Episode #61 with Fitness Trainer and Instructor, Andrew Read

September 08, 2021

I’ll be frank. Most trainers are incompetent at best and dangerous at worst. Their idea of training is to make you sore and sweaty. If you like that idea then go stand in a sauna and I will happily hit you with a bat. If you’d actually like to reclaim that same playful athleticism you had as a child then come see us. We advocate movement, strength and endurance work – if you think being in shape is only about standing still and lifting weights then you have fitness all wrong. Movement is the essence of life – it fixes poor movement and strengthens and protects the body. When we stop moving we die.

-Andrew Read

Why Should You Listen to Andrew:

Master RKC (Russian Kettlebell Certified instructor – the only Australian ever promoted to this level).
Certified Kettlebell Functional Movement Specialist
Certified Indian Club Specialist
National Director Primal Move
Qualified Olympic and Power Coach through the Australian Weightlifting Federation
Ironman Triathlete
Author for – Blitz, Ultrafit, Inside MMA, International Kickboxer, Oxygen and Breaking Muscle.
Lectured in Australia, USA, China and Korea.

Check out more great info from Andrew here: ReadPT.com

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Andrew Read

Interview with Fitness Trainer and Instructor, Andrew Read talking about coaching methods and dealing with athletes

Corey Beasley [00:00:01]: Hey guys, is Corey Beasley with fight camp conditioning. I’m on the phone here with Andrew Read. Andrew, how are you doing?

Andrew Read [00:00:07]:Very well. Thanks Corey. How are you?

Corey Beasley [00:00:09]: I’m doing great man. Thanks for joining. Andrew is all the way on the other side of the world and Australia, so we appreciate you taking the time and sharing some of your stuff with us.

Andrew Read [00:00:19]:Yeah, hopefully you won’t need to translate it from my Australian isms.

Corey Beasley [00:00:24]: I’m sure we’ll be all right. But Andrew, give everybody a little two sense of who you are and what you do?

Andrew Read [00:00:30]:Well, because on a fight show let’s see. My parents thought I was an unruly child, so they sent me to Taekwondo when I was 10. It’s funny because that sounds embarrassing now. But back then, I mean, there was Taekwondo or karate those were the choices. So I did Taekwondo. I was okay at that. I nearly made the Olympics in 1988 when I was 17. It was in Seoul. So the Daimler sport, we sent three guys we sent a light, a middle and the heavyweight and I came runner up in the selection trials as a white. So I nearly got an Olympic spot. But then Taekwondo got funding because it became a full sport and it was going to be a full sport for the first time of the Sydney Olympics, which meant that Australia got entry into every event if they wanted it. And all of a sudden, all these guys who I mean we don’t have NFL, but we have rugby and AFL and stuff that is played professionally. So they had guys that maybe had just missed these highest tier professional sports looking around going, well, geez, I can get a black belt in this thing in two or three years and I could make the Olympics for this. And all of a sudden the quality of athletes went from recreational athletes like me to serious, amazing, nearly the top percentage of athletes in the country doing Taekwondo. And all of a sudden my competition results weren’t so good. So I started looking at more serious martial arts. I looked at Wing chun, I looked at the Kito, I did some Thai boxing and along the way had been lifting weights, started lifting weights when I was 13 because I was kind of skinny as a kid and went through puberty, a little light. So I was always trying to keep up with the other kids I was playing sport against or completely in Taekwondo against, because I realized I wasn’t strong enough. Obviously the only information around back then was bodybuilding stuff and there was no internet. So it’s impossible to get any sport training information unless you were lucky enough to be good enough to actually be in one of these national programs. We’d end up with like a good coach in charge of you. When I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine brought back to Australia, her Canadian boyfriend. So she’d been living overseas, brought this guy back. He and I hit it off. I was doing some Kung Fu through at the time and he was like, I want get back into martial arts. I said, well, you don’t come and do Kung Fu. And he’s built like a wrestlers. He’s got these tiny little T-Rex arms. He looks terrible when he punks his stuff. And he said, well, this is shit. And I said, I want to do some like wrestling or something. I said, well, there’s this guy over the other side of town, his name is John Wolfer BJJ aficionados was one of the dirty dozen, was one of the first 12 black books and the shadows made who weren’t Brazilian. Wow. He’s kind of a big, he’s kind of a big deal. He was teaching jiu jitsu, but as part of his own like shoot fighting curriculum. And so my friend go and trained with him and he said, this is fantastic. You have to come. And my first night there, I saw all these guys that I knew from Taekwondo who were always better than me and he kicks my ass for years and years competing. And I was like, well, if all these guys are here, they must be something to this. And like most people in their first night at jiu jitsu I got embarrassed here I was thinking I had a fight, whatever I got snapped up and down the mat, like just horrendously beaten nonstop all night long and was like this is pretty cool. And everyone’s first night at jiu jitsu, right? What it feel like I was drowning.

Corey Beasley [00:04:20]: I got choked up little teeny Japanese chick for a month and a half.

Andrew Read [00:04:24]:So there you go you know, it works right. And so you do all that. And UFC was coming out and so did some jiu jitsu and I got my first job in a gym. So I think I was I like, like 22 or 23, I think when I started working in the gym and I had applied to this one gym like three, four times and they knocked me back. I was really trying to work for them because I had more than one gym. So back then there were in Australia, no big gym chains, no one had multiple places. This guy, he’s one of the few places that owned more than one gym. So you had a few around town and I thought, well there’s actually a potential here to like there’s more to the business. And maybe I could end up running one of these gyms or whatever. And he hired me and within about like a month or two months, I was head of the PT program that they had just set up. And I went from zero clients to like about 60 hours of PT in the space of about three months. And we went from three trainers and one sales person to three sales people and something like 3000 members. Liked the gym just exploded. This guy, he super good first boss to have, he was one of the first guys to see spinning. And again, it’s one of those scenes you laugh and you’re like, it’s not very functional. Spinning was one of the biggest trainings ever in the fitness industry. He recognized this thing called body pumps. So Liz meals which is a New Zealand company, so they’re huge in Australia, had a single body pump you stand in the Rose room, you’re lifting little weights for long periods of time to rise you soundtrack and instructor at the front telling you to feel the burn and all that stuff. It’s incredibly popular in Australia. It’s been around for like 20 years and they’re still the most attended classes in any gym in Australia. So he had one of the first ever pump classes was held in his gym and his aerobics instructors were at the very first pump instructor workshops. I mean, he just really good at spotting trends and things like that. So great guy to work for. And then you kind of fast forward to now. So I’ve done martial arts since I was 10. I’m 45. I’ve been lifting weights since I was 13. Being training people since I was 25 and somewhere along the lines that all kind of met. A friend of mine whose name is Sophie Drysdale, obviously married Robert Drysdale. I got her into jiu jitsu in the first place. So that’s kind of be entertaining as a story. And when she comes back to Australia, I’ll do some stuff with her sometimes I’ve trained, Robert Drysdale when they were still together a couple of times. Have worked with weirdly my mother who’s not into jiu jitsu, but she’s actually now a world record holder and world champion in the dead, lifted 75 years old. So at 75 years old, 51 kilos. She’s got an 85 kilos best competition lifts, which was at the world champs in Baton Rouge last year, which beat her own world record by two and a half kilos. So I’m like most trainers quite a big variety of people and that kind of gets us to where we are now.

Corey Beasley [00:07:59]: You didn’t allude to it as well, but you have a pretty extensive history in the military as well?

Andrew Read [00:08:06]:A little bit. It’s now something that was nearly 20 years ago and it was also it didn’t count all the guys doesn’t in their forties or in an older will remember there was a time where you wouldn’t get deployed overseas or if you’re in the military now you’re going overseas for sure. I never been shot at, I’ve never shot at anyone. I’ve never been overseas with the military the only thing I’ve fired roughly near someone is blanks. I generally don’t talk about it a huge amount, although it kind of colors everything. And certainly when you’ve been through some selection things, it makes everything else seem kind of easy, like when I go along to something people like, Oh my God, like that was the hottest thing ever. Like that one hour workout. Are you kidding me? Or I remember and this is no slight on Jim Jones, I’ve done all of their courses. I thought some of them were pretty good. So I did their level three course, which is like a week-long and they train twice a day I was actually going to sealFit Kokoro camp the following weekend. So I used advanced Jim Jones seminar as my tapering. That’s how stupid I was. And it’s a pretty state hill. Like it goes up, I think its 2000 feet in a mile. So it’s like a 20% gradient or something. It’s pretty quick and takes about 45 minutes to walk up. So we walked two more miles. We walked up in a mile down the whole thing, took like two hours and these guys were wiped out for the rest of the day cause some of them massive. They’re like a hundred and 10 kilos. They’re like 220, 240, something like that. They’re not designed to carry their weight for long periods of time. I did it and I’m like, I’m going to need to train again later today because they haven’t really done anything much. We just went for a walk for two miles. So when you bring the military and someone goes, okay, we’re going to walk 30 kilometers with our 50 kilo pack plus a rifle. All right. It puts it in perspective.

