We’re turning the clock back again this week to an episode I recorded in January of 2020 with my good buddy Dean Guedo, Canadian Sensation. Little did Dean and I know that not even two months after recording this episode, the whole world would be flipped upside down. The big question we centered our conversation around is, how do we merge old school, “dumb and strong” lifting sessions with a more new school emphasis on movement selection and movement quality?
Because frankly, hitting your strength, physique and performance goals should never be worth your while if you are having to sacrifice your health, functionality and well-being to do so. We then discuss the importance of cueing and understanding what you are trying to get out of an exercise. In other words, if you know how to coach and cue exercises well, then you can make training the intervention.
Listen in to learn how you can get really strong, build muscle and become an even better athlete while feeling your best.
What You’ll Learn in this Episode:
- [04:00] Dean’s Background
- [09:30] The never-ending pursuit of training
- [11:15] The transition from ignorant and dumb weight sessions to focused movement quality training and how to keep it fun
- [20:00] The badass psychological factor in sports, and turning off the switch
- [30:30] Specifics on Dean’s journey after powerlifting to fix himself
- [40:00] Taking what you need from others in the industry and remaining yourself
- [47:45] Dean’s programming for clients and interventions for injury prevention
- [01:10:35] Dean’s Resources
James Cerbie: Sweet. We’re live. Take two. All right, we have Dean Guedo on board today. Before he introduces himself. We’ll give a quick backstory. We got about 25 minutes or so into an episode, like a month ago. And then my internet literally pooped itself. Like, it totally died.
Dean Guedo: It was dying. And then you’re like, yeah, I think we had a consensus before. You’re like, if it drops, it’ll only drop for like, 10 seconds, which is stick around. And then I did. And then I realized after five minutes you weren’t coming back. So I wanted to bench press. Yeah.
James Cerbie: Which was a good alternative.
Dean Guedo: Yes. And I remember I was texting you or I was sending you messages like, yeah, I’m just going to bench press. Is it okay? I don’t think you’re coming back. You never did.
James Cerbie: No, it died.
Dean Guedo: So this is take two.
James Cerbie: Take two.
Dean Guedo: I don’t even remember what we talked about.
James Cerbie: Which is great.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: So now we’re far enough away. We’re not going to try to replicate what we were talking about. It’s like a fresh slate.
Dean Guedo: Okay. I could do that. I have to reintroduce myself, don’t I?
James Cerbie: You do have to reintroduce yourself, because nobody has heard that.
Dean Guedo: Okay. I almost feel like you need to ask me the question. So it’s real. Yeah.
James Cerbie: Okay, let’s make it real. So, Dean, could you tell people a little bit about who you are, kind of where you’re from, your background, how you got to doing what it is that you do?
Dean’s Background
Dean Guedo: Okay, I have this whole story, but I’ll try to condense it, but unlike that typical dude who played football, didn’t want to do anything except for playing football. So I ended up getting a degree in football and then to stay playing football in College. I think I was in recreation or something, whatever was easiest to get into, because otherwise I was going to go to work and I didn’t want to work. So going to school and playing football was a much better option, especially on scholarship. And then to continue playing football. I had a few injuries, kind of within my seven years. So I had two injuries, which gave me two extra years to play out. So I need to stay in school to play football. So I became a teacher and then kind of what you do when football’s ruled out? I went to combine, tested well, and didn’t get drafted. My whole life was over. That typical whole story. Luckily, I already kind of knew because I had two pretty serious injuries. So I tore my MCL, so I was out one season, and then I had a tumor on that same knee, which I was out another season, and tore my hip and femur and all that stuff, both Jackson style.
No, I have a really shitty story. I toured in yoga.
James Cerbie: Oh, man. Dude, how pissed was your coach or just you?
Dean Guedo: The story was I just had knee surgery. So I was like, you’re like 21 years old. I’m going to do yoga because that’ll get me ready for football to get me more flexible. And at that point, I didn’t have an MRI on my hip, but I had a pincer and a large femur. And then when I went to pigeon pose, it was just waiting to hit that pincer and rip my label. And then what happened was we were in Bikram yoga. I don’t even know if I can use Bikram now after that Netflix documentary. But it was hot yoga, okay? And yeah, it tore. It just was like, I remember because it was like my second yoga class ever. And the lady was what you say? She’s like, if you’re feeling like it’s too much for you, just go in child’s pose. And I just didn’t know it was super-hot. So I was like, oh, this sucks anyways. And then I was like, I’m fairly sure I tore my hip. It fucking hurt so much. And so I just went in child pose for 40 minutes. I had no idea what was going on.
And then, yeah, like, I tore my hip. So I actually played through that, to be honest. That was my last season. So I entered my last season of football after this hip surgery. So I had knee surgery, was out of here, was rehabbing to get back to play, and I tore my hip. And then I played through that. And so I couldn’t lift my knee past 90 the whole season. And then I tore my tricep the first game. So it was just like a horrible end to my whole career, which leads directly into why I’m into this stuff so fast forward. I became a teacher, realized I didn’t want to be a teacher, quit, became a trainer, and I kind of am accidentally an online trainer. I have my own studio, and I do nutrition online for a company called Stronger You. But my interest in all this stuff started because I was fucking broken piece of shit. After football, I tore both my hamstrings, I tore my labor room on my shoulder, I tore my tricep, I tore my chest. I’ve had knee surgery, hip surgery, and concussions. I was literally so messed up afterwards. So any meathead would do.
I decided I’d get hip surgery after football. And then I went right into powerlifting.
James Cerbie: Natural transition, like, two months post.
The Never-Ending Pursuit of Training
Dean Guedo: Not major hip surgery, but they took my labor amount, remodeled my femur and all that stuff. And like, yeah, I went right into not even power, like, geared powerlifting. Straight west side. Yes, straight west side. Like, multiply. Like, the guys I rolled with, I was a bouncer were just all bearded, tattooed dudes that like to lift the west side. So I basically became a powerlifter. And through that, just injuries after injuries. And how do I fix myself was kind of what led me down the rabbit hole of sports performance. We can say BRI DNS, but everything that I could find to fix myself was essentially why I became a coach, because I just kind of killed two birds with 1 St. I started learning all this stuff to help me and help my research. And then that ended up sparking a career in this industry.
James Cerbie: That’s good. I have a very similar origin story, if we want to call it that, because I started running into injury issues in College, playing baseball, just stress fractures in my back, pulled quads, all the fun stuff that you just get used to seeing. And I got tired of people telling me that it was just par for the course of being an athlete. I was like, okay, to a certain point, yes. If you’re going to push the boundaries and try to be a freak athlete, then your injury risk will be a little bit higher. Totally understandable. But the rate at which it was taking place was ridiculous. And so when I got out of College, that was the first thing I did. I tried to figure out, how do I fix myself so that I can keep training and be this really freaky all-around athlete, and then it just naturally segues into doing it for other people.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. Because it’s just like, once you kind of and you’re probably very similar. But with football, I always liked training more than I liked football. I was good at football, but I couldn’t wait for the off season because we had this sweet crew. We worked at this speed, strength place. It was, like, all DeFranco to that point. DeFranco, West Side model, switched chains and bands that we thought were so badass, but we kept getting broken, obviously. But when you learn to love lifting that much, it becomes just as much of an opportunity to like, how strong can I get? How fast can I get? It’s the same as, like, how can I get good at football? And when you’re done that, there’s no other progression. If you really love it, you need to keep going, because you can’t just stop there. Because once you kind of get a taste of that environment, which, by the sounds of it’s, is very similar, it’s just like, what do you do after? Will you just keep lifting and getting strong? Like, there’s no end to this. And once you realize that there’s so much more to learn.
