to hear what you say, that might have helped as well. So I’m right now staying on it until I find a good reason to get off of it, but yeah, I love that approach. I love that approach.

1:49:47 I’m a firm believer, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Don’t fix it. We see people change their training and their diet all the time when it’s working for them, and I was like, what are you doing? I said, guys, picture this: you’re surfing and you’re on this great wave and out of the corner of your eye you see another wave, so you’re going to jump off this great wave that’s here right now in the hopes of the one behind you is just as good? Why not finish this wave and then go get another one?

1:50:14 All right, so you’re a big fan of letting people stick with something that’s working, stick with it because it’s the only way to know, right? It’s the only way to know, because, like, personal experience does, if I see, so I saw an article the other day, probiotics are bad for you. Okay, well, I was having severe, several years back, severe digestive issues, maybe it’s, wow, three or four years back now, that went fast. Nothing would digest, nothing. If I ate a high-fat diet, it didn’t digest, high-protein diet didn’t digest, high carb, low carb, you name it, vegetables, it didn’t matter, it would not digest.

1:50:49 Bloaty, gassy, miserable, I, and I was like, I am not living 30 more, 40 more years like this. Screw this, I’m not putting up with this, this is nonsense, this is miserable, and trying to find a solution and came across something one day, say these, I looked up symptoms and somehow managed to come across something that said probiotics may address these. Luckily, a good friend of mine trained professional athletes, and over the years, you know, these guys, they’ll spend 500,000 a year on their training, so they don’t care what their supplements cost, so I had these laboratory-grade supplements that he had given me, so downstairs I had laboratory-grade probiotic, went down, 12 hours later, wow, are you kidding me?

1:51:41 It was that simple, it was that simple. So visit with some people and they put me on a protocol of these were like 50 billion, laboratory grade per, so I did one with each meal, three times a day, and, uh, that lasted for about six weeks and just kind of naturally tapered off by itself. Never any more problems. So every once in a while I usually will do two or three per week just to repopulate, and they, the recommendations were to have different kinds of probiotics so there’d be different colonies of flora.

1:52:19 Since it worked, I never really went down that route, so I just, I just stayed with that particular probiotic. Amazing. So, you know, when I see that, personal experience, the whole point of that was, when you know something from personal experience works, kind of doesn’t matter what anybody says, you know, “This says you shouldn’t be doing it.” Well, you know what, I don’t care, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, you know. So I appreciate you going to the effort of writing that article, but I’m not interested, right, because you’ve seen that in all of your years of training, where we do this, this way because it works, and then 10 years later someone tells you why.

1:52:53 Yeah, right, yeah. And they’re always, have you noticed, they’re always jumping from crisis to crisis nutritionally, especially. Gluten is evil, fat is evil, carbs are evil, too much protein is evil, vegetables are evil, vegetables are the cure, it’s always. I think a lot of it is just marketing to get you to jump to a new product rather than just some moderation and patience. Yeah, it’s kind of the human way.

1:53:17 What’s your big challenge for you these days? So right now our biggest challenge is, uh, growing as a company. So a lot of companies, they, they all go through stages, and so we, this last two years has been a massive restructuring. Did we do well? Were we a multi-million dollar company?

1:53:40 Yes, everything was good, but there’s a ceiling you can, we ran into that we couldn’t get beyond in terms of production or staff accountability, staff oversight, and so all those systems had to be put in place and it’s been wonderful, we’ve learned a lot, I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s just, there are basics that a certain size of company have to be in place. And you know far better than me, they have to be in place. Yeah, and things have to be documented, and you know what, guys, this is how it has to be, you know.

1:54:16 And so we actually, uh, these last couple years I’ve gone through a lot of staff. So a friend of mine who owns a 700 million dollar fitness company, he’s got one employee left from back in the day, and I’ve got one now left from back in the day, because we just outgrew skill sets. Yeah, and that’s just the evolution of a small business, you know. We were talking earlier, I mean, for me this started me and my, on my own for three years pretty much, and you know, that’s how a lot of things start, and then, you know, when you get four, five, six, seven, eight people, it’s one thing, when you start getting into those teens, that’s where we’re at, that’s where life got challenging.