Corey Beasley [00:10:29]: I think it’s there’s a lot of stuff that’s out there. There’s a lot of information like you alluded to before. And like we were talking about before we even started recording, we were talking about when you go to fitness shows and stuff like that and it’s still dominated by bodybuilding and supplements, and some of the people talking about working out, even if you are a jiu jitsu guy or MMA fighter or whatever, there’s a huge gap between what athletes do or should be doing and what a lot of times they are doing right?

Andrew Read [00:11:03]:I’m going to say social media has been enormously helpful. Like the internet has been fantastic for getting information out. You can find if you look in the right places, great information, but you can also accidentally find the wrong information. And the other part of it is, so if I’m training, I don’t know someone for a UFC fight. Like a big fight. There’s lots of money on the line. Maybe it’s a title fight or whatever. People forget that before that final anaerobic training phase that they’re in, like really putting the page like the full stop on their fitness. There was a ton of base building, basic strengthening and aerobic work before that. They forget all that because they don’t see it. So what you see only the crazy anaerobic stuff and be like, I’m going to train like that five days a week. All right, let’s see how long that last they’d burnt out within like a month maybe. And then the other part is if I’m the coach or the manager or even the athlete, I’m like, do I really want to show people the best? Do I really want to show them like the secret of my program or I’m going to just put some crazy shit up and maybe send people in the wrong direction. So then when it comes to competition time, I can crush them because they wasted their time on like single leg bosses, squats or some bullshit instead of actually just squatting heavy.

Corey Beasley [00:12:30]: So I mean so if somebody comes and sees you. The guy says, okay, I got a fight coming up or jiu jitsu tournament, whatever it may be. And they come and see you for the first time. Where do you kind of start with that guy?

Andrew Read [00:12:46]:Where they hurt? When you’re dealing with combat sport guys, I mean that’s the first thing is what hurts right now and it’s a rotating thing like you can, my neck is good today, but my fingers is shit, I can’t hang onto anything. Well we can, let’s get some stuff we can do that’s the first thing after we get past that discussion, if it really is the first time we’ll do FNS and we do FMS because I mean I worked for them and I believe in the system, but if it wasn’t that, I’ll do some other kind of movement screen. I would just check out what they can and can’t do, like show me your squat. Show me how you dead lift, what exercise are you familiar with? So we can start crafting a program. I tend not to do anything super complicated in training anyway. But my belief is that while we need some movement complexity, the martial arts guys are getting it from the training because they’re moving in so many different ways with such speed and power, very different, I don’t know, like my 35 year old office worker who comes in and other than sit still all day, they need to move in a bunch of different ways. So maybe we need to do some a license little sprint drills or some kinds of staff or maybe you need to do some cooling variations like you might see from Goldman or either portal or something like that. Because I need that. But the martial arts guys, where are you hurt? What can you do right now? And then let’s start from there. And most of it ends up looking really simple because the three things I think really affect people mentally and fight these one. And I think you get it more in jiu jitsu. So when you tie up with someone for the first time and like you grabbed them or they grab you and you can’t break the grip, you first thing is fuck. Like there’s some reflex now brain when you can break grips, you’re like, Oh shit, I’m in trouble now. And actually my friend Sophie, so she was an elite gymnast before she got into jiu jitsu I mean early on like white, blue and purple belt. You’d see her tie up with these girls and they’re all the same weight and they’re all athletic. But she tied up with them and you’d see the look on their face. If it was the first time they wrestled or like, fuck, I’m wrestling a guy because she’s so much stronger than them. She basically just grab them and throw them face first into the ground. So that’s the first thing is maximum strength. Not only does it dictate fights, but it can mess with people’s heads straight away because already in the first five seconds you’ve beaten them. Because now they’re fearful. And then the second thing is max strength is going to run out. If you’re in a MMA match, you got 15 minutes. If you’re in a jiu jitsu match, you’ve got a minimum of five and a maximum of 10 continuous minutes to go for, if you’re a wrestler is it two to three minutes, if you Judo at five, you kind of max strength your way through that. You need some conditioning. So fights are one late if it’s even on fitness. So you’ve got to have some fitness there. And most people, because of the way they built, we’ll have a disposition towards one or the other. Like you’ll get that guy he used crazy strong and so he focuses on the straight stuff because of course he wants to do this thing that he’s good at and then you’ll have the person who is more like me. I’m far more strengthened based on, I’m just not a very be strong guy. And all the things I’m good at. Like, let’s go for a five day run, let’s go for a 1500 meter swim. Like all that kind of stuff. I’m good at that. But so for me, instead of doing more fitness stuff, let’s do more strength stuff. You need more strength and so you’ve got to figure out the person’s strengths and weaknesses. And so that should be part of your assessment as well when they first come in.

Corey Beasley [00:16:43]: Yeah. Because I think that’s a big misconception or not misconception, but just the thing that people just completely screw up.

Andrew Read [00:16:52]:The idea that there’s like, a jiu jitsu program, there’s an MMA program. No, there’s a program for that guy right now. And people get tied into their, while the programs is this, he’s got a fucking spreadsheet man where that guy is, he’s flesh and bones. He’s his physical state changes every day based on what he did the day before. And so MMA guys, it may change because you had a different training session two hours ago. So forget your play. You’ve got to be comfortable with, says today’s max bench press in front squat Chuck that out. Because what that guy needs right now is some TLC and maybe we’re going to do some crawling and some foam rolling and some farmers walks. Because that’s all we can actually deal with.

Corey Beasley [00:17:37]: Now, from an assessment standpoint, day to day. Is most of the day to day assessment start just talking with those guys or do you have any other thing?

Andrew Read [00:17:47]:Absolutely and I like telling people my number one coaching towards my eyeball, like for kids and you know like you train people, you spend a lot of time with them. I have customers that I sometimes see more than my partner, my partner is a firefighter so I might go like two or three days without seeing my partner based on our own work schedules. So I’ve got customers that are coming in training with me five to 10 times a week. In some cases I’m seeing them twice a day. So I get to know them and physically I can recognize, Hey, that guy’s walk and really tired. He’s all slouched over like he’s already exhausted just sort of grabbing and his elbow a couple of times while he was warming up you got to be watching them all the time because a good athlete won’t tell you when they’re hurt because a good athlete wants to compete. A good athlete wants to train, they want to push. In a lot of sense it’s like Icarus. Like they just want to push higher and higher and harder and harder. Half your job is holding them back half your job, its okay to have an easy session today and sometimes fighters and probably endurance people are in the same boat because the endurance guys have got, I mean it’s funny, everyone thinks like marathon runners a week. I mean, if you hang out with endurance people, they are bat shit crazy and hard as nails because the sport depend on pain tolerance. So they’ll say, no, its okay or when I warm up it goes away. Well maybe we should actually let it go away full stop rather than warm up and hope it goes away. So half the job is pulling them back so they can have a better session later on or knowing, Hey, this session today, it is being like a priority. But I’ve got one later in the week I want to do with you. That absolutely is. So let’s kind of keep our bullets in check and we’ll save them for when we need them.

Corey Beasley [00:19:45]: Now you’ve been doing this for a long time. From your perspective what are some of the places that you’ve learned or courses that you’ve been through that really had a huge impact on the way that you think, the way that you train on the way that you train other people? I mean, because you’ve probably been through a lot of different courses and workshops and programs and stuff.

