Mastering Pulling & Pressing Gymnastics: The Audit / Plan / Execute Matrix for Coaches & Athletes: E.371

We lay out a simple matrix to fix pulling and pressing gymnastics: audit, plan, execute across mobility, stability, strict work, low-rep checks, capacity, intervals, and metcons. Coaches get a system to diagnose and program; athletes get clear steps that trade ego for durable skill.
• moving community chat from Discord to Telegram
• early-bird camp at CrossFit Roots announced
• why practice hard things: growth, challenge, mindset
• audit sequence: dead hangs, kip swings, handstand holds
• strict strength as the bridge to safe capacity
• low-rep checks to confirm core-to-extremity timing
• capacity waves: high sets to dense sets
• intervals without interference to build athlete IQ
• metcon strategy: short/medium/long, cardio/gas/muscle
• programming across planes: pull, press, odd objects
• mobility test–retest, post-training mobility habits
• patience as a coaching and athlete rite of passage

Head to the link in bio on Instagram to get signed up for any of our individual programs. TeamMisfit.com for affiliate programming—click Sign Up Now for a two-week free trial at SugarWod, StreamFit, or PushPress. Camp at CrossFit Roots Jan 30–Feb 1—early bird pricing live. Email coach@misfitathletics.com for the Telegram link.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Housekeeping & Program Links
• 1:00 Community Shift: Discord to Telegram
• 3:57 Camp Announcement: CrossFit Roots, Boulder
• 8:50 Why We Host Camps for Coaches and Athletes
• 13:25 Athlete Psychology: Why We Practice Hard Things
• 21:50 Main Topic Setup: Pulling & Pressing Focus
• 23:40 The Audit–Plan–Execute Matrix Overview
• 26:35 Audit Step 1: Mobility & Stability Screens
• 32:20 Audit Step 2: Strict Variations
• 39:40 Audit Step 3: Low-Rep Movement Checks
• 44:05 Audit Step 4: Skill vs Capacity EMOMs
• 51:00 Audit Step 5: Intervals Without Interference
• 57:00 Audit Step 6: Metcons & Athlete IQ
• 1:00:35 Planning Mobility: Test–Retest & Tools
• 1:05:40 Planning Stability: Holds, Carries, Secondary Accessory
• 1:10:40 Planning Strict Strength Across Planes
• 1:16:35 Low-Rep Practice Frequency & Oversight
• 1:20:30 Capacity Progressions: Sets, Volume, Intensity
• 1:26:20 Intervals by Stimulus: Cardio, Gas, Muscle
• 1:30:40 Metcon Integration & Seasonal Timing
• 1:33:52 Closing Links & CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

Good morning, Misfits. You are tuning in to another episode of the Misfit Podcast. On today's episode, we have a two-for-one special. If you are an athlete and you want to know how to get better at pulling or pressing gymnastics, we're going to talk you through that. And if you're a coach, we're going to take you through our audit plan and execute matrix way to systemize thinking relating to getting people better at basically anything. This one is kind of set up for this specific scenario, but a lot of the nuances will apply across the board to different things. So that part of it will be fun. Before that, we'll do a little bit of housekeeping, do a little bit of live chat, and then jump right in. Housekeeping, super straightforward. Head to the link in bio on Instagram to get signed up for any of our individual programs. You can get signed up on Fitter or Strivey. If you are looking for our affiliate programming, you can head to teammisfit.com, click on the sign up now button, and you get a two-week free trial at SugarWad, StreamFit, or PushPress. We are officially 100% moved from Discord to Telegram. I should have the I actually made a list. Let's see if I can find it really quick or not. Did I name it? I'm not very good at naming sheets. I have a lot of untitled sheets.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31

Uh that is you'd think that wouldn't be a problem with the largest search engine in the world, but who would have thought that it's search functions in Google Reading how bad it is, man. Might as well be Ask Jeeves in like 1994.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46

Yes, I found it. All right. Shout out to Gus, Paolo, Chad, Adrian, Kyle, Seamus, Tammy, Pete, Jason, Ashley, Nate, Brock, and Katie. Everyone was super cool about me being like, hey, you guys are our VIPs, MVPs on these posting platforms. And if you move, others will join you. So thank you to everyone for being cool about it. And we're always open to feedback. And one of the things that someone requested was like, you should tell everyone why you're making the move, basically, like our feedback to Discord, I guess. And from an admin standpoint, an automation standpoint, and a file sharing standpoint, it sucks. It's cool that we had all the different channels and everything like that. But you have to do these weird things called nitro boosts to have certain things show up, and it's just a really weird, tiered payment system. Telegram is basically just stripped down and more straightforward. And I know people are kind of getting used to it as we go, but there's like been a lot of action in there in the last week. And that's just like thank you to everybody who made that happen and the other people who are participating. If you cannot find the link, just let us know. Reach out on social, email me, coach at misfitathletics.com, and we will get that to you. So yeah, we are completely moved. I am working on what we do with the Discord and is there a way to archive certain things related to that? But I am going to in the near future shut it down to the point where you can't post to it anymore. Because I just don't want to, you know, every week go check and see if somebody is screaming into the abyss. Also on Fitter, there are communities and there's some pretty good conversations there. But if you want to open up the, you know, group of people that you're talking to, I would say only like 10% of our users use the communities feature. Keep using it if you want to. I'm I'm always on there, happy to answer questions. I like sort of eavesdropping on you guys' conversations, but Telegram will definitely be the place to kind of make that happen. So yeah, I think that I think that's basically it. Live chat.

SPEAKER_01: 3:48

We have do we want to uh is it talking about C A M P yet?

SPEAKER_00: 3:53

Oh, holy fuck, what's wrong with me? Thank you, Hunter. You're welcome. All right, we have a big announcement. Maybe you saw it on social media, maybe you didn't, maybe you got the email from me, maybe you didn't. We are going to be at CrossFit Roots for camp January 30th through February 1st. That is in Boulder, Colorado. If you're on the fence and then you're like, hey, why don't we go snowboarding on Monday? Hit me up. We'll talk about that. But yeah, we uh we're we're we're going to, I know that there's sort of like a lot of CrossFit HQ influence in that area. And Nicole is someone who's been involved in the community for for a really long time and is uh someone who who uses Misfit affiliate at her gym. And we've we've sort of shouted them out before talking about it. Kind of feels like that's the kind of place that carries the same kind of standard that we try to do here, which which I think is rare when you look at the community at large. So not only is Boulder, Colorado, just a really fucking cool place, really great food in that time of year. Like if you come to Maine and it's just always dark and fucking overcast in winter and you're stepping in slushy puddles, like but if you go to a like picturesque mountain town kind of a situation, it's got a different vibe.

SPEAKER_01: 5:09

Is it also is it gonna be snowing in Boulder, Colorado at that time of year?

SPEAKER_00: 5:13

Oh yeah, yeah. Got it right. Um, but it could also be like 55 degrees. I went to college 30, 40 minutes north of there, and you'd get snow and it would be gone the next day, kind of melt, like that kind of thing. The weather, honestly, at elevation can be anything. Yeah. At any time. So yeah, we are it's it's in the link in bio on Instagram. Uh, you'll be taken to the kind of the event page. We've got some information there. If you are on the fence, another, you know, DM me, coach at misfitathletics.com via email. I've had some people reach out and ask if it's a good situation for coaches. I kind of joke that like we're not athletes, so camp it almost is more for coaches just because of the way that we think and communicate. Um, but you'd have to look at it through that lens. Honestly, today's episode is maybe an interesting exploration into like if I'm listening to this, am I trying to get better at strict polling, or not strict pulling, but pulling gymnastics, pressing gymnastics, or am I trying to get someone else better at it? Those are just two different lenses to absorb similar information. And like, I would, if I was like starting a new gym or something like that, one of the first things that I would want to happen is to just make a camp happen so that my entire coaching staff could come to camp and just see the way that we it's not just the movements, but it's also the way that we communicate with people, the way that we sort of break certain things down, that kind of deal. So if you are a coach, it's funny. People ask, like, if I don't follow the programming, can I come to camp? If I'm a coach and not an athlete, can I come to camp? If I'm more of just a fan of all of this, like I'm a nerd on it. Like all of those camp is very much for those people. And I like to say that it is a very unique situation to be in a room with that many like-minded individuals. That is my favorite part of camp. Um, I I like the idea of getting our programming out to as many people as possible and our whatever services that we have out to as many people as possible. But I thrive when I am having, when I am coaching someone who really cares or talking to another coach who is like all in on this concept. And I think it's hard to find, you know, you go out into an affiliate and you gotta pick out the like couple of people that are like that in any given class. You show up at a camp like this, and every single person that's there is very much into something that is very similar to you, and that can just be like, I don't know, just a really cool thing and a way to motivate yourself from whatever perspective.

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

Yeah, I think the like we've been to a lot of places camp wise. Probably I feel like roots is like, you know, as as much of like a a CrossFit mecca as you as you kind of get as far as like definitely a destination with an okay. Yeah, gym destination, city, coaching staff too, you you really can't miss. And then like, yeah, my like love helping athletes of all varieties, you know, whether you're competitive athlete or you know, an affiliate athlete, just just trying to get better at something. But from the uh from the coaching perspective, it's like I'm I'm a just a just kind of an ardent believer in like the the CrossFit methodology being the foundation that all of us kind of kind of branch out from, whether or not your your goal is kind of the long-term health that CrossFit was was originally kind of touted for, or maybe dipping your toe into the more like competitive sports side of fitness, understanding CrossFit at the most base level, I think is necessary for both of those people and the coaches. So I'm I'm excited to just go to a place that you know has that like just kind of ingrained as like a baseline of like coaches, coaches understand this stuff. We try to teach the members this sort of stuff, and then hopefully we can bring a slightly different, you know, different perspective, and then also kind of take it even a step further for the athletes who want to treat CrossFit like a competitive sport. Yeah, should be a great time.