1:54:50 Yeah, it’s for protocols and systems, and you have to create these assets and all that, and it can be a really weird time also as a founder or manager, you have to learn all these new skills that absolutely you never had to before, and you have to delegate things. That delegation was the hardest one at first. Sure, that was tough, my first employee. Yeah, he says, “I’ve got it.” In fact, he’s still with me today, he’s awesome, Corey’s awesome.

1:55:17 Yeah, okay, but that first time of handing over those reins and then you got to kind of trust it’s going to get done, that was tough. Yeah, it’s a growth process, but one, real, sounds like you’re enjoying. I like challenge. Yeah, I like challenge. I had, I’ve had some great mentors come through here over the years, and one of them, a business mentor, and he said, “Brian,” he said, “you want less control, that’s how you scale your business, with less control.”

1:55:43 And it’s the last thing you want to hear, or you believe, less control. Less control, finding that balance, right, of how much less. So I had tried, my friend and I, as interesting, we were both doing the same time trying to pull back, pulled back a little too much and then both had to come back in, not where we were, but there were certain skill sets that we had that were essential things that we could do that no one else could do. So, okay, and so now I think we’re at a pretty good balance.

1:56:14 I feel good where we’re at now, but that was interesting. Yeah, what do you do every day to be successful? Do you have certain habits, routines, uh, wake up times, anything? I am not nearly as good at that stuff as Tim, I’m not remotely as good as Tim. Uh, my poor wife, she’s, she’s used to me, it’s kind of the writer’s curse.

1:56:35 So, you know, I may have an idea at two or three in the morning and I’ll get up and, you know, you write it and then hopefully that’s all it was and I go back to sleep. No, sometimes it turns into two, three, four hour marathons, I don’t feel like it until you look over and it’s, you know, six in the morning, like, oh no, not again. Uh, for me, uh, training times are sacred, training is sacred. Uh, it gets rid of the stress, you know, multi-million dollar business, we’re international, about 45 international, uh, clears the head, keeps things in perspective, some personal accountability there is very good.

1:57:36 More. And I don’t exaggerate to my staff what my strengths are, they know what my weaknesses are, for example daily housekeeping things that are essential to a healthy business. I am terrible at them. I don’t, for gymnastics it didn’t bother me, paperwork stuff, I just hate it, but I got great people in place who are really sick individuals who love it, right?

1:58:15 Right. I, I don’t know why they love it, but they love it and they’re awesome, they’re so much better than I could ever be. So we just understand, you know, these are my talents, these are their talents, uh, trying to put the right people in the right chairs, right? And that honesty you got from gymnastics, right, everyone’s got to be honest with themselves, gotta be, and you can see it right in the performance, so pretty much everyone can make a consensus and say, “Nope, you didn’t get it,” or, “Yep, you got it.”

1:58:40 Oh, they know when you’re full of it, right. Um, what was the best day of your life and, and the worst? Wow, tough question. I don’t know that I evaluate things that way. There have been a lot of great ones, but it tends to be, memory shift over time, so I’m not sure we’re always as, is it as rosy as it would have appeared?

1:59:10 Obviously national champions were great, marriage great, birth of kids great. Uh, I’m, I’m not afraid of failure at all, not, not in the slightest. No, I’m like everyone else, it will upset me, especially if something goes really south, but, um, some of my best ideas have kind of come out of the ashes as we’re sifting through and restructuring. It’s just a matter of spending some time, sometimes it’s a lot of time. I’ve had some projects, well, Richard, my friend who’s the sculptor, is a great example, he’s had some projects or he’s been working on for 10 years and this one’s not going and he’ll set it aside.

1:59:56 So it takes, uh, gosh, we’ve probably got 20, 25 staff all together, and it takes all those people working on various things to bring all the things that are in my head to life. There’s just so much, but it’s, I’m so grateful for that though, it’s so grateful because it frees me to be creative and to kind of be out there and lead the way. And, uh, yeah, gosh, just gratitude, gratitude, no way to do it all that and bring all that to fruition just on my own.

2:00:33 There’s only, I mean, when we started the company I was doing the normal, you know, 18 hours a day doing everything myself for years, but I get, we get so much more done now. You know, so like you mentioned, uh, the ability to let stuff go, you know, what am I good at? Okay. What are they great at? As long as we’re getting it done, so like to not micromanage.

