Ep. 15: John Welbourn – Former NFL Lineman

00:00:00
Speaker 1: You know, I think it’s a pro athlete, Like you live in this weird Ivory tower where like I, like I said, I got the chance to one on one fist fight the toughest dudes in the world for a decade. Yeah, every Sunday in front of millions of people wearing white spandex and like, like when you break it down like that, people are like really, I’m like, yeah, I never touched the ball, right, Like, I just got to basically impose my will. And I think that like level of addiction of like I know exactly who I am and what I’m doing, and I know you know the results of my hard work, right And dud I was telling somebody the other day, I’m like, don’t be upset about the results you didn’t get because you didn’t.

00:00:29
Speaker 2: Do the work out out here. The stakes are real. Effective preparation starts with fitness, but it requires so much more. This show explores the tools, knowledge, resilience, and skills needed to be ready when it matters the most. Join me Rich Browning as we apply the decades of wisdom I’ve gained through training and competition to hunting in the back country. This is in pursuit brought to you buy Mount Knobs in collaboration with Mayhem Hunt. All right, bird you ready, yes, all right. We got John Wellborn, NFL former NFL player, CrossFit athlete for a little while. So I watched you on Every Second Counts on one week, yeah, one week?

00:01:19
Speaker 1: Well yeah, so uh yeah. I was trained to go back and play in the NFL and they asked me to do the cross at games and I was like, what’s this crossing games?

00:01:25
Speaker 2: Let’s do it.

00:01:26
Speaker 1: And they were like, well, You’re going to have to go and compete, and I’m like, let’s do it. So a week before training camp started, I went out there and did it after doing CrossFit for about ten days, that’s awesome. And then I showed up and it was awful.

00:01:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, which that would have been waits every second count So I was the one that finished with the thirty squat clean yeah and jerks or whatever. Yeah, yeah, heck yeah. I remember I watched that documentary when I first got into CrossFit. So it was you Spiel.

00:01:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:01:52
Speaker 2: Who were the main characters.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: It was Josh Bridges, No, Josh everettsh Everett. Then there was my Dutch and then there was another dude who I can’t remember his name.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: Fitzgerald, James Fitzgerald. Was he in there?

00:02:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, opt OPT. And then then there was another guy but I can’t remember his name.

00:02:11
Speaker 2: I didn’t realize you were just doing it to do it, not that you were like.

00:02:16
Speaker 1: I had a lot of into that. It’s had a lot of ego. I was like, no, it was.

00:02:23
Speaker 2: Man.

00:02:23
Speaker 1: So I was living in Newport Beach and I used to train an athletes’s performance which was up in Carson, and so anybody it’s from LA knows it’s like.

00:02:30
Speaker 2: Not very far.

00:02:31
Speaker 1: It’s probably about nineteen or twenty miles. It could be thirty minutes or it could be four hours. So I got to the point where I was just tired of driving to Carson. So I go up there three days a week. And then I googled and I found a gym that was right around the corner that had bumper plates, which was a CrossFit gym. And I showed up there and the guy I was like, Hey, can I just pay to work out here? I want to use your equipment, And that’s how it all kind of came about. And then I guess the owner told CrossFit that this NFL dude was training there, and then they reached out and then they invited me, and I didn’t necessarily know what it was, and I.

00:02:59
Speaker 2: Was like lifting in there.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, like they said it would be some heavy stuff and a little bit of running, and I was like, great, I’ve been run more than like thirty yards at a time because we’re only giving speed for second about six second verse. Yeah, just nothing but speedwork, like the conditioning stuff. I had a note like at the time, I believed that having aerobic base was the most overrated thing in the planet. Right lift heavyweights, sprint, rest and recover and we’ll be good.

00:03:20
Speaker 2: You’re good. I mean, you were a guard, right guard? I played.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: I played guard for so I played tackling college and then I started my first year at tackle and then they moved me to guard, and then I played tackling guard and kind of moved in between over those tens.

00:03:32
Speaker 2: So you at that point you were out how much you weigh.

00:03:34
Speaker 1: I showed across the games at three hundred and eight pounds. Wow, So I was like and so every year I played the majority of my NFL career between three or six and three oh eight, But I went to camp at three twelve. YEP, so I was probably closer to three twelve. Yeah, And I showed up and I’m looking around and the speelers are like one hundred and thirty five pounds, and I’m like, I’m gonna get killed dead.

00:03:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, what were the There was a sprint or it was like two hundred meters type sprint.

00:03:57
Speaker 1: A eight hundred meter he’ll run, yeah, and then I mistakenly got selected to do the run first. I should have done it last, because at that point I was just done.

00:04:07
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then was there a deadlift burpie?

00:04:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s deadlifts and burpies. And then there was a pull up chest of our pull up and thrust. Her problem was is that they left the racks out where the rigs were outside. It sound right, and they were all rusted.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it does sound like.

00:04:19
Speaker 1: So the very first rep sheered off both of my pomps and I actually you can see it in the video. I think I’m biting the skin and spitting it out.

00:04:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, like both cheered off to the point they.

00:04:29
Speaker 2: Did not give the context that you were like straight off the NFL, Like no, you know in the video, So if anybody gets a chance to go back and watch it, it’s pretty good.

00:04:37
Speaker 3: That would have been like you was drafted in ninety nine.

00:04:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I was going in my tenth year. Yeah, I was going to my tenth year, and I was like, yeah, I wouldn’t do that working out. I’m good at that. I didn’t realize that they were stacking the deck against me. They were setting you up. Yeah, it sound like anything they would do. No, And the the worst part about it is I like just didn’t know, like.

00:05:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t know what to do. You didn’t know what the methodology was, You didn’t know you were stepping into you didn’t know any of it.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it just showed up. But also I’m the type where I like, somebody’s gonna throw something out, I’m.

00:05:10
Speaker 2: Like, I’m gonna try it. Yeah, that’s right. Well, so then from there you start CrossFit football. So that’s where I first, you know, obviously I watched the documentary. Sure, and then when I was I was a strength coach a little while at Tennessee Tech under Ship Pew and so he was big on CrossFit football.

00:05:24
Speaker 1: Well what’s wild is I had wasn’t a coach. I never thought about coaching. It was actually Glassman that hit me up and asked me kind of pitched me on the idea of like a can you come.

00:05:35
Speaker 2: Help us no subject matter expert essentially.

00:05:38
Speaker 1: Like actually the way he framed it. So when I ended up getting hurt in my tenth year, I came home and I ended up having knee surgery yep. And I was trying to reboot my life, which you know at the time, I was planning to go to law school. Yeah, okay, And so I graduated from Berkeley in four years, got my masters in my fifth or did my master’s work in the fifth, and then there was a lot of scholarship to go to law school at Bolt it’s called Berkeley now, and so I applied for that. And that was kind of my like, hey, I’m going to play for like a year or two in the NFL, Like I mean, honestly, like how long do white guys play?

00:06:07
Speaker 2: Right? Like I was ran into the back of every single being an offensive lineman looks terrible.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: It’s the most fun job.

00:06:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I bet it’s awesome, but just getting I feel like you guys get folded up on on the regular.

00:06:18
Speaker 1: It’s the only way I could describe it is imagine getting to go out and do whatever you want physically to somebody, and then they blow a whistle and you get to walk back and do it again without any real repercussion, and you get to one on one fist fight the toughest dudes on the planet. So at the end of the day, you know exactly how good or bad you are, which is great for like whether or not, ego, whatever it is, but like there’s no like, hey, take the toughest dudes on the planet. Let’s strap it up and get it going.

00:06:42
Speaker 2: That’s awesome.

00:06:43
Speaker 1: And I loved it. I loved every ounce of it, and I was really sad when it ended. Yeah, so I had to figure out something else you enjoyed. So our family business, when I was planning to do was go back to law school. And then that’s when Glassman hit me up. And it was kind of an interesting pitch. The way he framed it was something like that, you know, somebody says something you one time and you’re like, man, I never thought about it like that, and I had no desire to coach or really kind of get into this role. And he said, he goes, would you help us develop our technique or our technology on how to train athletes? And I had never thought about training as a technology, and the way that he said it, I was like, oh, that’s really interesting. And then he asked me, He’s like, what are your theories on training? And I was like, I can tell you that I’ve been fortunate to work with the best people on the planet, you know. I was recount of the conversation I had with Charlie Francis after I hurt myself my rookie year. Marl Dapa Squall put me in touch with Charlie and I talked to him. You know Ben Johnson, sprint coach, you know, all her theories on sprinting come from him. I’d a guy named Todd Rice. You know rof Eervey’s Todd Rice is the guy that trains the boots of Brothers, you know. So I just had these like amazing strength coaches. Oh yeah, I mean just like at every turn, I had these like, you know, incredible dudes. And so I just kind of smart enough to aggregate all this information and I was like, I can do this. And then they asked me to cross a football, which I even say, I don’t miss a terrible name. I thought it was a cool name, but well, I mean but people showed up legitimate with cleats, thinking that we were going like yeah, yeah, and I was like, not how we’re doing it.