SPEAKER_00: 9:13

Early bird pricing is up now. I believe I set it to the end of November in terms of us figuring out the exact coaching staff, how many coaches we're bringing. It is really helpful for us, if financially viable, for you to basically buy it now, you know, into November, that kind of thing. For anyone who's used to our typical camp pricing, um, us having to travel 2,000 miles basically added like$40 to$50 to your ticket price, um, just to kind of be transparent. So um it's you know, just costs a little bit more money for us to get out there. It's really important to me that we bring the right staff, the right size of staff, all of that stuff. So um I honestly don't think we've ever had someone be like, that was not worth the money that we paid. We've definitely had a lot of people being like, you should charge a thousand dollars for that. That kind of thing. So so yeah, um, I don't know how the fuck that slipped my mind, but very exciting announcement. And people ask all the time, we want to be able to do one to three camps a year. Um, and a lot of it just comes down to the planning of you know what HQ does and where our athletes are going and what the landscape looks like and all that stuff. So it's exciting to be getting back into it. Um hope to see all of you guys there. Link in bio. I think it's right at the top right now. It's one of the one of the top ones. Training camp at Roots. Early bird pricing is available for another month or so. Um, and then you gotta pay 50 bucks more after. Now we are on the live chat. What you got going on?

SPEAKER_01: 10:51

I played golf so poorly on Sunday that I booked a lesson in the middle of my round.

SPEAKER_00: 10:58

That's just great.

SPEAKER_01: 10:59

Like, you know, it's kind of funny. I don't remember who I was talking to about it, but my and I might even be just be repeating myself. Maybe I was talking to the podcast about this, but the you know, I went through a stage or have gone through a stage of ask of saying to myself, like, I don't understand the affiliate level athlete who wants to get better at CrossFit for the sake of getting better at CrossFit. It doesn't, I don't, it doesn't compute with me. Because I think of in my current state, I think of CrossFit as purely the like the one workout I do. It's this, it's like just kind of part of the habit of the day or part of the routine for the day, get my workout in, move along. I know I did something good for my health. But the idea of like proactively doing like more than the class in order to get better at it, I'm like, I don't understand this. Like, I don't, it doesn't, it's it's been a long enough time for me that I no longer understand the desire to get better at it. Having started a new kind of athletic endeavor in golf, I now understand why people or kind of have been reminded why people spend extra time, extra money on a sure personal training or you know, whatever it happens to be. They're they're dedicating personal resources in order to get better at this thing that like now that I'm talking about this, I do feel like I said this on the podcast. But it's like in or for me, me, me getting better at golf does nothing for my life other than makes me personally feel good, whatever motivation that is, whether it's egotistical, competitive in nature, whatever. But it's like like why would you like why am I spent why did I spend money to go someone to go teach me like how to get better at golf? And it's like, well, like I guess do I need a reason? Like it brings it brings happiness, like playing playing good golf is more fun than playing bad golf. And it's just like it kind of got me down the rabbit hole of like a little bit of athlete psychology of like why why do people like what what I guess what motivates somebody to like get better at something is kind of a it was kind of a weird rabbit hole for me. But as I was like in the moment extremely frustrated after playing well on Saturday, very much a Jekyll and Hyde kind of weekend, and I'm like, why the fuck? Like, okay, you suck? Great. Here's a lesson. Here's a lesson inbound. You're gonna you're gonna pay for book it and pay for it in the middle of the round that you're playing poorly, and then go do it. And it kind of made me think, I was like, why do people spend why do why do people spend the time and the money getting better at something that isn't necessarily gonna do anything for them like from a utility perspective, other than maybe just like it brings, it's like it's satisfying, it brings personal personal satisfaction, achievement, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_00: 13:43

I don't know if my question's making any sense, but the long and the short is No, no, it makes perfect sense, but it's so easy for me to push back on. It's grow or die. You are we don't have the same opportunities to challenge ourselves that we used to. Life used to be significantly more challenging. Like the hermetic response to I'm frozen because I'm outside, or I'm boiling hot because I'm outside, or I if I don't, you know, if I don't find, you know, I'm not fit enough to find my fucking food, then I'm gonna die. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, and we can you're talking big picture, like, I'm talking, yeah. I'm talking, yeah. Life is easier um in well, it's easier in different ways, obviously, and harder in different ways, but you if things are working properly, you should be motivated to like that's one of the main points of like testosterone. It's like you should be motivated to improve yourself. And part of that is just the like the challenging of yourself to prove to yourself that you can't overcome adversity. You are learning, you are training yourself for a moment when you literally need to overcome actual adversity. So I think the challenging people finding ways in modern society to challenge themselves is incredibly important for maintaining survival because we know, you know, there's the like the reason why you have the giant head aliens with like the tiny arms, whether someone made that up or saw it. Do we dare go down that road again? Is the concept that we're gonna get really fucking smart and not be very physical beings. But you can also take a look at modern society and be like, it might I see a lot of shrinking heads and larger bodies, heads, a lot of a lot of heads, tiny heads, huge bodies for heads, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:38

So it's the bat I think it's the battle against that. It's the battle against I eat absolute dog shit and I, you know, basically just watch TV and I don't do anything, and I, you know, maybe collect, you know, a check. I don't work, I don't you know what I mean? Like just this version of a human that's like parked on a couch.

SPEAKER_01: 15:56

We think it's more based on like a desire to improve at something difficult, yeah, and to be challenged.

SPEAKER_00: 16:02

To be challenged, yeah. Yeah. Because it still is, I mean, CrossFit is a hermetic stressor, like that's obvious, right? Yeah. But there's there's definitely stuff going on with doing the same thing. You know, golf is very mental, very like understanding the mind-body connection, that kind of thing. And if you want to get into like the philosophical reason, it's like light and dark, good and bad, rain or shine, I feel good, I feel bad. There's people think that they want to be happy all of the time, or that like a two-minute friend would be easy or whatever. It wouldn't, it would suck, it would be boring. You wouldn't under you would have no juxtaposition to create the idea. So for sure, those are those are very clear reasons to me why people would do that. And then I also just get a kick out of like Hunter's. I don't think you guys ever have to worry about Hunter coming on here and spouting a bunch of bullshit to you. Like, because he's like, he's like, he's like, my livelihood relies on selling the things that I don't even understand why people buy them. Yeah, I I fucking love that. No, it's great, it's hilarious.

SPEAKER_01: 17:09

I mean, yeah, it wasn't meant to be that. It was, but it was, it was more like, well, now the I mean the the the end of the story says I actually do fully understand it and like good on you. Yeah, and it's like, but yeah, yeah, I won't bullshit you. But to be clear, like if you're not doing CrossFit, what the fuck are you doing?

SPEAKER_00: 17:25

Yeah. If you're not doing CrossFit and signing up for camps and paying for remote coaching, also a lot of t-shirts, then I don't I don't think we can help you. I hope you know we're joking when we say that. Um all right, what do I have? Uh my my my life is wild right now, and I won't fully divulge publicly all that is going on in my life right now. But Operation Dad Bod is it's not in a holding pattern, but like holy shit. It would be an understandable holding pattern. Yeah, yeah, it's an it's a holding pattern. It's not intentional though, is I think what I'm hoping gets me like brownie points from a anti-regression back in my own good graces. But we're working through it. My back is just such a problem, and there's a lot of really good research on what happens to stuff like that when you're under high levels of stress. Basically, your nervous system is mixes it right up, does it? Yeah, yeah. Being in fight or flight all the time makes your back feel really good. Yeah, makes sense. Recommendation. Tight as light, as they say. Don't sleep, drink this.

SPEAKER_01: 18:40

It's not like your entire nervous system, like in your back.

SPEAKER_00: 18:44

Yeah. Um, and then um the Steelers did not play. The we talked about it's basically the opposite of the game. Can't win, don't play. Yeah, exactly. Can't lose.

SPEAKER_01: 18:57

Can't lose.

SPEAKER_00: 18:58

The Red Sox, that was fun. They beat the Yankees in game one, which was awesome. And I talked about like a fragile franchise could crumble. And they honestly tried to. The Red Sox could have and should have won game two to end it, and then had no business even being on the field with the Yankees in game three. So it was fun. I think it caused the Yankees a little bit of panic, which is nice. They are getting their asses handed to them by the Blue Jays, which is beautiful. So we'll take that. But it was fun to get into playoff baseball, and then also, this is blasphemous, but kind of fun that I don't have to like deal with that, like figure out how to make time to sit in front of my television for three hours.

SPEAKER_01: 19:40

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 19:41

Yeah, well, luckily, so they do oh look, pitch clock. Yeah, yeah, three hours. Yeah, it's like a three-hour game now. Like regular seasons, like two and a half hours. It's also not just the pitch clock, though. Um, relief pitchers have to throw to a minimum of three batters. So when we used to watch Red Sox Yankees playoff games, it'd probably be like five hours long because lefty specialist comes in, righty comes in, and every time they're coming out and warming up, and like it's crazy to be at those games. Yeah. Because like as the tension builds, everything slows way fucking down. So playoff baseball is much more digestible now. And I just have to assume that unless something goes wrong that as a longtime baseball fan, do you support these changes?

SPEAKER_01: 20:25

Or are you more of a traditionalist and like fucking let it let it let it watch?

