Jordan Stanton, owner of Next Level Barbell , joins Matt & Scott to discuss his story of frugality, risk taking, and self-determination. He went to college to become a nurse, but realized this was not a career he wanted to stick with long term. He began to train lifters and came to a point where he had to decide if he was going to really pursue it or not, and he ultimately did. He paid off his bad debt with frugality and even though his initial gym was in a garage, he provided a clean space ...
Sep 15, 2021•49 min•Season 18Ep. 3
This is the original Dominion Strength Training interview. Blake & Katie join Matt & Scott to discuss the creation of Dominion Strength Training. You can find their website here and follow them on Instagram here . Blake identified the possibility for creating a belt company when--as a novice lifter--he saw a gap between poorly made, cheap belts that you could get quickly and expensive, high-quality belts that took months to get to you. He realized that lifters needed a high-quality belt ...
Sep 14, 2021•35 min•Season 18Ep. 2
Matt & Scott share their business books that have provided them value and insight as business owners themselves. The E Myth Revisited (Matt) This book discusses business systems. There are owners, managers, and technicians in every business. If you’re a great technician, you might not be a great manager or owner (e.g. if you’re a great coach, it doesn’t meat you’d be great at running a gym). Scott’s Initial Recommendations He recommended reading the Wall Street Journal daily for a few years-...
Sep 14, 2021•40 min•Season 18Ep. 1
Who are we, and how did we get here? Matt addresses these in his 2021 BLOC Party State of the Union. This is Matt's address to the Barbell Logic coaches and staff at the 2021 BLOC Party. Matt delivers these roughly quarterly to the staff, and he initially intended to keep this internal as past state of the unions have been. Ultimately, though, at the prompting at some of his staff, he realized this is a good address to release. It's a good overview of how much Barbell Logic has grown and changed...
Sep 06, 2021•29 min•Ep. 379
Matt & CJ Gotcher answer your questions about the Academy and coaching, including when you should fire a client, how Matt's coaching practice has changed, the PBC process, and how to know if coaching is NOT right for you. CJ Gotcher is a staff coach for Barbell Logic and the Academy Director. 0:00 Introduction 1:57 Firing a Client As a coach--or really anyone in the service industry--you will eventually come across a client who you no longer wish to serve. Often, this comes from repeatedly c...
Aug 30, 2021•58 min•Ep. 378
Enjoy the panel Q&A that ended the 2021 BLOC Party. Listen to Dr. Puder, Matt Reynolds, Gillian Ward, Niki Sims, Andrew Jackson, & CJ Gotcher answer questions from the BLOC Party attendees. Topics include nutrition post-vacation, finding clients in a new location, training to looked more jacked, and countering the effects of sitting. 0:00 Introduction 2:20 Finding Clients in New Location Deliberately seek out communities and meet people. Go to the same places and talk to people and get t...
Aug 23, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 377
This podcast is a recording from the 2021 BLOC Party. It was the first presentation on Saturday, August 7th that Matt & Niki gave to the staff, coaches, client, friends, and family of Barbell Logic. It comes from a emerging idea that Matt and other staff and coaches at Barbell Logic have been developing, which is that STRENGTH CANNOT COME AT ALL COSTS. We have to consider and balance all facets of health. Sometimes and for some people, that means chasing PRs. But for lots of people, that doe...
Aug 16, 2021•26 min•Ep. 376
Thomas Frank, popular YouTuber on productivity and related tips, joins Matt to discuss his journey as a Barbell Logic Online Coaching client as he just recently achieved a 1000-lb powerlifting total. You can learn more about Thomas Frank at his YouTube channel . Thomas is publishing a video on his channel documenting his journey. Thomas & Matt met at a conference and Thomas mentioned to Matt that he wanted to do a video on accountability. Matt pitched to Thomas to let him be his coach. Short...
Aug 09, 2021•47 min•Ep. 375
John Welbourn joins Scott & Matt to discuss his journey from skinny kid to NFL athlete to fitness figure trying to share the benefits of strength & fitness. John Welbourn enjoyed a long career in the NFL, in part because of his dedication in the gym and in the kitchen. He ate healthy foods, being an early adopter of the paleo diet, and saw the benefits on the field from getting strong in the gym. He also got a degree in rhetoric, of all things, certainly flying in the face of the typical...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr•Season 17Ep. 5
Jordan Stanton, the President of the United States Strengthlifting Federation (USSF) joins Matt & Scott to discuss the differences between USSF & other federations. 3 things stand out with USSF: weigh-outs vs weigh-ins, press not bench press, and no judging commands. Immediately following your third deadlift attempt, you are escorted by someone of the same-sex to a private room where they take your weight. You are not allowed to use the bathroom until after the weight is recorded. This p...
