This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we had one of the world's best sports athletic trainers ever. Brian Kula, by the way, he coaches and helps Christian McCaffrey. This is one of the best athletes in the NFL right now. Anyway, Brian Kula teaches us today the secrets of developing speed, power and strength. And actually in this episode, no joke, he blew our minds. This happens rarely when we have a trainer come on and we feel like we might disagree. But at the end, we learned something. Brian taught us a lot in this episode. Look, if you're a trainer or coach and you want to teach people how to build speed and power, you will not want to miss this episode.  This is one of the smartest people we ever talked to in the space. Today's giveaway on YouTube, the Super Bundle. Here's how you can win it when we post this in that 24 hour period. Leave a comment underneath, subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. You do all those things that enters you to win the Super Bundle. 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You get $200 off and you also get to belong to a private group on Facebook only for Mind Pump trainers and coaches so we can all work together and win this war on poor health. Anyway, if you're interested, go check it out. Go to mindpumpfitnesscoaching.com. All right, here comes the show. Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for coming on. So something that tripped me out quite a bit. Now, I know Adam and Justin have played sports. Justin at the college level. I never really played traditional sports, but I always assumed that at the highest level, the trainers that trained the players just knew the most cutting-edge exercises and techniques and programming. And when we started the podcast, I was shocked when we would meet some of these trainers and they would do things that I wouldn't even allow my trainers in local big box gyms to do. It just blew me away. And I realized that a lot of these athletes were so gifted and they'd been training for so long that as long as you don't mess them up... In spite of their training. Yeah, it was in spite of their training. Then we met some other trainers where they just blew my mind. You seem to be one of them. You seem to train people different and produce incredible results. What's the difference between how you apply or approach training your athletes versus, let's say, how other athletes try to improve, let's say, speed, power and performance? Sure. You know, I think there's such a spectrum when it comes to training. And I think where you fall in the spectrum kind of defines you as a trainer. And I think for us, it's a speed development, speed-based programming type of an approach. I come with a long background in track and field. And so the speed development component was really a piece that we thought could move the needle for athletes no matter what sport they were in, what stage of development they were in, they all needed speed. And as you've seen, even at the highest level in soccer and football and lacrosse and all these sports, speed defines kind of the best people on the field. And so, again, my long history that, you know, like I've said before, I didn't really set out to have this unique training system. I just always felt like it was the proper way to go about, you know, helping an athlete, starting with the speed-based, doing things in and around that that support speed. And that doesn't mean that we do things completely different than other trainers. A lot of it is just how it's structured, how we put it together, what we prioritize, I think is really probably that, you know, maybe the differentiator. And then obviously when you're working with a professional athlete, it's just even a little bit different from there. You can't just do the same things you do with a developing young athlete.  Tell me a little bit about your upbringing and like how you grew up in coaching and training and how you got to where you're at. That's right. Yeah, it's the family business.  My grandfather was a state championship coach. My father was a state championship coach. I kind of grew up in a gym. You know, I was hang cleaning when I was probably eight years old with PVC pipe and just kind of got to be around that. I really took to my dad. I was the oldest.   I was familiar with that stuff from a really young age. And then I just had this trajectory where I was going to go be a coach teacher following my dad's footsteps. So I'm not sure I had another choice to do, you know, other than what I did, but definitely had a really good base and foundation of knowledge, you know, even going into like college when I started learning, you know, the science of what I was going to be doing. Could you remember all the way back then, like the stuff that your dad was doing and stuff that was different than everybody else? I mean, as a kid, could you- He did you do compound lifts and things like that, right? Oh yeah. Nobody else was? Yeah, he was doing things that I mean, back then it was kind of a big, whether it was like tilted towards bodybuilding or kind of a powerlifting type of an approach. And we did a level of powerlifting. He ran a powerlifting club and things like that, which, you know, strength moves the needles for athletes in all regards, obviously, but he was already into Olympic lifting and things like that. And, you know, because he was also a track and field guy, he was a four event state champion in high schools, you know, track and field. He also played football. But because of that background, you know, and naturally he tilted towards some speed development kind of stuff. And so moving the bar fast and kind of the strength speed stuff, now you're starting to see it's like, it's not cutting edge necessarily. He's been around for centuries, but he was really into that stuff. So it influenced me greatly. What, so you said strength moves the needle. We understand that, right? If you get stronger, you tend to get better at most physical pursuits. That's right. But speed is very interesting. What are the components that contribute to speed? And then how do you train for those? Because, you know, I lift, I can be pretty strong. I can lift more than average guy, but I would not classify myself as fast. I don't have speed. And then there's other guys that wouldn't lift half as much as I do, but they would just leave me in their dust. Like what is it that makes speed different? How do you train for that? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a really speed is a, it's a neural activity, right? It's a central nervous system and how that fires. And so you have to really, it's like anything in training. If you have a adaptation to a stimulus, so it's what kind of stimulus are you presenting? And so when we do speed stuff, we do stuff fast. We run fast. We jump fast. We try to create great stretch reflex and things that are components of speed. And you see somebody who's fast, they all have common traits.  They move fast. They hit good positions, which is another component for us with the mechanics piece that we dive deep into. And that's partly because of my years of experience of developing a track and field sprinter. There's a level of efficiency that goes into that as well. And so how do you teach that? I mean, it's easy to have somebody do squats and they get a little faster because they're stronger, but can you actually get in there and dive into the details of how their foot's getting in the ground, the force application, the proper recovery mechanics, you know, all the things that would go into moving the needle a little bit farther than just getting stronger. Okay, what about fatigue? Because I remember as a trainer, when we first learned how to do what would be considered plyo exercises. I mean, this is way back. I'm talking like late nineties, early 2000s. So we'd have people jump on boxes and benches. But as trainers, we had no idea what plyometrics were. So we would just have people do it until they got tired. And I remember I met a trainer who had a little bit of an Olympic lifting background. And he told me, if you're tired, you're not moving fast. You're not training explosivity anymore.  They have to do this fast. Fatigue is the enemy and it blew my mind. And I've heard you talk about this as well. Explain fatigue because right now someone listening to you is like, oh, move fast. Cool, I'm gonna go do my curls super fast like I get tired. That's not exactly right. No, and you hit the nail on the head. I mean, it is, fatigue is kind of the enemy, right? We don't want to try to, when we're training, obviously there's gonna be a neural system fatigue at the end of a workout, but during the workout, intra workout, we don't necessarily want, you know, to hit a level of fatigue because then we're not hitting that 98, 99, 100 percentile of movement, which is what we want to develop the appropriate system for speed. Okay. So rest and recover. Rest and recovery and how it's structured and put together becomes supreme. You know, it's all the exercises and everything that you'd want to do with an athlete is out there, but how you put it together and how much of it that you do is critical. So when do you stop a set? So let's say somebody's doing a squat. Yeah. I mean, it could be any exercise, but let's say it's a squat and you're trying to train power and speed within that squat. So you're watching them. You said fatigue is the enemy. In other words, just a paraphrase. If they start to get tired and move slow, it's now we're not doing what we're trying to do. When do you stop the set? Like, what are you looking for? Like, cause someone right now might be like, okay, like, how do I know when to stop at what rep? And when do I stop the set? Yeah, I think some of that is pre-programmed. I mean, it comes in through how am I putting together their sets and their reps and their rest intervals in that exercise. You know, for us, we live in the one to three rep range for power. We live in the, you know, three to seven rep range for strength. We rarely get into the reps eight, nine, 10 and above because that's where you're going to see real fatigue. And then we don't want to get good at moving slow. We're not that interested in hypertrophy. If we get some level of, you know, the hypertrophy because of strength, we're okay with that. That's good, dense muscle fiber, but we're not in for the big pump.  But for an athlete, it's much more important. You know, are they moving fast? Are they fully recovered? So to answer your question, as a coach's eye, if I see that there's fatigue happening in a workout, we're going to cut it off right there. Charlie Francis, you know, one of the old famous track coaches used to say, if there was a PR done in practice, you were done with that session immediately. Oh, wow.  Well, let's pause on that for a second. I just completely blew my mind. That's a great point.  