Andrew Read [00:20:11]:Yeah. And as I’ve gotten older, I guess it’s changed a little bit more. I mean, my focus now is on, I’d like to be able to do jiu jitsu for, I mean I’m 45, I’d like to still be going at 65. So how I view training is quite different. I mean I went to masters worlds last year, so it’s not like I’m sitting in the corner twiddling my thumbs. I mean, I still am out there trying as hard as I can, but sometimes you’ve got to know when to back off. But in terms of training, let’s see. I was really lucky early on I got exposed to this guy called Ian King. So Ian King is, he’s a bit of a legend in strength conditioning, may be the most ripped off guy in strength and conditioning, the rep tempo stuff, as much as people sort of attribute it to Charles Poliquin, Ian King was actually involved in that as well. They kind of did it together and then, because Charles had a bigger profile, he just started taking the credit for it. Single leg training being Ian King is the guy who made that popular. So within, like probably the first two years of working, I can’t even remember how, but I ended up at a workshop that he was running and just thought, well, this is fantastic. And so that changed a lot of stuff for me. And what a surprise after I’d been exposed to one of the guys who was like the best athletic trainers in the world, all of a sudden my clients at the gym started getting results through the roof and actually through him. So at the same workshop I met guys who were like absolute top level sports strength conditioning coaches here. As I started doing internships and stuff like that. So as we football teams, it was with what’s called the OIP, the Olympic athlete program. So starting to see, Hey, this is what the Taekwondo you guys are doing, this is what the Judo guys are doing. I had junior triathlon, I had swimmers and tennis players. And so I started seeing like some, like what the top people were doing. Those we have a grand running meet here, so you get some hot runners it, and there was Cathy Freeman who won the Sydney gold for the 400. There was the girl who got the silver in the same race. It was Maurice greene, Donovan Bailey, like in the weight room, all of the one time, these absolute top of the heap sprinters. So I got to watch Ram train. So Ian King that was super helpful. More recently I went to the RKC before it got super culty and weird and kind of went off the deep end. And the thing I really like about the RKC obviously not all the culty stuff, but just the reminder that you can go back to basics and get great results from basics. And for many people there is some solid queuing involved. Most coaches, I think most trainers don’t really understand the exercises very well because the industry moves so fast purchase we’ll do like 10 reps or something and think they’ve mastered it. So the RKC forces you to stick with a few things and get much better than, so the coaches end up with a better understanding. I mean, imagine going to jiu jitsu only guy teaching your jiu jitsu class has been doing jiu jitsu for a year and that’s the boat most people in when it comes to personal training. They’ve got a one year trainer showing you how to deal with something as complex as the human body. It’s probably a little bit more complicated than a year’s worth of practice.

Corey Beasley [00:23:41]: I mean, looking back at even coming to stuff that I used to do five, 10 years ago is it’s completely changed.

Andrew Read [00:23:47]:I haven’t changed that much. And if I look back over the very early years, the first two or three years, but once I started going to these, Ian kind and then through the internship program, my stuff hasn’t changed that much because back then, so Paul Chek, who people probably don’t even know who he is, but Paul Chek is the guy who made those big round balls in the gym, popular. If it wasn’t for him, they would run there. And going even further back when we had VHS video would always internally at one of those places, my first day was, Hey, watch this series that Paul Chek has put together on the back. It was like eight videos or something that were two hours each. So I spent like three whole days watching these things. And he was into a single limb training and Ian King was in the single limb training. So all that one leg training. I’ve been doing that for 20 years. So when I see now guys to man, well it’s functional and we’re doing single limb training and we do this and we do that. I’m like, you guys are 20 years behind. So I’m lucky that I was just in the right place at the right time. I got exposed to some really good people and the stuff that now has been tried and tested enough to know that, yeah, this is actually a really smart way to go. It was the right stuff. I didn’t waste my time on crap basically. Right. And then the FMS, the FMS has been a really neat way as a trainer and people, I think make a mistake. They think the goal is to be stuck in this kind of permanent corrective phase where we’re constantly going to be working with bands. And doing this other stuff. And the goal of the FMS is to train, make sure you don’t have any restrictions that are going to cause injury and then let’s train. And so again like the RKC which was a reminder for quality and a return to basics. The FMS is really no difference. It’s a focus on quality, the focus on injury prevention, which for guys who are getting punched in the face constantly for fun they’re already at risk the body’s under a huge amount of stress. So sometimes it allows you to have a conversation with you and said, Hey look man, you can only absorb so much stress in your given time. Even you’ve done 10 rounds of sparring today, your wife has been yelling at you, you’re borderline about to lose your job because you barely been there getting ready for a fight. And I know you want to hit it hard in the gym, but that’s actually the worst thing for you right now. So we’re going to do this other thing over here. That’s a recovery session. So we don’t give up the rest of the week just because you push hard now because maybe it’s Wednesday or something and you’re feeling good but styling get tired and you push now and now you’ve wiped out the rest of the weekend, Thursday, Friday, Sunday training this shit. Maybe we just take it really easy right now and you bounce back and you have a good first day Friday, Saturday. So we give a one session to maybe gain back six or seven. That seems like a really good thing to me. And so the FMS is just a really good lens to allow me to do that and it allows me to get to know someone’s body instantly in the first session in 10 minutes to the same sort of degree that might normally take two to three weeks of training someone because you’ll eventually see all the same stuff. It just isolate it and reduce the distraction. So you can instantly go, this person’s not good at that. Therefore their program needs to have this stuff in it. And you can figure out how to write that program, which is what I was talking about. You don’t have a jiu jitsu program, you have a program for this person at this time.

Corey Beasley [00:27:34]: So from your perspective, you 45 years old, you still compete in jiu jitsu. What does your week look like for you?

Andrew Read [00:27:44]:My week I do jiu jitsu three or four times a week. So I go Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, January. And I try to get him Friday as well. Friday is kind of a swing day because there are times where I really want to go but either A, I need to work. So there’s some work stuff that needs tying up or B, I know that if I train Friday I won’t get a good session Saturday night. And because of as a trainer I’m busy in the morning, I’m busy at night when most classes are so I can train a lunchtime and that’s great because not that long ago places didn’t have a lunch time classes. But the people that generally go to lunchtime classes at my club at least are not super high level. So the Saturday class is actually my chance to train with the best guys in my club. That’s the only time during the week I get this same. So Saturday is really important for me to get through because that’s the key session for me for the whole week with jiu jitsu. I do strength and conditioning. I do little bits four days a week for strength. At the moment I’m doing, I found this really cool pull up program called the Recon Ron program and it’s basically five sets every time you do pull ups and the first week is like six, five, five, four, three for the five sites. And then it’s like seven, six, five, four. It’s just that just bumps up slowly. By week 10 you should be able to get 20 in hang pull ups. So I just thought it’d be a fun thing to play around with for a while. So I do that four days a week. I do some more serious lifting along with that two days a week, which is probably like a front squat and bench press on one of the days and the other day’s dead lift and some kind of press as well. But it’s more likely like a kettlebell press or something like that. Like another head press. And I do some fitness stuff every day because and this is, I got this from Joel Jamieson, I went to his workshop like a year ago, two years ago, and I thought it was really A, because I have like a endurance banged to what I do anyway. And with the strengths coaches seem to think there’s some evil involved with cardio. Like if you do cardio, your handle explode or you’re magically lose all your strength or like just the shit about cardio makes you weak and all this kind of stuff. I mean, Hey, the Navy seals run. It doesn’t seem to make them weak worries for all time have run. But the coolest thing about Joel’s thing was that he tells people to do cardio. And one of the first things he said in his workshop was in his opinion that even the number one risk factor over the age of 44 for both men and women is a heart attack. And so if someone’s only come to training maybe like twice a week, the number one thing you can do for them is help them prevent having a heart attack, which means they’ve got to do some cardio. And if they kind of out of shape and they’re not very trained at cardio, that’s going to have to be steady state because you don’t want to give you relative beginner who’s out of shape and in their forties hard intervals as they tell you that. That’s just dumb. And now I’m in my forties I just remember that, Hey, I want to be playing this game for another 40 years. So my goal is to get to 50 in the same sort of shape I’m at 40 and get to 60, like I was at 50 and so on and so on. And as I get older, I am particularly with wrestling, I’m wrestling guys who like 25 to 30 years old, I’m really proud and I took a break for a little while because I was focused on work and stuff like that. I mean people who do jiu jitsu, know you tend to be in and out of it depending on various work situations. And I went back in October, 2015 and since that time I haven’t missed a single round a rolling once. And there were guys who were 50% younger than me that I’m training with and the only way to keep myself able to keep up and do round after round after round is cardio. That’s it. That’s the only thing that keeps you in the game. So I mean, I get feeling like you’re being muscled around. That might change, but I don’t feel like I’m weaker than everybody, but I can feel like, if I don’t keep up the cardio, they run over the top of me eventually.

