Ep 105: 2021 Training Debrief – Biggest Winners, Biggest Losers, and Top Lessons Learned

What were your biggest wins in 2021? This week myself, Ryan Patrick, Ryan L’Ecuyer, and Lance Goyke sit down to talk about our biggest training takeaways from 2021. It’s always interesting to look back on the previous year to see what worked, what didn’t work, what needed improvement, what needs to be implemented, AND what needs to be eliminated.

The main theme of this episode is to unpack the big rocks that have stayed consistent in our growth at Rebel and to share what newer ideas and tools we will be adding to our toolbox (that we think you should, also) in 2022. The three of us unpack all things improving your metabolic health, why daily movement is so important, being open to different training methodologies, the distinction between cognitive stress and physical stress, and much more. Listen is as we discuss our biggest winners in the industry, our biggest losers in the industry and our top lessons learned. 

What You’ll Learn in this Episode:

• [07:34] The decentralization of knowledge and decision making and the importance of diving into the information yourself
• [11:05] The obvious way to improve your metabolic health
• [15:13] Why daily movement is so important
• [17:35] The distinction between cognitive stress and physical stress
• [19:30] Bed rest studies and the alarming results for changes in our physiology
• [21:32] Why low intensity cardio has a huge impact on your training
• [24:54] Why those who have the best fitness outcomes are those who give their all to the experience
• [29:36] Being open to other training methodologies
• [34:53] The difference between good, useful data and just noise
• [39:52] Why your intuition and judgement for how you feel is more meaningful than the piece of technology you’re wearing
• [49:26] Knowing you can do anything but not everything in your training
• [51:44] Coming to the realization that sprinting and straight bar deadlifts do not play well together
• [53:42] Understanding that the simpler and more consistent you are, the better your outcomes will be

DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

James Cerbie: Hey, what’s up? Yeah, it’s been a while since we all got on here. I mean, this is how they usually work, right? It’s been 20 minutes and we just sat here and just shoot the ship for 20 minutes before we even come on to talk about anything, as is tradition. Oh, yeah. The Omicron, which, by the way, sounds like a transition former, like, when I first heard it, I was like, That’s definitely a transformer character.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: I want to get it when it is Covid Optimus Prime.

James Cerbie: Have you had it at all?

Lance Goyke: I mean, I’m sure I’ve had it.

James Cerbie: But yeah, you’ve definitely been exposed without a doubt.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: Yes, but I really actually haven’t been sick at all in the last couple of years. So I had something early on, like before anyone really knew what was going on. So I’m going to say that I’ll tell you about Optimus Prime.

Ryan Patrick: I had a roommate in College who this semester he failed out. He actually skipped all his classes and just built a six foot five optimist crime outfit out of boxes. This was before the movie came out, and I had this research. Yes, he would skip all his classes. He built this out of an old refrigerator box. So every night he would go to bed and I would set it up in front of his door. So the first thing he would do when he opened it would be the opposite prime. But it was a pretty good time, except for when he had to move out.

James Cerbie: That’s wonderful.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: I hope he still has it.

James Cerbie: That’s a great usage of time and resources, for sure.

Lance Goyke: I’m sure his parents were very happy.

Ryan Patrick: He’s very successful now. Which is funny.

James Cerbie: Of course he is.

Lance Goyke: Yes, with that level of creativity, I don’t know how you couldn’t be exactly.

James Cerbie: Well, let’s do this. Let’s start off with what we view as maybe the biggest winners from 2021. It could be like anything. First thing that comes to mind is probably the right answer here. So I’ll kick it off. And my biggest winner in this whole fitness strength and conditioning industry in 2021 was the resurgence of training with machines. Maybe that has been more prevalent before 2021, and I just wasn’t paying as much attention. But from my vantage point, it is something that I saw far more often and was a much larger part of our world in terms of training and programming, both for myself as an athlete and then as a coach. So that was my biggest winner in 2021. Seeing machines, I think actually come back front and center to be looked at. I don’t know if educational is the correct word here, but looking at it in the correct usage in terms of what can this tool really do for us and moving away from that period of time where it was just like functional movement bro. Like, why would you get on a machine that’s not working your whole body type thing? So I really enjoyed the evolution of the conversation taking place around machines and where they fit in training, because I think that was my biggest winner from 2021 for sure. Let’s go around. So we’ll go RP next.

Ryan Patrick: Okay. I think for me it’s just kind of looking at the coach landscape, and I think this may apply to some people out there who are just interested in the training stuff. Training side of the equation, too, but independent thinkers, I think it’s kind of Tags on to what you’re saying, James, but there are a lot of people truly entrenched in camps. Social media is very loud for people in those camps, and there’s probably utility and all of the things that are out there, all the different commercial systems, whether it’s prior, if you’re in the speed world, it could be the go to people. There’s probably an element of truth in all of this. And I think the people who can kind of sift through the noise and actually capture the essence of what these camps are trying to say and make some informed decisions for themselves really get a much better leg up on training. I think they have a more holistic view of what’s actually going on, and it seems to solve a lot more problems because every system in and of itself is going to have a scenario where they don’t have the answer specifically.

