Ep 64: CrossFit's Good, Bad, and Ugly

This episode delves into the good, the bad, and the ugly of all things CrossFit, straight from a world-class CrossFit coach. It answers many important questions, including: -What are the 3 most dangerous exercises in CrossFit gyms? - What are the most common nutritional mistakes of CrossFit athletes? - What do elite CrossFit athletes do differently than the rest? Example: How do Rich Froning and Jason Khalipa warm up? - Is the CrossFit Games really CrossFit? - Is CrossFit a fad? - What is the future of CrossFit? The man to answer all this (and much more) is Kelly Starrett http://www.mobilitywod.com/. He's trained CrossFit athletes for more than 130,000 hours (!) and 10 years at San Francisco CrossFit http://sanfranciscocrossfit.com/, which opened in 2005 as one of the first 50 CrossFit Affiliates in the world. There are now more than 10,000 Affiliates worldwide. Kelly's clients include Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world record holders in Olympic lifting and powerlifting, Crossfit Games medalists, professional ballet dancers, and elite military personnel. Even if you have zero interest in CrossFit, this conversation invites you inside the mind of one of the world's top coaches. Kelly discusses habits, strategies, and thinking that can be applied to nearly everything. We cover a lot. QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: If you had to pick one sport or weightlifting movement for the rest of your life, what would it be and why? Please share and explore answers in the comments here http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/04/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-crossfit/#respond.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Kelly, what did you have for breakfast? I ate 20 dwarves while doing a handstand on the carpet.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  It's key to that carpet.

• 0:32Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by Mizzen & Maine. Don't worry about the spelling. All you need to know is this. I have organized my entire life around avoiding fancy shirts. Because you have to iron them, you sweat through them, they smell really easily, they're a pain in the ass. Mizzen & Maine has given me the only shirt that I need. And what I mean by that, and Kelly Starrett loves these shirts as well, is that you can trick people. They look really fancy, so you can take them out to nice dinners, whatever. But they're made from athletic sweat-wicking material. So you can throw this thing into your luggage in a heap, or on your kitchen table like I did recently, and then pull it out, throw it on with no ironing, no steaming, no nothing.

• 1:14Tim Ferriss?

  Walk out, and you could probably wear this thing for a week straight, or make it your only dress shirt. And take it on trips for weeks at a time, never wash it, it will not smell, you will not sweat through it. You gotta check these things out. So, go to 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com/shirts. And if you order one of their dress shirts in the next week, you will get a Henley shirt for free. That's worth about 60 bucks. So, put them both in the cart, use the code TIM, T-I-M, and you will get the Henley shirt for free. Check it out, 4hourworkweek.com/shirts, and you'll see some of my favorite gear, including the one shirt that I've been traveling with. The Tim Ferriss Show is also brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is your one-stop shop for anything graphic design-related.

• 1:58Tim Ferriss?

  You need a logo, you need a website, you need a business card, or anything else. You get an original design from designers around the world who submit drafts for you to review. You are happy, or you get your money back. And I have used 99designs for book cover ideas for the 4-Hour Body, which went to number one New York Times, for banner ads, and you can check out some of my actual competitions at 99designs.com/tim. You can also get a free $99 upgrade if you want to give it a shot. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 2:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am thrilled to be bringing you yet another example of world-class performance. And of course, on The Tim Ferriss Show, what I attempt to do is deconstruct those performers to give you the tools and tricks that you can use. And whether those people be from the worlds of finance, say investors like billionaire Peter Thiel, celebrity like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or sports. And this episode is going to focus on the one thing, besides politics and religion, that get Americans all hot and bothered, and that is CrossFit. We will delve into the good, the bad, and the ugly of all things CrossFit. We will answer many, many questions, including what are the three most dangerous exercises

• 3:16Tim Ferriss?

  in CrossFit gyms, generally speaking? What are the most common nutritional mistakes in CrossFit? What do elite CrossFit athletes do differently than the rest? For example, what do Rich Froning and Jason Kalipa do for warmups? Is the CrossFit Games really CrossFit? And what is the future of CrossFit? The man to answer all of this, and much more, is Kelly Starrett. He's trained CrossFit athletes for more than 130,000 hours and 10 years at San Francisco CrossFit, which was one of the very first 50 CrossFit affiliates in the world. There are now more than 10,000. His clients include Olympic gold medalists, Tour de France cyclists, world and national record holders in Olympic weightlifting and

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  powerlifting, CrossFit Games medalists, ballet dancers, elite military, on and on and on. This is going to go very, very deep. It involves significantly less alcohol than the last long conversation I had with Kelly, which is also included in the blog post at 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, where you can find show notes and other things, 4hourworkweek.com/podcast. And without further ado, enjoy, discuss, debate, yell and scream. Here you are, Kelly Starrett.

• 4:30Tim Ferriss?

  Sir Kelly, welcome back to the show.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks for having me. It's a little more lucid this time, perhaps?

• 4:36Tim Ferriss?

  A little lucid, a little less alcohol, a little more caffeine. Whatever you gave me here, I mistakenly thought was one cup of coffee. And you're like, "It's strong." I was on the phone and I was like, "Oh, don't worry. Yes, strong, fucking strong coffee, whatever."

• 4:47Speaker 00

  I think it's supposed to be diluted at like 8 to 1, but it's fine. I'm sure it'll be fine.

• 4:52Tim Ferriss?

  So, we are here at San Francisco CrossFit and you have quite an anniversary, I suppose you could call it. You've spent 10 years in this world called CrossFit.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, this year now is 10 full years.

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  So, I want to dig into this because we've known each other for quite a while. And to perhaps lead off for people who may not be familiar with this world, or have heard the word a million times, but don't know what it really means. For you, what is CrossFit? Or how do you define CrossFit?

• 5:26Speaker 00

  You know, there's the official definition of trying to get people to work at higher intensity in movements that replicate the movements that we see in life. It looks like squatting and deadlifting and pushing and pulling and running. If you had to sort of mash up the tenets of gymnastics, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, and all the aerobic responsibilities also that come along with that, that's what the programming looks like. But that's not what it is. For me now, 10 years, I've been, I mean, we estimate even in our gym here, we've been doing it for nine plus years. We've done maybe 130,000 athlete hours here, which is a lot of pattern recognition. That's a lot of people going up and down, squatting, moving. And what we've come to, I've really come to understand, this is my own interpretation,

• 6:10Speaker 00

  is basically saying, "We have figured out now, here are all the things that a human should be responsible to be able to do." You know, can you put your arms over your head? Yes or no? Well, can you do that in a handstand? Can you do that with a dumbbell? Can you do that with a kettlebell? Can you do it with a barbell? Can you go from ground to overhead to do that? Can you press overhead? What ends up happening then is we've been able to window down to say, "Here are the positions, the archetypal shapes that are represented in every sport, in every situation, every position." But in the gym, I can say, "Do you have this position? Yes or no?" And then I can say, "Oh, you do? Well, let me challenge it." And the obvious one for the gym for most people is, you know, is load. Let's make it heavier. And you know, because you've come out of a serious strength conditioning background in the past, powerlifting, that...

• 6:56Speaker 00

  A long time ago, our answer to everything was, "Oh, just get stronger." You know, "Oh, he's got glute weakness." I'm like, "Seriously?" I mean, that guy deadlifts 700, you think his glutes are weak? Or she plays in the NFL, you know? I mean, like, people are ridiculous. It's not a weakness problem. And what I found for a long time was that we were throwing bigger and bigger engines onto cars that couldn't handle it, right? Well, how much do I need to squat if I'm a runner? 400, 500, 600? Right. Guys like Pavel were like, "You can double bodyweight back squat? You're probably good enough to excuse from getting any stronger." Right? You know, Dan John was like, "Hey, you should front squat." You know, a long time ago, Greg Glassman was like, "Hey, look at the overhead squat versus your front squat." Just presupposing that you can do those two movements. Right. Right? And then, look at the difference between there.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  And that's a pretty good indicator of how robust your spine is and how good your shoulders are. So, we got, now, we can start asking a little bit different question besides, is it... Because what we evaluated was, "Well, I put more weight on the bar, so it must be better." Right? But now, we can say, "Hey, what about if I have you run around the building? And you start breathing hard? And then, show me how strong you are. Show me how that position was." "Oh, okay, so now, I can challenge your position with cardio-respiratory demand." And boy, that starts to look a lot like sport, huh? Like fighting. Looks like skiing at the bottom of a bump run, or running all the way down and having to cut, or, you know, I mean, that actually starts to feel like sport. What happens if I start to burn, or I'm fatiguing? Metabolic demand. What happens if I add speed? I make a lot of errors if I go fast. What happens if I'm competing?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Like, you and I just decide right now, we're gonna go have a push-up contest. Whether you are the world champion in push-ups or not, a little bit of your back, if your brain starts to freak out because it's on the spot. So, we add the psychological pressure. What happens if I make you change mechanics? And so, there's this bunch of block practice. Instead of doing 100 swings, we're gonna do a burpee, then to a kettlebell swing. So, suddenly, I can change the motor programming. And what we found, and this is my own language around this, is that all of those things are really the definition of intensity. Metabolic load, right? Cardio-respiratory demand, load, speed. The other aspects are, aspects of the training that are the sort of intellectual piece around sort of programming the training, but my estimation is the people who can maintain

• 9:07Speaker 00

  the best positions are the best athletes and remain the most robust and have the biggest work capacities and as a side effect, because we teach all these principles, can apply them to things that matter like life and sport, not just more exercising.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's, I was having a conversation with, you mentioned Pavel, and he's, he has a tendency for very short answers, which is fun to listen to, he's a great voice too, for those short answers, but somebody asked him for basic advice related to endurance and he said, "Fix your posture, work on your posture," whether that is, you know, running posture, standing posture, sitting posture, etc. And what I'd love to ask you is, if you look at the CrossFit community as a whole, there are so many gyms, so many boxes, what are problems that are very often not being addressed? So people come in, they jump straight into, you know, the workout of the day, or metabolic conditioning, what are some common

• 10:04Tim Ferriss?

  mistakes of, whether it be CrossFit instructors or trainees, where they come out six months later and, from your eye, you're like, "Abiency has not been fixed."

