Coaches, I’m going to challenge you with a little mind game today.
When was the point where it would have been a good idea to own a CrossFit box or to own CrossFit football or to own an online programming brand for CrossFit or to become a serious CrossFit coach or to be the best CrossFit coach in your city?
The people who moved early on that accessed an opportunity that isn't there today.
Let's look at what happened with CrossFit and then let's compare and challenge the idea of what might happen with ATG.
So CrossFit was giving… it was basically putting out free workouts.
So you could go on CrossFit.com and you could see what their workout of the day was and you could play along with that and they ran events and there were a few gyms that decided to become CrossFit gyms and gradually that spread and it spread globally and weightlifting became normal.
And some of you won't remember but before CrossFit, weightlifting wasn't really normal.
When I went to university, you were told “unless you're really going to specialize in weightlifting, you shouldn't try it”.
Especially with the snatch, we were encouraged not to try it and it was thought of as being too technical, and too difficult.
This is the message that I received anyway.
I don't know if everyone was receiving this message but very few people were learning weightlifting.
It wasn't used that much in professional sports at that time. especially the snatch was more uncommon.
Of course, there are exceptions to that but CrossFit really changed.
There weren't strength and conditioning gyms in Australia, it was extremely rare if not impossible to run a strength and conditioning gym.
All the private gym scenes that Real Movement worked with and lots of others worked around, really came out of CrossFit.
CrossFit popularized strength and conditioning for everyday people and it was kind of sold as be prepared for anything and it went viral and it went massive and it was all over Netflix and lots of people have done it.
Now let's look at what was the market for that. What was the demand around that?
Well, they created something completely new.
There was no demand for it.
People didn't know what any of those things were.
I mean the average gymgoer didn't know what double unders were.
Many still don't, I guess, but they created a big enough niche for there to be 14,000 gyms worldwide.
So the workouts were free online and then you might say “well actually no one really wants to follow just the CrossFit workout of the day” but a lot of the gyms actually put their programming up for free as well and there's a lot of programming online that's 10 bucks a month, 15 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month.
So why would you pay 50 a week, 60, 70, and 80 a week to go and train at CrossFit box, when you can get it for cheap online?
Well, there's lots of reasons why you go and do that.
You go and do that for the community. You go and do that for the environment that you create around your sessions. You go and do that for the coaching, to get it right, to get better, for the motivation, for the equipment.
So let's look at ATG and let's look at Ben Patrick's account knees over toes Instagram. 370, 380-something thousand subscribers and followers.
Youtube has just gone past 200,000. Videos clocking in over a million views.
Did Greg Glassman ever have the charisma, the drive behind what he's doing that Ben Patrick has?
Was there a video coming out every day informing people about this?
At what stage did Joe Rogan interact with CrossFit?
To my understanding, I could be wrong with this, the first I know of Joe Rogan interacting with CrossFit was Matt Fraser which just happened.
He's already spoken about Ben Patrick. He's already spoken about doing ATG training.
So Joe Rogan, one of the most influential guys in the world today, a lot of men look up to him
, and pretty much anything that he speaks about sells out instantly.
I have friends that have a liver supplement, they sell a desiccated liver supplement.
I have two friends actually, one in the UK and one in Australia, and the ones in the UK sold out instantly as soon as Paul Saladino mentioned the importance of liver.
I don't know if they spoke about desiccated liver, I haven't seen that episode.
But the Rogan effect is real. You look at the power of professional athletes.
Now Ben isn't leveraging the relationships that he has with professional athletes, with teams, and with some of the highest-profile players in the world.
He isn't leveraging that. He isn't leveraging the massive amount of online subscribers that he has.
He's just focusing on information, on quality.
But you as a coach, I want you to see that finally, the opportunity that you've been looking for is here.
People saw it, some people saw it with CrossFit of like “okay now I get to be a coach, I get to teach people how to move, people who are motivated, people who want to go hard. I’m going to be a CrossFit box owner. I’m going to build a life out of that.
Now the problem that happened from a business perspective was anybody else could become a CrossFit box owner for 3000 US dollars so the barrier to entry was very low, the equipment is not expensive and the weekend course, I think is a thousand dollars and then you pay the affiliation fee.