Anything beyond that, unless you could break that PR, which is probably not going to happen, is just compromising recovery and maybe what you just accomplished, so stop. So even if you're in 15 minutes, hit a PR, you're done. That's right. Wow, that really blows my mind. And it does, because again, I think we all grew up under the mentality that more is better. I've been doing a little bit more. I work a little harder. You know, it's the plus one factor, right? I do one extra rep every day. Over two years, I've done, you know, 700 extra reps. And in some regards in some facets, that does, that matters, right? Consistency matters and doing something consistent in a consistent basis matters. But when it comes to like high output, you can only do that so many times a week. You know, we train some of our top guys, top gals, three times a week maximum with a day of recovery in between. So we don't give, now we'll do active recovery, we'll do a workout, you know, on those maybe a Tuesday, Thursday, but they're Monday, Wednesday, Friday routines. They're, we're getting after it, you know, in regards to, you know, they might be running a fly 10 meter as fast as they can. That stimulates central nervous system like nothing else on the planet. So it's gonna take them several 24 to 48 hours to recover before they can do something like that again. Or again, you're either just, you know, not training the proper system or you're setting up for injury. Both things of which we're not interested in. Now, Brian, when I hear you say, we're getting after it, here's what I picture or automatically comes to mind.  Like the typical like burn calories or bodybuilding workout, like I fried my legs, I hit my back, I can't move it anymore. That's not what you mean though. You don't mean we're getting after it like that. So explain that. That's right. Yeah, no, our, I mean, I would say in a 90 minute training session, there might be four to five minutes of actual real work getting done because everything else is gonna be potentiation, activation, work up to preparation. Then, you know, we might hit just two fly tens in a workout might be their actual load volume. Now we're gonna throw some ply metrics in there. We're gonna do some other things, but a good ply metric set takes less than 10 seconds. You know, so when you add all that time up, it's kind of like the old track and field decathlon. You know, it's a two day event, but you actually compete for about five and a half minutes. So it's a similar concept where, you know, the timing of it and the execution of it is way more important than just being fatigued at the end of the workout. So not being able to walk out of the weight room is not a good workout in our world. Right, right. And just to add to that, you said hypertrophy for the sake of hypertrophies, not a good idea. And after your bodybuilder, of course, that's what you want. But if you're an athlete and you gain 10 pounds of muscle, but you don't gain much strength, you just made yourself slower, essentially.   Who's gonna win? Yeah, of course. So it's just, it's mass-specific force is what we refer to it as, and that's, you know, what's your body weight to strength ratios? And, you know, for every couple pounds of body weight, you have to have exponential strength to overcome that weight to move the same speed. Right. So we're gonna try to make you strong and fast and develop the nervous system without putting extra pounds on. I mean, even Christian, you know, as an NFL running back, best in the league this year, about 206, 207 pounds, you know? We really try hard to keep him there. You know, we don't want him to be 215, 220. Okay, so what does this feel like? So if I'm trying to train myself, so the way I picture this, and I keep hammering this because it took me a long time ago, it took me a long time to understand this completely. So what this feels like, and correct me if I'm wrong, what this would feel like in a workout is, I'm doing a movement, I'm trying to do it explosively and quick, and when I start to find that, I can't move it explosively and quick. Now it's just, I'm noticing like my sets are slower than they were before, I'm done. That's right. That's right, and there's ways to monitor that, right? You can have a coach's eye watching you, you could have a VBT, you know, tracking system that's watching you like a perch or something that's tracking your bar speed or tracking, you know, we use a lot of timing system and we'll use vertical jump measuring systems so that we know exactly where they're at. You know, with 30 years experience, I can tell you if you're done, but there's younger trainers that might not have that eye yet, so we just use equipment and technology to tell you, hey, you're now performing at a 87 to 90% range, you're done. So looking at bar speed and stuff like that? Yeah, absolutely. How hard is it to get the clients to adopt the philosophy, right? Because I imagine you have to wrestle sometimes with the guy going like, I got more. Yeah. Why are we stopping now? This was easy. Why are we resting this long? No doubt. How often do you gotta wrestle? It depends on the level of athlete, but almost daily. I mean, especially with the pro athletes, you know, and I got a few of them at a really high level. I got a soccer girl in mind, you know, she plays for Team Canada and man, she just wants to do something all the time and you know, her rest interval, I always tease her that she doesn't know what a real minute is. You know, I want a minute recovery in about 10 seconds.  And then you go, I'm gonna tell you why. You have about two or three good reps in you at that level and then you're only gonna be operating at 95% so you're not gonna run as fast. It only takes a couple of times of that and then they kind of realize and understand. Yeah, and then you're just practicing how to move slower. Exactly, and if that was the case, then I'd be, I wouldn't want to be in business, right? I mean, it's like, hey, you want to be really good at running slow, go to the guy next door. I mean, that's not my gig, you know, I want to make you as fast as humanly possible, move really efficient and explosively. So that's gonna take this, you know, this different approach. Now, how hard you mentioned the clients, but how hard has it been to work with coaches in terms of you working with professional athletes? They have like a whole system, you know, that they send them off with, but then you're doing things completely different in terms of like the off-season training. And have you ever been able to integrate some of your methods in with some other organizations? Yeah, at some level, I mean, it depends. We haven't really even tried that hard to infiltrate like the professional system. I mean, there's a major respect there for what those guys do and have to manage, you know, an NFL team, that guy's managing 53 guys plus a practice squad and everyone's got a different story and injuries and I can't really speak into that. So, I mean, we kind of just trust that they're gonna do good by the athletes and then we'll take what we can in the off-season. We do do a bunch of consultation with high schools and stuff like that where we can, you know, kid comes to us for six months. We want to try to make sure they keep that going. Cause again, it is a consistency game, you know, speed. You got about a three to five day window where the central nervous system will start to detrain if it's not stimulated. So that takes a repetitive three to five day stimulation. And if you go into an in-season mode and you never sprint, hamstring injuries, neural fatigue, you know, you start to see kind of a deep performance or decrease in performance from not hitting that system. You've mentioned the central nervous system. So I'm gonna tell a story to kind of illustrate this and then an example I give because I think people have a tough time understanding, okay, central nervous system, neural fatigue versus the muscle fibers themselves and muscles. So the story, I'll tell you a story happened to me years ago and my oldest is 18 now. He was maybe a year and a half, two years old. He was at the top of the stairs in my house. I was at the very bottom and there's probably, I don't know, 10 stairs in between us. He came around the corner and I could see he was about to take a step and tumble down. And I grabbed, because out of fear, I grabbed the railing and I just pulled myself to the top and grabbed it, ripped the railing off the wall, pulled half of the muscles in my body. And what had happened, because I wouldn't have been able to do that if I tried, but I was so scared that I think, as it's explained, the central nervous system will limit the amount of power you have based on what it feels is safe. And Olympic athletes are a great example. They're able to exert 97% of their total neural power. Where's the average person, I've read somewhere around 70 or 60 or something like that. So what is the central nervous system doing there? And why is it that we can be so much stronger when we're scared or we feel like we're in danger? How do you train that? How are the muscles involved with that? What does that look like? I think it's, picture it as like you're taking the chains off it, right? It's there, it's in us. We know that we're not tapping into the capacity of it. And so the way that you train is going to give you some abilities to get into that system more readily available. So if all you do is jog slowly and not to pass judgment on anybody or anything, but what we see a lot of is like early in the fall football season, we see a lot of hamstrings, we see a lot of cramping and things like that. And those would be indicators that those athletes probably didn't do enough sprinting or hitting that nervous system component in the off season. So they come in, they get in a game situation or the, I gotta save my son at the top of the stairs moment and they hit that high level and it freaks out, right? There's just not a, they haven't been exposed to that. So in the training, we feel like you need to have exposure to that. And there's a lot of trainers out there, especially with the high end athlete that are afraid to tap into that because of, I don't want to get a kid hurt. I mean, I can tell you some of the pros that I've worked with, it's terrifying. They're worth 50, 60 million dollars. And, hey, I want you to get on the track, we're gonna warm up, potentiate, make sure everything's firing and loose and good to go. And now we're gonna let it rip. And that athlete gets injured during that session. That's a big deal. That's not just playing around in a high school weight room. So, we have confidence in what we're doing, but we also know that the more consistently they're exposed to that system, they can tap into it more. So you and I don't tap into that system hardly ever. It still lives in us, right? We have that ability. Of course, our muscles and tendons and ligaments and everything aren't built to sustain it. So there's gonna be things popping left and right when we hit, when we get into it. But that's why we try to, it's just kind of building a resiliency to those high exposure of speed. Can you walk me through, so knowing that, like how you would warm up, like specifically, I know you have your own methods for that, but what does that look like for some of that sprints? I mean, from a high level, without diving too deep into the details, we try to do like some spinal deloading and some nervous system turn on. We use a system called RPR, reflexive performance reset, where we kind of do some goofy fascial stuff that kind of turns on the nervous system. That's probably a whole nother podcast to dive into. Then we do some locomotion with some movement, raise the core temperature, get the blood flowing. A lot of activation type movements. We do work a lot like on a blackboard, getting the foot to kind of move and be mobile. A lot of mobilization of the knee ankle hip joint. And then we start slowly gradually getting into our bounce fire series, which is a kind of a sprinting progression of learning how to push through the ground, loading the foot. It's kind of a mechanics thing. It also presents thousands to millions of ground contacts, which then starts to get ankle stiffness and stretch reflex and all the things that you want out of sprinting. And then that just builds into the workout, which again, the workout is actually probably the shortest part. Yeah, that's gonna take a while. It takes half an hour to get an athlete ready to that point. We also want to get some load volume in there in regards to speed reserve and the ability to handle those forces by doing some loaded sprints and plyometric type movement, kind of things that we'll do. Wow, so hold on. The warm up, first of all, I didn't hear you say static stretching. I didn't hear you say get an elliptical and do 15 minutes to warm up your body. Right. No, you didn't. There's incredible intent and direction in your warm up. And the warm up is 30 minutes. Why is that so important? Because the warm up's not what's giving them the results. It's the workout. But why is the warm up so important? Well, they have to be able to do the things you're gonna ask them to do in the workout, right? So the mobilization, the activation, a lot of athletes nowadays, obviously we're dealing with phones and posture and we have issues, just mobility issues with young kids now. And so we have to get them out of that. We have to decompress the spine. We have to make sure that all the hips are either mobile or stable, right? Kind of every other joint we want mobile stable, mobile stable up the kinetic chain. And so those things have to all be in alignment. And that's not just something you can do on an elliptical, you know, for five minutes and get the blood flowing like we used to think was the case. You know what this reminds me of?  