2:00:59 You know, guys, now still hold them accountable, guys, I need this done, okay, but let them decide how it’s going to get done, not get in there and say, well, you didn’t cross this T, you didn’t dot that I. They don’t need to hear that from me. I, I hire bright, successful, independent people. All right, here’s a problem, guys, run with it, and if it’s not quite right, we’ll come in and we’ll adjust. I’m okay with that, but I’m no, that’s, they’re being graded, that’s what gives me freedom.

2:01:25 Yeah, yeah. Who’s been the biggest influence on you? Was it a parent or a mentor or a, one of your coaches back in the day, you know, for the longest time? Okay, uh, I, I didn’t understand the nature of a leader’s personality because I had to be the worst employee on the planet, the worst employee, not in terms of quality of work I was doing, but in always watching and evaluating my employers and coming back, you know, we could do this better, we could do that better.

2:02:03 And if someone’s a hard charger and they’re honest and open, that’s a gift from God, but if you’re not, that’s the most annoying little, funny, you just can’t wait to get rid of them, and so never quite fitting in, always, always feeling like a square peg in a round hole, always. And interestingly, as becoming more successful as a national team coach, now having the opportunity to interact with other people like-minded, oh, I do fit in somewhere. Well, this is interesting.

2:02:41 And then GB led to another level of growth, right, where suddenly we’re working with CEOs and hedge fund managers and special operations and these great artists and all these things, and they all think the same way. It’s like, oh, I was just playing with the wrong people, that, that was just, I do belong to a group, and I do belong to the group, I was just in the wrong group before. You belong to the work-hard perfectionists. Yep, the psychos. The psychos, right.

2:03:13 Do your best, do your best, which really means your very best always. I think it’s a phrase that gets used a bit. Yeah, your very best. If it’s the best in the world, great, if it’s not, well, the gifts you’ve been given are the gifts you’ve been given, your job is to maximize them, right? And the truth is, is that I probably, even when I think I’m doing my very best, you as a coach can look at me and say, “We got a lot more than that.”

2:03:39 Everyone’s that way, right? That’s why it’s so important to have people you can lean on, right, people who can lean on, whose judgment you trust, who operate at a high level. I, I firmly believe we should surround ourselves with people who are better than we are in different areas, and then be humble enough and honest enough to listen. I said, “No, you need to do this.” Okay, like, for example, as our company was growing, some of my staff changed part of our website and they knew I wouldn’t approve it, so they just did it.

2:04:18 Okay, and they were right and the customers loved it, everything went great, so the lesson learned was just because I like it doesn’t mean the customers will like it. And so for a long time this page was on our website that they love, that I hate. It, I was like, it doesn’t matter what I like, as long as they like it, it’s good. It’s good. And so, uh, yeah, surround people, surround yourself with people who are bright and pull you along and who aren’t afraid to be honest, who will call you on your nonsense, because we can’t.

2:04:50 Like, could I, could I train myself as a competitive athlete? No, couldn’t be done. It couldn’t be done because I’m gonna have the same tendencies as everyone else to make excuses, ease up, because I can’t, I’m not, I’m not emotionally detached from it, I’m in the middle of this experience and feeling it. I need someone who can dispassionately say, this was good, this was not, this, we’re going to do better. So I think we need that in our professional and our private lives as well.

2:05:20 Yeah, most definitely. Um, what scares you? Failure? Well, failure in terms of not doing best effort, there’s actually, maybe failure is not the right word, mediocrity. And for me mediocrity isn’t necessarily mediocre results but mediocrity of effort.

2:05:43 I cannot stand it in myself or any of the people around me who are close to me, I despise mediocrity. I don’t mind if they’re not the greatest in the world as long as there’s effort there. I cherish best effort above all else on the planet, and with yourself as well. Try, you know, it’s hard, it’s hard for all of us to be honest, you know, because we make excuses, we’re human, and that’s where that, that good support system around us is so, so important.

2:06:13 Yeah, yeah. And, uh, what keeps you awake at night? That’s a good question. Uh, doing a good job with family. Okay, I have two daughters, one finishing high school, one starting high school.

2:06:38 Okay, I have 14-year-olds, so I kind of know what that’s like. Okay, I’ve got one who’s, uh, getting ready to be 15, and then the other one is just turning 17. Uh, making sure I’m, I’m, am I requiring their best without going overboard, you know, wanting to be super close but not becoming buddy-buddy, not, not blurring that line where there’s still accountability but still a close family. I really want family to be most important. Uh, I’m, uh, so they have Type A and then they have Type double A, I’m like Type quadruple plus plus plus A, it’s ridiculous.

