What Does It Feel Like To Squat 1000lbs? | Brian Carroll

Brian Carroll is a coach, author and multiple world record holding powerlifter. Brian is one of the strongest men on the planet, having squatted 1000lbs+ more than 50 times in official meets. He suffered a catastrophic spinal injury which would have stopped many athletic careers but has recovered to not only be pain free, but now has his eyes set on more world records. Expect to learn about the genesis of powerlifting as a sport, Brian's advice for strength athletes and those beginning their lifting journey, his mindset before he is about to lift, his diet and training plan and much more... Extra Stuff: Buy Brian's Book - https://www.powerrackstrength.com Follow Brian on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/briancarroll81 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What do you do before a lift and what is the inside of your head like before you're about to put 1,000 pounds on your back in a meet?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  It's uh, it's really focused and I go to a dark, dark place in my head where I don't care about anything else. And the last thing I want in the world to happen when I'm under the bar is to miss the lift and embarrass myself. So everything is extremely tight. I visualize and see the lift being completed effortlessly before I even approach the platform. I already see it happen. I see the crowd's reaction and I strive for that feeling to happen before it even happens. So I get out there and I just go to my default mode. I tune everything out. I tune everyone out. I go and lift and I fight for my life for a couple of seconds and I put it back down. Then I try to breathe and relax. So you turn

• 0:51Speaker 01

  it on, you turn it off. You turn it on, you turn it off. Kind of like a fighter, UFC fighter between rounds. You gotta chill. Breathe and relax. Then you go, you turn it back on and you relax.

• 1:07Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by, without a doubt, the strongest man that I have ever had on this podcast, Mr. Brian Carroll. Welcome to the show.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me, Chris. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to having a chat with you.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, me too. Recently had mutual friend of ours, Dr. Stuart McGill on the show and he was singing your praises and we also briefly discussed the work that you two did together. So I'm excited to hear the other side of that story as we get through today.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yes, it's been a very interesting journey, the last six years that I've known Dr. McGill. And I met him in May of 2013, where I went to see him for a very complicated back injury that I had. The actual injury was basically had no disc at L4, L5, L5S1. It was flattened just the same at L5, or L4, L5, L5S1. Both the discs were gone and it had a couple implant fractures working down to the sacrum where it was almost split in half. So I was in a bad spot where surgeons were wanting to do a spinal fusion on me. They were talking all this crazy stuff about how I'd never be out of pain and Stu, right away, said I can get you out of pain, but your lifting is done.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  You have absolutely no athleticism left in your back. And I'm telling you this as if you were my son, I would urge you to retire and never consider lifting heavy again. And I said, well, you just said that you could help get me out of pain. So I looked at him and I looked at my wife and I very calmly said, I'm gonna lift again, so let's get me out of pain. And he said, well, you know, my thoughts on this, first things first, let's get you out of pain. And then we'll proceed, you come back in six months. We'll, we'll see where you are and then who knows? Maybe you're right, maybe we end up writing a book about it. And that was the first meeting that we had, May of 2013. And we wrote the book in 2017. And I held him to his feet to the fire when he said this about the book.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And it's, it's a, have you ever heard the phrase, fact is stranger than fiction? It's super true, man. Some stories that I could tell you, you'd be like, how does that even happen? How does a guy from, how do two men from totally different worlds, one in the lab clinic training center, one from in the hole in the wall powerlifting gym, how do they merge? And write a book that helps people all over the world? So it's a pretty awesome story.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  I'm looking forward to getting into it today and I'm sure that a lot of the listeners will be as well. So can you give us a little bit of a background to your powerlifting career? Where, where you got yourself to in the buildup to this and some of your achievements?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I started, I did my first bench competition in 1999 when I was a senior in high school. We just actually had a 20 year reunion for high school this past weekend. So I'm feeling kind of old. I just turned 38, I just turned 38 last week. But I started when I was 17 and I actually got really serious about lifting when I was 16, when I was legally able to join the, the local gym. So from there, I just fell in love with lifting. I didn't party in high school. All I did was lift, eat well and run. And I played baseball. So that was kind of my prerequisite to taking it to the next level. Once I graduated, I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. So what I did is I kept working my sales job at Coca-Cola and I just lifted, I lifted, I lifted, I did some bodybuilding for a little bit.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I kept competing in powerlifting. And then finally the, the bug fully bit me in 2003, where I did my first full competition meet, which consists of the squat, the bench, the deadlift for total. So I did that. And early, I started training for that in early 2002, then 2003, that was it, man. That's all I thought about for the next 15, 20 years. It was just, you know, and it's still that way, but I've gotten a little bit more mature with my approach to lifting, my patience, because coming up, it didn't take long until I hit some big, big numbers. Within three and a half years of my first full meet competition, I squatted 1,030 at 220, which broke the all-time world record,

• 5:10Speaker 01

  held by Chuck Vogelpohl at Westside Barbell. No one saw it coming, so here I am, a kid at 25 years old, break this world record. The next thing you know, I think I'm untouchable. I think I'm Superman. I ended up going up a couple of weight classes, setting records there, 1185 squat at 275 in 2011, but that lift cost me. You know, I had a number, one time I had a number two total ever at 220, number two total at 242 multiple times, and a number two total all-time at 275, but after a while, that cumulative trauma of abusing my body, meat after meat after meat, and not necessarily investing back into my body after each competition, I kind of became physically, in some ways,

• 5:55Speaker 01

  mentally bankrupt, because I was pushing, pushing, pushing. And you see people, whether it be CrossFit, whether it be fighting, wrestling, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, bodybuilding, you have to have rest. You have to have downtime. And one of my good friends is arguably the best bodybuilder of all time, Dexter Jackson. He takes a lot of downtime every year. He just won the Tampa Pro, and he's, he's actually in line to win the Olympia this year with Shawn Roden pulling out. Kai Green's not competing, Phil Heath isn't competing, it's wide open. So, you know how old Dexter is? He's 49, he'll be 50 on Thanksgiving.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  That man is a beast.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  So, but I've learned from him, take time off, come off supplementation, don't train so hard, give your body a rest, so you become hungry once again to do it. And unfortunately, I didn't always have that approach, and my body got badly beaten up.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  How would you describe your training style in those years when you were getting yourself up towards 1,000 pounds and then moving from the 1,035 to like the 1145 squat and stuff like that?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 1185 is where I ended up. Yeah, like every pound counts there.

• 7:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you fought hard for them.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  It was whatever it took. Whatever it took, it did not matter. I trained whether I felt good or not. I didn't always listen to my body. Like I alluded to earlier, I thought I was Superman. I thought I could do everything with no, do every and anything without any consequence. And after a while, everyone's human. We've seen it. We see it every, every field. Eventually you slow down and Dexter slowed down some. He didn't win a pro show for three years. And this is his first pro win in a while. So we all slow down. So what we have to do is become more cerebral as we get older, as our lifting age, our lifting age and biological age are two different things. I know many people that just started lifting heavy at 40 years old. They don't have the miles that I have on my body, even

• 7:50Speaker 01

  though they're older than me from a biological standpoint. So it was reckless. It was heavy. It was pushing at all costs. Now I've kind of developed a little better philosophy over the last six or seven years where I scale training back. I have programmed D loads where I take lightweight every few weeks. If I don't fill up to a lift one day, I'll ask myself, am I being a coward or am I being smart? And I'll weigh all my options. If something feels off and it starts to feel better, maybe I keep going. Or if it feels off, I shut it down and just help the other guys for that day. So I'm a lot more cerebral these days and I have to credit Dr. McGill for a lot of that because he helped, he helped me a great deal.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I can hear the narrative, the Stuart narrative seeping through in some of the words that you say. And I, like, I'm doing the same, right? I went to go and spend a day with Dr. McGill, very fortunately in Canada a couple of weeks ago. And I did my podcast with him and we've been in touch a lot over email and stuff like that. And I find myself drinking the Kool-Aid or singing from the same hymn sheet now as well because it appears to be the right one. And I want to get on to the whole, the, the whole ethos behind your injury and your recovery and stuff like that. But there will be some big fan powerlifters out there who will want to know what sort of split you were doing in the buildup to your main meets in the, the, I guess, the heyday of your comp prep and stuff like that.