00:08:11
Speaker 3: No.

00:08:11
Speaker 1: I was like I’m just trying to teach, you know. And and the original idea was like if CrossFit sat in the middle, you got CrossFit endurance on one side intervals.

00:08:18
Speaker 2: That was kind of the idea.

00:08:19
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I don’t know. And then on the outside there was like cross at football, which was they were going to like how to use crossfits for sports specific training, right, And I was like, okay, I can do this. Translation. So we ended up launching it and we got like seventeen thousand hits the first day, and then they hit me upside you got to come teach a seminar, and I was like, so the seminar was awful. We talked people how to lyft weights, and then I made them watch football plays on my cutups, and then I went through and was like okay.

00:08:42
Speaker 2: Here and then why we do this?

00:08:44
Speaker 1: And then people were like and then I had to like take a step back and realize, like, oh, like the tenants of athleticism and a lot of these pieces like this is what seems so basic and simple for me I didn’t.

00:08:55
Speaker 2: I realized you got to not dumb it down, but you have to like, well, I just.

00:08:58
Speaker 1: Didn’t think normal people wanted to know this stuff. Like well at the time, I thought that, and this, as you guys know, because you guys live in kind of a little bit of an ivory tower too. To some extent, you live in this bubble where all your friends are pro athletes, and so you think, like most normal people, like what do they do? Run marathons? Like do a triathlon. I’d go to the gym and I’d see people kind of lifting weights, and I just kind of assumed that, like there was professional athletes and then the rest of the world just kind of did like pilates. So when I got out, I couldn’t believe that like normal people wanted to know this.

00:09:25
Speaker 2: I wanted to suffer and train hard.

00:09:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like, and I was like, where are these people? I can’t believe there’s all these people that want to know this stuff, right, So it was really it wasn’t the methodology, and it wasn’t cross at HQ. Was actually the community of people that were interested, which is why I stuck around. And those are the people that I really liked and like I always go back whenever anything happens. I’m like, you just don’t remember what it was like for the people that showed up to the seminar. It was like bringing fire to Eskimos.

00:09:50
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, for sure.

00:09:51
Speaker 1: And people were so excited, they were so thirsty for it. And then like all the other stuff was just kind of like what we had to suffer.

00:09:56
Speaker 2: With, right, that’s awesome. Yeah, I mean those days. I was just out of my four year degree in exercise science and then under Tennessee Tech here and then Chip, I was actually a firefighter. The reason I found CrossFit was Chip was teaching one of the like training for performance or something, one of the classes we had to take, and like similar to you, probably in the beginning, he would just put on a CrossFit dot com video and be like, yeah, look at this. I remember one of the first workouts I watched was like burpie mile, and then he showed a guy doing fran and I think it was Bill Grumbler in turnout gear. And so I was a firefighter, Oh yeah, I could do this, and so that’s kind of the rest is history from there, and then he offered me a job as an assistant or a grad assistant and.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: Our first commercial offering at Tennessee Tech.

00:10:44
Speaker 2: No, really, I think I think so. I think it was before I was there, but it was up in the was it in the old in the stadium up top?

00:10:51
Speaker 1: Maybe on an incredible facility now, but yeah, it was awful, trash. I totally bombed it. Chip liked it well, like they liked it. But I just remember like my lecture was terrible. I didn’t know what I was teaching. I got up there and I realized I was like, oh, man, like I have to like like one of my uh like our family friends. Like you know, you end up with these kid friends where your kids are friends and your parents and then the kids aren’t friends anymore, but you still keep the parents. So my buddy Dad’s wife Michelle always is like her joke is like do better, do better, be better. And so I had this moment where I got up there and my presentation was not good because one I didn’t know the source material and I wasn’t an expert. And I just remember like echoing my head like you have to do better. And I ended up going back and that was where I started like really digging in on the methodology and deciding like who I am, what do I believe? What am I trying to teach? If I’m going to influence people, it has to be both good and authentic.

00:11:42
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, And I think basically from what I gathered from it was you took the Crosswit methodology, which is a general physical preparedness, but we know the demands of the sport of football, so we’re just sporting sport in general, right, But you can also you can adapt that. And that’s what we’ve done with on the Hunt side of things, is like, sure, we know what we’re training for in within some type of you know, but I still think you know, a lot of guys or girls get out there and think, oh hunting, I’m just I need endurance and just time on my feet, which you yes, you do. You also need a lot of this other stuff, and some of that is burst energy, you know, like we know the different energy pathways and those types of things. And so we’re training people. Granted we are leaning more towards the endurance side, especially closer to the event, but you know, there’s this whole I think we get caught up and thinking that, oh it’s got to be there’s no plan, but there is a plan. You look at a season or a year and you’re like, and I think of it as for hunting, Like I’m getting people, guys, girls ready for September, and so you know in January, we’re building strength, right. You know, you take a college football or a you know, a yeah exactly, and I know, right you and but we still keep some intensity and still you know, keep a base. But hey, we do specialize in a certain area. But then it slowly transitions. You know, we’re talking periodization to where they’re ready for their event, right, and so I look at it as hunting season, as their event or our event.

00:13:05
Speaker 1: And there, yeah, they’re just their season in general.

00:13:07
Speaker 2: Exactly, And so I enjoy it, you know, similar to you probably where you kind of geek out on it and people it gets lost where people are like, I don’t I don’t care to show.

00:13:14
Speaker 1: Me what to just tell me what to do. Yeah exactly, that’s why you’ve been successful.

00:13:18
Speaker 2: But I enjoy it, man. You know, it’s similar to what you’re talking about. You just start geeking out on numbers and just you know stuff that most people are like, I don’t, I don’t care why the number, why the movements go that way or do whatever. So but yeah, we I used a ton of the crossfoot football, so well, you know, I took the ideas.

00:13:32
Speaker 1: Of it, so you know, before a cross at football, strength was just another element that it was. Actually we started prescribing a strength workout and a conditioning workout at the same time in the same day, and they were like.

00:13:43
Speaker 2: Two workouts and we’re going to people are going to die. Yeah, close people’s mind. I remember the first time we did it to a day. People were like, I got hate mail. I get two hundred emails, how dare you? And I’m like, well, it’s called strength and conditioning. We’re going to do them both and then we can combine them into one too.

00:14:00
Speaker 1: And then you guys started doing twenty nine workouts in a day.

00:14:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s true. We did kind of mess that up for everybody.

00:14:05
Speaker 1: People. Well, so Nicholas Romanov, who was the post guy, incredible coach. I didn’t really buy into the methodology as much, but like for his knowledge as a Russian sports scientist, like unbelievable, and he was University of Moscow and so we had a lot of great conversations and he brought up a really cool point once where because I was asking him about, like, why is it some athletes can handle more training lad than others. So my roommate in college is gut named Kevin Doherty, and Doe benched like four hundred and fifty pounds in high school. She squatted like in the sixes, and then came to college, and every single day he was in college he got weaker, to the point where he barely benched three hundred pounds as a senior. And I remember asking him, like, Dough, like, what happened?

00:14:44
Speaker 2: What’s going on?

00:14:45
Speaker 1: He’s like, he goes, I’m just tired. I can’t do it. Because to play college football you have to be a big monkey, is what I call it. Like we would train six days a week, and it was like, you know, progressive overloading. Yeah yeah, And he was like I trained three days a week in high school and like I feel tired all the time and I’m detaying and I just can’t handle a lot. So I asked doctor Romanov about it, and he goes, they did a you know, I hope it’s been many years. I’ll tell his story and this is doctor Romov’s sory, not mine. Yeah, but they did research and they looked at like different monkeys. And there were certain monkeys that played and battled and fought and did everything and moved like twenty hours a day, and then there were other monkeys that only moved enough to eat and were very like sedentary and rested a lot. So what they did is they flipped the environments and they put the one monkey as he’s one of those, oh he is okay, They took the monkeys that moved all the time and they locked him in a cage where they couldn’t move sound. And then they took the other monkeys that like only moved a little bit to eat, and they forced them to move all day. And the big the monkeys that needed to move or that couldn’t move a lot, ended up just laying down and dying. And the other monkeys when they got out of the cag just went over and beat each other to death. So they theorized that there was like big monkeys and small monkeys, and in the training space it’s the same thing. And doctor Romanov went through all these different athletes that were like small monkeys where they only trained three four days a week and they want a gold medal. But the minute that you put them in a high intensity program. It just imploded.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: You mean, everybody’s different and you have to train differently for some people. Yeah.

