Big Scary Goals - Dave Whitley

And if we really take a hard, detailed look at our own belief systems, very often we find out that we exist in a world of conflicting beliefs. And if there's internal conflict, if there's a if you believe one thing to be true and you believe another thing to be true that is oppositional to the first thing, then those things just kind of butt up against each other and you never get anywhere with it.

What's up, fitness fans? Welcome back to the Future of Fitness podcast and interview series. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and we're on episode number 150. 150. Wow. That's uh it's a lot of episodes, and it's been a lot of fun, and uh a lot more to come. So really just getting started. But this episode is with David Whitley, aka The Iron Tamer. Uh, I have had the pleasure of seeing David present at a number of conferences, and I can tell you one thing, uh, well, his story's fantastic, right? And we'll get into that. But he's an attention grabber, like the stuff he does. Um, you know, bending these huge nails and wrenches and and all of these crazy cool old school, old-time strongman tricks, uh, not even tricks, just feature strength, right? It's amazing. And how he's uh taken that story and taken that ability to grab attention and put a really, really strong message behind it. And one of the messages that we talked about here is is you know, having big goals, right? Big goals that scare you at least a little bit. Uh if they don't scare you a little bit, then you know, why are you going after them? We only live this life once, right? So really, really inspirational for sure. And uh we also talk about keeping things simple within the fitness industry. I think we all like to overcomplicate things a little bit at times, um, totally unnecessary for the greater population. So a lot of great messaging in here, and I'm really excited to share this episode with you. David's a great guy. Um couple things before we get into it. Number one, I want to read a review. So this one comes from Coach Ola. And I know Coach uh Ola's from I believe a Middle Eastern background. I've seen some of her Instagram, which you can find at uh BFit for A K H I R A H B Fit for Akira. Um but here's what she says I love this podcast so much and love listening to Eric as he always has fresh insights as well as feels welcoming to listen to. There are other podcasters who I listen to, and sometimes I feel like they're too preachy, uh, sometimes in their tones. But Eric sounds super friendly person and approachable, which makes the show even more valuable. I've gained so much from it, and it's on my list of recommended podcasts for fitness professionals. Thank you, Eric, for elevating the fitness industry to the next level and for speaking your voice. Keep on inspiring us, Coach Ola with Be Fit for Akira. Uh awesome, awesome. If you guys can find Ola, uh Coach Ola on Instagram, at least she's on Facebook to uh check her out. Um she's doing some really special things. So uh this episode is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors. I'm really excited about what I'm doing now and partnering with Ken and Level 5 Mentors is just right where I should be. Uh it's it's an it's a business coaching experience, kind of like unlike any other. Um you know, in 2020, we'll be working to uh have quarterly workshops. Um we do a lot of one-on-one coaching, but we also have an ecosystem. And if you haven't noticed, uh I like to network. Um, I know a lot of people. And when I work with people, not only do I I we uh Ken and I help them clarify the vision and get unstuck. Uh, but then we try to provide as many tools and resources and networks as we can to make this success happen really fast. And uh it's just a really cool experience seeing our clients grow, see us grow uh as we do this. So go to level five mentors, L-E-V-E-L, the number five mentors.com. The website's still under construction, so we have some work to do on that, but it's up. And uh there's a assessment there. Uh we grade things, you know, in five different areas of freedom. So uh time, money, relationships, purpose, and health. And not necessarily in that order, but you can get an idea if you take the assessment, see, well, well, how am I doing? It's free, right? Go check it out, say you're doing, and I'm happy to schedule a call with you and talk about a little bit more and see where you are and and possibly help you get on stuck. So uh level five mentors.com, super exciting stuff. Now, without further ado, let's get into it. This is episode number 151 with David Whitley, aka The Iron Tamer. Enjoy the show. All right, and we're live. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah, man. Um, you know, uh, this is actually take two for us for some internet issues. But so I'm gonna ask the question again. Because I didn't really get the answer the first time. If you uh if you had to choose, are you a Marvel or a DC guy?

I am I I I would if I was forced to choose, I would choose Marvel. Even though you may be able to see in the background right back here, I have an ancient Batman toy stuck to a metal plate on the wall back there. Um Batman's always um my favorite comic book character when I was young was the Hulk. And so um I think that initially started my interest in strength as a very young boy. And so I would have to defer to Marvel. But I love all of them.