• 9:14Chris Williamson?

  Could you take us through the typical sort of day and who was programming for you? What were you eating, et cetera, et cetera?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Good. Okay.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  So it all depended on what weight class I was lifting at. I lifted at two twenty, two forty two, two seventy five, and even three oh eight. I bench pressed there.

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  That's a large range.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  So it really depends on what weight class I was lifting at. After a while, I got really big for the two twenty class. And so I had to go up to two forty two. And then that allowed me to eat a little bit more. So at the end of the day, it comes down to calorie consumption. And your timing, your timing is to me important. You need to eat enough, but not too much where you store body fat. So at times I've experimented, I've eaten too much, I've gotten fatter. But with powerlifting, it's tricky because it isn't about who looks good. It's about the person who's most functional and strong at that time. So just like the whole mobility, flexibility thing for powerlifting is you need enough, but not too much. It's the same thing with body fat. You don't want too much body fat where you go up a weight class or

• 10:14Speaker 01

  you're unhealthy. But at the same time, when you start talking about lower than 12% body fat, your joints end up getting a little bit less supported. You have less fluid in them. Your core becomes smaller, which your trunk is the pillar of strength. That that is the catalyst to to big lifts. You unleash athleticism through a stiff proximal core, and it leads to distal mobility throughout the the shoulders and hips.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  Now, that is straight out of the Dr. McGill playbook. That is, that is, that is his voice. You even said it in a Canadian accent, I think, there for a little bit.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I did. I did. Hey, Stu's my man. So basically, right now, I'm still going to train for competition. Right now, I'm taking time off. And very fortunately, I just got my blood work back and I am completely healthy in every way. My cholesterol, my kidneys, my liver, my heart, everything came back is is good and really good on some things. My overall cardiac risk was like off the charts low. So that's a good thing after all this heavy lifting.

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. So I'm gonna probably pick back up in 2020 for some competitions. There's still some numbers that I'd like to hit. I'd like to get that 1200 pound squat in because 1185 is 1200, but it's not quite 1200 pounds. There's only been 10 men that ever squat 1200 pounds ever.

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And they're all over 300 pounds.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  So you could potentially be the lightest man?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  Would you be trying to do that two eight, two eighty five?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  I would probably try to do that two seventy-five. Yep.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  Oh wow.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Hundred and twenty-five kilo. So, right now, my diet consists of a lot of steak, a lot of rice, a lot of spinach, carrots, Greek yogurt, oranges, orange juice, and, uh, whole eggs. That's really what I eat now. And I think it's, uh, my blood work's a testament to, uh, to eating the right foods. You can still be big and strong and healthy at the same time. But in the past, I would be on the seafood diet. Whatever I saw, I ate. I ate, ate, ate. I love to eat. I love junk food. So that's something I've been working on as well, is just scaling back to junk food and not feeding my brain those happy feelings by, by eating, getting the serotonin or whatever it is it releases when you eat, you know, a big piece of pie or a big piece of cake or a big bowl of ice cream.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I've gotten better about that. But my overall philosophy is eat, eat for performance. Eat to perform. And, and whatever fuels your body to lift the best is what you need to eat. And that's gonna range a lot from different people. I think Stan Efforting's vertical diet is a great, great diet for the strength athlete. And hell, I've been following it, and my health is better than ever, too. I eat a lot of red meat, cholesterol, L, HDL went up, LDL went down. Imagine that. Triglycerides right on. People are scared of red meat. And I, I don't really think that it's, uh, it's the poison that a lot of people think. Now, for some people, maybe they respond poorly to starchy carbs like rice and, and, you know, uh, high-fat meat like, like red meat or ground beef.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  But for me, it works really well. Uh, so that's been my, I've always liked to eat a lot of stickin', uh, sorry, steak, chicken, uh, fish, shrimp, and then rice, pasta, oatmeal for my carbs. And then I've always liked spinach, squash, uh, carrots, uh, you know, to get my micros in. And then I like to supplement with some vitamin D. I'll take some fiber to make sure everything's, you know, nice and cleaned out. And, uh, fish oil. So, uh, other than that, man, that's really the basis of what I've used as my diet overall. And then if I feel myself leaning out too much, I'll add more calories. I'll add more carbs and fat. Usually the protein stays about the same. And then-

• 14:01Speaker 01

  You know, depending on where my body weight is, it might be more carbs and fat or less carbs and fat. And I use the mirror to be that indicator for me. Um, not, not necessarily the scale, but I can't disregard the scale because I lived in a weight class. So there's a lot of variables there. Now, as far as my training split, what I've found works best for me, and it was corroborated by Stu's wisdom, is I like to squat and deadlift on day one. There's a couple of reasons for that. It allows me a full week of recovery before I squat or deadlift again. So I don't have to worry about squatting Saturday and then deadlifting Wednesday, then having to turn around and squat again on Saturday. So that's been something I've done for the better part of the last 12 years or so, but it really hit home when Stu told me, you need to give yourself at least five days in between loading.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So day one is squat and deadlift with a little bit of assistance. Uh, day two is off, day three is bench press and bench press assistance. Day four is off, which is Tuesday. Wednesday is squat and deadlift assistance. So I'll do my, my hamstring work, my quad work, my upper back work, my mid back work, my bicep work. And then I take Thursday off after that day. And then Friday I do a little bit of a pump workout where I just get some blood flowing. I'll do a little bit of sled dragging and cardio and carries, which I do at the end of each workout, but it's more of a focal point on Friday. And that kind of gets me ready and the blood flowing for Saturday morning when I squat and deadlift again.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Four days a week.

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  And that's that rotation?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. And then every three or four weeks I take a lighter week on the main movement. So I might only work up to 50% of what I'm capable of that day. And that's why I think a sliding scale, something like RPE, the rate of, rate of perceived exertion or effort, however you want to put it. I think it's good because depending on what you have going on in your life, the weights are going to fluctuate. You can't always go off of percentages. What if you're on a honeymoon and you're in Jamaica and the weight room is not up to snuff? You're going to have to scale back the weights you use. If you're only going off percentages, it's going to lead to a lot of disappointment eventually. So what you do is you look at what you're capable of today, then work off of that max, what you feel like you have in the tank that day. So, um,

• 16:15Speaker 01

  A lot of the time, every three or four weeks, I'll just work at like a five RPE or 50% of what I'm capable of that day and just do singles. So I reiterate those n-grams of perfect form every single time. So it gives me not only a refresher for my brain, but a refresher for my body. And then I'm ready, you know, I'm a little uh more motivated to get back under the bar with heavier weight the following weeks. And what I like to do is take a light week before you're absolutely crippled and forced to take a light week. Because then, we know that overtraining can last up to a month for some people. They're overstimulated, they might get sick, they might not sleep well, they uh they might have regression in their strength, achy, the flu.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  There's a lot of symptoms that come along with training too hard for too long. And I've been there multiple times. You just, everything feels like crap, you become depressed, everything's heavy. So why not stay ahead of that wave before it crashes on you? Why not ride it like a surfer?

• 17:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yeah. One of the things that you touched on earlier on that made me think, something I know a lot of athletes that are listening will consider, which is how much of my, not unwillingness to train, but my concern about the session that I have in front of me, or the difficulty that I'm finding in this session, how much of that is because I am, my current makeup is not in a very optimal state. I've underslept, I'm not eating very well, I might be getting the onset of a bug, and how much of that is me being a pussy? How much of that do I need to push through? And that line is, it's very difficult to define, right?