And so when you can start just weighing all the stuff out and get to the meat and potatoes, trim the fat, whatever you want to say, I think there’s a lot of value in that this could apply to a lot of different landscapes. I’m sure for people who can just think for themselves.

The Decentralization of Knowledge and Decision Making and the Importance of Diving Into the Information Yourself

James Cerbie: I do think that that’s a really good one that I’ve thought a lot about over the last week or two, and this applies obviously far beyond just our industry and the application of training. I think that we are on this wave, this massive wave of decentralization essentially of knowledge and know-how and smart people can go online and get on PubMed or get on Google Scholar. We can do our own research and come to our own conclusions and not have to be totally reliant upon someone in an Ivory tower with letters after their name to say, oh, well, this is the answer. But then you actually dive into it yourself and you realize, well, it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. And that’s probably not the answer, because everyone’s going to have biases when they come at it. So I do agree. I think that general decentralization of both decision making knowledge is really nice and good to see, because it’s going to become less about what letters you have moving forward and more about who’s right and wrong, because that track record is going to be there.

Ryan Patrick: Absolutely. And I think the way you kind of enter that conversation is highly critical, too, because if you are certain that your system has the answer, then there’s going to be a problem with that, because you have to have an open mind. So for anybody who watches Cobra Kai, you gotta mix the styles.

James Cerbie: I like it. But I think, like an example of that concept in the business world. Somebody who has essentially no letters would be Gary Vaynerchuk. But Gary has over the past decade made predictions and continuously been right. And so people are not going to look at it and be like, oh, well, you don’t have an MBA or you don’t have a PhD. You don’t have this. They’re going to look at your track record who’s consistently right essentially in what they’re saying in their predictions. I think that’s going to have a really interesting trickle effect throughout everything that goes on, both newspapers and media and politics. Yeah. I think that’s going to be a really fun one. And I have already broken the one thing we talked about before we started, which is trying to keep this more training centric and not diving into all the other realms. So that’s on me. But, Mr. Wilson, let’s see what you’ve got.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: Well, I’ll go a little less cerebral, and I’ll say that I’m pretty happy to see along with the machines that bodybuilding is back in. Baby, let’s go. Let’s get yoked, let’s forget about moving well and being strong and functional and all of that stuff. Let’s just get so big that you don’t know who’s next to you, who’s behind you, you can’t turn around, you can’t bend over, let’s just be complete refrigerators and just take up as much space as possible, leaving a big carbon footprint. That’s really what it’s all about. But no, I think it’s actually like, this is something over the years that’s been cool for me because I really came up and I think we talked about this before it came up in the functional fitness part of fitness, which was, like, the worst error of all time. I really felt like an idiot for wanting to pursue bodybuilding, and there were a lot of coaches that I really respected. I kind of looked down on that type of training for a while. So it’s cool to see it kind of swinging back a little bit. But like you said, James, in a more intelligent manner.

Of course, I’m being facetious when I say that we all shouldn’t care about doing anything but getting huge. I’m going to do that. But I don’t expect everybody else to. I think there’s a lot of things that we can gain from training from fitness, but it’s cool to see that become okay again, that you’re not a moron if you care about aesthetics, because guess what we all kind of do. It’s always going to be there. And I think it’s nice to be able to admit that and be okay with that. There’s no reason not to feel your feelings. And if you feel like you want to be huge, that’s great. We accept you.

The Obvious Way to Improve Your Metabolic Health

James Cerbie: Yeah, I do agree. I love that it has become more and more okay to just want to focus on muscle. It is okay to just want to train to put on muscle, because there’s obviously going to be a scale here. But at the end of the day, it drives me insane when online see all these people talking about metabolic health, and it’s like, well, you know, a really fast way to improve your overall metabolic health is to just have some more damn muscle mass. Yeah, really good things happen when you have more muscle mass. Obviously, there’ll be a little bit of a Bell curve effect, because, like, the very high end of that distribution is probably not going to be the healthiest. But I do think that with the machines and the hypertrophy has made, like, a really big comeback, and it’s become front and center again, which I really do enjoy seeing, because it’s such an important part of the conversation. I think they got poopooed there for a while. Like, how dare you train? Just want to put on muscle. Like, who are you?

Ryan L’Ecuyer You do bicep curls?

James Cerbie: Yeah.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: What don’t you read? No.

James Cerbie: All right, nice. I like it. L’Ecuyer, what do you got? Biggest winners, 2021.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: I’ve been thinking a lot about what you guys are saying. It’s super interesting. I had a client once. Mr. Wilson here. I had a client once. I told her normally we would recommend about 1 gram of protein per pound of your body weight. And she went, actually, I kind of think that the amount that they recommend we don’t really need. So I usually have about 30 or 35 grams a day. I was like, okay, well, this is going to be a big undertaking. I’m supposed to talk about winners, not losers. So the biggest winner to me. And this is hard because I don’t really follow what other people are doing. I ain’t got time for that. I just do what my clients are doing and what I’m doing. And one thing that really helped out this year is doing daily exercise. It’s not usually as little as five minutes, but it’s usually not much more than 20, just enough to sweat, enough to move around, just enough to get, like, an epinephrine response and wake up. And even more importantly, I found a lot of my more fragile general population clients.