Corey Beasley [00:32:19]: Do you think that stuff comes from, I mean, personally, if I had to think about it, a lot of the big traditional strength coaches are either power lifters or probably at least in the States or footballs, It’s tense five yards and out. They have to be violently explosive for a very short amount of time, which is just a different energy system and skillset then fighting or rolling or any of that stuff?

Andrew Read [00:32:49]:So if you’re a stand up fighter, like you’re a kick boxer, boxing guy, you’ll need to weigh, more aerobic than if you’re a grappler. If you’re a grappler, they’re far more anaerobic and strength base the matches are shorter, but grappling is just a much higher strength component. And then within that, and I actually was asking some friends, so I’ve got friends who are like, three times Judo Olympics, I’ve got another friend who went to the last Olympics as a wrestler. He unfortunately dislocated his elbow in his first match. Just a freak accident. So you went to a winter post and put his hand out and his elbow just popped out of place. And then I’ve got friends like my friend Sophie, she’s a world champion as a black belt in No-Gi. And she’s a Pan-Am champion in GI. I’ve got friends who’ve been to Abu Dhabi, like I’ve got this great range of friends who are grapplers in standup fighters and the standup guys didn’t say there’s anything specific that they needed, but they did know that you had to be super fit, stand up grapplers the judo guys and wrestlers have a bunch of specific strength exercises, particularly rotational stuff that they felt was really useful for them. And then the BJJ guys, they’re like, well, actually the most important thing is just to be genuinely strong and then get in heaps of rolling. So it was interesting the difference between the three main styles of fighting, if you want to call it that and how they both look at strength and conditioning because a lot of people would think it’s the same across the board, but the needs are very different. I think masters’ jiu jutsu was different again because the matches are shorter. So actually that conditioning and if you watched any of the masters matches, like Sal, he won with a broken arm and he’s division with [Inaudible 00:34:41]. So four and a half minutes and then a great judo through. Now he does have a black belt in judo, but if you’ve got a five minute match, and so there’s no time for stalling. And I need to see any the masses, black belts stall like you see in normal 10 minutes IBJJF and the conditioning ended up needing to be way more judo-based and you need to focus far more on the standup. There wasn’t as much pulling in the black goat masters is the reason most black belt events.

Corey Beasley [00:35:11]: Now I that when is the next master’s world I know there’s a huge is it the IBJJF worlds that are pan-AM’s that are coming up in March?

Andrew Read [00:35:26]:There’s the Europeans are on like right now. The masters’ worlds were in August solvers unit probably August again. There is Pans must be soon because worlds is June or July and then No-Gi worlds is like November or something.

Corey Beasley [00:35:52]: I always laugh because we were in Southern California and I’m like, I always laugh at the BJJ guys. I’m like, guys, it seems like you guys have worlds like every three months it’s like there’s always something going on here.

Andrew Read [00:36:04]:It’s not as bad as boxing, but I mean it is a little bit like everyone wants to be the boss of their own Federation. If you went to a good established karate school for instance, you’d see like a dozen black belts there. Most of jiu jitsu people get their black belt and they’re out the door and they’re starting their own club probably across the street. Jiu jitsu is just so different like just the way everyone’s mentality is different. And I don’t want to say loyalty, but there’s kind of used loyalty. Like the karate guys would never do that. But jiu jitus guys that’s normal.

Corey Beasley [00:36:46]: Yeah. I don’t know why that is. I think between trainers pretty similar maybe from my experience. In jiu jitsu guy, same. So Andrew, for everybody that’s been listening this long, do you have a lot of experience doing different things? As far as using your wisdom as the 45 year old guy and the back of the room that has all this stuff that he’s done wrong. What would you give a specific strength and conditioning coach as far as advice, who’s working with these athletes?

Andrew Read [00:37:25]:Do you know the joke about the old bull and the young bull? So the old bull and young bull standing on top of the Hill and they’re looking down on all these cows. The younger one goes, let’s run down there and fuck one of those cows and the old we’ll turn to him and say let’s walk down and fuck all the cows. And I mean that’s a secret to strengthen missing, right? Like don’t blow your load today because you’ve got to keep in mind, particularly if you’re a martial arts guy, like okay you want to train hard Monday? What’s that going to do to you on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. What’s that mean for your comp next week? I mean I’ve seen people have their comps the day before. I’ll just come in and roll white and then because they’ve had a couple of days easy. I mean, you know that feeling when you arrested finally because you been training like so much and you’re arrested and you coming, you feel like you can walk through walls and you feeling good. So you go and you go and next thing you know there’s nothing left and you come the day before in extreme cases one of my clients last year, not a fighter but like an iron man triathlete, she had an Ironman five weeks before. That’s how big a hole she dug for herself. So went out and had a 50 K trail race, which she won but, and won it by a mile. And next day like she actually got a staffing section in on bits of her face and for grapplers we were like, yes so doesn’t everyone get that? No, Runners don’t get staph infections. That’s a sign of, yeah, broken down her body was that she got a staph infection, not from having someone’s sweaty gay rubbed in their face, but just from how fucked up her system was. And then she just had her event five weeks too early. That’s all. So you have to take into account when you wrote the program, you can’t just go, well, we’re going to do strength on this day, we’re going to do this on this day, we’re going to blah. You need to watch the guy in front of you. If it’s an online system and your training and by remote you have to be in contact with them on a super regular basis. One of the guy I training in Scotland right now and you think he’s one of those guys like I’ve got these programmers and he’s like, well I want to run a sub 40 minute, 10 K, I want a 60 seconds freestanding handstand. I want to put on seven to eight kilo of muscle. I’m also going to do jiu jitsu twice a week. Tick-Box in four times. And he also does a traditional form of kung fu that he really likes. I’m going to teach that a couple of times a week. And I work full time and I have two young kids. And for most people I go, shut up and let’s be realistic with him because he is a total freak of a guy he’s at one in 10,000 kind of guy. He can actually accomplish all that. It’s possible. So we’re two months into this program, he’s about to tick off two tick off the handstands and the run very quickly and then we’ll get into the more serious stuff. But we talked to each other minimum every three days you got to monitor the fatigue and the stress. That’s the only thing and I’ve used like heart rate variability. I’ve used like resting pulse the eyeball test. I’ve used a whole bunch of things, but all comes down to the same thing. We need to make sure that you are receptive to training today. So it doesn’t matter what the program says to do. I want to know that you’re going to be okay. And I have no fear at all in heavily modifying and some days even checking out what the plan was to allow you to be in a more receptive state for the rest of the training. So I will give up today to gain back the rest of the week. And I think that’s like the coaches being tough or they helping their clients develop toughness and if they getting punched in the face for fun, they’re already tough enough. And then despite that and those people particularly need to be given permission to have an easy session and realize that longer term, this is actually helping them. So don’t be afraid to chuck the plan away and do something that is more useful on that day, but also means, if you have a client who’s a bit of a hypochondriac maybe hasn’t yet mentally developed. And I have a young guy right now, he’s a tennis player. He’s probably in that boat. You do have to be careful because you can easily be misled and give them an efficient, that actually used now too easy because they’ve told you they need an evening session. And what they really have said to you is, I’m lazy and I don’t want to train hard today.

Corey Beasley [00:42:12]: So how can you tell the difference on that one?

