Transcription

Nick  00:00

Welcome to the shark bite show, where we dive into stories of our members, coaches, friends, and family. Shark by fitness and nutrition. Alright, let’s go.

Josh  00:10

So Josh, why are the workouts we do so short? Today we did a 15-minute workout, right? Why are the workouts we do so short in comparison to if you go to a normal style gym and you’re there for two and a half hours,  It’s very specific here. You come in with a very specific intent we have proper progressions that build in prep your neurologic and musculoskeletal system for whatever that work is for the day. So it’s a lot more specific and dictated towards what the stimulus is that we’re trying to get out of it. We’re not wasting with a lot of fluff. We come in, we’ve got a task, we’ve got a job, we hit it and we accomplish it and we move on.

Val  01:00

Yeah, I would say it’s an intensity focus. It’s a more general health focus in terms of strength, endurance, mobility, hitting the umbrella part of it, as opposed to when you go into a regular commercial type gym. A lot of people are there, they’re following the influencers on Instagram, they’re trying to be the bodybuilders, bikini models. So if you’re looking to go in, and specifically only grow your rear delt, here’s probably not the place and you’re gonna sit there for 10 minutes in between sets on the bench on your phone because you have to rest and probably piss somebody off. If you’re not resting, you’re waiting for something else that somebody else is using. It’s like that’s why it takes so long and it takes away that intensity factor as opposed to, you can come in here, get bigger, faster, stronger in an hour and then get on with your day.

Nick  01:59

That was one of the main draws to me I think was because when I first started getting into working out I was going to a YMCA because that’s all there was in upstate New York the worst place on earth. I’ll be there for like two and a half hours. What am I doing?

Nick  02:16

Then I had someone somebody Yeah, what right not speaking to anybody hat down headphones in. Then somebody got me to do this workout. This CrossFit workout is called Cindy. I remember doing that and being like when I was done being like, hold on, This is your workout. This is what you did for the day. Because I mean, I was dead, but he was done. I can get my butt kicked this hard and this guy was in really good shape. I can get this fit in 20 minutes, right? Yes. Sign me up because I don’t want to spend three and a half hours. I know for me a big part of it was that I would walk around the gym get what do I do? So much of that time was wasted. So I mean, having short workouts. Our classes are an hour right, but there are multiple things that happen out of that. But man has not been there for two and a half hours a major, major game-changer. Why do we choose the functional fitness style of working out? Some people call CrossFit. We’re not technically CrossFit anymore. Why do people choose like functional fitness style? Over like other forms of working out? Why did you guys choose that? And then why do we as a gym have that value?

Val  03:57

So I thought, getting out of gymnastics that all I wanted to do was lift heavy things. And then I got into powerlifting and weightlifting and kind of quickly realized that that wasn’t the case. I was sitting around for 15 minutes in between sets. Either that or I was finishing my lift in 25 minutes. I was either bored or getting yelled at. So I just started doing extra stuff. I started playing around with some things that I missed from gymnastics like handstands and saw people on Instagram and stuff, doing handstand push-ups and toes to bar and things like that. I was like, I can do those things. I want to do those things. So I got into practicing those. I did one of my last powerlifting meets and I was like I think I’m done with this. So after that whenever we would start going into lifts, I would just start doing like metcons and things like that and getting that intense workout in 15 minutes and being like on the floor and I get up and be like, Alright, that was good.  So I found that more fun and more stimulating to me than hitting a set of five on a back squat, and then going and sitting down, drinking some water. And then like sitting again, because you don’t want to get too tired before you hit your next set, I think it also just has a lot of transferability. I’ve gotten way stronger than I could have ever imagined. I’ve picked up a lot of skills in terms of being competitive and stuff like that, which is important to me, but not important to everybody. Whenever I go on trips, where I’m doing a lot of hiking, it’s really cool. Or I go somewhere, and I’m swimming, and I’m like better at swimming than I ever used to be. I can keep up doing things that I want to do without even thinking about it. One time I did. I signed up for a Spartan Race. Somebody asked me, they were like, how are you training for it? And I was like, I’m not I’m gonna show up and do it. I train every day, I’ll show up into a 5k run with some obstacles. Like that’s not a big deal. 