00:16:04
Speaker 1: And so the thing is is in college football and also in pro football, you had, especially offensive line, you have to be a big monkey. You have to be a big monkey, whereas like there were quarterbacks who are small monkeys, like you know, like I played with Tom Brady and there was a kid with a little counter and he counted every single throw Tom threw and then all of a sudden, once he hit his number, he was done. And I played with other guys that could throw the ball like Patrick Mahomes can throw the ball three hundred times in a practice. I think Tom got like fifty reps. So they were like, you know, and they know exactly, like, hey, this guy’s a big monkey, small monkey. For those positions offensive line, you just have to be able to like run into a wall over and over again. Yeah, and the guys that don’t kind of naturally select out don’t make it. And so that was a big piece. And especially when we started looking at like how CrossFit people and you know, you obviously are the biggest monkey. Was yeah, well, well yeah, formerly a big monkey, but like you know, and you kind of set the pace. And I think what happened was it’s kind of like in the Tour of Ants when Lance Armstrong would take off and all those dudes tried to chase him and he would just like grind him into the earth. I think you probably obliterated your competition just for the fact that you were training at such a high volume and a lot of guys couldn’t handle it.

00:17:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no. I mean when we started, it was like one workout a day, and if you did more than one workout a day, you would probably die, like your kidneys couldn’t handle it. And whatever we did. I remember the first time we did two workouts we did there was a bench and pull up workout land in the morning, and that afternoon we did a second workout. We were like just waiting to die, you know, and it didn’t happen, and so me and Darren and then on just kind of just started doing it right and it wasn’t even it was just like second nature, right. It was like there’s a lot that goes into it, you know. In the last couple of years, I’ve joked that I think there’s some substance abuse is part of it. Little obsession, little substance abuse, a little the way I was raised, right.

00:17:47
Speaker 1: But oh you mean that you have like a little like addicted person out for sure, one hundred percent. I always believe that there was a lot of people masking addictive personalities and maybe like the dependence like this is almost better than like AA to be able to get into CROSS exactly.

00:18:02
Speaker 3: So if you have somebody, I guess you recognize that.

00:18:06
Speaker 4: So like very practically, if somebody’s following, whether it’s our program, your program, and they how do they recognize in themselves because that’s like the normal thing, you know, Like for the normal person you’re there all they see a workout and they’re like, oh, I’m not I don’t want to do that’s too much work.

00:18:23
Speaker 2: That’s bird with rope clowns.

00:18:24
Speaker 1: Well, I mean the thing the thing to think about this like I.

00:18:26
Speaker 4: Actually did like all the pro football stuff because it had anything like.

00:18:30
Speaker 3: Early on in my cherry picking workouts.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: I would look at me. But you look at a lot of the stuff we do now it’s similar to Cross because it’s interesting, like it’s intervals, like you can get more intensity when you break things, and people are get so caught up and like, oh, I just got to do a fort like even in I’m thinking in the hunting space specifically, like, oh, I need to be our rock. That’s that’s it, and I need to do that every day. And I’m like, no, you need some like intense bursts rest intense bursts, like because you’re just gonna run yourself on the ground. So sorry, I mean, uh no.

00:19:00
Speaker 1: Is the biggest issue with online programming, Katy.

00:19:03
Speaker 3: You know, if you’re a small monk, you’re a big.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: You’re a small I could put you through the training and I would. The problem with online programming is you is you’re basically programming for the bell curve, the middle of the bell curve, and the problem is you’re gonna have bout liars on the top and the bottom. And unfortunately, there’s not a good way to assess these people. And I’m sure you guys run in it, and that’s why you have churn and burn. People come in and they look at it like this is too much, this is too complicated. I don’t have this equipment. So you start looking at all the pain points. But if you can hit it, and I did. I got into it. The other day. Guy sent over an email my assistant sent it to me, and I like, I took it and I was like, the guy’s like, you know, basically like critiquing it, and I kind of like basically was like, I got thirty minutes, Yeah, sit down. And I sent this guy like a dissertation on everything, and he of course responded with like a one line room, you know, kind of a smart ass. No, it was more I don’t know, but hurt kind of I’ll use the word response, because he didn’t I don’t think he understood it and didn’t understand that there is a lot of physiology and science and experience.

00:20:00
Speaker 2: And on top of it.

00:20:00
Speaker 1: I’ve been doing this a long time. I think since two thousand and nine. We programmed at least one at the time was across a football but then it became like nine different training programs. It’s something like over four million workouts delivered to hundreds of thousands of athletes with just millions of these data points. And after a while you can kind of see like the you know, the neo matrix where you’re like, all right, I know how to get people strong, I know how to get them jacked, I know how to get them really fit. And then you’ve tested on all these athletes and you know what the results are. And so if somebody sits outside that pool, they’re either a high or really high and it’s not enough or it’s too much. And at that point you have to dial back volume in intensity and you have to look at them be like all right, I will never turn down the intensity, but like you can recover from intensity. And we did a years ago what’s the guy’s name, Abajef came and gave the Bulgarian Olympics lefling coach came and gave a talk for high school football on a program that he would use for Bulgarians to train high school fotball, basically maxing out every day. So we sent every single so somebody there sent me the program and I was like, let’s do it. I squatted between four fifty and five fifty for singles for eighteen days in a row, yep, and then on like the nineteenth day, I couldn’t even squat one thirty five. And I realized the problem is is that like you can go with a lot of intensity, but you have to be so conscious of the volume. So everybody can handle intensity, how much volume they can handle is like big monkey small monkey. So like, let’s say somebody needs three reps, because if you look at like Propen’s table, you know, you’d see like, you know, somewhere between a magic of like four to seven. So like rich could probably handle ten, you might be able to handle four. You’re still going to do the thing, same deal, and like you just have to figure out what you can recover from. And the greatest way to do it is, you know, a percentage of one hourrammar intensity, you know, and.

00:21:45
Speaker 2: Then document how you feel and hey, you know, like hey I’ve done. When you have this, you can look at all, right, this week was good, you know, and put a couple weeks together and you’re like, okay.

00:21:56
Speaker 1: I’m good, and now you start to kind of see what it looks exactly. But people don’t want to do that.

00:22:00
Speaker 2: They want to be told what to do, and they’re in one I see that side of it, Like you pay for it, so you want to know that. But also everybody’s a little bit. And then you go and you get into nutrition too, and there’s so many differents.

00:22:12
Speaker 1: I also have a theory that the training that you do before puberty there’s like an effectively priming of the pump We had Chris Summer on the podcast, who is a high level gymnastics coach, developed like kids from like cradle to like Olympic champions, and he started talking about this idea of like exposing them to like GPP and like strength training pre puberty that it effectively. They did a study that we referenced in Russia where they had kids do a bunch of strength training GPP like kind of like what you see for CrossFit pre puberty, and then other kids didn’t. Then at puberty, they all threw them in the same program, and the kids that had done this training beforehand developed strength and skills at a much higher level than the ones it didn’t.

00:22:52
Speaker 2: I think that’s building a neuro early.

00:22:55
Speaker 1: But also there’s a priming of the pump. And but so I think a lot of people did before they started lifting weights, you know, just like what we did for training as kids. I did side ride your bike trees, so like it’s six. I started in martial arts, and then we rode bikes, and we played baseball, and we did all these sports. And like where our house was was like the bus stop, so all the kids would get off and we had a basketball like a hoop so we had these like gnarly basketball games, and then my brothers played football and like just this whole thing. So I got to it, and all of a sudden, I was like lifting weights and I got stronger every week when other people weren’t. And then I was able to put on size and I grew and I just like other people kind of flaked out and I was like, I don’t know, every time I go in this weight room stuff, I get stronger. It’s kind of addictive.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I’m one of thirty two first cousins twenty five or boys. So everything we did was a competition, right.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: That is the best training environment, I really.

00:23:45
Speaker 2: Is, you know, like and you know they our uncles would shame us if the girls beat us, which they did regularly because they were pretty athletic.

00:23:52
Speaker 1: You know, like that is I’m so glad you said that. I personally believe one of the greatest training stimulus is is shame and thought of like not being able to hold the standard, where like all of a sudden, you’re like, man, like what if I’m not good enough? And the internal shame Like uh, I’ve told the story on our podcast, but I was a pretty fast runner and like like when I was in middle school and then I grew like four inches and I couldn’t run. Like it was like literally like I I like went from like you know, all of a sudden, like you know, crushing everything, to all of a sudden like I’m getting like c’s on because they would time our runs in the good grade and all of a sudden, I was like humiliated. I’m like, how am I going to go home and tell my mom I got a CMPE because I can’t run fast. So I asked the teacher and I was like what can I do? And she’s like, well, if you want to stay on Fridays, you can do extra credit runs. I’ll give you more points you get a better grade. So I like lied to my mom. I’m like, hey, I got to study extra on Fridays, and then I would run extra because I was.

00:24:44
Speaker 2: So humiliated disappointed in yourself.

00:24:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was like ten or eleven, twelve years old, and I’m like, dude, like I can’t. Well, my brothers all played football, so but I was just like a little bit of shame. And then I realized that like that’s not a bad thing, like like that’s like motivating. Well, uh, there’s a certain standard that I hold myself to you and I have to meet that.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: Sank. That’s awesome. Yeah, I mean it’s it’s intrinsic for us. That’s because we were just born in that situation, you know. And I feel like nowadays it’s tough, right, there’s a balance to it, right, you don’t want to belittle or you know, you want to somehow develop it for them intrinsically. You know. I don’t ever shame my kids about that type of stuff that you can.