Yeah. Yeah, I asked that question because it's uh I've seen you present twice um at two different conventions, and it was awesome. I mean, super memorable. Like if anyone's ever seen David William present and the things he does up in front of crowds and the uh the feats of strength that go into your your uh I guess performance for lack of better term, it's it's really cool. And you talk about your story um and why you got into strength and all that. So maybe indulge us one more time in that story and how you got into what you do now.

Sure. Um, when I was a kid, I was overweight and I had a really terrible stutter. And so when I would get called on in class to answer a question, um, I would get like physically ill knowing that it was coming, like if we had a book report due later in the week or something like that, because I would always get picked on, I'd always get made fun of and get called names because of this stutter thing. And um in addition to that, I have an extroverted personality. So those two things together um wound up with me intentionally being disruptive so that I could control the attention that I was getting. And I got into some trouble, not huge amounts of trouble, but I was a little unruly then. Um, and when I um wasn't doing that kind of stuff, I was fascinated with all things to do with fantasy and science fiction and comic books and and all of that, and very quickly identified with the Hulk because he was huge, he was strong, he was invincible, and he was fueled by this anger. And I was a little angry because of the circumstances that were going on there with being picked on. Um, and then Lou Ferrigno came on television as the Hulk when I was a boy, and something switched like a switch flipped in my mind. I knew it wasn't a costume and I knew it wasn't special effects, like we had prosthetics on his face and stuff, but fascinating to me that I'd never seen another human that looked like that. And so my habit at the time, every Sunday we would get what it seemed like it was this big, this massive Sunday paper. It was probably only about this big because I was a child, you know, would come rolled up. And I would take out the comics and I would spread them out on the table and I would read each one of them. And um, after seeing Farygma on television as the Hulk, my mom comes in and I was had everything spread out, and I had the classifieds rather than the comics. And she's like, What are you doing? And I said, I'm looking for gamma radiation so that I can get zapped out the Hulk. Let me tell you, in a pre-Google world, finding gamma radiation to inundate yourself with as an eight-year-old boy is a very difficult thing to do. I couldn't even find a radioactive spider to buy me. So I kind of let go of the idea. Um, and then a few months later, with Ferrigno and Schwarzenegger and Colombo and all those golden air champions, and seeing with Ferrigno, not as the Hulk, but as himself, and training and all the montages and the scenes that went along with that, I realized, okay, the way these guys are able to do this is through this training. So for that Christmas or um um a gift, I got a set of weights, an old like concrete and plastic revolving sleeved um DP barbell and dumbbell set, and started lifting men. And I sort of followed bodybuilding methodology from whatever books I could find at the bookstore and magazines and stuff, and um, probably about 11 years ago or so that I got into doing feats of strength, and from from as a kid to becoming a performing strongman, there was all these different things that I kind of had to go through and figure out and understand. And it all sort of conversed when I met a guy named um um Dennis Rogers, who was uh Bud Jeffries introduced me to Dennis Rogers. And Dennis is if the people listening don't know him, he is pound for pound the strongest man in the world for the feats that he does. He's maybe 165 pounds, and he's got several um like world records and stuff of stopping motorcycles and airplanes from taking off and just nuts, nuts stuff like that. And the very first thing I ever saw him do was bend a wrench on video. And and my I was pretty strong. I'd been lifting barbells and stuff, and I had gotten into the whole kettlebell thing and was you know was was pretty strong and understood a little bit about grip strength. But when he bent a wrench, like that doesn't compute. That goes back to the whole gamma radiation thing for me. So I um um actually at the time had a website that I was doing interviews, audio interviews over the phone and recording them. And this is before podcasts were a thing. I was mailing out physical CDs to my customers that were buying. And so um I had interviewed Bud. Bud introduced me to Dennis, and Dennis sent me a bunch of DVDs of of him performing and also of him teaching stuff so that I would be able to have a good interview with him. And I watched that and it it blew my mind. And he said, Hey, if you ever want to learn any of this stuff, just let me know. And so I immediately took him up on that offer, and that was 11 years ago, and since then we um have expanded that into something we call old-time strongman university, and we usually about once a year get together and do a workshop. Um, he and I teach it together, and um it's passing on the classic feats of strength, stuff like bending nails, bending horseshoes, bending longer pieces of steel, um, driving a nail through a board. That's kind of the fundamental stuff that we cover there. Talk and um how to actually take that skill set and turn it into something where you can present a speech and um get paid to do it. So it's it's a it's been a fascinating journey.