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Sure. Well, I will correct and just play the devil's advocate around this statement, because my experience has honestly now been, no one just jumps right into a gym anymore. You can see on the internet and go explore on your own garage, but I think about 100% of the gyms I run into have some sort of, "Holy crap, you don't know how to move," you may have a big engine, but you don't have any exposure to this. Like, our cyclists are the worst. They come in with the most, like, robust aerobic engine, they generate huge amounts of concentric force, have no eccentric control at all, right? So that means they can't lengthen under load, basically.

• 10:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right. For those people listening who are not in the gym much, if you're in a squat position and you move up into a standing position, you can think of that as concentric, doing the reverse eccentric, where you're lengthening.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  So what we saw was that people were coming in relatively aerobic fit, I mean, people aren't slouches anymore, they really aren't. They're exposed, they're doing intervals, I mean, the internet has blown people's, I think, general conditioning now, much higher. Like, for example, and I'll come back to the question, but, for example... You know, the CrossFit unofficial CrossFit mascot, everyone loves the show is Pukey, right? Pukey the Clown. I haven't seen someone vomit in a CrossFit in eight years. Like, it used to happen all the time. Like, people used to come in, do a workout, and vomit because technically, there's an area in the back of your brainstem called the area post-feromone. It samples your blood circulation, right? And what ends up happening is people were generating so much lactic acid that their brain was like, "You've poisoned yourself, blah." It activated your vomition center.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  That's the mechanism for vomiting from workouts. That doesn't happen anymore because people's conditioning, whether you're at SoulCycle, dude, go to SoulCycle, blow your brains up on a bike, you're gonna be, like, protected, not from movement or eccentric load, but like, you'll be able to buffer some lactic acid, right? So we've seen, I've seen the general fitness go up, but what has happened now is that people have said, "Okay, look, you can't just come in here and train because you're going to wreck yourself, and more importantly, you're not gonna understand what it is we're trying to do." Which is, here are the fundamental movements that are the sort of, um, sort of signature positions of the CrossFit method, and you don't know any of them, right?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  So we force people to come in, and the mistake is, as a coach, that I need to get people moving, and this is why, if you go to a CrossFit Level 1 seminar, they are going to teach you, and they're really excellent. Excellent coaches, very thoughtful, very, very, the, uh, the course has evolved in 10 years, a ton. We've become more sophisticated in 10 years, but we teach you with really low loads, i.e. a PVC pipe or a medicine ball, because I've never seen anyone die from those things. But the ego gets involved, and pretty soon, there's a barbell in it, and you can still see people performing a tremendous amount of work in bad positions. And what ends up happening is, is we get people in, we have to give them a little taste

• 13:10Speaker 00

  of intensity, and we do that with the rowing machine and some burpees, right? We get them saying, "Hey, I need to show you what happens when you start breathing hard." But then, and we end up making, I think, a set of decisions about getting people moving, right? Because if you, if you're my mom, maybe you don't have that ankle range of motion, you have an artificial hip, the most important thing is that we start squatting, right? And I have a lot of ways of making that difficult. "Oh, we're gonna get on this, this air dine, and we're gonna sprint a little bit, and then come back and air squat for me." Like, that's enough for a lot of people. The problem is, and I might turn your feet out and I might be okay with you rounding your back a little bit, it doesn't have to be perfect, but now at least you're squatting, we can have a conversation about what's next, right? I can make errors. The problem is we start loading this inefficient, this compromised movement because we said,

• 13:55Speaker 00

  "Hey, the first thing is, let's get moving." Now what? And what is, we need to continue to refine the mechanic for life. And that's the biggest mistake. I think people aren't understanding, they're like, "Well, they're squatting up and down, now." Refine the mechanic, meaning the movement. The principles behind the movement, right? And it's all there for us, it has always been there for us. "Hey, limit motion of your spine under load." Everyone agrees. And yet, when I take the average person off the street and just have them squat very fast, I see a ton. I had a young NFL prospecting today, right, getting some advice about his knee, he's gonna go to the combine. I asked him, "Just do an air squat." And the amount of reversal in his spine, he literally rounded into a dumped like dog taking a poo position, and he had massive fins in the middle of his back where his

• 14:39Speaker 00

  musculature has overdeveloped from him basically rounding underneath. And I was like, "Um, so, that's not really good, let's do less of that." And he's like, "What, what? What are you talking about?" Like, he couldn't even identify that this thing was going on, right? And, you know, from the physical therapy side of things, from the sports performance side, the highest level form, these issues that I hammer on and hammer people on are the limiting factors to you getting, stopping injured, and they're the limiting factors to you being the best in the world and winning a gold medal. I mean, these little details. And so, we should be constantly refining technique to express what is full physiology.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  So, for example, um, there was a, you know, one of the things, there's so many voices in fitness now and so many people coming in, but like, someone basically, do you know what apologetics is? Like, that's- I get the first part, not the plural. Apologetics is basically in religion where people come around and explain a phenomenon in terms of the dog, "Well, this is what that meant now," right? And they, it's because a lot of it was allegory and metaphor and lesson, right? In science fiction, apologetics means you can explain any technology away based on some other thing. Well, I see apologetics happen in human physiology. "Oh, the reason you can't squat all the way down is your hip structure." Right? "Oh, some people don't just have long femurs, so they can't take a poo in the woods and

• 16:03Speaker 00

  squall all the way down." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" The issue is that people, we haven't making, given people clear benchmarks about what is normal and what is dis-normal, right? Cook and those guys, Cook and Burton, the functional movement screen have tried to establish baselines for performance, but those don't even go all the way to show me that you have full range of motion in your ankles. Like you, one of the secrets I don't think people understand is that you are, you have good positions. And those positions have protected you for a long time, right? You have, you can squat with your feet together, ankles together, all the way down. Full hip function, full ankle function. But people are coming into the gym, basically as demi-human. They have big aerobic engines, because that's what someone said they should do, but they don't have even

• 16:47Speaker 00

  like 50% of the ranges of motion they should have, and they don't even have the motor control to be able to start to express this stuff. You know, what is it, if you want the great tranquility, be willing to sweat the white hot beads, right? I mean, Olympic lifters got it right. And you can see why the Olympic lifters are like, what the hell? Why aren't you Olympic lifting? You can't even put your arms over your head. You know what I mean? And the Olympic lifting demands that we have basic capacities in all of these shapes. The only thing that's missing is the bench press shape. But guess what? Olympic lifters do some bench pressing. You know what I mean? So they figured it out. It's a lot easier to go that direction than the other way around. Right. And, and that's right. And so it's interesting, you know, I think that what we're, what we have not done a good job of is showing people how far away from normal

• 17:29Speaker 00

  they are, right? Well, you'd have no, like, you should be able to keep your back flat and legs straight and hinge over and pick up a barbell. And I bet, I know you can do it, because I've seen you do it, but I bet that 95% of the people in the street are stiff, don't have the motor control, tight hips, whatever, it doesn't matter. It's not indictment on their lifestyle, it's an indictment that we don't understand what good function is, and the training we've been doing for the last 50 years has not necessarily heightened that. Now, there are populations. The jiu-jitsu guys have been on this a long time, right? That you have to have these good positions, they're requisite. Hip flexors the size of camel hip flexors. It's true. Cause a little low back soreness, but otherwise.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Besides that, but what you're seeing is a lot of people have worked this out many, many, many But we haven't applied it to sort of the rigor of modern humans. And that means modern strength and conditioning. And we haven't couched it in the term. So when people walk into the gym, you know, it is, I don't think people realize as a coach, it is an enormous fucking challenge to say, oh, by the way, you have no understanding of how you move. And if I make you breathe a little bit harder, you throw it away and you move like crap. And by the way, you eat like an asshole and you don't sleep. And what are we going to do in this hour? We have to start a conversation. So for me, there's this line of, well, we got to get people in the door and we got to get them started, right? But that's not the end of the conversation, you know?