So you're dealing with people, now the average person probably should warm up smart too. But you're dealing with athletes whose power potential is essentially equivalent to what I'm saying, the drag car, where you got to really make sure everything's perfect because if something goes off, one degree off or half a degree off is a major injury. That's right. Yeah, I mean, and you can make some mistakes with younger athletes.  They can kind of, you know, you can make a couple of misses there. We try not to, we try to train our young kids exactly like we train our professionals. But yeah, you're dealing with Ferraris versus, you know, Volkswagen's at some level with those guys and you got to be really careful. You know, this reminds me of, have you ever heard of the term old man strength? Oh yeah. Yeah, so I remember. I got a little of that. Yeah, right. The way we explained it, years ago we had this question asked on the podcast and someone was like, what is old man strength? Is it real or whatever?   And the way we explained it was like, you see a puppy when they're like full size, but they're still a puppy and they're goofy. They don't know their bodies. Whereas, you know, your 48 year old uncle's body has been the same for a while. They just know how to move it better. And so that's essentially what we're talking about. So you get in this person It's a senior high performance. We got to get everything moving right. Cause we're about to ask this person to exert incredible, you know, performance. And we want to prevent that potential injury or just improve. That's right. Yeah. I mean, your example of the drag cars is wonderful. My dad used to know Tony Schumacher's family.  If one thing's a little bit off, right? The whole piston blows, the engine blows up. And I mean, it's, I guess it's not a one for one with a human athlete, but pretty close. You know, I tell you that a couple of people I work with are, they're pretty stinking explosive. Meanwhile, you could take your Honda Civic, throw some, you know, diesel gas and unleaded it again.  Still gonna get down the track.  You mentioned, okay, we talk about the younger kids and obviously they have a little bit more resiliency. You can get away with some things. How does the assessment process change with like a young high school athlete versus a pro? Like we've talked on the podcast before, like, I assume and correct me if I'm wrong.  He's already a genetic freak. He's already at the highest level. I don't want to break anything. I don't want to, if I see that, oh, he has slight internal rotation in his hip. Like I don't want to correct too much because this guy has figured it out at the highest level versus maybe a 13 year old kid who's, you know, learning how to squat a little fun way. So how does the assessment process different and how does your attack go different for each? I think it's just a matter of like micro or macro. Right? I mean, you're looking at a young kid. It's more of a macro view on things. You know, you're seeing massive improvements in their miles per hour, in their output, in their vertical jump, and those are the things that we're looking at and testing and monitoring. Obviously there's just the visual of what we do in my staff who's phenomenal. You know, somebody asked earlier about my staff and my staff is incredible because they're all master coaches. We all adhere to the same philosophy. So I have a staff of people where I can come out and be on your podcast while they're back running the show. And they're really good at that. But with an older athlete, a more developed athlete, then it's just a micro look. I mean, professional athletes are master compensators, right? They can be completely injured and still perform. That doesn't mean it's great for their body or great for performance. And I've seen that with a couple of our athletes where, you know, gosh, you're completely asymmetrical or you have hip mobility problems or whatever, but you're still able to do everything you're doing. So there in lies the assessment of, okay, what do we need to do to help that person versus, we kind of know what we need to do with the young kid to continue to progress them in their development. Yeah, well, so like just to piggyback off that, you take a high level athlete with a little, with what a typical trainer would say is a movement pattern issue. But that movement pattern issue this athlete has been training with and learned how to work around so well that you've completely thrown off their movement. And now they're worse. Even though you've corrected, you know, something. And then we're talking about the CNS a lot. There's a lot of things that affect the central nervous system. So to give you an example, I'm sure you're familiar with the study, but there was a study that was recently, not recently, it was done over the last maybe five years that compared different aspects of lifestyle and injury risk, okay? So warming up, not warming up, going too heavy, whatever, lack of sleep. The thing that caused the most injury was lack of sleep. Lack of sleep, more than not warming up, more than doing your mechanics wrong, it was the absolute worst thing.  So what are the things you look at besides your training and your warm-ups with your athletes? Because I mean, a lot of things affect those. That's right. Yeah, I think with the younger kids, it's hard to monitor, obviously, right?  You know, all these kids nowadays, they want to take this and take that. And the best thing they can do is just have a good, well-rounded diet and get a lot of sleep, you know, especially as they're a developing athlete. But then even professional athletes, you know, and they can get tugged in a lot of different directions, you know, and have a lot of different things going on. It'd probably be pretty easy to lose sleep and stuff like that. But the ones that I know that are really good and have had sustained careers and they're excelling in their deal, they still prioritize that. You know, they don't get caught up in the party scene. They prioritize sleep.  It's not like, you know, that young kid yet, but I think that, you know, we don't monitor the young kids very much. We just try to preach, you know, hey, this is good for you. We don't know exactly what they're doing.  I mean, you could easily change something and make it go a lot faster. You get to the highest, highest performance. Yeah, what about like when they first come in, like we have a good friend. I don't know if you're familiar with Joe DeFranco. I think Joe DeFranco is one of the OGs in the space, training football athletes and stuff like that. And he blew all our minds on one of the ways, you know, there's lots of HRV training and stuff that's out there for all these cool tools. He would actually do just a grip test before. And I thought, I don't know why I never thought of that. That's big. Yeah, so basic and simple. And so do you have something like that? Like when the guys come in, obviously you're asking, right? How did you sleep and stuff like that? But do you have something that you do to test to see if it's aligning with what they're telling you? Yeah, you know, Taylor Nelson Cook, who's my VP of operations back home, he's into all the gadgets, right? He has a, he does a grip test and we have Hawken Dynamics as a partner. And so we'll get athletes on those and try to get some, you know, monitoring numbers we can get about, I think 127 data points on one counter movement jump. Wow. Which will tell you a lot of readiness and are there asymmetries and you know, things like that. So yes, we are trying to do those things. I probably fall a little bit on this side of I'm just old and I've been doing it so long. It's more for me, it's more relational and a conversation and I can almost just feel. Pick up the signs. You know, I mean, I probably say that, you know, of all the workouts I've written over the years, I've never completed a one of them. There's never been one that's gone exactly like I wrote it out. Yeah, yeah. It's a sign of, I say that's a sign of a great training. 100%, right? You have a plan, but then never the, nothing ever goes according to plan. The plan is that there's no plan. I mean, you know, we have an outline of what we want to accomplish. I can tell even in the warmup or in conversation, what's going on, how they're feeling. And I know already I'm making adjustments to the load, to the volume, to the intensity, the amplitude, like whatever it is that we need to make adjustments on.  Or, hey, that, we knocked it out of the park and now here's what we're doing in two days from now. Well, so. Brian, you totally back up how we feel, which is that experience when it comes to trainers or coaches is the most important thing. Because look, here's the deal. You could have, and I'd love your opinion on this, you could have all the data points you want, but if the athlete, if the athlete suddenly doesn't believe, just doesn't believe that they're ready or thinks of something different or whatever, that's gonna throw everything off. And those data points aren't gonna show that. You could have all the physical readiness in the world, but if the athlete's like, I don't think I feel good, even though the readiness says they do, guess what, they don't. And the only way you can know that is by watching the signs through experience. So you probably can look at your athletes and you probably kind of know. Yeah, I do. I mean, I think it's, I tease a lot, right? The whoop got the whoop now. We got the Apple Watches, we got all the things. And I kind of tease. I'm like, you want to know why I don't wear a whoop? I don't wear one.  You know, whether it's 10 or 100, it don't matter. I still got to go. And I do feel that way with athletes a little bit too. I think some of that stuff gets in their head. And sometimes if you're a good coach, you're also a great psychologist. And you can help them get to a great training session, even though they don't totally feel well or whatever that number that the watch told them, sometimes gets in the way. So it's a fine line, I think, to not use technology and not would be absurd. But I also think not everybody can have 30 years of experience of diving in. It's really important to me that we are relational with our athletes. We're talking with them. We're knowing what's going on outside of it.  