 Which one of you guys started the fire on YouTube with all the trolls? What? We didn't start the fire. Yeah. Yeah. It was always burning since the world of turning. We're going to blame it on Justin. Why? Which one? Good. The CrossFit one is going. Oh, I see. Of course. What do you mean? Which one? Of course it's going nuts right now. Yeah, of course. We knew that was going to happen. Yeah, you know what? That's where they hang out, apparently. You know what I find? You know what's funny to me is, OK. So I guess if I had to identify with a modality of training, it would be bodybuilding. If I had to. Right. If you had to put me in a category of how I train most often or what I gravitate towards the most, it would be bodybuilding. Which I find it funny that people get insulted and they feel the need to defend CrossFit when we talk about these things. It's like if you were to talk shit about bodybuilding, as oh, it's a terrible way of lifting, and I wouldn't. That's who I am. Right. I wouldn't feel the need to come rescue it. And we're like, well, that is so wrong, and you don't know what you're talking about, Sal. There's one thing to attack. Talk about drinking the cooling. Well, here's the deal. OK, you have to get more specific. So you could say bodybuilding training sucks. OK, but why? Why do you say that? And then if someone sits down and lists, well, if you constantly isolate muscles, you create maybe some dysfunction. It's aesthetic focused. So you don't focus so much on mobility and on functional strength and movement. Those are actual good critiques. They can be very good critiques. Absolutely. And we talk about how many people get into the gym because they're insecure about their body. And I could make the case that training for aesthetics and using the mirror and the way you look as your main motivator is actually a terrible way for most people to train and most clients that I train. But I wouldn't get offended by that. No. I poke holes in every method that's out there. Look. Look. But only when we talk about that one. OK, this is what it reminds me of. Years ago, I don't know. This is probably, I think it was 1994, I want to say. I remember I was watching TV and this commercial comes on TV. And it's like this cartoon character. And he's like punching the ground. And it's like ultimate fighting championship. I remember that. Find out which martial art is the toughest. Boxing versus judo, taekwondo versus karate. And it was like this huge debate back in the day. When I was a kid growing up, you'd watch martial arts movies. And it was always kung fu versus karate or boxing. And it was this huge debate. Which style is the most effective? Who's going to use the five finger death punch? And you know we ended up figuring out through mixed martial arts that all of them have strengths and all of them have weaknesses. And the best. And guess who the biggest badasses are? The one that can do all of them. The one that utilizes the strengths and nullifies the weaknesses. OK, similar with training modalities. Does yoga have strengths that are superior to other forms of modalities? Yes. Does yoga have weaknesses? Absolutely. What about bodybuilding? What about powerlifting? What about crossfit? What about kettlebell training? All these things have things you can learn from and use together to construct the mixed martial art of training essentially for the average person. Now if you want to be special. Let me put it this way. Using the same martial arts argument. If you want to be the world champion at Shotokan Karate does it make any sense to train in wrestling or devote any time to wrestling? No. No, the sport of Shotokan Karate is specifically Karate. Your best bet is to focus all your time on Karate. So if you want to be the best crossfit athlete in the world makes perfect sense to go focus all your time across. Same thing with powerlifting, bodybuilding, etc. But if you want to train your body the average person would be fit, well rounded. Your best bet is to take a little bit from each one and of course you're going to lean more in one direction and other because of your preferences. If you like squatting and deadlifting a lot you're probably going to do more powerlifting than the other types of lifts or modalities. But you can take a little bit from each one. Yeah, but we've done what? 1,500 episodes and we've poked holes in every modality. Every modality. We shit on everything. But only when we talk about that one do we get this, the feedback is crazy. It's always people that get so butt hurt about talking about crossfit. There's a bit of a cult. A bit? Yeah. Come on Jesus, it's ridiculous. Well, and here's the thing, because people will say things like oh, you know, I work out a crossfit box and the way that they train they teach technique and they focus a lot on form and it's very appropriate to the person's level and there's lots of individualization of the