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

  And I'm gonna guess that even more so in a sport like powerlifting, where spit and sawdust, guys like Louis Simmons, Westside Barber, you know, get it done.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:06Chris Williamson?

  How, how do you, how do you make that judgment? And how do you swallow the ego?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Whenever I figure it out, I'll do another podcast with you and I'll tell you.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Because it's a ever, it's a, it's a, it's a constant battle to figure that out. And you know what? You can read all these textbooks. You can read my book, 1020 Life. You can read Gift of Injury, Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance, so on and so forth. Back Mechanic, but until you understand the art of coaching and application, all that knowledge is crap. It's useless. So I say that to tell you it's, it's about the art. It's the art of knowing your body and paying attention to indicators. Indicators meaning physical, mental, psychological, spiritual, whatever you have going on, you've got to say, hey, is the juice worth the squeeze today? Am I close to a competition? Do I really need these lifts?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay, let's push a little bit. Hey, I'm 12 weeks out from a meet. I don't need to go heavy today. I'm going to shut it down. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and feel a little bit better. My girlfriend just broke up with me. I didn't sleep all night because the neighbors were fighting. You know, I didn't eat good today because, you know, my child was sick at school. So it's, there's going to be a lot of things and not everything is going to be optimal every single time. But with that said, I think preparation beforehand, having your food cooked in case you can't, you know, run and cook your food or go home and get it. Knowing places where you can get your food while you're out to eat and always staying up to date on your sleep and not, and not staying up all night, every night. And, you know, get on a schedule because that's important.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  A, a lot of people seem to think that it needs to be regimented every single day. So that means getting in bed at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock and sleep until six or seven and doing that every single day, uh, which will get your body in a nice, nice rhythm there. But I've still yet to optimize my sleep. I like to stay up late, man. I like to read. I like to research. I like to see what's going on, man. And the thing about being up late is no one's going to bother you. You know, no one's going to bother you. You do your research. I like to read, study and. That's a problem for recovery, though.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, naturally, I'm a night owl as well. I recently read a blog post saying that people have a genetic predisposition to being early birds or night owls, and that's really quite difficult to to flip around, although I've I've worked as hard as I can to get myself onto the same like daily cadence as everyone else. But it's I'm I'm still bouncing off that limiter a little bit. Another thing that came to mind when you were talking about routine and routines there. Blog post from Ryan Holiday, which I've discussed on the podcast before, which is where he says that you don't need a routine. You need a number of routines. And he talks about how he has his I'm away on a book tour routine.

• 20:53Chris Williamson?

  When he's in a unoptimized hotel room and there's a blinking light over the far side and it's not quiet and it's this, that and the other. But he can, he's realized, I need an eye mask, I need earplugs, I need et cetera, et cetera. And you're saying the same. It's like, okay. What you have this particular day coming up and over time, a little bit of experience will show you that you need to prepare better for this. I need to have my food prepped for the full day, not just for lunch. I need to make sure I've got water because I'm going to be driving a long journey or whatever it might be. All that sort of stuff. And I think that comes across with experience, right? Which is obviously what you've been able to tap into now.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yep. And that stuff isn't going to come from a book. It's going to come from experience. And I wish I knew back then what I know now, but we all say that, whether it be about relationships, whether it be about nutrition, about high school, whatever it may be. And I mentioned high school because I just had my 20 year reunion and it's definitely interesting, the perspective that I have now versus back then.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's it's all about preparation and that's that's going to give you the most likely chance of of success. And that's being prepared, also being flexible and being able to roll with the punches because not everything. Not everything's going to be going to go your way. And it's very frustrating and I've struggled with that, too. So you have to toe the line of being an absolute control freak and also being able to go with the flow.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Which is, it's like saying, uh, I want, I want my food super hot, but at the same time I want it super cold. It's impossible. So you gotta optimize. You gotta pick your battles.

• 22:31Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So many people that are listening may have seen powerlifting. They'll know what it is. Squat bench and deadlift, those three lifts. But there's kind of two broad leagues of powerlifting, I guess you could call it, in being equipped and unequipped. Is that fair to say?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Very fair. So back in the days of, let's say, uh, Bill Kazmeyer, he's a guy that wrote the foreword for Gift of Injury, uh, great strength athlete. I don't know if you saw, but we had Swiss last year in Mississauga, Canada, and we had a powerlifting panel with myself, Jim Wendler, J L Holdsworth, Ken Wedham, uh, Ed Cohn and Bill Kazmeyer.

• 23:11Chris Williamson?

  That is a big, that is a big, big names.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And we had some great talks. You know, Bill wore what he could back in the day, and that was a very, um, not very helpful squat suit, A-spanaged knee wraps. Uh, they'd wear tiny T-shirts to help them bench press more. So it's evolved over the years. The bench press shirt was invert, uh, invented in the eighties. And what that did initially was help protect the pecs and the shoulders from heavy bench presses. Eventually it's evolved where the gear helps a lot more than it used to. So now what you have is the belts, the knee wraps and the sleeves that give supportive, um, give support to the, the, you know, the elbows, the knees and the, and the core. They are way more beyond anything

• 23:57Speaker 01

  that was going on in the seventies and eighties and even nineties. So with technology, everything evolves. So in 2006, e- everyone lifted equipped. There weren't people that lifted raw because you'd be bringing a knife to a gunfight, basically. Uh, you would be, you'd be very overwhelmed. And the only people that lifted raw without equipment were the people that couldn't quite figure out their equipment because there's an art to it. It isn't just about putting equipment on and lifting big weights. You have to acclimate your central nervous system to that heavier load, to that extra hundred pounds on the squat that you can't lift without the suit.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a, it's an art to it. You have to be strong in and outside of the suit, and that's a balancing act. So. Once, once the, uh, the RAW movement hit in 2006, a lot of people, um, started lifting without powerlifting gear or just wearing, uh, wraps and sleeves and a belt without the suit. And they call that RAW, but it's not really RAW unless you're not using anything, right? Because I've known people who get 50 pounds out of a belt. They get 150 pounds out of a tight knee wrap and then, you know, so on and so forth. But it, it's kind of, it kind of had a big split back in 2006 because they had first official RAW meet, the New England Record Breakers up in Massachusetts. And then a lot of people started getting into the sport because the gear turned them off because

• 25:17Speaker 01

  it's a lot of work. You have to have people there helping them. So shortly after the birth of RAW powerlifting, CrossFit started coming over and competing a lot in powerlifting. And so that made powerlifting explode, but the quality of it kind of went to the wayside. It wasn't as thick in the competitions and you had a lot of beginner level strength athletes coming into powerlifting. And as CrossFitters, they're not going to wear the gear. So that's how powerlifting RAW, uh, kind of took over the last, uh, 10 to 10 to 10 to 13 years or so. And, uh, that's where we are now. And I've always lifted equipped because when I started in the 90s,

• 25:59Speaker 01

  a gym rat, as we call it, would lift heavy weight in the gym. But a powerlifter would put the gear on and go and compete in a meet if they're a powerlifter. So that's why I came up. I wore knee wraps. I wore squat suit. I wore a bench press shirt even in the 90s because everyone else did. Now things have changed a little bit because people think that the suits and the shirts have gotten way too excessive and way too complicated to use. But I've just evolved with the technology the whole time while other people have taken the gear off and lifted RAW. Uh, at the end of the day, it is all still powerlifting. It's just a bit of a different sport and I can get into the pros and cons of each too.

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  That would be, that would be great. One thing that's interesting, I, I have to say, because I don't know the lineage of powerlifting sufficiently well. I presumed that equipped had come out of RAW, whereas it appears that it's actually the other way around.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Bench press was invented, bench press shirt was invented in the 80s.