They’re not pro athletes or whatever, so they don’t always respond well to training. But if they do cardio on their off days, they recover a lot faster and they’re actually ready for the next workout. And it’s just because your body’s moving around and moving all the I mean, this is how I explain it. Maybe you guys got a better explanation, James, or whatever. It might be like a brain signal thing. But to me, the way I explain it, you’re just moving cells around and the stuff that goes into cells and those things just need an excuse to clear out the bad stuff and put in more good stuff.

Why Daily Movement is so Important

James Cerbie: Yeah, I like that. For me. It usually comes back to I think so many tracks back to mitochondria. And I think that if we look at health and longevity, there’s a lot that can be discerned from just thinking of pure supply and demand at the electron transport chain, and we’re not going to go way to that rabbit hole in the chemistry of it all. But simply put right. Like the daily movement is so important because you need to have daily input where there’s going to be a mismatch between supply and demand at that electron transport chain in one way or another, because then that mismatch isn’t there. That’s when complications start to arise. So yeah, that makes total sense to me. Right. I think that 10,000 steps maybe has some warrant and just having that daily movement where I can either take away supply to create a mismatch or I can increase demand. Those are really my only two options there, and I can only remove so much supply. And while I do think calorie restriction and things of that nature have pretty strong support in the literature. That wouldn’t be like my immediate recommendation to just perpetually be calorie restricted.

It’s going to be a balance of using different inputs at different times. But I do think that that daily movement to increase the demand at the electron transfer chain has vast effects throughout the cell because of the pathways and the cascade that’s going to take place when that occurs.

Ryan Patrick: About that all day conditioning, especially for Gen pop, because for them, the barrier is always getting them moving and actually doing things they perceive, especially with all the marketing stuff out there that they have to do this high intensity training with the low intensity training. It’s such a small barrier for them. I just feel like when they do that between their workouts, it really shifts the dopamine scales towards favoring, working out and being more consistent and just finding that high that they get from exercise because it’s not hard to do. But you feel so good after, even if it is 20 or 30 minutes, it really doesn’t take that much.

Lance Goyke:  I had a similar experience with that and with bodybuilding that both of you guys are saying it’s like this has kind of become more okay to do. It’s okay to feel your muscles when you work out instead of just doing the right movement pattern.

The Distinction Between Cognitive Stress and Physical Stress

Ryan L’ECuyer: Man, I think about this a lot with just the and this is probably on the fringes of, quote, unquote science and research. But I think there is a distinction between stress that’s more cognitive in nature and emotional in nature and physical. And I think we’re probably more designed as animals for stress to be triggering mobilization. And I think that there’s definitely it seems, at least from what I’ve seen that there’s some evidence that there are some distinct hormonal differences or just long lasting effects of just being chronically overstressed in a mental or physical way, which is, frankly, the way that most of us are stressed. So I think something to this like there’s a stressor and then there’s a response being more sympathetic in nature, and then there needs to be some type of mobilization of that to use that response for kind of what it’s designed to do. And I think people just get kind of lost in the response part of that and never really get to mobilization and never really complete the stress loop. And I think that’s where this kind of stuff can come. I mean, you can explain it.

Somebody could explain it in a way that sounds very scientific in nature and maybe supported. But I think you just know it when you do it just anecdotally you feel it right. How many people use exercise as a stress relief? It’s a real thing. So I think that’s been something I’ve tried often to no avail to really explain to my clients that if you’re feeling really shitty, like you’re feeling really tired and you don’t want to do anything, but you haven’t been doing anything. It’s not because you’re physically tired, like you need to go move. I’m telling you right. Like, you know that when you do this thing, when you come and do a little bit of exercise, even if it’s just a little bit of aerobic work. You’re going to get that category response. You’re going to get the little endorphin release and you’re going to feel 100 times better. So just fucking move daily.

Bed Rest Studies and the Alarming Results for Changes in our Physiology

James Cerbie: We’re designed to move. Bad things happen when we stop moving, and it happens really fast. Alarmingly fast. You can go look at bed rest studies in this realm, and it is incredible how fast our physiology just falls off a cliff. It is alarming. I think I’ve referenced this study on here before, but the Dallas Dead Rest study was a big one because they essentially took high train cyclists, and they Vo two Max tested them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that fun stuff put them into. It has been so long since I read it. I don’t remember the specifics, but put them into we’ll call it like, six, seven, eight days of bed rest, something like that legit complete bed rest. And then you pretest after, and we’re talking outrageous drop off and physiologic output and performance. Right. And then they did a follow up study on that one. That was actually really interesting because they took the same group and brought them back in, like, 40 years later, something like that and then tested them again. And it was like seven to eight days of bed rest was worse for you than 40 plus years of aging.

Lance Goyke: That’s wild.

