Tyler Marx, from CoreXcell Joins Us for Episode #71
Tyler Marx is an athlete and strength coach, working CoreXcell Sports Training in Pennsylvania. Their gym is deep in the heart of wrestling country and Tyler helps some of the best wrestlers in the world prepare for competition. He goes into depth about their training philosophy, how they assess, and train athletes that walk through their doors.
Tyler Marx was a two sport athlete, Wrestling and playing Football at the College level. He studied Athletic Training at King’s College and continues to educate himself on the latest practices of injury rehabilitation and prevention. Having injured himself multiple times throughout his career, he enforces the importance of taking care of your body on and off the field to athletes and adults of all ages. He is also a Certified Personal Trainer and runs the Adult Fitness Training Program within the CoreXcell facility. He is an ambassador for Lululemon Athletica and runs fitness classes for their events. Tyler has developed a Fitness Program for the U.S Air Marshalls. He has also developed a Wrestling specific workout program with Former Lehigh University NCAA Wrestling National Champion, Zachery Rey and University of Maryland Runner-up, Jimmy Sheptock. Tyler continues to make connections with coaches using CoreXcell Mobile, which allows him to bring workouts to their practice facilities.
Follow Tyler Online:
Instagram: @_trademarx_
Twitter: @tmarxxx
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tyler.marx.90
Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Tyler Marx
Interview with the strength and conditioning coach from CoreXcell Tyler Marx to talk about his coaching methods
Corey Beasley [00:00:01]: Hey guys, is Corey Beasley with fight camp conditioning and I’m on the phone with the strength coach Tyler Marx. Tyler, how you doing?
Tyler Marx [00:00:07]: Good man. How are you? Glad to be on the air.
Corey Beasley [00:00:10]: Yeah, absolutely man. I appreciate you taking the time to join us, Tyler, for everybody listening and give them a little two sense of who you are and what you do?
Tyler Marx [00:00:18]: So I’m Tyler Marx with a CoreXcell sports training. We’re located in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, right by Allentown. We train athletes of all ages, all levels from middle school level to professional level work with wide range of different athletes. We’re a private training facility. And what we do is we bring in an athlete, find out where they are structurally, athletically, and then we train them and we keep testing them along the way. And we can get into different concepts and stuff like that, but we’re based on just primarily getting results. And what we do is we study with some of the top guys, top trainers in the country, in the world put together a pretty cool program that I like to share more about with you.
Corey Beasley [00:01:12]: Cool. So Tyler, when did you get you start strength and conditioning? How’d you get started?
Tyler Marx [00:01:19]: Actually, it goes all the way back through our eyes all into like my middle school, high school era. When I started training myself under my coaches and actually the company I worked for was around back then. So I actually worked out at CoreXcell as an athlete. So I really saw results in myself with this company. And that started the whole passion for it, then obviously I went through sports and went to school for athletic training though. So I’ve played football and I wrestled in high school for North Hampton high school. I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with we’re mostly known for our wrestling. And then I went on to college and actually studied athletic training, played football there, had my third knee surgery in college as a 19 year old. I had three surgeries, so that was terrible, actually had to throw in the towel. And that was quite the process for me. And accepting that was kind of my identity. And how I’m kind of giving back now is I took an internship with coreXcell and from there I’m able to give back to the athletes and almost live through them, but help them develop and prevent injuries. I take a huge stance on preventative exercises and also do some rehabilitation as well. So I’ve been with CoreXcell for almost four years now. So I really found myself a job that I love. I don’t really feel like I work at all, I’m just really just giving back and doing what I love. So it’s definitely a blessing to be doing what I’m doing basically that’s where I’m at.
Corey Beasley [00:03:24]: Yeah. So I mean, I would imagine that any athlete, whether they used to be in compete or what do they still do? I mean, the stuff that you’re talking about going through major, major surgeries and overcoming is just part of the sport. I don’t know too many athletes that haven’t gone through that and I know it’s a lot of the experiences, I had a couple of kids that come through and they asked me to like, coach how the hell do you know all this, how to fix all this stuff? And I’m like, well, my dumb ass wrecked my body when I was young. And because I couldn’t not be active, I had to figure out a way to get out of it. And fix myself so a lot of it’s just been putting myself back together and over the years, just helping other people along the way. So I mean, honestly I think it’s probably a blessing in disguise for you.
Tyler Marx [00:04:21]: Yeah, it definitely is. And at the time, obviously I didn’t view it like that, I thought the world was over, but now looking back I’m glad I went through all that pain because it grew me as a person with character and stuff and I’m able to now apply that all those life lessons and maybe steer these kids into maybe not hitting their head on that same type of injuries and stuff like that. So through my own research and developing the types of rehab protocol that I find that to be the most effective. It’s definitely awesome and work with a lot of kids and implement a lot of it, even if they’re not injured, just preventative exercises for them to keep from getting injured.