• 26:56Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And everyone wore one, including, including a lot of the people that don't like gear now.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of people don't know that, that, you know, some of the best lifters ever, Mike Bridges, Osby Alexander, Lamar Gant, Ed Cohen, they wore gear. They wore powerlifting gear. They wore knee wraps, they wore suits, they wore shirts sometimes. So, um, yeah, so it's always been equipped. Now Fred Hatfield, Dr. Squat, one of the first guys to squat over a thousand pounds. He actually was known to kind of bend the rules a little bit, whether it be putting tennis balls behind the knees or wearing really tight jeans to lift in.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  So that's literally my reaction, the laughing. That's the laughing I have when people talk about powerlifting being a pure sport. I'm like, you have no idea. They would have done anything back then to lift more weight, just like we're doing now. So to me, the only level playing field is wear what you want to wear, take what you want to take and then come compete like a drag race. You know what I mean? Cause otherwise the testing is flawed. That's why so many people every couple of years in the IPF are booted out. They change the weight classes, they change the records because the cops will always be behind the robbers, the criminals. They're always going to find ways to beat the drug test. Now you have rules that are implemented in the IPF where you can't have someone assist

• 28:20Speaker 01

  you put on your knee sleeves or elbow sleeves because it helps you too much. You have to be able to put them on and take them off by yourself because everyone has been in the rules. They're wearing sleeves that took three people to put them on and they're getting 50 pounds on their squat. So that's not raw to me, but again, this is my opinion.

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  I, I, the problem there is that as you start to add layers and layers of nuance and say, you can't this and you can't that, everyone is going to find a way to do those things that you've now prohibited. And I, I, I agree. I think we've, I've heard it on a million podcasts before, people saying, I want to see how fast, the fastest man on the planet can run with everything that they, that he's got behind him, with his testosterone as high as he wants it, with his human growth hormone as high as he wants it, with all of the assistance, all the kit in a wind tunnel at what, cause that's what you want to see. At the extremes and the limits of human performance, limiting anything to do with it to me is.

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  If it's for safety, I don't know, that bit's a nuanced point, but definitely as a spectator of the sport, I want to see someone go as fast, lift is heavy. That's what I want.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  There's been more home runs hitting baseball this year and ever in history, this year in American baseball, and even more than the so-called steroid era. And the problem with that is people want to see action. They don't want to see a pitcher's battle, a pitcher's duel. They want to see the ball hit hard and far. That's what they want to see. So, you know, baseball suffered for a long time after the so-called steroid era, and it died. It died a little bit. It's coming back now, but also the common denominator is a lot of people think they're wrapping the baseball tighter.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, they're changing the ball, right? It's got a cork center or something now?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, they've changed a few things about it, and it's made the ball what they call more lively, where it jumps off the bat further. And a lot of pitchers are very mad about it because it's making their job harder, because it's harder to get people out.

• 30:20Chris Williamson?

  No one goes to the baseball. We went to a New York Yankees game recently on a stag do in New York. Went to a New York Yankees game. Not a single, I don't think there was anything more than a double that was hit. And I'm like, I've been there for three hours. I mean, like, come on.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  You want to get your buddy's worth?

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And that's good. And that's going to be from seeing action, home runs, doubles, triples, plays at the plate, action, clashing.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  That's what you go to see.

• 30:48Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  So, there's a, there's a very good episode of Victor Conti, the guy behind Balco, on Joe Rogan from about seven years ago. It is brilliant. And it talks about how there's no truly drug-free sports out there. There's always dirt. I don't know if you saw the Icarus or Icarus or whatever on Netflix. It goes to show you that everyone's doping to some extent, for the most part. They're always trying to beat the system. If they're not taking things that are prohibited, they're taking things that are almost prohibited or a slight, very, very. Um, slight deviation of that chemical. Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  And then they pass and then there's always stuff and that's how Victor Conti developed those designer steroids that people forgot about that drug companies had developed long ago and they weren't on the banned list. So he took them and said, Hey, these aren't banned. Let's go. Fire away. Baseball blew up, football blew up, track and field, weightlifting, all that stuff did. Yeah. You might even notice that the action stars were more muscular back then, too. Mm hmm, mm hmm. Christian Bale is one of them. Brad Pitt is another. They're all a lot more muscular than. Uh, so I, I think a lot of people were dabbling in that and, uh, not to get on a tangent, but this is an interesting rabbit hole. You know, we talked about the government and the bodies that be, the powers that be concerned about health.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  That's, that's so hypocritical when they allow alcohol sales and cigarette smells or sales and tobacco and pharmaceuticals that are killing people left and right. Don't tell me that you drug test for the safety of athletes when you allow all these crazy things to be, to be taken and used. That's the problem I have with it because I think that the use of performance enhancing drugs is not, I wouldn't say it's safe, but there's a lot more dangerous things that we do and we ingest on a regular basis. And I know lots of people that have, have taken performance enhancing drugs for 20 and 30 years. And they've literally had no side effects other than a little bit of stuff that will, will happen.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Blood pressure will come up, the cholesterol will get out of whack, but all of it returns to normal when they come off of it. Just like other medicines, they will screw you up for a little while. You get done what you need to, then you come off. So I think that a lot of that's overblown and that was exposed by Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel about 10 years ago, when they went and talked to these doctors that researched testosterone and other performance enhancing drugs. And they said, there's a lot of medicinal benefit to some of these as long as they're taken properly and the dosage is going to reign. Range and the tolerance is going to range just like with any drug from person to person. So it really just depends. So I get why they want to clean up sports.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily agree with why. Don't say it's a safety concern. That's silly.

• 33:43Chris Williamson?

  I think a fair play concern seems to be a good shout. It allows you to have contiguous records and stuff, year on year, right? Like if it wasn't happening back then, it's difficult to rate what's happening now. Have you seen, I'm going to guess that you will have done Chris Bell's bigger, stronger, faster.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Fantastic documentary. I don't think it's still available on Netflix, actually. Did you watch prescription thugs, which was the sequel?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:09Chris Williamson?

  And he's got a new one on that leaf, that plant leaf. What's it called?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Kratom.

• 34:15Chris Williamson?

  Kratom. Yes. He's got that coming out soon, although it might not be out, might be out. Anyway, yeah, bigger, stronger, faster. He says on that, he has this particular quote where he says, they litigated testosterone and other performance enhancing drugs to stop cheating in sport and stopped 99% of people taking it who weren't cheating in sport. Because it was the gym rat in the gym who wanted to get big arms or someone who wanted to, you know, there wasn't someone that was competing in a professional organization. So on that point, I think, yeah, I agree with what you say. So getting back to powerlifting itself and talking about what the kit consists of now. So we've spoken about kind of the heritage coming up.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  So you're, you're going to go do a meet next week. What's, what's in your kit bag and what are you putting on for what lift and why? And what's it consist of?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  So for the squat, I wear squat briefs underneath.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Squat briefs?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, squat briefs. So they're, they're like, you know, they're knee length or a little bit shorter actually. And they support the hips.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  And so it helps a bit. Now, different people get different amounts out of each piece of gear and how much they fine tune it, how much they can utilize it. Because you got to think when you start putting restrictive clothing on or restrictive apparel, it changes the groove if you let it. You have to keep it in the same groove. So if the bar is harder to bring down or the bar is harder to come down with on the squat, then that's another variable you have to control. You have to force yourself to get down. You have to stay tight. Your blood pressure is up higher. So. I wear briefs under the squat suit and I'm sponsored by Inser Advanced Design. So I wear their Leviathan squat suit that's adjustable.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And that allows me to on a, any given day when I've had, when I have it tuned in and locked, locked in really nice, I can get another 200 pounds over, over my raw squat. But with that said, some people only get 50 pounds, but I've mastered it. I've mastered it to make my equipped squat, as we call it, the best possible, without compromising anything else. I don't care about my raw squat when I'm training for the meet. That's the, the, the way I've trained for the last 20 years. All that matters is what you do in competition. And to me, that, that's, that's real, the real sport of powerlifting, the variables there.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, anyone can literally, someone that just started lifting weights in the gym can go and do a raw powerlifting meet. That doesn't take much skill. They may not lift very much weight, but it doesn't take any skill to squat 50 pounds, to bench 50 pounds or just to deadlift 20, you know, 250, 125, whatever it may be. That takes no skill. Now you add in gear and equipment, there has to be a bit of pedigree and development of that skill and harnessing it. So it kind of eliminates a lot of people that should not be powerlifting from even trying it. So that's what I liked about it. With powerlifting being mainstream, there's pros and cons. It used to be scary and a lot of people didn't want to do it because the people were crazy. Now it's widely accepted.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can't, you can't look down on someone for being a beginner. I get all that stuff. You shouldn't. But at the same time, these strength sports aren't for everyone. And I think the, the pendulum has swung in the favor of anyone can do it. Everyone's accepted, all this stuff. And I think it should be a little more scary, a little more violent, like it used to be in the days of Kazimir and Cone and Goggins and all those guys. And when I came up in the nineties and early 2000s. So that's a little bit about the squat gear. And of course, I wear a heavy duty weightlifting belt to create that stiffness and that intra abdominal pressure in the trunk. And it's an art to it, man. It's an art to be able to to hold more weight than your body can

