Two Peas in a Podcast

Episode 121 - Dave Lipson

Dave Lipson is an accomplished coach, athlete, writer and founder of Thundrbro. His background as a professional baseball player, CrossFit athlete, and bodybuilder provides a unique perspective to maximizing the performance of a human body across multiple domains.

Dave's area of specialty is exercise physiology. He has written multiple books on the science of muscle hypertrophy along with nutrition & training protocols. Today the Thundrbro community inspires athletes to lift heavy and live a loud life with no regrets while making those around them better.

To connect with Dave please reach out directly to:

https://thundrbro.com/

Broadcast on:: 07 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

Dave, did you know that most 30 and 40 year olds do not look like you brother? I guess it depends on where you go. Probably not in America. I don't think probably not in America. And definitely not outside of the gym because you are so, so fit. You've found this perfect solution of the ideal fitness and aesthetics for you. And you were just out there spreading the message to everyone who will listen. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you for sharing your time with me. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor to be here. Now, Dave, who are you and what is it that you do today? That's a pretty deep question. So I'm Dave Lipson, like a lot of people out there who may be listening that are avid athletes and into training. I'm a lifetime athlete, right? I started with traditional sports. I played baseball for a long time, was lucky enough to get to play professionally. And then fell into fitness. And it was very natural transition for me because of that passion and that joy of movement. I just love using my body. It's my happy place, right? And I realized that after my baseball career, that baseball was just kind of a vessel just to express my gifts, right? And falling into training immediately, it was clear to me that this was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I just couldn't envision myself doing anything else. And I love to train myself, but what I love even more is showing other people stuff. And that whole process that I learned from sports, that process of adaptation, right? Like applying stress to yourself, getting the body to adapt it to change. And in some way, or the best way that you can, being able to control your own destiny as an athlete and as a human with your physical body. So I got into training after my career and quickly, after that, found CrossFit, which was a really cool opportunity for me to really redefine what training can mean. Because previous to that, I was only training for baseball. And then when I got done, it was kind of like, OK, I like to move. I like to fart around the gym, but then CrossFit created a whole new meaning in that it was about forgingly fitness and seeing how fit you could actually get. And I, you know, that hook and sinker, right? I just, I loved it. It made open up a whole new world of opportunities for me in terms of exploring my physicality, expanding my knowledge as a trainer. My background before CrossFit was traditional strength and conditioning, with like the National Strength and Conditioning Association or what most strength coaches know. And CrossFit really expanded my world of understanding, maybe more of the physical culture aspect of things. And, and from there, I got into education and I started working for CrossFit on their education staff for a decade. I taught courses all around the world about the methodology and the practical application of how to, you know, do CrossFit and develop as a trainer. I competed in the sport. I coached my wife. She went on to win a world championship. And then after, you know, a long time of being so immersed in CrossFit, put my wife and I started to realize that we think we need to kind of evolve this for ourselves based on our needs and our goals. And we got to a point where we felt like maybe we were aging out of it a little bit. Our bodies were getting really beat up. We weren't really seeing any kind of like progress anymore. And it ended up leaving the gym feeling a bit more defeated than victorious most days. So after having a really major back surgery, which was, you know, an important cornerstone in my, my career is, is figuring out, hey, Dave, you love training and you've got this new life, you know, with modern technology, they can fix your spine. What are you going to do to honor that? I started really to think very hard about what the next 20 years of training was going to look like me because I already had the first 20 years down. So, you know, now, now what does it, what does it look like? Now what I'm done and it became very clear to me that it probably wasn't doing more, you know, super high intensity as fast as you can or as heavy as you can, lifting, but it probably looked more like trying to foster a good quality muscle and fortified joints and be able to build the physical structure of my body a little bit more because I never really had pursued that at the same level that I had pursued, you know, elite athletics. So I immersed myself in the world of bodybuilding, full tilt. I went to the best bodybuilding gym in America, found one of the best coaches, started mentoring under them, started training with them and learned so much about diet and adaptation and how to change the body and then tried to take those skills and go back to that world of functional fitness and CrossFit and figure out where was the overlap between these two worlds and how can you blend form and function together and for those athletes that were struggling with the same questions I had, which was how do I continue to train hard as I get older and not get hurt and how do I continue to see progress when what I've been doing is no longer providing those results. My goal was to try to answer those questions by introducing some elite hypertrophy methods to that functional space and since then it's been an awesome ride, you know, it started with me just kind of sharing what I was doing with myself and that eventually turned into my company ThunderBrow and ThunderBrow is a community now of thousands of athletes that follow all of our really cool programs that, you know, blend elite hypertrophy training with barbells and dumbbells and functional fitness to pursue that idea of physical culture of not just looking the part but not being able to do anything and not just being an elite athlete but not having the physicality to go along with it but being able to blend the form and