Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite: Why Crossfitters Should Incorporate Bodybuilding Movements ft. Marcus Filly

Starting point is 00:00:00 And then people in the functional fitness world, the CrossFit world, were like, I kind of want to keep doing curls. It's like, yes, you can. Power Project family, this is a Power Byte. And a Power Byte is a highlight from a full-length episode that we do not want you to miss. Links to the full episode are on the podcast show notes, along with special perks for all of our beautiful listeners. Enjoy. Do you think CrossFit, for the most part, has fixed the resilience aspect of things? for the most part has fixed the resilience aspect of things.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Because like, you know, the idea when we were looking at CrossFit years ago, and there's always memes about like CrossFitters when they're training, their form's kind of messed up because of the time aspect of things and they're trying to do things fast, right? But do you think in general, like that's been kind of modified and changed and you don't see as many injuries? Or is that still a big problem within that sport um well i like to be really careful to differentiate between crossfit as a sport and then crossfit as the like a methodology for for general population and i also like to be

Starting point is 00:00:59 careful to say like look i'm not i'm not affiliated with the brand or the company anymore you know i used to own a CrossFit gym. I don't anymore. I used to compete in the sport of CrossFit. I don't compete anymore. I still know many people. I still follow the sport. And I still connect with coaches that are in the industry or under the brand of CrossFit. And, of course, I saw some of the – I was an early adopter.

Starting point is 00:01:23 And I was a very proud participant in the early years of the culture of CrossFit, despite the shortcomings and despite the mistakes that we made. You know, people getting injured, people getting too much intensity, maybe trying to fast track something that, you know, shouldn't be fast track, right? You shouldn't fast track somebody to snatch, maybe, you know. You shouldn't fast track somebody to snatch, maybe. With that said, in an effort to be kind of on that leading edge of that community, I learned a tremendous amount, a lot of things that gave a ton of value to people. When it was done well, it was beautiful. When it was done poorly, and poorly just means somebody who didn't have experience coaching it, then it was disastrous in some cases, or it was really bad for some people. So the limiting factor was experience. We're almost 15 years, I don't know, 15 years from when the first CrossFit affiliates opened up. So 2007 was the first CrossFit Games.

Starting point is 00:02:23 2022 is right around the corner. So, we're 15 years later. It's been a lot of coaching, a lot of hours, over a decade of the sport, almost two decades of the methodology and when the website was launched. Lots of education, lots of subject matter experts coming in and helping the CrossFit community, coaches, athletes, learn better movement mechanics, learn better things, made a lot of mistakes. Seeing all the problems with trying to do this, you look at a standard CrossFit gym now, what the programming looks like, it's highly elevated. There's a lot of CrossFit gyms that use things that I put out, functionalbuilding as, as their group fitness delivery, because it's, it's the same movements. We got burpees, but we got dumbbell floor presses too. You know, we got, we got chin ups and we're also doing, you know, sumo, sumo

Starting point is 00:03:16 deadlifts at tempo. And so I think a lot of things have just continued to L every, you know, every, you, you keep messing people up. That's not a good business move, right? People want to stay in business. People want to help people. And over time it's just continued to get better and it will continue to get better. And, and the ownership of CrossFit has changed hands recently. You know, there's, there's, there's still driven to make a profit. They're still driven to drive the sport, to do all the things that help grow a

Starting point is 00:03:45 business. But I think at the underlying principle is like, we got to help people. And if the more people we help, the more the business grows, because when people were getting hurt, that didn't help the business. It drove people out of the gym. So I think there's a lot of things that are getting better. I think that there's fewer and fewer people that are just like, Hey, you know, I got a good idea. Let's open up a gym and let's just, you know, throw people through a crazy workout of burpees and kettlebell swings and jumping on boxes and cracking their shins open. Like it's happening much less because those facilities and those coaches just, they can't survive in the current fitness climate. They just don't. People are like, I see through that. There's too many options out there.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Now you've got CrossFit. You've got F50. What's it called? F45. You've got these different Barry's Boot Camps. You've got all these options for people to do functional training with some intensity. And everybody's like, we've got to keep people safe

Starting point is 00:04:42 and having fun and making progress. So it just helps everybody raise their abilities and the quality of what's out there. It's not perfect by any means, but it's getting better. you know it's just been around for a long time and now there's like obviously there's a sport of bodybuilding but in your context i don't think you're really referring to the sport of bodybuilding i think you're talking about utilizing some movements that will help build the body yeah but that are movements that can be uh maybe beneficial to your day-to-day type thing sure yeah well this is where the the blending of functional and bodybuilding come together and what you just said at the end. But breaking them apart, from when I was 13 and going to the gym, like I started going

Starting point is 00:05:35 to Gold's Gym and I was just doing bodybuilding routines. And when I talk about bodybuilding, it was like the goal was to use resistance to alter your muscle mass. To grow muscle. Why did you do that? You were just trying to get, you were like scrawny or skinny or like, I just need to be bigger. No, I was. Stronger for soccer. It was interesting because at the time, I just liked moving. I liked doing, like I was with my brother at like 10 years old and like, you know, we had a little thing in the garage and it was like, oh, can I do a pull up on this? I was like trying to figure out ways to do this stuff. I don't know where I got that from, but I just, I kind of liked doing the pushups and I think I wanted to get muscle. Not because I was scrawny, I was like an athletic guy, but I just thought it looked cool to have muscles. So I wanted to go to the gym and my brother wanted to go to the gym and I wanted to hang out with him and that was cool. So he got his license, you know, at 16, I was 14 and we were driving to Gold's gym and that was perfect. We just followed the machine's

Starting point is 00:06:34 description. There's the picture. Okay. This is a check. Okay. We'll do chest. I'll do all the chest, right? Bodybuilding to me or those routines were all about what can I do to affect the size, the shape, the look. And it was never about function. Like you get a little stronger, which is a functional trait. But I wasn't trying to like move well. I didn't think about technique. I didn't think about technique until I maybe had my first shoulder pain doing bench press. I'm like, am I doing this right?