SPEAKER_00: 20:30

I'm uh I love baseball. Baseball is like religion in my family. I am also like ADD kid and like got shit to do. I I guarantee you I was watching crows attack a hawk long enough to miss a fly ball at least once. And like like as an adult or as like a late teenager. Um then obviously just as a kid, it's fucking either really exciting or very fucking boring. Um, so I definitely support that stuff. The robot umps are coming next year. So they've tested that in the minor leagues. So like I'm up to bat, and there's an egregious balls and strikes call. I can tap my helmet, and the robot will immediately say like they were right or wrong. It's kind of like a challenge, um, that kind of thing. But it's done completely by technology.

SPEAKER_01: 21:22

There's still physical umpires though, behind home plate.

SPEAKER_00: 21:25

Yeah, they're calling balls and strikes the whole game, but only so right now the challenge system is basically before the next pitch is thrown. I believe the uh the the team has to say that it's a challenge and then they do the whole video review bullshit. This is gonna be a limit on challenge on field. This is on field only. So batter, pitcher, catcher are the only people that can challenge. Um, and then obviously, yeah, so that will be hilarious if like someone with a massive ego ruins their team's challenges because the coach does not the coach doesn't really factor into it unless you can like sneak a quick glance at your coach and he tells you to tap your helmet like that kind of thing. So that'll be that'll be fucking fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 22:07

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 22:08

Yeah. All right. So today's episode for the athlete, how do I get better at how do I master, how do I figure out pulling and pressing gymnastics? Obviously, there's a list there, your toe-to-bar, your pull up, your bar muscle up, your ring muscle up. On the pulling side, you know, your rope climbs and your legless rope climbs. And then on the pressing side, kind of part of the family is your wall walk and your handstand walk, but we're probably going to be talking a little bit more about the handstand push-up variations when it comes to this stuff. And on the coaching side, we are I'll sort of put it out there. I'm testing the waters a little bit. So I'm working, it's it's been a long time coming and it's still probably going the to still a little bit more runway, but I'm kind of testing out how you guys feel about us doing educational content for coaches. We talked about sort of the you know, the idea related to camp. Like that's just those are our people. That's our brethren. And I really like my end goal in my career is to coach coaches. That is really what I want to do. So online courses, mentorships, teach people how to program, teach people how to like basically pass on the information that we've learned over time. And today is just an example of sort of testing the waters related to that. So you guys can let as always, you guys let us know, both from the athlete side and the coaching side, what you think of this stuff. And basically, what I am looking at right now, and I'll pull it up on the screen, figure out technology. Let's see. We're gonna try to do a good job of making sure that if you're not watching on YouTube that we're explaining what is happening on the screen here. So, what I am looking at right now is the audit, plan, and execute matrix. So column A, running vertically, we have three rows audit, plan, and execute. Um, and these are very much in order. And then from left to right, um basically the top of the matrix, we have mobility, stability, strict variations, low rep, skill slash capacity, intervals, and met cons. Um, and the idea here is we would start in that top left corner. We're gonna be auditing the mobility and stability, and then we're gonna work our way left to right, and then we're gonna come up with a plan, and then we're gonna talk about kind of the execution phase of those things. Um, again, from the coaching perspective, when you have frameworks like this, not only do you, I don't know, not just basically just not like leave things out, forget certain levels of it, you can also communicate really well to your athlete, to your coaching staff, to other people what you are trying to do. Because one of the things that happens, definitely more so with me and the way that I think and execute versus Hunter, but both of us, is like we can just tell you from our experiences what to do out loud in real time. And then is it documented? Is it teachable? Is the person gonna remember what you said, that sort of thing. So, in a in an effort to sort of teach and pass these things along, this is one of the things that can be really helpful.

SPEAKER_01: 25:06

Yeah, and I think that like that kind of framework is is always helpful. And I think the order of things that we have here is also like really useful because there is kind of like to my point, my initial point in uh when we were talking about camp is like, you know, we're we're maybe talking to an athlete, an athlete of any ability level, right? But like affiliate athlete all the way to games athlete, like the the foundational kind of first principle stuff remains the same. It's like if you don't have access and stability, so mobility and stability, like it doesn't matter if you're top 20 in the world in the CrossFit Open or trying to do an RX workout at your affiliate, like the requirement's the same, right? There's just a different level of capacity that you expect from a different type of person. And a lot of times the conversations are really the same. You get athletes who want to be want to perceive them or perceive themselves as a whether it's a competitor or somebody who is working towards that sort of kind of down that path, like that there there are there is no difference in the requirement. There might be a difference as far as how I as a coach communicate with that athlete, but I'm but the the end goal is still gonna be the same. What the words that I use and the the the you know the vernacular and stuff might be different, but the end goal is all the same, and we're all working off the same kind of like again, like the foundational principles in order to build capacity and especially like gymnastics movements.

SPEAKER_00: 26:29

Yeah, for sure. All right, so we are looking at the first block in our matrix here. We are in the audit phase. As the coach, we're looking at things and trying to gather as much information as we can. And we're always gonna start with mobility and stability. So, in a perfect world, you are working with an athlete in person, and it's like, I want to do a personal training session, let's how to end to the gym, let's take a look. These sort of audits in singular form can very much be done in an affiliate setting as well. I think that's really important to sort of put out there. But I want to see someone definitely from the bar first. We might not know necessarily what someone's goals are, um, but the bar and the rings, I want to see a dead hang and I want to see kip swings. I want to see how someone holds on to a bar and rings. Is there pinky knuckle on top? Are they wrapping their thumb or not? Is there tension in the elbow? Is there tension in the shoulder? Are we drawing this nice, beautiful straight line? Is that rib cage broken? Like you can really learn a lot from someone in the most basic setting. And it's really imperative not to really coach much in this in during a lot of these audit things, unless you're worried about safety. Like again, my guys, I'm thinking more along the lines of someone comes to me and they want to get better at something that they can already do. Hunter, a lot of the time is going to be like, can we hang from a pull-up bar? Like that kind of thing. So I know that it's, you know, I think we'll probably bounce back and forth a little bit from that. But then I would move on to like, how are you moving in relation to the object? It's very different. Someone might have a really good understanding of, um, and a lot of people don't, the kip swing on the pull-up bar and what drives that and what it looks like. That's when we can really get a look at some mobility, that kind of thing. Um, you know, it's all good and fun that someone can have that dead hang, but when we get into the hollow arch, what is that starting to look like? And then getting a little bit more into technique, but you can really learn something about someone's body awareness when they don't have the fixed object and are kipping on the rings.

SPEAKER_01: 28:33

Yeah. A quick question is for clarification on this. Are you you do you want to do like broad kind of bullet points? Because I see you've got you've got pulling and pressing in the mobility stability cell, or are we going to do like an example movement as we go here or more more broad?

SPEAKER_00: 28:48

We'll keep it broad to the family of pulling and pressing, because I think we can use concepts and teach over kind of a broader scale. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 28:58

Yeah, I think that like, and as a coach, what you can the way that you almost delineate these two things, and this is the same, this is you know how you would you you would not say like, hey, I want to get better at a you you would not have an athlete come in and say, Hey, I want to get better at squatting, and you say, Okay, like let's see, 315, hit me up. Let's what do you got? Sure. Right? It's like, okay, let's look at your air squat with a pause. Like, what does the bottom position of your squat look like? You need to take this, and this is the same way that I like to warm affiliate athletes up for class, right? It's like you start by assessing static positions, right? So like the bottom of a squat. Does the athlete have like the things you said, the body awareness, the kinesthetic awareness to just like know where they're at in space? Hey, hey Tommy, do you know that you are like six inches above parallel? Do you know that your, you know, your arches are collapsed? Do you know that your, you know, your elbows are bent as you're hanging from the bar? Always start. I like to with the static positions. And like you said, like it you can't oversimplify it, like just hang. From a pull-up bar. I could see, like, you know, hey, we're gonna talk about toes to bar, been to a hop, hang from the pull-up bar in a hollow position. The athlete hops up, their thumb's over the bar, their rib cage is broken, they don't really have any concept for what you know a hollow position actually looks like. Maybe they're just dangling from the ground, and like you would be very or maybe not at all surprised at like, especially an athlete who maybe hasn't been coached before or doesn't go to an affiliate with grade A coaching, you know, it's like they don't even they don't know what they don't know. And starting with the static positions is like that's just raw baseline, right? Same thing with pressing. It's like a handstand hold. If I see you kick up into a handstand hold and you know, your your chest is pointed at the floor in an overextended position, like I know what's coming, but you need to like an athlete might think to themselves, like, yeah, I can do a handstand hold, nothing wrong with this. And it's like, actually, everything's wrong with this. And like, I already know, I'm not gonna tell the athlete, but like in my head, I'm like, okay, I probably know what I'm gonna see here, here, here, and here. And you can kind of almost like you don't want to get ahead of yourself and just kind of know it all, but like at least you know probably what to expect, and you can get better at assessing, kind of assessing and correcting. So always think like, do the static stuff first, hang from the pull-up bar, get into a handstand hold, get on top of, you know, what's the dip position look like on the rings, whatever it is, but the static, the stationary stuff, then, you know, like you said, go to the kip swings, right? Go from the handstand hold to the actual wall walk, make the athlete move dynamically, and what maybe was a really sound static position all of a sudden falls apart when you start to move because the athlete doesn't have body awareness, doesn't have like the coordination or whatever. And it's like a lot of times those are like the foundational problems that athletes have versus something like crazy down the line.

SPEAKER_00: 31:53

Yeah, and I'm definitely this is the way that I'm going to address all of this stuff is gonna turn this into like an eight-part series, but I think it's worth it. So, two things that come into mind as an affiliate coach, you can build in like half of this into a warm-up without even telling people, right? I'm thinking of like Yeah, I mean that's how I do it. Like you guys do the scat pull-ups, and then we do some kipping, and then it's like, hey, let's get, you know, potentially get some strict or banded stuff worked in. Let's, you know, one other thing that would be really important here at a higher level would be changing the grip on the pull-up. Like I know for me personally, after years of of baseball and football throwing, like, like palms facing is it hurts my elbows.