function in the gym so that you can apply that fitness outside the gym and love the way you look and to me that's really the magic ticket that starts to kickstart progress for people is reframing it a little bit from, you know, just focusing on your score in the whiteboard of how fast you could go or how many reps you could do or how long the workout took you and moving it more towards focusing on the training adaptation you're getting from the exercise and maybe not maybe putting a little more emphasis on how you're doing what you're doing from what the previous, you know, method was which was just like balls to the wall, full tilt, you know, red line and hope for the best. Yeah and get the score. It feels like you were one of the original people in the CrossFit space just in general like you found it way earlier than a lot of other people did. When you found CrossFit what was the training methodology like and what are some of your first memories of those early days of CrossFit? Well actually there are people that, you know, definitely got into it way earlier than I did. I started officially in 2007 and at that point there were not a lot of CrossFit gyms around at this time I was in New York City and there was like one gym in Manhattan called like CrossFit NYC and then there were a couple more that popped up kind of like that year but they would be like really not your traditional gym like very dingy spaces. I remember the first gym I went up to was in the fashion district on like the fourth floor of a broken down building. You're like walking up a fire escape and then we walked in the gym and there were like nails coming out of the wall and there was blood on the floor and it looked like the movie saw or something right and it was like homemade fitness equipment too. It was like a homemade plyo box and homemade parallets and you know there were people in there it's the first time I ever saw like Olympic lifting shoes if you're wearing all these like wooden shoes and I'm like why are these guys wearing bowling shoes and you know we did a workout there and it was it was CrossFit right. I remember my first workout it was called Fight Gone Bad which is like you know pretty tough workout. That's a terrible workout for a first workout and I remember kind of hanging my head out the window looking down on like 42nd Street or wherever it was afterwards and and just thinking like man you know at this point I had already been a professional athlete for a pretty long time you know in baseball and I was thinking gosh I've been training like my whole life and I've never really trained before certainly not like this. So it opened up a whole world of opportunity for me you know just expanding what I thought training could be and then you know the coaches there were really excited they're like oh you got to compete in the CrossFit games and I got to laugh. I'm like I'm a professional baseball player. I'm not trying to be the best at exercising. I mean this is fun at all but later on that year I actually found myself out in California and I did go to the CrossFit games and I literally just walked on. You could walk on and sign up and do it and at that competition I met someone who's still a good friend of Camila Mein, Dave Castro who was at the time holding the event at his ranch and we hit it off. I told him a little bit about my story and and he said hey you want you come to a seminar come to a level one and I took the course and and then shortly thereafter I started interning to to run the course and I had a background you know an educational background in traditional strength conditioning before that or I think a lot of people at that time and cross through at least the only thing they knew was CrossFit. There wasn't any kind of sports physiology or you know exercise fizz background but yeah and you know that was uh that was really interesting time because CrossFit was on the rise it was emerging so it was kind of like um fitness fight club you might imagine basements of churches that was a weird kind of like not just like our warm-up is your workout kind of thing but there was kind of like this this mantra of like these workouts are deadly they might kill you you know and you get rhabdo and die it's it's the most dangerous workout you could possibly do and people really embrace that and they embrace that idea of like oh I'm gonna be an elite I'm like a navy seal an Olympic gymnast you know Olympic weightlifter wrapped in body armor or something like that um and then that changed a little bit you know as as CrossFit became more mainstream that edginess started to go away um and then it became a very lucrative thing and you know now you see gyms all over the place um and it was it was really beautiful and and uh you know I treasure all those times you know in that period between 2007 and maybe 2000 and like 18 um it was such a fun time because it was all this opportunity as an athlete as a coach I traveled the world amid all these people I met my wife my friends it was my whole community um and and it was kind of difficult to remove myself from that because it was so deeply ingrained in my identity but I realized that in order for me to grow and take that next step I had to get out of that bubble um and and and so I started Thunderbrough and tried to maybe stay adjacent to CrossFit um but uh but not kind of full tilt like I was before because um you know my uh my perception of things had changed slightly over time yeah and I love that story so much because you will have such a positive attitude about CrossFit in general and obviously it has brought so much positive into you and your family's life that like sitting on the other side of it it must feel amazing yeah there there's only the only thing is just like the gratitude you know that like the the opportunities the the people I met the friends I have I met my wife you know even now to this day a lot of the people that are in our lives are one or two steps away connected from CrossFit and we love nurturing and maintaining that relationship because you know it's it's really really wonderful uh for us and if anything you know I hope that what we're doing now can in some ways uh continue to uh contribute to that community in a positive way and help people stay in in the CrossFit gyms and in the programs by maybe evolving their thinking and their methods a little bit yeah tell me about this idea of coming up with Thunder Bros you grabbed one of the best Olympians in America one of the funnest people as well and you guys came up with just a concept of doing something that's so different so unique but at the