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can squat with your feet turned out like ducks. You totally can. You can set a world record in powerlifting like that. But you know what you can't do? You can't run. You can't jump and land. You can't cut, I mean, it really causes all these problems. I see it. And I also see people losing performance that way. So the question remains, this dichotomy then is, share my feet are turned out because that allows me to squat all the way down. Great. That's a beginning of a conversation. But the optimal position is the position that allows me to take my fitness and now transplant that into motor patterns. Instead of just saying, well, you're really fit now, so you're protected. Now I can say, well, I've practiced these shapes and this pattern and the, the theory and the principle, and I can now apply that to whatever I'm doing.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  And that's what's missing from the gym.

• 19:40Tim Ferriss?

  So this is, this is a really fascinating topic for me. The, the gym to sport transition.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Huge.

• 19:47Tim Ferriss?

  And whether that is a worthwhile goal also. Uh, for me, just as a side note, I mean, I've been spending time exploring, just chanced upon meeting the co-founder of AcroYoga. And I'd never had much interest in yoga.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Well, let's just stop. I mean, AcroYoga sounds really stupid.

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  But what is not, it's not really stupid.

• 20:07Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's not. And it's, it's partner yoga involving gymnastic and acrobatic positions. So if you've ever seen, say, a Cirque du Soleil performance with two strong men where they're linking arms and, and holding handstands overhead and so on. Uh, the, the motions are quite similar, but you spend a lot of time on your back, uh, balancing people on your feet and so on. And but the coming back to your squatting position, I remember asking Jason, I think his last name is pronounced Niemer, really excellent coach, why he was recommending that I hold my hands a certain way when practicing handstands because I've been instructed elsewhere by other gymnastics coaches to do it a different way. And he said, the reason you're holding it that way, even though it's a little more uncomfortable is because when you go into

• 20:52Tim Ferriss?

  the actual positions in acro yoga and you're doing it at speed, you're going to maintain that exact hand position. So you want to train that pattern. And I was like, oh, got it.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:02Tim Ferriss?

  And let's talk about athleticism, though, the, the, the training versus athleticism conversation. And I hadn't heard of this because I, I'm not, I'm not exposed to the CrossFit Games much, but can you talk about the, the softball phenomenon a bit?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Well, I, it's, it's, you know, CrossFit, you know, as originally conceived by Greg Glassman. And if you look at the original fitness in 100 words or less, in there, it says regularly learn and play new sports. Hey, nice middle splits, bro.

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you started doing the middle splits. We're sitting here on the floor in the gym and I was like, I'm like getting sort of adductor jealousy.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  So.

• 21:44Tim Ferriss?

  Although your ties look like swollen ticks and mine look like.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  I just woke up and I was like this, bro. I don't know what happened. It came with the kit. The, um, you know, so the tenet always has been, hey, you need to keep learning and you keep diversifying. They call that lateralization, right? People have been talking about it in surfers or some skill, the big, the big wall climbers suddenly are doing breath holding and they learn something about that, right?

• 22:07Tim Ferriss?

  Or slacklining.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Lateralization, right? Stephen Cutler's been all about it. So that's an important piece of like saying, okay, you have this skillset, let's go challenge it in a new domain. That's the crucial. What is interesting and is always going to be a problem with.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  For me, with CrossFit is that I can't always, you know, CrossFit is the single, for me, the single best integrated way of training I have ever come across. I still haven't seen it. I've seen it refined. I've seen Mackenzie apply it, the concepts and principles to endurance athletes. I've seen Wellborn apply it to power athletes. The kernel and the methodology is the same, right? But, and I haven't to date seen something that looks better at general physical preparedness. Like, I want my daughters to have a skillset and a base fitness and strength, and, and this is the model. Is it the model? Should I have all of my NFLers do something that looks exactly like CrossFit? No, but I can still keep the tenants there,

• 23:07Speaker 00

  right? The thing, the base code is so good. The problem is, sometimes we confuse the ability to do, perform a lot of work with the ability to be athletic. And, you know, one of my definitions of who's the best athlete is who picks up the new skill the fastest. This is why, I mean, your little experiment, the Tim Ferriss experiment about how fast can I learn, really piqued my interest, because I'm like, that is the limiter. How, how fast can I apply this base skillset? What is, what does that base skillset look like? You remember, Robert Heinlein had that little quote, it was like, "A man should be able to..." Butcher a hog, captain a ship, etc., etc. Like, plan a war, like, set a bone, right? Specializations for insects, right? That

• 23:52Speaker 00

  was like, some strong girls in the background. I don't know if you heard that. But, the, the issue here is, you know, what we should be doing is trying to ask ourselves, what constitutes the right skillset to quickly pick up new skills and to reapply as myself, as a learning animal? And, what I can tell you, and I believe this in my soul of souls, and I've seen it, that good strength and conditioning programs, and I'm talking about at all now, right, beyond CrossFit, good strength and conditioning programs reinforce skills and positions. Ito Portal, for example, is a good example of this, right? I don't, I don't know if you, many of his guys are going to play in the NFL, but that's not, doesn't mean he hasn't,

• 24:35Speaker 00

  isn't right about, you know, this, this concept. But, that... You know, how do we, what's the language of creating a ready state in the human so that I can constantly be not limited by my physical capacity? And that is position too, that's positionally driven, that's my ability to pick up and learn new skills. And I think what you're referring to is in the CrossFit Games, what we saw is that people were freakish about their work capacity. And then some people asked them, I mean, very strong, huge aerobic engines, and they're like, "Just throw this ball." And you're like, "Brrr." What was the, what was the event? I didn't see it. It was a softball toss. Yeah, throw distance, throw the softball as far as you can. Now, check this out. Turns out that Rich Froning played football in college. Guess what? He's a pretty good athlete. Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Graham Holmberg, two-sport college athlete, right? "Oh, what did he do? Oh, he was the, like, pitcher and the quarterback." Like, he's a mutant. He did alright. "Pretty sure these guys throw it." But there's some other kids who obviously had deficiencies in there, have thrived because in CrossFit, by the nature and the limitations of challenging people's fitness, it's hard to see the aspects of athleticism. It's not always the case. They really do try to program those things in, but it's also limited by, like, how do we do with, you know, how do we have a pickup game of basketball? You can't really see and judge that stuff. You know, they make people swim, they make people run, they make people bike, the obstacle course was a great example, the expression of just moving through the environment, I love that event.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  But there were some people who had some really horrific softball, they end up rolling in underhand because, and that really begs the question, because the central tenet of what this experiment was, and it's important for, I think, the average person who is CrossFitting, right, is that there's sort of two CrossFits, and I think CrossFit HQ would back me up on this, that we have the highest expression of CrossFitting, which is the CrossFit Games. And I just came from an athlete camp that Reebok put on in the Bahamas. I'm not gonna lie, it was okay. Yes. Right? But we did a bunch of training sessions with some of the best athletes on the planet, and the first thing that all of these gamer guys did, like, these are the, like, these

• 26:45Speaker 00

  are Rich Froning's, Jason Kleepa's, all really extraordinary athletes, they all went and played pickup football, and on some ashtray, like, boom, immediately, and you're like, "Oh, wow, these guys are pretty legit athletes." There was some aspect of their athleticism that they carried to CrossFit, and then CrossFit allowed them to heighten this, these functions.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  And what I think happens sometimes is now because people can't sort of separate that out, it's easy to put on a pedestal, if I can just work really hard, then I'm gonna be a really good athlete and be able to pick up all these new sports. And yes, one of the things that I've seen Greg Cook pivot on and some people pivoting on around CrossFit is they didn't, they've realized that people aren't giving up capacities to CrossFit, right? They're, they still are, most of us are still have full ankle range of motion because we do pistols.

• 27:35Tim Ferriss?

  Additive, not replacement.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. And, and for a long time in the strength and conditioning world, we have seen people get a really big power clean and then everything else sucks, right? It all sucks. So what's interesting about the program here in our gym is that we really ferret out all the crappy movement patterns, you know?

• 27:53Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you this, if I could, this is just top of mind right now. I guess, I guess two things. If someone were to ask you, is CrossFit Games really CrossFit? Should the multitudes of people in CrossFit gyms aspire to that as an objective, number one? Let's start with number one. But got a bunch top of mind, but that's the first one.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  No, I don't think they should. And, but I will tell you that the athletes involved and the experiment involved has been so informative for me as a coach, as a physio, because I can really see what the deficiencies are at day five, at day three, under these loads. And, and it really starts to matter when we see that the best athletes refine position, refine position, refine efficiency, and, and win, right? That's, that's been the name of the game. It used to be that you could just outwork people, that, people are trained two and three times a day. They are the most meticulous athletes I've ever seen in any sport, anywhere. They're on top of the nutrition game, on top of the recovery game, on top

• 28:57Speaker 00

  of hydration, adaptation, mechanics, like, they are really, really have depth. I mean, Rich Froning, he's a little tiny guy, you know?

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  How much does he weigh?