Yeah, yeah, awesome. And uh we got a little bit of like crackling from the thing, so I switched to audio, so people are watching YouTube, that's why. Um I have a question for you, man. So, how does one stop an airplane?

Um, I've never done it, so there's that, but uh the way Dennis did it, he's done it on a couple of occasions, is they were um I want to say they were T-130s, but I may be wrong. They're small single engine prop planes, and he attached uh um cables to the undercarriage, and on the end of each of those cables was uh like a harness that went around his bicep with a handle on it, so he could cross his arms and squeeze the handles and the forces exerted against uh his upper arm, against his humerus as it's pulling. So he's using grip strength and the rest of his upper body strength to form the link in a chain that connects two airplanes going in opposite directions. And so he gets in that position, and there's video of this on YouTube, and he does the same thing with motorcycles. I've never done the motorcycles either, but I've I've been thinking about attempting that feat sometime soon. I just got to find some people with some motorcycles to that are willing to do it. Anyway, they they start the the engines up on the planes and then they accelerate to what would be takeoff RPMs, and the planes never move. And he held them, I think, for 30 seconds or a minute. I don't remember what the time was. But um, that was the feat that put him on the map back in the mid-90s. And after that, he uh just just kept going.

Dude, did you ever follow like Jack Lelane and some of the things he did? No. Sure. Would you would you consider him at all like in the same genre, or do you think he's he's different? I mean, like some of the stuff that people I remember he he towed a boat um across the I think from Alcatraz um across San Francisco Bay with his hands and his feet shackled, right? So he just swam with it and towed the boat. That was pretty incredible.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Do you do you put him in the same category or is he kind of different than what you guys do?

I would definitely put him in a category with the great strongmen in the past for sure.

Yeah.

Um and and the uh when I'm talking about strongmen in the context that I'm using right now, I'm talking about performing strongmen, not competitive strongmen. There's a distinct difference. There's been a big um a big spotlight shined on competitive strongmen recently with this um show that's been going on with Eddie Hall and Brian Shaw, and I forget who the other two guys are that are on there. Um, but they are the like world strongest man, Arnold strongman competitors, and they do these various events as sport. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about guys who get on stage and bend steel and rip decks of cards and those sorts of things as a performance. And that has its origins in the vaudeville era in you know the late 1800s and early 1900s when people would go out and seek out live entertainment rather than you know watch Netflix or television or even listen to the radio back in those days because a lot of people didn't even have radios. So um it was that kind of um entertainment. And I am a part of the uh modern era of the old time strongman is what I like to call it.

Yeah, yeah, it's really cool genre. I mean, what um besides like the speaking engagements that you do that I've seen you at and that that type of thing because you did um, you know, I think you mentioned Perform Better, Strength Matters, um, all those. Uh what else? Which other what other ones do you do?

Um I do mostly corporate stuff. I'm actually off um I'm off to Prague next month to do um it's called the European Summit. I still to this moment don't know what the the conference is about. They just want me to come in and speak and do my thing. And I said, okay, sure, I'll do that. Um, but also tomorrow I'm off to Utah to do a show at a um college in Utah for the incoming freshmen. So corporate stuff, college stuff, and school stuff is primarily my audience that I'm um getting in front of and doing the the speaking. And I use the feat strength as a vehicle to help deliver the message. And if you boil the message down to a single phrase, it is imagination creates reality. So whatever whatever you're imagining, that's what you're gonna wind up becoming in your life. So choose that wisely.

Yeah. And it's um it's it's pretty interesting because I think, you know, when you look into I mean, the last 10 years, like personal development has become quite popular, right? Um, you know, and uh I think about that term, people are like, well, personal development's kind of put this into this genre thing. I just call it learning and growing, right? Which I think is uh what everybody should be doing in their life anyway. But you know, a lot of the modern um personal development talks about like, you know, defining your goals and having big goals and you know, um, you know, kind of looking at the goal and then working backwards and and reaching that. And I think that's a big thing is a lot of people don't even know what their goals are. Sure never even stopped and thought about it, right? So how do you, you know, when you talk about thinking big, like what let's dive into that message a little bit more because I think if if people first of all just actually took time to like, well, what do I want out of my life? Like what are what am I what am I working towards? Um, but how do you define how do you help people think big, right? Use their imagination. What's that messaging?