James Cerbie: Yeah. Not lifting was never on the table. No, never. Because I had a very similar, probably freshman year of College, summer leading into my freshman year of College, I really fell in love with the weight room. And then that love just grew throughout College.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: And College ended, and I was pumped to go left, but I was a train wreck.
Dean Guedo: Well, that just did. So I didn’t even realize that’s how messed up I am. I don’t know how you’re pretty smart. I thought I was super smart, but I was a big meathead, so I didn’t even know how fucked up I was till I started pushing powerlifting and trying to squeeze every ounce of strength. And I’m like, Everything hurts all the time. The more I learned, the more I realized stuff hurt, and the more I realized things shouldn’t look the way they looked when I was doing them. But I almost wish I could go back to that point in time when I was in College, and I was just, like, smashing weights, and I was probably doing it horrible, but I didn’t feel bad, if that makes sense.
James Cerbie: Sometimes just being ignorant and dumb is the best medicine.
Dean Guedo: Like, there’s some things I did back then I don’t think I could do now just because it’s like my mental capacity to understand I shouldn’t be doing those things. It just blocks me from doing them. We used to do stupid box jumps with weights on, like four foot boxes for reps, and I wouldn’t even try that now. And we were jumping off of it instead of stepping just like, stupid shit. I don’t know. It’s just interesting because I wish I could go back to that time because it was so awesome and so new. But you almost have to not. That’s where I’m saying the progression is always there, but to find the new, better thing at this point in time is like, it’s such a unicorn because it’s just more work and the stronger you get, the more weight you have to lift. And so there’s no fun new frontier that’s just, like all encompassing. It’s the same shit, which is good. You realize the gains come way slower the longer you’re in the game. That sucks.
James Cerbie: Yeah, it’s just a never ending game. Once something becomes easier than you progress and then it gets shitty again, but in a good way.
Dean Guedo: It’s like video games. Like if you played Skyrim or any game where you min Max certain stats, it’s just like, it’s super fun at the beginning, but then it’s just like at the end, everything is just you’re just grinding away for one extra skill, and it’s just. I don’t know. I don’t know where it’s going with this, but I understand that that’s kind of where that kind of pursuit of I don’t want to call mastery, but just pursuit of the gym kind of does lead into that training career because you have all these skills and you love doing it anyway. Like, for me, when I was a teacher, I was just thinking about lifting and reading about lifting and learning about powerlifting and my competitions and looking at Instagram who’s my next competitor. It made no sense to be in that career because I couldn’t make money at learning about weights, you know what I mean?
James Cerbie: In College. So the first person I kind of got into was Louise Evans at West Side. I’m not sure how I got there, actually.
Dean Guedo: This is where we talk about this.
James Cerbie: We kind of got into this last time, so we found our way back. Yes, I was an economics and political science guy in College, but I can remember ordering super training, managing the training of weightlifters, and all these other old Russian manuals because guys like Louis Simmons and Dave Tate were all saying, yeah, you got to read this. This is the foundation. I was just sitting there reading that in College, yeah, exactly. I was that guy, but it was all because I wanted to try to have a feel for how we blend those two worlds that we were just talking about? Because I always want to go mash with my buddies and just jam on music, crank it up to the point where I may blow the windows out and we just have a great time. But I don’t walk out feet boldly to shit and pay for the rest of the week. How do I marry those two worlds?
The Transition From Ignorant and Dumb Weight Sessions to Focused Movement Quality Training and How to Keep it Fun
Dean Guedo: Well, it’s funny because you can, but that’s what I mean. If you think about that environment of even looking at the west side because the same thing like Joey Francois had his WestSide for Skinny bastard. Anyway, it’s like all models after. It does the same shit. But at that point there wasn’t that understanding of better movement. Not that it wasn’t a thing, but it wasn’t cool or popular then. So, I mean, that’s something that you’re doing now. Back then there was none of that. But were people good at sports because they just liked lifting and they pushed in the gym and then they became better athletes or would have good training made them. That’s what I mean. I don’t know if it makes a difference in the end.
James Cerbie: It would have helped me.
Dean Guedo: It would have helped you.
James Cerbie: I played a rotational sport.
Dean Guedo: That’s true.
James Cerbie: And I couldn’t rotate.
Dean Guedo: That’s true.
James Cerbie: I was really good in straight lines, in vertical jumps and even agility and stuff. But when you’re supposed to swing and throw and you can’t rotate because of the way your spine is because the set joints bang into each other, it makes it really difficult.
Dean Guedo: But the thing is, the reason why that sucks is because that type of training isn’t going to fulfill what you just talked about. Boys, the gym bang.
James Cerbie: And you can have both. You can do both heavy things. It’s just the exercise selection and how you go about it and appreciating sagittal frontal transverse stuff. When I was at Cressy, there was a really good environment. The energy is directed in different directions. We don’t have guys lining up for a low bar back spot Max. But you see, dudes, that will reverse launch.
Dean Guedo: That’s true.
James Cerbie: 405 on the SSB bar for two per side, which is insane, which is so strong. Right track bar deadlifts. And then you obviously have your other things blended in. You had that element of this is where we go, like gas pedal go, let’s get jacked up and get after it. And then we got to blend in these other pieces. They’re going to keep the car running. Well, yeah.
Dean Guedo: Which is just like, I guess if I were to go back, I would have totally done differently. Like you said. I think we can. Michelle Bowen. She’s kind of built that in her old school. I know she doesn’t do that now, but I watched her training videos with the girls hockey, and they were banging around weights and running. It seemed like it would be pretty sweet. And I was like, I guess you’re right. You can marry them. But it’s still, like, in my head. Maybe it’s just because I’m football, but everyone would have ripped off shirts. Like, they cut their own sleeves really low, so they have that low trap cut. They all take pre back out. We would, like, lift really stupid, but I wonder if we would have been weaker. But maybe lifting, like idiots, made us so confident that they were good at the sport. But in football, it’s different because you can get away with a lot if you’re crazy, you know what I mean? Your crazy doctor can really up the end. And I know that’s not thought of always, but there’s some dudes that don’t live, that are fucking crazy at linebacker, that don’t do shit, and they fuck people up because they’re just super confident and they just don’t stop when normal people would stop on contact.
So that extra half a second of crazy because you’re fucking jacked might end up being a defining factor. I know that’s not always the case, but I just always wonder.
James Cerbie: It’s like if there are certain things that you do that just make you feel like a total baddest.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. Lifting arms for names.
James Cerbie: Sure. There was a safety in the NFL.
Dean Guedo: I think it was. It’s Landry.
James Cerbie: There’s a picture floating around, and he looks like the Hulk.
Dean Guedo: Yeah, he’s jacked, but he’s jacked and crazy like everyone says. Because if you look at his highlights, he’s that dude that doesn’t stop when people make contact. And, like, that does make a difference when you’re running through and the queue is, like, always running through the person, but that never happens. Most people are smart enough. You’re going to hold up a bit. He just never held up. And I think he basically injured himself out of the League by being crazy. That’s when you can leave with your head, basically.
The Badass Psychological Factor in Sports, and Turning Off the Switch
James Cerbie: But I think the badass point is really important, because if you have an athlete or a client and you can give them something, it may not be perfect, but it gives them that sensation and they walk out. Feeling invincible is not the right word. But I think people know what I’m going for here. Yeah, you want to get that for your athletes because you don’t want your athletes walking onto the field in this soft, placid mindset. I want you to feel like a complete Savage who’s going to run through a brick wall.