same time has this broy feel but at the same time is backed by science and there is so much genius in that idea where did this idea come from and what were the early steps of implementation for you guys um I mean Thunder Bros kind of have a by accident like I mentioned you know I started after my back surgery just kind of sharing what I was doing with my training and I'm like hey I'm starting to incorporate these things I started adventuring under you know these these uh exercise physiology professors and really wanted to understand hypertrophy um and then uh with a friend of mine Andrew Charlesworth who was another CrossFit gym owner um we decided that you know why don't we start a website and we honestly originally we worked on seminars together and and you know he loved this stuff and we loved we loved coffee and and supplements you know it's so funny but we had this idea of like hey let's make testosterone boosting coffee and all it's under bro coffee and uh and then we can also I'll write a book about how to blend bodybuilding and CrossFit together and we'll give them a training program and and I knew nothing about how to do that so Andrew was like well I know how to make a Shopify site and I'll design the t-shirt and we can give it a shot so we launched with that unfortunately the coffee never came to fruition because we got kicked off a Shopify before we even had a chance to try because they were like you can't sell supplements or pseudo pharmaceuticals here but I had written this um I had written kind of this like manifesto um that was originally it kind of started as an article that I wanted to write for the CrossFit Journal so kind of backtracking and in 2017 the directors of training Dave Castro and Nicole Carroll asked me and my wife Camille if we wanted to maybe come up with our own specialty seminar like a specialty course that they could offer and I said yes I have a great idea I'm studying it right now it's it's you know hypertrophy for functional fitness and they kind of laughed at me they're like what do you mean like bicep girls that's silly like we don't do bodybuilding here and I'm like no no there's so much more of that there's the the cellular physiology the orthopedic benefit the ability to continue to train hard and see progress as you get older not to mention that muscles the currency of longevity um and so I told them like why don't I don't think you understand when I'm when I'm getting out why why don't I write you an article and I'll submit it to the journal so you can understand a little bit more and as I wrote it they got longer and longer and it's just it turned into this like five page thing and a 20 page thing that ended up being a hundred pages long because I went into everything you know everything from what's a muscle fiber how does it grow how do you apply specific stress stress what are the methods you can use in the gym what does that look like with CrossFit training how do you incorporate nutrition and supplements to magnify those things what are the lifestyle factors you need to focus on to maximize it and it was just like big book and uh and when I went to submit it to the CrossFit journal I just before I I sent it to them I said hey if I if I submit this to you guys would you own it and they said yeah and I go okay I'm just gonna keep it for myself because I work too hard on this it's been it's been six months of me writing this thing so I'm gonna keep it and we offered it on the website as one of our original ebooks I'd purchase you for functional fitness and along with that I wrote the program that I used after back surgery when doctors told me hey Dave you can't lift heavy weights anymore I had to figure out if I can't lift heavy how do I regain and foster muscle mass I lost almost 30 pounds after back surgery like how do I gain that muscle back if I can't lift and they're they're you know rebuttal was like well don't don't lift that is terrible advice came up with this method and it was a method where we used lightweight weight for lots of time under tension and high reps and it was something I put together with a mentor of mine Dr. Brad Schoenfeld who's like the godfather of muscle hypertrophy and we put it out in a basic template called the 90 day get huge program and I remember the day we launched the site it was on a Friday and I was so worried that my friend Andrew who was a gym owner and you know had a family in a house I was like I really hope Andrew doesn't lose his money because we spent a couple thousand bucks making a website and doing graphic design and making some t-shirts and we made our money back by the end of the day so it was very clear to me like wow there's an insatiable appetite for this in our community there's a lot of people here they have the same story of me they love doing CrossFit they love functional fitness but they're frustrated because they just don't know what to do because you know they're feeling defeated and broken down or they're starting to experience that decline so what's the answer and from there the programs grew right so as at that point in time I was kind of preparing to do one of my first bodybuilding shows and I ended up competing in high level bodybuilding for most five years after that but I was just starting to explore some of these really interesting methods and these things that I had never seen before in a gym I think when most people think hypertrophy they're like oh you know four three sets of ten nice and slow and I was learning things where I'm like this is insane people need to know about this because really high level bodybuilding isn't about making heavyweights feel light it's about making lightweights feel really hard and the training stimulus was so tremendous but I was still saving my joints and I was getting such great muscle growth and all these things so I developed a subscription program called muscle anarchy and what muscle anarchy is is it's actually a method it's a method of training where we take these principles of pre-fatigue heavy mechanical loading concentration work in metabolic stress and we hit these broad movement patterns from every single angle and it's a really nice kind of blend of things and to me it's kind of like that middle ground between crossfit and bodybuilding where you're doing these these elite methods that are typically done unlike machines but you're doing them with barbells and dumbbells and it's really reinventing what training can mean to you inside that garage gym space and so that program very quickly became the entire company you know that program grew to thousands of athletes and it was really it's a