2:07:21 So, uh, you know, wins enough, enough, you know, back off. I have, uh, one daughter who’s academically based like me, all right, so it was easy to see the world through that lens. I have another daughter who’s much more artistically based, right, that required a changing of gears for me and that, that was wonderful. That was wonderful, I actually valued that, it was like having a different world view, a new map put on top of my view of the world. Oh, I never considered looking at things this way.

2:07:57 That was a huge blessing. Uh, my wife is a super strong, patient woman because I am just a major pain in the tail, just driven and focused, and you know, she keeps feet on the ground for me. It’s good. Yeah, so yeah, failure, and that will probably keep me up more than anything else. It’s tricky.

2:08:22 Yeah, and it’s always changing. Oh, for sure. I think, um, President Obama found it difficult when his girls got to be around that age, because when they’re younger a lot of times, you know, Dad is such a big part of their life, as they get over that hook they’re trying to get their independence and, sure, I know he was kind of moping around the White House a little bit, being like, “I got no girls anymore because they now, I’m, I’m the last thing they want to be a part of,” at least for a few years, and I hear they come back later.

2:08:52 Well, I’m such a, you know, everyone’s surprised that, you know, in terms of my daughters, I’m such a softy, such a softy, so sentimental. So my oldest daughters had been looking at colleges all around the country, okay, and she’s super bright, I knew she was going to have her choice, and then one day she’s like, “You know what, I’m going to go to Arizona State, I’m going to stay home. I don’t want to be far from the family.” And I had to turn and kind of try to hide my tears, because I’m like, oh, that’s awesome, I don’t want to scare her away, I’m just like, that’s awesome, sweetie, thank you, thank you.

2:09:25 Okay, she can’t, I don’t want to scare her off, but that meant the world to me. Yeah, meant the world to me. That’s good, that’s good, she’s close. So yeah, I think my uncle went to ASU, so it’s all good. Um, Coach, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end.

2:09:39 I’m going to ask you, um, knowing everything you know now, all of your experience, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Christopher and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Chill the hell out. Was he in the military? Yeah, I was in the military. It was black or it was white and I was just as hardcore and hard-nosed and uncompromising as you could possibly imagine, and too much, too much.

2:10:13 Uh, I’m the first one in my family to have, you know, a relatively higher level of success, so I didn’t, I didn’t get to come up with the appropriate mentoring, you know, that if you do, I was one of those ones that they said, every, all the tests are high, you can do whatever you want. Well, that means the potential to do whatever I wanted was there, it doesn’t mean I literally got to do whatever I wanted, which was the definition I chose to follow. So, you know, I should have done so, for example, I went to, in college when I started, it’s a huge scholarship, I think I paid 75 dollars a semester, okay, but you know, college professors actually expect you to do homework.

2:11:02 They expected that, they expect you to go to class. So within a year my, my wonderful scholarship was no longer there. Now I had dated a lot, I had trained a lot, but there was no one there to kind of get some structure to say, you can do what you want within limits, however there are certain boundaries that can’t be crossed and there are basics that have to be addressed. And so I went into the military, did a lot of growing up, came out and then did it right.

2:11:32 I would have broadened my focus, you know, at the time, just like everyone, I wanted it then rather than being uncomfortable for a few years and get it done and move on. Uh, I, I’m feel fortunate that I learned those lessons later in life. I think the national team, between the military and the national team coaching, that was a very good environment to learn how to manage, you know, my learning curves, how to do products, how to do projects, uh, not be afraid of hard work.

2:12:10 It would have been great if I’d learned it 30 years earlier. Yes, it would have, but such as life. On that same a note, best advice you’ve ever received, you know, could have been from someone in the military or said a parent or another coach or maybe a student? First one that comes to mind is, you know, run my business like national team. Think we just, we had discussed, because that encapsulated so many different aspects of being patient, because I’m extremely impatient.

2:12:43 I’m incredibly impatient. Uh, everyone who meets me said, “You’re the most patient person I’ve ever met.” No, I’m not, I’m just extremely driven, and in order to get what I want I had to learn to be patient. I don’t like it, I don’t like it any more than anyone else. I had a brutal temper when I was young, brutal temper, but that’s counterproductive, so I learned.