Corey Beasley [00:05:08]: Yeah, absolutely. So, Tyler, you went through your internship, what other kind of places have you studied or people have you talked with or gone to different courses and stuff, what kind of stuff have you done?
Tyler Marx [00:05:23]: Actually CoreXcell. We actually do our own certifications actually. So we certify other trainers, we’ve done in the past. So I actually went through the certification through CoreXcell certified you can say so. And other than that, I mean within being here, there’s been trainers that, I’ve been studying under now there’s four main trainers that kind of make up our programming that I studied for and it’s Mark Marinovich. I’m sure if people in the sports training industry, they know that name from, he’s trained Troy Polamalu and athletes like that. And buddy Morris he was a strength and conditioning coach and now he’s with the Cardinals. So NFL and then we have Louie Simmons at Westside barbell. I mean, those guys they kill it with getting serious strength gains with their power lifters. And we don’t use all of these different trainers and just go directly on their protocol on what their beliefs are. We take, basically the strength from those guys. And then we put it into one program. That’s the unified method. And there’s also Charlie, Francis big track training coach. So basically, taking all different aspects from those trainers and putting it together into warms the unified method CoreXcell programming. And we’re actually coming out with a book pretty soon. Just the explaining for anyone that wants, it’s called the practical applications of advanced training methods. And it’s called the unified method.
Corey Beasley [00:07:28]: Very cool man. Now I know you work with a lot of different young wrestlers that are coming into your place as well as some guys that are pretty advanced in that world too as well, right?
Tyler Marx [00:07:45]: Some local guys, this Lehigh Valley, if anyone knows like Pennsylvania wrestling, they know, like, we have Valley wrestling is top notch you got people from all over the country. They just had this pit classic that they do. They have people from all over the country wrestling just PA wrestlers and just how strong the even the state tournament is here comparable to a national level tournament. But some local guys, some local high school guys I’ve worked with, I worked with North Hampton high school. I worked with our team this past summer and Eastern wrestling, a bunch of different schools around the area, some individuals coming from. And then also, you have some of your well known guys like Zachery Rey with team USA. He wrestles for team USA 4:10 AM champ, he won a national championship for Lehigh university his junior year. And then senior year he was a runner up, so two times finalist wrestle at the world level. And we’ll be wrestling up here in Vegas pretty soon. So actually today Joey McKenna, I don’t know if you know that name from a Stanford. He was in here today working out with me. It was kind of nice having him, Zachery Rey brought him in. That was nice working with him and then, Daniel from Lehigh who just a won the national title, what a great performance. He had a great tournament. He has worked with him a little bit. So my passion for wrestling is definitely there because I was a wrestler and it’s coming back around and I’m able to give back to them, the community around here.
Corey Beasley [00:10:03]: Very cool. Now, Tyler, when these guys walk in the door, what’s a typical workout look like?
Tyler Marx [00:10:13]: So first and foremost, like I’ll actually set aside a time to just evaluate them as athletes, just almost as a structure. I kind of looked at each athlete as like, almost like, think of it as like a building, like, start from the foundation and then we’ll build upon that. Like, where are their deficiencies, where their weaknesses and a lot of that comes from their stabilizing muscles, like, their core, their heads, their shoulders really looking at that and that’s just telltale, on what could be future potential injuries or have they been an injury or what is it from that type of aspect and approach that I’ll take. So basically do a test on their core, low back, the strength level is. Before that, actually we’re going to take a look at their posture too, because if someone’s out of alignment and they go, that could be a very big, a blockade to getting good results without getting injured. So we’ll take a look at their posture, their core strength and all their stabilizes a hip growing, hip flexor, Glute muscles, see where they’re activating, see where they’re kind of maybe they’re misfiring and then get into their flexibility tests. I mean, that’s a huge factor. And then from there we’ll do actually do a vertical jump just to test raw athleticism or basically through, like a combine testing. So the vertical broad jump, five, 10, five. We’ll give them a baseline test and see where they’re at and we’ll put together a program for them. And each session is two hours long we’re starting from the ground up. So the first thing when they walk in, you’ll have our own program on a computer and we’ll take them through all that. But they’re doing, our warm-up we call it the structural foundation warm up. I mean, that’s all of your core exercises really just activating all your stabilizer muscles. That way when you go throughout your workout, they’re activated, they’re firing properly, and then we can get build real solid muscle with them. And then from there we’ll do some explosive jumping maybe, depending on the day, maybe we’ll do some footwork, work on some agility or some balance exercises. And with each of these aspects, we have like hundreds of variations that we go through. But there’s always a base layer the most important bread and butter exercises that we always make sure that we maximize to an optimal level. And then from there, then we get them and do some different variations. But and then obviously after that, then we’ll get into the listing. So whether it’s a upper day or lower day, that’s kind of how we split it up. And then we have upper heavy, and then we have the upper speed, which is later in the week. And then we’ll do a lower heavy in our lower speed and obviously the volume and the, and the reps and sets are different on those. So that way we can really build some explosiveness with our athletes. And then within, obviously they get into their auxiliaries and stuff like that. And that’s where we work in some of the injury prevention exercises. Whether they’re stretching and they’re doing maybe some different rolling self-massage and if they’re tightened certain areas and corrective exercises and then we’ll get into their sprinting and conditioning at the end. So athletes coming in here for two hours and we’re really pushing them properly with the right type of exercise to make sure that they’re staying structurally sound. But also, we’re building this close in this and everything’s down to the science we’ve done, CoreXcell 15 years of research and developing and finding the best method to really maximize an potential.