Andrew Read [00:42:15]:Well, you just got to get to know them. That’s all there is to it. And everyone thinks training is about, I’ve read this book and I’ve done this course. Training is all about relationships. It’s physically you have to be able to identify what state the person is in and then you have to know them well enough to know when they’re being honest with themselves and you. And there are times where, I mean, actually the girl who broke down for her ironman she told me on Friday that she was feeling off and whatever. And one of my other customers was doing a two K row, which is a pretty grueling thing for people who haven’t done it, it’s sort of seven or eight minutes of tongue out, heavy breathing and collapse on the floor afterwards for genuine efforts. And one of my other customers who has had kind of a breakout six months, I mean, she’s really gone berserk and has made amazing progress. She hit a PR by a substantial amount that she broke the gym record for the two K, and that’s a record that stood for five years. So she really did a good job and I said to each a woman, like you’re going to do it. She’s like, no, I need an easy day and blah, blah, and missed her own PR by three seconds. So she didn’t break the record again or anything, but she was only three seconds off her PR after convincing yourself that she couldn’t train hard that day. And so sometimes you do need to prove to people that, Hey, you’re a lot tougher than you think you are. And if there’s zombies came right now despite how you feel, you’d actually be able to cope. So, but it all just comes down to personal relationships.

Corey Beasley [00:44:02]: Yeah, absolutely. That’s good advice for sure. I think the more and more I hear a lot of top coaches talking more and more about communication and opening those lines of communication and really connecting with people standing it’s funny versus just barking orders, you know, and yelling and screaming, being a cheerleader, you know?

Andrew Read [00:44:23]:Yeah. Well I think it’s like Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee said when I first got into martial arts, punch is a punch and a kick is a kick. And then I more, and I realized a punch wasn’t a punch and a kick wasn’t a kick. There was a lot more to it. And now I see that a punch is the punch and a kick of the kick, and you eventually go through that point where it is the yelling and screaming and the, Hey, you says we’re going do five reps at 80%. And you realize that these are just tools that we’re using to achieve an outcome the same as you throw a combination in a fight to achieve an outcome or to force a particular response. That’s what we’re doing with exercise as well so it’s no more no less than that but it’s exactly that at the same time. .

Corey Beasley [00:45:07]: Yeah. Andrew, I appreciate you sharing a lot of good insights from you and hopefully everybody absorb at least one or two of them though out the hour. But thanks again, I really appreciate your time.

Andrew Read [00:45:20]:Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Episode Transcript

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Andrew Read
Interview with Fitness Trainer and Instructor, Andrew Read talking about coaching methods and dealing with athletes

Corey Beasley [00:00:01]: Hey guys, is Corey Beasley with fight camp conditioning. I’m on the phone here with Andrew Read. Andrew, how are you doing?

Andrew Read [00:00:07]:Very well. Thanks Corey. How are you?

Andrew Read [00:00:19]:Yeah, hopefully you won’t need to translate it from my Australian isms.

Corey Beasley [00:00:24]: I’m sure we’ll be all right. But Andrew, give everybody a little two sense of who you are and what you do?

Andrew Read [00:00:30]:Well, because on a fight show let’s see. My parents thought I was an unruly child, so they sent me to Taekwondo when I was 10. It’s funny because that sounds embarrassing now. But back then, I mean, there was Taekwondo or karate those were the choices. So I did Taekwondo. I was okay at that. I nearly made the Olympics in 1988 when I was 17. It was in Seoul. So the Daimler sport, we sent three guys we sent a light, a middle and the heavyweight and I came runner up in the selection trials as a white. So I nearly got an Olympic spot. But then Taekwondo got funding because it became a full sport and it was going to be a full sport for the first time of the Sydney Olympics, which meant that Australia got entry into every event if they wanted it. And all of a sudden, all these guys who I mean we don’t have NFL, but we have rugby and AFL and stuff that is played professionally. So they had guys that maybe had just missed these highest tier professional sports looking around going, well, geez, I can get a black belt in this thing in two or three years and I could make the Olympics for this. And all of a sudden the quality of athletes went from recreational athletes like me to serious, amazing, nearly the top percentage of athletes in the country doing Taekwondo. And all of a sudden my competition results weren’t so good. So I started looking at more serious martial arts. I looked at Wing chun, I looked at the Kito, I did some Thai boxing and along the way had been lifting weights, started lifting weights when I was 13 because I was kind of skinny as a kid and went through puberty, a little light. So I was always trying to keep up with the other kids I was playing sport against or completely in Taekwondo against, because I realized I wasn’t strong enough. Obviously the only information around back then was bodybuilding stuff and there was no internet. So it’s impossible to get any sport training information unless you were lucky enough to be good enough to actually be in one of these national programs. We’d end up with like a good coach in charge of you. When I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine brought back to Australia, her Canadian boyfriend. So she’d been living overseas, brought this guy back. He and I hit it off. I was doing some Kung Fu through at the time and he was like, I want get back into martial arts. I said, well, you don’t come and do Kung Fu. And he’s built like a wrestlers. He’s got these tiny little T-Rex arms. He looks terrible when he punks his stuff. And he said, well, this is shit. And I said, I want to do some like wrestling or something. I said, well, there’s this guy over the other side of town, his name is John Wolfer BJJ aficionados was one of the dirty dozen, was one of the first 12 black books and the shadows made who weren’t Brazilian. Wow. He’s kind of a big, he’s kind of a big deal. He was teaching jiu jitsu, but as part of his own like shoot fighting curriculum. And so my friend go and trained with him and he said, this is fantastic. You have to come. And my first night there, I saw all these guys that I knew from Taekwondo who were always better than me and he kicks my ass for years and years competing. And I was like, well, if all these guys are here, they must be something to this. And like most people in their first night at jiu jitsu I got embarrassed here I was thinking I had a fight, whatever I got snapped up and down the mat, like just horrendously beaten nonstop all night long and was like this is pretty cool. And everyone’s first night at jiu jitsu, right? What it feel like I was drowning.

Corey Beasley [00:04:20]: I got choked up little teeny Japanese chick for a month and a half.

Andrew Read [00:04:24]:So there you go you know, it works right. And so you do all that. And UFC was coming out and so did some jiu jitsu and I got my first job in a gym. So I think I was I like, like 22 or 23, I think when I started working in the gym and I had applied to this one gym like three, four times and they knocked me back. I was really trying to work for them because I had more than one gym. So back then there were in Australia, no big gym chains, no one had multiple places. This guy, he’s one of the few places that owned more than one gym. So you had a few around town and I thought, well there’s actually a potential here to like there’s more to the business. And maybe I could end up running one of these gyms or whatever. And he hired me and within about like a month or two months, I was head of the PT program that they had just set up. And I went from zero clients to like about 60 hours of PT in the space of about three months. And we went from three trainers and one sales person to three sales people and something like 3000 members. Liked the gym just exploded. This guy, he super good first boss to have, he was one of the first guys to see spinning. And again, it’s one of those scenes you laugh and you’re like, it’s not very functional. Spinning was one of the biggest trainings ever in the fitness industry. He recognized this thing called body pumps. So Liz meals which is a New Zealand company, so they’re huge in Australia, had a single body pump you stand in the Rose room, you’re lifting little weights for long periods of time to rise you soundtrack and instructor at the front telling you to feel the burn and all that stuff. It’s incredibly popular in Australia. It’s been around for like 20 years and they’re still the most attended classes in any gym in Australia. So he had one of the first ever pump classes was held in his gym and his aerobics instructors were at the very first pump instructor workshops. I mean, he just really good at spotting trends and things like that. So great guy to work for. And then you kind of fast forward to now. So I’ve done martial arts since I was 10. I’m 45. I’ve been lifting weights since I was 13. Being training people since I was 25 and somewhere along the lines that all kind of met. A friend of mine whose name is Sophie Drysdale, obviously married Robert Drysdale. I got her into jiu jitsu in the first place. So that’s kind of be entertaining as a story. And when she comes back to Australia, I’ll do some stuff with her sometimes I’ve trained, Robert Drysdale when they were still together a couple of times. Have worked with weirdly my mother who’s not into jiu jitsu, but she’s actually now a world record holder and world champion in the dead, lifted 75 years old. So at 75 years old, 51 kilos. She’s got an 85 kilos best competition lifts, which was at the world champs in Baton Rouge last year, which beat her own world record by two and a half kilos. So I’m like most trainers quite a big variety of people and that kind of gets us to where we are now.

Corey Beasley [00:07:59]: You didn’t allude to it as well, but you have a pretty extensive history in the military as well?