2:13:09 When I was young I was very much an introvert. I love talking to people now. I think sometimes people use these designations as crutches in order to maintain a current behavior and not get out of their comfort zone. All right, there was no way for me to go and talk to huge groups with being an introvert, so you learn it, you fake it till you make it, and then one day suddenly you find out, huh, maybe I wasn’t 100 percent an introvert, I just hadn’t learned an important social skill.

2:13:43 Okay, well, once you learn one lesson like that, that kind of opens the door. Well, if I did it once, now what else do I need? I know I can get it, I just have to find the right resources and the right person to learn from. Yeah, you’ve learned how to learn now, so that’s excellent. Learned how to learn.

2:14:00 I, I think that’s, I’ve tried to instill that in my daughters, so when they’re going through high school and some of this stuff is nonsense and I admit that to them, I said, “Ladies, this is silly stuff, you’re never going to use this in a million years, this is a complete waste of your time.” And I said, “That being said, this material in and of itself is not the purpose. The purpose of this material is to teach you how to be responsible, to teach you how to be accountable, to teach you to pay attention to detail, to teach you how to think clearly and understand nuances.

2:14:35 That’s what this is for, whether you use the actual material itself is inconsequential.” So I’ve tried to impart that lesson over the years, they’re young, I’m not sure they’re buying in, I’m hoping we’re planting some seeds. It sounds reasonable to me, so it always does to us old folkies, right? Last part of that question is, um, to that 20-year-old that’s, that’s watching us right now from, you know, any country around the world, advice to them, um, for their future, anything, maybe their, their physical body and maybe some, maybe their own practices, their own discovery of this world, what would you tell them?

2:15:10 Dream big. Dream big. I was always the biggest dreamer in my group. So I remember being young and sharing these big dreams and aspirations, and I was always surprised by how many of them thought it was overboard or how many of them were so much more modest, and I, I never got that. Why, why not swing for the fences?

2:15:38 What will it cost you? What, what if you were capable and you’ll never find out. To my mind, so if when I learned, when I was learning before I was a national team coach, while I was trying to become one, I didn’t, I didn’t care what the top coaches around me were doing. I didn’t care, I didn’t care what the top coaches in the state where I was were doing, I didn’t care. I didn’t care what the best coaches in the country were doing, I cared what the Olympic champion and his coach were doing.

2:16:09 That’s what I cared about, and then, all right, how do I break this down? I wanted to learn from the best, from the very best, because obviously if I can be successful at that level I’ll be successful at every other level under that, where a lot of people I saw were kind of doing the opposite approach: I’m going to be very good at where I am and then I’m going to study the next group. Well, to me, maybe some of the things I learned were improper and now I have to unlearn that in order to go to the next level.

2:16:40 Why not just learn the best practices first, even though it may take longer, right, and just make a run for it, make around. So dream big, don’t, don’t be afraid. When I started GB, and I bet yours was the same, I can’t count how many people told me, “Why, dude, you’re not making any money?” I bet I did three, four years without making a nickel. “What are you doing?

2:17:07 What are you doing? You know, if you need money you can get a part-time job down the road, right, and you won’t have all these hours.” But you gotta dream big, because they’re always gonna say no, you can’t, it’s gonna be hard, it’ll be this, maybe that, maybe. But what if? So I love what if.

2:17:30 What if it’s huge? Well, that fires me up. Yeah, I like the dream big, I like learning from the best, and, and yeah, when you start something new, you know, I did a TED Talk about three or four years into London Real, and I was, I was telling this story about how, um, I, I put my London Real up on Facebook, on, it was one of the first times I had these pages on Facebook back in the day, and I was like, for a business, and I checked one time and I could see that none of my friends and family had liked my page, and when I would contact them, none of them had even watched my show, and this is after doing it for, like, a year full time, every, and I, I came to realize that first it made me angry and then it made me realize, no, this is the price of admission to something great.

2:18:13 I use that a lot, price of admission. Yeah, you know, yeah, and so yeah, you’re gonna have to get through that resistance to see how bad you want it. I’m sure you’ve seen that with your athletes, and actually maybe as a final thought, I like it that way. I, I like it that it’s hard, I like it that it’s hard, I like it that it thins the herd. I like it that it self-selects, that the ones who are serious and the ones who want it most, who really dig down and put in the effort, they’re the ones who get it.