• 29:06Speaker 00

  I think he's probably like 190, 185, just something like that. Snatches, snatches 315. Like in tennis shoes, in, in Reebok flat nano shoes that like, I can, not, not Olympic lifting shoes. And he does that in the context of also being able to do all these other things. So I think it's, what it has done, what, the reason for me that the Games are so important is that it's, it's changed the consciousness about what's possible. By the way, you can still run this mountain 7K. And be brutally strong. In fact, why aren't you? You know, and I think people have been having that conversation for a long time. It also has gotten us really clear about what works and doesn't work in a very sort of pressure cooker situation in terms of-

• 29:46Tim Ferriss?

  You talk about programming and training load-

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Well, a little bit of the programming, but I would say about nutrition-

• 29:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  About, I've never seen these, any athlete in the history of the world do more work than these kids. I know the Tour de France guys, I mean, I know them personally, and their wattages are insane. The run, best run, like, they're putting, everyone's putting out hard, but no one, like the CNS load, the crazy loads, and that has really made it very clear about the lessons that we've been able to pull out of it. So, as an experiment, as Formula One-

• 30:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  But not all of us should aspire to be Formula One drivers, or even drive our cars like Formula One, and very few of us have the genetics-

• 30:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Which is the also sort of-

• 30:25Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, the highest level.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Lie, right? The lie that we tell ourselves, "Well, you know, I can train like them, so I'm, I, you know, no, you can't, you're not them genetically, I'm sorry, but..."

• 30:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, Tim Ferriss, you're a bad meth kid. Go sit in the corner, play Scrabble.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  You know what, you, you're, you are relatively strong. You're strong-ish.

• 30:44Tim Ferriss?

  Strong-ish.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  You're aerobic fit, a good thing you're a smart kid.

• 30:46Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 30:47Speaker 00

  And you're a good dancer. People don't know that about you. And, um-

• 30:49Tim Ferriss?

  I learned to throw the javelins at the people who are stronger.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  (laughing) And I can run away.

• 30:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  So, you know, I think, I think that it's vital to understand the role of the games that played in terms of raising the boat, also, sort of distilling down the essences of what's important and not important, and the lessons we've learned out of that, and how to program. You know, because I think a long time ago, you know, even guys like Louis was like, "Well, we're all powerlifters, so we'll just apply powerlifting." Well, that didn't work at all, right? And what we're seeing is very sophisticated training. Omega wave, heart rate variability, like, what people are doing-

• 31:24Tim Ferriss?

  What is omega wave?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  It's, it's a, a way of sort of looking at biorhythms, heart rate variability, and really coming up with recovery scores so you can understand in real time the effect of yesterday's training.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  So, the, the HRV would be part of that?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But like, like, HRV on steroids, right? And so, what, what's amazing now is we're seeing- That level of sophistication, and I've been able to take that and apply it to NFL. And, you know, I mean, not like, hey, we do thrusters, we're gonna be good at the NFL, but really, the principles. And also, it's given me the view of understanding all the corners that we're missing, right? That you have to have the corners of your range of motion and capacities. Otherwise, we're gonna have issues.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by corners?

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Well...

• 32:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of the edge cases, like this is a 10% case in your sport?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  No, more like, show me that you actually, you don't have 85%-ish of your shoulder range, but you have stability and capacity in the fullest end ranges. So, in the corners of your range of motion, right? So, if all the way overhead is one of those corners, I have my arm over my head. Like, if you're not, if you can't hold two dumbbells over your head with your arms, like, straight, like, you're holding like hammers and your rib cage down, that's an incomplete position. And it's that position that's costing you when you swim. It's that position that's costing you when you throw a ball. It's that inefficiency that's costing you when you fall. Now, we have a way of really understanding. And what I've been able to do is, for me, I've been able to repurpose CrossFit into the greatest diagnostic tool ever.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  And it's independent of you breathing hard, right? The intensity is an important piece that other people don't understand. So, the GPP that everyone has been talking about for a gazillion years, general physical awareness, the Russians, I think, invented that word, right? And they, and they got into it, they're like, you have to be able to jump off a ladder, without your knees wobbling. That was a really simple way of just loading a squat, right? That was, that's what that was, it's not mystical. You know, what we said for a long time was, you know, get your kid in gymnastics, that's really good, it'll make good athletes. We're like, why the fuck does that matter? Like, really, tell me why? Well, it turns out that the, the things that you have to be able to do in gymnastics teach you certain positions and principles that you can then apply.

• 33:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, use your skeleton, not just your muscles.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Yes. And then, we can get away with, you know, big muscle-bound guys who get their asses kicked, you know, like, or the little skinny cardio whippet, who falls apart, can't lift 60 kilos off the ground when they're breathing a little bit hard. Like, those are both ends of the spectrum that aren't good.

• 33:50Tim Ferriss?

  What, you mentioned nutrition, and I've got a bunch of, a bunch of questions, but, in, in brief, what would you say are the most common nutrition mistakes? Or...

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see, detrimental beliefs that CrossFitters have.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Well, this is the first, for a lot of us, me included, you know, I'd actually heard, you know, the zone was the first thing that, you know, that Greg talked about.

• 34:18Tim Ferriss?

  Back when I was first training in CrossFit, and I think I've told you this before, but back when the Santa Cruz guys would come to Mountain View to train at the Half Gracie Academy.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:28Tim Ferriss?

  It was all about the zone, and I remember training with those guys.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Well, and so, again, let's, let's get to understanding why that mattered. Because people's macronutrients, their combinations in terms of what they were eating, was way, way out of, was wacky. Not eating any fat, not barely getting enough protein, massive amounts of carbohydrate, and that was the first way we could just identify the problem, right? So, but then we started measuring and weighing, so then we had an idea of what roughly we were taking in. And to this day, I look at a bandana, I'm like, "Three blocks," you know, like, "That's 30 grams of carbohydrate." You know, it's been useful, it's like a, like a metric unit, right? That's a kilometer, that's a meter, right? Gives me a baseline of understanding how much food I need to be eating. But then, and it was always about food quality.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  That was always an important conversation. But then people would be like, "Well, I can eat this bacon and drink this beer, and I'm still in the zone."

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  I'm hitting my macros.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Like, "Come on." You know, and so what would happen then was that we saw this paleo-revolution wash over the CrossFitters. So I, we're like, and the first time I said this to my wife, Juliette, bless her little heart, was like, she Googles online, because Juliette's the biggest skeptic, and she was like, "This is some bullshit." I'm like, "What?" She's like, "The first thing that came up was hornets' nest soup." Like, "Wasp's nest soup, Kelly?" She's like, "That's what you fucking mean?" And I was like, "I don't, I think it means no grains, you know, and we should eat vegetables." So she's like, "This is some bullshit." But that was really, again, a conversation about food quality, right? Well, then we saw this revolution.

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  Free range hornets.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Juliette literally is just like the greatest bullshit detector. Thank you. Everyone, everyone just get yourself a Juliette.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  But then what we saw was that everyone got super squeaky clean, like didn't even use salt. And I was like, oh, you know, salt is really useful. I saw a bunch of my friends who cleaned up their diet and they were, they literally tanked like they were blacking out because they weren't getting any salts ever. Like we, there's this thing called salt. It's amazing. Humans invented the salt routes for it.

• 36:29Tim Ferriss?

  I read a, I read a study on primates and why humans are so fond of fructose, you know, the naturally occurring sugar in fruit. And why it's so problematic to have, say, a high fructose corn syrup or agave nectar. It's like 75% plus fructose and we get fatty liver disease. When we were migrating apes, uh, the way that we would sustain higher, uh, blood pressure without salt was with fruit.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Oh, doesn't that make perfect sense?

• 36:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  It makes perfect sense.

• 36:58Tim Ferriss?

  But yeah, salt, guess what, folks? Pretty important. Or like blood pressure.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  It's so important. Like Stacy Sims is a good homie of ours, right? She is a exercise physiologist out of Stanford. She's been exercise physio to the best athletes on the planet, best, especially the best aerobic athletes, but she assists everyone. Her company is called Osmo Nutrition and her thinking about hydration is vital, but she's like, hey, there's this stuff called sea salt. Take a pinch of it, throw it in your water and quit being a jerk and diluting yourself, right? You know, not diluting, diluting, right? And what we've seen is that people are not applying the lessons of, that we've learned in sport for the last 20, 30, 40 years to day to day life. So people got really squeaky clean and they could not eat enough carbohydrate to support the level of training that we were doing, right?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And all the endurance athletes were like, dude, you can't eat a hundred grams of carbohydrate a day and expect to thrive. And sure, just be a keto adapted athlete. I'm like, yeah, that works if I have to do it, but man, that's, that's not working for me so well.

• 37:59Tim Ferriss?

  You have to be very meticulous.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  And you have to have the genetics to really support that.