Dean Guedo: Well, that’s what I mean. That night leads the discussion. Even if you’re looking at Saturday frontal and rotation, all that stuff in terms of what you’re doing in the program, what’s good enough? You know what I mean? There’s something that’s perfectly you think you’re going to build this perfect program for this athlete, but maybe sometimes good enough is better because you can then squeeze out I’m using my hands, but squeeze out that extra performance just from essentially the environment and mental capacity to think the badass factor. It matters, I would say, and maybe no one will agree with this, but you can have the same athlete, same position. If the one dude did more arms, his arms are way bigger and he bench pressed more than them, I bet he would do better. You can even take all the rotational stuff because he knows that he’s stronger than that dude. And that makes a big difference when you’re in a contact sport, but even in baseball, man, those guys are jacked on steroids. Like when Mark is good for them, but there has to be some reason he’s going to walk up to the plate thinking he’s better than them.
That makes a big difference. Like, fuck you, motherfucker. Like, that crazy factor is huge.
James Cerbie: It’s big. It’s so important. So let’s transition away from craziness for a second. It matters, actually, before we move. So when I had Andrew Triana on Triano, sorry, we had a conversation about this, about this kind of dichotomy of extremes and being able to flip that switch because if I’m going to deadlift, I want to be full-fledged rage mode. But then my other 23 hours of the day, I would like to be like a Panda bear and just chilling, totally relaxed. And having control over that gas pedal is so important that’s something that doesn’t even get talked about a lot.
Dean Guedo: Like it kind of does within our crowds. A lot of people listen to this, and even part of the platform like that’s a huge part of most of their spiels. But even if we look back to some of the things that we’re talking about with sports performance in College and being a badass, that stuff wasn’t cool. And now if you can make that stuff cool, that might be the defining factor. Because even if you look at any of the fastest track dudes, a lot of them are exactly that. They’re lazy as fuck. They’re almost intuitively or unconsciously trying to do nothing except for the times they have to race. And I don’t even know if they know they’re doing it. It’s just like, you know what I mean? That’s a task specific thing, but it’s kind of cool if you have that ability and you understand the implications of it, which doesn’t get talked about a lot outside of our sphere of people.
James Cerbie: Yeah, because if you can’t turn it off and have those two extremes, then we start getting into the realm of you don’t recover well. No, you don’t digest your food well, you don’t sleep well, et cetera, et cetera. The population that does this very well are the Samoans, the Polynesian culture. I have never seen people who can live on those two extremes better. When I was at the University of Utah. It was incredible. Literally. Kung Fu Panda. They’re just flopping around. Super chill. But the moment you put a helmet on, Yo, straight warrior culture.
Dean Guedo: Well, even if you look at I guess that’s not all Blacks and white, but are they all Blacks from there? Which ones? Even them? They’re pretty like that. But that whole idea of their chant beforehand, I love it. Yes, I think it is. But that is turning the switch for them. It’s fucking crazy. But you look at them.
James Cerbie: You can’t see that Knocka jacked up.
Dean Guedo: No, but it’s such an extreme from what they normally run at, which is just kind of cool.
James Cerbie: You can’t be there all the time. It’s not possible you would burn out so fast.
Dean Guedo: That’s probably why I’m so hurt. And probably why you’re so hurt is like, I didn’t really have that off mode. I had someone on my podcast, I think it was Christian Tibeto who was talking about kids nowadays playing. We’re talking about hockey and how Fortnite was huge amongst NHL players. But they stayed in the competitive sympathetic zone because they’re playing Fortnite after practice. And they could almost do the metrics on the Omega wave on, like who was going to be fucked up because they would stay up with the Blue Light and playing very competitive games, which is still simulating that environment. And they performed worse. And I think maybe it was Calde eats, maybe it was Caldet. But anyways, he could check. He knew who was going to take the next step to the next level. Generally based on the OmegaWave scores, based on who was playing more video games. It’s almost like the more video games he played competitively, especially as an athlete. You want to win everything, it will suck the performance out of you because you’re never out of it. And you wouldn’t think something stupid like that would do it. But I played Halo too, in College.
James Cerbie: Oh, yeah, we played so much Call of Duty, Super Smash Brothers, Nintendo 64.
Dean Guedo: They did not help.
James Cerbie: It’s not intense.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. If I think back to it, I remember I’d go to a game and I go home and try to relax and I go play Halo Fever. We had Shell, we call NHL, but we had Chill here in Madden. But yeah, you never get out of that mode. And now Blue Light is a big thing. But all this stuff is kind of coming together. But it all leads to that whole idea of being able to turn that switch off, but making people realize that there is a switch to turn on and off and what does it because different people have different switches or different environments that will turn that switch off. Like, for me, it could be not having a good bench press that day. Yes, I would fuck up my whole day if I didn’t know that. I would just be sitting there stewing in it and I wouldn’t recover.
James Cerbie: Yeah, that’s fair with the Internet. Like, when your Internet doesn’t work, that’s upsetting.
Dean Guedo: Did you go and breathe afterwards? Like, get into, like, supine, inverted?
James Cerbie: I’m pretty chill.
Dean Guedo: You seem pretty chill.
James Cerbie: Actually, most of the time I wasn’t this way in high school or College at all. I think it was after I read Zebras by Sapolsky.
Dean Guedo: The Ulcer one, five.
James Cerbie: Zebras don’t get ulcers.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. I haven’t read it.
James Cerbie: Yeah. And just talking with people, I came to the realization that 99% of things just don’t matter. And on a scale from zero to ten register, maybe a .5% but people love to blow things out of proportion.
Specifics on Dean’s Journey After Powerlifting to Fix Himself
Dean Guedo: I had that exact realization. I remember specifically because when I quit teaching and became a trainer, I was on this mission to learn all the best stuff from all the best people. And I got really fortunate where I messaged Pat on Instagram. He basically took a band of his wing, but he’s like, do this and this, and I did it. And then I would go back and he would like, and then I met Mikey Nelson and all those people. Anyway, it’s skewered into that. And I remember one day because I was just trying to learn all day. If I wasn’t training or training clients, I was always learning. I had some course or, like, I had some material or I had some torrented book. Don’t tell anyone that I was reading some medical textbook. But I remember sitting there in bed one day and thinking, like, I just listened to a Ben House lecture, and I was like, I’m never going to be as smart as that dude in that one thing. He’s a psychopath in terms of the stuff he talks about. And I realized none of it matters. I just need to keep getting a little bit better, because if I try to emulate that person or Mike T.
Nelson or you or whoever, like, triangle, triangle is like a crazy person in terms of all the stuff he knows. If I tried to be that I would never be good at what I’m good at. And so none of it matters. Literally, at that point, I realized nothing matters at all in a horrible way. But it freed me to then just be relaxed. And I was like, super chill.
James Cerbie: Super freeing.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. And I was very similar to you. Like, I was always bound up tight and kind of after that, I kind of took a bunch of steps afterwards, I’m like, I got to stop trying so hard, and then everything else worked better because of it. Weirdly.
James Cerbie: Yeah. I think part of that transition for me was also because I was a terrible test taker throughout middle school and a lot of high school. But then at a certain point, it just set in and I realized that there’s no reason to be nervous. Why should I worry about this test? The only reason I would worry is because I don’t do a good job preparing. But that’s totally in my control. So why should I stress about it? That was a huge shift for me. If it’s in my control, no reason to stress. It’s just a matter of doing it.
Dean Guedo: When we’re sitting in one test and I blanked, and I’m sure everyone’s kind of had that same experience.
James Cerbie: Hardcore.