proprietary method and it's really a game-changing kind of thing and and over time you know we started to realize maybe one program isn't enough for everybody maybe some people don't have the time maybe some people want more of x y or z so we started coming up with these spin-offs that still leveraged the method but had a different take on it so we had you know muscle anarchy express for people in a time crunch dumbbell anarchy for people who only had a set of dumbbells power anarchy for people who wanted to incorporate powerlifting so we took a conjugate method powerlifting template and used our hypertrophy methods alongside it only slowly which is what you're talking about where you know we combine with with uh you know Chad and he's obviously like you know Chad is an actual olympian who's been in the olympics multiple times he's so well versed in uh in olympic lifting and we met him uh we've known him for a while but we actually got to spend a lot of time with him down at the power monkey camp and he told us him kind of getting into some bodybuilding stuff and we showed him you know our method and he was like this is awesome let's do something together you know and and maybe same thing for olympic lifters who are like i love olympic lifting but um you know i just can't handle it at all anymore just for that to be the only thing i do my joints are getting beaten up but the lifts aren't going up anymore and i just want to look great naked and not feel hurt all the time um it's a great way to kind of blend those things together and maintain your skills or even improve them but focus on the hardware the physical body um and then there are also like a lot of other spin-offs we're working on one with chris henshaw where there's an aerobic capacity uh hypertrophy hybrid and another one with uh kettlebells where there's a kind of a flow kettlebell program with hypertrophy on top of it so there's there's no context by which you really couldn't apply it because the method is all about blending performance and aesthetics so whether you're a runner or a golfer a football player a crossfitter it doesn't really matter the idea is like you know have imposing physicality and the ability to use it outside the gym in your specific sport or skill yeah and it feels so common sense to sit on you know this side of the age spectrum going hey it is a no-brainer to want to look good without having to wreck yourself every single day it feels like the mindset shift is slowly happening in the direction of more people accepting body building as part of just looking and feeling your best why do you think for such a long time that so many people have this negative just idea of what bodybuilding actually was without digging into the knowledge behind it well i think there's a lot of things you know there's a lot of reasons why like one reason is the original owner and founder of crossfit really had a stick up his butt about bodybuilding and he didn't like it because he started in a bodybuilding gym and he got kicked out and he didn't like all the meatheads he had a completely different method right and and i don't think they treated him very warmly about it and so the attitude was like that's stupid you know you're just a display model only and really diminishing aesthetics to the point where you know greg glassman the owner and founder would say it's stupid to have mirrors in your crossfit gym well what does that say to people who are in the crossfit gym because they are there for aesthetics it diminishes their goals it diminishes their why so i think that's one one part where it comes from i think another part is most people in crossfit have come from like that traditional club gym and they have a misconception of what they think bodybuilding is they think bodybuilding is like doing three sets of ten and farting around isolation machines and and when they did that they probably didn't get very good results for for two reasons one uh you know they did not work very hard and they didn't know how to do really high utility compound efforts yet and i think that's the gift that crossfit has really given the fitness space is that it's it's taught a lot of people how to perform these gross movement patterns these compound movements that have great application in and outside of the gym but more so have tremendous efficacy in terms of training effect you know they pack a real punch and it's also taught them how to work really hard you know to the point where they're like puking or their hands are bleeding and they're not afraid to look silly or stupid in the gym where most people in that traditional club gym are just like headphones on and don't don't look at me don't talk to me and i don't want to look silly um so now you know when you take that person who is has you know been doing crossfit and you bring them back into that maybe bodybuilding environment boy do they have such a huge advantage let me tell you story when i decided i was going to compete in bodybuilding it was for one main reason i didn't want to be a bullshitter you know i i didn't want to get a reason i didn't want to say i have a bodybuilding program but i've never really done bodybuilding myself never really coached bodybuilding myself didn't really have that real world application because no matter how much you read in a book you don't know until you know a knowledge can only be accumulated one way that's through experience right so you can read it until your face is blue but until you've been under the way until you've been dieting so hard your hands are shaking until you you actually get to feeling experiencing you just don't know um so i really wanted to bring myself you know at that point in time i was well known in crossfit i kind of felt established as a crossfitter as a coach as an athlete and then i went to that you know elite bodybuilding gym and i was at the bottom of the totem pole and i loved it because it's an opportunity for me to prove myself and when i told them hey i'm a crossfitter and i want to want to do a bodybuilding show they laughed at me and i was like this is great this is like ammo this is rocket fuel for me they don't even know and shortly thereafter when i actually started training they were like holy shit this guy trains hard and i got very good at bodybuilding very fast because i knew how to move and i knew how to push myself and so you know it was it was to me a very fun experience that i think a lot of crossfitters may not even know that they have is they've got a huge advantage in that bodybuilding space because they have these tools and these skills that most people in the