James Cerbie: Yeah, it’s incredible. And that’s one of those big things where you just got to move. And so, yeah, biggest winner. I like that one, Lance, that can get a clap here. I think this is new. They added these on the Listen live audience for the show now. Tickets soon, so stay tuned, everybody. We have a bunch of these here. We could also give one of these. Yeah, that’s serious. We’re going to open every episode with that.

Lance Goyke: I hear that every day when I wake up in the morning, every single day.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: Yeah, me, too. That means I heard it 1 minute before I hopped on this call.

Why Low Intensity Cardio has a Huge Impact on Your Training

James Cerbie: And then the one thing I’ll hit here before you go to Biggest Loser, and I feel like I just hammer this home so much. It’s just like beating. Maybe I’m just kind of slamming my head against a brick wall here. But that low intensity cardio is just the lowest hanging fruit. It is so easy to implement, and it always works. And it always has a huge impact. I don’t know anybody who has started to do it and then not had phenomenal outcomes from it.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: There’s no excuse anymore either. Watch a fucking show. Like, put it on an ipad. Watch a show that doesn’t matter. You don’t need to be hyper focused while you’re doing it.

James Cerbie: It’s so easy now. All you need is a watch in a chest strap and just go do something and just keep your heart rate between 110 and 130. And you know what? Most of you listening are going to get between 110 and 130 when you’re just walking fast anyways. So it’s like, just do it. Okay. Do it. Okay. Let’s transition here. Let’s go. Biggest losers of 2021 and RP, why don’t you kick us off? And then I’ll close out this one.

Ryan Patrick: Before. So I think the biggest losers, I guess it kind of looks at who I feel drawn to from just a cognitive perspective. But there are people who are kind of in the middle zone, who are your independent thinkers. And then there seems to be, like, two ways they can approach this one. If they’re really abrasive and aggressive about all the people on the extremes, or they educate and provide value and kind of have an open mind with all this stuff. And I know that’s not specifically training related, but if we want to bring it into that realm, we’ve already mentioned there are a number of useful tools available, and it’s knowing how to use all of that and not being putting the hand up to the bodybuilders. Or maybe now the functional people. These things have a place in a training program, and you don’t have to be disrespectful to the kettlebell guy or the functional training guy or the bodybuilding guy. There’s important contributions that all of these can make to an entire program. And so I think to lose is just to really be just kind of an asshole to everybody else. So I know it’s not like a big epiphany or anything, but I just see this.

So it’s kind of like people open their mind to these new philosophies and training, and then somebody kind of steps out and all of a sudden they’re drawing these lines in the sand. They’re just creating conflict for the sake of social media, like clicks follows, because that’s the stuff that really gets attention. But over the long haul, I’m just impressed by the people out there who do have that mature thought process about this and are able to gain following, are able to actually help other people with the knowledge that they have. So I don’t know, just the assholes they’re always going to finish last. I think in the long run.

Why Those Who Have the Best Fitness Outcomes are Those Who Give Their All to the Experience

James Cerbie: Yeah. I like that. I think I will carry that over to training a little bit just from the past year. I think that we’re very fortunate that the people that come on board to work with us are generally the very independent thinking, growth, mindset oriented folks, because a lot of them come on board, and they just essentially are willing to hand the reins over to us and focus on execution. And they want to learn along the way. But they’re not so rooted in the things they came from that they’re sitting there like questioning every single decision that we make with them in training. So I think that another important one is that the athletes that have the best outcomes are the ones that essentially totally give over to the experience. Right. And I think that ties in very tightly with what you were just talking about.

Ryan Patrick: Yeah. There’s time and a place for all of this. I do most of the training programs that are kind of sport related, the guys who want it more on that power and speed spectrum. But I’m going to pull stuff from Mr. Wilson if they need some hypertrophy based training or if that becomes their priority, I’m okay. Like sending them that way. It’s not like I care. Some mid 20’s don’t want to power train or work on speed for a little bit. I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense to me. To live, like, in a place like that where you can’t use all these tools, like, they’re great.

James Cerbie: I like it. Okay, Mr. Wilson?

Ryan L’Ecuyer: Yeah. That’s the one that I really like. The only one that I really had written down here is just that same concept. So I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but I think Ryan really nailed it with all of that. It’s just unfortunate I’ve caught myself at that previous time in my life, and I will catch myself again without a doubt. And it’s just like, you just end up losing when you go down that road. It just ends up being so limiting. And it eliminates a lot of ideas and a lot of people out of your life many times. And we have to have these opposing views to get better. We need to be challenged. So I think if you’re anyone who’s not seeking to find the flaws in their system, I think that’s the person who loses, and I think that it’s kind of the same concept here. Let’s be open to everything. Everything has some amount of utility. It wouldn’t be here otherwise, if somebody has gotten better doing the complete opposite of what you do. So let’s figure out what the commonalities are in that. And how do we learn from that and just provide a better service for the people that we work for?

That’s really what it’s supposed to be about, not about us being right or having the right system. It’s about doing a good job. So kind of the same thing with more words, which is kind of my specialty.