• 38:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  You know, and like boot, oh, I, I looked at some sugar. Now I'm not keto adapted, right? And you know, the key is.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Always, and this has always been the CrossFit HQ position for one, number one, eat enough carbohydrate to support exercise. Well, I've taken, I've finally figured out what that means, right? And that's a fluctuating norm, you know, and also in the last 10 years, we have figured out, for example, through the miraculousness of blood testing, of genetic testing, like we can actually get that stuff now done pretty easily. Turns out, for example, I'm an aerobic responder. Means, big aerobic workouts cause my body to be like in Nirvana. And power athlete stuff, I have to train that stuff, of course. But that is not where I should be making my money. Why, my genetics tell me, and it's interesting that any success

• 38:54Speaker 00

  I've had as an athlete, I've basically been swimming against that stream my whole life, right? Well, my genetics also tell me that I don't process saturated fats very well, and they call it lean paleo, which means eat high quality food, Kelly, but you don't need bacon every day. I don't eat bacon every day, and I don't eat nuts. Cause when I do, my cholesterol goes through the roof. And I know, we can be sophisticated about cholesterol, but when your cholesterol's 400, like there's something up. Right? That's not, you know, and I have a bunch of friends-

• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  More points in calories than a big, than a Whopper.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  That's right. So I, I think that's the, what we've found is that people have gone back to rice, they've gone back to, you know, hey, I've, I've got to source my carbohydrate intelligently, in order to support the amount of training I'm doing. And that was, that was, I think, a reaction. People are less afraid of gluten. I think they really try to stay away from it. You know, maybe that's just Monsanto that's talking there, but uh, you know, I, sorry, you're gonna have to edit that out. Sorry, Tim.

• 39:46Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. They'll send a letter bomb to your house, not mine. It's fine. Just kidding, I love you Monsanto. That's, that's free.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  You know what's funny about weeds? Nothing's funny about weeds. So, you know, the, the bottom line is, I think we've seen that correction. But once again, we should take that lesson from the highest level sport. That's what coaches are trying to do. Distill principles, not methods, right?

• 40:09Tim Ferriss?

  And also, I think particularly when it comes to macros, is know thyself and know thy sport or training load, right? So, Pita Tia, Dr. Pita Tia- Who you've, have you ever spent any time with?

• 40:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 40:21Tim Ferriss?

  You have to meet this guy. You guys would love each other. But he was on the podcast and we talked about cancer research, but he's also, he would...

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Is he the, he's the sugar cancer connection guy?

• 40:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I, he would talk about that certainly, but he is a, he was a former oncology researcher. He's also been a surgeon and he's a high level, he would not want me to say high level, but he's a high level endurance athlete, you know, 100 mile swims and things like that.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm not gonna call that high level.

• 40:47Tim Ferriss?

  And he's also, he's also very strong for his, for his body weight. And he, he loves doing time trials for cycling. And so he is almost always keto adaptive. He's in ketosis for those people who haven't heard my conversation with Pete Attia. All that means is you're, you're utilizing fat as, this is highly simplified, but fat instead of glucose as, as your primary fuel. And when he's doing these intense rides though, he, he knows exactly his respiratory quotient when he kicks over to anaerobic and how many calories he can consume and how many calories his, his liver can store so that he never comes out of ketosis. So he can be pounding gels, but he's like, okay, I know that my liver at my body weight, I'm gonna store about 400

• 41:30Tim Ferriss?

  calories of carbohydrates based on, based on this target distance and this target wattage, et cetera. I can end my race and still be in ketosis or my time trial. But that's because...

• 41:41Speaker 00

  And my problem with that, of course, is that, that's true. And he is the freakish outlier with the data.

• 41:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And very few people are gonna do that.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  That's amazing, by the way.

• 41:50Tim Ferriss?

  But what's, what's fascinating is, so yeah, the paleo, the paleo community, what are, what are other, are there any other common dietary mistakes that you find people make?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, people are terrible around water. You know, the coffee has been the cult, like black fluid. What do we call it? The cup of fear?

• 42:07Tim Ferriss?

  Cup of fear.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Cup of fear. And, you know, people are like, I don't need to drink water. I drink coffee all day long. And then this Kill Cliff, you know, which is an amazing CrossFit soda. You know, it's not related to CrossFit, but it's sponsored by some, anyway. You get the idea. It's amazing with vodka too, by the way. But, which is also can be gluten free. So you're still paleo. It's fine. And, but I think what we're seeing is that, you know... You can, here's, here's what's crucial. You can be at 80% of your function and come in and do relatively okay. Once you move well, once you've been doing this for a while, you can just be on the edges of your sleep. On the, you know, borderline, eat some extra ice cream, you know, budge a little bit, you know, not deal with stress.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  But of course, we know all of those things I've got to keep an eye on. This is what a physical practice is. And what we've seen then is, for me, it's important that you're actually signing up for a race. You're signing up for an event. The gym is not the event. This is the place where we train. And yes, it feels like competition here because I, it's intense, it's deep practice. Daniel Coyle, thank you. It's, it's me really, really practicing.

• 43:14Tim Ferriss?

  The telecode.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  That's right. Nice dude. Uh, it's, it's deep intention, it's hard aerobic conditioning, but it's still not the same thing as stepping into a ring or lining up on a 5K or signing up. And what you realize is how important all those aspects of are to your, your, your training. You have to eat right. That's why I'm like, look, the CrossFit is doing, does the CrossFit Open, which is the biggest sporting event in the history of mankind. That's what it is every year. More people sign up for the CrossFit Open. They do five workouts and then, and it's a big international competition, right?

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  It's a virtual games?

• 43:49Speaker 00

  It's a virtual games, basically. It's, it's a feeder to regionals. So, you know, whether you like it or not, I'm like, why don't you do it? And for no other reason than, why don't you have something hanging over your head for five weeks in a row? Because that's really...

• 44:05Tim Ferriss?

  Which also gives you a target other than the next day's wad.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:10Tim Ferriss?

  So you can actually decide what the optimal diet is, given that five week goal.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  You just make a whole bunch of different decisions. You know, what, what do they say? I mean deadlines focus the mind, you know, Mr. Deadline Guy? And, uh, you stay up all night because you realize you're like, wow, it really does force, you know, your thinking about this. And I, I think that's, that's what sometimes gets lost in the CrossFit gym. Initially, it was terrifying. I didn't know if I was going to survive. Let me give you an example. When I started this thing 10 years ago, Adrian Bosman, He was a, you know, CrossFit headquarters, Uber mensch, right? And, and he was one of our first coaches. I did all the coaching. We, this was all unknown. There were, we were the 27th CrossFit. I think officially 50th. Now we're like 27 on the list.

• 44:52Tim Ferriss?

  How many are there total?

• 44:53Speaker 00

  11,000 roughly, which is a revolution. You, I mean, it's not a gimmick. And what ends up happening was there was a workout that was snatch 135 pounds 30 times. Adrian and I didn't know if we could do it. We didn't know anyone who had done it, except like Olympic lifters, you know, who had like seriously trained and were strong. And one day we were like, we're gonna do this, even if it takes us all day. And like we psyched ourselves up and like now, like they throw that as like an after effect. You can do that in 90 seconds. I mean, things have changed dramatically in 10 years because of what, you know, it's like the four minute mile. Everyone's like, oh, you're still running four minute miles? That's so quaint.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  We're in the one minute mile now. And, um, but you know, 10 years, we didn't know. And so now we're starting to see that, you know,

• 45:39Tim Ferriss?

  What's, what's possible?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 45:41Tim Ferriss?

  Now coming back to the snatch for a second.

• 45:45Tim Ferriss?

  So I've never been a practitioner of Olympic lifts for a whole host of reasons, but primarily because I had reconstructive shoulder surgery in 2004, doing silly stuff like grappling that made my arms stick out of the front of my chest.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Maybe you should have been Olympic lifting.

• 46:00Tim Ferriss?

  So maybe I should have. So I had a lot of apprehension about

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, rightfully so.

• 46:05Tim Ferriss?

  Like terminal, it's kind of overhead, last 15, 20 degrees. And, uh, but I found a lot of value, particularly in the last six months or so with focusing on overhead squatting movements.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:16Tim Ferriss?

  Still not to the point where I'm going to do snatches. And I think that's where I've become smarter over the years is recognizing that you can, you can really refine movement patterns. I don't have the go heavy, go big or go home mentality anymore that I used to because the, the risk benefit's so.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  Unfavorable to me, but why is Rich Froning so good at the snatch? And what are the common mistakes that people make with that movement?

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Well, Rich has excellent mechanics. His full range of motion, his ankles, his excellent shoulder range and understanding of stability. He's able to get his, I mean, he just does things that are naturally important to snatching. He does them effortlessly in terms of getting his torso upright. His, his, obviously it's a lot of training stimulus in these things, but he understands how to create stable shapes and he's able to get into those shapes. So he doesn't have to work very hard. The, the, the work he does goes into, it's a, he gets 100% benefit from that. He doesn't have to, he's not working at 80% of 70% efficiency. Does that make sense?

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  That makes sense.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  He's, he's working hard on those shapes. What you, what you discovered though is, I think, underlying the, you know, it's a part of the functional movement screen since 1996. Dan John is like, always, all his throwers say, "I wish I had overhead squatted more." Glassman valued it as like one of the most important capacities. And in fact, one of the earliest best cross at workouts, I think it's called Nancy, and it's run 400 meters, so innocuous, right? And then just overhead squat 95 pounds, 15 times, like, I'm, like, that's, that's pinche weight, but just do-

• 47:53Tim Ferriss?