Josh  06:25

So my foundation and start is similar to yours was the military, but while I was in one of my leaders was starting to get into CrossFit. And he was starting to get into the concepts of CrossFit at the time. And he was starting to implement those style workouts. And we’re like, oh, wow, there’s a lot of transferability of this into like the job that I’m doing. Then when I got out, I started going to more of your commercial traditional style gyms. And I got bored. Like I was sitting around, nobody wanted to talk, it was just a very negative vibe and atmosphere.

07:24

Then I started looking at programming, Dark Horse is a program that I found that I got into back in the day, and it was like more of this functional fitness style training than I found CrossFit Cape Coral back when they opened back in 2014. My life was very inconsistent at that time. And I was never a consistent member for many years. So I would go back and forth between your traditional lifestyle gym and functional fitness and I just found more fulfillment, happiness benefit, and long-term outcome with this style of training than I did anything else.

Nick  08:00

I found CrossFit many, many years ago, right, and did that for many years. But I think we also realize like, I personally don’t think CrossFit itself is bad, but there are some things about it that I don’t think really fit the general populace, right. And I’m now the general populace. We might play on a team, right? But I’m a normal human who’s just kind of good at working out. I don’t want to do the things that general CrossFit says to do I don’t want 90-minute AMRAP where I feel like I’m dying every day and that’s cool, but the vast majority of people don’t want that. Even they say they want that they don’t realize they don’t want that. They want to get fit, have fun, and feel good. So functional fitness, instead of your stereotypical CrossFit I think achieves a better version of that.

Josh  09:04

To feel good is a huge one too because a lot of people want to do those long workouts because they think that’s what’s going to make them fit, but they don’t have the lifestyle that allows them to recover from 90 minutes workouts. So then they feel like garbage. And they’re like this isn’t working. You’re like, what you’re doing isn’t working? 

Nick  09:23

We have a buddy named John and he goes to a different gym. He does multiple workouts a day, right? He does exactly the opposite of what I’m saying, but he’s trying to be a professional athlete. He’s made his life match around. Our friend Hannah who is in Sharks with us, she’s doing multiple sessions a day, right? Her life is revolving around that. I don’t mean that negatively. That’s their focus.

Josh  09:45

They’re checking the boxes, when they eat, they’re tracking their sleep. They’re like doing all the things.

Nick  09:50

If they were doing the things we’re doing. If they’re living life outside of the gym or they’re taking care of their kids. They’re doing a 10-hour workday where they’re sitting at a desk where they have the normal stresses that come from life. And that’s not a priority focus. 90-minute workouts don’t make you better. They make you much, much worse. They demolish your endocrine system, your mental, everything.

Josh  10:17

Everything hurts so bad when you do that consistently.

Nick  10:27

We do Olympic lifts, cleans, jerks, snatches, we definitely do more than a person who goes to a normal style gym, right? Why do we focus on this?

Josh  10:40

I feel that those are beneficially interjected into our style of workout because you get to take all of the building blocks and then put them into something that is an accumulation of all the foundational components. We talked about functional fitness and most of the activities have direct correlations into how we go into life, you reach up into a cabinet, you got to be able to reach up and push something up into a cabinet or something like that. Maybe a snatch doesn’t have that functional component, but it has all of the foundational key components added into one final outcome. So it’s kind of like an ultimate test of the pieces put together. They’re super compound movements that let us hit a bunch of different body parts, muscle groups, whatever you want to call them at once. They transfer over if you’re moving, and you have to get a box from the ground up into a moving truck geared picking that box up from the ground, and cleaning it up to your shoulders, and putting it in the truck or you’re picking up a couch and you’re deadlifting it, rotating it, all these different things. So they allow us to just do life better. They practice coordination, they practice strength, they practice mobility, they’re like all of these different things, depending on how we work them. But it’s not just we do this, because we want to max it out. And it just looks cool.

Nick  12:10

To be clear, we don’t do them every day, right? But I know that that’s what people see on the internet. Sometimes they think like, Oh, you must just do snatches every day or something or cleans. I think there are really important benefits like the difference between type one and type two muscle fibers, and how you’re not generally getting type two development when you’re doing cardio all the time. We’re very, very lightweight. So explosive movement is really important for that. I also think it’s just really important to remember that it’s fun. It’s fun to practice Olympic lifting.