James Cerbie: Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s just all about the outcome. Like, are you getting the outcome for your person that they desire? If so awesome, because so much of what I despise about this internet debauchery, dumb arguments. Most people are arguing over things that neither side can actually say is right or wrong. Yeah, it’s so dumb. I’m like, okay, I appreciate both of your opinions, but you guys are both talking like you’re 100% correct, and neither of you have the capacity to 100% say that I’m right or you’re wrong. And so we’re literally just arguing for the sake of arguing and calling people out on Instagram to try to just get more attention and follow. And I just don’t see the value, the utility in that. I don’t care if anybody knows who I am. If our athletes and our clients keep crushing it, keep getting awesome results and they’re having a great time. It makes no difference to me if anybody knows who the fuck I am, I don’t care. I prefer if nobody knows who I am to be completely honest, Lance, what have we got? Biggest Loser 2021.

Being Open to Other Training Methodologies

Lance Goyke: Well, I’m weary to say anything because I don’t want to take away from that point that you guys are making, because I totally agree with it. You get people I don’t know, presenting ideas backed into a corner. Got to argue out of it. It’s just super toxic. What I will do to play this game and say something else is that it’s kind of in the same vein as let’s be open to these other methodologies. Periodization. I’m framing it positively, but periodization works. So if you want something and you just do the same thing over and over again, you’re probably not going to get that thing, even if the internet suggests that’s how the program should be written. Like, you got to get away from it sometime. For me, I want muscle mass, but I can’t lift heavy all the time. Sometimes I gotta do it with some lighter weights because my body just doesn’t stay together or cardio I’ve heard is good for you. So we should try that sometime and then maybe it’ll support your ability to maintain technique when you’re tired.

James Cerbie: Got it. So we have the biggest loser as just continuing to do the same thing over and over again. Isn’t that the definition of insanity is insane you’re looking for?

Ryan Patrick: Yeah.

James Cerbie: Okay.

Lance Goyke: Dedication. I thought.

James Cerbie: Those two probably go very hand in hand more than we want to attend.

Ryan Patrick: Line I got away from bodybuilding training.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: I once stayed at a hotel that was about 35 minutes away from a gym. It wasn’t my choice from a training perspective. None. Never. I think I did, like, some Turkish get ups back in 2019. I mean, I had, like, a weight lifting day for a little while, like on Saturdays where I’d like, go and do some snatches and cleans because I was like, this is definitely going to make my quads bigger, so it still has all intense. It was still always for bodybuilding. No, I was what I was called. I was a closet curler for a while. Like in the early phases of my, I felt like I had to wait until the gym closed down to hit my bicep curls in case Mike Boyle found out, but I’ve always been in it. I’ve been competing consistently since I was 17 in bodybuilding, so that hasn’t ended. So I never really like to pull in the other stuff. Like I was very open to the other ideas, and I needed them. Frankly, I don’t think I would be. I mean, I’m very confident that I wouldn’t be training the way that I am. Now, if I hadn’t learned all these other methodologies, I went pretty deep into some certain things, like PRI, like, I started really changing the way that I was moving and particularly with the big lifts and probably screwed myself in a lot of ways for a little while there.

But I really did need to have that shift. I think kind of like Lance was talking about needing that. You got to purify this stuff a little bit or you’re just going to end up down a bad hole. But it was always that I still had a base of bodybuilding for sure. I’m just a complete meat headed heart. And since ten years old, I can’t let it go completely.

Lance Goyke: I was going to use you as an example while I was giving my pitch, and then I was like, this example is probably going to backfire. I should probably backpedal.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: No, I’m okay with it.

James Cerbie: But the thing is, you do cycle, though, because you compete in powerlifting and bodybuilding. So there is a natural rhythm and flow to your training, because I think in any high level bodybuilder, there is as well. You have to appreciate the fact that there’s a lot of diminishing returns. A particular type of stress input is only going to get me so much change before I start getting the flat part of the curve. And then we have to change the input because you handle all of our hypertrophy people here at Rebel, we can talk about the different inputs and the different phases we can take people through. We have metabolic stress. We have mechanical tension on the spectrum, and there are ways to move in and out of the spectrum, to continually make progress forward without just banging your head against the wall, doing the same damn thing over and over again and then falling into the trap, which I hate of like, oh, well, it’s just an effort problem. You just need to work harder. And it’s like you need some minimal level of hard work and effort to achieve anything. But once that’s there, it’s not an effort problem, like working harder is not going to just make it better for you. It’s a systems problem. It’s a process problem. Okay, good.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: I like it.

The Difference Between Good, Useful Data and Just Noise

James Cerbie: That was probably my favorite moment of the podcast of all time. My biggest loser in the fitness strength conditioning realm is, I don’t know if other people would categorize these things as losers, but I’m going to categorize them as losers, but I think others should just erroneously collect data for the sake of collecting data. And I can’t stand it. The Whoop band, the aura ring, all of these things that are just flooding people with data that is honestly almost worthless. It’s just that it doesn’t really bring anything to the table. It’s a huge distraction. It’s just like, people just view it like, oh, it’s data. So it must be good. Not true. There’s a difference between good, useful data and just noise. And I’m so tired of seeing so many people get lost in this realm of because that seems to be the thing that’s, like, the big movement right now everybody’s trying to come up with wearable sport tech that gives us all this awesome people that not watch this air quotes, awesome training, physiology data to make better decisions about your training. And I’m just like, it’s all bullshit. None of it is meaningful.