00:25:24
Speaker 1: I like, as a parent, you can’t shame them. But if they have a little bit, yeah.

00:25:28
Speaker 2: And you’re trying to like how do you how do you cultivate it? Cultivate it? Right? Yeah? So like Lake, when my oldest is starting to play middle school basketball. So she’s fifth grade and then she plays some garbage minutes on sixth grade, and so it’s she plays a lot on fifth grade and then she’ll sit the bench on sixth Then you can just see it like stewing in her head that she’s like wants to be out there, and she’s like Dad, what you know, Like what do I gotta do? I’m like practice, you know, like everything comes just natural to her. She’s a good athlete, but she’s just the speed of games way different. Those girls have been playing for a while and played serious. Where she played rec ball, it was one one Saturday, one practice a week, and now she’s practicing three or four days a week and she’s getting good. But it was cool. It’s cool to see her, like how do I get better?

00:26:11
Speaker 1: And so that for me as a dad, I’m like, hell, yeah, I think I have two daughters. I get twin girls, and I got a little boy raising daughters. I’m totally not equipped for group with all brothers, right Like. I’m like, for years, the only girl we knew was my mom, right like, like there were no girls on her streets.

00:26:26
Speaker 2: It was all boys.

00:26:27
Speaker 1: And so having girls is really interesting because like like we solve problems like hey, I’m not good at this practice more, whereas like girls are not necessarily looking for you to solve their problem. I’m like, well, we can just go lift weights. We have this huge gym up on the heel, and I trained professional athlete. It’s like all these people.

00:26:42
Speaker 2: Come and I’m like, hey, let’s go get on tam sprints sprints.

00:26:45
Speaker 1: And They’re like, no, Dad, I just want to like I want you to listen to and I’m just like.

00:26:49
Speaker 2: I’m not a quick for this. I don’t know what to do. Go to your mom.

00:26:51
Speaker 1: And then my son will look at me maybe like I know, he’s like, you want to go out and shoo twenty two.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: So I’m let this do it? Yeah, Trice, yesterday other girls were gone. I was sitting in the sauna and he always asks, and I’m like, you can’t sit in the son, you know. I was like, yes, show was like come on, Trice. He’s like, what said, I’m gonna go sit in the suna?

00:27:04
Speaker 1: You want to go hot asauna? We’re talking about. Well, I put him at the bottom.

00:27:07
Speaker 2: It was one hundred and forty fifty degrees at the bottom is like one hundred and twenty. Like it’s right by the door. Yeah, but he was made his year nice. He was like I put him in. I said you got ten minutes you can sit with me, and dude, he was fired up. He’s like I can go and so he’s he loved it.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: Or U we have a barrel and we go like one eighty seven, one ninety.

00:27:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s at one ninety where I’m at, but down here he was probably one twenty.

00:27:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s that one ninety is real. It’s funny the like one seventy five. I can sit in there all day. Yeah, one ninety. At like ten minutes, I start getting this like antsy feeling.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: I started doing I rock for the last five other I’ve been doing twenty five minutes and then three minutes colde and that’s my like morning routine. I’m trying to get up thirty minutes earlier just to do it, and it’s been awesome, but it’s that last five minutes. I listened to a book in there, and I’m not like the last.

00:27:58
Speaker 1: Two minutes SONI, I was buying like sna hat.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. We had like I like.

00:28:01
Speaker 1: Cold water to put my hands in, and uh yeah, I’ll do ten and then I go thirty seconds in the cold and I get back from my other ten one and but yeah, that one eighty seven one ninety is is real. And then my wife just like hanging out there like all day and being like, oh.

00:28:13
Speaker 2: This is fine.

00:28:14
Speaker 1: I think I’m gonna stretch a little bit, and I’m over there having like a panic attack, and she’s like, are you okay. I’m like no, I gotta get out of here, and she’s like in there for like twenty or thirty minutes and like stretching. Oh, I feel great.

00:28:23
Speaker 2: I’m like, I can’t get my wife in there. She’s like, no, I’m not doing that. You got a sweat. But the kids loved it, and or Trice loved it. He was just like but the crazy thing was the next two hours, it was like you gave him twenty candy bars. He really is wide open, you know. Like I was like, hey, you gotta drink this whole glass of water while we’re in here. You got to like if I started seeing he didn’t even break a sweat. He’s nine, yeah, and so he didn’t eve break a sweat. White.

00:28:47
Speaker 1: His face just got red red, and he’s like red, just stripping.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: He was having a blast. He’s like, why are we doing this? What’s this? What’s this? And I’m just like, just I can’t talk right now.

00:28:56
Speaker 1: It’s so hot in Texas that I tried to convince my dog that, like, you know, because my one daughter plays basketball, mother daughter plays soccer, that they need to get into the sauna for like a heat inoculation, and they’re like.

00:29:07
Speaker 2: Nah, not doing f off. Yeah, Honestly, in the summer. I got away from the sauna just because it is so hot and humid here where I was, I just didn’t want to do it. I went straight cold.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: How bad is it here?

00:29:18
Speaker 2: It can nineties, mid nineties and the ninety eighty ninety percent humidity. I mean not you’re probably five or six degrees.

00:29:24
Speaker 1: I think cool or warmer. Yeah, but it’s it’s very like two years ago we were seventy days over one oh four. Jeez like it. Texas is the most angry, egregious place I’ve ever been. Like, it’s spiteful to the point where I tell my wife, I’m like, I’ll go anywhere to get out of this place.

00:29:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I got to go to Michigan.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, if somebody knocked on our dorm bought her house, I’d be like, I’m leaving this guy forsaken place and I’m never going. What was it the Davy Crockett was like, if I owned Hell in Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell. Yeah, it’s it’s that terrible, that terrible. Yeah, it’s hot. Yeah, it’s just spiteful Louisiana. So he’s aware at that marriage. Oh yeah, that’s a sweaty place, too.

00:30:01
Speaker 2: Sweaty place. That’s the hard part. The humidity. It’s the humidity they get you.

00:30:05
Speaker 1: No, it’s it’s swamp. So so the Brazilians I train for jets, they’re from like north Brazil, so victors from Florida, Laisa, and that’s the sweatiest place to the point where like he’s like, oh, you know, nobody has there any air conditioning. So the other day when we were all.

00:30:20
Speaker 2: Sleep there, I couldn’t. Like it has to be sixty seven degrees, I think I will not sleep.

00:30:26
Speaker 1: I think it’s carbs, you think so. I think it’s carbs. That they eat a lot of carbs. It makes them tired because they like rice and beans and they’re like a pretty carb heavy diet. And then when they try to come to the States and eat that same diet, they all like kind of lunchy.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:30:39
Speaker 1: So like I think it’s vitamin D exposure or they’re just way tougher than we are.

00:30:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that’s as I’ve gotten older too. The like heat and humidity I want no part of. I don’t take the cold any day.

00:30:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no problem. I can sit in the ice tub all.

00:30:51
Speaker 2: Day, I can layer up. I can do whatever, but heat just sucks, all right. So now you’re you’re training a lot of jiu jitsu.

00:30:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I I Shanji Heberro, who’s my coach. Shanji is like considered like the rich Throning of jiu jitsu or the Michael Jordan of jiu jitsu.

00:31:07
Speaker 2: Right, you better make sure Michael Jorge’s better.

00:31:10
Speaker 1: So Chanji’s like a twenty time world champion and considered like one of the best in the world to ever do it, you know, like hodyre Gracie, they considered to be the best. I think he lost five times. He lost three times to Chanji. So Shanji’s pretty legit, pretty good. So my daughter was swimming a bunch and she got kind of burned out because they wander in the pool like it was like, ooh, swimming is ridiculous. It was three hours a day, five days a week. So after like and she’s like nine or ten. So she’s like, Dad, I want to try something else, And I was like I had There’s a guy named Craig Douglas who does like a combative steel and he came on the podcast and he invited me to come on his combative steel and basically I’m pretty good on my feet because I boxed and played in the NFL, but laying on my back, I’m.

00:31:51
Speaker 2: Like a big turtle. Yeah.

00:31:52
Speaker 1: So in the NFL, if I end up on my back with a gun on top of yeah, everything’s going yeah, and I don’t have a job anymore. So we ended up to go into this combatives thing and I ended up like laying flat on my back with this dude on top of me who was like three hundred pounds but he used to be three sixty, so he’s like a big water balloon. This guy Nick, He’s super nice dude, and he was a jiu jitsu I want to say, he’s like a brown belt. He passed my guard, took my gun and shot me with a sim or a fill of a scar and he also got me ric And one of the instructors was like, dude, you got to learn to like fight off your back a little bit. And I was like what do I do? And he’s like, I’m gonna give you this guy’s number, So he gave me Shanji’s number. He was one of his black belts. So I called Shanji and he was like, you know in typical braziliance. I’ll call you back, you know, hear from him, and the Brazilians aren’t great with time. So I ended up taking my daughter up. She’s like, I want to try jiu jitsu. So I took I took her up to Shanji’s place litter ju JITs, and we just kind of became friends. And then he asked me and he’s.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: Like, hey, h.