traditional club gym just don't have um now it's just a matter of putting some bumper lanes on instead of things being constantly varied or you know shaking stuff up for the can and hoping for the best you've got meticulous you know very thought out precision and accuracy with training and nutrition and they're sealing just skyrocket so high because they don't even know what they have yes it's funny it's finding that middle ground between you know training not over training and trying something new that you just aren't that good at yeah tell me about that experience of the actual show because i'm so curious at like what it is that you learned actually being on stage and going through the entire experience you know since um since then and now this is years and years later right so this is one two so almost seven seven years later i've taken dozens of crossfit athletes from that crossfit space and they've done their first show and i tell them everything they're going to go through because it's always the same stuff and one i tell them this is gonna be more challenging than anything you've done before because i think you know how to work hard but in crossfit the hard part is the workout in bodybuilding the hard part is everything outside the workout so you're gonna set like say i'm so tired i'm so hungry maybe i can cheat maybe i can do this or that like you don't it really takes a lot of discipline and it's going to challenge you in a way where you know as you prep for a bodybuilding show you may be going you know two months being in a low grade of hunger trying to push yourself to an aesthetic that you've never been to before but within that statement you have to understand that to achieve something you've never been able to achieve you have to do something that you've never done so it's going to feel really really hard and the first time is always the worst time because you don't have that reference you don't have that muscle memory so to speak you don't have that pain threshold yet so you just don't know so that's going to be challenging the other thing i tell them is you know remember that you decided to do this and so don't take it out on the people around you when it gets hard you know don't don't feel sorry for yourself when you're hungry and tired and then you know the second guessing of wondering oh i'm gonna look silly i'm not going to be big enough i'm not going to be lean enough the other athletes are going to be better than me i mean there's a lot of stuff that fucks with your head when you do that and that is exactly why i think getting a person who's interested in seeing what they can do aesthetically i think it's a fantastic idea to sign up for a bodybuilding show because there's nothing that will bring out the discipline the dedication and the sense of desperation then knowing that at a certain day at a certain time you're going to be naked on a stage in front of a panel of judges and all your friends and family under the lights with a bunch of other really good looking dudes up there so you better be ready and you know every time without a doubt you know i'll have this conversation at the beginning before they even start the prep i'll say you're going to tell me this you're going to tell me you should do the show you're going to you're going to want to pull out you're going to tell me you're too hungry you're going to tell me you don't feel big enough you're going to tell me that you don't feel big enough and believe me that's completely normal because everyone's going to do the same stuff but i guarantee you by the time you get to show day it will be completely worth it because the show day is the reward right this is a sport where it's not how you compete on game day it's everything you've done months before that gives you the opportunity to finally showcase your hard work and and show everyone especially the people that really love you look how far i was able to take myself like look what i was able to cultivate if you can do that you can do anything and most people can well like i'd say like half the people that do shows not my athletes but just in general a lot of them end up pulling out because they just they crap out they don't have the the mental bandwidth and i think that's where the coaching really comes in is explaining the athlete how it's going to feel to you physically how it's going to feel to you mentally you know watching out for these traps and these things they can fall into and that's the knowledge because i've been through it myself and multiple multiple times and you know every time it got better right i learned how to manage myself better and and like i said you just you know what to expect the last show i did i think i looked the best i ever looked and when i did i was like it didn't even feel that hard you know it's a experience it was normal to me at that point um but it's a really fantastic experience and then coming off of that you know the goal isn't to just be a bodybuilder the goal is to explore your physicality the same way you explore your athleticism and see you know i want people to sign up for the ultra marathon and see what you can do do the powerlifting competition try the the crossfit competition see what you can do but come back to a baseline that still serves all the their goals where you know you're able to achieve an aesthetic where you are very proud of how you look you know you're the guy who stands out in the crowd but you can also you know play in other arenas as well and and it doesn't have to be display model only kind of stuff yeah and yeah i love that because it's so frustrating to the bodybuilders where like fuck this guy doesn't even like do all the stuff but he's still stronger than me and he looks great and he goes and he runs at 10k and on the saturday it doesn't make sense you know that's uh i love this attitude that you have of just being so positive and being so happy about trying new things now what i find with my wife is usually she's in one of two camps either she is super super supportive about the idea or at the end of the day she's like here nadia don't do that what was kami like the first time that you told her hey i'm gonna do this whole thing just to challenge myself and my mind kamiel is uh she's a pioneer wife okay and so what a pioneer wife means to me is that she's the person who's like ready to strap it on and and go to work and you know do the stuff she's very supportive you know it's not about what this is going to cost her but all she wanted to do was just try to support me and she and she got it um where i ended up actually getting a lot of pushback was from