SPEAKER_01: 32:39

So funny, we did we did that today with we did clean and jerk toes to bar, and it's like that supinated grip is really telling of somebody's ability to externally rotate the shoulders. Somebody who hangs from a pull-up bar like this with their palms facing each other, like I'm willing to bet that their front rack looks something like you know, like this. Just stab myself in the eye. But like once and then one you can start to pick up the an important thing here, too, is like as a coach, having an understanding of all of these, you know, the kind of anatomical descriptions of what's going on, right? It's like an athlete who does a kip swing and their elbows bend as they get into kind of that arch position. It's like, well, that's a that's a compensation mechanism for a lack of shoulder rotation, unless it's just a body awareness thing, right? But like understanding how joints are supposed to be moving, what their like ranges are, and and that could be as far as like understanding like a physical therapy, like kind of like, hey, this is what normal range of motion is, right? And like, so if this is hindered in any way, like, you know, someone who lacks internal shoulder rotation is probably gonna have trouble locking the bar out overhead, is gonna have trouble in that arch position in the kip swing, is probably gonna be overextended when they get up against the wall because they they're gonna compensate for a lack of range of motion somewhere. Athletes are exceptionally good at working around things that they don't have, they're not they don't have yet.

SPEAKER_00: 34:07

Yeah, and the other piece that came to mind because it's the lecture that I'm working on right now, is intuition and coaching. We cannot and will not give by definition examples for everything that you could possibly see in a handstand hold, in a dead hang in a kep, in a kipswing. And partially that's because do you want do if you filled out this entire matrix for one movement, would you want there to be, you know, 20,000 words? That would be a little convoluted. And the other reason is it's like a cornerstone of the things that I want to preach in the educational content is intuition is so fucking important as a coach. Um, and we've had this conversation before, Hunter, but it's just there's a certain kind of coach that wants a by the book definition of a thing when human movement and the way that the body works, and even the context in which who are we talking to? What are they trying to accomplish? There's too many ways for that to spider out into, you know, a million scenarios that we need to be willing to sort of trust all of the information that we've been fed and what that could mean in a particular moment.

SPEAKER_01: 35:17

Yeah, for sure. Just a I think that like as a coach, you need to have the kind of textbook understanding of what's going on, but a very conservative application of that as far as like when you're communicating to an athlete, right? They don't need the buy the book thing. They need they need you to translate the book into their language based on what they want.

SPEAKER_00: 35:38

All right. So to put a period on this, and before we move over to strict variations, we want to see someone doing the absolute basic concept related to the movement that we're looking for down the line. Dead hang, kip swings, a handstand hold facing the wall, facing away from the wall, a wall walk. We can learn a lot about what we're working with. And you know, you can blow people's minds with the like, oh, it's actually not your mobility. Please stop staring at the floor. Like, tuck your chin. Wow, these are easy now. Great, let's move on, like that kind of thing. So we're gonna take a look at that first. As we move on now, I'm gonna wanna take a look at the strict variations, even before we get into seeing the, you know, typically core to extremity type movement. And that is going to help with like it's like a bridge. We have mobility, which would give us, you know, sort of the opportunity to become stable. And then that becomes a bit of a barrier to entry to have having real strength related to a movement. Like that's the order that I usually think in things about. So I want to see the way that you do a strict pull-up, the way that you do a strict handstand push-up facing in both directions, the way that you do a strict ring dip, right? Like someone who sort of falls apart under intensity in a muscle up, and then you see them doing a strict ring dip, and it's like, you know, they're shaking. Okay, this is making a whole lot more things aren't perfect. Things break down because we don't have either the mobility, the stability, or the actual strength to be able to do so.

SPEAKER_01: 37:10

Yeah. Yeah. And this is, I think this one is like where, again, thinking about the range of athletes who might be trying to do this, it's like the difference here might be a CrossFit games athlete who does their strict pull-ups with a super broken midline position. They're leaning back, they're they bend their knees, their feet are behind them, that sort of thing, versus, you know, I'm an affiliate athlete, I want to get a bar muscle up, but I don't have a strict pull-up. And it's like, okay, the com we don't we don't need to go much further than this before we start to plan and execute the idea of like, hey, this is this is actually not a this is a maybe uh an actual strength thing, probably a combination of strength and nutrition, right? You carrying around excess body weight that is making gymnastics, and we're talking about gymnastics today, so that like that has to be a huge part of the conversation, right? We don't need to get too far down the road, but that's like that's like a just at baseline. Like if you are carrying around excess body weight and don't have the strict capacity to perform just the foundational strict movements, the dip, the push-up, the pull-up, it's like we're not even I'm not even gonna go that much further down the dynamic, the core to extremity kind of components, kipping and stuff like that, because it's like we're now just trading off like safety for the goal of just like this random movement. So, but yeah, the strict again, like I and I think about that if you kind of again maybe attach it to or associate it with a weightlifting movement, for example. This is where I'm like, like, okay, we've demonstrated a good air squat, we've demonstrated the pause in the bottom of the squat, whatever. Now let's put a little bit of weight on the bar, but I still want you to pause in the bottom, like tempo down, pause in the bottom, stand up. Do you have again applying all those same things, but we just have a little bit more intensity in the fact that there's a loading component to it, but it's still, you know, front squat, like as soon as we add weight, the hips go back, the elbows drop. Like we can learn a lot by just going kind of slowly, and never as a coach, never hesitate to force an athlete to pause or just or you know, yeah, pause, slow down, yeah, slow down, be static in a position, go slower, like Demon for as much shit as people give the old PVC pipe. Like, man, that the number of athletes who just don't move particularly well when you slow them down and force them to work on, like think about what they're doing is is higher than you would think.

SPEAKER_00: 39:32

And there's the other lens in which I would look at this from is if we fast forward out to the end and a and an athlete is semifinals level, crossfit games level, and they have a weakness in one of these movements, you know, sort of under fatigue. We can it's usually pretty fucking obvious if someone learned their first variation of one of these movements just trying to get one fucking rep kipping. Yeah. And as we're going through this stuff, you can teach them really how to understand gymnastics concepts within strict movements and completely remap the way that they're doing these movements. So, like, I have people who would just absolutely crush and annihilate that first column, mobility stability. Then we get into strict variations and they use their biceps and they break their midline to do a strict pull-up. I mean, we see that like all of the time, and it was funny because we got this beautiful display of it when you're at Watapalooza. You have these athletes who are, you know, pretty good at like pulling gymnastics in a kipping form in high rep, but you look over and you see someone like Alex Smith who's basically holding like a slight pike and using, you know, pulling down with his back. And then you see athletes who are, you know, barely gripping onto the bar and they're breaking at the chest and they're getting back behind the bar, which you know makes it all bicep. You get into the strict handstand push-ups, and someone can hold this beautiful position, and they do like a really slow negative and try to like bounce on their neck and hope that somehow that gets them back up, you know, which it'll do for a couple of reps, but you're not really gonna make it very far in that, or they're breaking at, you know, the you know, really kind of chest pointing out or their butts up against the wall. And a lot of these things are exacerbated even more when you're facing the wall and like a wall-facing thing. Like you see a lot of people who you can't really figure out in real time why they wouldn't be good at this thing because they might be like a puller or repressor from a genetic standpoint and they're still not good at it. Take a look at their strict movement and it will tell you a lot. It's like this is all fucking like there's a reason why their forearms and their biceps always feel like they're gonna fall off. Like, what are we putting tension on? How are we doing that? So at all levels, these strict variations, even if we gotta pull out the band, can be really helpful in figuring things out. All right, moving on to low rep. Essentially, what we're saying is again, affiliate context is super easy. Hey, jump up, why don't you give me a few reps? Why don't you show me your toaster bar? Show me your chest to bar, you know, show me these things. And that is when we are in a lot of instances auditing the like quarter extremity concepts, the way that someone moves when they're becoming a little bit more dynamic. And again, there are stricter variations of these things. There's still the strict handstand push-ups, the legless rope climb is going to be one where there's like a lot of strict strength that's required, but there actually still is a lot of quarter extremity if you're doing the you know the legless rope climb properly. So a movement audit of the thing that we're trying to get better at basically toe to bar, chin over bar, chest to bar, bar muscle up, ring muscle up, rope climb, legless rope climb, handstand push-up variations, that kind of thing. How do you move in general without digging into at all like a bit one bigger set, repeated sets, anything like that? Hey, why don't you jump up and give me three? Like that kind of thing. That's what I want to see. Yep, not a whole lot to add there. So, one important thing here as we're moving left to right, we talked about this before we hit record, is we might not make it all the way left to right. Like, there's a lot of people who you can get to a, you know, crazy enough skill. Honestly, it's everyone, every single person. There is going to be, you know, maybe it's ridiculous and it's backflips, but like there is a skill where it's like, if I roast you on an Echo bike and then ask you to go do freestanding handstand push-ups or whatever, that gives us context for the entire spectrum of athlete. Whereas some might be like, we finally got a total bar, but like we're not putting those bad boys in mechcons yet. Like, that's crazy. So at a certain point, as we're working left to right here, you will stop and drop down to plan mobility stability, plan strict variations, plan low rep, that kind of thing. But we're just gonna sort of keep going as if we're we're checking those boxes there. So if we have seen the ability to express mobility and stability, and the person can do strict variations, and they've shown us a few low rep, and it's good enough, we can get into building skill and capacity. And those aren't always going to be like, you know, they could be basically extending a skill session from what we just talked about with low rep. That would be like the low end of okay, um, you've shown me your, you know, two or three reps here. Every two minutes, you're gonna keep doing that, and we're gonna keep an eye on it and see if the coaching that we're having in that moment can kind of move it forward, that kind of thing. Capacity would be our standard recommendation here, um, which is gonna be again more in kind of the planning phase, but we would be watching you do an EMOM. We would be watching you, we would be auditing the way that you move once we introduce volume. And I don't want to get too much, my mind always wants to go to the programming side, but we're still taking a look at this. What happens when your set of three becomes another set of three and becomes another set of three? How do you change the way that you move? Or is it the same? That sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01: 45:10