Dean Guedo: Hardcore.
James Cerbie: One very specific memory of this.
Dean Guedo: And it was awful. I remember sitting there. It was like an all written one. And then I remember I was like, Fuck it, I don’t give you a shit about this class. And then everything just started coming back to me the second I stopped having this anxiety over this stupid test. Like, I should start remembering stuff and like, yeah, it’s horrible.
James Cerbie: Mine didn’t come back to me. No, it’s in Organic Chemistry and Organic chemistry tests or exams for me or in our class, you would get maybe five questions to do over the course of your 60 to 90 minutes. So if you don’t get one of those questions, you don’t. You’re kind of a deep shit.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: And I got the one blank hardcore on the mechanism and the electron flow I had to draw out.
Dean Guedo: Like, from the transport chain.
James Cerbie: Oh, no.
Dean Guedo: Okay.
James Cerbie: This is a file. No electric file.
Dean Guedo: I don’t want to listen to it.
James Cerbie: That realm. Yeah. We don’t have to worry about that. So I would be interested to hear where the first place you went after? West Side and powerlifting.
Dean Guedo: Like, after powerlifting was done.
James Cerbie: Yeah. So you finished powerlifting?
Dean Guedo: Yeah, I can remember.
James Cerbie: And you’re kind of beat up really strong.
Dean Guedo: Yes.
James Cerbie: But you find yourself on this path to want to find a better way.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. So I can actually remember it pretty clearly because at that point, I was pretty successful in powerlifting. I was like a four time national champ in my division, GPC in Canada. So I was a fucking strong dude. But I was writing articles for, like, 1020 Life with Brian Carroll’s team, and I was on that team and doing this whole powerlifting thing, and I literally just quit. I remember I had a call with my coach, and I was just like, I think I’m done. This isn’t like my hip was hurting. My grid was hurting. And I’m like, I think I need to leave powerlifting because the ultimate goal of trying to get stronger wasn’t aligning with the fact I couldn’t do that because of my hip. And I was going to do what I was going to do regardless of whether there’s pain, which I knew wasn’t helping because I was super angry in life, and I was mad all the time, and it was bleeding into everything else I was doing, which just made my life horrible. So I just straight up quit. I left the team. I wrote this nice email, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like, I’m done. I need to change my life. And then that coincided when I quit teaching and became a trainer. So how did it all start? Basically, that’s when I kind of got into Mike Boyle stuff and I kind of learned, like, a basic structure for that type of training. Before that, I was in block training on the West Side. It was just like super linear, super easy peaking programs. Nothing super crazy because powerlifting is super easy. And then Mike Boyle led to podcasts and podcasts, and I just didn’t have a direction. And then I listened to Pat is kind of the center for a lot of people, but he was on a podcast with, I don’t know, it was Mike Robinson or something, but he was talking about looking from deep space, human body from their head, and he’s looking at their heart from the left, and their diaphragm is here but slightly off to the right, and he sees air expanding on the right side but not the left. And there’s all these asymmetries and then the pelvis. And he’s like, just walking through this. I’m like, what the fuck is this do you talk about?
James Cerbie: Who is this guy? Who’s this crazy person?
Taking What You Need From Others in the Industry and Remaining Yourself
Dean Guedo: He was talking for like an hour on this and a lot of the stuff made logical sense. I’m like, I don’t know anything. I literally thought I was the fucking best. Like, I knew the West Side. I was a fucking strong power lifter. I had a 750 pound deadlift.
James Cerbie: Like, Fuck, I have a dynamic effort.
Dean Guedo: Yeah, I can train people. I know all this stuff, and I didn’t know anything. I think at that point I’d been to, like, Chris Duffins thing and Dean Somerset and Tony Josey, and I kind of had that path of mentors that kind of helped me along better ways, and that led into DNS. But Pat started talking and it was a game over. I remember I messaged him after that because I just didn’t give a shit. People get scared to message people. Pat had like, 2000 followers. Like, Fuck, I need to talk to this guy. And he basically just said, Go look at PRI as a big influence with me and get my course. And I think the next day I got his course, learned about all of it, then kind of went down the PR rabbit hole. And like I said, I already had a background on DNS, but that sort of thinking in terms of Asymmetry and whatever left AIC and all the shit was just so new and so awesome. But it opened up such a can of worms for the filter or lens. Like the anatomy trains. All that stuff kind of bled into this organic view of training, which was nothing like what we would have learned with West Side or just basic squat technique for toes.
Like all the normal stuff you learn when you learn about that stuff. And it just sent me down this rabbit hole of like, I need to learn all this because now I know nothing. Like, I’m literally at square one. Didn’t even know what a fucking anatomy train was that was in past things like pure eye anatomy train start reading those stuff. And I was like, what the fuck’s an anatomy train? What’s fascia? And so I’m learning about all this and I’m like, I’m so shitty. I’m just the worst. I’m the worst trainer ever. And so, yeah, that’s how it started. I know it’s just horrible, like super bouncing back and forth, but I basically went from thinking I knew everything was super strong to being the worst trainer amongst all these strength coaches that knew Pat. I was like, I’m just a loser.
James Cerbie: It’s like a never ending process, though.
Dean Guedo: Well, I still think I’m a loser now.
James Cerbie: I just always come back to I feel at least probably once a month. I’m like, yeah, I just don’t know anything. I’m dumb.
Dean Guedo: Well, it comes back to that same moment. So I started learning about Puri and DNS and just like I had tons of clients and we had a strength class of the groups. I had so many reps of this stuff. I got really good at seeing it and being able to coach on the fly and then coming up with my own ideas. But I remember sitting there in that same moment with the Ben House thing and I was thinking, I don’t know anything that I stopped worrying about how much better I need to be to be Pat or to be Ben or to be Mike T. Nelson. And I started realizing it doesn’t fucking matter because Pat does things his way. I don’t agree with everything Pat does in terms of how he thinks about things or how he trains personally. We’re on different spheres, but it’s cool to have those influences and then just kind of see what happens because it doesn’t need to be one thing. It just needs to kind of be better than it was and then continue to get better. And so basically, I took that weight off my shoulders and I just got better at understanding how simple things need to be instead of thinking about everything in a super complicated lens.
That a lot of those systems DNS Puri any of that shit, like layers onto this complexity that doesn’t really matter at the very end of the day with a lot of the basics that we end up doing anyways, we end up having a product at the end that looks very similar to everything I was doing before. It’s just a little bit different in terms of how I coach it. And once I started just kind of dumbing it down, things just became so much better because I didn’t need to learn all the intricacies of every PRI course. Nor do I want to. I do want to, but I don’t need to do it now. I can kind of do it over time because we have a good system. Things haven’t changed. I still use a variation of my boiler system for a lot of the stuff because it just is laid out so well for an hour training session, and it works. We have to make it any harder than it has to be.
James Cerbie: I can remember the first time finding PRI in that world.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: It was just such a light bulb. Aha moment.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: I was like, oh, this makes so much more sense than everything else that has been shoved down my throat as an athlete for my entire life. And I got super lucky because the first time I met Pat, I was finishing my internship at Cressey Performance now, Cressey Sport Performance, I believe. But Pat came to do an in service, and he was still at Springfield.
Dean Guedo: Okay.
James Cerbie: And so Pat walks in, and anybody has had the pleasure of meeting and spending some time with Dr. Pat Davidson, high energy, high energy guy. And he gets into this presentation and he starts going, talking about blood, ripping around, banging into a scapula, wrapping around this way. And the next thing I know, Pat is talking about being a human out in the woods and you meet a Wolf. He’s like, who are you Wolf? Fuck you. I’m a human. I’m the most badass predator that ever lived. And then we came back down, and they were like deep biomechanics. And it was like all over the place. But I loved it. And that was kind of my introduction into the prison.