crossfit and my colleagues and friends at crossfit who told me it's silly it's stupid why are you doing that and i'm telling like i'm trying to explore a completely untapped space no one's ever done this before no one's ever been an elite level crossfitter and they got on a bodybuilding stage like that doesn't happen you know it's happened in the other directions when he came from bodybuilding he went to crossfit but no one's been able to do like both simultaneously and i don't like again i don't want to be a bullshitter if i'm going to say i blend hypertrophy training and bodybuilding with functional fitness i need to do that and uh you know that was tough for me because i really respected these people and i look up to them so it kind of it kind of hurt but whatever that's just that comes you know whether it's them or family members like that's going to happen too people are going to try to diminish your goals they're going to try to say well you know why you do in this this is stupid and and usually that's coming from a place that has nothing to do with you that's coming from a place where something about that is pulling something out of them that makes them uncomfortable like maybe they don't love their physique so they don't want you to do that or they just want to categorize it as stupid because it doesn't feel achievable to them but i will say that after doing this for you know my first second third show and starting thunder bro a lot of those people turned and became members and clients uh you know so that's just that's just the nature of doing something different is you're going to get pushed back if anything that's just a signal that you're doing something right right that you're doing something that's making people uncomfortable you're doing it right um and uh yeah like when i did the first show kamil was amazing she helped me uh the biggest thing i kind of had to adjust to was just the intensity and the the discipline of the diet being on a schedule eating a set every set number of hours you know having everything really dialed in with precision accuracy food type that kind of stuff and doing this constant weekly evaluation of whether i needed to adjust up or down to continue to progress because you know just like training is stress on your body and you got to get more weight on the bar to get stronger it's the same thing with nutrition right nutrition is placing that stress on your body to get it moving and then you know when you start to stall and it's no longer producing results you need to increase the intensity of the diet it's just understanding how much you need to increase it to kind of keep yourself going um but she was really fantastic with that and after she had our baby Zoe um you know the the pregnancy really trashed her body like a lot of women like it just changed things hormonally physically it's just different right she never been that heavy before and she lost a lot of muscle mass you know all the stuff and uh she said you know what i want to go from the worst shape of my life to the best shape of my life within a year and so she did that's a big whole habit she started with just incorporating hypertrophy training she then started to recomposition her body and she got herself to the point where she qualified as a national level competitor in bikini having won the crossfit games just a few years prior so that's really really impressive and and even to this day like you know we don't have any plans to compete this year but there's so many things that we've learned through that process that we incorporate into our daily life to maintain a really high baseline so when you say hey dave you're you're the best looking 42 year old in the room there's one reason and one reason alone that a 42 year old is going to have the most imposing physicality in a room full of dudes and that reason is discipline right and i think that's what bodybuilding teaches you is how to have a high level of discipline a high level of precision and accuracy a calculated approach to training and nutrition in life that you can then you know doing a show takes it's that really high level but even if you go to 70 percent of that that's still remarkably better than what most people are doing so yeah that's that's the biggest gift from it is just learning those skills yeah and i love this part of you and i have so much admiration for it as a man of just having this ability to go hey this is going to be difficult hey i've never done this before i'm going to get through this on the other side of it i'm going to be a better man i'm going to be a better husband i'll be a better father having gone through the experience now one of the other big things that i just love so much about you is that you have this incredibly good attitude and you mix and humor into every single thing that you do how come more people don't mix and laughter as part of their training and when you come into any type of body building gym into any type of weightlifting gym it just feels a hell of a lot more serious to people than having a good time and hitting a good workout well i've i've always um i've always loved being the big version of myself so to speak and everyone everyone you know has that in them to be the big version themselves whether you're like the funny person or the the hard-working person or whatever like that hyperbolic version of yourself um you know when i was a kid my mom my mom and i when i was really young we got in a really bad car accident and we had a head-on collision i was in the hospital for weeks and weeks it's right before i was supposed to go to kindergarten and after that i went to school later that year and after a few months the teacher sent me back home and they said hey we think david has autism because he's not talking and that stuck with me for a really long time it was post-traumatic stress you know i was all kind of messed up i ended up with you know stomach problems and neurological problems but the point is that i was this very timid kind of boy and the only place that i felt safe to let go and and be myself the only place i felt like i was in control was when i would be at recess or gym class or playing sports so the sports arena the athletic fields the baseball diamond that became my safe place and it was where i could be that big powerful version of myself where i wasn't scared and i was scared for a very long time like i was scared to talk i was scared to talk to a girl i was scared to you know like all this stuff but in in the sports i was like oh i can i can dominate people here right so that became my area to really be the big version of