So somewhere around those sorts of numbers, you've got yourself a CrossFit box and anyone can do it and one of your staff can leave your gym and open up next door to you and undercut you by five dollars and you build them up as a coach and you put them in front of your members and then they move next door and they say “hey come with me”.
Now, I think the CrossFit stance on that is, survival of the fittest.
Let's just… you just go for it. Open capitalism.
And there's merit to that, it's not the only way to do things but it's one way to do things.
There've been a lot of successful businesses created around CrossFit.
Now let's look at the demand, so there was zero demand for CrossFit, no one even knew what it was, or how it works but they looked at it and they went “That looks like fun. Those guys are jacked. Let's go.”
Now let's look at ATG.
How many people have dysfunction in the lower body that gives them trouble walking up and down stairs, which has stopped them from being able to run, jump, and play with their kids?
It's actually a much bigger percentage of the global population than some might think.
Almost everybody, I would say.
Even if we said it was 50% of the population and I think that's being… if we said 50% of the population is deconditioned to the point where they're unable to participate in the activities that they would like to participate in, physical activities, I think that's being very generous.
I think there is a bigger percentage than 50% and it doesn't look as intimidating as CrossFit.
ATG doesn't look as intimidating.
Ben's mom who's 66, she's very athletic but she's not attempting to break any world records and she's able to train ATG.
There are a lot of online members in that demographic from my understanding and there's huge potential to expand into that group.
My mom has also been doing ATG movements, she's been training under Ben in Sydney and Ben Roberts and she's loving it, she's had really good results.
She had a knee replacement a few years ago. She had a bad ACL injury and a bad surgery and she'd had trouble with it ever since that was in her 20s.
She'd had an arthritic knee for many many years and she had it replaced and she feels a lot better and she's really really enjoyed the training with Ben and she's got function back that she didn't know that she was going to get back.
So what is the demographic for this?
You could open an ATG gym that focused purely on over the 50s and do very very well.
So the baby boomers are a great place to do business if you're looking at this from a financial perspective.
Who's got the money? The baby boomers do. People over 50, people over 60 and they want to stay forever young, that's the dream of their generation.
So they have the money, they have the time and they want to be young.
Is there a training system for them? Yes, there is, it's called ATG.
Now let's look at people who want to play sports.
When you're a kid, you don't want to do CrossFit, you want to play soccer, you want to play rugby, there's a very small percentage of people under 18 who are thinking about doing CrossFit.
There are some and it's grown a lot obviously, it may not be growing at the moment but look at that compared to the number of people who want to play professional sports, the dream is to do that.
How big is the market to be able to help those children to improve?
Now Ben deliberately priced his online product so that his 12-year-old self could have bought the product because his 12-year-old self did buy the product but it was someone else's product and the product got really really bad results.
If you watch his Instagram today, you say “what if I knew about ATG 10 years ago?”.
I had that same story on my first overuse injury at 10 years old.
I was also fanatical, I really wanted to go to the Olympics. I trained harder than most people but it consistently resulted in overuse injuries, in my knees, my shins, and shin splints and that was a barrier to me being able to train as much as I wanted to to get as better as quickly as I needed to go to the Olympics and I had ankle surgery, I had two bad ankle injuries because of orthotics, the orthotics were to prevent the shin splints which could have been presented prevented had I been exposed to ATG.
So how big is the market for this? How big is the market of people like me in their 30s, in their early 40s, wanting to get back to being more athletic, wanting to be able to play with their kids, thinking about the day when their son is going to be faster than them?
My son is four years old. I don't want him to be faster than me at six.
I don't want him to be faster than me at eight.
At some point I want him to be faster than me, if he's faster than me at eight because he's running a 12-second hundred then I’ll take it but I want to regain athleticism and play with them and have fun and enjoy that side of my life.
My dad had a hip injury and he had a hip replacement.
He wasn't able to do too much with us.
Again, he wasn't exposed to these sorts of methods and I think he probably could have improved a lot if he had that exposure.
The consequences of us not knowing how to train the human body are extreme.
They really are extreme and I don't speak to professional athletes who have this under control.
I speak to professional athletes who have issues that they don't know how to deal with and who want solutions.
So professional athletes, it's potentially millions of dollars to them.
If they get an extra three years on their career, in the NRL and they're a starter, then there's a million dollars.
If you look at all the young guys who don't make it because they get an ACL injury and then they get another one or they get a broken leg on the back of that.