Why Your Intuition and Judgement for How You Feel is More Meaningful Than the Piece of Technology You’re Wearing

The only thing is, I was talking to Doctor Mikey about this the other day and he said, well, the HRV off the Ore is worthless. Don’t even look at it. And I’m like, yes, kind of figured that because I think the sleep it collects is also 100% worthless. And then the loop band only really tracks off heart rate. So it gives you a strain score that’s totally made up and has nothing to do with what you may have done in a weight room lifting weights. And now their big thing is, oh, well, we added this near’s device onto a Woop band that’s going to be able to look at your blood two sat on your fucking wrist. Who cares? I’m sorry. It drives me insane. I can’t stand it because I think it’s moving everybody into this realm of immense complexity with just tons of numbers and data that you don’t know what to do with. And so I want to see us start getting rid of all of that and only collect data if you’re actually going to use that data to make meaningful decisions with it. Data just for the sake of data is a really fast way to just end up in murky waters where you’re going to be confused.

You’re going to overthink things and you’re not going to make good decisions. And that was my biggest loser of if you guys can’t tell, my biggest loser of 2021 is the erroneous collection of data that doesn’t do anything to actually meaningfully impact the decisions that we make on a day to day basis, because there are very few things that I think actually make it onto that list very much as people don’t want to hear it.

Lance Goyke: You’re pretty heated about that one, eh?

James Cerbie: Yeah. It drives me crazy. I hate it.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: What was the affiliate code for omega waves that rebel has again? Rebel hearts and omega waves?

James Cerbie: I haven’t spent as much time with the Omega Wave, but the people that have really used Omega Wave for a very long time seem to be able to actually make pretty good, meaningful day to day decisions. Like Who’s the Lance? Who’s? The soccer strength and conditioning performance coach up in Seattle. He was one of the first guys that really got into it trying to remember. You’re not talking about the coach, is it Tenny? Dave, Dave, Tenny. Is that right? Yeah, I think that’s scratching a brain cell. But the thing is, you talk to people that have used the Omega wave. They’ll even tell you that we collected data for two, three years. Yeah, it seems almost like a retrospective before we are confident enough to start making decisions on those things. But the Megawave is pretty comprehensive. That pulls a lot of different data.

Ryan Patrick: Consumer based version as I hold my whoop and up. I’ll touch on that in a second. What is the consumer actually using versus what is the elite version of that technology able to assess? Now, I use the Woof band just mainly to track like the Journal of Habits of Things that I do just to see if there’s any trends. But I mean, it gives me a higher string score when I clean than when I do a 30-30 circuit in the gym. Which is totally ridiculous.

James Cerbie: You said clean, like, clean clean around the house, in the gym. Okay. I didn’t know if you meant like, Mr. Biogee. Yeah. Mr. Miyagi is a big strain score, bro.

Lance Goyke: So you’re saying that we need to do more cleaning?

Ryan Patrick: Okay. Cardio was away compared to a Fitbit. I mean, that technology is not the same. It’s not even close.

James Cerbie: No. And the price point clearly reflects that.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: The way that it’s presented is pretty poor, too. I take HRV in the morning as well and rest in a hurry in the morning. And it’s really just like, I’m going to use that to look back over time again just to see if there’s any trends. And it doesn’t, like, make any. I mean, at this point, it’s just, like, habitual. I just do it as part of my morning meditation deal. There’s no reason not to do it, but I’m not making decisions on that day to day. I think that’s where it really bothers me. It’s just like, you show up, you’re red, and that means you can’t work out. Actually, you probably really fucking do need to work out. Like we were talking about earlier with that stress loop thing. That’s where misinformation around it is kind of a bummer.

James Cerbie: This is my other huge bugaboo in this realm. Is that the trend that tends to come from this when people are collecting tons of meaningless data that you can’t do anything with, it tends to lead them to a fragility mindset when they feel like they can’t train and work hard, because whatever score today isn’t very good. And I’m like, well, to be Frank, that score is about as meaningful as the poop I took this morning in terms of me making a decision on how do you just feel? Like, just tell me your intuition and judgment just based on how you feel is more meaningful by 1000 fold than what this very highly marketed piece of technology is telling you, right. Say, hey, I feel okay today. Awesome. Let’s just start moving. Let’s see how you feel after five to ten minutes of just moving and warming up.

Ryan Patrick: You got to wonder, too, because I know whoop sponsors PGA. I feel like maybe they gave NFL teams up to what they do to a guy before kickoff who’s, like, I’m not there today. Does that affect him and his performance when it has no relevance? Now I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. If I see a rat, I’m like, we’ll fucking see about that.

Lance Goyke: I see you and I raise you.

Ryan Patrick: Yeah.