• 38:09Speaker 01

  actually lift. So you have to program and build your central nervous system so it doesn't just shut off when you pick that weight up on the squat. Because a lot of people's lights go out on a big bench press, a big squat, they go out because they have too much blood pressure. They get lightheaded and they go out, or they they crumble because it's too much pressure.

• 38:31Chris Williamson?

  What does it feel like physically, what not mentally yet, what does it feel like physically to have all of those layers on? Is it just like being compressed down an awful lot? How does it feel to be in the squat suit?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  It's very uncomfortable. And a lot of people who have who've knocked it in the past haven't tried it. And, you know, an interesting tidbit is there's been a lot of lifters that left equipped lifting and went and did the raw and did really well. I've yet to see more than a couple lifters ever leave raw lifting and come to equipped and dominate. There's only been a couple people do that. Yeah. And that's what I mean by the skill. If you can squat well in a squat suit with all those variables, you damn sure can squat well without all those things. So I advise everyone to start off raw. Everyone to start off raw, get the form, create those end grams. And then from there, if you want to add equipment, then so be it.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  But build the base level of strength and have some technical proficiency before you even worry about that. What does it feel like? Sometimes everything in your body hurts. The squat suit's very cumbersome. So that's why you have to stay calm. You know, you have knee wraps on, you have a squat suit on, you have to shimmy under the bar, you have to get tight, you have to pick the weight up. And then you have to squat with pristine form with all those layers on. So it's very difficult. Another thing that people don't realize, it's hard to tell where you are depth wise. So you might think that you're going super deep and you're still that much above parallel. So there's a lot of a lot of variables there that add some difficulty to it.

• 40:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So that touches on a question that I wanted to ask. I'm sure a lot of people are thinking, what what do you do before a lift? And what is the inside of your head like before you're about to put 1,000 pounds on your back in a meet?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  It's uh, it's really focused and I go to a dark, dark place in my head where I don't care about anything else. And the last thing I want in the world to happen when I'm under the bar is to miss the lift and embarrass myself. So everything is extremely tight. I visualize and see the lift being completed effortlessly before I even approach the platform. I already see it happen. I see the crowd's reaction and I strive for that feeling to happen before it even happens. So I get out there and I just go to my default mode. I tune everything out. I tune everyone out. I go and lift and I fight for my life for a couple of seconds and I put it back down. Then I try to breathe and relax. So you turn

• 41:04Speaker 01

  it on, you turn it off. You turn it on, you turn it off. Kind of like a fighter, UFC fighter between rounds. You gotta chill. Breathe and relax. Then you go, you turn it back on and you relax. So it's a dark place that I go to for sure.

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  I love hearing about that. Um, listeners who heard the episode with Sonny Webster, Olympic weightlifter, he said something interesting and I'm gonna ask you the same. He said that he does the same before he steps up to the, to the platform. He visualizes himself completing the lift. He gets asked a question often. I wondered the same for you. Do you visualize yourself doing it from the first person? Or do you watch yourself doing it from behind the stage?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Both.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, interesting.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I watch myself from the crowd.

• 41:48Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I see myself in the crowd, how I'm gonna look, how I look so sturdy. I'll look so sturdy and stiff on the squat that as soon as I pick it up, everyone in the crowd knows that I'm gonna crush the weight. I see that happen. I go through the squat. I come up. I grind through it if I have to. And then I know I've already done a dry run in my head. I go out there and do it. I also see myself doing it, picking up the weight, feel myself doing it. So I look at it from all perspectives.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that interesting that we, we view it, for some reason, we decide to view it from not ourselves. We look at it from someone else. I think that's really. I don't know. I don't know what that is about about prep, but obviously, you know, some of the best athletes in the world in the world choose to to use that. So I'm moving on.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  I think it's I think it's self awareness, too. It's a bit of self awareness that comes with the maturity of lifting. And you want to be, you want to, you know what is expected up there on the platform. And you know, when someone is up there and they know what they're doing, that's what you expect from yourself. So you automatically want to see that from yourself, I think. I don't know. That's a little weird, but.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  It's good. It's good. Interesting. If you've got any, any ideas or if you're someone listening who has any more information, feel free to get at me. So you mentioned that the 1,185 pounds squat cost you.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:12Chris Williamson?

  Can you tell us what and why?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  So I had squatted 1130 just before that squat. And I wanted to go for the all time world record of 1180. So I had to beat that by five pounds or two kilos. So I was feeling good. I figured I could get the lift. As I was doing the lift, it's the heaviest weight I've ever picked up and I saw stars. I saw black spots everywhere and I picked it up. It was very heavy and I was like, here we go. So I came up with it and as I was locking out my left leg stopped working a bit. And I had a hard time locking it all the way up. And at that time, I felt like I re herniated a couple of discs or damaged something pretty bad. And that cost me a bit because my lifting started to regress after that lift a little bit.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  And so I got with Dr. McGill and got that figured out. But I knew that I'd messed something up as soon as I got from underneath the squat and walked away. I knew I got a little bit forward, a little bit bent forward with it. And I got out of position, which cost me.

• 44:14Chris Williamson?

  But still stood it up.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Still stood up, still got credit for it and had to get basically helped off the platform after that. And I still finished the meet and did well. But yeah, that that I left a little bit of something to myself out there that day.