Dean Guedo: Similar to my experience, where it’s just like he starts talking at some different rate. That makes no sense.
James Cerbie: Yeah.
Dean Guedo: And I think within that Echo in that story, there was another video within that realm of time where he’s talking about monkeys falling out of trees, humans revolving like wrap on the branches. And I’m sitting there, I’m like, I don’t even know if he’s right. He could be making everything. And that’s what I mean. I don’t even want to go read up on all that stuff, but he makes a good story, and it makes you at least want to learn something. The lens in which he’s seeing things through, it’s obviously working. So I need to at least have a little bit of that.
James Cerbie: Yeah. But I think two points from that. The one where I was going with the lucky statement is that the next place I went was iFAST where I got to spend time with Mike Robertson and Bill Hartman and the Purple Room and talk about an accelerated learning experience, having three to four months of build time, and him essentially teaching you myokin respiration pelvis and getting to see it through his lens.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: It would have taken me years to do what we did in that three to four month period and have him lay it out for me the way he did and teach me, which is why getting his intensive high on my list right now.
Dean Guedo: But his iPad, that was the next place I went. So the same progression, but I went fast online, obviously, and try to consume everything Bill does. And then there’s enough people like you and Pat and Michelle. There’s just so many people that are kind of offshoots of some of the new stuff Bill does that I can piece together some of it. It’d be awesome to go to the intensive ones where you can get the intensive experience, which I’m sure is better than the watered down version.
James Cerbie: He’s brilliant. But I think the point you made about not trying to be Pat. Yeah, it’s so important because if you try to be what someone else is, you’re never going to be good. It’s more about learning from that person, pulling from their models and their methodology, and then putting it in your own toolbox. Sorry, but you always have to be forming your own path. If you try to just replicate someone else’s path, it’s not going to work. And I think that there is actually a really interesting story. I heard this was back when the UFC was first getting started. There was, I don’t remember his name, but he was high level Brazilian jiu Jitsu Guy Silva. I don’t know, but he would essentially go around and teach people his techniques and his methods and how he did things. And someone asked him, are you ever worried that you’re giving away all your best info and someone’s going to take it and beat you? He’s like, if anybody ever steps the Marine and tries to beat me at my own game, I will never lose. He said, because they can never beat me. They have to take what I’m giving them and then put it into their own system.
James Cerbie: I think that’s really important for people to walk away with.
Dean Guedo: Yes. Not that I came to realize, but I was trying to pull information from everyone. And once you’ve learned enough stuff, you realize that stuff leads to a million other things. And you kind of have to divide your time and understand that you cannot get to these places that some of these people went to even like, with you, with your Masters or bandwidth, anyone who’s done a PhD, you’re so narrowly focused. Like, I can’t even fathom being able to be that well versed in those subjects because I didn’t dedicate those years to it. It’s just like I don’t expect people to be stronger than me on a deadlift, because that’s all I’ve been doing for ten years or even football. So I’m strong, but I’m also good at football. Someone else can’t just replicate that because they didn’t divvy up their resources. And once you kind of realize that you can start to be free to then just collect what you need and get rid of. I think that’s the Bruce Lee thing, but take what you need from everyone and then disregard the rest. Because at the end of the day, the product that you’re kind of pushing forward has to be very specific to you because you have your evolution of whatever you are.
And if you don’t do that again, you’re just going to be a shittier version of everyone else, which is for some people that might be fine, but you’re never going to be that. Like I would never, ever be Pat because Pat did straw man. Pat did all these things and Pat did a PhD. Like, I’d have to go back to school anyways. I learned that that game wasn’t the game I wanted to play. And I think that’s good for any strength coach because there’s going to be some process of copying or pairing or kind of assimilating all this information because you have to learn it and you have to do it. So you need to get to that point where you can start to manage the new information coming in through the lenses that you’ve kind of created. So once you’ve gotten to that point, whether two or three years or whatever, however long it takes for you, then you have to take the step. And I think I wrote up with that on Instagram because Kyle Dobbs is a mutual friend as well. He’s really good at calling up the Echo Chambers but realizing he’s within his own Echo Chamber and then trying to divvy out other stuff.
But it’s cool to be in. I think it’s super cool to be in the Echo Chamber because you have to learn for everyone in it to then understand what that Echo Chamber is. And then at some point you have to evolve or progress outside of that. And we’re still probably all going to come back to our same tribe. Even if you look at Rebel and everyone’s kind of evolved with it, we’re kind of all the same people in some respect. We’re always going to probably be that. I’ll probably still fight to the death for anyone within this group. But it’s okay for me to go learn about stretching because even though Pat doesn’t like stretching, there’s probably still some application for me that I can take away from it, even though Pat might want to kill the people that do stretching. If I just listen to everything Pat says, I will never learn because I’ll just end up being a shittier version of Pat or a shittier version of Mike T. Nelson, whatever, you know what I mean? I think that if you don’t get to that point of being able to stand up for, I guess the path you want to go down to, then you’re just going to end up being your tribe, which is I don’t know, I’m just not okay with that. I’m not okay with being one thing. Yeah.
James Cerbie: You want to have as many channels open as possible, take in as much information as possible, be selective, obviously, but you never want to shut doors just for the sake of shutting doors, take it in, put it through whatever your process is to try to determine if this is something that I want to include in my model or not. But I hate when people just essentially throw on Blinders and put in earplugs and they’re just stuck in their own little world and they refuse to take anything else in. How are you ever going to learn and progress? You’re never going to love 100% of anything that you go see. But if you can take 10% of that and bring it back and make what you do better, then that’s a win.
Dean Guedo: Well, you see it a lot. I don’t want to see the PRX. I was doing rounds like this.
James Cerbie: It’s all the letters, right? People just get these letters and they’re like, well, I can’t look at anything, study anything, or learn anything if it doesn’t involve these three letters or two letters.
Dean Guedo: Whatever it is, that paints a weird picture where everyone else thinks if I do a pure eyedrill, I’m a pure eye guy. And it just fucking bothers me because it’s just like, I don’t want to be wrapped up in that same group of people who like, I know they’re talking with a closed minded people who are only doing their one model, which, again, works for what it works for. But it’s just I’m never going to be that person who stuck on one thing for better or for worse. Like, maybe I’m doing other shit that’s shitty, but I just don’t care because it would just suck to be Stagnant.
James Cerbie: The Stagnation is the worst.
Dean Guedo: Can you imagine just doing the Puri model? Like, let’s see your practitioner and just only doing that stupid fucking model every day? Like, it would totally work, but it’s so boring. I’d want to just find something better just with the simple fact that it would suck doing those stupid ass drills all day. But they work. The weird thing is I’m okay with people knowing about PRI and all that stuff, because at the end of the day, that system has given me the ability to fix a lot of the problems that I dealt with with other people. I’ve still not fixed all my problems, but people that come to me from the powerlifting world that see me for the things that I do, I can fix a lot of things in literally, like, ten minutes because it’s such an easy lens to fix some of the basic fucking problems in Stagnal plane. It’s just wacky. It’s wacky how? Well it works for simple lifting problems for most people, like simple lifting injuries that my shoulder hurts, my hip hurts, my knee hurts a little bit. Like most of the stuff we fixed in ten minutes with a lot of stupid shit.
James Cerbie: Yeah, for sure. On that note, let’s transition to lifting things. I know you have the hypertrophy study that you’re in right now.