00:32:49
Speaker 1: You’re good at lifting weights. And I’m like, I’m all right at it. And he’s like, I got some young guys that are really like high level professionals, but they haven’t trained. Would you work with them? And so I met them and there was like kids in their early twenties and like you know, at the time, I didn’t know anything about jiu jitsu, and I was like they were just I didn’t know what their skill level was. I just know that they are the nicest kids. Like I joked that I adopted all these Brazilians, like huge hearts, just the nicest kids you would ever want. Like when everybody talks about this generation, it’s not these these kids. Yeah, these kids grew up like in Brazil where like like yeah, like like money, like it’s just a different class, like a different group of human beings. Yeah, like all grew up in the church, you know, so they’re all like, you know.

00:33:31
Speaker 2: Like just solid kids, nicest kids.

00:33:33
Speaker 1: Like people that you would want to have over your house, introduce to your family. And uh so I met the kids and I was like, let’s do it. So I worked with them and trained them for two years for ADCC and you know, and then at that point I thought it was disingenuous that I was training them and I didn’t know anything about jiu jitsu. So then they sucked me in and then I started doing it, and it’s been really good for me for the fact that when football ended, I figured, like that combative style of my life it kind of ended, and I would go box and stuff, but I wasn’t never going to get in the ring and compete, so it’s just like hitting the heavy bag or kind of doing some light stuff. And then when I got into JITs and I went out there and I was like, oh, like, it’s great to have something to train for. And I realized what I was missing in my life was I just didn’t have anything to train for. Like you’ve got into hunting and some other things, but you need to have that like this is what gets me hundred percent.

00:34:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially that’s your background, right, that’s what you did your whole life.

00:34:23
Speaker 1: Yeah and so and then also my wife makes a joke, She’s like, you wouldn’t be into this if you guys were even weren’t training the best guys in the world on hundred percent, Like like a high tide ride rises all boats, iron sharpens iron, you know, like I I’d like appreciate if it was just some like black belt dad dad, bod dude he was teaching stuff I would have been in. You show up with like a twenty five year old Brazilian kid who is absolutely smashing it, yeah, and then being like as he’s choking up, being like you’re doing so good, I’m so proud of you, and you’re like.

00:34:49
Speaker 2: Shut up with you. Two things. So, the one thing we’ve talked about getting into jiu JITs did you have any major injuries or did you have any major you got sidelined? You said, but how does that go with jiu jitsu?

00:35:00
Speaker 1: Like, so, I have an issue, I have like a bone chip in the back of my knee which is limiting range of motion, and then.

00:35:07
Speaker 2: I have pain when you get past that range of motion.

00:35:09
Speaker 1: Well, it just stuck. So I was supposed to get a surgery like ten years ago, and I just have put it off my right now, Okay, I got left and then my shoulders stinged up, so I can’t put my hand over my head anymore.

00:35:21
Speaker 2: We got almost the same thing because I’ve always like I’ve wanted to try jiu jitsu, but I’m like.

00:35:25
Speaker 1: The and to finish it, hopefully business will give you a little bit of solis. Because of the training we do, We’ve found a way to develop incredible range of motion in the hips. And so because I’ve so I’m so flexible in my hips, I can cheat everything. So like I have like an interesting way that I play where people don’t know that I’m limited in these ways. So the problem is is a lot of guys come in that don’t have hip flexility, and because they don’t have that hip flexibility, and they can’t really do shit all right. And so the other problem too is people really suck with like no transverse rotation, so like the ability to be here and be able to do frame and it’s just it just comes down to, like does the training allow you.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: To do.

00:36:07
Speaker 1: And I can I’m sure, yeah, I think it’s just being able to hide it. But like, for example, Victor who I trained, was a top ultra. When he came to me, he had L four L five to the point where it was so crippling that when he went to the ADYCC he couldn’t fight on his feet. He had to literally start on his back and like just basically like sit down because he couldn’t stand on his feet. And he’s one of the best in the world off of his feet. Now what’s weird is if he’s on his feet, his level athleticism is probably about three or four. Really, you put that dude on his butt and he’s an eleven. I’ve never seen anybody. It’s like, you take that guy off his feet, and his ability to move on his back and be able to do all these kind of understuff for a guy his size is like nothing I’ve ever seen, to the point where he’s it’s frightening to roll with him.

00:36:49
Speaker 2: Really.

00:36:50
Speaker 1: The other day, there’s a thing called they called octopus guard where you’re inside control, and he kind of sat up, grabbed his leg and then kind of like got me off balance, kicked his leg under and he put it hand and did like a Turkish get up with me on his hip, and I’m like, like literally like I started kind of like, well yeah, because I thought he was gonna done because I’m thinking of all that, you know, torturing them on the bikes.

00:37:09
Speaker 2: And all the train I’m gonna get this best.

00:37:12
Speaker 1: And I thank god he didn’t. He didn’t hurt me. But I’m always like, dude, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. But it’s it’s been really just uh, it filled a bucket. I didn’t know I was missing with not only community, but also being around some young guys yep that were training hard because the problem is is my age, like most of these dads don’t do anything. And then they’re like, oh man, look pretty fit. What are you doing. I’m like, I get beat up by these Brazilians and I try to kick their ass every day. So it’s been good for me.

00:37:37
Speaker 2: That’s awesome. Yeah. No, I think the other thing was that was the first thing. And then second thing I think is exactly what you said, and we kind of preach here with Mayhem with hunt is trained for something, have something you look like I don’t. I’m not a goals guy. I’m not I don’t look especially now with you know, with a bar bell, I’m never going to hit a pr again on a bar bell, right, and so for me, those are those days are gone. But I can put a date on the calendar that’s a CrossFit like I’ve done. I did three local local partner competitions, one in July, one in August, and just finished one this last weekend or in October, and then hunting season and then two years ago for two years I did lead build one hundred mile mountain bike race. And I need something exactly like you’re saying, I need something to maybe obsessed a little bit about, but like, yeah, you know, one hundred percent as long as it’s not sacrificing you know, family time, because I’m at that point in my life. Sure, but like I still need need to not feel dangerous, but you need to feel like you need to feel dangerous a little bit, right, you know, Like I need to do something that’s you know, worth worthwhile or worth training for us. What’s the point Why am I, you know, grinding in the gym or doing whatever if you don’t have a date on the calendar that you’re aiming at, right.

00:38:45
Speaker 1: Well, it’s also who like so that this is an interesting piece is I think I don’t know, like I said, like you know, I think it’s a pro athlete, like you live in this weird Ivory tower where like I, like I said, I got the chance to one on one fist fight the toughest dudes in the world for a decade every Sunday in front of millions of people wearing white spandex, and like like when you break it down like that, people are like really, I’m like, yeah, I never touched a ball, right, Like I just got to basically impose my will, and I think that I think I did.

00:39:14
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:39:14
Speaker 1: I know a ball bounced up one time and I got it and like seventeen people hit me at once, and then the next time that similar thing came up, I just kicked it out of bounce. I was like, man, I don’t want touch this thing because my hands were so like taped up.

00:39:26
Speaker 2: I was like I can’t.

00:39:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that like level of addiction of like I know exactly who I am and what I’m doing, and I know the you know the results of my hard work, right and uh, dude, I was telling somebody the other day, I’m like, don’t be upset about the results you didn’t get because you didn’t do the work. We just had our big power ethic collective for all of our coaches. And John McPhee, who’s a former Delta guy. He was on like Rogan and Sean Ryan. He teaches some shooting stuff. So he came out and taught a shooting course for us, and uh, you know, like you guys, like I hunt every night and I very concealed, so I shoot constant constantly, you know, Like I feel like if I’m going to carry a gun, I need to be proficient. Like once a month I dry fire, but then once a month I stopped. I shoot my duty loads, reload, and then I go back. So we got out and we were shooting, and I was watching guys shoot and like they’re like all over the place, and uh, one of the guys had like a pretty badass race kimber and like he was like I don’t know what he was aiming at. I was like, we see that thing, and I basically key hold like ten shots and he’s like, man, I’m like yeah, but I actually shoot practice. Yeah, Like, don’t be upset that like you didn’t get it in when you don’t do this. Yeah, And I think the same thing for JITs and for fighting combat as because I run into people all the time and be like, oh, I’d be able to handle myself.

00:40:33
Speaker 2: I’m like, really, I don’t know.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: I was like, what if the dude knew how to fight? Or what if like these situations like and do you have the stamina? Have you ever taken a shot? Like do you really know? Have you ever tasted you on the fight club? You ever tasted your old?