James Cerbie: It’s like in the movie 300 where they have those special soldiers that are what they were called, like, the Unkillable or whatever? We’ll put that to the test all right. Nice guys. I like that. That was a good list. So last bucket, let’s sit here if you can do it as either top lessons learned or just top lessons learned. Your biggest takeaway from 2021. It can be within your own training. It could be things that you learn from programming and managing your clients, your kind of biggest takeaway from 20 and 21 as a whole that you’re going to be moving forward with. And let’s start with Lance and then go the other direction.

Lance Goyke:  Sure, I’m going to pick the topic of Cardio, and I have two lessons based on cardio. So one, what is cardio? I believe now that walking is not cardio, that does not count. And maybe for Mr. Wilson, it is when you’re lugging around all that weight like that’s hard. It’s hard to carry a refrigerator around the block. But for the most part, even if you’re walking fast, it’s probably not cardio. If it’s uphill, I’ll give it to you if I want to do Cardio on the treadmill. One, I don’t run because I hate running, but two, I will do a walk. I’ll crank the incline up as high as possible, and I’ll go to, like, two and a half, 3 miles an hour for my slow, short legs. And that seems to be pretty good. I get my heart rate up to those zones that James is talking about over 110 or whatever, and I can maintain it and maybe not indefinitely, but I can maintain it. So what is cardio not walking? Make sure you do walking and make sure you do cardio walking is your movement goal. Cardio is your heart goal.

James Cerbie: We’ll say that like that. And then a very good distinction.

Lance Goyke: My next thing that I really kind of discovered this year, though I’ve been trying not to discover it, is that cardio is probably more effective than caffeine. So like, if you’re just pumping more coffee and you probably need a break, you probably need a 20 minutes break and you probably need to sweat during that break.

James Cerbie: I love it. That’s fantastic. Do you have a go-to? Would it be as simple as just if you have things at home just like hop on a bike for ten minutes and cruise.

Lance Goyke:  Oh, my God. That would be great. We have a gym that’s like a building away. So I just walked to it in our apartment complex, though. Apparently that’s too far for us, because Allison just bought an exercise bike that’s going to go in the kitchen. So we’re going to be doing it right. There is no delay. Usually I hop on the bike. I used to go back and forth between uphill treadmill walking and the bike, but I just hop on a normal spin bike. It hurts my butt, and that tells me when to stop and I just go and I turn on. One of you were talking about this earlier, but I just turn on YouTube, and I watch YouTube or I play a game on my phone while I’m doing it, and my heart rate stays elevated. I’m still doing my exercise, but it can become kind of my break time. And now I don’t have to use mental break time and exercise time as separate entities.

James Cerbie: Good.

Ryan Patrick: Tug at your heartstrings a little bit. But back in my body building days in College, it was a real source of stress to walk across campus with a backpack because I thought I was going to destroy my gains.

Ryan L’Ecuyer:: Oh, yeah, I have 100% in there with tears.

Ryan Patrick: I can’t take one more step.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: This is it. I lost it all.

James Cerbie: I’m actually curious to know, Ryan, if you’ve ever intentionally used, you know, like at the grocery store, they have the carts you can get in to drive around in to fill up your have you ever intentionally gotten one of those?

Ryan L’Ecuyer: No. The problem is, I can never figure out how to start them, but if I could, I probably would.

James Cerbie: Excellent. All right, Mr. Wilson, top lesson learned. Biggest takeaway from 2021.

Ryan L’Ecuyer: All right, let’s see a couple of quick ones. Google is really cool. They have a lot of cool features. I like Google Forms. I’ve been using those more. There’s, just, like, a lot of free stuff like that just makes your life so much easier. So I have a couple of people that I work with shout out to Bianca and Bart that have shown me how inefficient I am with a lot of the stuff that I’m doing. They have just really cool systems in there that you can use. So I’ll say that really quickly. The other thing that’s been really cool is I don’t know if this is trendy right now. I hope I’m not being trendy, but I don’t really pay attention to what’s going on in the world, but I’m taking Mike T’s metabolic or physiological flexibility course, even though I can’t pronounce it, it is really good. And he’s got a lot of stuff in there on, just like, different breathing techniques and stuff. And I’ve been messing around with that quite a bit. Doing more like a nasal breathing type of cardio, which, of course, I found a way to meet head low intensity cardio.

I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to go nasal breathing cardio as hard as I possibly can and see what effect that has. What I found is that, actually, man, it’s maintained my aerobic fitness. I think at least my aerobic output is way higher with so much less than I thought that it would. So what I’ll typically do is just like an anecdote. I was warming up eight months ago when I had an Echo bike at home. I was doing every day before my lower body training days or just before, like, a squat or something like that. I would do just 1 mile on the Echo bike as fast as I can go with nasal breathing. It’s terrible. I think the fastest I ever got was, like, 158, and then I lost access to my Echo bike, which won’t get into. And I didn’t have one for, like, seven or eight months. And the only thing that I was really doing for Cardio was basically like skateboarding. And if Lance wants to count my walking, we’ll count the walking. But when I started doing that period of time is just doing some breath holds with my morning sit and just working up to these long exchanges with as long of holds as possible.