Um, well, the first thing to go back and address something that you said, you said you just call it learning, and I agree with that. Um, I think that there is a a line that separates learning from personal development, and it has to do with the subject matter. I think that if you're working on personal development, you are learning about your own mind and your own habits and the way that you work. You're learning about yourself. Um, and learning as a uh a broad umbrella that we can stand under, I don't have to pay attention to myself at all. I can learn about a whole bunch of stuff that's out there somewhere and be very knowledgeable, but not really be able to apply that knowledge to uh my own life. And so um that's the distinction between the two things for me. Um, being a guy who has taken an interest in doing things that are physically on the spectrum, somewhere between very difficult and impossible. Um, I think the idea of thinking bigger than is comfortable is what's very important. Um, all too often I think that people will set a goal based on what they think they can do rather than what they really want. And um one of the guys that I've learned a lot from is a guy named Dr. Joe Vitali, and he says that, and he's actually a strong man student of mine too. So there's been this um reciprocity. I've learned a lot about my mind from him, and he's learned about his body from me. Um, but he says that um a really good goal should excite you a lot and scare you a little bit. And if it's not scaring you a little bit, then it's not big enough. And so how much bigger can you think, how much bigger can you imagine, and how much farther can you go with that, I think is the the really critical part. Um because if if it's not big, then then it's not really helping you grow, you know, and it's it's a matter of of who do you really want to be? Not what, but who. And the really interesting work that that comes into play in that is when we start to look at who do I have to be in order to accomplish this thing that I want to do. And very often it's gonna require a fundamental change and evolution in who I perceive myself to be. And where we really run into the the interesting part is in order to do that, we have to go back and look at our own belief system. What do I believe about myself? What do I believe about the world around me? And if we really take a hard, detailed look at our own belief systems, very often we find out that we exist in a world of conflicting beliefs. And if there's internal conflict, if there's a if you believe one thing to be true and you believe another thing to be true that is oppositional to the first thing, then those things just kind of butt up against each other and you never get anywhere with it. So if you believe that that the only way to transform your body physically is to get up early in the morning and go to the gym and do your thing and eat healthy, but you also believe that you're not the kind of person who can wake up and function before nine o'clock and you're never gonna eat cauliflower or or steak because you like hot pockets too much, then you've you've got this conflict within yourself that's gonna wind up just spinning its wheels and it's never gonna go anywhere. So I think that the scariest part of any personal development is self-analysis and looking at these beliefs, and very often you find out that you believe something that you didn't realize was part of your belief system, and you understand that it does not um contribute to whatever goal it is that you're moving towards.

Yeah.

And so that's that's where the really interesting work comes into play is reprogramming that subconscious part of yourself that is guiding those behaviors.

Yeah. Well, all right. So there's a lot to unpack there. Right. Um, that's uh, I mean, that's that's some some big stuff, and that's all part of a you know a significant process. Uh certainly doesn't happen overnight. Maybe let's let's dive into some of your personal experiences and your growth um, you know, uh throughout the years. But what you know, when you look when you started your own self-analysis over time, which I'm sure you now do more intentionally than maybe you did prior, you know, what were some of the contrasting beliefs and some of the things that you had to overcome about yourself in order to get to the goals that you want to get to?