2:18:50 They’re the ones who get it, and the people who say they want it and don’t follow through, they never get it. I, I like that it’s hard, and I, I think that shows with everyone who’s achieved a level of success, they all speak the same language, you know, we paid dues to get here, we paid dues to get here. And sometimes people think, well, there must be a secret, there must be a secret. That is the secret, that is the secret, just be, to say it nicely, you know, be determined, but maybe the flip side of that is too dumb to give up.

2:19:26 You know, just, you know, make it. I love that it’s hard. You know, make me earn it, make me earn it. Exclusive club that way. I love that.

2:19:37 Uh, good, you’ve just fired me up, Coach, I don’t know if that was what you’re trying to do, uh, but that’s great. Myself too, right. Um, really appreciate all this thought, you know, we haven’t delved into the details, and if people want to learn more, definitely they need to follow you on Instagram, Gymnastic Bodies, and GymnasticBodies.com, uh, to look into more your training. I mean, you have so many incredible protocols and, and really just some basic mobility and strength and flexibility thing that anyone can try and start using, and, and I’m going to start playing with Jefferson’s and I’m going to post those, and even, you know, shoulder flexion, and just find out, you know, what I, what I’m doing and how I’m doing and, and what I’m doing wrong, not to mention all the advanced stuff.

2:20:16 So well, even if it’s, even if it’s doing it wrong, but it’s a start, right? Yeah, and then it just gets a little better. Yeah, even if they just do it, to add a bunch of different products, there probably our easiest one for people is our new subscription service, so instead of spending the sixteen hundred dollars for everything, it’s thirty dollars a month, so, you know, come in and try everything, you know, is it for you? Yeah, and that’s right on your front page.

2:20:41 So, um, yeah, fantastic stuff, so much knowledge, uh, you have, and I, I’m always thinking about all of these movements, these, you know, athletes are doing them, gymnastics and all the crazy work and science and those 16,000 hours, you know, and all the knowledge you must have, a lot of hours. It’s a lot, and you know, I think people, uh, need to learn more about their own bodies. Absolutely, and just plan on using them, and I’m 47, just did that Ironman.

2:21:09 Um, I, you know, I’m taking hand balancing classes once a week, I’m getting better and better, still break dancing, like, and my body’s in better shape than it ever was, you know, but I’m putting under load and all these things on a regular basis and I feel great, so, um, I encourage people to not give up on somebody. One of my mentors used to have a sign behind his desk that I saw when I was 17, and it, it made such a strong impression on me, I never, ever, ever forgot it, and it said, “Dead at 35, buried at 65.” And I was like, oh, and you know, I’ve seen that come to life far too many times, far too many times, where people assume that because they’ve gotten into their 30s it’s done and now it’s a downhill slide.

2:21:59 Uh, it’s a downhill slide if you choose for it to be a downhill slide. You know, it’s, it’s under our control, gosh, especially in the West. All right, especially in the West, with so many resources and opportunities, you know, what are we going to do with it? Create our own. I love that statement, 35 and 65.

2:22:21 Uh, again, thank you so much for coming here. Thank you, bro. And, uh, I do want to say also before you go that I, I’ve had the pleasure of having Ido Portal’s in that chair, and I do hope you guys find a way to speak to each other in the future. You’re both, I would like to too. Yeah, you’re a fascinating guy, we had a good time for a lot of years.

2:22:36 Yeah, and, um, you know, we’ve done, uh, we did a documentary with him last year, and to prepare for, I saw that, I thought it was really well done. Okay, thank you. To prepare for that I had to go read his old blogs, and there’s one from 2008 where he talks about going to visit you and, oh yeah, or something, and, you know, your hospitality and how much he learned from you and all that, and it’s just amazing to see, you know, that that, that beautiful relationship was there.

2:22:58 So you don’t give me a call, that’s a push to you, and if he does, watching to him too. Uh, because you guys are both, we’re both stubborn, so yeah, it would be good. Yeah, which you’re both stubborn, highly opinionated, and, uh, you fight for what you believe for, which makes, which makes great men with great ideas. And sure, and there’s a reason for that, and you both have very different visions of what to do, and, and it’s a beautiful thing that way. So, uh, yeah, I appreciate that, that’s both you guys.

2:23:24 Um, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. Um, I wish you well on yours. Say hi to Arizona to me. I will, for me, I will. And, uh, all the best.

2:23:31 Thank you so much.