Dean Guedo: Yes.
James Cerbie: But when you think about programming and training at this point. What does that look like for you? More for, I guess, if you’re writing training programs for other people.
Dean Guedo: So like I said before, I don’t want to say I create my own model because it’s just a blend of other people’s stuff. But I found a lot of value in the way that Pat structures things with Sagittal in terms of the progression.
James Cerbie: In terms of where to start and where to go.
Dean Guedo: Yeah, it’s just like a basic lifting program in terms of what you need to have included. It still comes down to push, pull, vertical push pull, bilateral movement, a single leg movement, and some sort of press because I like and I’m going to always include those things because I just like powerlifting. I’m so biased, but there’s always going to be some sort of squad, some sort of deadlift and some sort of bench. But where I progress to is like the way that I look at it is where am I going with this? Essentially I have to hit all those things and then I just use whatever the structure of what the person’s needs are to fill that. So whether it’s if they have two days or four days or if their goal is to purchase your strength and just kind of like program it out based on that. But it’s still always going to be for me because I like to especially my training sessions, I like to hit all those things because I want to make sure that everyone’s doing some SAGAL plane at some point progressing to something frontal and then doing that for lower and upper with some sort of pelvic or abdrill, like something that just encompasses all those things and ties it all together.
And I use a lot of supersets with my program and Venom. It’s time density stuff, but it’s like, can I do two supersets in a session where I hit frontal plane or saddle plane ABS and then frontal plane, saddle plane, pelvis, and then squat and upper body movement, that’s probably a push or pull and then a push or pull big movement and then something like bilateral, which I know that just ends up being super oblique, but it works so well because once you have the big rocks of having that progression, then you can kind of progress upwards. Like we talked about with the Sagittal frontal transverse. Most people never get the transverse because they suck. And so I don’t even get to that point with a lot of people because by the time we’re in front of the plane, they’re fucking badasses at most stuff for a lot of the people I deal with.
James Cerbie: Which is a lot of the general population for the Gen pop people and the clients that you see. Do you see a lot of commonalities? Because I think people in our group, if you were to sit down and talk with them, you would notice and see that at this point in time, you’re probably pretty confident in what’s walking through the door. If you have a new person coming, you’re going to have some assumptions about what’s coming through the door. Do you feel that’s pretty true?
Dean Guedo: Yeah. It’s horrible. I don’t have a table. I do some table tests. But generally, like, most people walk into the door if they look like me or some form or they widen the angle and fucking stuck in, what do you want to call it? All those. They’ll be super good at compressing internal rotation and you have to feed the other systems. And the same thing with the other end with a lot of females is they’re going to be super narrow and they’re going to have none of the other things are going to be super excellent with external rotation. So anyways, where that gets to is like the same fixes are the same shit. I teach them how to do ABS based on their external angle. So I’ll teach them some sort of breathing drill that ends up not even telling them that it ends up being some AB hamstring drill. And then I’m going to show them something for their lower what would be like to go there for you? For me, I usually just, it depends on the person if they’re like, really depending on where their heads are. But I’ll usually start with something 90 with their heels on a bench and just teach the tuck, because a lot of people have never been taught that and just get a proximal hamstring.
And then I’m going to go split it up by teaching them their AB drills. So I’ll usually do some sort of reach. So if it’s narrow or wide, I just stick with the reach. So if they’re narrow, they’re going to reach internalization up front and just do the nice side. And then I do some form of that drill for now for steel angle till they get their ABS where I need them to feel them. So they get their EOS. So external bleeds, if I can get them that, and I tell them to point to where it is and if they feel it right where I need to feel. And I’m like, fuck, that’s it. That’s exactly what you need to feel. And then we just combine the two and the same thing. I need to get their IO. So they’ll reach overhead hard, per, slip, breathe. They’re going to point to the side of their stomach for the iOS area. And I’m like, okay, good, that’s your ABS. And I just combined the 90, 90 with the ABS. And that’s their squat, that’s their deadlift, that’s their bench, that’s their shoulder press, that’s their row.
And I literally, it’s almost like clockwork. Once they feel a proximal hamstring and once they feel their ABS, I call it their money ABS. But when they feel their ABS for their infrastructure angle, generally it fixes a lot of things.
James Cerbie: 100%.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. Especially because most of them come in lifting before. It’s way easier if they’ve never lifted before, but some of them have some preconceived notion of what a squad is, what a deadlift is, what a shoulder press is, whatever the fuck. And if they have those two things, they literally cleans up everything. I don’t coach a lot of times because if they have those things, there’s only one way for them to do it right. And if they trust me enough, they’re just going to do it. And so it ends up being super simple to teach basic sagittal plane competencies, because that’s pretty much 90% of what most people do in training sessions anyways. A lot of times because that’s their preconceived notion of what a training session is. Unless you’re dealing with athletes.
James Cerbie: Yeah, man. I think just finding people, getting them to feel ABS and hamstrings, that does wonders. It’s almost for almost everything, almost everybody. And that’s where you don’t want to get too complicated.
Dean Guedo: No.
James Cerbie: Overthink things. If you can get someone ABS and hamstrings, you are on the right path.
Dean Guedo: Well, and a lot of times people look like me, they’re super wide, a lot of it’s their sternum control. But if I can get them ABS and hamstrings and then I kind of can coach other things, then you can kind of start layering in. So like, the program looks the same regardless, let’s just say the program looks the same. The bias of each exercise would just start feeding in some of the systems. Where are you going? Can you hear me at least? Sorry, I left a blank, so you’re going to be able to see it.
James Cerbie: My dog was at the door being a huge baby that’s also approaching his bedtime.
Dean Guedo: Nice.
James Cerbie: Curious.
Dean Guedo: What I was saying was that you can add an abstract whatever and then take whatever program you want to do. Like fucking. However you laid it out, all the biases come in with that Bill Hartman intensive model that Pat basically taught us all. But if you need to feed them a little bit more external rotation, you’ll just add either their early propulsion or late propulsion. So like arms overhead or arms low, you can do Zerker swats, but you can start toying around with every single Journal in the gym to then feed the thing that they don’t have. So for a lot of people, squats that are wide over, Sterling will feed them a wedge, but then start lowering the wedge down so that they can feel the things that they need to feel on the ground. But you can start to bias every single thing in the gym, whether it be an arm curl. Just get a little bit more external rotation because we already know that they’re going to be super compressed and not get there. You just teach them how to externally rotate their arm and that’s essentially an early propulsion breathing thing, get the maps, and boom, they got it.
But it just puts a new layer on everything so that I can be a technician in terms of fixing everything while not telling them I’m fixing things. We’re just literally working out. And I just change little subtleties with their ability to skeleton to then feed the other systems, and they already have ABS and hamstrings.
James Cerbie: So then they end up just feeling a good point where you’re using the training session as the intervention, because I remember somebody, I think, messaged me to ask me this question recently about how you get buy-in, how you get these people. If I don’t want to spend all this time on a long, exaggerated warmup, say, 30 minutes laying around, blowing up balloons, foam rolling, et cetera, once you kind of get them to find and feel the things that you’re chasing, then it’s about, okay, let’s go work out and be good with our exercise selection. And if you coach and queue the movements. Well, your training is the intervention.
Dean Guedo: Yeah, well, the training is the intervention. And the training interventions are hard. And for most people that don’t have attachments to a barbell back squat, low bar, like if they’re not power lifters or Olympic weightlifters or bodybuilder, we’re not even training those people a lot of times in our training sessions because they’re fucking they don’t need you or they don’t think they need you anyway. They probably do, but they’re not paying for personal training. People are paying for personal training. Don’t have attachments to those things. So Zerker squat searcher is it Zurcher Zurcher squat on the ledge is fucking hard. And it does all the things they want, especially if you get them to externally rotate their arms and just get a little bit of reach. And they’re like, oh, my God, they’re shaking.