Um I was brought up In a in a home, in a culture where everything revolved around food. And um I think most of us in the United States anyway, we we have this thing with food that there's some sort of morality attached to it. And and I I had this same kind of thought process. And I'll I'll I'll give you an example, like like hypothetical clients, since we're talking about the fitness industry anyway. Um anyone who works with clients in the fitness industry has probably experienced something similar to this. And if they haven't, they just haven't been in the business long enough yet. You have a client and you you outline a training program, outline nutrition for them, and based on their goals, and you got everything in place, and they go and they're doing their thing and they're just killing it, they're doing great. And then they come in on Monday morning, right? And they say, Well, I was really good all last week, so I felt like I deserved a treat. And so on Friday night, I ate pizza and drank beer, and I was really, really bad. And I know you're gonna be mad at me because I drank pizza and beer and was so bad, but that's what I did, but because I felt like I deserved it, but now I feel really guilty about it, and I need you to kick my ass because I did that. Right, right. And and it's uh I thought like that at one point, you know, it's like I I I would do the thing, and then I would feel like I deserved the reward, and then I would get whatever the reward was with food, and then um feel bad about it, and then try to uh beat myself into goodness again with it. And the big realization that I had that flipped the switch for me, and then I've done everything that I can to pass it on to other people, is your morality is not based on your food choices. Uh a beer or pizza or or broccoli or chicken breast is not inherently good or bad. There's no morality to the food. It's just does this line up with what you say you want to do for yourself? And I think that thinking like that is something that has to be dealt with and analyzed, you know. And the other thing is is I don't I don't buy into food as a reward anymore. Um I if if you want to eat the food, then eat the food. But don't don't um don't condition it with external circumstances based on behavior. Don't don't say, I've been really good, I deserve a treat, and then feel bad about what you did for yourself. Um, I use treats to train my dog. So I I don't buy into the whole treat thing. It's either you eat the food or you don't eat the food, and you either enjoy it or you don't enjoy it. And um, it took a lot of self-analysis on my part to realize that I was I had set up all this conflicting stuff, and it was in my subconscious, because I said earlier that that um we live in a culture that sort of revolves around food. I mean, if you get together and something bad happens, well then you know, you go eat your feelings, right? If you get together with a bunch of people and you're celebrating something, you have a big meal, right? You go on vacation, oh, I don't need to follow the nutritional guidelines that for the goals that I want while I'm on vacation because I'm on vacation, you know. And so we we will say that we're going to do this thing and we will follow it until the first glimmer of a reason to break away from that shows up. And that other part of our subconscious mind that doesn't line up with that will be like, yeah, you deserve to do this, or no, you don't deserve that. So go eat your feelings. You know, there's just there's no way around it. And so by um understanding that idea that there's no morality associated with food, that was the a big thing that that flipped a switch for me, for myself. And I started um talking to my clients about it when I had a gym, and um, it was a huge, huge deal for them too. Um, as far as any other stuff, personal development-wise, you have to analyze every belief and every relationship with that belief that you have. There's a whole lot of people that wish they had money, but will remain broke because subconsciously they believe that money is somehow evil or bad. Um, you know, that that money is the root of all evil. I would contest that the lack of money is the root of all evil, you know, because you don't you don't see people with with sizable incomes holding up liquor stores. It just doesn't happen, you know. So there's all of it in any aspect of your life, and it can all it can all be kind of categorized into three broad categories. You got your health, which involves your diet, your nutrition, your sleep, all that kind of stuff. You have wealth, which is anything to do with um the material world and the contributions that you're making. And then you have relationships with your family, with your spouse, with your children, with your pets, with your friends, with yourself. Um, those three areas are kind of the broad areas where we can go and look at our belief systems and adjust our belief system to match whatever our goal is. Because if the belief system doesn't match the goal, the belief system's gonna win. And if it's an unconscious, subconscious belief system, it's gonna win even more because you you don't even know that there's a problem. It's like having termites in your basement and you never go in your basement, then one day your house collapses, and it seems like all of a sudden your house fell apart. But really, what happened? You had a problem for years that you didn't know about and it just didn't line up. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think you know, it's it's interesting because when we look at things and the power of you know these beliefs that we have, you know, really deeply rooted in each individual and each person has a different set. But you know, we talk about rewarding ourselves, and it's such a great example, like uh, you know, okay, well, I I had a great week of you know, nutrition and exercise, so I'm I'm gonna reward myself with pizza and beer. But logically, that's not a reward. No, right? It's not, it's not we know that we're like, well, logically, it's not a reward, but we do it anyway because of something innately in us. It reminds me of uh, did you ever watch Bill Cosby himself? I know Bill Cosby's not thought of in the same way he used to be, but that was a genius stand-up. Yes. And he talked about like how uh we like to celebrate by drinking. And uh do you remember this? So he's like, yeah, you know, celebrate. And then he goes through the whole thing of him, you know, uh hanging out over a toilet as he vomits, and then at the very end, he's like, and that's how we celebrate, right? And yeah, it was so that hit me at a young age, so I was like, God, yeah, we have a weird way of rewarding ourselves in this culture.

That's that's how we celebrate, but that's also how we commiserate. Right. You know, I've had a I've had a really crappy day. Man, I need a I need a drink.

Yeah.

Or in the case that I was talking about earlier, man, I need a a bag of Oreos, you know?

Yeah.