Aug 04, 2021•48 min•Season 17Ep. 4
We understand that some people don’t train strength just for general health or quality of life, but to improve their performance in a sport or physical activity. How do you both train strength and improve sports performance? Right now, hyper-specific training is in fashion. For example, throwing an extra heavy shot or doing half squats with a narrow stance because it mimicks the football player’s stance. This type of training neither offers productive training nor productive practice. Training p...
Aug 02, 2021•45 min•Season 17Ep. 3
Despite the fact that meets are fun and help give more purpose to our training, they can be a long, stressful day, and we recommend having a coach or handler who can worry about the administrative and logistical things (when are you up, get you food and drinks, etc.). There are many common pitfalls that people tend to do their first meet. Don’t stay amped the whole day. Relax when it’s time to relax. Don’t get amped up until you’re going for the final attempts, and, really, you shouldn’t get rea...
Aug 02, 2021•41 min•Season 17Ep. 2
You signed up for your first meet: what do you do now? Scott & Matt discuss what to do now. A huge part of preparing for a meet is realizing the purpose of the meet. The purpose of the meet is to set PRs, give your training a purpose, have some fun, meet some people, and leave feeling encouraged about lifting. Nobody cares who wins. You should change as little as possible leading up to the meet if it’s your first meet. If you’re a novice, just keep doing LP. Maybe you can practice some singl...
Aug 02, 2021•27 min•Season 17Ep. 1
Training while traveling presents challenges, whether your a frequent business traveler or someone who only travels to visit family or for vacation. Either way, we have to decide to train or not to train and then how to adjust training before, during, and after to best meet our goals. If you are someone who rarely travels and NEVER misses a workout and you finally go on a vacation, it's not important to your long term progress to miss a week or even two. Again, though, there aren't a huge number...
Jul 26, 2021•41 min•Ep. 374
Noah Hayden continues his discussion with Niki & Matt, now laying out & discussing his proposed exercise selection criteria and programming criteria. Below are his proposed exercise selection criteria. train the most muscle mass in normal, predictable movement patterns requiring normal coordination when possible over the longest effective range of motion to lift the most weight that is structurally sustainable with exercises that have a wide therapeutic window What are we looking at when...
Jul 19, 2021•36 min•Ep. 373
Noah Hayden joins Matt & Niki to reexamine the exercise selection criteria. Noah first pitched these ideas in episode 3 of the Barbell Health Series & then Noah Hayden refined them in an article for Barbell Logic . As coaches, we likely love lifting, and this passion helped motivate us to pursue a career in helping others lift and experience the benefits of strength. Many of our clients, however, do not share the same passion, and while getting stronger will benefit them--and strength wi...
Jul 12, 2021•36 min•Ep. 372
Time is your most valuable resource, and you don’t know how much of it you have on this earth. Because of this, protecting time, being efficient, and knowing when to trade money for time is important. Its importance heightens if you find yourself in a situation where you make enough money that you can make more money on your work than completing a menial task, such as mowing the lawn or cleaning the house. You might actually make more money paying someone else to do this. This isn’t the case for...
Jul 08, 2021•38 min•Season 16Ep. 8
Chris & Matt Reynolds like to wake up early and GET AFTER IT. If you don’t, that’s okay, but you might try before you write this off and it’s super important to have a consistent sleep schedule regardless of when you go to bed and wake up. You can’t make up for lack of sleep on the weekend, and your body will learn and adjust to a regular sleep schedule and be better off for it, as opposed to inconsistency. If you want to try this, give it a try for 3 weeks. If after 3 weeks you hate waking ...
Jul 07, 2021•29 min•Season 16Ep. 7
Let’s talk about focus. This is something people don’t do well these days. Focus has atrophied due to smartphones, social media, the internet, TV, etc. Focus, however, is critical to productivity, success, happiness, and getting done deep work. Something that can help both improve focus but show you how hard it is to focus and how easily you get distracted is meditation. The practice of bringing your focus back to your breath or a mantra helps build the muscle of focus and helps you see your tho...
Jul 07, 2021•22 min•Season 16Ep. 6
Matt & Chris share a technique they use all the time, called the Pomodoro Technique. This technique is perfect for both knocking out urgent tasks or carving out time to dedicate to deeper, important work. The original approach is to dedicated 25 minutes to totally uninterrupted work followed by a 5 minute break. You can string together multiple blocks as you get better at this. Also, if you string together multiple blocks, you often need a longer break every so often. 25 minutes isn’t set in...