Andrew Read [00:08:06]:A little bit. It’s now something that was nearly 20 years ago and it was also it didn’t count all the guys doesn’t in their forties or in an older will remember there was a time where you wouldn’t get deployed overseas or if you’re in the military now you’re going overseas for sure. I never been shot at, I’ve never shot at anyone. I’ve never been overseas with the military the only thing I’ve fired roughly near someone is blanks. I generally don’t talk about it a huge amount, although it kind of colors everything. And certainly when you’ve been through some selection things, it makes everything else seem kind of easy, like when I go along to something people like, Oh my God, like that was the hottest thing ever. Like that one hour workout. Are you kidding me? Or I remember and this is no slight on Jim Jones, I’ve done all of their courses. I thought some of them were pretty good. So I did their level three course, which is like a week-long and they train twice a day I was actually going to sealFit Kokoro camp the following weekend. So I used advanced Jim Jones seminar as my tapering. That’s how stupid I was. And it’s a pretty state hill. Like it goes up, I think its 2000 feet in a mile. So it’s like a 20% gradient or something. It’s pretty quick and takes about 45 minutes to walk up. So we walked two more miles. We walked up in a mile down the whole thing, took like two hours and these guys were wiped out for the rest of the day cause some of them massive. They’re like a hundred and 10 kilos. They’re like 220, 240, something like that. They’re not designed to carry their weight for long periods of time. I did it and I’m like, I’m going to need to train again later today because they haven’t really done anything much. We just went for a walk for two miles. So when you bring the military and someone goes, okay, we’re going to walk 30 kilometers with our 50 kilo pack plus a rifle. All right. It puts it in perspective.

Andrew Read [00:11:03]:I’m going to say social media has been enormously helpful. Like the internet has been fantastic for getting information out. You can find if you look in the right places, great information, but you can also accidentally find the wrong information. And the other part of it is, so if I’m training, I don’t know someone for a UFC fight. Like a big fight. There’s lots of money on the line. Maybe it’s a title fight or whatever. People forget that before that final anaerobic training phase that they’re in, like really putting the page like the full stop on their fitness. There was a ton of base building, basic strengthening and aerobic work before that. They forget all that because they don’t see it. So what you see only the crazy anaerobic stuff and be like, I’m going to train like that five days a week. All right, let’s see how long that last they’d burnt out within like a month maybe. And then the other part is if I’m the coach or the manager or even the athlete, I’m like, do I really want to show people the best? Do I really want to show them like the secret of my program or I’m going to just put some crazy shit up and maybe send people in the wrong direction. So then when it comes to competition time, I can crush them because they wasted their time on like single leg bosses, squats or some bullshit instead of actually just squatting heavy.

Andrew Read [00:12:46]:Where they hurt? When you’re dealing with combat sport guys, I mean that’s the first thing is what hurts right now and it’s a rotating thing like you can, my neck is good today, but my fingers is shit, I can’t hang onto anything. Well we can, let’s get some stuff we can do that’s the first thing after we get past that discussion, if it really is the first time we’ll do FNS and we do FMS because I mean I worked for them and I believe in the system, but if it wasn’t that, I’ll do some other kind of movement screen. I would just check out what they can and can’t do, like show me your squat. Show me how you dead lift, what exercise are you familiar with? So we can start crafting a program. I tend not to do anything super complicated in training anyway. But my belief is that while we need some movement complexity, the martial arts guys are getting it from the training because they’re moving in so many different ways with such speed and power, very different, I don’t know, like my 35 year old office worker who comes in and other than sit still all day, they need to move in a bunch of different ways. So maybe we need to do some a license little sprint drills or some kinds of staff or maybe you need to do some cooling variations like you might see from Goldman or either portal or something like that. Because I need that. But the martial arts guys, where are you hurt? What can you do right now? And then let’s start from there. And most of it ends up looking really simple because the three things I think really affect people mentally and fight these one. And I think you get it more in jiu jitsu. So when you tie up with someone for the first time and like you grabbed them or they grab you and you can’t break the grip, you first thing is fuck. Like there’s some reflex now brain when you can break grips, you’re like, Oh shit, I’m in trouble now. And actually my friend Sophie, so she was an elite gymnast before she got into jiu jitsu I mean early on like white, blue and purple belt. You’d see her tie up with these girls and they’re all the same weight and they’re all athletic. But she tied up with them and you’d see the look on their face. If it was the first time they wrestled or like, fuck, I’m wrestling a guy because she’s so much stronger than them. She basically just grab them and throw them face first into the ground. So that’s the first thing is maximum strength. Not only does it dictate fights, but it can mess with people’s heads straight away because already in the first five seconds you’ve beaten them. Because now they’re fearful. And then the second thing is max strength is going to run out. If you’re in a MMA match, you got 15 minutes. If you’re in a jiu jitsu match, you’ve got a minimum of five and a maximum of 10 continuous minutes to go for, if you’re a wrestler is it two to three minutes, if you Judo at five, you kind of max strength your way through that. You need some conditioning. So fights are one late if it’s even on fitness. So you’ve got to have some fitness there. And most people, because of the way they built, we’ll have a disposition towards one or the other. Like you’ll get that guy he used crazy strong and so he focuses on the straight stuff because of course he wants to do this thing that he’s good at and then you’ll have the person who is more like me. I’m far more strengthened based on, I’m just not a very be strong guy. And all the things I’m good at. Like, let’s go for a five day run, let’s go for a 1500 meter swim. Like all that kind of stuff. I’m good at that. But so for me, instead of doing more fitness stuff, let’s do more strength stuff. You need more strength and so you’ve got to figure out the person’s strengths and weaknesses. And so that should be part of your assessment as well when they first come in.

Corey Beasley [00:16:43]: Yeah. Because I think that’s a big misconception or not misconception, but just the thing that people just completely screw up.

Andrew Read [00:16:52]:The idea that there’s like, a jiu jitsu program, there’s an MMA program. No, there’s a program for that guy right now. And people get tied into their, while the programs is this, he’s got a fucking spreadsheet man where that guy is, he’s flesh and bones. He’s his physical state changes every day based on what he did the day before. And so MMA guys, it may change because you had a different training session two hours ago. So forget your play. You’ve got to be comfortable with, says today’s max bench press in front squat Chuck that out. Because what that guy needs right now is some TLC and maybe we’re going to do some crawling and some foam rolling and some farmers walks. Because that’s all we can actually deal with.

Corey Beasley [00:17:37]: Now, from an assessment standpoint, day to day. Is most of the day to day assessment start just talking with those guys or do you have any other thing?

Andrew Read [00:17:47]:Absolutely and I like telling people my number one coaching towards my eyeball, like for kids and you know like you train people, you spend a lot of time with them. I have customers that I sometimes see more than my partner, my partner is a firefighter so I might go like two or three days without seeing my partner based on our own work schedules. So I’ve got customers that are coming in training with me five to 10 times a week. In some cases I’m seeing them twice a day. So I get to know them and physically I can recognize, Hey, that guy’s walk and really tired. He’s all slouched over like he’s already exhausted just sort of grabbing and his elbow a couple of times while he was warming up you got to be watching them all the time because a good athlete won’t tell you when they’re hurt because a good athlete wants to compete. A good athlete wants to train, they want to push. In a lot of sense it’s like Icarus. Like they just want to push higher and higher and harder and harder. Half your job is holding them back half your job, its okay to have an easy session today and sometimes fighters and probably endurance people are in the same boat because the endurance guys have got, I mean it’s funny, everyone thinks like marathon runners a week. I mean, if you hang out with endurance people, they are bat shit crazy and hard as nails because the sport depend on pain tolerance. So they’ll say, no, its okay or when I warm up it goes away. Well maybe we should actually let it go away full stop rather than warm up and hope it goes away. So half the job is pulling them back so they can have a better session later on or knowing, Hey, this session today, it is being like a priority. But I’ve got one later in the week I want to do with you. That absolutely is. So let’s kind of keep our bullets in check and we’ll save them for when we need them.