I love what you go ahead. Um, another thing that was a a big paradigm shift for me in terms of the health and fitness and and training specifically, is I came through um my understanding of training, watching, like I said, Pump and Iron earlier, and and um um all the bodybuilders of the 80s and early 90s, and I was really into like Mike Mincer's approach when I was into that sort of stuff, and it was all this one set to failure, push past failure, um, push past your limits, all that kind of stuff. Um, and if you're not sore, then you didn't do a good job, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I realized that that is just dumb. It's dumb and it's counterproductive. Now, I'm not saying that Dorian Yates, who is probably my favorite bodybuilder of them all, is dumb because he trained that way, but he was training that way to a specific end with everything else that he had in place from his genetics to his nutrition to whatever performance enhancing drugs he was using. He was blindered, that was his thing, and it will work. But for the average person who's looking to put on a little muscle, get a little stronger, drop a few pounds, whatever, it's it doesn't work that way. And to really become strong, it doesn't really work that way either. I think that those guys who train that way get strong accidentally. Um, if you look at, and if you look at Dorian or if you look at Ronnie Coleman, who was another guy who trained like that, they're Dorian's in pretty good health now, but Ronnie's busted up really bad, you know. And when I started studying how old-time strongmen really did stuff, the thing that switched for me was a guy like Arthur Saxon, lifting weights was his job. Doing feats of strength was his job. And so he would go on stage every night and he would lift something or do a feat that someone in the audience was unable to do, but it wasn't even close to what his maximum ability was doing when he was doing a show. Now he competed in some lifting sports and he would he would go to his maximum ability there. But for example, um, one of my favorite lifts is the bent press. And if anybody doesn't know what the bent press is, that's fine. Um I've written a book, I've written a book about it, taming the bent press, and um you can you can find that on um Amazon and Lulu.com. But um Arthur Saxon was the undisputed king of the bent press, and still is, in my opinion. And he would regularly go on stage every night, sometimes two and three shows a day, six and eight shows a week, and he would bent press, which is lifting weight overhead with one arm. It's a press where you lift weight with one arm, and he would put up anywhere from 275 to 310 pounds as part of his exhibition, and that's more weight than the average person can deadlift right now. Yeah. Um, and the same was true back then. Most people couldn't even pick that up off the floor. Um, but to put that in perspective, his all-time best was 385 pounds. Well, um, and that was unofficial, he didn't actually stand up with it. And there's there's a possibility that he got 400 pounds up but didn't actually complete the lift. But his official best ever was 370 pounds, put overhead with one arm. So let me ask you this if we adjust those numbers to something that makes sense for a normal human, if you can, if your absolute maximum that you can put up overhead is 135 pounds, can you do 85 to 95 pounds pretty easily anytime? And the answer is yes. So it's just a matter of adjusting the numbers like that. If he's putting up 300 pounds as part of a show, and his his emphasis is on making it look good, not am I gonna complete the lift? And he knows that his maximum is say 350 to 370, then yeah, sure. He's operating at about a 70 to 80 percent, and he can do that with no trouble at all. So taking that approach and applying it to my training and realizing that the best way to make the most progress and require the least amount of recovery and have the least chance of getting injured is to do the minimal effective amount of work and not do anything else. Because we seem to have in the fitness culture tied to it, this idea that the more work we do, the more result we're gonna get. But if that were truly the case and we followed it to its logical end, then we could take six months off work, train 20 hours a day at maximum output, and then become a world champion in six months, right? It just doesn't make logical sense because it doesn't take any of the other factors of recovery and everything else that goes along with it into place. So if we look at it from more like uh administering a dose of medicine, um, what's the the smallest amount of medicine that I can give you that's going to treat your symptoms or that's going to um cure your problem? That makes a lot more sense. And if we think about it in terms of um, I I hear the hardcore people in my mind from years ago saying things like, I'm pushing my body past its limits. I'm going to force my body to adapt and grow. Well, the thing about it, from a biological standpoint, adaptation is not something you can force, nor is it something you can stop. All you do is subject yourself to a stimulus and you adapt to it. That's that's our biological nature. And if you subject yourself to lifting progressively heavier weights, you'll get progressively stronger. If you subject yourself to progressively more intense sunlight, you'll adapt by getting a suntan. How much effort do you put into getting a suntan? None. You just go spend some time in the sun and you cut it short before you get burnt up. Um and another example is if we take someone who's sedentary and they've been working a desk job for 25 years, and they drive their car, they sit and watch television, they eat their meals, they sleep, and they go to work, and that's pretty much all that they do. They're not much more active than that. The fitness pros can spot these people when they walk into the gym the first time because they're soft, they and they may be um not carrying much muscle, even if they are bigger people. And they have this sort of rounded back, kyphotic posture, right? And what's happened is being perpetually in that flexion, sitting at that desk job eight hours a day for the past 20 years, their spine has adapted to that posture. They're living in the posture of their job. Well, the question is, they've they've made changes to their tissue on a skeletal level. The the spine itself, the bones of the spine itself have shaped into this kyphotic curve, this this sort of hunched upper back. How much hard work and effort did they put into that to force that adaptation? None. All they did is sit at a desk for 25 years. There's not a lot of effort involved in that, and yet they still get the adaptation. So the idea that that increasing the effort forces the body to adapt is just not physiologically true. And if you put that to the test and start training yourself in such a way that when you get done, you feel better than you did when you started. Most of the time, sometimes it's it's good to kind of open it up and and and go a little bit further than that. But most of the training that I do for myself is very, very easy relative to what I'm capable of doing.

