When you're an olympic weightlifting coach, you're a leader, a guide, a teacher: You're the go-to person when people around you need answers. And while this is certainly a position of honor, it also comes with its difficulties, chief among them: Knowing who you can turn to with your questions. That's precisely why we invited Dr. Jason Miller, Ph.D., onto our podcast.

If you're looking to dive down the rabbit hole of programming design and coaching methodology for olympic weightlifting, if you've got nuts-and-bolts questions concerning the application of the latest scientific research on strength, power, technique development and more, then this podcast is a must-listen.

Dane Miller is a force. Twice-over business owner and coach of Olympic competitors, world champions, and NCAA athletes across 7 sports, he combines a deep knowledge of sports performance with business acumen and people skills you just can't teach. We admire the heck out of him, so we invited him on our podcast to find out, essentially, how he does it all.

What ensued was a highly informative, highly animated conversation about everything from coping with COVID-19 to running a business in the health/ fitness industry to what it's like to train with pioneers such as Dr. Anatoliy Bondarchuk and Charles Poliquin.

"Your most effective instrument for effecting change is your report, your relationship with the client."

We'll let that sink in for a moment. This quote, so profound in its succinct expression of truth, is one of the many gems that emerged from our conversation with Dr. Lisa Lewis, Ed.D. CADC-II. As a licensed, practicing psychologist, Dr. Lewis is an expert on motivation and behavior change. And while a portion of her career is dedicated to clinical work with individuals seeking to become healthier, we invited her on Episode 57 to talk about the other portion of her career-- the part focused on helping practitioners help others get healthier.

That distance between who you are and who you want to become? It can feel staggering, daunting, even impassible at times. Especially if you’re fixating on the sheer expanse of it. However, if you focus on taking a single step across that distance, things might not seem quite so overwhelming. Because a step is small. A step is manageable. And, as James Clear discusses in our latest podcast, a step is exactly the motivation you need to take another.

James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits, a New York Times best selling book about the art and science of habit formation.

On episode 55, Pixie Turner, M.Sc., and Alan Flanagan, M.Sc, joined us as we jumped into our coveralls, rolled up our sleeves, and took a look under the sputtering, stalling, overheating hood of public nutrition.

And what did we find there? Increasing rates of food anxiety and disordered eating. Widespread chronic lifestyle disease. And hunger. People are suffering from an excess of food messaging at the same time that people suffering from a lack of food choices at the same time that people are suffering from a simple lack.

Common knowledge has it, you shouldn’t train for ultra marathons at the same time that you train the snatch and the clean and jerk. Common knowledge has it, if you try to build strength, you shouldn’t also try to build your endurance. But Evan Peikon of Training Think Tank has it, common knowledge is wrong. 

This isn’t the first time in history that common knowledge has been off base.People used to think the body was made up of four “humors”, for example. And that lead to medical bloodletting: a wasteful, ghastly, and, by today’s measures, horrifically misguided procedure.

You know what great coaches are like? Carpenters. Carpenters that have a whole host of tools at their disposal-- carpenters who know how to deploy those tools at the right times, during the right projects, and for the right purposes. 

You know what great coaches are not like? Cult leaders. Cult leaders who doctrinize exercise, who proclaim some movements “good” and others “bad”-- whose approach is not only anathema to science, but is also no good for their clients.

In today’s hyperspeed, digitized world, people don’t seem to have time for paradox or ambivalence. They want clearly defined, mutually exclusive sides, and they want to align with one immediately. But while this may be an expedient approach to separating friend from foe, it’s not an especially honest or judicious way of looking at things.

In fact, forming polarized opinions requires oversimplification and exaggeration-- two enemies of truth. And, unfortunately, CrossFit has fallen victim to today’s side-taking, label-sticking culture.

Nutrition can be a topsy-turvy place-- a place where misinformation parades around in six-pack suits with “fitspo” masks, where cult leaders preach food restriction dogma from social media pulpits, where marketing supplants science, and where people trap themselves in echo-chamber labyrinths of their own design.

No matter how much you know, no matter how much experience you have, no matter how steadfast or disciplined or committed you are, you’re human. And, as Dr. Mel Davis, Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt, and Renaissance Periodization Coach explains, that’s a critical thing to recognize. It’s the key to reaching your aesthetic, athletic, and health goals.

When it comes to nutrition, there’s an elephant in the room. Actually, a few. And Alan Flanagan, M.Sc., Ph.D. candidate studying chrono-nutrition, and former lawyer, joins us on Episode 49 to confront them.

He begins with a particularly stubborn impediment to progress: Post-Truth Anti-Intellectualism. This movement, characterized by…

As Bryce Lewis, IFP Champion, Drug-Free Powerlifting Coach, and founder of The Strength Athlete, puts it, “The whole relationship between a coach and an athlete is hinged upon success or failure in making the athlete better.” So how can we ensure this relationship will lead to success? On Episode 48 of our Podcast, Bryce Lewis helps us answer this complex question.