That was almost the James Tedesco story. When I first worked with James Tedesco, those who don't know Australian sports, he's probably the top player in the game.
I’m close to it over the last couple of years, he's won all the awards. He's a fullback so kind of like a running back maybe for those who love NFL.
He'd torn his ACL and then broken his leg and he was back at training and he was limping around when I started work as a consultant to the Tigers in 2015, end of 2014 and I said “this guy, if he's going to be your star player, he's got one massive leg, he's got one tiny leg, this isn't going to work”.
He was limping around and I encouraged the coach to make sure he didn't train so that he could get that leg back looking something like the other one because often I see professional athletes being forced or encouraged to run this or run themselves back into form.
To run out the injury. It just doesn't happen.
I believe he would have done the same thing again.
He would have continued to have extreme problems, massive problems with that leg.
He came up to my place over the Christmas holidays to train which is unheard of in rugby league together with a few other players and we worked on their legs primarily.
We trained their legs a lot, we trained two or three times a day, for four days.
It was a big session. Big sessions, big camp, some trampoline, and some fun in between but it was a huge training camp and he went back and he trained again after that but they basically gave me two, three weeks there to get him going.
He played most of that season. He's hardly missed a game since then.
Now he was going to be a great player. I’m not saying that that was a factor in him being a great player.
What I am saying is that him getting exposed to lessons like those that are in ATG obviously, I didn't know ATG at that time but I'd been trained through the Poliquin system and just by getting him deep front squatting, just by getting some basics and foundations, I could have done a much much better job but what I did was enough and he was in a really bad state and he was already back training on the field and then he wasn't in such a bad state and he played and he played really well and he continued to play and then he went to the Roosters and then they won two back-to-back premierships and he won all the awards and he was a star player.
Now there's sliding doors here, what if he hadn't come across an ATG coach?
I don't know, you don't get to know what would have happened.
What I do know is we made some big changes from what he was doing and he went and did what he wanted to do.
How many athletes don't get that opportunity?
From a coach's perspective, we have to change that.
I missed out on my Olympic dream because I wasn't able to get my legs right.
Eventually, I came to a point of frustration, and I just kind of missed the window, like that's the way professional sport is.
I wanted to make the Australian under-21s team.
I think I was very close to it. We won the national championships.
I felt like I was one of the key players in our team amongst five other teams kind of thing that players were being selected from.
I think seven states, territories, or whatever in Australia but some of them are not to the same standard.
I was just a year too late.
It improved a lot over those last years but I missed six months of training because of ankle surgery.
Three-four months I’ve still got a massive bone spur in my ankle because of that.
I don't think I needed that surgery. I don't think I would have had that surgery if I didn't have the orthotics.
I wouldn't have had the orthotics if I'd have known how to get rid of shin splints.
I had compartment syndrome testing. I had stress fracture testing and scanning and anti-inflammatories and this is not what a teenage kid needs to be doing, the teenage kids need to be playing their sport, getting better, and chasing their dream.
So we need ATG coaches. I would contest that the market for ATG coaches is much better prepared and better educated and ready to go than the CrossFit market was.
What we're offering, what ATG Online does is offers a fifty-dollar service.
Fifty dollars a month just like all those CrossFit online training programs that are out there.
There are lots and lots of ways to get trained in CrossFit for 50, 100, and 200 a month.
You can pay more than that as well if you want but then all of them have local CrossFit gym memberships as well, even people who are buying those subscriptions because they want somewhere to go and do it, they want to coach, they want the environment.
So let's do it. If this is going to be the next wave if Joe Rogan is going to get on this bandwagon if all these pro athletes are doing this, then what are we waiting for?
If all people are getting joints replaced left, right, and center without attempting this method, if professional athletes are losing years, games, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they can't all make it but they shouldn't not make it because they didn't get the right training.
They cannot make it because they didn't train hard enough, because they weren't skillful enough, because they weren't tough enough, whatever reasons, but let's not make it because of the strength coach.
And the fact of the matter is that if you train athletes like powerlifters or like bodybuilders or like weight lifters, you're not training them in the way that the body is designed and engineered, you're putting imbalances into the body that aren't there in children.
Children are extremely resilient to running and jumping.
They can get up and sprint straight out of bed. They can do a depth jump body height straight off a table, more than body height, all little kids can do that.