Like, you can go find one. People hit us up all the time. I can send you exactly what Jalen Howell's doing or some of my athletes. But you're missing the most important component, which is the relational piece and motivation and really that pulse check. The mindset. 100% mindset. You remind me of a line from the movie Rocky. These guys are making fun of me because I always quote it. It's like the 10th time he's brought it up. First time in this interview, everybody. Don't make me get up and start doing burpees. Yeah, I know. There's a scene in there where Rocky is, I think he's starting to date Adrian. And Mickey goes, women make the knees weak. Women weaken legs. Yeah, but I really like this girl, you know? I like her signia. I think what he's talking about as a trainer is it's the mental part, you know what I mean? And that's that old wisdom. In boxing training where they say, oh, don't sleep with somebody for 30 days or whatever. Everybody's like, where's the science? It's like probably the psychological stuff that has to do with you if you get in a fight or something like that. That's right, yeah. And sometimes we just gotta lean on like, and again, it can be good and bad. We lean on what we know, which can be that old school mentality that we haven't broke. Versus though, there's some stuff we learned along the way of I loved what was Jim Harbaugh last night said something about. He called his dad on something that he wanted. We had a bad practice and I called my dad. He told me what to do in 30 seconds versus me having to go back and figure it out in three hours. He just leaned on his dad's wisdom of all the years of experience. And here he is probably 80-some years old and man, he could just dissect it like that. Now, because you were literally bred into this, do you feel like most all your knowledge has come from most experience in your father and grandfather?  Yes. Okay, tell me. Yes, yes to all. I mean, I think I had a great, the upbringing piece, the foundation of going in. But really from there, I can't say that I looked back much from there. I didn't go back. My dad passed away seven years ago. I haven't been able to kind of spin a lot of this stuff off of him. And so, but in those next 25 years, I was probably annoying to coaches and people when I reached out to and I went and visited and I lived in a weight room for 14 years, teaching seven, eight weight training classes a day. Those were all my test subjects. And I was reading and I always had a thirst for doing it a little bit better. And what's this guy doing? And what's this guy doing? And Bill Carson at East Carolina University, back in the, gosh, mid-90s. And that was my first guy that I was like, gosh, I read an article of how he's always sprinting and spikes and going fast all the time. That sounds fun to me. That sounds better than what I did. So I'm gonna try some of that. And then reach out to Vince Anderson and reach out to all the guys along the way. I actually also had some great mentors locally in Denver there. I got to be around one of the best track coaches, I think in the world, who only ever coached club track. He never coached professional. He never coached college or anything. But this guy had unreal developmental assets that I got to have a front seat to and I paid attention versus going, I know how to do it. This is how my dad did it. So I'm gonna do it this way. And I probably took a lot of things from my dad and my grandfather was older. I didn't get to really see him coach. But some of these guys that I got to be around, man, I did get to see it. And so I would just take bits and pieces. And now we have Kula Sports Performance and we have what I'd call a system. But it's just a gumbo of all the things that I've learned over the years. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this. And then what's our little special secret sauce that we added to it, which is probably just the volume in the programming and the organization of it became our system. Yeah, now, Brian, we pride ourselves. We talk, typically we talk to generally the either the average person who's trying to improve their health and fitness. And sometimes we talk to trainers and coaches just cause that's what we did for decades and years. And one thing that separates us or one thing that we all value is that there's a value in all these different training modalities. Like for the average person, I can definitely take some principles for bodybuilding that'll benefit them. I can definitely take some principles from powerlifting that'll benefit them or principles from Olympic lifting or principles from track and field. That doesn't mean the average person is going to be any of those things. But there are components that we've picked and chosen that seem to benefit the average person. If you mix them right, kind of like what you're saying into a gumbo, this is going to work really well. Are there things that you've been able to adopt from different strength that have nothing to do with football, let's say, like, are there things from bodybuilding that you've seen that may have some value or Olympic lifting? I'm sure that was something like that. Yeah, or powerlifting, like, could you talk about that? Sure, yeah, I mean, I think I've been influenced by almost every, you know, industry that touches sports performance, if it's, I mean, even down to physical therapists and body care people, physios, medical, you know, I've been very fortunate because the athletes I work with to be around some of the best in the world there and learn about fascial and Aldoah methods and how, you know, different ways to care for the athlete. Those things sometimes are more important than what we do like in the weight room. Again, that's why I led with, like, the weight room's the lowest hanging fruit, you know, that's easy to get an athlete, put him in the weight room, make him a little stronger, and we say, I'm a sports performance guy because Johnny got a little faster, he jumps a little higher, of course that's gonna happen. But again, if we're gonna keep pushing the envelope, and you know, we're gonna do that, but then we're also going to touch on, you know, all these other influences and things that have come into, I guess, the industry.  Not everybody gets, you know, to see that stuff. No, no, no, no, I'm sorry. Aldoah blew my mind the first time that we did that. Yeah, completely. In fact, I'm gonna ask you a super annoying question that I get annoyed with when people ask me, but I know the audience wanna hear this and so I wanna hear how you navigate it. For a football player, what is one of the most, or maybe the three most important exercises? And I know that's annoying because it depends on the athlete and all that stuff, but can you name three that you would say generally are some of the most important exercises? Sure. Sprinting fast, jumping high, and I would, if I had to dial down to one lift, it'd be the trap bar deadlift. Oh, wow. So, you know, and again, and I know those are three very general things. You echoed, that's right, Corey told us exactly. Well, you don't do a lot of spinal loading at the professional level, right? I don't do any. If I can help it, I don't do any. Once in a while, we'll load up a big, heavy like a pin squat or a box squat type of a deal. We don't wanna mess with their knees. And so you have to put on for a little hormone response, you know, just to get that, you know, push on some heavy weight. But yeah, we try not to spinal load if we don't have to. I don't even love spinal loading young athletes, to be honest with you. I just think we can accomplish and get a lot done. Trap bar deadlift hits seven major muscle groups. It's force production into the ground, which is where you play sports. Football is one of the only sports where you actually have like an external force in the game itself. So therefore that would make sense to, you know, a little bit of back squat, little, you know, having to push on weight. Oh, I see. But everything else like soccer, you push on the ground, track and field. You're not pushing against someone else. Right, you're not pushing against an external force. So it's ground-based, which is funny because I referenced Husker Power earlier and that, you know, those guys were big of ground-based movements. And that's where my mind was rooted for all those years. So when trap bar deadlift came out for all those years in the weight room with those young kids, 50% of them were terrible squatters. It's a hard movement if kids have mobility or long femur or, you know, just different mobility issues.  He has a hard time back squatting, but I can get him into a trap bar deadlift and he's very proficient at it. We can elevate it if needed. It's safer, but we still get the strength and the, you know, eccentric, concentric movement. Let me add to that, Brian, because, you know, what I would say, depending on the person, if someone's like, oh, I don't have the mobility to squat or whatever, I'd say, okay, let's work on the things that will prevent you from doing what would be considered by many people a fundamental exercise. However, when you're training an athlete and you got a season coming up, you might not have the time to build the skill to then reap the benefits of that exercise, in which case, a trap bar deadlift, like you said, I could have almost anybody do it. Am I putting this in the right context? You're, that's nail on the head.  You know, if I'm gonna have to spend eight weeks getting the kid to squat better and I can heal wedge him and I can do all the things and work mobility, that's great, but now I just spent eight weeks doing that when I could have spent eight weeks working on his force production in the trap bar, because I can get him on that day too and we're rolling. So for us, especially in the private sector, like that's our staple lift, as far as a heavy bilateral goes. So back to your original question is, if I, you know, and I've been asked this quite a bit because we've done some stuff on mass specific force and we, I would throw every weight lift in the weight room out if I could just do deadlift. Wow. Wow. That's great.  They're not like, I got eight weeks till I got to get into season. Totally different consideration. Average person, I would say, let's work on mobility. You're going to have to want to squat. We, you know, it's not just eight weeks, it's the next 40 years. You're training athlete, you got a timeframe, you got to produce results. That makes the biggest difference in the world. Sure. Yeah.  Two podcasts I was on a couple of weeks ago, asked me if you could throw out one exercise, what would you throw out? And I said the back squat. So, you know, it's not a very, it's not a very, it's not a very popular, I mean, you guys aren't going to joke me, are you? No, but you're explaining it perfectly, Brian. Completely logical. ROI has to be played in this. Sports are played on one foot anyway. Like, you know, and I know that you need, again, that big, heavy back squat, there's something to that. But if you had to go back and do a case study on a soccer player, how often are they, you know, force producing off one foot versus two? So we'd much rather go into a rear foot elevated, you know, lunge or something like that as a major lift. Also too, in the United States, I think we've gotten, maybe it was bodybuilding, I'm not exactly sure the cause, but we're very quad dominant.  And then, you know, we forget the posterior chain, which is the gas, right?  