training. My question for those people is functional training. Yeah, well my question is always this what makes a form of training crossfit? What are the things that make it crossfit? Yeah, please define it. To my best estimation, and I'm pretty good. I know this. I understand crossfit quite well and I know you guys do too. To my best estimation, what makes something crossfit literally is the sport of crossfit. Training for the sport. Other than that, what they're utilizing are deadlifts, squats, presses, cleans, they're running, they're doing exercises and doing them all right doesn't make it crossfit. What makes it crossfit is when you make it the sport of crossfit. And even if you want to go into the modality of it, they've pulled from every other functional training method that already existed. So it's like this culmination of all these other training methods out there that does have legitimacy into it but what makes it crossfit is the intensity, it's the competition of it, it's the actual sport of it that differentiates it from everything else. I think it's the feeling of superiority that I love to just poke at because I think they think that many people that take it believe that. Now mind you, there's a lot of people that listen to mind pump also do crossfit, are in our community or in our forum that are not like that, that are like understand the points and they can say, hey, I like doing it. I love the community. I've been very consistent with it. I totally hear all the points that you guys make. I try and make adjustments into my routines and add mobility days and do things like that. But yeah, I totally get it but it doesn't mean we're telling people, don't do it. It's just when we think, when I talk on this podcast, the person I think I'm talking or who I'm trying to communicate to are the people that I trained for 20 years. Those people. Yeah, average person wants to get in shape. Yeah, yes. Not the supreme athlete who is trying to compete in crossfit. I mean, by all, you should be doing that if that's what you want to do. I'm talking about, you know, Susie who's 55, had three kids, tried to lose weight for the last 20 years. Yo-Yo dieted most of her life, which by the way, this is like 70% of the clientele that would come through the door of a gym that would hire a personal trainer. That's who I'm talking to. I'm not talking to you 20-year-old kid who's in great shape, great mobility and don't have weight issues. And there was a comment in there where one guy's like, I lost, I don't remember what it was, like 80 pounds doing crossfit. Therefore, it's amazing. Okay, let's just use something else. I lost 80 pounds playing basketball. I lost 80 pounds. Crash dieting. Playing soccer. I lost 80 pounds doing jiu-jitsu. Does that make it the best form? Maybe for that person, look, if you love it and it's working for you, actually, I'm never going to argue against that, right? Yeah. Unless you're getting lots of injuries, unless you're, you know, complaining about problems. I'm not going to argue that. It's obviously worked for you. It's obviously brought you more benefit than good. Yeah, but you've got to be even careful saying that, because the sustainability of it, as a coach that's experienced, you know that. Right. Like somebody could easily... Right, I don't recommend any hardcore sports for weight loss. Yeah, I mean, somebody could have easily lost 80 pounds by, you know, grossly reducing their calories and running five miles every single day. Right. And just because they liked doing that during that time and that's got them those results, me as a professional would still not recommend that as an ideal weight. Right. Because what I know is the sustainability of that long-term is just not realistic. Most people, okay, will not run five miles a day and eat 1,300 calories forever. And so even if it did work for you and you do like doing that, that's the problem that I have with that. Well, you know what the issue is, and you guys, we've seen this in diet culture as well. If somebody does something and it gets them to lose weight and change the way they look or the way they feel. They're a fervorous evangelist at that point. Yes, they're so married to it. So you could talk to somebody who's lost a lot of weight doing keto or going vegan or paleo or whatever, cabbage juice diet, whatever. And what you'll get is a, somebody's very religious about what they just did. Well, you could bring it instead of diet, bring it back to training modalities. Sure. People get the same way with that. That's why there's a community of power lifters, there's a community of crossfitters, a community of bodybuilders. And so it's no different. I talk to them the same way. It's like that when I was bodybuilding, one of the biggest flaws that I saw in my peers was that's the way they always trained. It's like, dude, you guys know that if you just moved out of this, you know, super