And I’ve gotten up to, like, a 72nd hold after the exhalation, and I retested. I got access to an Echo bike again, and I retested it and actually hit, like, 156 for a mile with nasal breathing the first time back into it. And I don’t know if that’s the cause of it, but I think that the idea that I’m trying to get across here is like there are these cross effects of different types of stressors, and I think not being able to breathe is pretty stressful. But if you can teach yourself how to be okay with that, you can just develop this higher threshold for output and things that are very similar. So cutting off breathing completely is pretty close to how you feel when you’re doing a really hard cardiovascular effort or just any type of performance that’s going to be like a high sympathetic tone. So yeah, I don’t know. I think that’s pretty cool. That’s a big lesson for me this year is utilizing some of these, I don’t know, like CO2 tolerance type of methods or whatever you want to call it and just seeing the carry over into different things.

James Cerbie: Nice. Yeah, I like it. It makes a lot of sense from a CO2 tolerance in the brain, especially RP. What do you got?

Knowing You Can Do Anything but Not Everything in Your Training

Ryan Patrick: Biggest lesson learned. This is one of those lessons that I know, but I think I’m really bad at doing so. I don’t know if I really know it from the standpoint of being able to execute it, but you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. I think from a training perspective, this should be pretty obvious. I’m a terrible coach for myself because I try to put too many things into a program. There’s just too many methods in a lot of cross chatter, and it ends up being this overly ambitious program with unreasonable volume. So, you know, going back to some of the conversations it’s about, periodizing, the training, making sure that consolidating the stressors, and that I’m very specific about what adaptations I want to drive the most and making sure that the allocation of volume matches what I say my priorities are and then allowing those to change over time. I think from just a day to day life standpoint, I’ve felt like I was busy since I’ve been in College, but the things that consume my time and attention now have more gravity to them than they did when I was 20 years old.

And so it’s just learning to delegate, learning to prioritize my time very intensely and making sure that I do those things that I need to do, because if I try to do it all, it just goes down in flames. So I think it’s a very simple lesson to understand. I think it’s an extremely difficult one to apply, and it’s why in many domains of my life I will get a coach to help with that objective viewpoint because I think I can be my own worst enemy when it comes to a lot of this stuff. But as far as training, I just think it’s understanding. We’ve talked about the utility of several things today, and if you try to do all of that, it’s almost impossible. There’s just not enough time in a week, so that’s my takeaway..

Coming to the Realization That Sprinting and Straight Bar Deadlifts Do Not Play Well Together

James Cerbie: I like it. I had two training takeaways for the year. One is far more actual, just nuts and bolts training, which is coming to the realization that sprinting and straight bar deadlifts do not really play well together. That was a tough pill for me to swallow, because in 2020 I really wanted to get back to sprinting. It’s something that I’d let fall off, and I just realized that at a very hard time maintaining we’ll just call it hamstring health with sprinting and the training was well organized, right? I wasn’t being a dumbass. It was just I found that it got to be really difficult having sprinting and then straight bar deadlifts and sprinting and trap bar deadlifts worked far, far better in unison so that I could still have something that I could actually push load and velocity with on a hinge that it just mesh and match better with sprinting. If I kept the straight bar Dead’s end, I just kept running into too many little tweaks and upsetting things going on in the Hamstring realm. So that was a lesson learned for me, and something that got carried over into programming stuff with clients is just appreciating the incredibly high demand on high demands on Hamstrings and sprinting brings to the table and realizing that straight bar deadlifts probably do not really fit too well with sprinting in the same program, that’s an end of one conclusion.

So take that for what it’s worth people. And the biggest lesson learned, number two is this is really similar. What RP was getting after is just I was reminded over and over again throughout the year how important just consistency is and simplicity. And I feel like everybody is trying to make things so much more complex than they need to be. They’re trying to have 17 coals and things in the fire. They’re doing all these different things and modalities and without fail in training in business and anything I touched in 2021, the simpler I made it, and the more consistent I was with it. The better my outcomes were. Period. You don’t need complexity. You need a simple yet elegant plan that you can consistently execute at a very high level and that’s the name of the game is that you need that consistency. Consistency is King. So simple, elegant that you can consistently execute at a high level. That was a big takeaway for me in pretty much every big bucket in life. When things started to get too complex, I started to do too many things. It was no longer simple and consistency and execution fell off. Then my outcomes deteriorated. Those are my big ones from 2021. Nice fellas. Excellent. Any closing thoughts here for the people at home?

Lance Goyke: I feel like we’ve done 53 minutes of closing thoughts because everything’s been kind of this pithy. This is my lesson. Biggest winners, biggest losers. Those are just lessons.

James Cerbie: Let’s be real. We’ll end on that. We’ll end with the commentary that you’ve listened to. 54 minutes of lessons learned and I hope that you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. This was good. I love these types of conversations anyways. Happy 2022 Family hope that you all had a beautiful holiday and a great new year and we really do appreciate you tuning in with us and listening to the episodes and us just bantering and chatting and talking. We just appreciate you. We hope that your loved one, family friends are all doing well and healthy and look forward to talking to y’all again next week. Alright, talk soon.

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