Yeah, man, there's so much good stuff in there. And out of curiosity, have you seen the uh I think it's a recent documentary of West Side versus the World?

I have not seen that one, no.

Oh, it's it's amazing. I mean, we talk about like um, you know, these these are people who are training so hard in the strength game that literally people are dying. Right. And uh and yeah, we you know, you see a lot of West Side adaptation for the general population. I just I'm I'm not seeing it. I just don't get it. Um I mean they they're they're the strongest gym in the world, right? That's for for people who are all in, willing to give their life. But for the general population, now I'm 42. I train um I train weights twice a week and I keep it simple, right? I I have a very simple routine and it works for me. And I I'm not hurt, right? And I do everything else, you know, I just stay active on the other side, and that's really all all people need. And I've talked about this so many times in on the podcast, how as a fitness industry, how what we've done is almost overcomplicated what fitness needs to be, um almost to protect our own entity, right? Like, well, you need us because it's complicated. Well, it's not it's not great. It's not, it's not no. Yeah, yeah, I think it's amazing. So you've been also um tell me about like because you mentioned the one arm press, right? But you you've you've done like a whole routine using one dumbbell.

Sure. That's the um the most recent thing that I've um brought to brought to market as a product. And um if I can can push that a little bit right now, um the website, the website for that is the one dumbbell challenge.com. If you go there and put in your email address, um, I will send you immediately a PDF for no cost of uh six mistakes that I have either experienced or observed or both throughout the 40 plus years that I've been doing this. Um, I'll turn 50 this year in about three months. And so I've and I've been I've been involved in strength since I don't know exactly when, but it was before I was 10 years old because I I remember getting a set of fixed weight dumbbells for my 10th birthday, and that was not the first weights that I ever had. So sometime before that, um I started I started in with that uh plastic and concrete set of weights. Um but anyway, there are mistakes that keep popping up, and if you're making these mistakes, then you're shortchanging yourself. And so you get this PDF if you if you go and just give me your name and email address. That'll put you on my mailing list and um caveat. I will continue to reach out to you and attempt to sell you things. So um uh full disclosure on that. The program itself, um after you put your name and email address in there, you'll be taken to another page. If you want to purchase the program, then then I would really appreciate that. And um also got a special um limited time thing going on where I'm um giving a dramatically discounted bonus of coaching calls one-on-one with me, two of those calls for about half of what one call would normally cost. Um, but anyway, the way the whole thing came about is I have been since uh 2006 or so teaching and working with people as a trainer and coach. And 2010 up until a little over a year ago, I owned gyms in a couple different locations. And then last year, uh around the beginning of August, as um we were getting closer and closer to the date that my son was going to be born. It's my first child, uh almost certainly gonna be my only child. Um, he's he will turn a year old in October. So he's 10 months old right now. Um, as we were getting closer to that date, I started looking at various different things in my life that I wanted to change. And I decided to get out of the gym business and move everything that I'm doing from a coaching standpoint to an online platform. So I'm doing online coaching, and the only time that I really have to leave the house is to go teach a workshop or to go do a speech or a show. So it allows me, and my wife is a photographer, she's self-employed as well. So it allows us to stay home and raise our son, and which is great. One of the drawbacks to committing to that was I no longer have a gym. And it used to be that I could get up and go and train my morning clients, and then I have clients later in the day, and I could have, you know, four or five hours over the course of the day that I could work on whatever I wanted to work on in the gym. And I had all the equipment that I wanted, had everything that I needed. And so training was just a thing that I could do as much as I wanted to and um work on various different things. And then when the gym went away, I sold the majority of the equipment that I have. The equipment that I wanted to keep now is here at my house, but it's outside in a machine shed that is um three walls and a roof. So one side where there would normally be a wall that's completely open, like you would park lawnmowers and tractors and stuff in it, right? Yeah, and so that's where I train now. And so when it gets really, really cold or really, really hot, I have things that I have to deal with in that capacity, you know? And um, for example, just a couple days ago, I was um working on doing some lifting and um managed to disturb a wasp nest and got stung on the face and my eyes swelled up, and you know, so um that's how