And to be clear, we're now like we're just watching an athlete in this phase to accumulate, you know, not an egregious volume, but we need to see. I need to see, I need to see that. So the way that I'm kind of like envisioning this as well from like a an affiliate coach perspective is like kind of the mechanicsy mechanics consistency intensity side, right? So it's like the mobility, stability, and strict stuff is like foundational mechanics. Do you do you have any idea where your limbs are in space? Do you have any idea what midline control actually is, where your you know, scapular control, you know, hand uh are there restrictions otherwise that are just preventing you from doing the movement mechanically correct? You get into low rep in the skill, and this is where I'm asking you like, hey, does okay, you said you can do 10 muscle ups. Does the 10th rep look like the first rep? And if not, how much different does it look like? And this is where I think, like, assuming that you have those first that first component, the mechanics part, like lots of athletes are gonna live in this like kind of consistency development stage for a long time, right? And then this is like it's also iterative, right? You're gonna not asking you to only do low intensity emoms until you can do 50 muscle ups, and then we'll do intensity, right? It's a balance of both. It's kind of like a almost like a GPP application of skill development, but like in general, this low rep and the skill capacity kind of legs here are where we want you to accumulate reps. And as a coach, where you're watching athletes, like where at what point? It's like, okay, he's good for 10 muscle ups, but it's like after 15, we start to like the feet kick way up. There's like this massive, massive heave and kip, and the dip is ugly. And it's like, where is it a mechanical breakdown or is it just a capacity breakdown? It's just like, yeah, this is just like this is just how many I do before like I have to start compensating elsewhere. And then we can like as a coach work on a plan to like push that capacity further and further to the right. And it might include intervals and MECOs, like we're talking about, but it's also probably gonna include just a lot of like, hey, you want to get better at bar muscle ups? Like, great, you're gonna do a shitload of strict pull-ups, different pulling variations and stuff like that. Maybe we'll do some kip swings, but like, and you know, maybe it starts with a 10-minute emom of one muscle up, right? And then next week it's two muscle ups in the first minute, and then 10 for the remaining nine minutes, and it's like, or one for the remaining nine minutes, and iterating like that. But this is where it's like a lot of times athletes, it's like, hey, I got my muscle up. Can I do muscle ups in today's workout? There's only 15 in the middle of this thruster burpee metcon. It's like, motherfucker, like you did one. I'm proud of you, you're doing burpee pull-ups, you know, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00: 48:02

So yeah, the the um the nuance here from a remote coaching perspective is if you come visit me, you're starting in that top left corner. And I don't fucking care who you are because we probably are gonna have to have the conversation of whatever it takes isn't just a high heart rate. Um, you got people who are great at doing a high heart rate, you got people that are great at moving big weight, and you got a lot of people who don't want to do the couch stretch or their dead hangs or their squat holds, like that kind of thing. And I am talking about some of the best athletes in the entire fucking world. So that's where we're starting. As a remote coach, a lot of times you got to take the person at their word. And the very first audit that you do is actually skill and capacity. And, you know, it's that weird first week of remote coaching where you're like, I'm not changing shit. Why don't you do the program and show me what it looks like? Right. Like that is such a huge part of it that is incredibly important. So that's typically if I'm working with someone and they've been honest about their abilities, I can have a pretty good idea of what to give them and how to trim certain things down. But a lot of it is observation. And you know, you're making a fucking omelet, you gotta break a few eggs. You're gonna have some sessions where it's like, coach, you asked me to do four muscle ups on the minute for 10 minutes, and I made it three minutes. It's like, well, you probably should have told me like that kind of thing, but yeah, that's a that's kind of a different conversation. So a lot of times that's what that's what happens in a remote coaching setting. But to again to put a period on that one, we have just, hey, I want to watch a more open-ended skill session. I want to watch you kind of try to figure this thing out, or I need video of all of your sets from your 10-minute emom. That kind of thing. All right. So now we are moving on in this scenario where we're feeling okay enough to say we're gonna do some intervals now and just use a you know, a specific example if we are looking at pulling or pressing gymnastics. Probably the most friendly thing to do is a cardio, cardio interval, cardio meaning, we're not really running interference. The sets and reps really just kind of line up with I want you to get off the C2 bike with an elevated heart rate and go do eight chest bar pull-ups, right? Like, like we're gonna start with lower stakes. There's a lot of levels when it comes to what we can do here. So we have that ability. Then we would move on to maybe say like a gas stimulus, where it's like we're gonna add more variables. It's gonna be your traditional, you know, monostructural weightlifting gymnastics triplet, and we're gonna see how you do. And I might even ask you to hold 70 RPMs on the bike and then go do your deficit handstand push-ups. And we're again starting to increase the difficulty. Um, and that difficulty could be um like physical, and that difficulty could be on like an athlete IQ level, that sort of thing. So as we move down the line here, athlete IQ makes way more sense to be part of our audit as coaches. It's like you don't suck at bar muscle ups, you just think everything has to be unbroken. Like, what are you doing? Like, that doesn't make any sense. So it's gonna make more the most sense over in over in Metcons, but as we work through intervals, that's going to be a way for us. Intervals aren't just the ability to to train faster CrossFit, they're also the ability as the coach and the athlete to take a break and reassess.

SPEAKER_01: 51:35

Yeah. Yeah. And I think like going thinking about the skill, like the the progression we've gone from like the super basic static movements to like adding a little bit of you know complexity to now we've got the core to extremity thing, but we don't need when we're talking about intervals, it doesn't need to be ultra high intensity to start, and probably not, right? If you're doing a more intensity than no intensity, yeah, slightly more. And that could be the difference between, right? Like, okay, my my skill capacity plan for improving my muscle ups was like, okay, I'm gonna do two two ring muscle ups every minute for 10 minutes. It's like maybe the interval version is like you get on the like you do your two muscle ups and then you see two bike in the remainder of the minute, right? So it's like an interval where like the only conflict here is now like my heart rate is slightly elevated. Or it's you know, hey, I'm gonna do, I personally really like the like I'll do the gymnastics movement first before the machine, because like ultimately, like, and then the the there become gets a there becomes a a bit of a programming nuance, right? So if like I want to get an athlete better at muscle ups and we're gonna work through 10 rounds of two muscle ups and eight calories on a C2 bike, right? So I'm gonna use a machine that has no, like you kind of alluded to, no conflict muscularly. The only thing that's gonna do is elevate the heart rate slightly. And then I'm gonna have a rest period that's just long enough for the athlete to recover enough to be successful in their set of two muscle ups, but not so much rest that, like, hey, that that C2 bike will add up over the course of these 10 rounds of two muscle ups. So the idea is, you know, maybe by the seventh and eighth round, like the cumulative effect of an elevated heart rate is actually starting to impact the muscle ups. And then we can like, we can work, kind of continue to progress from that perspective. And I agree with what you said about like the the stimulus. Like once you're starting to introduce a little bit of intensity, whether it's before or after the movement you're trying to improve on, don't intentionally create muscular interference. Don't make the first skill session you do row muscle up, right? Or, you know, ski handstand push-up. Like you're setting yourself up for failure, will increase that capacity later. I just need you to like be able to do this with your heart rate at 110 instead of 70.

SPEAKER_00: 53:59

And I feel like it should be obvious what we're looking for here while we're watching this, but there's nuance. Like some people just don't like being uncomfortable and they kind of go like spaz mode on a movement. And that can be a little bit easier to fix than like I just again don't have the general physical preparedness to do a moderate set of you know deficit handstand push-ups while my heart rate is elevated. Like there's too much waste being accumulated. You know, as I'm looking at this, I would need this for bar muscle ups. Like I would pass all of the tests up to skill, and then I just don't have the capacity for them. I don't, yeah, they're they don't they come up for me four times a year and I do them, and then I'm always like the person after the open, like, gotta start practicing my bar muscle-ups. I suck at these and I shouldn't, that kind of thing. And it becomes more and more apparent as we make our way across this and end up at the interval and at the MECCON. So we're just, you know, looking in a similar lens at the idea of like, do you have an issue with the way that you move your body? Do you have an issue with the capacity and the movement? And or do you have an issue with GPP, strength to body weight ratio, like the more broad um implications, that kind of thing. So we are introducing intensity in a tiered system. Those tiers are hey, this is a short workout before it's a medium, before it's a long, this is a cardio stimulus, before it's gas, before it's muscle. It is low volume before it's high volume. And there's nuance again with the volume thing because we could be saying volume in a set, or we could be saying volume over the course of an entire workout. So a lot of different ways to introduce that. Last but not least, we are going to audit you doing, pulling, and pressing gymnastics in a MetCon. You know, you get maybe one interval in a competition, and affiliates are doing a lot more Metcons than intervals when there's gymnastics involved, or they should be. And that's when shit can really go wrong. Like if you've made it to this point as the coach and the athlete, we're probably gonna be able to cook something up to fuck with your movement. And again, it could be the stimulus, it could be the movement combinations, could be the volume, all those different things. But we want to see the real deal. And we could even, you know, maybe there's one more column that's competition because, you know, different things happen in a Metcon in competition than a Metcon after a rest day in your gym as the very first thing that you do. But we're just gonna essentially continue to audit the way that you are moving through these things. And we wanna see all of it. We want to see short, medium, and long. We want to see, you know, all the different variations of the stimulus. We want to see different volume. Is it more that it's challenging for you with that really high heart rate? Because, like for me, that's going to be more of the issue. Like, I can do a workout that's like more muscle endurance-y, that has higher volume of a particular movement because there's basically more standing around in it. So it's not always gonna be the same thing that's going to be an issue for an athlete. All right, we are now moving on from the audit phase to the planning phase. What are we gonna do about the things that we learned in relation to this stuff? And this at this point may or may not get more specific to the movements. We're just gonna keep talking and find out what happens, basically. So, whoa, power just go out? Yeah, kind of the lights flashed, but the computer did not. Interesting. All right. Well, if the podcast ends here, it's been real, ladies and gentlemen. All right, so we're in the planning phase. We're looking at mobility and stability relating to pulling gymnastics and pressing gymnastics. Hunter, what are we gonna do about someone's mobility relating to a dead hang or a handstandhold?