• 44:30Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that interesting? So moving on to the progression or the regression, I suppose we could call it, from that point up to when you sat down with Dr McGill. Also, there's a story about when you were in a parking lot as well, which I think a lot of people might be interested to hear. So you had a, so I'll ask you, do you think that there was any other significant acute episodes other than that particular squat? Or was it cumulative over time? Is it just volume and volume and volume?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  There is a lot of things. I think the first, first incident was in 10th grade, I was running stadiums and I tweaked my back a little bit. The second, so that's 1995 or 96. The second incident that I had was in 2003, I strained my back a little bit and I felt a pop when I was deadlifting. That settled after a little while. Then in 2009, I was on an obstacle course. I was trying out for a scholarship with the police department and I was the first person to run that morning. And it was eight o'clock in the morning on a July, July day. So we had a lot of humidity. And as I was jumping over a barricade, there was dew all over it and I

• 45:43Speaker 01

  slipped and landed right on my butt, my back like that. And that's when I was laying in the parking lot afterward, my legs weren't working and I barely was able to drive myself home. It took everything I had. But like any brilliant athlete like myself, I did my first 1100 squat, 800 deadlift about three weeks after that. So that's just to kind of answer your question. I did a lot of stupid stuff and I just kept pushing like I was Superman. And finally, in 2011, that big lift, it was another little thing that chipped away at it. And then 2012, about eight months after that 1185 squat, I was warming up, I was on pace

• 46:24Speaker 01

  to squat 1200 at this meet. And when I was warming up, I felt my back go. I felt, man, a lot of burning sensation locally in my lumbar spine. And I had to very, very, very much battle through that meet. I ended up winning that one, but my back started regressing. So that was 12 and then 13, it got really bad. And that's when I finally gave up after seeing.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Multiple neurosurgeons, multiple orthopedic surgeons, I'd gotten my shots. You know, people get these shots, these, these facet joint injections, nerve root blocks. The problem is if you're not removing the cause, they're totally useless because it's only a numbing sensation. So until you remove the cause of the pain and build more pain free capacity, those, those epidurals are useless. So I went through that thinking they're just magically going to cure me. Then I went down the path of trying to get surgery, thinking that would just be, I'm going to go out and get surgery. Then everything's going to be great. And that's not the way it works. And thank God. My client suggested I see Dr. McGill and within a month I was there with him in his laboratory.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's crazy to think, so speaking to Dr. McGill and also having read Back Mechanic and a fair chunk of The Gift of Injury, your book with him as well.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  Surgery appears to be a very, very rapid option. I think perhaps a little more so in America. In fact, I was with Dr. McGill when he took a phone call from a lady who said she'd had back pain for eight days, had been to see a consultant and the consultant had said, we need to get you in for surgery. And I'm thinking to myself, you've had back pain for eight days. Like, that could be anything. You could have like a splinter in your back. Like you literally could have sat on a bit of wood. So, yeah, the, the, the root of surgery.

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  Dr. McGill went through a number of the reasons why that's a bad idea in, in his estimation. I think the stat is now at 80% of back surgeries are back to the same baseline level of pain within 12 months.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  I think that's around about right.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:39Chris Williamson?

  So you didn't, you didn't go for that. You went to go see Dr. McGill and split sacrum front to back. L4, L5 and L5S1 are just obliterated, I think was the terminology that he used.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  And from there, what happened? Cause you're used to doing deadlift and squat on a Monday and bench on a Wednesday and all this sort of stuff. And Dr. McGill, Dr. McGill does the thing where he pushes his moustache to one side and he looks at you, he looks at you like this. And then he gets his finger out and he points at you. And what does he, what does he say?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  He says that my spine hygiene is terrible. It's not of a top athlete. So I had to reprogram the way I moved. And that meant squatting. So everything I did when I'm sitting in a chair, I'm standing up, pushing my hips through. Then when I sit down, I'm not plopping, sitting down easily. So I had to get the hip hinge down, the same way you push yourself off the toilet. I had to learn to lunge to tie my shoes. So for instance, it's here, put my foot up on a chair and then lean forward and lunge into it. And then the last thing is a golfer's pickup, where you basically stand on one leg and then reach down with a nice and flat back. All I was doing was bending, bending, flexion under load, further perpetuating my injury and

• 49:59Speaker 01

  picking the scab every day. So you have a lot of people and I was included. I would do reverse hypers. I would do lumbar stretches, the silly stretches he calls them. I'd pull my knee to my chest. I'd bend down and touch my toes, which is not inherently bad, but it is bad for a powerlifter, especially one with back pain. Now, if you're trying to be a gymnast, those stretches are probably going to help you or may they might help you, right? But you've got to pick. If you want to be a powerlifter, you have to tune the body to be a powerlifter. If you want to be a gymnast, you need a lot of flexibility, but don't expect that strength out of it. Just like the powerlifter shouldn't expect that mobility out of their back. You have to, you have to choose wisely with every exercise that you put in a program. So I was doing the reverse

• 50:43Speaker 01

  hypers. I was doing this stretching. I was doing weighted sit-ups. I was basically creating the perfect recipe for a painful back. So I know you'd be very surprised, Chris, but as soon as I removed the hammer, the hammer that was always nailing my, uh, my pain, my pain triggers, I felt a lot better within a couple of days and my pain wound way down almost immediately.

• 51:07Chris Williamson?

  Can you take us from what, what was it at daily? Was it a eight out of 10 or seven out of 10? Where'd it go to?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  It was an eight within 24 hours and even a couple hours in the lab, it went down to like a three of just me being conscientious of, okay, sitting up properly, not leaning forward, not bending. Within a couple hours, it felt a whole lot better. And within a couple of days, it was down to about a two or a one.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  How did that feel after, after being in so much pain for so long?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  It was a huge relief. My, my wife couldn't believe it because she came along for the ride. And she said, you haven't talked about your back hurting one time since you left Dr. McGill. And I said, I know, it's crazy. And, and I like to share this information with people to know that they can get out of pain. The problem is they're too blind to see how simple it really is. They think that they have to take this medicine. They think that the back surgeons are the end all be all, when they're really, they're designed to do one thing and that's to cut on you. And like Dr. McGill says, and he probably explained to you, they're not likely to go in there and cut your only pain trigger out. A lot of times there's multiple pain triggers. Uh, there's no guarantee they're going to get that one and, and, and likely they're going to open you up.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  They're going to destabilize your back. They might fuse it together and then the, uh, the above and below of the fusion is going to suffer after that. I, I, I've yet to meet more than a couple of people that have ever had a less than one back surgery. There's always more that follow. There's always more because you know what? They don't remove the cause.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever met someone who's been through back surgery and has come back to be athletically capable?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yes, I have met, but they had three surgeries. Yep. And they still are, uh, inhibited in certain ways because they don't have, they're locked up. They have a spinal fusion. So they've had three fusions. And, uh, the first one didn't take. Uh, the second one ended up, uh, reversing itself and the screws came loose. The third one took, but, um, they have a lot of struggles and a lot of pain daily. They, they come and go because you know what? When you cut through those nerves and you cut through that musculature, sometimes it's never the same again. The nerves might reattach somewhere else and then you have weird pain randomly. So there's a lot that,

• 53:27Speaker 01

  that you're risking when you let someone open you up like that, that doesn't understand how the spine is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be a bending rod like that unless you're tuning it for it to be that. And, uh, the PTs just blindly prescribing stretching are really hurting a lot of people. When they, when they get them out of surgery or, or referred to, to PT to prevent surgery, they just further complicate it a lot of the time.

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's the quote from the gift of injury? Uh, do not cut open that which God designed to stay closed?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yes, that is what, uh, uh, a, um,

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Anesthesiologist surgeon told me, because I was wanting to get back surgery and he said, you know what, avoid back surgery, avoid it at all costs because I have colleagues that do it and they are not successful and it's going to further complicate everything. And that's when he used that line, keep it closed. And I actually, this weekend, I saw a couple of people I hadn't seen in a while, both of them worked for a back surgeon, I'm sorry, they worked for a medical device company that works alongside surgeons for spinal fusions. And he said, dude, you do not want, these surgeons, they mess them up all the time and they, my friends are, they work alongside the surgeons to ensure that the tools they're

• 54:47Speaker 01

  using, that they sell them are being utilized properly. He said, man, these surgeons mess up all the time. You do not want to ever get a back surgery. Little do they know, I already knew all that.