We like gas, right? You know, we want big old booties and hamstrings and we need a little bit of deceleration abilities out of the quads for a football soccer player, but track and field and speed as we're trying to, we got to make sure that that's equally developed. Yeah, see, when we're talking to the average person, the average person is their priorities are, and we wish they were different, but the priorities are look better. Yep. So like, what's going to build muscle? Whatever I can see in the mirror. What's going to make fat loss easier. And then next would be like health and mobility and stuff like that. That's right. When it comes to like changing the body and we have the timeframe being forever, back squats are amazing.  I mean, it makes absolute perfect sense.  And I'm glad he did because this confuses people because what ends up happening is we had a question from the average person. They're not, they don't have any season coming up. They're, you know, 35, they just want to be fit. I heard this trainer say that, you know, half squats are better. It's like, okay, what, who were they talking about? You know, NBA basketball player, like, you know, totally different. So it makes a big difference who you're talking about.   Just go do this and you're good. I mean, for me, when we're vetting like a new athlete, we got to figure out. I'm a training NHL guy up in Canada. I went up and visited him this summer and he can't trap bar deadlift. I mean, that's my main lift exercise. It's my go-to and he just can't do, he's got some low back issues. So we had to get pretty creative on, okay, how else are we going to stimulate? And, you know, the posterior chain, but make it heavy.  And so we threw that in there. But again, I can't just say like, hey, our system is trapped bar deadlift. Josh, go do your thing. He's going to get injured or he's going to get frustrated. So it's all, you know, even that, that regular, you know, dad that wants to stay in shape. Maybe he wants to train like an athlete. We can't just say, do X, Y and Z. You know, what works for you? What, what are you good at? How do you move? You know, maybe back squats are great for you. Maybe you got bad knees.  Is there ever a case, is there ever a case where you let an athlete still back squat? I mean, if he was doing it, maybe- If they had like really good- Yeah, great technique and they've been doing it for 10 years or something. Sure, I have a couple of college football players that I work with and that's a staple in college football programs, big old back squat. So if that's in their programming and they need to go back to school in the fall and they have to, you know, be get tested and things like that, then we're going to keep that going for them for sure. I don't think it's something that's negative for an athlete. You know, when I say I'd throw it out, it's not because I think it's a horrible lift. I just think that there's other ways to skin the cat, you know, and especially from the, maybe the realm that I'm coming from versus like I'm not just, you know, we're not trying to build 600 pound squat clubs in our weight room, you know, as a college football program, which can be important. You know, there's a, there's a mental component to that. There's a camaraderie and a team thing that's just not the world that I live in. Well, something I've heard you and somebody else bring up before as a concept, I'd like you to explain a bit further was like slack and contract. And that being why, another reason why you don't really tend to back a little bit of the squat and how it's like more eccentrically focused. And so can you explain that a bit more in terms of the concept?  You have that tension there. And so you need some of that in sport, but, you know, we'll tilt towards like a heavy pin squat where we break the concentric, eccentric chain so that we have pure concentric output, you know, not kind of a stretch loaded. So is this a pause? So bringing down the pin, rest it for a second, come back up, we're starting at the bottom. It can be either, I mean, it can be either. I really like box squat. I think that probably comes a little bit from old school, my pops back in the day. That's my, that's my favorite level. Yeah, box squat, but also a pin squat's the same thing, just not sitting down. I think for some athletes, actual, the act of sitting, they relax their low back a little bit, not, you know, not good. So with young athletes, we go to a pin squat. So we'll put the safety pins up where they get into about 135 degree squat. They rest the bar before the eccentric movement on the way back up. So we accomplish the same thing. They put some heavy weight on. Again, we don't have to go all the way to the bottom where there's just such that, you know, uncomfortable position for a lot of athletes at the bottom. Some kids, some athletes are great at it. You know, they got short little femurs, short torso, whatever, they're just built to squat.  I was kind of a taller, longer de-cathlete type and I didn't love the back squat either. Maybe that's part of my bias because I wasn't, I was the guy that probably benched more than I squatted at one point in my life. Do you use like progressive resistance, like bands or chains ever? We do sometimes. I don't know the limited amount of time that I have to program for things. We would typically rather be an inch wide and a mile deep in what we're doing.  That's a big mistake a lot of trainers will make, right? 100%. I'm gonna do all these different methodologies versus like getting really good at the big ones. What was that? I think guys in my industry, maybe, I don't know, what I've seen is they're just afraid to lock into something and know it's gonna work even as basic it might seem. You know, I could sit here and lay out my system for you and you might be like, hmm, that's not as complicated as I thought it might be. That's what they say about our program. You know what I mean? Yeah. Are you like, this is it? Yeah, that's right. But you know what? I already know all these exercises. I can go a mile wide and an inch deep and get, you know, but we're working for mastery. Some of the things that we wanna get out of like, especially the speed components stuff, you gotta do millions of times over to get good at it. And then same thing in the weight room. I'd rather just, you know, focus on being really good at that. We're never getting injured. I'm not gonna, you know, every time you present something new to them, in an exercise, you're gonna present, it's a new stimulus. So you're gonna get some soreness.  So why would I change the heavy bilateral, you know, every other week? I kind of want them to get used to deadlift. Now we'll go into different variations of that where we have an eccentric component. Sometimes we drop the bar from the top to eliminate eccentric, like if we're in season or pre-season, we can do elevated, we can do split stance. I mean, we can do tons of variations. Brian, when we would train the average person and we'd work with, I'm gonna use an example because I'll ask you a question after. When we work with the average person with diet, this is just through experience. There's a million or one different things we could do with someone's diet, but they're the big rocks and then there's the smaller ones. Like we're gonna start with the ones that people will probably be able to do that'll also give them the biggest result. So to give an example, I could tell someone to count their calories and the macros, or I could tell them, hit your body weight and protein from Whole Foods.  Do you have for high-level athletes or are they're your big rocks? We're like, okay, we're gonna do this first because this typically yields the biggest result before we move on to some of these smaller things. You just said it, it's protein. Really? Yeah, 100%. My wife's actually our nutrition coach and she'll get on and do a consultation with all of our young athletes, for example. And the number one thing that she comes out of them with is they don't eat enough protein. Everybody. 100% 100% We're a carb world, right? Everything's quick, easy carbs. And so I think just telling them, because again, they'll get full and maybe not eat as many carbs. So you're killing two birds with one stone without having to tell them like, hey, you just gotta hit 1.5 times your body weight in protein and see what happens. Wow, you're aiming for one and a half. For your high-level athletes. Well, and frankly, it's a little bit of the mindset of aim for 1.5 and hope you get to 1.0. Then you'll get to 1.0, yeah. Same like an experienced trainer. Same with hydration of, hey, just replace everything you're currently drinking with water. So if they drink a Coke, they're just gonna drink a water. If they drink coffee, drink a water. Now, is the focus Whole Foods where you're like, eat this protein in food? Try not to get it from a- Whole Food Always. Whole Food Always.  Some kids are not gonna meal prep. They're not gonna have their chicken and rice throughout the day. So maybe a shake makes sense to try to supplement some of that in. But yeah, my wife, who's our foodie nutrition coach, she would tell them Whole Food first. Do you see this with the high-level athletes too? Where you're like, yeah, you're not hitting enough protein. It depends. I mean, my high-level athletes, I don't have a ton of them. And so the ones that I do have are pretty elite and they're taking care of that stuff kind of on their own. I mean, Christian is, as an example, is dialed in like you wouldn't believe. I mean, he could sit on here and tell me how to clean up my diet. So he's pretty dialed in that way. I think most of them are Janine Becky, the gal that plays for Team Canada, Jalen Howell at Racing Louisville. These guys are, they wanna be the best in the game. So they're taking care of everything. They're sleeping. They're taking the right supplements. They're hitting all their nutritional needs and sleep. And it's impressive. I mean, it's actually inspiring. Now you've worked with Chris McCaffey for a long time. I'd be remiss not to kind of dive in a bit in terms of like when you guys met, like what makes him so special as an athlete? Like obviously he's literally like the best right now in the league. He's average. I don't know, he's okay. I hope he hears this. He's on my favorite team and I'm a big fan. So let's just say that he makes me look like a really good trainer. He's a pretty easy guy to coach. Okay.  He's easy and he's hard to coach in the same, you know, in the same breath. He's just a guy that, you know, takes it so seriously. He has a strong desire to be the best. I mean, even this season, right? I mean, this has been a great season for him. He's wanted this season for seven years running and he wants five more seasons like it afterwards. And he'll do pretty much anything and everything to make sure that that's in alignment. So yeah, our relationship stems back to high school.  Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah, football and track have known their family for, you know, tons of years and... Well, that'll make it so much more effective because the trust is there. Yeah, we really do have, I mean, we have a friendship. We have a mentorship. I think we have, you know, we have some spiritual alignment. You know, we hold each other accountable in some of those ways. And so it's really a special relationship but the training piece, you know, after his rookie year in the NFL, he came back and said, dude, NFL is another level in speed. Like he's fast. He was fast for me in high school. He ran on a couple of state record relays for us. I mean, he was fast. But after his first year in the NFL, that was the one thing that he came back that said he needed help on was he got, he needed to get faster. So he kind of tapped me in just, you know, I was a speed guy, we had that relationship. And I just told him, I said, I'll train you but it's gonna look probably a little different than what you've done in the past. It's gonna be track and field based, speed based. And it went really well. Those first couple of years were really good. He's in Carolina. He had the thousand, thousand season and then he went through a couple years of injury, which again, I think they were trying. I know they were for him. They were for me as a trainer. They pushed me to be a lot better in the compensation and the body care and all the other things. I mean, I really honestly probably owe it to him primarily to have gotten to the level as a trainer that I am now. Cause you don't show up to train really any of those guys not fully prepared.  Yeah, tell us about that. Cause I remember the first time I experienced this personally. I didn't play traditional sports, but I was a grappler. So wrestling, judo, jiu-jitsu. And I remember the first time I would go against high level black belts. And then I remember when a world champion came in to train with us. And it was like, it was like I knew nothing. All of a sudden it was a different human being. Tell us the difference between high school college and the pro level. You just kind of talked about that. Your athlete in college very fast goes up to the pros and all of a sudden he's slow. Like how big of a difference is that step? Yeah, it's massive. I mean, I think we even see that from high school to college, right?  Yeah, right, K1 versus D3 is a big difference. Absolutely. It's eye-opening for me, man. Some of those guys are boom, boom, and right into the professional ranks. And then, yeah, I mean, you're talking about how many millions of kids play like high school football, right? And then you're talking about 53 guys on a roster, times 30, two teams, it's so elite. I heard some in the other days, it's something like, oh, he was only on the practice squad. And I'm like, bro, he was on a pro roster in the NFL. That is so elite, you have no idea.  They have no clue how talented those guys are. And the ones that are elite in that realm, the McCaffrey's, the fill-in-the-blank, it's unreal. It's like a different species. It is. It really is a different level of athleticism, but it's also another level of mindset, commitment, execution. It's all of it. It's the whole nine. Brian, we created a program called MAP Strong. It's like a strongman-based workout program. And we did it with a World Strongest Man. Robert Oberst. Robert Oberst competitor. He was also a D1 football player at one point, right? And it was the first time I'd ever seen somebody that big. I'm like, how much do you weigh? 340 pounds? 340, I think. He was doing some drills, which was part of the program because he believed strongman events required some agility. So he's running ladders and sprinting. Like fast. I've never seen a 300, first of all, I've never seen anybody move that fast, but someone who's that big moving that fast was terrifying actually in real life. Like to see something like that looks like a cartoon, like is this real? And then Adam and Justin have a story where they used to manage a gym and there were a bunch of, there were a few like pro, like they're San Francisco 49ers.  And there was only, I think two starters. The rest were, you know, just on the roster. And they were football players, big dudes, basketball players. There was a lineman. Yeah, linemen dunking on an amazing athlete. Catching alley-oops. And none of them are basketball players. Shoot, they're just NFL players. It's insane. We had a training session in 2019, I think it was. And we were at the old high school that I was at. And the three of us, I had DJ Moore and Alex Arma that were with the Panthers and Christian. And we went into the gym and they were dunking the basketball. You know, and Christian, he's five, 10 and a half, you know, like on a good day kind of thing. And he's doing windmill dunks. Alex Arma, who's about six foot, two, 45 pound fullback is coming in two hand dunking the basketball.  So it's, yeah, it's a different, it is. Yeah, this was, it was Isaac Sopiland who was a lineman who's like 300 pounds. I had to cover him. Manny Lawson literally jumped over my head and caught an alley-oop and dunked it. It was just, it felt like I was in a movie. Yeah, yeah. We were like little babies out there. And we were all ex-basketball players. So we thought we were actually gonna put up a pretty good game. It wasn't even, it wasn't even close. Well, in fact, your point about the big guys, I mean, that's, that's again, sometimes I almost go there when I'm training like a guy like Christian where I'm like, man, I've seen Chase Young and Joey Bosa up close. And those are the guys we're trying not to get hit by. That's like getting hit by a Mack truck, man. It's unreal how big and how fast they are.  I mean, it's, it's scary. It's scary. Trent Williams. I mean, Trent Williams might be one of the best athletes in the NFL. I don't, I remember if he's 3'10 or 3'20, I don't know what he weighs, but he's a massive human being. And he moves when he gets out and runs in space. It's, it's, it really is. I can only imagine being like McCaffrey and seeing something like that coming at you is kind of, that's motivating. I gotta get a good grab on your team and not on the other team. I guess. So, so, you know, I think it would be relatively, I think easy, maybe not, but relatively the average person thinks it would be easy to identify physical attributes of a gifted athlete, right? You can see them play. There's so much better than everyone else, so much faster, they jump so much higher. What are the mental attributes that you see in some of the top athletes that separates them from, from other people? Yeah. Discipline, I think is probably the, I would say one of the number one things. So just consistency. Just consistency, discipline. They, they, they don't miss training sessions. They don't miss sleep. They don't give in to the, you know, the, I guess temptation to party. Exactly. Like all, all those things and, you know, not that any of those things in a small microdose way are, are bad. You know, I think everybody's human and whatnot, but the ones that I've seen be excellent and I've just been blessed to be around some of the best are so consistent, it's almost sickening, you know? But that's why they're where they're at, you know?   You're making millions of dollars. You got all these fans, you're famous. I remember what it was like to be in my early 20s and not any of those things, and to not go and drink and party and, you know, hang out with girls, whatever. That's a big deal, what you're talking about. Sure, it really is. And I mean, and some of these guys, like, I don't know, I mean, I've trained a couple of pro soccer girls who are not as famous, who are not making, you know, all the money, but they still have the discipline because they wanna be the best at what they do. And that's as admirable, you know?  She eats perfectly. She's trying to be the best soccer player and make the U.S. women's national team and, like, all the things. And she does it through a level of discipline. I think it's a common thread through those that wanna be excellent. Do you get more joy in training the younger athletes or the pros? Gosh, it's a tough question. I've actually been asked that a couple different times. And I just, I get a kick out of both of them. You know what I mean? They serve different. It's kinda like when I coached. When I coached track, it served me one way. When I coached football, it served me one way. You know, one was very much like, I train them and then I cut them loose and it's fun to watch. And football, you have like this direct impact on what goes on because you call the plays and stuff. I think with the athletes, it's similar where the young athletes, man, you really help kinda get them going, you know? And the pro athletes, you have to dive so much deeper. There's more of that personal relationship piece and a lot more, I guess, mentorship that goes into that. And so, you know, when I watch them play in a professional game, I worked with Anna Hall in high school. She should be a gold medal favorite in the Heptathlon this year. When I watch them compete, man, it's like you're living every moment with them. You know, I don't know that I get that kinda buy-in with the high school kids, but yet you probably help that high school kid move so much further down the path, you know? So it's kinda the same but different. Right, right, there's a little bit of, it's like what kid do you love the most, right? Yeah, right. I do like them both. I mean, there's something still about, I mean, the other day I had to kinda tap in and help some high school hurtlers, which hurtling was kinda my thing and I love coaching it. It was probably one of the best 90 minutes I had all month of just diving in with these kids that can hardly walk and chew gum or whatever and you're teaching them how to hurdle and you're going over the basics. Whereas the day before, I'm working with two of the best soccer players in the world and we're doing all kinds of different stuff with them, but they're both special to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you look at Christian's season this year, it's one of his best performance and also one of his healthiest season. That's right. Is there anything that you attribute that you guys did differently this off season or what did preparation? Yeah, I think we do.  I mean, just based on his performances in the pre-season, in the off-season. I mean, I think he got healthy. We dove deep into some compensation stuff and some of the foot patterning and kinda got his ankles back where they needed to be. And he does a lot of things on his own, obviously that helped take care of that stuff as well. But then I just knew when we sent him off to training camp this year that it was gonna be different. You could just tell. And the last couple of seasons prior to this, it wasn't that way. You're kinda hoping that it, those things don't flare up or he doesn't get injured again and stuff. And then he came into the 49ers organization, which was such a blessing for him and to get into a great system and around a bunch of great players and coaches and stuff. So kinda really happy for him just because he worked so hard and does everything the right way that he's now in this position. I would imagine you have such a good eye with your experience and then your relationship with them. Are you ever wrong?  And it's like, are you ever wrong? Or are you? No, man, I'm never wrong. Come on. No, I mean, I think every off season, right? I spend what, from August until February kinda going over what did we do? What are we gonna do different next year? What am I seeing on the field? Things like that. It's an evolution where I don't ever think I get to just raise my hands and go, man, we did it. You know, I get, he comes back during the bi-week and we do a couple of days of work where we kinda iron a few things out and some consultation calls it. He might not be feeling totally right cause this happened or that happened. I mean, that guy gets in 12 car accidents a weekend. You're right. You know, and so it's kinda like just keeping him put together. But I think, you know, when we send an athlete out after a period of time, whether it's one week or six weeks or however long the off season is, I usually feel pretty good about, you know, where we got him to, you know, they all come in at a different place.  We get that a lot. Like, I wanna train college and pro athletes.  