James Cerbie: You’re shaking like crazy.
Dean Guedo: And that is the intervention. But that’s also a squat. And it’s a squat where you can progress and you pretty much don’t even need to leave this happy zone of all these exercises that you built, like bench press with their feet on the bench and with a tuck, and they’re just reaching. Like all that stuff is normal gym stuff that you would do in a training session anyways. You’re just cueing it in a way to, again, get the intervention. But it’s just a good movement. It ends up just being good movement that ends up making them we talk about the switch, but they’re not leaving the gym session fucking super sympathetic because they’re jacked up an extension because you just fed the right systems the whole time. It’s super easy to get out of it when you’re not lifting like an idiot, which is like what we all do.
James Cerbie: We did good work.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: That’s what’s so big is that you need to get them a training fact. They’re not coming to you to just flop around all day. They want to feel work. You have to give them that.
Dean Guedo: But the thing is, this stuff is applicable to powerlifting and bodybuilding everything.
James Cerbie: Because right now you get to get rid of those biases you were just talking about. Get away from this idea that I have to squat with a barbell on my back. Granted, you will one day if you want to get on a platform, that’s your sport. So you have to do it. But maybe you don’t run that all the time, all year. Maybe you mix into something a little bit different.
Dean Guedo: Well, especially if you’re fucked up. So this is the one thing I’m like my own experiment for this stuff, but a lot of it hasn’t been done before in the sense of my idea is load and shitty low or shitty movement with a lot of load got you to this place where I was super fucked up. Like my knee hurts all the time. It still fucking hurts. Back hurts. All this stuff, it just doesn’t work with the stuff I was doing. Now we have tools that can load the opposite end of that spectrum. So for me, I have that transformer bar and he has a catalog bar, this Chris Duff and stuff. But he has a lot of stuff where you can start feeding external rotation and you can start feeding forward load to then get your ribs back with that transformer bar to an extent you could have never done before, especially when you put them on that setting where it’s like super far in front. So the long story is that it ends up you can start to load that in the same fashion once you loaded yourself like shit for years to get yourself out of it.
And for me it’s working. And you can start layering that on with bodybuilding like Ryan and I see Pad Ryan Lekure on here. We have conversations like monthly on how do we kind of change a lot of these things we’re doing the gym to then do, like you said, the interventions with bicep curls, cable bicep curls externally, rotating your arm just a little bit more, breathing in early propulsion to get that air in the bottom and then just going Ham. You can start to create mechanical tension in these places using actual load. But doing it in a way that you’re feeding those systems as opposed to just doing everything in extension like a meathead. And it’s not that hard. You might lift a little less, but we’ve found that generally that stuff, it’s almost like once the learning period is over, like anything, it’s just a neurological effect at the beginning. And once you get there and get past the hump, everything is the same. You just feel a lot better. And then you’re not feeding the system that most of us feed to then end up in the spot where we all ended up so that we learned all this stuff.
So there’s one point if we got there. And when you learn all of it now, the end product is how do you meld those worlds together? And I think it ends up just being that biasing every single exercise for you, which isn’t that hard for most things. The hardest thing is bench press, because it’s a straight bar, unless you need other tools like the catalog bar. But Bodybuilder has been doing fucking Dumbo bench and neutral grip forever, you know what I mean? Once the attachments start playing into it, it gets really hard to get better or get out of pain because the attachment is more important than actually getting out of pain, which I know all too well because I’m still dealing with it.
James Cerbie: But I think the important point there is that you can use this new model or way of thinking about training and still get really good results. You can still get really strong and jacked and powerful and move well and not feel like a train wreck. What’s the big deal that’s I think the hard part in our circle is figuring out how to distill all that stuff down and get it out to the general population because we generally attract what I would call educated meatheads, the more cerebral group who’s really into that sort of thing, or they’re coming from more of a broken background background did the feedback on this thing throwing me off like crazy.
Dean Guedo: He can hear my own voice now and he realized it was shitty.
James Cerbie: That’s true. Yeah. I can hear my own voice and my headphones as I talk because Dean has an actual real podcast set up. I just use the interwebs, so it’s throwing me off hardcore. But I think that the important point here is that you can still get really good results using these different techniques and interventions. There’s not just one way that you have to train if you want to be strong and jacked and powerful. And that’s exciting because we have this new blank slate almost. We’re going into unknown territory at this point.
Dean Guedo: Well, that’s what I mean. Even with that transfer bar, Pat talked about it a little bit, but there’s not many people throwing in that big setting and trying to get strong at it. And for me, there’s nothing to compare it to, to know whether it should work or not. But for me, it’s been working like, this is the first time I’ve squatted in over two years consistently. And like, yeah, I’m in a little bit of pain, but it’s so much better just from a simple tool. And if I take that concept and try to feed it into everything I’m doing just because essentially the person that I’m trying to fix is me and I’m that person hurts all the time. How do I fix that person ? You start adding in these interventions that are just lifting and it ends up becoming like, if you look back at a lot of the bodybuilding stuff and a lot of the old school body, but they’re all doing it, they just didn’t know why. Now we have an explanation from some smart people on the mechanisms on why these things work, and it makes it so much easier to be surgical in applying them, which was never happening before.
It’s just like all the people that were giving out information were doing the best things for them. A lot of these concepts are applicable to that type based on your table test, so you can start building out these programs to then again, elicit the same response as we were always doing it, except for they’re not fucked up. And the better thing is if you’re not fucked up, it just makes it way better.
James Cerbie: Train harder and longer.
Dean Guedo: That’s the biggest thing I think I’ve realized with a lot of stuff and even just getting rid of attachments and doing things just a little bit better and I still look like a meathead. I’m not the best example of a lot of these things, but I do try. But I’ve lifted for a year straight. That’s huge. And I’ve gained £12 because I wasn’t injured every fucking month. I think a lot of people can relate to that. And the way you get out of that is to start to learn these lenses. You don’t need to take them as gospel, but if you don’t know them, then you don’t know how to apply them for however you’re going to apply them. For me, I apply them this way. Someone like Pat or you or like Trip will use these things another way, but it will end up being at a similar spot. It’s going to be nuanced to how we see it. And that’s a huge thing because you can’t actually do that if you don’t learn the stuff. And that takes a lot of work, which most importantly yeah.
James Cerbie: It’s a big learning curve on the front end, but it’s totally worth it.
Dean Guedo: Well, it’s worth it because it’s like I can’t say this enough, but a lot of these tools have given me the confidence to, I guess train out a lot of shit with people in a very fast time. Everyone thinks you’re a wizard and I’m not this crazy smart person and all these things. I just know how to coach well. And I’ve learned enough that now it’s not hard to fix things because of all these tools. And I think a lot of people get that. Like you look at Cressy, he may not have learned all the same stuff, but they’re just surgical and how they do things, but to get there you have to actually do it. I don’t know.
James Cerbie: He’s got to put in the time and we are humble enough.
Dean Guedo: We better.
James Cerbie: You don’t know a lot.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. And we have better stuff. Now I can confidently say that the place in which we’re at is super exciting because we talked about the frontier. What’s the new frontier? There’s not many things coming up, but there are a lot of people taking a lot of the old ideas and either recreating them or coming up with new concepts to them and they’re super effective. Are they useful for everyone now? But I mean, if you can even take 10% of that and you can find some useful tactic for them, that’s a game changer for a lot of like the Bills, like early propulsion model on how to fucking put your arms and legs. Sounds super crazy, but it’s been a game changer for how easy it is to get air into the system where it was really hard before. If I use DNS tactics or pry stuff, it’s almost like it happens instantly. And I was like, fuck, I wish I would have known that two years ago.