• 54:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you don't, I've spoken to patient zero, Dr. Stuart McGill himself, he knows all of this stuff. So, moving forward from you've had your consultation, you're now at least a little bit less pain free, but you're not able to get under a bar without pain, I'm going to guess, and start squatting. So what was the next few months, the next year like after that consultation with Dr. McGill?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  So it was all about discipline. It was desensitizing and removing the cause. So it was a lot of McGill big three and a lot of walking for a couple of months. And then eventually, when the pain was totally gone, I called him up and he said, well, you're pain free. That was my job. Now it's your job to get back to the platform. So I took that on and I learned a lot. And thankfully, because of me learning how to progress from stage one of removing the cause to building pain free capacity and so on and so forth, I've become pretty well versed in helping other people progress. They, they, they need to read back mechanic and gift of injury to find their pain triggers and to remove them. Once they remove them, I can show them how to implement the exercises to build them

• 56:05Speaker 01

  back. And I do that with a lot of people. I'm actually a McGill provider now for Florida.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  Amazing.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  As a clinician, yeah. So I see a lot of people here in Florida for their pain. And again, the prerequisite is re- is reading back mechanic and gift of injury. That way I'm covered. They need to, they need to diagnose themselves. They need to remove the cause, then I can help them train as a trainer, getting back to sport and whatever that may be. So for me, it was a lot of McGill three, a lot of carries, a lot of walking and just perfect spine hygiene, whether it be sleeping, moving, working, traveling every single day. And what this did was put dollars in my bank account.

• 56:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm hearing, I'm hearing the McGill accent just pouring out here. It's fantastic.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  So I, I, I put, I put deposits in the bank account. So when, uh, so I saw him in May. So when November rolled around, I had enough to start withdrawing. So I put it in outside of the gym. So I could pull it out inside of the gym. And, uh, so once I progressed from the carries and such, I had it in goblet squats, I had it in elevated deadlifts and rack pulls. Then eventually by November, I was getting back to the competition lifts. And then I think by January, I squatted over a thousand pounds again, pain free. And, uh, I still had a couple, uh, roads to cross and hurdles to jump over as I went to compete in March. That was 10 months after seeing McGill. I was just flat out too big. I'd gotten

• 57:38Speaker 01

  too big, too heavy. And, uh, at the meet, I was actually winning it and going into the deadlift, my back got grumpy on me. And so I pulled out of the meet. I didn't finish. That was a blow to my ego because the whole year after that, I'd been working on getting back, getting pain free, you know? Excuse me. A lot of people had seen my progress, right? And it was disappointing to me that I wasn't able to finish. So Stu and I devised a plan where I would drop some body weight and I would build more capacity by squatting, benching and deadlifting all in the same day that would simulate the meet. So you got to get into a little bit of extension when you're squatting, a little bit

• 58:19Speaker 01

  of flexion sometimes, a little bit, and then a lot of extension on the bench and then a little bit of flexion and extension on the deadlift. So I was able to build more tolerance and more athleticism slowly. And then if I felt like I was pushing too hard, I'd back off. So I was really in tune with my body by then. And then within the next few months, I had a personal record at a lighter weight class, better than injury, pre-injury. And then I won the Arnold two more times after that with better lifts post-injury than I did pre-injury.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  So you touched on ego there and the fact that you had to say no to this deadlift.

• 59:00Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the first few months, because there will be a lot of people listening and I'm I'm one of them. I'm personally interested. I've recently seen Dr. McGill. There will be other people out there who will be suffering with an injury and they may have been prescribed a course of rehabilitation, which requires them to take a big slice of humble pie. And they're going to have to swallow an awful lot of ego. So for you, one of the strongest men on the planet, how did it feel? Did you have any trouble with that? Or was your goal to become pain free? Did you see this as a part of your journey? Or were there some questions in there where you began to get frustrated and stuff like that when you were doing bird dog for, you know, 10 minutes a day and side plank for 10 minutes a day, et cetera, et cetera?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  It was a blow to my ego, but I looked at it this way. Nothing was more devastating to me than losing my athleticism. So after trying to do it my way, researching on my own, thinking I knew everything, getting the shots, getting the consults, I caved. And when I talked with Dr. McGill, I was a little skeptical about what he had to say. And then after a little while, I realized that he knew what he was talking about. So when I met him at that May, at that, on that May day in 2013. I went into his lab as a complete beginner. I went in there like I knew nothing. And the only thing I held tight to concerning my ego and my pride was that I'm gonna compete again. Everything else, I turned over to him completely.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Now, I've met a lot of athletes that are world-class, world record holders, you name it, that are done now because they couldn't step away from the barbell or step away from the track or the octagon and get pain-free. Now, I've met a lot of people that say they can't do it for a variety of reasons. And what I say to that is biology is very binary. It doesn't care about your mental state. It doesn't care about what you have going on, your bills. Either you're giving yourself enough stimulus to build and be better, or you're tearing your body down. And so if you can't stop lifting for the sake of your mental health or your wallet, then I wouldn't expect to get out of pain.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  And that's what I tell them. And then they go on and have a surgery thinking they could just get their pain cut out and they're good. And then they never return back to the platform or the octagon or the track or whatever it may be. So it's very hard for a lot of people because there's a lot of stress going on right now throughout the world with the climate, social media, everyone's wound up and fighting. And so they use exercise for an outlet to de-stress. And when you take that away from them, they freak out. Well, you can still walk, you can still do your core work, but you're gonna have to take time away from going out there and drilling the barbell every day. So it was hard, but once I got going, because I caught some,

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  I caught some stuff from friends when I wasn't lifting. And I would still go to the gym every day, but I'd be doing my McGill 3 and my carries and all that stuff. So I didn't care. And the way I looked at it was this. I'd beaten just about everyone in the past, and I was doing what I needed to do to get back there once again, and I'd get the last laugh.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  What a fantastic philosophy. What a fantastic philosophy. I mean, when you are one of the strongest men on the planet, that's the sort of thing that you can say. But I hope that that has reframed for a lot of people that might be listening, just the sort of sacrifices that you do need to make. I've certainly, having seen Dr McGill, and I sent him a couple of emails afterwards, just asking for some clarity on some of the prescriptions that he'd given me moving forward. One of these questions asked the, asked something which I shouldn't have asked, which was, can I go to failure on any of these slash slash, do you have an RPE or reps and sets like suggestion? Because that's the language that I talk in.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  That's what, that's all I've known. I've known, well, how hard should I go on? And it was TRX, ring rows, pushups, front rack kettlebell carry and single leg knee raise. How hard should I go? Can I go to failure? And I, I just got this email back and I was like, oh no.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  What did he say?

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  He was just like, he shouted at me. It was shouting. There wasn't any capital letters, but it was in quite big text. And it was just, Chris, you are talking like a bodybuilder. You want, this is not the route to get pain free. You need to be focusing on movement quality first and foremost. I have had athletes who have done nothing but XXX for six months to one year to two years before they move on to anything, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I was just, I'm like, okay.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I have, I have a lot of athletes that I work with through online coaching, and I get them to read back mechanic, get them to read gift of injury and ultimate back. And then, once they get pain free, I progress them. But sometimes they relapse. And that might be because of new stress in their life. They may have gained some weight, they may have lost some weight. There's a lot of things that change. You know, our body is ever evolving and adapting. So sometimes they're on a very light regimen for a year and they think that 10 weeks of working with me is going to cure everything. And I'm thinking, man, some flare ups can last three months or longer. You know what I mean? If the nerve is really pissed off. So it takes time and there's no magical wand. There's no magic bullet. It's all about removing the cause and giving your time,

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  your body time to let biology do its thing. And you can't contradict it with things that don't are not cohesive. And that's a big thing that that I think a lot of people miss.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Uh, concerning your question about RPE. In my experience, what's so funny?

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Just the fact that I asked that question to him. Just when I, when I think back to the email, I just, I, I think about how in trouble I was.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Don't worry, I get, I get corrected all the time too. Don't worry about it.