They can touch their toes, and they're very flexible until they spend a lot of time in chairs and locked up but that's a separate conversation.
We need to restore youth. We need to return to the childlike mechanics.
So we're going to have more muscle than the children.
I’m faster, we become faster and stronger as we get older but it's the lack of connective tissue development and the over-functioning, over-emphasis on muscle, the over-emphasis on the upper body, the lack of emphasis on the tibialis, on the calves, and the soleus, on the foot strength, on the knee tendons, on the knee over the toe.
All of these factors are debilitating humanity.
So there are so many gym memberships in the world today and there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably over a million, struggling trainers in the world.
Most coaches out there don't have enough business and it's a shame because the demand for great coaches is bigger than it's ever been but it's very very difficult for someone who decides “I want to get a good coach. I want to get my body going.”
Most people have already discovered “well, I just go and do this training and then I get hurt. I don't want to get hurt so I'd rather just not or I’ll just go for a walk instead.”
We need people to have a brand that they can trust.
That was really the ambition of Real Movement was to have a place in every suburb of the world, somewhere where people could go, where they knew they were going to meet a good person who was well educated and had a great perspective and thought deeply about how the world works and what they're doing, who knew training.
The bottom line, you have to know training, you have to know how the body works.
Now people who work with people who have already got massive dysfunction, if you have massive dysfunction in the body, people know where to go.
“I go to this specialist, go to that specialist” and then we assume that they have the answer but the fact of the matter is they don't know much about how to improve human ability.
ATG is the best system that has been developed for improving human ability.
It's built on the technology that Charles Poliquin developed.
He coached 286 Olympic medalists.
He had some of the biggest arms you'll ever see.
He knew strength development.
He knew how to create winning athletes.
What Ben's done is taken that to the lower body and used it to be able to dunk where he couldn't even touch the ring and now he's almost touching his head on the ring.
He's throwing down massive dunks.
He's got no pain and he can do human knee extensions when he was told he would never be able to bend his knee fully again.
So he's got massive function where there was dysfunction and he's the expert of that journey going from massive dysfunction to extreme levels of function.
The cool thing is, he's giving it all away.
You can learn it all on Youtube.
If you will humble yourself to be an amazing student of ATG, I’m also giving away ATG for Coaches.
We're both doing very very well.
This doesn't need to be a business squeeze.
Charles Poliquin, it was very expensive to go and study from.
I invested over ten thousand dollars in Poliquin education and I didn't get anywhere near as much as what I can get off Ben Patrick's Youtube.
That's just the truth, Ben Patrick's Youtube is the best resource that's ever been created around strength training and I’ve read pretty much everything that's out there.
There is not much that I haven't looked at.
Training systems, I’ve studied lots of different systems.
I’ve had lots of different mentors and they have their benefits.
Louie Simmons is a genius.
Louie Simmons is a strength genius, in physics and I love that system.
His focus is equipped powerlifters lifting the heaviest weights in history.
What's cool about that is he keeps them human because of the sleds, because there's some jumping in there, some speed work, they actually maintain great ability together with what they do but they're not designed to run and therefore if that system is taken to running athletes, then you'll create serious dysfunction for what an athlete needs to be able to do.
They'll be able to produce a lot of force but they may not be able to deal with the braking forces.
They may not be able to deal with the different positions that are required because the demands of powerlifting are very very different.
Now if you use Louie Simmons together with Ido Portal or Louie Simmons together with Ben Patrick then something special could happen.
There's a lot there, I’m not saying that there's not a lot there in the Louie Simmons system.
He's still working on the hardware.
Then there's all sorts of crazy stuff going on in the world of athletic development.
All sorts of funky ideas and they're software focused, they're skill development but if you don't have the hardware right, you cannot win.
You cannot win CrossFit games if you're a male at 65 kilos or you're six foot three and you're 75 kilos, you are not going to win the CrossFit games.
There's a physical buy-in for every sport.
In rugby league, you need to have a muscle number of around 100.
Now there's a few outliers and you can outlier to a certain extent, you can go a certain amount of standard deviations away from optimal and still be able to get by if you've got amazing skills or other attributes.
But there is a new system, there is a better system, there is a solution that the world hasn't seen before, it brings the technology of the most successful strength coach in history to everybody and he's taken it to another level.