James Cerbie: Yeah, that happens all the time.
Dean Guedo: Yes.
James Cerbie: Wouldn’t life have been nice if I had known this information was like a month ago? One year ago, he learned on his own.
Dean Guedo: I don’t think that’s what I’ll never be like. I’ll never be Bill’s coming up.
James Cerbie: You’re very confident saying that.
Dean Guedo: It’s like coming up with new ideas that are original. There’s not many original things that come up, especially not that level. And so I would say my originality comes without I piece together everyone shit, but I don’t come up with my own scientific ideas that change the game. That’s fucking crazy. How do you get this part?
James Cerbie: It’s really just about blending the best of the old with the best of the new because there’s a lot of stuff that’s been done for a very long time and it works and it works really well, but it’s kind of taking the best of that and then blending with all these newer things that are coming to light and just being open minded and having a beginner’s mind and being willing to not be rigid in your stance and accept some of this new stuff that’s coming in. So we can have both sides of the coin. Like we talked about at the very beginning, I want to still feel good, but I also want to be a freak. So how do I find that balance well?
Dean Guedo: And that actually ties in very well because you’ve all heard it pretty much especially with athletes and people are going to be strong anyways, at this point, I’m a pretty firm believer that most programs work, but they don’t work in isolation. And so when you start to layer some of these coaching cues and some of these concepts onto it, you can make pretty much any program work. And then it becomes about what do you like and what volume can you handle and what are you going to do consistently? And then all these things do is allow you to do that where I think if you give someone a program, you’re not a good example. But dude, off the street wants to get Jacked, you give him this perfect program, it’s giving me a shit shot. Because he doesn’t know how to lift. He doesn’t know how to apply these concepts. And that’s where this is really powerful, because you can basically turn any program into something that’s going to work. If you fucking do it, it’s not going to work better than others. Like, there’s obviously going to be programs that are better. But knowing this stuff is really freeing because you can essentially be effective and you could still be shitty at programming.
I know it sounds horrible, but as a personal trainer, you can literally know nothing about it. You can do anything in the gym, but if you coach it, well, they’re going to get results because they could just keep going. And that’s something that you can’t do when you lift like shit.
James Cerbie: That’s a great stopping point. Don’t lift like shit, people. That’s going to be the tagline for this.
Dean Guedo: Well, the funny thing is I’m like the postage chocolate.
James Cerbie: We’ve all been there.
Dean Guedo: I’m still kind of getting like that’s a really hard attachment to let go because you do get big.
James Cerbie: Oh, yeah. It’s fun.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: Until it’s not nice. So where should people go if they want to find more about you?
Dean’s Programming for Clients and Interventions for Injury Prevention
Dean Guedo: I’m pretty simple because a lot of my company stuff is wrapped up in the stronger your nutrition. So a lot of my personal stuff is just Guido Power on Instagram. We used to have a website first thing, but I’ve kind of consolidated my other stuff, and then that’s pretty much the best place to reach me at DMI. I get people once they listen to these things, asking about this external rotation shit. I’ll probably point you to Pat, but I’m pretty good at answering questions on the fly. Other than that, my program with you guys on Rebel is venom if you think that you got what it takes. My program is fucking hard, by the way. I feel bad for anyone going in because I already know how shitty it is. That’s like my selling feature, but it goes back to that same concept of a firm believer in the simple stuff done just like super well can then lead to huge results if you just have to work hard. But you need to not look like shit first. And then once you get that Instagram, Instagram is my best place.
James Cerbie: Okay, sweet Instagram. I’ll put that in the show notes. And then the final question we always wrap up with is if you’re going to think back over the last one to two years, any books, resources, workshops, seminars, things that you’ve been to that you feel are just can’t miss.
Dean Guedo: Yeah.
James Cerbie: What would you throw out there? Just a couple.
Dean Guedo: I’m trying to look for my book right now. I have a book that I want to recommend, but I don’t have it right now, so I probably can’t. I think it’s called road excellence or something. Okay. First I’m going to start off because I can see it. No doubt is anything Pats have done. So rethinking the big patterns has been pretty helpful for me, just as a starting point to a lot of these concepts to kind of get into it. I don’t want to say surface level because Pat is not a surface level person, but it gets you excited about a lot of these new concepts of Puri and DNS and a lot of this movement stuff in a very simple fashion so that you can then have a road map to learn any other way. Ben House, a big mentor in terms of my progression as coach, and a lot of stuff that I’ve learned or people that I’ve met through those systems have come through. Ben. So I know he’s doing his BR 200 Burrow research, but Ben puts on a lot of high level shit that makes you think very differently. And he’s saying stuff that no one else is kind of willing to put out on the line.
And that’s very valuable for anyone kind of getting this industry, because you’re fed this perfect picture of nutrition and lifting, and it kind of just snaps you out of it and makes you think about all these other things that we’ve been talking about, whether it’s sympathetic parasympathetic, eating, blah, blah, blah, like environment, all this stuff he’s really big on, but it gives you a lens that you can’t take off afterwards, which is awesome but awful at the same time. And then I can’t find the book.
James Cerbie: Damn it’s called okay, find it. And then just send it to me and I’ll put it in the show notes.
Dean Guedo: It’s like a book that has nothing to do with lifting.
James Cerbie: Perfect.
Dean Guedo: It’s about some, like, dude who goes on, he wants to go learn about mushrooms, and he goes and finds a shaman, but then it’s like a real story.
James Cerbie: Is it a hero’s journey with psilocybin?
Dean Guedo: Sort of. It ends up just being a book about seeing essentially what you see isn’t necessarily what you get, and it makes you just change your mind, and they go into the desert and they just stare. And basically his mind plays tricks on them. But just because your mind plays tricks on you doesn’t make it not real to you, and it just makes you think about what you see and how you perceive the world is how the world is to you, and then not take other people’s perceptions and biases into account because they’re not you. And that’s a huge thing for me. And it was stupid that I got something on this book, but I read it and I was like, man, this is exactly what I needed. And Yeah. So Pat, Ben, those are my two biggest influences, I think.
James Cerbie: Okay.
Dean Guedo: And then anyone else in your podcast, fuck, they’re all awesome.
James Cerbie: Michelle, you got to keep the rhythm going here.
Dean Guedo: Yeah. I’ll stop the rhythm.
James Cerbie: My dog is so hungry. He came into the room and he slowly walked over to where he got fed. He looked in his dog food bowl and was like, there’s no food in here. He got some water and then he came back and laid pretty close to the desk and he’s slowly getting closer and closer to me and now he’s just here and his head is in my lap and he’s staring at me ready for dinner. Fortunately he’s not drooling in my lap.
Dean Guedo: We should tell him to read the book. I found it. It’s called journey to IXplan I-X-P-L-A-N. It’s a Carlos Castaneda book and he’s like this big author that got in shit because I think he called all his stories nonfiction but now they’re saying that they’re made up after he died and so it’s just like the writers Guild fucking hates them and it’s kind of cool if you get something out of it.
James Cerbie: It doesn’t matter.
Dean Guedo: Yeah, it was in the 50s. No one gives a fuck.
James Cerbie: No one cares. He was probably stoned out of his mind.
Dean Guedo: Definitely. That’s why the book was awesome.
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