SPEAKER_01: 57:53

Well, I mean, we're gonna do both of those things, but we're also like this is where the coach comes in handy. It's like identifying the exact kind of root cause is really important here, but it can be hard. And it's usually not just one thing, right? It's like what what is the what is the mechanism for this limitation? Is it something genetic? Is it like body anthropometry, or is it like a result of the fact that your desk job has you hunched over a computer for eight hours a day, right? So having a plan, I'm like from a resource perspective, I'll like K Star is still my my go-to, you know, from back in the day, sticking a lacrosse ball in a trap, grabbing a floss band, wrapping a shoulder, stuff like that. Like you have to target, like I think the nice thing about this is like if you're if you're an athlete who's willing to help out or to help out, if you're an athlete who's willing to to kind of put in the work, I'm kind of and like, and also like what I'll say here is like I'm I'm a I'm somebody who will I will do everything I can to figure something out on my own long before I pay somebody to do it. You can call that me being cheap, frugal, or just hunter a problem solver, but I'm gonna throw a shitload of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So if my shoulder mobility is a limitation, it's a it's a single across ball in the trap and the scap and trying to get that thing moving. It's uh, you know, a foam roller, a double across ball in my thoracic spine to make sure I can achieve extension. It's you know, flossing the shoulder, it's finding kind of and all of this is being done with kind of the test retest kind of concept in mind, right? Like, okay, my shoulder mobility sucks. I flossed both shoulders for two minutes, and now I go dead hang again. Did my shoulder mobility improve? Yes, great. This is a tool that can be used. Did I use a single lacrosse ball and mash the shit out of some tough tissue? Holy fuck, that worked really well. That's actually now the number one thing that I know I need to do before I go overhead uh in gymnastics. Gymnastics, right? Or whatever movement that we're talking about. Obviously, this is where it it comes in handy to have a coach, right? Because there gets to be a limit as to you what you as an athlete have the capacity to to kind of you know do on your own. But if you're a coach, like knowing what these resources are, I like I said, KStar, both the written books that he's he's got. Fuck. Oh, it's right here. The Supple Leopard books, Aaron, I don't remember his last name, but the Squat University dude. We have the the book Rebuilding Milo that he he established. K Star like wrote the foreword to that. Um these are all like excellent resources for under, I'd say even more so, like they're great, they they're great, they provide excellent tools, but they also like educate you as a coach on like again, what is what is actually happening here? Why does this person's overhead mobility suck? I notice that their elbows bent when they when they kip. I notice that they lean back when they're up against a up against the wall in a handstand hold. Like, what does all this stuff mean is the first step. And then what are the tools that I have at my disposal to actually improve those positions? And then as the athlete, it's like, did this thing work? Yes or no? And that's how we kind of assess, like, okay, yep, this is the plan for improving my overhead position, for example, or improving my stability, you know, hanging support at the top of the rings, hanging from a pull-up bar, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:27

Yeah, when I think about mobility, I split it up into two camps, one being that test retest model, and I urge coaches, coaches, if you hypothesize too much about this shit and don't go get in a couch stretch and don't go do the bandit distraction and do the lacrosse ball and do the floss. I just don't think you can really teach it in the same way. And the barrier to entry, like again, if we're talking about like, do we want to argue whether you should be able to do a muscle up if you're a coach, totally different conversation. Barrier to entry is pretty damn low for you to go. I think that next level of learning is having the book out on the gym floor and actually doing the thing. I think that can be really helpful. But I think about the test retest model very much being a singular mobility session where we can like figure out what's going on and then the way that you would get ready to execute on a particular movement. And then on the other side of it, I think things like static stretching and yoga poses and things of that nature, even the you know, banded distraction stuff, just sort of helps you, I think, target areas a little bit better. You are really missing out if you are not either executing on or programming that sort of thing after the movement is done and there's really good blood flow and warmth in a particular area. You can make serious changes in your mobility if you have a post-workout routine and like shocker, that's just really good for cool down as well. So that can be part of it. And then the other side would just be maybe the activation piece of we're starting to make these changes pre-workout, on rest days, post-workout. Can we target like the bridge to stability? Can we target the musculature with band pull aparts, with you know, glute bridges, with banded walks, all of that stuff? That to me starts to show the athlete how they can use the new tools that they have, and then what stability work should feel like. So stability work then becomes like do the thing. I'm not good at dead hangs, I'm not good at handstand holds. Guess what? You know what's awesome for those things? Like reasonable volume. And if you follow Misfit Athletics programming, you have a 10-minute cap on five minutes of holds basically every day. You have a dead hang from a pull-up bar. You know, you have your overhead squat holds and front squat holds and squat holds and your handstand holds. And, you know, maybe there's the traction variation where I'll have athletes do hang from the rings, but their feet are on a box so they can kind of modulate their body weight a little bit more and have it not be like grip intensive, grip intensive. That to me is the start of the stability conversation. Let's express the thing that like has the fault in it through mobility and then going back to it and seeing how we're sort of dealing with that. And then now we're starting to bridge over to the gray area between stability and strict training, which is what on the website or in our programming we call secondary accessory. Um, so you know, so you're doing like five rounds of 15 reps of something, or you're doing five rounds of like really light farmers carries, or you know, walking around with kettlebells or dumbbells over your head. We're making our way down the line of I understand how to get myself into a better position. I understand how to use the muscles. Now that's let's train the muscles in a low stakes environment. That's how we start to sort of make our way from left to right and the spectrum that I create in my head.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:03

Yeah, I think this like starts to the just looking at the spreadsheet, like strict variations and low rep almost kind of like match up a little bit, like skill and yeah, the strict variations.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:14

Yeah, there's a there's a I like to think that there's a I want to teach the athlete what the bridge is from one column to the next. So we get into strict variations, that's gonna be your primary accessory where you're doing less reps, you're doing your strict pull-ups, you know, you're doing your seated dumbbell strict press. You know, maybe you're doing less reps of a horizontal pull so you can get into a more challenging position. Like I'll start people with the five by 15 inverted barbell row, but then I want to see them get into the six by 10, um, where they're like either close to horizontal with the ground or even like elevated um where their feet are up on a bench and doing that sort of thing. Um, and again, as we get into the strict variations, that's when we can build that strength and understand movement patterns. Like, I think for me to understand strict gymnastics, I had to understand strict pressing. Like the idea of a power lifter saying in your strict press, like tense up to the point where you feel like every muscle in your whole body is going to explode. And then that idea of we don't even really have muscles, we're just one giant muscle because of connective tissue, can tell you how like knee extension and glute activation makes your strict press go up five pounds, that sort of thing. Then watching gymnasts, why are they so rigid when they're moving? It's the same idea, right? Like when they're when the system breaks down, you know, I know both of us did a bunch of engineering classes, but like, you know, if you're fucking if your bridge is overextended at one of the beams, bad boy's gonna fall and break, right? So, like to like create a strong body before you even use it is a concept that like people really gotta understand. Like power lifters saying squeeze the bar like you're trying to break it. That's so that there's no slack in the system. So that when you go to deadlift, your scaps don't get pulled forward, that kind of idea.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:10

And I think that's like just that's reflective of the understanding that like CrossFit by nature is that is a compound movement, right? So none none of these, none of your, you know, your shoulder strength in isolation is not like that. Could be a a problem. It could be why your strict handstand push-ups aren't great, but if we're just gonna but we're not gonna just do like front raises and presses and lateral raises, we're not gonna like beef up the singular individual muscles, right, that that compose of the shoulder that help me strict press, right? We need to train these movements in whether it is a strict version, an isometric version, you know, we want to get better at toes to bar, like do some L-sits, that sort of thing. You still, as an athlete and a coach, have to understand that we need to train these movements in conjunction with like with the entire system. This is not an isolated thing. That's not to say there's not a place for like small accessories or whatever that strengthen or you know, activation drills that strengthen their turn on the rotator cuff, for example. But like when we're actually training these, we have to have this understanding that yeah, it's like yeah, the strict press is a reflection of your upper body strict pressing strength. But to say that like, yeah, you're just gonna be a limp noodle from the shoulders down and then expect to strict press any semblance of weight, like you wouldn't no nobody would make that assumption. Just remembering remembreminding athletes that like, hey, that the your your body works as an entire unit, not as a whole bunch of individual component parts.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:48

Yeah, and I mean my mind goes to like a hundred different things as you're talking through that, and it's like, well, yeah, we are using seated, neutral grip, strict press, but like it's kind of comfy if you weigh 230 pounds, right? Like I get to move weight again. How do you feel when you kick upside down? And gravity is not that friendly, right? To get ultra specific within this concept, I am going to once again work left to right with the way that I'm thinking about programming. So I want to early on, say it's phase one for an athlete, I want to be doing the pulling and pressing in as many planes as possible. We know that that works really well. So I'm gonna have an athlete doing strict pull-ups. I'm gonna have an athlete doing some form of barbell row or ring row. I'm gonna have someone doing hand over hand sled pull. I'm getting a lot of things covered with the pulling. Then we go into the pressing and we have, you know, at our disposal, we're working from those safer things like the dumbbell press. We've got dips, we've got incline bench, we've got barbells, we've got dumbbells, we have ring dips, we have push-ups, we have ring push-ups, we have handstand push-up variations. We're gonna work our way through those things. And then as the athlete is coming along, it's more about making sure that those different planes of pressing are showing up at different places within the actual program. So, like, I don't need there to be a hand over hand sled pull every single week of the entire offseason. Hopefully that's turning into, you know, it's actually in a METCON or we're doing legless rope climbs, you know, or we're doing high rep, you know, gymnastics pulling in a MECON, that sort of thing. But I am still going to, if it's a weakness for an athlete, make sure that like those different planes are showing up in their training. They're upside down, they're pressing, they're doing dips, they're doing push-ups. It can just be put into a bunch of different places as opposed to we're doing accessory work to start, because that is a great place to start.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:52

What are you putting in this plan row here? Is this more like an actual nuts and bolts?