There was no Jefferson there was no extreme long-range movement in the Poliquin system from my understanding of it and I’ve studied it extensively definitely used long-range training and he was the first one to understand structural movements and neural movements from what I can see if someone knows more of the history of it I'd love to understand but I was looking for the holy grail of strength for a long time and I believe if you look deeply into Charles's arms programs you can see long range mid-range short range strength but what we needed was extreme long-range and extreme short-range as well as short-range mid-range long range now
Definitely used long-range training and he was the first one to understand structural movements and neural movements from what I can see, if someone knows more of the history of it, I'd love to understand but I was looking for the holy grail of strength for a long time and I believe if you look deeply into Charles's arms programs, you can see long-range, mid-range, short-range strength but what we needed was extreme long-range and extreme short-range as well as short-range, mid-range, long range.
Now if you don't know what I’m talking about, you can dive further into the ATG for Coaches lectures and I’m going to make as much of that free and publicly available as I can because coaches need to know this stuff.
Everybody is suffering the consequence of a disempowered society.
If we can empower society with physical ability then who knows where it's going to go?
You see once people regain their physical vigor then other things can be regained as well.
We want that personal power, we want people to be feeling confident and powerful.
The opportunity now is… if you can see this as being something that's going to change the world then you can either watch it from the sidelines and think “that CrossFit stuff is rubbish” or you can be CrossFit Los Angeles CrossFit Sydney CrossFit London the people who did that did well the problem was anyone could go and get one in ATG it's by invitation right
The people who did that did well the problem was anyone could go and get one.
In ATG it's by application, you put your name forward as “yes I would like to be an ATG gym” and when there's no hurry, we don't need everybody to do this, not the business model to put a gym on every street corner.
What we want is for great coaches to be known and to be busy.
Now having a gym is not a hands-off business.
I speak to so many people who want passive income.
Most of them end up in jail or poor.
It's very difficult to do, it can be done but there are a lot of different skills that are involved in that and they're skills that most people aren't really willing to develop.
If you want to work hard and help people and get results, whether it's working with a professional team like I did or running a gym like Ben did, then I think that we have an opportunity that hasn't been had before.
I want to work with a bunch of professional teams.
I do think that ATG should be working with top coaches in every league, and every sport around the world.
Why not?
If there's a better system out there, show me.
I’m happy to discuss it with you.
I’m not close-minded.
I’m always looking at other solutions and there are lots of intelligent ideas out there.
I think you'll find the deeper you go, the more truth is in the athletic truth system.
That's my experience and it continues to evolve and it will continue to evolve.
Challenging new coaches, a lot of people thought they had the next Facebook when Facebook came out, the next google, the next uber, it's difficult.
Yes, there are next movers but it's difficult.
There was CrossFit now there's ATG.
It's up to you, what you can see, what you want to do.
If you have that vision for your own brand and you're really clear about it and it conflicts, it doesn't make sense, what you're learning about with ATG then don't do it.
But if it makes deep sense to you and you know that this is your mission and your purpose… is to have the impact that ATG is already having whether it's with professional athletes or everyday people in your community, then there is an opportunity here that hasn't been presented ever before to be part of a brand that is relevant to just about everybody, old, middle-aged, professional athletes, young athletes.
And there's going to be a lot of fun, there's going to be a lot of evolution, there's going to be a lot of change over the coming years.
I’m excited for that journey and I think that we're going to have a lot of fun, we're going to change a lot of lives.
If you think that we're chatting today about nutrition, CrossFit's had the most impact on human nutrition of any brand.
From my perspective they pushed the paleo zone diet, a lot of the keto-type stuff came out of that and Glassman took a serious stand against the sugar and whatnot.
You don't really need to stand against anything if you stand for something.
There is an opportunity to change some things about the way the world works.
CrossFit has done a lot, 14,000 gyms, lots and lots of people who've tried it and they have impacted the world.
It hasn't been presented that much in the mainstream and when you see it, it's just the CrossFit games which is the super elite end which is not really what CrossFit was created for or what it's really meant to be about.
The real journey isn't publicized but small groups of passionate people change the world, that's all that's ever changed the world.
The market made “we can change the world but we have to make a strong decision and we have to back that decision with massive action and then time will tell how far we can take this.”
If you get some thoughts here, if you know where you're headed, drop me a message.
I look forward to building this stream over the months and years to come.
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