setting, isolation exercise, pumping exercises all the time, you would see huge benefits if you power lifted for a little while. Like you have no idea. And that's actually a great point is that even if you are extreme in one of the sports, there are some things you can learn. It doesn't have to be a ton, but there are some things you can learn that will also benefit you. For example, bodybuilders that take from powerlifting, they build more muscle as a result of doing that. Some of the best power lifters in the world, bodybuilders in the world, were power lifters at one point. Ronnie Coleman is a great example of that. You know, you could do that for most of these modalities and I think you're doing yourself a huge disservice when you put yourself in this camp and it's us versus them mentality because you're no longer open to growth. You're no longer open to progress or even just seeing what's not working for you. Make no mistake, when you get stuck in a mentality, you can actually do yourself quite a bit of harm. I mean, going back to the diet thing, I can't tell you, I would get messages from people, especially when we first started the podcast, I get messages from people who are like, hey, Sal, I've been doing keto for four months. I feel terrible. I'm very constipated. When is my body gonna transition? When's it gonna start feeling good? Like it's not, it's been four months. It's not working for you, but because they're so stuck on this camp that they're ignoring their body signals. You see this with training too. Hey, Sal, I lost 40 pounds doing CrossFit, but I had to get a shoulder injury. I feel really run down. I got my testosterone levels checked, it's down. So when is that gonna start to reverse? Well, maybe that's the wrong modality for you right now. It's literally everything we've learned over the past year or two is how tribal everybody is and how much they don't wanna hear a counterpoint or invite a discussion of admitting that there may be some flaws in the methodology. They don't wanna examine that and think critically about things. Yeah, I know. It cracks me up though. It always cracks me up. And I think part of me likes to trigger it. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's like, let's start this conversation. Yeah, because I feel like, again, we've talked about all the other modalities in this podcast, but nobody brings that up. Everybody's like, oh, these guys talk shit about CrossFit. It's like, bro, we talk about every modality. And everybody is, by the way, everyone is just as guilty and so gravitating towards one modality and sticking to it. I mean, that was a lot of the motivation of starting the show was that we wanted to break those barriers and teach the average person that there is something to take from power lifters. There is something to take from kettlebells. There is something to take from CrossFit. It's easier to stay in that one, train of thought in that same pattern because it's your body, it likes that. I wanna keep doing what I like to do. I don't wanna challenge myself. I get it. We're the same way too. We're just as guilty. That's a human condition. Yes, when I assess the way we all train, we all tend to gravitate towards the things we like most, but we're all aware of it. And we all know, like, okay, it's been a little while. I've been pushing the weight too much. I need to get out of here, go into my body builder way. Or I need to go mobility focused. Or hey, I'm gonna pull the kettlebells out and get working on some rotational stuff. So yes, I mean, I'm just as guilty too, but I'm also aware enough to be okay that when someone points out one of those modalities as having flaws, I don't get attacked personally. You're coming after me. You're like, all I can say is like, yeah, you're right. That is a flaw in that training modality. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, look, again, just to hit the other side, for as long as I've been in fitness professionally, which is over two decades, and non-professionally, which is much longer, no strength modality at all was able to get people to squat and deadlift and to use bumper plates. None. Bodybuilding failed at that. Powerlifting failed at that. Weightlifting failed at that. It was CrossFit. It was CrossFit that literally got people to squat and to deadlift and to use platforms. Before that, you would not find a platform. They certainly didn't invent it, though. No, you would not find it in any gym, and literally, I would manage these 40,000-square-foot facilities. There would be one squat rack, and nobody would use it. And deadlifts, God forbid you saw a deadlift, people would freak out. So CrossFit single-handedly, that's why I'm grateful for CrossFit, it single-handedly got people to do some of the most effective exercises known to man. Does that mean I can't critique some of the other shit? Now evolve and be better. That's all I'm asking.