There's just a lot of experience needed to take those guys and kinda put your arm around them and get them from, you know, one of my athletes came in this year, had a horrible ankle and hip injury during the season, missed the last month of the season. We had to work through that for four weeks before we could even train. So we had to train just to train, you know, and there's medical treatment and all the things that go into that. So yeah, I mean, it's just, it's not a one little one answer thing for any of those high level athletes.  And when you look at different sports, obviously you can make more money in some versus others. The longevity of the athletes is different, depending on the sport, some more dangerous than others. Are there some sports, cause you have kids, I know you have a son, do you have any more kids? Yeah, I got, I got a bunch of them. I got four kids. Oh, good for you. I got two of my own and two from a blended family situation. Wonderful. And yeah, they're brought my son with me today, so. So I got, I have four kids too. Nice. Is there any sport that you look at and you go, man, I hope my kid isn't good at this one is good at a different one because I know the risk factors or whatever. Do you, do you think that way? Or is it more like whatever works? No, I think, I don't think that way necessarily.  My son was a basketball player, you know, played in college.     I don't know. So I just think it's part of, I mean, to me injuries are totally part of sport and it's part of what we do of a, even from return to play, prevention of injury, working with physical therapists on stuff. I mean, it's just, that's just part of the gig. I feel like he'd be more tortured if all four kids wanted to be pickle ball players. That would probably be more torturous. Well, you know, this brings up a great discussion, Brian. Because this is called. Dad has played pickle ball years ago, you know. I like it. No, no, this is good because there's a currently a discussion that seems to be brewing where you see these parent organizations in school saying we shouldn't let kids play tackle football. We shouldn't let kids box.  Don't let the soccer players head the ball anymore because it's, but us who have played and trained people, whatever, the risk is part of why you gain some of the benefit and that's kind of what life is like. How do you feel about this discussion where they're like, no, no, we shouldn't let kids play tackle football till college. Some people are even saying. You probably don't want my opinion on there. I do. I do. I know what I would think about that.  I'm sorry, but that's just kind of where I'm at. I think that we have a lot of, I try as a very popular comment to make on air, but I think, you know, a level of toughness.  Cause I think you want people to be safe, but I also think too that, you know, there's just some inherent risks and things that you take when you're going to go do those things. And, you know, you can't protect everybody from everything in my opinion. So I think if you're going to choose to do those, you just have to know what those risks are and be willing to, you know. You know what's interesting about that conversation is the people who are, who seem to be pushing the hardest have zero experience in either these sports or, you know, for example, you don't let a kid tackle till they're big and strong to get in college. The risk of injury probably going to go through the roof. That's right. Because now they don't know how to hit, they don't know how to take a hit, and now they're big. And that's actually going to make things worse. But the only way you would know that is if you actually played or trained or worked with athletes. If you're just on the sidelines, you think, oh, they're little, don't let them do that. Five-year-old hitting each other with helmets on, that's not going to do anything. You got a 20-year-old potential for injury. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know. And again, I would never want to talk politics, but I just don't think it's for somebody else to say. You know, if my kid wants to take a risk of playing football, hey man, there's head injury, knee injury, all kinds of injury potential. If that's what you want to do, then go do it. But I don't want some organization or some governing body telling him he could or couldn't do it. That's kind of guess where my opinion would lie is that's our family's decision. And if we decide we want to do it, then we're going to go do that. I agree. Any top supplements that you like to work with with athletes that you notice a big bang for the buck, typically? Creating. Yeah, always. Yeah, always creating. What about nutrients? You ever seen nutrient deficiencies like, okay, maybe vitamin D or whatever tends to help? That's my wife's department, to be honest with you. I'm not great that way.  So... That's okay, not this either. We got green juice now. Yeah, that's all these fitness gurus out there. I'm like, yeah, I don't really eat broccoli that much. But yeah, I think creatine and then, you know, I think my wife would say something along the lines of making sure they're getting a good balanced nutrition. And if they are deficient in some of those things, I know magnesium to help sleep and some of the, you know, there's some stacks. I just think for young athletes, like man, check the box with whole food. The big rocks. Creatine is like the most researched supplement on the planet that's really good for you. I mean, we got old women taking it and old men and it's helping the brain function.  But I think it's pretty good for you. And so we have all of our athletes, male, female, young old, taking creatine. I got a personal story for Brian on creatine. So I, as just a knucklehead, you know, insecure kid trying to build muscle, I started taking creatine probably in 19, I want to say 95 maybe, 96. Never stopped, right? Just always took it. Never stopped until now. Now the research is coming out, it's good for you, it's healthy. And I learned that I have this genetic, like anomaly or whatever, I forgot what it's called, but MTF, HR, I don't methylate very well. And the recommendation is to take things that help with methylation, one of them being creatine. So I've accidentally been doing something amazing for myself. Let's go, let's go. Were you taking dimetize back in the 90s? Cause there were about two people that were making creatine in the 90s. Our gym coach was, you know, passing it over and we were out in the hallway just dry scooping stuff. Foss the game. Foss the game. Totally, totally. What about, so okay, so I mean, you're very much aligned with us with the old school methods, the big rocks and stuff like that, but have you found any tools like stuff like Ate Sleep or Cold Plunge or Red Light Therapy? Are there any things that you do like or that you have your guys on or that you use personally with recovery and sleep and things like that? Yeah, I like all of those things. If the athlete, I think that's the, even more of the psychological benefit is the net recovery stuff is what do you like? You know, I mean, we have a sauna at the house. We have a cold hot plunge at the house. My wife loves that stuff. She's really into it. She's really disciplined. I'm the opposite of that. Like I love all that stuff and I'll do it for two weeks and then not touch it, you know, for two months kind of a guy, part of it's I'm just really busy. But I think those things like, you know, some of the athletes that I work with are very consistent with like a daily sauna, a daily cold plunge and there's, you go back to the, you know, the finished studies of, of a sauna and what it does for you. 100% like, I mean, I think, I don't know why you wouldn't do it if you have access to it. And so, you know, yeah, I think, I don't know, we don't have any researcher data or studies or anything like that of, hey, these athletes do that stuff, so they're better. Yeah. I just think for, if you can do it, you should. Yeah, yeah. How do you, a personal question. So you've always, you've been an athlete, you train, work out, you work out with those top athletes. How do you train yourself now? Obviously you're not trying to play at super high levels or maybe you are, I don't know. Like, what was your training looks like for you? No, there's no doubt, I'm not doing that anymore. No handball? No, no, not even pickleball. I, you know, for probably until about four years ago, I was pretty fit in regards to, I was very steady in the weight room. You know, I watched my diet, I did some food prep stuff. You know, I stayed fairly strong, I would say is my definition of what I try to be now is just strong. I feel like if you're strong, that gives you some, you know, longevity. 100%. But four years ago I had another ankle injury that had been giving me fifths for years and years and years and I had to have a massive surgery which turned into an ankle replacement, which has now caused knee issues. And so I'm just, I'm kind of broken right now. And so that's been really tough to maintain a level of fitness and stuff. And I mean, I'm still on the floor, coaching athletes and I can still move and do things that way. But I just don't probably take, I'm a classic do as I say, you know, not as I do. That's like every good trainer, we train our clients better than we train ourselves. 100%. I mean, I've, you know, I'll get up at four in the morning and write workouts and spend two and a half hours writing a workout for the pro soccer that's elite, perfect, got everything. Oh, don't forget to take your supplements. Don't forget this, that and the other. And I'm reminding them of everything. Meanwhile, I got four hours of sleep.    That's helped at least sustain me to still be fairly strong, fairly, you know, I wouldn't call myself fit by any stretch of imagination. Have you seen the data on what, like how much training and volume and stuff it takes to get somewhere and then how much it required just to keep it? It's crazy, it's like so little just to maintain. How hard is this, your wife does nutrition. So, you wake up, have coffee, Chick-fil-A, how hard is that? Is she like, or does she just know like you guys been married a long time already? We've been married a while and she's a very forgiving soul. No, she's great, we, I mean, she is the definition of discipline, right?  I'm just, you know, I'm atomic habits on the things that I have to get done with our business and where we're headed and making sure all the athletes are taken care of. I've just kind of prioritized myself last, probably for the, you know, last, you know, five, seven years or so. And that's okay with me. And like you said, you know, I can jump in the weight room for a couple of weeks and kind of get everything back. We're going to the Bahamas, then I can kind of get into shape, you know, for a month, I kind of have that luxury that I'm not, you know, my metabolism is pretty good. I got good genetics. But yeah, I'd like to take care of myself better than I have where we're headed there. I'm headed over to Germany to get some treatments and then we'll see how it goes from there. I'd be excited to hear that. What is it, what's the business look like for you?  Or are you trying to do something different with it?  