Andrew Read [00:20:11]:Yeah. And as I’ve gotten older, I guess it’s changed a little bit more. I mean, my focus now is on, I’d like to be able to do jiu jitsu for, I mean I’m 45, I’d like to still be going at 65. So how I view training is quite different. I mean I went to masters worlds last year, so it’s not like I’m sitting in the corner twiddling my thumbs. I mean, I still am out there trying as hard as I can, but sometimes you’ve got to know when to back off. But in terms of training, let’s see. I was really lucky early on I got exposed to this guy called Ian King. So Ian King is, he’s a bit of a legend in strength conditioning, may be the most ripped off guy in strength and conditioning, the rep tempo stuff, as much as people sort of attribute it to Charles Poliquin, Ian King was actually involved in that as well. They kind of did it together and then, because Charles had a bigger profile, he just started taking the credit for it. Single leg training being Ian King is the guy who made that popular. So within, like probably the first two years of working, I can’t even remember how, but I ended up at a workshop that he was running and just thought, well, this is fantastic. And so that changed a lot of stuff for me. And what a surprise after I’d been exposed to one of the guys who was like the best athletic trainers in the world, all of a sudden my clients at the gym started getting results through the roof and actually through him. So at the same workshop I met guys who were like absolute top level sports strength conditioning coaches here. As I started doing internships and stuff like that. So as we football teams, it was with what’s called the OIP, the Olympic athlete program. So starting to see, Hey, this is what the Taekwondo you guys are doing, this is what the Judo guys are doing. I had junior triathlon, I had swimmers and tennis players. And so I started seeing like some, like what the top people were doing. Those we have a grand running meet here, so you get some hot runners it, and there was Cathy Freeman who won the Sydney gold for the 400. There was the girl who got the silver in the same race. It was Maurice greene, Donovan Bailey, like in the weight room, all of the one time, these absolute top of the heap sprinters. So I got to watch Ram train. So Ian King that was super helpful. More recently I went to the RKC before it got super culty and weird and kind of went off the deep end. And the thing I really like about the RKC obviously not all the culty stuff, but just the reminder that you can go back to basics and get great results from basics. And for many people there is some solid queuing involved. Most coaches, I think most trainers don’t really understand the exercises very well because the industry moves so fast purchase we’ll do like 10 reps or something and think they’ve mastered it. So the RKC forces you to stick with a few things and get much better than, so the coaches end up with a better understanding. I mean, imagine going to jiu jitsu only guy teaching your jiu jitsu class has been doing jiu jitsu for a year and that’s the boat most people in when it comes to personal training. They’ve got a one year trainer showing you how to deal with something as complex as the human body. It’s probably a little bit more complicated than a year’s worth of practice.

Corey Beasley [00:23:41]: I mean, looking back at even coming to stuff that I used to do five, 10 years ago is it’s completely changed.

Andrew Read [00:23:47]:I haven’t changed that much. And if I look back over the very early years, the first two or three years, but once I started going to these, Ian kind and then through the internship program, my stuff hasn’t changed that much because back then, so Paul Chek, who people probably don’t even know who he is, but Paul Chek is the guy who made those big round balls in the gym, popular. If it wasn’t for him, they would run there. And going even further back when we had VHS video would always internally at one of those places, my first day was, Hey, watch this series that Paul Chek has put together on the back. It was like eight videos or something that were two hours each. So I spent like three whole days watching these things. And he was into a single limb training and Ian King was in the single limb training. So all that one leg training. I’ve been doing that for 20 years. So when I see now guys to man, well it’s functional and we’re doing single limb training and we do this and we do that. I’m like, you guys are 20 years behind. So I’m lucky that I was just in the right place at the right time. I got exposed to some really good people and the stuff that now has been tried and tested enough to know that, yeah, this is actually a really smart way to go. It was the right stuff. I didn’t waste my time on crap basically. Right. And then the FMS, the FMS has been a really neat way as a trainer and people, I think make a mistake. They think the goal is to be stuck in this kind of permanent corrective phase where we’re constantly going to be working with bands. And doing this other stuff. And the goal of the FMS is to train, make sure you don’t have any restrictions that are going to cause injury and then let’s train. And so again like the RKC which was a reminder for quality and a return to basics. The FMS is really no difference. It’s a focus on quality, the focus on injury prevention, which for guys who are getting punched in the face constantly for fun they’re already at risk the body’s under a huge amount of stress. So sometimes it allows you to have a conversation with you and said, Hey look man, you can only absorb so much stress in your given time. Even you’ve done 10 rounds of sparring today, your wife has been yelling at you, you’re borderline about to lose your job because you barely been there getting ready for a fight. And I know you want to hit it hard in the gym, but that’s actually the worst thing for you right now. So we’re going to do this other thing over here. That’s a recovery session. So we don’t give up the rest of the week just because you push hard now because maybe it’s Wednesday or something and you’re feeling good but styling get tired and you push now and now you’ve wiped out the rest of the weekend, Thursday, Friday, Sunday training this shit. Maybe we just take it really easy right now and you bounce back and you have a good first day Friday, Saturday. So we give a one session to maybe gain back six or seven. That seems like a really good thing to me. And so the FMS is just a really good lens to allow me to do that and it allows me to get to know someone’s body instantly in the first session in 10 minutes to the same sort of degree that might normally take two to three weeks of training someone because you’ll eventually see all the same stuff. It just isolate it and reduce the distraction. So you can instantly go, this person’s not good at that. Therefore their program needs to have this stuff in it. And you can figure out how to write that program, which is what I was talking about. You don’t have a jiu jitsu program, you have a program for this person at this time.

Corey Beasley [00:27:34]: So from your perspective, you 45 years old, you still compete in jiu jitsu. What does your week look like for you?

Andrew Read [00:27:44]:My week I do jiu jitsu three or four times a week. So I go Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, January. And I try to get him Friday as well. Friday is kind of a swing day because there are times where I really want to go but either A, I need to work. So there’s some work stuff that needs tying up or B, I know that if I train Friday I won’t get a good session Saturday night. And because of as a trainer I’m busy in the morning, I’m busy at night when most classes are so I can train a lunchtime and that’s great because not that long ago places didn’t have a lunch time classes. But the people that generally go to lunchtime classes at my club at least are not super high level. So the Saturday class is actually my chance to train with the best guys in my club. That’s the only time during the week I get this same. So Saturday is really important for me to get through because that’s the key session for me for the whole week with jiu jitsu. I do strength and conditioning. I do little bits four days a week for strength. At the moment I’m doing, I found this really cool pull up program called the Recon Ron program and it’s basically five sets every time you do pull ups and the first week is like six, five, five, four, three for the five sites. And then it’s like seven, six, five, four. It’s just that just bumps up slowly. By week 10 you should be able to get 20 in hang pull ups. So I just thought it’d be a fun thing to play around with for a while. So I do that four days a week. I do some more serious lifting along with that two days a week, which is probably like a front squat and bench press on one of the days and the other day’s dead lift and some kind of press as well. But it’s more likely like a kettlebell press or something like that. Like another head press. And I do some fitness stuff every day because and this is, I got this from Joel Jamieson, I went to his workshop like a year ago, two years ago, and I thought it was really A, because I have like a endurance banged to what I do anyway. And with the strengths coaches seem to think there’s some evil involved with cardio. Like if you do cardio, your handle explode or you’re magically lose all your strength or like just the shit about cardio makes you weak and all this kind of stuff. I mean, Hey, the Navy seals run. It doesn’t seem to make them weak worries for all time have run. But the coolest thing about Joel’s thing was that he tells people to do cardio. And one of the first things he said in his workshop was in his opinion that even the number one risk factor over the age of 44 for both men and women is a heart attack. And so if someone’s only come to training maybe like twice a week, the number one thing you can do for them is help them prevent having a heart attack, which means they’ve got to do some cardio. And if they kind of out of shape and they’re not very trained at cardio, that’s going to have to be steady state because you don’t want to give you relative beginner who’s out of shape and in their forties hard intervals as they tell you that. That’s just dumb. And now I’m in my forties I just remember that, Hey, I want to be playing this game for another 40 years. So my goal is to get to 50 in the same sort of shape I’m at 40 and get to 60, like I was at 50 and so on and so on. And as I get older, I am particularly with wrestling, I’m wrestling guys who like 25 to 30 years old, I’m really proud and I took a break for a little while because I was focused on work and stuff like that. I mean people who do jiu jitsu, know you tend to be in and out of it depending on various work situations. And I went back in October, 2015 and since that time I haven’t missed a single round a rolling once. And there were guys who were 50% younger than me that I’m training with and the only way to keep myself able to keep up and do round after round after round is cardio. That’s it. That’s the only thing that keeps you in the game. So I mean, I get feeling like you’re being muscled around. That might change, but I don’t feel like I’m weaker than everybody, but I can feel like, if I don’t keep up the cardio, they run over the top of me eventually.