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:58

Like, well, I'm glad because this is an audio podcast. I'm glad that because this is an audio podcast that we're doing right by the listener while we're speaking through this, because I don't know how great it would be. I think if we did this episode again, I might fill this in before we start. Sure. I thought it would be cool for people to see us type into it and then I'm typing and I'm like, we are like filling dead air while the other person's typing through it. But yes, in a particular athlete, we would be going through and planning out what this progression looks like. How do I get this better? How do I get this better? How do I get this better? All the way from left to right. And it is for every athlete because dealing with the fact that they're immobile or hypermobile in a particular area, even if they already have those other things, is really important. So each part of the plan, especially related to what time it is in a season, is incredibly important regardless of the level that they're at. So then we move over and it's like, okay, again, the strict variations, we're gonna be hitting all probably early in the year, all planes of pressing and pulling in this environment. And then as the year goes on, spreading them out more into skill intervals, metcons, like that kind of thing. So then we get into the low rep planning phase, and that's really just about the opportunities that you are giving athletes to continue to practice under supervision. So, how often it's like like in a remote coaching setting, you might be like, any cell that is pink means you need to film it and send it to me. But if we are still just practicing and it isn't really a skill and capacity type session, um then that's what's gonna go in the program. It's gonna be like, I want you to do a 15-minute bike at forever pace, and I want you to get off the bike every three minutes and do a really small set and just show me what that looks like, like that kind of thing. That's how we are going to plan to continue to try and bridge the gap from like we're making progress here, but we actually got to like do the thing. And that way you can be like, okay, so these look good in real time, you know, to use the chesta bar as an example. That common fault in the chesta bar is not using your hips, and it looks like in real time a big, beautiful, slow butterfly pull-up, but they're actually using their legs to lift them up, and then they're, you know, sort of just falling back through the bar. Where we want the legs in front to create leverage over the hip, and then the hip pops to do that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:25

I'm gonna make a minor, minor audit here. Tell me what you think.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:29

Yeah, yeah. Go for it. Uh it's gonna be so again in that low rep setting, we're just continuing to monitor practice. That's what the plan is. It is written out. It is we are two times a week going to actually practice this thing. And it's in their programming. And you can do the same thing at the affiliate level. It's like, hey, I think, you know, I hear this, I overhear this conversation like once a month. How do I get better at this? Do you think it's appropriate for me to do this once a week, twice a week? Can I do this three times a week? And then the more aggressive they are as a human, they'll say, Can I do this five times a week? And it's like, you don't need to snatch five times a week. Okay, like let's let's take it easy. So it's, hey, I think it's appropriate for you to work on this twice a week. Feel free to come get me. Feel free to video it and to show it to a coach, that kind of thing. That is how we are planning and actually like trying to move forward in a linear way with just that skill low rep situation.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:21

And move the word skill from to the left one column.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:25

It's correct, but it should be on the right. I read this left column.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:29

Yeah. Really? My so my my my thought is just like the this is semantics at its finest. Like, yeah. But I'm just like, so when I'm thinking, so what what is, and maybe maybe I'll just ask the question, how do you distinguish between in the planning phase, what is the difference between low rep and capacity? And that because that's kind of the reason that I move this over, like, especially in the audit phase. It's like, what is your the skill and low rep to me come in hand in hand? It's like, you know, hop up and show me one or two of these muscle ups that you want to work on. Like I can assess your skill in this low rep setting, right? And the capacity side is more like, okay, what happens when you have to do 30, 30 muscle ups for time when the plan is like, hey, we're in the skill section where like, hey, the the plan is you're gonna work on the 10-minute emom of chest to bar pull-ups, where the single point of focus that you're working on is is using your hips staying behind the bar. The thing that you were talking about, we're focusing on that very specific skill element of the broader movement. And then in the capacity kind of section, it's like, okay, we're not as focused on the very single specific nuance. We're actually here, it's it's five chest to bar pull-ups every minute for 10 minutes. We're trying to literally increase capacity with less of a concern of the very specific movement, like a component of the movement.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:56

So I'm answering all my questions. I think I can answer this potentially with something I'm doing right now in real time with an athlete. A competition gets announced and there's a handful of fucking weird things or things that we're not working on. The very first session that I program is like fuck around and find out. It is so open-ended that it's like, I want to see you do this thing, but there's no pressure to do six sets versus ten versus one versus two. Like, let's not work on it for too long, but like let's just feel this thing out. The next thing would be I am going to say I want six easy sets. I want to see you do the movement in a repeated fashion to see, you know, we're working with a low rep learner, a high rep learner, like what is what do we need to do to move forward? And then we get into capacity where it's like, I'm telling you, it's six by four. It's six by four, and it's at this particular time. So that's the way that I'm working with the athlete where it's planning and auditing in real time basically happening simultaneously because our time frame is is kind of short. So that's where that's where I create those like delineations between those particular things, but it is 100% semantics of like we would have to provide the specific definition. But I do agree that it is much easier to lump together the like, show me what you can do and work on the skill is one column versus capacity building is kind of its own thing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:29

That's I think yeah, I just think of capacity as like the first step in which just like okay, we've got the movement. I need to take you from like you physically can't, it's you know, it's 30. If I tell you to do 40 strict handstand push-ups, it's gonna take you 12 days because like you could do 10 today, that's gonna take you a while, but like 40, it's like I gotta come back tomorrow. So, like, how do we start to build the the broad capacity versus like the skill and the low rep to me is like the bare bones, like what does one, two, three reps look like? Whereas capacity is more like let's generate some volume regardless of the set size.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:07

I'm not asking you to do 30 of anything that look like shit. Like that to me is just where I'm drawing the line of we're not working on capacity until we can do the movement. Correct. And the recipe for capacity is very simple and so effective. We actually start with the highest amount of volume, but it is in a large amount of sets. So if we were like, we're gonna work on muscle ups, we are going to, this is a semifinals level athlete. The most muscle ups that I want them to do in a capacity building session is 40. Maybe that's 10 sets of four, right? With a bunch of rest in between. That gives us the basically we're developing the movement pattern and the musculature simultaneously. And it's important to note that 40 number is very relative. Sure. Like that low end could be 20, 10, 15, whatever. On the other end, we're working our way across seven to nine weeks, and we're gonna do 30 in the last week, lowest volume, three sets of 10. We have iterated on it's four, then five, then six, then seven, then eight, um, and we're working our way down. And that's where we are taking the concept of we've taught you how to move in an iterative process, and we've taught your muscles how to handle this thing in an iterative process. Now we're just we are leaning towards like the bridge from capacity to intervals is intensity inside of the capacity building sessions.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:31

Yeah, these are this is where as the coach, the planning out kind of the week by week, day by day sort of like actual programming becomes important. And this is where like, you know, your knowledge as a coach as a of programming as a coach is important. Like you said, this like I think it's it's important to like what's the end goal, right? That's like, you know, maybe if we're gonna do a test retest sort of thing, it's like what is 30 muscle ups for time look like in week one and then in week 10, and then we back plan from there. I think that's the easiest way to do it. And your explanation is right, right. It's like we're gonna start the the most volume is actually gonna occur. Uh assuming the athlete can handle the volume, we can maybe talk about somebody who's like, hey, I want to get better at pull-ups, but like the most I've ever done in a session anyway is 20. Like, if I tell them to do, you know, a hundred, am I gonna fucking kill this person? Right. So there might be a a kind of a building phase of the capacity, yeah, of the capacity. And then, like you said, it it kind of inverts into like, well, the the volume gets lower, but the intensity is higher, right? The if three, you know, 30 muscle ups done as three sets of 10 is very different than 50 muscle ups done as 20 sets of but 25 sets of two, right? That's very that's a very different kind of stimulus. So um, like to start, you know, if if there is gonna be like the test retest, obviously you've got those on kind of the book ends of the the plan, so to speak, and then back planning from there, I think is the the easiest way to do it. You start on the front end and like all of a sudden by week five, it's like fuck, why do I have this guy doing like six sets of 14 muscle ups? Like, how does math even work out? You know, it's like so back planning a little bit, thinking like the volume is down, the intensity though is up, assuming that's the that's the overall goal.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:25