00:40:44
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:40:45
Speaker 1: Have you ever broken a finger and had to reset it in between plays? And like that level of readiness, you got a plan til they get punched in the mouth? Mike Tyson h Yeah, and like I’ve been in that situation. Yeah, literally, yeah, many many times. And it’s just it’s good to know that, like you have a plan, right, and you’ve prepared for these things, and I think a lot of people just haven’t.

00:41:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, I mean even to the hunting side of it. You know, we practice archery. I lean towards archery more rifles. We went out and shot rifle because we are going this week hunting. Yeah, Elk and so went out tested a new rifle that we just got from Sick it’s also seven mil prc alm. I’ve been shooting a three hundred win, but this dude, that’s seven mil. Yesterday. Yeah it felt good.

00:41:29
Speaker 1: So I bought my son a six arc okay, yeah, so that small frame QLLC even that many fixed and six arc that thinks a laser.

00:41:36
Speaker 2: Paid this thing out to one thousand. First, we had some dope from one of our buddies that has a similar round. First shot bulls eye thousand yards. I was like, and we’re on a sled, like a gun sled, but still, yeah, it blew in my mind. It was nice. But so we shoot archery a ton and right, and so we try to and we we catch flak on the internet because we’ll do cardio and try to shoot or do you get flack on that because guys are like your mechanics bad mechanics, you’re you know, it’s it’s the same technique versus intensity thing that you hear in CrossFit all the time of like there’s a there’s a fine line that you’re trying to hit, right, dude.

00:42:11
Speaker 1: So I was very fortunate to get a tuliolk, which is in California. They’re in danger. Yeah, so my buddy friend of ours is eighteen thousand acres in California. Okay, he’s the third largest private landowner. It’s big in Californiaeah, it’s big. So he gets landowner tacks. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to hunt tuliolk for sure. So we went out to go hunt those a couple of years ago, and we chase those things through the mountains for three days with both so awesome, right, I never got within a half a mile these they would bugle and we would run, and like I’d go there and they’d be like a mile this way always. So then on the fourth day, the guy was like, hey, man, rifle. Yeah, so I shot a three hunder wind mag It was like, I think just over like five fifteen yep, one hundred and ninety grand hit it and the shoulder knocked it down. And I was like, oh, thank god we brought right because I have never killed anything big with a boat ritz. It’s I mean like turkeys and like, you know, some small deer still, but like never. And then I see like my buddies out in Oregon that are basically bow hunting these like Roosevelt els one thousand pounds and they’re taking these things down like Andy stump posts some stuff. I’m like, how, But then I realized, like, one, you got to be super efficient. You got to put yourself in the situation, and you have to have the time to invest to go out to It’s not like somebody’s dropping you in.

00:43:19
Speaker 2: No.

00:43:19
Speaker 1: You know, in Texas they have what I called the peanut butter hunts. Oh yeah, where the guys put peanut butter on the end of the barrel and the thing comes up, like I said, they shoot it.

00:43:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:43:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see that stuff all the time. I went to a guy’s house and they had this like you know, they’re feeding all these like crazy minerals and all this thing, and I’m like, that’s embarrassing. Why do you want that thing on?

00:43:35
Speaker 2: Right?

00:43:35
Speaker 1: It’s like, show me. He’s in this blind, they have a camera, they’re and they’re drinking, you know, and they shoot this thing at like five yards and I’m like, that’s not hunting, right in Texas, that’s kind of hunting. Like I feel like you got to serve forward a little bit.

00:43:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s you know, we’ve been on hunts where first day we killed something by grace of God and it’s still awesome. But man, the first one that I killed, it took me five trips, like thirty something days, and that’s the only one that’s hanging on the wall. And it’s a five by five. It’s not even a big elk, but it’s you know, it means something. And so yeah, this is the shared suffering. It’s the brotherhood, it’s the you know memories you have with that. But yeah, it’s having that date and having something to push towards or train for, and you know, we to go back to you know, we’ll do high heart rate shooting. We’ve done like eighty percent of a deadlift for three or four reps. Shoot on the minute and you know, just to tax that nervous system. But guys are just like, oh, you can’t do that, And You’re like no, because when that animal walks out and you start doing this, you know, it’s a way different experience.

00:44:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I watch like Bird’s Sworn and those guys, you know, they I mean, like Burden, those guys are like hitting shots of like eighty yards. So I like, go out and of course I set up. I’m like, we see if I can hit these things, and I’m just losing twenty dollars, but like like arrows to the point where they’re like going in the grass and I have no find them.

00:44:49
Speaker 2: I’m like, that’s the worst.

00:44:50
Speaker 1: I just lost like two hundred arrows trying to hit this thing.

00:44:52
Speaker 2: And I thought our tie was cheaper than shooting rifles.

00:44:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then I got to go buy new arrows, and the guys got to explain it, and you know, oh my god, we got to oh shop here.

00:45:00
Speaker 2: If you move to Cookville, oh man, still hot, but not as it’s not as this is, and you get like two to three months. Like what I always tell people is you got about six six weeks of you got six to eight months of great weather, and then we have two months of months.

00:45:16
Speaker 1: Like I’m naive on Tennessee. We’re in Nashville and your your eastern Nashville.

00:45:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, we’re an hour eastern Nashville and our half west of Knoxville and about an hour and a half north of Chattanooga. So like Tennessee, I always tell people, Look, when I was a kid, I was it looked like a rifle, like a slanted rifle. We’re like almost in the middle, but more towards the east. Yeah, so the right at the Appalachian Mountains are starting right now, like in the.

00:45:39
Speaker 1: Field, like it is it called the Smoky Mountains, Smoky Mountains, So yeah, like that’s that’s a pretty are We were driving around like this is beautiful.

00:45:44
Speaker 2: And it’s starting to switch colors and it’s it’s awesome.

00:45:47
Speaker 1: Texas is by far the ugliest state of hill country.

00:45:51
Speaker 2: I went. I went hunting in hill country the first time. It’s this year, and.

00:45:54
Speaker 1: That’s where we live, okay, and it’s the only part that’s at least doable. But we haven’t got rain in like five months, okay, so the entire thing is covered in dust and dirt.

00:46:02
Speaker 2: We were in Amarillo this last weekend and it just gray until you get to Palo Duro Canyon. I don’t know if you’ve been to Amarilla, and we do a mountain bike race there, twenty four hour, four men relay there every year and it’s beautiful. Like I didn’t know, you know, I’d gone to Amarillo a bunch of times and then they’re like, hey, we’re gonna go ride in the canyon. I’m like, canyon, you know, your flat, flat, flat, huge canyon and it’s beautiful.

00:46:21
Speaker 1: But yeah, and like like I think it’s a big bend.

00:46:24
Speaker 2: That whole area.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: Yes, real pretty, but for the most part texts pretty ugly. I mean, and I can say that like you well and that and also from California, And I think the problem is is like he becomes such an elitist in California just for the fact that the weather it’s perfect everywhere and it’s most beautiful state in the planet.

00:46:39
Speaker 2: It really is.

00:46:40
Speaker 1: Like like I was a couple of years ago, we did a ride for Indian Motorcycle. Okay, they were coming out with this new bike called the EPI Pursuit, So they flew us to San Francisco and we rode these bikes down like one all the way through to Joshua Tree.

00:46:52
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:46:53
Speaker 1: So it was like eight days where I got to like basically ride through And I had grown up in California, but I had never ridden a motorcycle like that. I mean, We’re driving through like Moral Bay and like, uh like all the yeah good, and I’m like, I can’t believe I live in Texas. So I don’t know, we’ll see where we go. But about every seven years I get the itch to move and I look at some maybe maybe potentially look at some new places. But my daughters are in eighth grade, so they’re getting ready to go to high school, and so yeah, we’re kind of in a weird spot. I’ll see how they go. But I I do like the fact that I can hunt my land, and I do that every single night because I have to kill invasive species. So I have a tripod thermal rifle and I shoot kind of an SBR three O eight and then my son’s got like that six arc and we had like a three hundred blackout and so he’s he’s on the cams too. U nine, Okay, Trice is eight. He killed his first year last year. Yeah, So I ended up shooting a big buck, and for some reason, the two does that he was chasing just were kind of like. The next day, we’re like just milling around lost, and I was like, man, like, we could use those doughs. So I shot the one dough and the other dough didn’t run. He’s like, Dad, can I shoot it? And so he got behind that three oh eight, pulled it like knocked it down at eighty yards and I was like, oh you did, and then yeah, like it was nothing, like didn’t even hesitate. And I looked at him I was like, well, he’s like, oh, it’s the same radical from uh Fortnite. Oh jeesus, And I was like, what is this game? So he’s been playing this Fortnite game and they were like he’s like a wizard shooting this thing. And I was like, dude, and he said, can I get a gun? I’m like, yes, let’s go get it right now.

00:48:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:48:27
Speaker 1: And so he’ll go out there and I think he’s going to spoil hm because we shoot everything suppressed. Yeah, and we just sit in the back and plank and you know, set up targets and different things, and he loves it.