Andrew Read [00:32:49]:So if you’re a stand up fighter, like you’re a kick boxer, boxing guy, you’ll need to weigh, more aerobic than if you’re a grappler. If you’re a grappler, they’re far more anaerobic and strength base the matches are shorter, but grappling is just a much higher strength component. And then within that, and I actually was asking some friends, so I’ve got friends who are like, three times Judo Olympics, I’ve got another friend who went to the last Olympics as a wrestler. He unfortunately dislocated his elbow in his first match. Just a freak accident. So you went to a winter post and put his hand out and his elbow just popped out of place. And then I’ve got friends like my friend Sophie, she’s a world champion as a black belt in No-Gi. And she’s a Pan-Am champion in GI. I’ve got friends who’ve been to Abu Dhabi, like I’ve got this great range of friends who are grapplers in standup fighters and the standup guys didn’t say there’s anything specific that they needed, but they did know that you had to be super fit, stand up grapplers the judo guys and wrestlers have a bunch of specific strength exercises, particularly rotational stuff that they felt was really useful for them. And then the BJJ guys, they’re like, well, actually the most important thing is just to be genuinely strong and then get in heaps of rolling. So it was interesting the difference between the three main styles of fighting, if you want to call it that and how they both look at strength and conditioning because a lot of people would think it’s the same across the board, but the needs are very different. I think masters’ jiu jutsu was different again because the matches are shorter. So actually that conditioning and if you watched any of the masters matches, like Sal, he won with a broken arm and he’s division with [Inaudible 00:34:41]. So four and a half minutes and then a great judo through. Now he does have a black belt in judo, but if you’ve got a five minute match, and so there’s no time for stalling. And I need to see any the masses, black belts stall like you see in normal 10 minutes IBJJF and the conditioning ended up needing to be way more judo-based and you need to focus far more on the standup. There wasn’t as much pulling in the black goat masters is the reason most black belt events.

Corey Beasley [00:35:11]: Now I that when is the next master’s world I know there’s a huge is it the IBJJF worlds that are pan-AM’s that are coming up in March?

Andrew Read [00:35:26]:There’s the Europeans are on like right now. The masters’ worlds were in August solvers unit probably August again. There is Pans must be soon because worlds is June or July and then No-Gi worlds is like November or something.

Andrew Read [00:36:04]:It’s not as bad as boxing, but I mean it is a little bit like everyone wants to be the boss of their own Federation. If you went to a good established karate school for instance, you’d see like a dozen black belts there. Most of jiu jitsu people get their black belt and they’re out the door and they’re starting their own club probably across the street. Jiu jitsu is just so different like just the way everyone’s mentality is different. And I don’t want to say loyalty, but there’s kind of used loyalty. Like the karate guys would never do that. But jiu jitus guys that’s normal.

Andrew Read [00:37:25]:Do you know the joke about the old bull and the young bull? So the old bull and young bull standing on top of the Hill and they’re looking down on all these cows. The younger one goes, let’s run down there and fuck one of those cows and the old we’ll turn to him and say let’s walk down and fuck all the cows. And I mean that’s a secret to strengthen missing, right? Like don’t blow your load today because you’ve got to keep in mind, particularly if you’re a martial arts guy, like okay you want to train hard Monday? What’s that going to do to you on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. What’s that mean for your comp next week? I mean I’ve seen people have their comps the day before. I’ll just come in and roll white and then because they’ve had a couple of days easy. I mean, you know that feeling when you arrested finally because you been training like so much and you’re arrested and you coming, you feel like you can walk through walls and you feeling good. So you go and you go and next thing you know there’s nothing left and you come the day before in extreme cases one of my clients last year, not a fighter but like an iron man triathlete, she had an Ironman five weeks before. That’s how big a hole she dug for herself. So went out and had a 50 K trail race, which she won but, and won it by a mile. And next day like she actually got a staffing section in on bits of her face and for grapplers we were like, yes so doesn’t everyone get that? No, Runners don’t get staph infections. That’s a sign of, yeah, broken down her body was that she got a staph infection, not from having someone’s sweaty gay rubbed in their face, but just from how fucked up her system was. And then she just had her event five weeks too early. That’s all. So you have to take into account when you wrote the program, you can’t just go, well, we’re going to do strength on this day, we’re going to do this on this day, we’re going to blah. You need to watch the guy in front of you. If it’s an online system and your training and by remote you have to be in contact with them on a super regular basis. One of the guy I training in Scotland right now and you think he’s one of those guys like I’ve got these programmers and he’s like, well I want to run a sub 40 minute, 10 K, I want a 60 seconds freestanding handstand. I want to put on seven to eight kilo of muscle. I’m also going to do jiu jitsu twice a week. Tick-Box in four times. And he also does a traditional form of kung fu that he really likes. I’m going to teach that a couple of times a week. And I work full time and I have two young kids. And for most people I go, shut up and let’s be realistic with him because he is a total freak of a guy he’s at one in 10,000 kind of guy. He can actually accomplish all that. It’s possible. So we’re two months into this program, he’s about to tick off two tick off the handstands and the run very quickly and then we’ll get into the more serious stuff. But we talked to each other minimum every three days you got to monitor the fatigue and the stress. That’s the only thing and I’ve used like heart rate variability. I’ve used like resting pulse the eyeball test. I’ve used a whole bunch of things, but all comes down to the same thing. We need to make sure that you are receptive to training today. So it doesn’t matter what the program says to do. I want to know that you’re going to be okay. And I have no fear at all in heavily modifying and some days even checking out what the plan was to allow you to be in a more receptive state for the rest of the training. So I will give up today to gain back the rest of the week. And I think that’s like the coaches being tough or they helping their clients develop toughness and if they getting punched in the face for fun, they’re already tough enough. And then despite that and those people particularly need to be given permission to have an easy session and realize that longer term, this is actually helping them. So don’t be afraid to chuck the plan away and do something that is more useful on that day, but also means, if you have a client who’s a bit of a hypochondriac maybe hasn’t yet mentally developed. And I have a young guy right now, he’s a tennis player. He’s probably in that boat. You do have to be careful because you can easily be misled and give them an efficient, that actually used now too easy because they’ve told you they need an evening session. And what they really have said to you is, I’m lazy and I don’t want to train hard today.

Corey Beasley [00:42:12]: So how can you tell the difference on that one?

Andrew Read [00:42:15]:Well, you just got to get to know them. That’s all there is to it. And everyone thinks training is about, I’ve read this book and I’ve done this course. Training is all about relationships. It’s physically you have to be able to identify what state the person is in and then you have to know them well enough to know when they’re being honest with themselves and you. And there are times where, I mean, actually the girl who broke down for her ironman she told me on Friday that she was feeling off and whatever. And one of my other customers was doing a two K row, which is a pretty grueling thing for people who haven’t done it, it’s sort of seven or eight minutes of tongue out, heavy breathing and collapse on the floor afterwards for genuine efforts. And one of my other customers who has had kind of a breakout six months, I mean, she’s really gone berserk and has made amazing progress. She hit a PR by a substantial amount that she broke the gym record for the two K, and that’s a record that stood for five years. So she really did a good job and I said to each a woman, like you’re going to do it. She’s like, no, I need an easy day and blah, blah, and missed her own PR by three seconds. So she didn’t break the record again or anything, but she was only three seconds off her PR after convincing yourself that she couldn’t train hard that day. And so sometimes you do need to prove to people that, Hey, you’re a lot tougher than you think you are. And if there’s zombies came right now despite how you feel, you’d actually be able to cope. So, but it all just comes down to personal relationships.

Andrew Read [00:44:23]:Yeah. Well I think it’s like Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee said when I first got into martial arts, punch is a punch and a kick is a kick. And then I more, and I realized a punch wasn’t a punch and a kick wasn’t a kick. There was a lot more to it. And now I see that a punch is the punch and a kick of the kick, and you eventually go through that point where it is the yelling and screaming and the, Hey, you says we’re going do five reps at 80%. And you realize that these are just tools that we’re using to achieve an outcome the same as you throw a combination in a fight to achieve an outcome or to force a particular response. That’s what we’re doing with exercise as well so it’s no more no less than that but it’s exactly that at the same time. .

Andrew Read [00:45:20]:Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Episode #61 with Fitness Trainer and Instructor, Andrew Read

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