hardcore I am. I train in a wasp swarm, you know. Um, they're all gone now. They pay for it with their lives. Um, but so that's the environment that I set myself up in. And so after our boy was born, uh, anyone who has children who's been a new parent understands the preciousness of time and what a valuable commodity that is. I'm like, okay, I need to strip this thing down to the barest elements that I can because I wasn't getting as much sleep, um, wasn't able to devote time to training like I once was. And I have to, I have to keep my skills sharp on anything that I would do in a show. So any bending, card ripping, um, driving nails through boards, breaking chains, any of that kind of stuff requires practice. So there's a certain amount of training time that is devoted to that, and that's non-negotiable. It's part of my job. Um, just like answering emails or or doing interviews would be, right? So um I noticed that my conditioning was slipping a little bit, and I noticed that my um um I was putting on some weight that I didn't want to put on, and so I'm like, okay, how can I simplify this down? And I started to go down the kettlebell route again, but as soon as I wrote everything out that I thought I was gonna work on, I was like, you know, this. Like here we go again. I don't really I know that if I approach this from day one with the feeling that I have right now, I won't make it to the end of the third week. So I kind of set that aside and I thought, what can I do that I haven't really done that can draw on what I know works, that I can get meaningful results in two hours a week or less with as little equipment as possible, was the last little piece of punctuation I put on there. So I I confined myself to using a single dumbbell, and I decided to use a density approach, influenced and inspired by Charles Staley and Paul McElroy. Both of those guys have learned a great deal about density training. And what it is, I I tested it out myself and kind of condensed it into a one size fits most program that at its highest output requires no more than two hours a week. And at its in the beginning weeks, it's more like 45 minutes a week to get it started. And the the only piece of equipment that you need is a single dumbbell that is at about 35, uh, between 25 and 35% of your body weight. So for me, I was using um a 75-pound dumbbell for most of what I was doing. Now I I did with my own um test run on it, I did adjust the weights up and down on some different exercises. But the core exercises are all very simple: one arm presses, one arm rows, um, goblet squats with a dumbbell, the humble push-up, and a few variations on push-ups that make it not so humble. And then um some crawling. Oh, and a dumbbell snatches, which uh are extremely different from kettlebell snatches. Um they're more like a barbell snatch, but the that's all explained in the um in the uh program itself. So I put all that together and then I tested it out on some online clients for anywhere from four to eight weeks, and it worked for them. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make this into an actual product and um offer it to people. And so it's out there now at the one dumbbellchallenge.com. So it all fit in with that minimalist thing. I have a limited amount of time, I have a limited amount of physical um energy to express in it too, because I have to keep these other feats up and going. I can't be like, hey, I'm the world's weakest strong man. I don't want to be that guy. You know, I had to keep my strength up for those things. So it supports that. But anyone who is um limited on time, limited on sleep, and needs to get maximum amount of stuff done in a fairly easy way, as quickly as possible, this is a good place for you.

Yeah, awesome, man. That sounds like a really cool program and very consistent with your values as well. Um, so is this will probably release um sometime early September 2019. So maybe you give me an insight like for quarter four, is there gonna be where where are you gonna be? Is there places where people can catch up with you in person and see you present?

Um, it is currently the 2st of August. I'm off to Utah tomorrow. I'm looking at my wall calendar right now. I'll be in Prague. I think the the my stage time is on the 13th of September. So I've got like a five-day travel window there. So I'm in Prague then. If you're in Europe, anywhere near Prague, send me a message on Facebook or send me an email to irontamer at gmail.com and let me know. We'll see if we can connect then. I'm looking into October. I'm doing a private event in San Diego in October. That's pretty much it for traveling for me.

Right on.

I've got a couple other school things that are coming up, but uh the average person wouldn't be there for that because it's for the students.

Right on. Well, man, thank you. And yeah, and for those listening, uh, if you do see Dave's name on the docket in any event, it's worth it. It's a really cool um experience to see you present and do the things you do. So, man, thank you so much for for taking the time and and just bestowing knowledge on us. And uh I think we covered up quite a bit today. There's a lot of ground we covered today, yeah.

Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Dave Whitley.

Thanks, guys.

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