00:48:37
Speaker 2: That’s awesome.

00:48:38
Speaker 1: So, like they can’t do that in California.

00:48:40
Speaker 2: His son killed three doughs. The other night. We were at across friend of ours runs a he’s got fifteen hundred acres. That’s where it was.

00:48:48
Speaker 1: They take, uh, so he’s got landowners. Well, well, so has hunting season started?

00:48:53
Speaker 3: It has, But Tennessee, you can kill three dos a day.

00:48:56
Speaker 2: You can kill two antlered bucks for the entire season, three domes a day. And so this guy has fifteen hundred acres. He takes critically ill kids and vets on hunts and so you know, they’re mostly buck hunts, and so he’s just got all these doughs that need to be cleaned up. So, like, what, eight of us went out there the other night and Ji, his son, was the only one that killed. We all had deer, but none within range. Nothing was within like seventy yards and gi birds. Text in the group He’s like killed, one reloaded killed, another one reloaded killed, the third one. We’re done. And I was like, you, maastard.

00:49:31
Speaker 1: So we for our wildlife exemption, I have to take five I have to like basically call five doughs.

00:49:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, and.

00:49:38
Speaker 1: We’re supposed to taking one buck with like two bucks. So for like one year I decided just to kind of like let him go and I didn’t take any bucks. And then that next year, about a week before hunting season, he was he got hit on the road. Oh and my wife’s like the big bucks on the road, and so I like jumped in my truck and somebody had like and people take road kill time to Texas. So the guy somebody ended up put in the back of the truck and was driving away. I could see myntlers. I was like, oh, so now I realized when I see him, I got to take him down.

00:50:02
Speaker 2: That’s the neighbors around here. Nothing’s growing past a four point, not a chance.

00:50:08
Speaker 1: So this is interesting and maybe have opinion on this, but I always thought that like the genetics were either like an a point or a ten point or this. Yeah, I didn’t know that they could actually grow from like an eight to a ten and kind of grow.

00:50:19
Speaker 2: Way more things. Yeah, you know, I think genetics have a lot to do with it. And there’s you get some goofy type stuff and different you know, points off of them, but yeah, a lot of it has to do with the dough, right, And I’m not I.

00:50:30
Speaker 3: Think everyone’s some of them are just like skank cracks.

00:50:34
Speaker 1: But so for for years I’ve been killing eight points because I wanted to try to like let the ten point genetics go. And I told that to a guy and he’s like, that’s not a real thing. I’m like, did I just learn?

00:50:44
Speaker 2: Well?

00:50:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was, what do you mean? He goes, no, eight points are grown.

00:50:46
Speaker 2: To ten points?

00:50:47
Speaker 1: And I was like, no, way have I been like misdoing this all these years? And then I realized, I’m like, man, maybe I’m not country enough.

00:50:53
Speaker 2: You’re eating it.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh we always do. Yeah, we we have an incredible processor. We take it there, I eight deer sausage last night, right, we do like I’ll cook it in like a big like I guess, like a Dutch Boy pot, and then we just put in like tomato sauce and I make the kids like spaghetti getty. Heck yeah yeah with that deer sausage. Like this is great.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: I mean, I’m sure a lot of the guys on here be like I never shoot an eight point, but I’m an equal opportunity, especially here in Tennessee where we’re at in Tennessee, all of our neighbors are going to shoot something if it’s an eight or less. I had a neighbor. One of my neighbors told me he shot a big bodied spike here one year, and I was like, sweet, you know, big bodied spike, bodied spike.

00:51:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, I do need to shoot my bow more.

00:51:37
Speaker 2: But I find myself like therapeutic. That’s why I do it, Like I just enjoy. You know, with a gun, you gotta like there’s just way more into it, right, you know, with a bow, I can just We’ve got papers from twenty yards out to one hundred in the front yard, and then we’ve got five targets over here property. Yeah, it’s beautiful here, and then you know, you got the the stressful part about not shooting the bison behind the target. But other than that, you know, it’s pretty good.

00:52:01
Speaker 1: It’s a lot of land to manage. Yeah, I like I so like I said that, we have a little bar and creek cruncher a property and because the old man built a damn it’s kind of like capture water. But it’s super overgrown and so I have to I’ve been cleaning this thing out and like have to manage all this land, and like you got to have equipment. I got to have stuff to fix the equipment and like the amount of work that I have to do. When people talk about land, I’m like, yep, I would have land, but I want to have a house about ten miles away that’s on a piece of property where I never had, Like literally, I want to have like where I could cut the lawn with like scissors and then and then yeah, and then I want like something like this because we’re all on one and then I would just build it. And then because I work on trucks and fabricate, so which is another one, Like if you’re gonna have all stuff. Well, you got to be able to weld.

00:52:44
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, for sure. So if you can’t weld, oh that’s why you and Watkins were walking welding.

00:52:49
Speaker 1: Well and trucks and all that like, because so like that’s the greatest way to learn to weld. It’s just fabricate off road trucks.

00:52:55
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So.

00:52:58
Speaker 3: I do have a question, So, talking sports specific training, you went from football to all of a sudden just training these are jiu jitsu guys didn’t know much about it, right, So just what did you learn in there or immediately said, well, I need to train this differently for these guys compared to So.

00:53:19
Speaker 1: There was a lot of epiphanies that I had in the training model in that the theories I had about training were one thing. But then when you start going and teaching seminars, and I was very fortunate to teach like hundreds of seminars around the globe, and basically people would show it for the CrossFit deal and I get to put them through to like a two day strength and conditioning I guess you could say diagnostic. And I realized that the people that I was working with were the least athletic versions of themselves. And the reason being is that they’d effectively morphed into something that just looked like saginal playing bilateral hip pinching. And you know, I mean the problem is is that’s the way the crossfait was design cross at mainsight is that it was just nothing but bilateral hipinging and a saginal plane. And athleticism happens in three planes of motion, you know, saginal, frontal, and transverse. You know different you know, primal patterns X, y and z access. You can be able to step, squad and lunch, you know, in the different upper body stuff. And so what I did is I looked at the model for sports like let’s say, like you know, athleticism, and then I created my own definition of athleticism based upon you know, what we had seen, which was the ability to seemlessly and effortlessly combined primal movement patterns based to accomplish the own or novel task. And based upon that model of athleticism, you know, similar to CrossFit defined fitness, I’d defined athleticism. Now this is where things get really wild. Fitness is personal, right, So to say that fitness is universal is a complete misnomer, right, being like, the fitness that you need to hunt is different than the fitness that you needed to win across the games. So to say that everybody need like has the same degree of fitness just didn’t make sense to me. Athleticism it’s universal. You can watch somebody. And I told Rory this. I obviously saw you in the cross of games. I’m like, man, this guy’s.

00:54:59
Speaker 2: Kill in it.

00:55:00
Speaker 1: But I never really I didn’t know whether or not you were athletic or not, right, and then I saw you play like a clip of flag football and you rolled out and you threw back across your body, and I was like, he’s athletic. Right, So for me, I had to see you do something, do something, do something athletic. I get that just basically going in a front like straight line, just basically suffering.

00:55:20
Speaker 2: You can’t it’s not athleticism.

00:55:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean I remember Kalipa right, like they did that zigzag run and he looked like he almost broke his ankles. And like I’ve trained with Jason, I’ve seen him and that’s not his strong suits, not athleticism.

00:55:32
Speaker 2: He’s our freaking straight forward athlete. But in that you know, you give him one task, right.

00:55:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so what I’m focused on is how do I make the most athletic version of yourself? Because athleticism is the ultimate like pretty girl in the room, right, Like, I’m not a Ferrari guy, but if a front engine B twelve Ferrari pulls up, I’m gonna hear that noise. I’m I’ll be like, oh my god, that thing sounds amazing. So athleticism, to me is the gold standard. So how do I take somebody and make a more athletic version of themselves? So when I started training these guys, I knew that they were highly skilled at jiu jitsu, right, but I didn’t know how athletic they were. So I put them into the same model because I had always viewed athleticism in terms of like standing on your feet, like imagine a linebacker, you know, being able to move. But now all of a sudden, you talk about people that play a sport that’s a more competed, a sport that’s like a three sixty gyroscope. They have to be strong in positions which I had never seen, like on your back here and this I mean to play bottom, play top. And so when I put them into the model and then the feedback I got from Shanji is they’re strong in positions they should not be strong in. They have something different than what they had before. And that was kind of the piece I knew, and I was like, oh, so athleticism exists. It doesn’t matter if you’re standing on your feet if on your back. But they also have to have a high level training environment, right, Like the training is one thing, but the sports specific adaptation and who’s around you and the competition. These guys have the most competitive training environment I’ve ever seen, Like I’ve never seen people going and legitimately try to kill each other for hours. And with that, it’s like, you know, I mean, so they have the environment, they have the skill, they have the early adaptation, and they learned all that before they were strong. So I always think too, like Olympic lifting, if somebody’s pretty strong when they come to Olympic lifting, they’re going to muscle the bar. If they’re pretty weak when they start Olympic lifting, they got to figure it out. Then they got to figure it out and then they get strong later. These guys start at such a young age, before they were strong, all they had was technique, and then they grew big and we gave them strength and now they’re just savages and like in a good way. I used that word once in this guy. This African dude was like, that’s kind of a like not a good word in Africa, and I was like, well, here, if somebody said that guy’s a savage in the NFL, but dude’s a savage, that’s a good thing to us. But yeah, it was just basically, there is a model for athleticism, and that when you put people into the model that we’ve developed within the training space, I can you know, improve upon that. And then what’s also cool with the way that with athleticism the blueprint I created, I can lay that on top of other people’s programs and see where they’re deficient and then help them. Okay, why can’t I do this? We’ll show me where you train this. Like one of the ones that we talked a lot about is a hip extension. Hip extensionally happens when you sprint, when the knees behind the glute.