The other thing to to get specific on the actual domains we're talking about is how often you can do these things. And that has to do both with the movement and the rest of the program. It's like where am I, what is the actual constraint? Because high rep pulling, the constraint is just the movement. If we do high rep pulling too often, you're probably going to get hurt. You're hanging from your body weight, you know, you are putting kind of that like slow twitch volume onto fast twitch musculature, which it doesn't like very much. And when it comes to the pressing, your constraints are probably going to be a little bit more what else is in the programming. Like you can work on strict pressing three times a week, even with, if it's done appropriately, even with like a master's athlete. But what are you giving up to make that happen? You're not doing any pressing in any of your metcons and intervals. That's probably probably a problem. Are you not doing any pressing, dynamic pressing, your push press, your split jerk, any of that stuff in your strength work? So we can and need to do the pressing more often. We shouldn't do it with the pulling. The pulling is kind of a unless you're really going all the way back to like stability work. Like, don't don't fuck up your athlete with three days a week of of high-rep upper body gymnastics pulling. Like that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:47

It's just more, it's just more dynamic. I think there's like the upper body pressing stuff is very self-limiting, right? The the biggest concern is probably literally more so somebody's neck and head versus like the muscular fatigue of doing a lot of presses. The pulling obviously has other implications too. You're gonna you're gonna shred the athlete's hands, or their elbows gonna be all fucked up or the shoulders all fucked up, like right. Bicep, rhabdo, bicep, rhto, bicep, bicep, rhabdo. So, yeah, a qu here's a here's a good question, because this is like along these lines. I'm an athlete, like I'm working on my chest to bar pull-up capacity. It's not that great to begin with. Should I even be doing it in a METCON or an interval? Or if I'm if I've got a plan where I'm like doing this capacity building, do I sack temporarily sacrifice putting it, you know, actually doing it in a CrossFit workout, whether it's a METCON or interval, until the capacity's there? Or do I apply kind of a GPP mentality and be like, no, I still got to do my capacity building, my skill stuff. But like, yeah, I just need maybe the coach has to help me scale it or put it into a MECCon intelligently, or do I do I just stick with capacity building?

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:00

Yeah, it depends on where you're at, both in your personal journey and the season. Because I love uh like staying to the left side of this matrix, if it's early in the season, even for some of the best athletes in the world, because we are truly creating a base and a foundation for improving capacity, like decreasing injury rates, like there's so much that happens. And so that's the way that I'm thinking about that. We get further into the season, if you have specific goals, like it has to be all of these things. Like the coach has to figure out like, how do I make it possible for them to work on all of these things over the course of like the more things you have to work on, the longer timeline it needs to be stretched out on. So, what do I mean by that? I can't have someone work on B, C, D, E, F, and G on Monday. That doesn't make any sense. But I could if it was six years long, right? So, like, what is the period of time that I have to spread this stuff out over to make sure that we're checking the boxes? And that kind of brings us to the intervals and probably is the perfect segue for it because it depends on the time of year. If I'm if we are at the point where we can introduce these intervals, is this someone who is doing the movement under fatigue for the first time? Has to be highly personalized. Has to be those examples that we already gave. Is this someone who's on the other end of the spectrum and we're in a comp prep or a phase three? Like we are doing all of the variations. We're doing short, medium, and long. We're doing cardio gas and muscle. We are doing low volume, high volume, big sets, little sets. We're doing all of that different variation because out of that we get general physical preparedness and athlete IQ. Like the athletes gotta know what to do in the moment. So many times people think they have a weakness, and it is a weakness of the mind and strategy. It's not actually the particular movement. They get FOMO when someone else does the strict handstand push-ups unbroken, even though if they did two or three sets, they would win at the end. They never find that out. That's never something that enters their brain because it's like they're getting ahead of me, and it's like, well, their strategy sucks. Or they're way better than you. Sorry. Like, you know what I mean? So again, that's kind of the spectrum there. And I am speeding up a little bit because we're not gonna talk about the execution phase on this podcast because we're closing in on an hour and 40 minutes. But the idea is the same with the Metcons. Like, it's just it's not, it's iteration. I wanna know as a coach that an athlete can have some space in between in an interval to think about the way that they're moving, to audit their sets and their strategy and the athlete IQ piece. We also have the opportunity to increase general physical preparedness by just going faster, that sort of thing. But that ultimate expression that we're looking for is the METCO. What happens in all of these different scenarios when it comes to skill? Like some people have a lot of capacity and not a lot of skill, right? You kind of just give up as a coach. You're like, well, it came in first. I don't know why they lean back so far in their row before they even use their legs. They're better than everyone else at it, and they're really bad at Olympic lifting. So I probably should go over there. It's hard as a coach sometimes, but like people do have capacity without skill, um, just for, you know, sort of genetic reasons or athletic background or whatever, that sort of thing. So we're just we've got an iterative process here. It's probably the easiest way to do my final thoughts. Like, we've built capacity within these movements by doing appropriate volume in a linear progression type of fashion. We move over into intervals and really take a look at all these different scenarios and you know, where are they good, where are they not? You know, how can we improve this? What part of the audit while you're watching the interval is is the thing that helps you get them over the hump? And then last but not least, that iteration has to lead to Metcons, both in the affiliate setting and the competitive setting. Like that's the thing that we do, that's the you know, three to four times a week thing at most levels, and then obviously that extends further. But like what happens when, you know, metcons are hard and there's a billion different combinations, you know, that's sort of put in there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:19

Yeah, I think like the nice thing about this, like this matrix and this layout is that it also again, it forces you as the coach to start from like this the bare bones foundation ground floor of like what's happening. You can't, if you have an athlete who comes to you and says, I suck at muscle ups, I want to get better at muscle ups, and you jump to the like, okay, let's go. Like, here's the program, here's the muscle up program. It's like you you've skipped a whole bunch of steps, right, in in this process that that you've made, Drew, and then like it it demon it just it would that would might indicate to me that the coach doesn't actually have like this depth of knowledge that's going to result in like long-term progress and sustainability, right? It's like if I could have somebody who maybe like in the example that you gave, someone who has raw capacity but dog shit skill, like I might be able to get them to that 30 unbroken muscle ups, you know, number. They all look like shit, but we got there. And it's like, at what point is the trade-off, you know, worth it versus not? You're close to the season, you're preparing for a competition, it's a bit of kind of by all means necessary. Got it. There's a time and a place for that, especially when we're talking about, you know, either, you know, your affiliate athlete, your quarterfinalist, maybe you're semifinal, hopeful, that sort of thing. Like, there's really not that many situations where we're gonna like suggest where we would say, like, yeah, let's jump the gun and just like let's just send it, build as much capacity without any consideration for like a foundational understanding of what's going on. And like, hey, the the fact is that you have no concept of what the hollow and the arch position are and And your like midline stability, like we have to start there because and it's also you have to also have to think about this like what other things is that going to improve with the athlete? Like, there's just so much crossover from movement to movement in CrossFit, like in general, and it all comes down to like the idea that you know you have control of your midline and you can stabilize it, you can actually transfer force from the biggest movers in your body to the little ones, right? The core to extremity concept. Like this is kind of where circling back to the beginning, like having an understanding of why CrossFit works as well as it does, and why like the methodology is pretty is pretty genius, and actually demit has been like empirically demonstrated to work pretty fucking well. Like, if you don't have that understanding as a coach, like you're just you know, it's like I know how to drive the car, I don't know how to build it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:50

I lied, I do have final thoughts. Love it. That was my final thought. We will keep this under two hours, almost positive that that's gonna happen. Oh, also I cut out all of the dead silences and the ums and ahs. So this is actually probably only like an hour and a half for people in real life. Um, something that we completely left out that is so important here, and you have to learn it through mistakes, is the idea that patience is a rite of passage as a coach and as an athlete. You will skip the steps as an athlete. You will skip the skip the steps as a coach. There are so many reasons why you would, you know, you got a client that wants it all now, and you're, you know, fucking having them do dead hangs and rolly pulleys and you know, doing jump rope singles, and they're gonna get pissed at you, and maybe they leave. But then you do it enough that you really stand by the tried and true methods that it takes, and the right of passage in your coach-athlete relationship is that like they're gonna be willing to trust that and take it one step at a time. So there is so much, there's a combined 30 years of history between Hunter and I having this conversation of both personally and professionally, potentially skipping these steps or not knowing that they existed, and then you iterate on them and you realize that like it's fun for me to break down a world-class athlete into the fact that they can't like dead hang or do the couch stretch because it reframes this idea. Like, like there are some people that like I have lost as clients because they were just give me a brick wall to run through. Give me the answers to the test. But they just wanted intensity to be one thing, and it's like keep sucking at this thing. And I can't, I can't, I mean, I can't punch you and make it better. You can't hit your head against the wall and make it better. Like, we have to work on this variation of the thing, and there's so many different iterations of it. You're gonna have clients that only want to lift heavy, like you want get strong, heavy barbell. It's like, well, you're fucking slow, so yeah, or like anytime you're asked to do 21 of these bad boys, you pass out. Like, we gotta, there's different categories here. You know, we gotta work on all of it. So I can tell you that you need to be patient, but in the long run, you're gonna have to learn through trial and error. Like, just be open to the idea that the way that you're currently doing things, if they're not working very well, slowing them down might be the idea that you're missing there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:25

Woo! We do it. Hour 45 on the timer. It's gonna be like a 12-minute podcast after you cut out all the bullshit.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:31

Yeah, cut out bullshit. There is actually one of the AI tools is like smart content or something like that, but that scares me. That scares me a little bit because it makes me smart clips and they're not smart at all. Um it's like Hunter's new golf ball. And I'm like, I don't think that goes on social. Hold on a second. Bump the brakes, guys. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Misfit Podcast. If you are looking for our individual programming, head to the Lincoln Bio on Instagram. Get signed up on Fitter or Strivey. If you are, well, also stay there. Stay in the Lincoln Bio and click on camp at CrossFit Roots January 30th through February 1st. TeamMisfit.com for affiliate programming. Click on sign up now. You get a two-week free trial at Sugar Wad, StreamFit, or Push Press. We will see you next week.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:17

Later.