  15 times 400 meters doesn't stop pinche.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  No, you'll have to overhead squat 15, 95 pounds 15 times, run 400 meters, and then just do that.

• 48:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Just do that like, mm, five times. And what you're going to see really quickly is, what happens, like, everyone can fake it for three, but then as you start to fatigue, or your, your, your, your positions aren't robust, you, you bounce off the, the tent. You, you no longer have access, right? And, you know, you start, the, the world gets really small and then you start suffering.

• 48:24Tim Ferriss?

  And then you eventually Labrador Retriever in the closed sliding door.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  True fact, true fact. So, you know, I, I think what is key is understanding what are the salient positions. You know, all we're doing when we say overhead squat is I'm saying, "Show me you can squat with your torso upright." And that looks a lot like sport, doesn't it? And if you have to lean forward really far to do that, then it says you have incomplete hip and ankle function, and you don't know how to create stability in your trunk. And that is a very powerful idea, right? And what's nice about the overhead squat is, I call it a category one movement. I can get very organized, and I can grind down to a position where either we agree that it's full range of motion or not, or till I start to lose position, I can come back up. And what I've removed out of it is the element of speed. So for my nine-year-old, for example, Georgia, the overhead squat is something

• 49:13Speaker 00

  we do all the time. Sometimes, we just bring the little kitty barbell into the, into the living room, and force she goes to bed. Yeah, even less, maybe 10 pounds. And she just has to do three sets of five. Why? It's practicing the shape, practicing the position. And that's where we're going to get bang for the buck. You can pull, you don't need to snatch heavy.

• 49:31Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think too many CrossFitters focus on working out and not practicing?

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Well, totally. And I would say that that, let's, let's take it out of CrossFit for a second, and let's put it into running.

• 49:43Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Running is a very, very technical skill that we should be developing from a very early age. And there are only like, what, 30 million runners in America who run three times a week, and only 80% of them are injured in a year. Wow, that's like the worst statistic ever. Listen, if you're listening to this, do not let your children run, it's dangerous. Comma, if you're a runner, and running is one of the things that makes us human, you should be able to run. That is one of the tenets of being a good athlete. In fact, look at the NFL Combine, for example. They jump, right? They have to bench press, which is a joke. That's the one piece that's a joke. But everything else is a run drill, change of direction drill. It's about fluency and economy of running and changing mechanics.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  No wonder a couple years ago, CrossFit put this big, like, you know, cone drill thing in there, because they're like, "Hey, look, this thing, you should be really competent in that, and you're going to get punished if you suck at it." So if we look at most people's running, how much actual skill development do they do in running? You mean besides tying their shoes?

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Next to none.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  None, and they just start running.

• 50:42Tim Ferriss?

  Unless you're with, say, a Joe DeFranco, planning on being in the NFL Combine, and he's like, "Actually, if you're right-handed, you should switch your feet this way because you cut one step out of the shuttle run, and then, wow, now you're a superstar."

• 50:53Speaker 00

  And Joe does a whole bunch of stuff about being, "Do you have the positions to run?" Like, for me, the most dangerous sport to middle-aged men is a track workout.

• 51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my God, it's so dangerous.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Like, you're just asking for a pulled hamstring or torn calf, because you're at the end ranges, and when you start, your back starts to deflect because you can't buffer your, you know, your huge engine, and then you have a neuromechanical compromise, tear hamstring. It's the same thing that happens in basketball. We don't even talk about what the end, what are, "Do you have the required range of motion to run?" Yes or no? And resoundingly, the answer is, "Hell, no." And do we do any skills or drills about improving the economy? No. So, what ends up happening, of course, is that we should, and what I can tell you that I see is that I see very, very intelligent coaches practicing skills, teaching skills, and then challenging those skills in a workout. And that is good programming.

• 51:45Tim Ferriss?

  So if I am getting to a point where I'm comfortable with overhead squatting with a barbell, and consider-

• 51:51Speaker 00

  That never happens, by the way, because it always, it always gets worse.

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I've, I've, no, you should have, I'll send you some photos. They're hilarious. The, if I'm considering going into, say, training for the snatch, what are common mistakes that I should be aware of, that I should avoid?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we have basically been able to break those fundamental positions down. So, how about this? Show me that you can actually put, you know, just put some tens on the bar, grab a women's bar, make it really light, you know?

• 52:22Tim Ferriss?

  Better for my tiny little bidge hands, anyway.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Well, hey, they're called dwarf hands, all right? And, and one of the issues is, you know, show me you can keep your back flat and actually get to the bar. And what you're gonna see is that people can't do that.

• 52:35Tim Ferriss?

  Get to the bar, meaning underneath the bar.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, just get into the setup position for the bar.

• 52:39Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  And what you're gonna find is that people can't even get into a decent setup position without rounding their back and dumping their shoulders. And then we start asking the question, what the hell are we doing? Your setup position is so shitty.

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Setup meeting that bottom position.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, can you, show me you can put your hands in a snatch grip and then sit all the way down on your ankles. Right? Sit down and get into a good position. What you're gonna find is that people universally can't do that. So suddenly, I've learned something about myself. Why do all the best coaches teach from the hang? Well, if you teach from the hang, then I take that portion out of it. I can derive a lot of the benefits from snatching without taking you to these compromised shapes. And the problem is, I know you can snatch from that compromised shape, but that's not the shape we all agree is the best shape. Does that make sense? So if you can't even get all the way down to the bar, an issue of technique is never, we're never gonna solve this because you're making basic type 1 errors from the first inch off the ground.

• 53:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Or in centimeters, because everything's in kilos in Olympic lifting.

• 53:39Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask you, I want to put you on the spot for a second because I've always wanted to ask you this and I'm not sure why I haven't.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Yes, these are my real calves. They're not cat's quads.

• 53:49Tim Ferriss?

  I was curious about your chesticles. All surreal?

• 53:52Speaker 00

  No.

• 53:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's just the left. I noticed you only put one and just testing it out. The, if you were, if you had to remove three common exercises from CrossFit gyms in the interest of safety, what would they be?

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Oh, so.

• 54:09Tim Ferriss?

  If you had to, gun against the head.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Well.

• 54:12Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't have to be three. Three or fewer.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Let me deconstruct that for a second. And that's crucial because first and foremost, all the movements in the training language are inherently safe. If you have full range of motion, the motor controller do them, right? So.

• 54:29Tim Ferriss?

  Presumably though, you get 1,000 people come in, there are certain exercises where a higher percentage of those people will lack that prerequisite.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  The number one most dangerous skill, bench press.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  And why? Because people don't have any internal rotation of their shoulder. They've pinned their back down, right? Let's, you can press all day long, standing overhead military press, strict press. You're gonna fail safely. When you fail in the bench press, that shoulder is, it's gonna translate forward. There's your labrum, there's your, can you bench press safely? Yes. Do we love floor pressing in our gym? Absolutely. We floor press a ton. But what I find is that people do not have the basic mechanics. And that's one of the ways that we've got in our head that we define, like, you know, we define strength, how much you bench, you know, how much you bench. You know, my friend Mark Bell benched over 900.

• 55:20Tim Ferriss?

  Our friend Mark Bell.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Our friend Mark Bell. And, uh, you know, that's an amazing amount. And what I will tell you is that his positions and mechanics, it is so technical. Like, I think I, once I became friends with-

• 55:32Tim Ferriss?

  Hyper, hyper technical.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:34Tim Ferriss?

  And also just the assistance work and everything that he does related to it is so sophisticated.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  I think I, after knowing Mark and Jesse Burdick for several years, I feel like I finally learned how to bench press. Even though I've been bench pressing since I was, what, like, a man? I came out like, like my testicles dropped and they handed me a bench press, you know? And so, I mean, I've said, I pulled the bench out of that. I also will pull the rings out.

• 55:55Tim Ferriss?

  Rings.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  And the reason is, what we see is that people can do movements that look like ring dips. They go up and down. But they don't lock out, their shoulders are in terrible positions. And what we value is them doing work going up and down. But if we put the rings back in for stability work, show me you have a good start position and finish position. Like, here's, here's one of my problems. Like, the TRX is a great piece of home equipment. Like, you can, one of the things that we, I'm a big fan of is understanding that if your hands are on the ground doing a push-up, right? Then you can cheat off the ground. You have what I call a closed torque environment. If you grip a barbell, that's closed, closed torque. It's basically a, a circuit, right? And I can create stability off that in really strange positions.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  Cause I can still bend the wrist.

• 56:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, like bending the bar, I mean.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  That's right. I should be bending the bar, but I can still bend the bar even though my body's in really strange shapes. As soon as they put a dumbbell in your hand, you can't do that anymore.

• 56:52Tim Ferriss?