00:58:08
Speaker 2: That’s it.

00:58:09
Speaker 1: So like just standing up and like closing your hips on a squat’s not hip extension. Hip extensionally happens when the knees behind the glute, So how do you train that if you don’t sprint like maybe like a Bulgarian split squad, but you have to sprint, you have to do things for your knees behind the glute. Is that’s one of the fundamental patterns of athleticism. If you don’t do something with a knee behind the glute, then like you’re leaving terrible hipps. You’re not training a hip extension. And then how would you understand these positions? If I don’t understand how to move my trunk and be stable and strong in these different positions, Like if you don’t train it or you don’t know to train it, then how do you know what you’re deficient at. I think what was fascinting about jiu jitsu is that they’re constantly looking for like pressure test to where somebody’s weak. Can this guy play this garden here? And people get kind of stuck into one side. But I need them be both bilatterally strong and then also never putting them in a situation where we ever take away from who they are in their wheelhouse. It’d be like for you, you know, like you had a wheelhouse that you knew.

00:59:04
Speaker 2: In that overhead squad and whatever. Yeah it’s not as way. Did you get deficient in that? Well?

00:59:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, but but I mean like you should, like you know, the age old like Ohay’s train. Your weaknesses I thought was horseeshit. Yeah, probably my profanity if to use any of it. I didn’t know if we were uh you know. But so for me, I was always like I always had fast hands. So I remember I ran in a Michael Strahan at a club in New York years ago and he’s like, you know, when we get in there, the one thing they circle you is say when they call you the straw that stirs the drink. But they also are like, your hands are so fast, don’t let this guy get his hands on you. And that was what I was. I was fast, Like I could set to a position, bend my knees, and I could shoot my hands and I knew like whether you’re not you’re playing hot hands or whatever like my brothers and I played that on car trips for hours. So I was always fast hands and like like we did speedback, I did everything to keep my hands fast, and like that was what I you know, quick punch, fast hands. I was never not going to train that, right, So you have to decide. I talk to all the young guys that we train, is like, what’s your wheelhouse? What do you do better than anybody else? Let’s pour gas on that and then bring the other things up, the other things up as you come. So training athletes is really interesting. And you guys know this like it. Our brains in our eyes are designed to see symmetry, right when you watch somebody move, you know, like somebody can step off of a curb and take Let’s just like I watched you, you know, roll out. I watched him roll out and throw across his body and I was like, I’ve seen athletic people do that, and I’ve seen unathletic people try to do that. And if it doesn’t look seamless and nefferless and not easy, yeah, but you can train that with repetition. And I’ve watched you know, Tom Brady incredible, but he is able to fool people into thinking he’s more athletic than he says because he was so regimented. But like if you watch him, like he probably can’t jump over real well. I mean he’s better today than he used to be, but like his mechanics and his perfection and his attention detail was like nothing I ever saw.

01:00:54
Speaker 2: He just doesn’t pick stuff up fast.

01:00:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, but then he but he’s so driven.

01:00:59
Speaker 2: That he would do it. Yeah yeah, he’d figure it out.

01:01:01
Speaker 1: Whereas I played with other guys that like like I. We had a backup quarterback gun named j Feely, who yeah yeah, so if you saw aj he kind of look like an accountant and he was one of our backups, Like he just like you didn’t think he was a football player. And I remember we played in a celebrity golf tournament and like the place we were at out of basketball court, he like went to and like shot this fade away and I was like, wait a minute. I was like where’d that come from? And like I realized he was like he just was unassuming, but it was incredibly athletic and moved really well. And that was the interesting thing. Man. There were guys that like forced their way through it, like putting like a you know, like their shoulder the wind, I’m going to move this rock, and the other people that was just seamless, neverless, gifted, just gifted.

01:01:40
Speaker 2: So you still watch the NFL I do team.

01:01:43
Speaker 1: Now, you know, I root four different teams based upon players. So I worked with a kid named Will Fries who came to me and his contract year end up signed five years eighty million. Last year he was he was in the Colts, he went to the Vice King. So now I’ve been watching him and he’s been playing great and.

01:02:03
Speaker 2: Uh Ions fan. So I was born in Michigan, so yeah, yeah, how’d you get down here? My dad worked for TRW airbag Inflators, moved moved the plant down here, and so we’ve been here ever since. It’s a bad place to end up, No, it’s pretty good. So but yeah, I’m a Detroit sports fan, so it’s been a rough upbringing. Uh.

01:02:22
Speaker 1: You know Hank Frayley who played center for me or center next to me at the Eagles CC offense.

01:02:26
Speaker 2: A line which is awesome. Yeah, they’ve got a good group there now with Dan and Catain Shepherd and dude.

01:02:33
Speaker 1: It’s they’re fun to watch at least. They have a great, great staff and it’s a good style of football.

01:02:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:02:38
Speaker 1: I love how everything runs in patterns, Like I was watching Scatterboo play.

01:02:43
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh my god.

01:02:45
Speaker 1: That dude has about a three year expiration.

01:02:48
Speaker 2: That’s what we were saying. I said, yeah, three is high. Yeah, that’s a high.

01:02:52
Speaker 1: He might not make it out of this year.

01:02:53
Speaker 2: No, And it’s fun to watch, Yeah.

01:02:56
Speaker 1: Dude, it’s it’s great. I love the fact that I cannot believe that many teams past.

01:03:04
Speaker 2: I was like, I was watch like I didn’t really watch them until we were going we were driving to Oklahoma and we watched that playoff game with Arizona State.

01:03:12
Speaker 1: And oh h yeah the bowl game they played.

01:03:15
Speaker 2: Or Texas maybe the first time I ever saw him too, and I was like, I was like, he’s puking on the sideline, like I.

01:03:24
Speaker 1: I was so impressed. And then when I got into the draft and I’m like, I can’t believe somebody’s not going to take a chance on the r the team’s passed up on them, and that kid’s running the rock, Like I haven’t seen anybody run the rock like that since like John Reggins, John Allstot like I played with guys like that.

01:03:37
Speaker 2: We just talked about this on a podcast. I was like coming back around to like the full back, you know, tight end full back ish era.

01:03:44
Speaker 1: So they the the NFL got kind of neutered, you know, it became just like the big pass game, and the problem is that the defenses became so just unwilling to hit anybody. Yep that I think now that like the offenses are like, well, the defenses are soft because we’re nervous hit anybody. Let’s just put a big full back there.

01:04:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:04:00
Speaker 1: So now you see teams actually running a full back just like, I can’t believe. This is the best.

01:04:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the football. I like, there’s a football you like, Yeah.

01:04:07
Speaker 1: It’s it’s great to see the Yeah, it’s like I do like watching pro football. And the biggest reason now too, is just they have so many cameras. Like I remember the first time I was playing and they were stringing cameras above us. It was kind of like a little like nerving. Yeah, Like all of a sudden there’s like a camera like like right above your head and it’s aimed right at you, and you’re like, i’s got a holding penalty and things on me. Yeah. But now they have I think something like seventy five cameras, and if you ever see, they’re like shooting all over and they can three D model stuff. So all of a sudden they pull it out and they do this three sixty things.

01:04:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve seen it.

01:04:39
Speaker 1: It’s incredible. I think what they’ve done better than anything is they’ve made it such a fan experience from home, like you understand what’s going on. It’s unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, thank you. What else you guys got anything else? We cover it all, You cover it all.

01:04:52
Speaker 2: John that was also about it.

01:04:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great, dude.

01:04:54
Speaker 2: One.

01:04:54
Speaker 1: I’m bum that I haven’t met you guys before. Yeah, I know, dude, you.

01:04:58
Speaker 2: Know, appreciate your both big fan bigs.

01:05:00
Speaker 1: Yeah thing, thank you for having me, dude, this is great. And is there anything any way I can never help or contribute to, let me know.

01:05:06
Speaker 2: Let’s do it. Anything else, Scott, that’s good. Cool sou mm hm hm