Jul 06, 2021•16 min•Season 16Ep. 5
We all have things we think are important, we want to get done, but we continue to put off. This occurs because of the difference between urgent tasks and important tasks and the 4 different types of actions that occur (as an action can be urgent & important, neither urgent nor important, urgent but not important, or not urgent but important). We tend to put off the important but not urgent things. If they’re never urgent, there’s never pressure to complete them. Ultimately, we need to put p...
Jul 06, 2021•16 min•Season 16Ep. 4
As advocates of strength training, we encourage people to add strength training as a habit. Many of the most important things we need to do to live a more fulfilling, productive life, however, involve breaking bad habits. Bad habits don’t have to be bad in a moral sense. They ultimately don’t provide us value and bring us closer to our goals. They might waste time or money. They might prevent us from building positive habits. They might make us less healthy or happy. Stopping these habits can be...
Jul 05, 2021•29 min•Season 16Ep. 3
Scott & Matt share some of their productivity tips: what to do, what to not do, and what equipment or apps help them. When it comes to equipment and apps, both of them find having one huge monitor, 2 monitors, or 3 monitors helps, as one monitor simply adds time to tasks on the computer. Scott has also found value in having a scanner to digitize documents. He puts these on Evernote and finds this saves time, helps keep these organized, and saves space. Both Scott and Matt value a quality bac...
Jul 05, 2021•42 min•Season 16Ep. 2
We have a model for the proper performance of the lifts and we understand programming principles and how to drive progress over time, but we have to acknowledge that for lots of people lots of the time, they can’t train optimally. And, honestly, at some point everyone--every single person--will be unable to train optimally. In these cases, we have to do the best we can. Life comes up and presents obstacles to consistent training: vacation, work, family, holidays, and injuries. Furthermore, some ...
Jul 05, 2021•31 min•Season 16Ep. 1
Matt & Niki discuss their pre-workout routines, from when they train, how they plan for training on the road, food, water, clothes: everything about how to properly prepare for training--physically & mentally. Rituals both help prepare us for training specifically (e.g. laying out our clothes the night before or making some overnight oats ensures our outfit or pre-workout nutrition are ready). Beyond this, however, doing something repeatedly before the same event primes our body & br...
Jun 28, 2021•47 min•Ep. 371
Jason McCarthy of GORUCK discusses rucking, his Army service, & building community through voluntary hardship & shared suffering. He shares his story of how we went from US Army Special Forces (Green Beret) to founding and running a company that--similar to Barbell Logic--believe in voluntary hardship and building community. If you're interested in GORUCK or their gear, go to http://goruck.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=16&aff_id=2784 and check out their high-quality clothing & gear...
Jun 21, 2021•41 min•Ep. 370
Matt, Niki & Andrew answer your lifting & life questions. Topics include best pants, jeans, & shorts (for men & women lifters), forearm pain from lifting, what to do between sets, and best song to rally at a dance party. 0:00 Intro 1:20 What to Do if Can't Press Standard Bar? aluminum bars are worth it--can use it for accessory lifts 3:01 What Should I Do Between Sets? should I sit, stand, pace, clean up, etc.? timer can help good to not take your mind away from lifting (unless y...
Jun 14, 2021•29 min•Ep. 369
Matt & Scott discuss fear of the lifts, especially heavy, PR attempts. Different people have different fears of different lifts based on history (repeated failure or past injury) and simply how they feel about the lift. Lots of people, for example, are afraid of heavy squats. There’s something about a heavy bar on your back and that you’re folded over in the bottom and--even with properly set safety pins--there’s just no graceful way to fail a squat. Scott & Matt even share their unusual...
Jun 11, 2021•47 min•Season 15Ep. 5
Men’s style coach Tanner Guzy joins the show to share some tips for improving your style and making sure you are highlighting the physical gains you’ve worked so hard to make in the gym. Tanner offers an online style course for men as well as one-on-one coaching (he even helped Matt frame his baby blues). You can also take a free quiz on his site to determine your style archetype. https://masculine-style.com Also be sure to pick up Tanner’s book on the intersection of style, power, and masculini...
Jun 11, 2021•1 hr•Season 15Ep. 7
If you’re failing early in LP, you have to ask yourself: are you working hard enough? Some symptoms of not working hard enough might be not uploading your failed sets to your coach & failing reps early in LP (like the first 6 weeks). This often occurs with people who think a lot in their work. No thought will help you move from the bottom of a squat to the top of a squat besides a simple cue. As an example, consider the Bulgarian Method, a program of lifting where lifters train 6 days a week...
Jun 11, 2021•46 min•Season 15Ep. 6