Yeah, there's zero balance whatsoever right now, I'd say. All my kids are out of the house now, so we're empty nesters. And business has been really good. You know, our big buckets of our headquarter corporate training centers we have three of them. They're thriving, doing well. And then we have our speed town express model, which is inside of a 24 hour fitness. We have nine of those locations. Did you partner with them? Oh, nice. We have, yeah. I did not know that. That's where we started, all of us away. Yeah, yeah, 20 plus years ago. Our master office, a friend of ours. So we just opened our first four in Colorado back in November and we just launched five in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in December. Excellent. So it's like in the facility. Yeah, so the old kids' clubs, right? Yeah. COVID closed down on the kids' clubs. We took those spaces and turned them into kind of what I'd call a speed lab. How smart. So it's just, you know, it's not a lot of weightlifting stuff, but what's funny, you know what is in there is a deadlift machine. So we have, we do all of our speed stuff on the treadmill and the turf and, you know. Now who can go in there and use that? They have to work with a trainer? Or anybody can go in there. They have to go and be with one of our trainers. Got it.  And we have four of those in Colorado, five in the DFW area. And those just launched. So we're getting those off the ground right now. Who'd you get connected with? Who do you know over there? Well, a girl that I coached 25 years ago, Lori Pitch, she was a hip athlete. And I worked with her and she ran for my dad actually at his high school. And then I coached her as a club athlete and she's now a district manager. So she introduced me to all the right people. Yeah, before you knew it, we were building. And the plan is to go build about 60 to 80 of these things. Brian, I think this is a great idea. I don't know if you, I'm sure you're familiar with this, what's happening, the trends in the big box gyms. It used to be when we were running gyms, late 90s, early 2000s, they spent so much time and money on cardio, very little space and time on free weights and resistance training. Nothing for anything related to athleticism. The footprints are totally changing. They're putting way more value now on the strength training because now people are finally starting to realize like this is the best way to train. If I want to be fit and healthy, we talk about this all the time. And then athletic training, functional used to mean stand on one foot, balance the medicine ball, do some weird stuff. But they're starting to figure it out and it's starting to go mainstream. So I think this is a phenomenal idea. I can't wait to hear how this goes out. Yeah, it's like a, it's a big old Hail Mary I feel like because it's a little bit outside of my comfort zone of just the scaling, you know, of, you know, we went from one facility in 2020. We opened right at the end of COVID as we were coming out of the pandemic and now we'll have 14 facilities operating right now. And so it's just kind of blew up. I think it's a great concept. The product's amazing. We got nine of them built out. We got them all staffed and now we're kind of rolling to see. I'd love to see what they look like. I know, can I ask, can you share a little bit behind like how the revenue split or can you tell me a little bit like how that works? I'm super curious. Yeah, no, we get a deal with them where we just have basically a lease inside the 24 hour fitness. So we're paying them a lease.  That's right. That's exactly right. So NutriShop does some of that inside of 24 hour fitness. They have a couple of locations. I'm trying to think of some other businesses they've partnered with. We could end up being their biggest partner because we have access to everyone that's available which is over a hundred.  But we'll see. There's a bunch here in Northern California that we're vetting right now. You can ask us. We know NorCal 24 hour fitness like the back of our hands. I'll be reaching out. I'm sure. That's Ben Randall's territory too. So we'll be talking to him. He's our VP of this all. Yeah, I ran open a couple of clubs up here back in the day. So then the normal general manager, sales staff, they don't sell your programs. It's your own staff in there that does it. That's right. That's right. Now there, I mean, we have obviously, they have, they have vested interest in seeing us do well. Of course. And so we have kind of the, the model is kind of split where we do the speed ton express, which is all the speed training for youth athletes. Then we put inside of there kind of an assisted stretch model called speed stretch. A lot like stretch lab and stretch zone and some of these places. Cause it's dead during the day. And so all those people that are coming in and out working out, you know, instead of driving to go get an assisted stretch, we'll do it inside of there. So we have created our own, our own system of assisted stretching. We have a system, we have all our credentials and stuff, and then they'll come in and do that. So since 2020 positive cash flow, is it profiting already? It has been, yeah. Wow. Yeah, yeah. We've had a great run. Our next, our next big move is our KSP global digital coaching platform where we can get outside of our four walls where we can get, you know, national international of taking our master trainers through our platform, which is our exercise.com app and spitting out workouts to, you know, soccer clubs in Spain and, you know, universities in Canada, some of these people that we're working with. Well, exciting. So yeah, it's fun. It's exciting. Very exciting. You know, getting into all that cause you asked about the business. I mean, there is no balance right now, but there's no balance because it's been, we've been blessed.  I got an awesome team. Our team's grown. You know, I started this company by myself in basically 2020, me and two NFL football players. And now we have 60 employees and 14 facilities. And it's just been like a whirlwind. And so there's a lot that goes on and changes, you know, being an entrepreneur is, I'm sure as you guys all know here, not the easiest thing, but I do feel like I'm in the sweet spot of life. You know, I kind of get to call my own shots and it's awesome. I love it. How cool. That's really cool. Well, Brian, this has been amazing, man. Yeah. I appreciate you coming on the show. It's so good. I mean, I always learn stuff when I talk to really good trainers. And so I learned a few things from talking to you. And excited to hear you, you kind of reaching out to the mainstream with these facilities. Yeah. Can't wait to hear about that. And, you know, if you want, you know, any help of the ones up here, we know. We'll definitely use your resource. I appreciate that a ton. Thank you so much. It's been great. Thank you.


A tale of two sides sitting on the same point, but going through different rings of form. After Bradford's excellent start to the season, taking 10 points from the first 12 available, the Bantams have struggled. Injuries have taken their toll, the problem becoming so much of an issue, that Derry Adams has taken the same approach to training. Rochdale, fired on by Jake Beesley, unable to prove that for a slow start. For the narrow midweek loss to Wiles, Oldham perked off Robby Stockdale, who urged his side to use the defeat as fuel to them. It's Bradford against Rochdale. A energetic early start from Rochdale. A bit sloppy through both sides on the touch of the ball, and a chance down this left-hand side, and a very good chance here. A very good chance for Bradford, and the deflection was worrying for Rochdale for a moment. Great work down this left-hand side. That's right-hand side, brought down. Obviously a little tight, and obviously a little awkward, near well though. Stockdale does like his teams to keep the ball on the ground. He's with his own team out to this left-hand side. Clip back in a real opportunity. And it's not an opportunity that Andrew Cook could take in the end. It was awkward, it wasn't really straight out, and he had to generate everything. Still be frustrated though, I think. He wants it, get it. For to Beasley instead. His pass is poor, and again Bradford can come forward. Cook wants it, off this left-hand side instead. It's another big chance for Bradford. There's a lot of bodies in the way. It might still drop for Cook, it might still drop for Cook. Roman on top of it, who's that just never really seemed to sit. Off of Burnham, could have gotten chances though. Clips up in the air. Sexy out-boxing, played pretty simply by the keeper. Could be taken as well. Genduck and Dany's left-hand side. Cron Burnham. He's going to support, and finally gets it from... Right owls. Or a corner kick. Range for a second. He's not like Sutton. He's about to test watch out. It's very difficult to get it anywhere through those bodies. They've been well in this game. They've not created so far as many chances, as you'd imagine they want to. Who goes for the shot? He's created better than that. 20-year-old, never really getting his body into the right shape. Time-class season played some of the best football in League 1. He's Burnham again, and into the side netting. He needs to be better today. Bradford City, way too many spaces. They get to take the chance though. Or just touch. Burnham wants it again. Right off to Sutton. And it's Gilead did. The first goal of his third spell with Bradford City. And it is a very, very simple one. Sutton shot, not dealt with properly. That one, impossible to stop. There is support. Burnham's brilliantly won by the goal scorer laid open. Just a little overplayed. Kick-its, somehow, not on target. It was coming into the pace. Bradford will lead at the break in that first half, but taking their chances, not creating too many clear-cut ones either, mind you, has it on this left-hand side. Don't think he might get it and does. Now struck from distance. Burnham-Borley can score from that range. Shani before, doesn't show it there. A little touch on the outside of the boot. Ball comes back, and now there are numbers of bodies forward here for Rochedale. That's a really good ball towards Cashman. Beasley's unmarked. He's got a right decision. Rochedale's top scorer. Pretty much unmarked in the centre. Again, very good. Couple of bodies in a fades, Beasley. It comes to Cashman. It goes over the bar. I'm not beat his day. Lovely ball. It opened up. It went up. Another chance here. Here is Sutton. Wanged chances from Lee by Sutton. Going to burst down this wing here and has done so very well. Sons into the penalty area. Another deck. O'Connell the guilty party. James Bell points to the spot. Sutton just got around the Rochedale captain. Chances galore in the first half. He takes his chance in the second. His fifth of the season. His first from the spot since 2018. And it somehow and just about made its way through the keeper. Bradford in complete control now. Had dropped away in form over the last few weeks. Still had gone the other way, but at the moment the home side are in control. Could be a chance here for Newby. Trying to win it and trying to keep it. Suddenly wins a free kick. It's low. It drives through and it's tapped wide if you tame goals for a penalty. Referee not interested. They're getting caught under the foot. Lovely touch here for Robinson who gets it back. Fear Robinson, wider goal. Not far away from the substitute. Lovely touch, lovely layoff. Kills it wide. Bradford will take all three points in a game. There's slightly more there over 90 minutes. But Rochedale and Danny Cashman in particular may feel they had a few goals and maybe a few points. They're felt there in their own. And it's still the ad-bretters first of his new start with the Bantams. Pouncing on a rebound. Then after lead by Sutton the Sparrow and Andy Cook who had a number of chances in the game was able to put the ball home. Rochedale weren't caught today. They just couldn't apply the finishing touches. It's finished. Bradford City 2. Rochedale no.