  Different game.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Right? That's why kettlebells are so important, why dumbbells are so important. Because they, I call it an open torque system. I have to create all the stability at the big primary engine. I can't cheat it up through the chain. And so, why are rings so important? Well, one of the reasons rings, dips are important is because they force me to show my hand, what's really going on at the shoulder, in an open torque environment. The problem, so one of the reasons TRX is great, is that you're basically taking really simple movements and being able to apply this, I'm in a strap, I'm hanging, right? And I can't cheat anymore, right? Because if I'm disorganized at the shoulder, I don't generate force. But the

• 57:32Speaker 00

  problem is with the rings, that you can still cheat yourself into an terribly internally-rotated position, cranking your neck back, and you can still go up and down until you can't. And remember, the gym is a diagnostic tool. I should be figuring out what's going on. I think the shoulder will handle, the hips will handle a lot more silly BS, a lot longer than the shoulder will, right? If I had to pull out one more movement, you know, hand against the, gun against the wall, I would say the butterfly kip. Only because, I think it's, that's how I, if you ask me to do a bunch of pull-ups, guess what I'm gonna do? Butterfly kip. But I understand the principles, and I have good range of motion. It's a completely

• 58:15Speaker 00

  safe position, but what we see is that people do not have, I ask them to put their arms over their head, for example, right? And they can't do it. And then, so suddenly magically hanging from a bar is going to increase that range of motion? No, they're gonna compensate. Then swinging, and landing, so what we do is we add speed to a bad position, and then that's really the recipe.

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  Capow. Goes the wire, the piano wire.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  But, but, once again, you know, we program all that stuff on our gym, but you'll notice that we have a lot of static ring stations, because what we saw as well, people can't even do, can't even get into the start position on the rings, which is elbows locked out, butt squeezed, thumbs turned out. They can't even get into the finish position, or the start position. So, what are we talking about? You know, what we're doing is we're end up arguing about bullshit, right? You can't even get into the bottom position of a snatch. Why are we talking about your snatch?

• 59:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and I mean, I'm getting into more gymnastics these days and I want to be able to do a back tuck. I've never been able to do a back tuck.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Really?

• 59:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Attribute wise, I have the attributes necessary, but it's a long story.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  No, I feel, because I was obsessed with that too.

• 59:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, so I want to get to that point. You can do that safely, but you can certainly do it very, very unsafely, or attempt to do it unsafely. And I think that the question of sequencing and how you put things in a proper order, from diagnostics to refinement to training.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  We have not given people the background or the language of how their bodies work. You know, I get to work with kids, like children, like first graders and some kindergartners in our swim team, all the way up to masters, Olympic athletes. I mean, like, I see it all, right? And what I can tell you is that most along the way, no one gets any formal training. And the mistake has been always, like, I think CrossFit is doing it more right. The DeFranco's gyms, the Mike Boils, the places like that are, you know, Shannon Turley at Stanford, there are pockets of really excellent thinkers who are teaching people

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  how to move. And that's a specific thing, right? And that's not just jumping back and forth and chasing a bouncy ball. That's very specific skills and challenging those skills with the things we talked about. So, you know, what we've seen is a decentralized, and CrossFit for example, is a decentralized Soviet sports system, right? We have 11,000 states. And what you'll see is that kids will grow up through the CrossFit system in a generation, and they will, they'll already be like, "Well, of course I can overhead squat. What do you mean? Why can't you overhead squat?" You know what I mean? And will solve a lot of problems. But the key piece is, we can't confuse exercising for full human capacity. That's the missing link.

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  And speaking of full human capacity, if you look at the most elite CrossFitters, what are, are there things that they do that the lower ranks do not? Commonalities that you've observed that? People can borrow, or emulate, or incorporate.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  You're saying that top CrossFitters, that the bottom aren't doing, that's just the recreational?

• 1:01:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like top, top quartile or decile of...

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  They all have, most of them I know are obsessed with mechanics, most of them. And really spend a lot of time refining that mechanics. That's really, you know, their positions are more effortless. Like, there was a, you know, I had this physical therapy instructor, and she was like, she taught pediatrics, and she's like, "Let me be fucking clear. Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs." And I was like, like, my mind was like, "Goo-doo-sh." Like, this is coming from the pediatric physical therapist, who was like, "What the hell's wrong with you? Why, you know, why are you so stiff?" You know? And, you know, I, and the key, the key...

• 1:02:05Tim Ferriss?

  We're doing synchronized stretches.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Is, um, the key is that people aren't spending enough time working on full position. And maybe it's because I have not made the case for it, because what we've done is, we know you can get by at 80%, but show me you have full capacity, because that's the thing that these top athletes have. I mean, they obviously can work really hard.

• 1:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  Full capacity, meaning the corners of these positions?

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, the positional, full position. And I always use this example, but squat down with your feet together, keep your heels on the ground, knees together. Can you do that, yes or no? If you can't do that, knees together, all the way down, chilling out in the bottom, like we're at a campfire, then you're missing full hip range of motion, ankle range of motion. One of those things is missing. And that's the mechanism for your hip impingement, that's the mechanism for your plantar fasciitis, for your bunion, for your torn Achilles, you know, for your pulled calf. That is the fucking problem. And you should be obsessing about this. You know, CrossFit is like, it's, or any good modern strength and conditioning system, because we're not the only ones doing it now, but they force us into these shapes that are diagnostic, you know?

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  And, you know, if you've been around Pavel, well, then you probably have done a pistol at some point.

• 1:03:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  That's because you have to be able to have that open torque control on your leg, right? That's how he gets away with not having to do lots of step-ups, right? Show me that you can squat up and down one leg with that strength, and immediately I can tell if you have the ankle range of motion, hip range of motion, do that, right? So it's interesting that that got pulled into the language because it was so diagnostic.

• 1:03:41Tim Ferriss?

  If, if there were two or three movements that people listening to this could videotape themselves performing for sort of maximal diagnostic value, uh, let's just say it's busy professional who's like, "Ah, you know, I'm probably letting go, but I want to get back into training. I want to be able to videotape myself at certain points just to see how screwed up I am before I try to do something I did when I was 20 years old." Is there anything in particular you'd recommend?

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Well, here's, the problem with that is that you somehow devalue some of the other positions. And in, in physical therapy school, they had this great statement. They're like, "Test something you think you changed and something you didn't think you changed." And I was like, "That is so eternal and amazing." And then I was like, "Well, fuck, it's my fucking shoulder. And if I'm compromised on this end, I maybe don't have the intellectual capacity to understand how that compromises me on the other side." And so, what, what's crucial is that you can go from the start position. So, for example, you may not think that Olympic lifting is important to you as a swimmer, but Olympic lifting forces you all the time, or swinging kettlebell, into having full internal rotation of your shoulder.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  So even just doing the Bergner warm-up with a PVC pipe, he's an Olympic lifting coach, you can Google "Bergner warm-up."

• 1:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell his name?

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  It's like B-U-R-G-E-N-E-R.

• 1:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  And if, Mike Bergner, and if you just get into this high hang position, like, like you're doing like the robot dance out to the side, right?

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  Do that all the time.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  You should be able to get your hand all the way down to your hip, and your shoulder shouldn't twist forward. So, people are like, "Oh, I don't need to Olympic lift." Well, you should be able to snatch PVC pipe without hurting your shoulder, but those same people will go to the pool and not recognize that the finished position for the crawl stroke is-

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  The same position.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  The same position. And so what ends up happening then is, in the swimming language, if I'm missing that internal rotation at the end, that means my shoulder comes forward, and that means my next stroke is compromised.

• 1:05:43Tim Ferriss?

  Compromised.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  And that's why you have to have full range on both ends of your shoulder, right? Because I'm going to compromise- And that's going to mess up my next start or my next rep.

• 1:05:54Tim Ferriss?

  I've been amazed how much my entire physiology has changed just focusing on terminal knee extension. Just like lay on your back, put your legs straight up in the air, pull your toes back, straighten your legs. And if you can't straighten them completely, I was like, wow, my legs are shaking like, you know.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  I handled that over to two NFLers today who were coming back from ACL repair. That they sit all day long, they're sitting 14 hours a day, knees slightly bent, they don't have that range. Posterior chain is, you know, you should, why can't you do a long sit?

• 1:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, last time you saw me, I could barely do this and now I'm like.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:06:30Tim Ferriss?

  Out to the.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  You know, one of the things that you, you know, the truth, PR, lifetime. One of the, one of the truths is that, you know, we're always talking about putting the hip back into the socket. Like that's the capsule stretch, that's for our body stuff.

• 1:06:45Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  But what you figured out was, boy, if I have somewhere some load, my legs are up and I put some load through that. That's seated that hip back into the position and reinforce that mechanic. And then you had to be stable in that shape. Same thing happens when you squat theoretically, same thing should be happening when you deadlift. But what we see is that the modernness of us is what messes us up. You have to have a movement practice. Pilates is a movement practice, yoga is movement practice, acro yoga is movement practice because they're exposed, crossfit's movement practice. But then I also have to probably breathe hard a little bit, some on there and get stronger. And your movement practice can handle that, can be kettlebells based, you can go to the Olympics that way. And then the last piece of course is that you have to be able to take care of your tissues. You have to know how to do some basic maintenance.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  You know, one of the reasons that for our body spoke to so many people is that it was like you gave them a blueprint, a Betty Crocker cookbook of how their body worked and the things that they can do that were actionable. They didn't require a doctor or a physical therapist. That's the revolution.