Corey Beasley [00:14:53]: Very cool. So are typically, are you got athletes if you’re doing a four day split those guys are coming in four days a week?
Tyler Marx [00:15:01]: Ideally. I mean, some maybe don’t have the time for that. But like our professional level guys, I also I want to drop another name that everyone should look out for if they don’t already know of him and is a prime example of what our program really can help an athlete with is Nick Sharga with temple football. He’s is there fullback number four really had to sign out for years. And this year is he going to really make some noise and it’s all about, it’s all about keeping them healthy and you know, watching them shine. I mean, any athlete like, like Nick Sharga is how we can get great results because just his characteristics, he’s a very humble very silent leader, very hardworking he’s one that I look up to. Like if you said jump, he says how high, a lot of wrestlers have that, which is why I really love working with wrestlers just that sport, you need that discipline, to be able to get to that next level and compete at that level.
Corey Beasley [00:16:36]: Well, honestly, when you find guys like that, it makes our job easy, right? Because when you coach long enough you realize that the like, I don’t know, me personally, I wrote an article a couple of years back and it was talking about consistency and if you miss one, let’s just say I sign up, I’m going to go work out with Tyler in Pennsylvania and I got all these goals and all these things I want to do, but I missed one session a week. Didn’t seem like much, Hey, I’m going to, I’m still going to get three sessions in, but I missed one session. If I do that every single week for a year, let’s say I take two weeks off, I’m at 50 workouts that I missed 50 workouts with Tyler, I can do amazing things in 50 workouts. That doesn’t seem like much in the small in the short term. Now, you did that for three, four, five years through high school. You do that for three, four years in college. And it really honestly becomes blatantly obvious why some people do incredibly well and some people get their ass kicked, and they do that with the strength side. They do it with the skill side. They do it with their food, they do it with their sleep become incredibly inconsistent and all these things. Then it spirals and it just, it balloons into poor results and it is, it’s a huge deal. So when you get guys like that, it’s a blessing man.
Tyler Marx [00:18:02]: Yeah. And then it’s more realistic to let’s I mean awesome stories of certain athletic processes and progress through them coming here, some people ask like, how can your training really benefit me or my son or whoever. And obviously they need those two characteristics, but I try to tell people stories of athletes who maybe they were sitting on the bench they weren’t playing much or maybe they got in sometimes but they come do like a whole off season with us let’s say six months. And all of a sudden they’re standing out they’re starting to play more. They come back another year, after that year, we have a base with them now. Then we start to really pick them out and now they’re hanging with the stars, they’re hanging with the other guys and it’s like, it seems like a stretch to say that, but most ideally situation is, well, I’m talking about this is like, you have guys like Nick Sharga who are just like I said, you say jump, they say how high with diet almost just as important I think if not more important is, is how they eat. You have your freakish athletes they’re just naturally talented they were born to be great. Like I said, really helping an athlete maybe they’re didn’t have great genetics and they’re not like naturally gifted. But they want to work, they want to get better. And those stories are really, how we get more business, those results are just how what makes my job more fun and more gratifying. But we can literally, we can change and change people’s lives in a sense and I’ve seen it happen many times where kids will be like before they leave, they go on their, their season or maybe they come back or maybe after a game they’re like, they come to you and get real emotional and like, thank you so much. Like, they cry like, Oh wow, they really thankful. And that’s a good stuff right there.
Corey Beasley [00:20:48]: Well, good stuff man. So Tyler, for anybody listening and wanting to learn more about your guys’ program what’s the best way for them to learn more?
Tyler Marx [00:20:57]: I’m just pretty simple enough they can go to CoreXcell.com. Also we have an Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that. So Twitter is just @CoreXcell spelled just like that. And then Instagram’s going to be CoreXcell_sports_training. And then my personal Instagram, actually I do some pretty cool stuff on their crazy workouts is a corefit_Marx.
Corey Beasley [00:21:38]: Cool. Well guys, I’ll definitely put those links down below, but yeah. Tyler, thank you so much for sharing with us, man. It sounds like you guys are doing some great stuff out there in Pennsylvania and we look forward to watching and seeing what you’ve got coming up in the near future.
Tyler Marx [00:21:54]: Thanks a lot. Glad to be on the air.