Josh  12:37

And it just feels so good when you hit something just right.  It’s fun to practice it because it’s hard. Even when you’ve been doing it forever, it’s still hard and you’re still fine tweaking things and figuring things out. I like the point you said that it’s explosive, because especially as people get older, they stop being explosive, and they stop jumping, and they stop using those muscles, which are so so important to keep using, especially for women. People have a lot of flak with geriatric old or older populations kind of doing these things. We’ve got individuals in here. So if we take someone like Miss Davis, for instance, and we put her up next to somebody else who is her age that is not living in a functional, active lifestyle. People will kind of throw flack towards those Olympic lifts because they say, well, there’s no real benefit to it. Well, Miss Davis can snatch, but maybe that doesn’t have any direct function, but because she has the ability to control that moved into that position, she is going to be much healthier than Betty Sue over there.

Nick  13:46

I mean she’s explosive. She does explosive things, and she can get off the ground. Let’s say she’s not doing squat snatches with a barbell right. She has the ability to do explosive things. And Val you coach our Legends Class, right. You can attest people stop having those things. It’s not because they don’t have the ability to, it’s because they stopped it 30 years ago, right.

Josh  14:12

And it can come back just because you lost it. It can come back. You just have to work on it. It’s crazy how unimportant people think it is. 

Nick  14:35

How do you guys personally recover from tough workouts? 

Josh  14:40

I try very hard to not be a hypocrite, a lot of people see me doing a lot of accessories and mobility work around the gym. That’s for me from not just the business, but movement standpoint, the stuff that I give out is not fluff. So I try to utilize a lot of the principles that I advise and teach and educate on in athletic recovery services on myself. So I do a lot of controlled mobility. I do a lot of loading and eccentric. I love the NormaTec love getting that blood flow. So I utilize those principles that help after a workout like as soon as I’m done, I’m going to foam roll, I’m going to do my mobility, I’m going to do mice stretching, or whatever it is that I’ve got to do to hit those areas that I just worked at a very high intensity and drink water with some salt thrown in.

Val  16:47

I have a couple of different points on this. I’m going to start this out also by saying I don’t try to be a hypocrite, but I am not the prime example for recovery. So ideally, I like a lot of low-impact movement for recovery, kind of going back to one of our first points, like the more I can keep moving even if it’s at a low intensity, the better I’ll feel. Sleep is a huge one for me. I know if I sleep better, I just feel better all in general 100% of the time. That isn’t always the case, I’m typically the person that wakes up four or five times a night for no reason, five minutes, then I’m back to sleep. But those disruptions in my sleep mess me up. So I try and be better about that, but my dog doesn’t help. But being young, I know I’m gonna start getting hurt. I don’t want that to happen, but I ignore a lot of stuff that I should be doing, like mobility and corrective exercises and things like that. So I’m trying to be better about it.

Nick  18:07

This might get me CrossFit canceled, but I don’t believe in rest days.

Josh  18:12

I can’t tell you the last time I took one.  I like active recovery days.

Nick  18:16

I think that’s really important, right? The concept of rest days. It’s kind of like when you’re dieting, cheat days. I think that the idea of it being so further in the opposite direction is actually bad for you. So Katie would get mad at this when she started working here especially when we were like testing out the nutrition program. So she got to see a little bit more of like my workout routines. I don’t believe in rest days. I don’t think that you should take a day where you don’t move for 24 hours. I don’t believe them. Maybe if you’re recovering from serious surgery or something. A hard workout doesn’t mean, doing four hard workouts doesn’t mean you don’t move for a full 24 hours. I think that’s actually way worse. I know that I feel much crappier whenever I do.

Josh  19:02

How many times have we come in? We’re like, man, we’re just trashed from what we did yesterday. And then we get through the warmup and really shit. I feel 10 times better right now.

Nick  19:31

We’ll even sometimes tell people to take rest days, right? But that’s not what we really mean. We don’t mean don’t move for 24 hours. Come in here and get a little sweaty, take your dog for a long walk. 

Josh  19:43

I encourage people if you’ve had a really hard training week and you feel like maybe you don’t want to be here today. Do an active recovery day. Like there’s a lot of workouts where you can treat that as such that’s no harm and instead of you just staying home and doing absolutely nothing come in, get some gentle movement. And then go on with the rest of your day.