• 1:07:45Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, and thank you for helping with that also. I have to ask this, this is, this is, uh, it's a common question, it's not one that I ask myself much, but I'm curious how you would answer it. Is CrossFit a fad?

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Oh, I would say totally, totally a fad, because front squatting and running is a fad. It's a gimmick. No, look, gymnastics is not a gimmick, um, Olympic lifting, not a gimmick, powerlifting, not a gimmick. You know, one of the things that I don't think people recognize CrossFit so much, and you can even go back to Pavel's book, it's like, he interviews some MMA guy who was legendary for his conditioning, he does the 100 kettlebell snatch test, and he does it in like eight minutes and it destroys him. Like, I have 13-year-old girls who can do that version of that thing in like three and a half minutes. You know what I mean? So, what we've done is we've gotten a lot better conditioned, and I think people understand

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  that CrossFit has always prioritized conditioning and aerobic engine first. You've got to take care of that stuff, and the body weight control stuff is the easiest way, and the most democratized way. Then let's have a conversation about how much you weigh, how strong you are. If you're gonna be the best at the CrossFit Games, you're gonna have to be really, really strong and really aerobic. For the rest of us, we can keep putting money in that strength bank, but that aerobic function bank, it goes dry.

• 1:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the conditioning to, uh, and I know you got, got a bunch of people to, to train here and business to handle, so I'll let you go in a minute, but the, to thin slice conditioning for a second, because for, for me, of course, I wanna, I wanna dig into the measurables. Is that primarily, when I look at, say, a metabolic conditioning workout, a MetCon workout, is it primarily trying to push up that anaerobic threshold, so that you don't get crippled by lactic acid and hydrogen ions and all that and puke into a bucket? Uh, is it VO2 max? Like, what are the primary components that you can kind of perform, that you can track?

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  The idea is that, you know, we could maintain all these other functions, strength, power, all the things that sort of valued us as powerful, functional people, and I could get all the benefits of the aerobic, anaerobic training with interval-like training, with high-intensity training, right? Izumi Tabata proved that a long time ago. But what we found is that, hey, probably you need to go long once in a while to make sure you can, and there's some adaptations that only happen at that long, steady state, right? I'm about, I'm signed up for the Molokai, I'm paddling OC1, it's like a five to seven-hour race. 20-minute workouts are not gonna do it for me.

• 1:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  This is kayaking.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Outriggert canoe.

• 1:10:13Tim Ferriss?

  Outriggert canoe.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Right, but my point is that I'm gonna have to go long. How long we need to go is up to my coach. You know, I'm probably not doing longer than an hour, still maintaining, respecting this aerobic piece. But that the intensity, you know, all of our energy systems work in concert and at the same time. You know, if you go longer than two minutes, two minutes is a 50% aerobic, 50% anaerobic effort. So, you know, running them, you know, at six minutes, eight minutes, you're full aerobic power. You know, that's just a much more interesting. Do 1K repeats, you know, that's something that people didn't understand about Brian McKenzie's model. You know, it's like, he has me do 5K repeats and stuff and on the erg and pooh, it's brutal. That's brutal.

• 1:10:51Tim Ferriss?

  Is this the standing or seated erg?

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  That'd be the skerg, the ski erg.

• 1:10:54Tim Ferriss?

  Ski erg.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  You know, that's, that's, that's a, those are terrible places to be, you know, 1K repeats. You know, and I, I think we even, people are not afraid of working hard anymore. We've gotten past that and now let's have a little bit better conversation.

• 1:11:08Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, what do you think is the future of CrossFit? You can answer that any way you want.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it's gonna continue to refine itself. I think, you know, people are coming in and all the coaches I know and work with, you know, are starting to understand what is we're doing and how sophisticated. It's not just, we just don't throw a bunch of random shit up and exercise till we puke. You know, it seems like that, you know, a bunch of, a bunch of jerks swinging around the bar. That's not what's happening at all.

• 1:11:33Tim Ferriss?

  There are some jerks swinging on the bars.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Well, that, that happens, I mean, I always point out, I'm like, the physical therapists out in the world, you had a business long before CrossFit, FYI. Like, there are people who have been fucking themselves up in every sport for as long as there are people because we're ego-driven people, because we're, we're driven to perform, right? So, you know, the key is to pull your ego out of this and really play the long game. What do you look like? How strong, how fit can you be when you're 50? The conversation changes a little bit. For me, it's, it's not, you know, can I deadlift 600 anymore? It's, you know, what's this look like when I run an ultra? What's this look like? How effective am I at running a 10K or paddling? Those are, for me, starting to be more interesting conversations than just absolute strength or absolute work power. How can I, how does this make me a better mountain biker?

• 1:12:18Tim Ferriss?

  If, if there were any, uh, any sort of parting tips, suggestions, requests that you could make of the people out there who are either currently CrossFitting or considering CrossFitting, what would you say to them? What would you suggest?

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  You know? It's not about who can work hardest anymore. That ship has sailed. If you're in a serious strength and conditioning program, you are very fit. You know, probably fitness is not, unless you're a beginner, fitness is not the limiting factor anymore. Your positional quality at intensity is the limiting factor. Because you're going to do the same experiment that everyone has done, and you will end up in a little tiny box at some point, wondering why you're George St. Pierre and you've torn both your ACLs. Right? No one was fitter, no one was more powerful, but his positions cost him his ACLs. And now that consciousness has come at a very, very high price. And, you know, you should be able to do these things forever.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  You know, there's not a time where you don't need to get up off the ground or do a push-up, but just let's become more sophisticated. Let's advance the conversation a little bit. Don't be a douchebag. If I walk into the room and you're rounding your back, I'm gonna cock punch you. Come on. It may happen once in a while at your heaviest loads.

• 1:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  I was drinking coffee and you tried to cock punch me earlier. I thought it was aggressive.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  I just, I think that's the issue, is that it's, you know, you need to bring the awareness that we're supposed to bring to this. If we're doing a five rep, we're just not even a five rep max, but we're just squatting, that fifth rep should look fucking good. You just did four more. Like, make it look better. Okay.

• 1:13:58Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we gotta run, guys. Last question. Any lesser-known strength coaches or coaches, period, that you particularly, that stick out in your mind that people might want to look up and learn more about?

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Joe DiFranco is amazing. If you haven't ever listened to Pavel talk, you know, he solved a lot of this a long time ago. The internet is rich right now with, you know, I would say, look at who's been on the podcasts.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  There have been some serious banner carriers for a long time. Mark Fristigan at Exos has been talking about these basic shapes and positions for a long time. Who are on his show? Who's around?

• 1:14:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  And I think the working coach piece is it. There are a lot of models, you know, but you just need to start a practice and then from there we can advance ourselves. But there's a lot of really good thinking in the world right now. It's very exciting. This is a good time to be in the world.

• 1:14:58Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. So, yeah, question your assumptions, folks. Test your own rules.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  And don't be afraid to suck.

• 1:15:03Tim Ferriss?

  Don't be afraid to suck. Find a place where you can suck.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Privately.

• 1:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  Safely. Kelly, where can people find you on the internets and elsewhere?

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  I'm on your couch. TimFerrissCouch.com.

• 1:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  Not to be confused with other couches on the internet.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Dude, we're at MobilityWad and mobilitywod.com. And man, I can't believe I've been doing this for 10 years. That's a lot of pull-ups.

• 1:15:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, to many more decades. All right. Thanks so much, man.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  Appreciate you.

• 1:15:35Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by Mizzen & Maine. Don't worry about the spelling. All you need to know is this. I have organized my entire life around avoiding fancy shirts because you have to iron them, you sweat through them, they smell really easily, they're a pain in the ass. Mizzen & Maine has given me the only shirt that I need. And what I mean by that, and Kelly Starrett loves these shirts as well, is that you can trick people. They look really fancy, so you can take them out to nice dinners, whatever, but they're made from athletic sweat-wicking material. So you can throw this thing into your luggage in a heap or on your kitchen table like I did recently, and then pull it out, throw it on with no ironing, no steaming, no nothing,

• 1:16:17Tim Ferriss?

  walk out, and you could probably wear this thing for a week straight or make it your only dress shirt and take it on trips for weeks at a time. Never wash it. It will not smell. You will not sweat through it. You gotta check these things out. So, go to 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out. 4hourworkweek.com/shirts. And if you order one of their dress shirts in the next week, you will get a Henley shirt for free. That's worth about 60 bucks. So, put them both in the cart, use the Code TIM, T I M, and you will get the Henley shirt for free. Check it out, fourhourworkweek.com/shirts and you'll see some of my favorite gear, including the one shirt that I've been traveling with. The Tim Ferriss Show is also brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is your one-stop shop for anything graphic design-related.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  You need a logo, you need a website, you need a business card, or anything else. You get an original design from designers around the world who submit drafts for you to review. You are happy, or you get your money back. And I have used 99designs for book cover ideas, for The Four Hour Body, which went to number one New York Times, for banner ads, and you can check out some of my actual competitions at 99designs.com/tim. You can also get a free $99 upgrade if you want to give it a shot. That's 99designs.com/tim.