Starting point is 00:07:03 You know, I was just doing, following the machine. Like that's the technique. Um, so bodybuilding for years was just about muscle contraction to change something aesthetically about myself. Um, there's a lot of strength elements involved in that, but it was, that was what it meant to me. But I put 10 years of that in and I showed up to my first CrossFit workout. And guess what? I was pretty good at it. You know, I could do the thrusters and the kipping pull-ups. And I almost got a muscle up on my first day. And not because I had done CrossFit and functional training, because I had done the reps.

Starting point is 00:07:37 I had built a base of muscle mass. And I always, you know, I did a lot of machine stuff. But I also got kind of introduced to Charles Pollackin as a strength coach and a bodybuilding coach early on. And some of his methods and his programs were like strict chin-ups, split squats, you know, heels elevated front squats, you know, movements that were like big ranges of motion. So I'm doing bodybuilding with big range of motion. So I have that in my background. So I'm doing bodybuilding with big range of motion. So I have that in my background.

Starting point is 00:08:10 And then, of course, the big CrossFit era, which was very functional, it was very performance based. And at the end of it all, I'm like, hey, there's this happy medium between the two. Pat Project Family, is TRT or HRT something that you've been interested in? Well, if you are, that's why we've partnered with Merrick Health, owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. They are the premium telehealth TRT and HRT clinic. And the great thing about Merrick Health that is so unique about them is that versus every other telehealth clinic out there, they give you direct plans for you specifically. Many clinics give you just plans that they give to everybody else.

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Starting point is 00:09:03 PowerProject15 to save 15 off all labs links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes let's get back to the video move to move better and to move like with more power and move to develop muscles and to focus on how to control our bodies and to change our aesthetic and i think people like this and people who like this think that this looks somewhat appealing. How do I make that bridge that gap? And then people in the functional fitness world, the CrossFit world were like, I kind of want to keep doing curls. It's like, yes, you can. And so how do we bring those together? And that was where this, this mindset

Starting point is 00:09:38 around functional bodybuilding just made sense to me. It was like, I, they both have value and they don't belong in different parts of the gym. They belong in the same part of the gym. I want people to like really pay attention to kind of what, what you mentioned there, because there's a theme that like has happened with a lot of episodes on this podcast when we've had people on, Andre Milanoch came on and his advice to lifters was the first few years, two to three years of your lifting, build up volume. Okay. So do a lot of high rep work in the gym, build muscle your training volume doing bodybuilding type movements yeah when you look at a lot of the top power lifters in the game a lot of them started with bodybuilding when they

Starting point is 00:10:13 were younger and then once they transferred the body but powerlifting boom for some reason they got strong fast yeah you had a base of bodybuilding you move into crossfit your body's resilient you're able to perform really well and adapt quickly yeah There's something, there's a lot there in building resilience in your body with bodybuilding before you start getting into a lot of these other sports. Right. Well, and some of these other sports, and when you start to perform in them, they're going to put a tremendous amount of load on, you know, connect the tissues. And if you've done the bodybuilding work and you put in those thousands of reps and the volume, it takes time for your ligaments and tendons to build strength. You can

Starting point is 00:10:50 build a lot of muscle mass quickly, but they're not going to catch up for five, 10 years. So you put in that volume of training. Now your ligaments and tendons are ready to handle the force production required for an Olympic lift in CrossFit when you're breathing heavy and you've just done toes to bar. So that's part of it. Yeah. One of my, my early mentors, James Fitzgerald, who I know you guys had up here, you know, he said, uh, I remember he said like, well, what's the best, somebody asked him like, what's the best way to, you know, be good at CrossFit? Cause he was the first champion ever. And he's like, yeah, yeah. Do bodybuilding for 10 years. And people were like, no, that's wrong. It's like, no, no, it's kind of right. So I believe in that a lot.

Starting point is 00:11:28 And then the other thing about bodybuilding is that there's a mind-muscle connection. Arnold talked about it. It's like learning how to actually control your muscles with your brain, like motor control. You just learn it. And I learned it through bodybuilding reps, but I also learned it through flexing in the mirror. I'm like a teenager. I'm like, how do I flex those upper back muscles? I learned how to basically flex my rhomboids.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Most people are like, what's a rhomboid? They have no idea. You're like, okay, let's go do this exercise. Let's go do a pull-up. Let's get your upper back. Let's get your shoulders to depress before you pull with your arms. They're like, what are you talking about? It's like, I'm like, I get that.

Starting point is 00:12:09 I know how to move those things because I was trying to do a rear, you know, double bicep and figure out how to make it look cool in the mirror. Right. So there's a, there's such beauty in, in taking pieces of that world. Be like, oh, that's how it makes people actually understand their bodies better.

Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Bite: Why Crossfitters Should Incorporate Bodybuilding Movements ft. Marcus Filly

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