Nick  20:02

It’s really easy to understand why people don’t understand that, right? Because the idea is well, I want to work out, I want to get a workout in and I just need the hardest effort possible. But I mean, there are days when operating at 65-70% is far more beneficial than operating in 90%. I mean, we take the quality style workouts, right? We have the five workouts, quality grind-heavy effort, sprint. The quality ones, those are like great days for that. If I’ve been getting wrecked, we did that goblet squat workout today. I think my glutes will never work the same again. Quality really pays off for that.

Josh  20:41

Don’t stop moving.

Nick  20:44

When we were doing knee rehab and hip rehab, we get them up the next day, you need to move.

20:52

So I’ve worked in various different avenues of rehab, and you stop moving, you start dying. It goes back to that stagnant city point that I said early on, if you’re not moving, the body’s not like you needed to flush your legs, you’re not going to flush, you’re not going to get things going.

Nick  21:09

How do you guys balance wanting to do extra work? Because this is something we hear a lot, especially people who started the CrossFit mentality, right? How do we balance extra work, instead of overloading and overtraining? How do we balance those two things? I think the most important thing is that people want to do extra without evaluating whether they’re doing enough, to begin with so what I mean by enough is you’re doing your 60 or so minutes a day of training, that’s fantastic, right? So people will be like, Okay, I need, I want more, therefore, I need more, but it’s not about the 60 minutes of training if we work out four times a week, or five times a week, how many hours outside of the outside of that, what are you doing?  I think it’s important to first look at are sleeping more than four hours a night, five hours a night? What is your nutrition like? What is your mental health like? What are you doing to recover? Are you approaching every one of your workouts with the appropriate intensity, I feel I was a victim of that for a long time, I would do my workouts, but I would scale them in such a way or maybe over opposite of scaling them, like modifying them to make them harder, but then I would miss out on the intensity of the workout.  Then I would not feel like I was getting better. So I feel like I need to do more so I can get better. I was also sleeping four hours a night, eating like crap all the time. So first, I would say, the way you balance it is by evaluating those things first, are you doing these things other than just more working out? That might make you better? But then after that, I would say you could do more, tons of people could do more fitness-wise if it was appropriate. What do you guys think of it as appropriate? Like, say, I want to get stronger, right? Should I be doing 10 pounds a week?

Josh  23:06

There are guidelines and certain things you have to do and take into consideration and a whole bunch of different factors to consider when you’re looking to put in extra work. Sometimes you don’t have all those answers, but that’s where coaches and professionals and people come in because they’re the people that have done the work. They’ve looked into it, they know how to get you where you need to be. Making those decisions for yourself is super hard. I know because I’ve done it, and I still struggle with it. I’m like, I come in, and I’m like, I just had such a hard workout. I feel like I should do something else later. Maybe that thing I do later is just schoolwork. I’m not getting my heart rate to 180% I’m not going 90% of my lift. I’m just sitting on a box in front of a rope and practicing my class with my feet and getting that down. Things that are important to me to get better at. But if I was just like, outside looking in, I’d be like, Alright, I need to come in and I need 20 rope climbs that would ruin me. So those are important things to take into consideration. Sometimes you don’t know what’s best for you. But there’s always a way to do it. I’m very big on especially over the past year and a half listening to my body. Key points, if you’re starting to work on wanting to do more, but then getting into overtraining, the three top tier things that people don’t like to acknowledge are sleep, nutrition, and mindset.

24:57

One makes sure that those check those boxes up to inject, but two with me listening to my body like I come in and I just feel trashed. You know that difference between just being sore and kind of not wanting to get into it to the day and where you’re like this is just not like a good feeling. I try to balance what my intensity is going to be based on that. And then I try to like, as Val was saying, like, I don’t want to get banned for saying corrective exercise because one exercise isn’t going to correct anything, but it’s that skill, that accessory work that’s going to help set the foundation so I try to find for me, depending on what day the week it is, or what week it is that balance that works for me.

Nick  25:37

I think that’s the most important part of what you said, just finding somebody who can help you with that. We’re launching a new program. It’s called ITP. The Independent Programming. So if you’re looking to do extra work, and you don’t know what that is, and you want to get better skills or your cardio or your strength or whatever, hit up Josh and Val. There’ll be launching that inventive program soon. This has been super fun. I think we got to do this again. Thank you very much, pal. To find us, check us out on social media or, you know, come join the gym.

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Check Josh and Val on these social links:

Josh’s IG: @josh_echelson  

Val’s IG: @valerie_gunning

Be sure to check out this episode of the #TheSharkBiteShow. 

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