myself and that you know started with baseball and after a while probably not until i got to about college i realized that i didn't have to only be that person on the field i could be that person all the time you know like in my people and sometimes that's assigning value yourself like oh people like me or they value me because i'm good at sports it's realizing that you have more value to offer people than what you do right and so it took me a long time to kind of figure that but i i i really started to become that person around my 20s where i was just had that big energy and i loved it i love being happy my daughter is the same way you can see this like beautiful untapped innocent kind of unbridled joy i have that in me too and and i love sharing that with people and uh what i realized is like after um after i'd been doing like sports and strongman crossfit competing when i started getting hurt um and it started for me like hurting my back right i noticed that i started becoming very timid again i i didn't like the way you know because i was used to being like the strongest guy in crossfit right and now i felt like i couldn't do anything and i was afraid to move and you know it really it really kind of sucked and uh and i didn't like who i was becoming physically but what i really didn't like is who i was becoming emotionally so after you know having that back surgery that was like i said it was a big kind of fork in my life was like when i i started to think about like what kind of man do you want to be you know like who do you want to be and and how does thunder bro embody that you know to me thunder bro is is it's a training program it's a methodology it's a you know a whole lifestyle system but it's also kind of a mantra like work hard have fun bring thunder be that big version yourself that idea of bringing thunder to me means that you are that superhero version of yourself that big version of yourself and so yeah i mean that like that is kind of where i keep going back it's like you know it creeps in every once in a while bad things happen i get discouraged and i i always ask myself you know what kind of man you want to be what version of yourself do you want to be because everyone has a choice you know you have a choice to be the child version you have a choice to be mopey or you have a choice to be the opposite of that you have a choice to to be the light to lift people up and to lift yourself up and if there's a magnetic component to that too right because when you bring that energy there are people that are attracted to that energy that identify with it and give it back to you they reflect it back on you and there are people that don't like it that try to kind of suck it out of you like a dream right so and they don't want to be around it so it it kind of creates you your own your own atmosphere around you where you know you want to have a crew a community of people that share that common value of you know bringing that positivity bringing that energy and being the big version of who they are god i love that so much because that crew and that network and that support system i've just like-minded people who are always lifting you up is one of the big things that in society today men for whatever reason just don't value as much and don't have as much have you seen that among specifically men where for whatever reason we a lot of the time fail to recognize the greatness in other men because a lot of people just feel like they're scared of coming up to a guy and being like dude you are a beast you do great work and you are just so good at that you know just i think sometimes people are afraid to they they dampen themselves right they muffle themselves because they're afraid you don't realize that sometimes i come into a room and i say something loud and and fun and and people are like you know like they don't like it and sometimes it opens up wonderful opportunities right you make friends i'm i'm like i make friends with a lot of people and a lot of people hate me too and i'm okay with that like yeah people who don't like me that they just they that's not their they are like i said that magnetism they are offended by that where other people are kind of drawn in by it yeah um hold on let me run an idea by you because i hear stand-up comics talk about this exact same thing but they talk about it from the angle of like getting booed on stage no matter what happens at the end of the day you as a person if you're a loud person and you're the biggest version of yourself people have to remember that whatever it is that you said regardless regardless of the context you were trying to make someone feel better and you were just trying to make people laugh and it feels like you're trying context has missed a lot i think people just forget like life is hard enough right life is hard and training is a great example of that right training especially the way that we train is fucking hard it you are torturing yourself now you can either torture yourself or feel bad about yourself or you can torture yourself and have the best time of your fucking life right i choose the latter right i i choose to have a good time you know people like we do these workouts and you're with your friends and it's absolutely brutal and we're having fun and we're working hard and it makes everything so much easier than if you started sulking about how terrible the workout is or how bad you know this feels or how much it burns like there are people that all they do is complain and i think in the end that's not helping them right and sometimes reframing your point of view takes something that it can go either way right like you can look at it and you could be like oh my god this is so terrible or you can look at it as like how lucky am i that i get to put myself through this amazing awful thing that's going to change me and i get to have a blast while doing it you know and and and it's uh i think just those those pathways in your brain like that neuroplasticity of of you know directing it either towards this is bad this is pain run away or this is pain this is fun this is amazing you start to crave it you start to crave the adrenaline you start to crave it makes you feel like you're alive it makes you feel like today counted for something like you accomplish something right so um it's it's all in that perspective and i think that's the kind of the we talk about like the um you know the the attitude or the mantra or the feel or the vibe of thunderboro that's the vibe is you know this is amazing this is awful and this this is like you know such a such a gift that we live in a time