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  I'm still learning. So yeah, don't feel bad about that. I, I sometimes I'll send something to him and like, that was stupid. Why did I even say that?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's, you can't take yourself too seriously. You're going to mess up, right? Especially to the, the godfather, right? So in my experience with my athletes and my lifting, the, the lion's share of your gains are going to be made between 70% or a seven RPE with three reps left in the tank. So about 85% or an eight and a half RPE with one to two reps left in the tank. Because when you go to failure, a lot of things happen. Number one, you're not happy about it. You know, if you're going for a max, uh, rep set and you want five reps with 200 kilos and you only get four and you melt, you, you fail and miss on the fifth one. That kind of crushes your day. It ruins your day a little bit. So

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  pick your times when you push and go after your numbers. Other times, you want to train and not test. Training and testing are way different things. When you go to failure, you're testing. You're going to the absolute limit of your body to find out where you are. Too much testing is problematic. So again, 70 to 85% of your max on a given day is the sweet spot. You can get a lot of volume in there. You're not going to be missing anything. And then, then, you know, you could pick your days where you go a hundred percent. But, uh, it's gotta be few and far between.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  I understand. One question I've been thinking, actually, do you guys ever do walkouts? Like very, very heavy walkouts?

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So we'll do heavy pickups, heavy walkouts. We'll do overload sets. So one, one good thing about powerlifting is Louis Simmons specifically, he's really changed the game for strength training in the National Football League here with American football, with the baseball players, with college football. Powerlifters have shown that barbell use and implementation is not just going to take away your athleticism. You know what I mean? You need to, you know, assess the demands for the sport, but at the same time, weightlifting isn't just this dangerous thing when it's done right. So it's pretty cool to see a lot of the things that we do in powerlifting have carried over to all the sports. You

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  know, Louis Simmons has done a great job with that. One thing that we've done, and I've utilized for a long time, is a reverse band method. And I got that from Louis Simmons. He calls it the Lytton method. I also got it from Rick Hussey, a big iron gym, a legendary powerlifting coach. What you do is on the squat, you hang the bands from the top, the top of the rack, and you hook it around the barbell. So as you go down, the load gets lighter. As you come back up, it returns to its normal weight. So what that teaches you is to pick it up and not be scared of the weight. You adjust to that load and the pressure. Then as you go down, the lower you go, the lighter it gets. And as you turn it around, it comes out of the bands. That's almost like a training wheel for a new, a

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  new exercise or a new weight. And we do a lot of those that are really good for tuning the central nervous system.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Holds, negatives, pauses, all the tempo, all that stuff has its proper time for implementation. But one of the biggest things that I'd like to tell the listeners out there is you have to be able to ask yourself and answer, why am I doing this exercise? And if you can't answer that, you need to remove it. Because I see people all the time, they'll send me their programming. They'll say, what do you think about this, Brian? And I'll say, well, it looks pretty good, but why are you doing the one leg Bulgarian split squat? Well... I saw my favorite lifter. That's a bad answer to say that. What you should say is I want to work on my quads a little bit more.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  You know, for the squat lockout or for the deadlift lockout or off the floor. Uh, I'm doing pause squats because I need more explosiveness. I'm doing speed work because I'm slow. I'm a good grinder, but I'm not good at exploding out of the hole. And these things can be taught. So your program needs to be built around the your weaknesses. And everything that I do, I can answer specifically as to why I do them or why I have my clients do them. And I think that's half the battle right there.

• 1:09:18Chris Williamson?

  So it needs to be built around weaknesses, but also around education of the athlete by the coach. Is that right?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. You nailed it. And, and, and never doing exercises just because they're hard or at random. Everything needs to be specific to the needs of the athlete. And, and for you, it might be 180 degrees opposite of what I need. You know, you look like you're a really lean guy. Uh, you know, you stay in good shape. I don't think you need to restrict your calories anytime soon. Me, on the other hand, I've put on some body fat this year, right?

• 1:09:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  You're lean. I'm not so lean right now. So for me, just to say Chris and Brian and everyone needs to eat 4,000 calories today. I'm like, no, I'll get fat. You may need that, but I'm going to get fat.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  So that's what I mean. Like you have to be able to answer these questions because they're so important. It's not just a one size fits all rehab, training program, diet supplementation. It has to be customized.

• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. That's a really good way to, uh, to, to comment on the coach and athlete dynamic. I certainly know a lot of people who are at both ends of the spectrum, right? I know some athletes who understand, and I'm, I'm one of them. I'm inquisitive. Even if it's not that I'm questioning what my coach is putting in as to question the validity of it. I just want to know. I'm like, okay, so why, why have I got this particular movement in or why are we using that time domain? Or why are we doing this particular number of reps? Just because I'm, I'm interested. Well, I also know people on the other end of the spectrum who just want the prescription that's put in front of them and they just want to go through with it. So I guess again, you know, for the coaches that I'm sure will be listening out there. That's something that you're going to need to take on as well, right?

• 1:10:57Chris Williamson?

  You're going to need to think what's the, the particular absorption rate of mental space for my client? And how much info can I give them to get them educated?

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Yes, you gotta think objectively for sure. And, uh, man, the, the key is, like you said, some people, they, they want you to hand them the fish. Other people want you to give them the fishing pole, right? The people that want the fishing pole are innate, they, they're innately wired to be coaches, I think, because they want to learn. They just don't want to be spoon fed and have success. They want to be able to replicate that success in my, in my experience. So the people that are asking questions, those are going to be the future leaders and not just the followers.

• 1:11:39Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Brian, I will be linking back mechanic, gift of injury. Is there anything else? If anyone's interested, wants to find out some more info, where would you send them?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Uh, they should go to powerxstrength.com. That's where we have all those books that you named. Uh, we also sell them on Amazon, backfitpro.com, kabukistrength.com. So we have a bunch of different outlets where you can get those books. I personally, from powerxstrength.com, ship worldwide. If anyone wants those, but for a lot of content that goes above and beyond the books that we've talked about, uh, my website, powerxstrength, has a lot of articles that I've written over the last five or six years that are there and they're free. So, uh, all of that, along with my, my training philosophy is called 1020 Life, and that's the book that, that I sell concerning my, uh, my strength training philosophy. And there's bits of it in Gift of Injury, a lot of it actually. But the strength manual itself,

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  without the rehab, without my story, is 1020 Life. But I'm on social media, briancarroll81 on Instagram and Facebook. And man, I really enjoyed this conversation. I say conversation because it's what it felt like and not just a podcast. So I really enjoyed talking to you. I'm located in Jacksonville, Florida. Anytime you want to come over, or if you're in the States, come. I've got a full training center here in my garage where my wife's let me deck it out. I got two monolifts, a deadlift platform, two competition benches, a rack, a belt squat, a lifting platform that's, that's competition grade, kettlebells to 50 kilos and dumbbells up to 80 kilos.

• 1:13:11Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever leave the house?

• 1:13:14Chris Williamson?

  I wouldn't leave the house.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  I don't need to really. I need to leave the house every once in a while. I get food, but I get the food shipped here too. But I want to thank you for coming on. I want to thank Dr McGill for everything, my sponsor, Enzer Advanced Designs and Jack's Nutrition. I appreciate all the help that I've gotten. And I can say that the last six years of having the chance to meet Dr McGill, it's really helped my ego, it's helped my pride, it's helped me to be more grateful, thankful for my athleticism. And I wish I'd have known this in my twenties so I could have embraced it a little bit more. But I'm in a good place now, so I'm grateful for everything that's happened.

• 1:13:53Chris Williamson?

  I'm so happy for you, man. It's really lovely to hear that story of redemption. I'm going to be following this journey to a 1,200 pound squat. I'm sure a lot of the listeners will be, you'll have gained a lot of new fans today. You're incredibly gracious. And I think for such a terrifying man on a lifting platform, you're incredibly humble and easy to talk to, Woffit. So thank you so much for coming on. Everything that Brian has mentioned today will be linked in the show notes below. As always, make sure that you get at him. If there's any questions you've got, you know where to find me at Chris Will X on all social media. Like, share, subscribe, do all that good stuff. But for now, Brian, thank you so much, man.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been a pleasure.