where you know we have the privilege of training we have the privilege of friends we have the the privilege of time to do this that's that's a gift i love that so much because i'm just all in i see the world the exact same way that you do and i think there is so much value to having this incredible attitude of hey i can do this hey this is going to be fun hey this is going to hurt but the pain is temporary and it's going to go away so we write these workout complexes and and i don't just write like a workout complex where it's like back squat all right back squat death set annihilation that'll be that'll be the name of of the workout right and it's like we're almost celebrating how how how bad it's going to be right and uh there's this quote that we have um i think it was like for one of these complexes that we wrote that was just like a really tough one and the quote was it's awful you're gonna love it and they they do again that's just like the perspective of what you're looking to get out of this right um to me that adaptation stress response that idea that i can apply a specific stress to my body and it can change in a calculated way requires you to get uncomfortable right if it's not uncomfortable if it doesn't hurt nothing's going to change your body has to get to that kind of alarm state and so that's not a bad thing that's a good thing um and sometimes it's educating people and letting them instead of run away from it kind of embrace it or even chase it um because that's where you get the most growth yeah and it feels like all of us innately know that you get the growth through going the through the uncomfortable they have one final question i'm going to hit you with today's this one for whatever reason it feels like today more than ever there are a lot of just unhappy specifically men who know that something is wrong who are unhappy with their bodies who are just not doing anything about it why do you think it is so hard to take that first step to go i'm not happy with how i look but there is a way to fix this and just get on the road and start doing the thing um i i think there are a lot of factors in there but i think the biggest one is just that idea that you know comparison is the thief of joy um and whether you're comparing yourself to who you used to be or comparing yourself to other people on instagram or facebook or twitter or tiktok or whatever there's there's never been more comparison going on yeah and uh it can be a really toxic thing it can really just eat away at at your soul so i think the first thing is is just letting go of what has happened who you were you know letting go of what might happen in the future and just being where you are right now being present i think that is a huge relief you know people who worry about the future get anxiety people who harp on the pass get depression being present is a really hard skill and it's very hard to be present right now because we're just constantly distracted by stuff by you know the cell phones or this and that like people do so much now life used to be really boring when i grew up like you go sit at the bus stop and look at your shoes you know it's easy to be kind of mindful but now it's just like constant dopamine hits and it gets you to a point where the only thing you're doing is chasing that thing to make you feel better and when you're doing that when you have to reach for something external to make you feel better that's a never ending cycle it has to come from within and the only way for it to come from within is you have to be good with yourself and so it's kind of letting go of those things being present being good with yourself and giving yourself the grace just to meet yourself where you're at and that's something that i learned like coming off a back surgery i couldn't do anything that was okay every workout was a victory even if it was five pounds because it was five pounds more than the week before and i was just i wouldn't you know like i knew i wasn't what i was before but i also had this idea where like i knew where i was going to like i knew i knew what i was going to be and that was exciting to me um and uh and and just being able to find those victories and you know like i think that's a big mistake people make with training and nutrition is they don't meet their self where they're at and they take this opinion where it's like all or none like either i do the diet a hundred percent compliance or it's a failure not really is rising that like 80 compliance still gives you 80 percent of the benefit um so and you just constantly hear well this person could do that or this person does this all this information you got to kind of quiet the noise a little bit and you know when i work with clients one-on-one that's kind of like the first thing we go through like tell me who you are like what you've done tell me where you're at right now and tell me where you want to go right and and then we start with like okay here's where you're right now let's map out in the next six months this is going to be your monthly ascent and you know what the end state's going to be but i don't want you thinking about that i want you thinking about the next rep the next step or the next meal don't even worry about it don't get too excited don't get too sad just be consistent and find joy in the process and and if it's too hard let's find a way to make it less hard so you can feel successful yeah i love this joy of finding small victories dave you are an absolute treasure as a man i admire you so much and i see exactly what you're building brother and it looks amazing thank you so so much i appreciate thank you so much for having on the put me on the podcast and uh yeah it's always like i said it's always a privilege to get to talk to people about what we do and share our messaging i'm sure you can hear a lot of the passion that comes through me and i tell cam like you know there's a lot of stuff i can't do you know there's a lot of things i'm not good at but but this i i really do take a lot of pride in it and i feel like it's an opportunity to share those gifts with the world you're i think a lot of men and women benefit from this stuff and nothing is more important than your physical body right your health is your wealth so all i want is to try to get this out there and bring some good things to people yeah and that's messaging is so so positive and it's so easy to buy and because we know exactly who you are as a person we can see the passion behind it dave thank you for sharing your time with me and our audience we love and appreciate you thanks a lot it's been fun thank you man