Welcome back to the Strong Life Podcast. This is your host, Zach Evanish. In this episode, I'm going to take you guys down. A little experience I had Monday night traveling to Philadelphia to meet up with my good friend, Joe DeSenna, who is the founder and owner of Spartan Race. He's also the owner of Tough Mudder. He's an author. Most of all, he's a dear friend. So I can't wait to share the experiences and the lessons learned from doing hard things and why it's important to surround yourself and be around the right people. So we're going to get into that right now. Here we go. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the Strong Life Podcast, where we talk about dominating in strength, health, business, and life. And by the way, if you're a parent out there and you've got a teenager, get over there and see Zach. Talk about being jacked up. This place is jacked up and ready to go. There's no better program than here. I push myself beyond the levels that I can go in here. God of it, it's on the ground. Have you ever seen Zach Evanesh? No, what's that? Oh, he's a he's a trainer out of New Jersey. First of all, let me let me just congratulate him on his badass name. That's a great name. What's his name again? Zach Evanesh? Evanesh. Evan. That's a pretty great thing. All right, friends, I hope everybody is doing great as the fall is kicking off into full gear, at least here in the Northeast. But I believe if you're an Australian, Australia, our fall, which approaches winter is your spring, which becomes summer. And we do have a good amount of listeners overseas. Before we kick it off, I want to share the latest five star review. If you leave a five star review, there's a chance that you could win a free gift. And so this free gift, this is going to go to Philip Burley. This is an amazing five star review. Phil, I want this. I want you to send me an email and give you three months free membership to the Underground Strength Academy. That's undergroundstrengthcoach.com. That's where we house all of our educational content for sport coaches, strength coaches, parents of athletes, strength athletes, anybody who's really taking their strength train seriously, check this out. Great review from Phil. Let's see, it was on August 28. And so today is 9/11. And of course, this is the anniversary of 9/11, which I remember clear as day, clear as day, especially where I lived at the time was Edison, New Jersey, Central, almost North Jersey. What a shock to the world. And here we are. The world is still still pretty messed up. A lot of crazy things going on, which, you know, all the more reason for us to train. All the more reason. So from Philip Burley, pure passion is the title of his five star review. I have been following Zach in some form or another for well over a decade and have listened to almost every episode of the podcast. First of all, Zach is a good person and a great dad, which in my opinion is the highest compliment you could give someone. That is an awesome compliment. That is a powerful compliment. Thank you. Secondly, the podcast oozes old school passion. The podcast is not all training and it's certainly no fluff, but is the right mix of training knowledge, passionate stories about the old school that gets you fired up. Amazing guest and advice to make you a better person. Father and husband, comma. If you are looking to listen to someone tell fluff stories, this is not your place. But if you want no nonsense in your face advice from someone that walks the walk, well, this is your home. Zach's rerelease of the underground encyclopedia was much needed as I had trained for years to find a good copy. Oh, tried for years. Yes, for those who don't know, my original publisher stopped printing it when COVID happened. And so I got the rights back to my book. And here we are on Amazon. I believe if you go to undergroundstrengthbook.com, you'll find it. And then Phil goes on to say, Zach's encyclopedia is filled with tons of exercises, advice and programming. That is a huge help, especially for us washed up meatheads. Keep preaching your passion, Zach. Love it. Phil, please send me an email by replying to our newsletter. Send a screenshot of your review right here. And you're gonna get three months free to undergroundstrengthcoach.com. All right, team. Next thing I want to say before I forget, the underground strength conference is live, but don't sign up for it because you could get a discount if you are in one of my online groups. So on the forum of undergroundstrengthcoach.com, you'll see a $100 discount code on both of my trainee road programs. Dad strong and gladiator strong. You'll see a $100 discount code. If you're in the Facebook group for certified underground strength coach certified SSP coach, which is strength and sports performance coach, you have a $200 discount code. And so hooking people up who have skin in the game. I think it's crucial to have skin in the game. I'm sitting here recording actually standing now. And as I look at my desk, I say, well, I have bought this. I have bought that, you know, the investment financial just changes things. And look, I want to say this too. Sometimes you don't have the money to do these things. But as a coach who would be attending underground strength.com, there's gonna be so much business talk that what's crucial is you are, I've said this so many times, you must learn to write your own paycheck men especially. And if women are listening, you know, they're being a strength coach, being the owner of the underground strength gym since 2002. I've had many of these conversations with moms who have to also play the role of dad because the father left and the father doesn't support the family. They don't send child support. I'm not sure, you know, the legal stuff that goes into that. But moms are left to their own raising, you know, one, two, three, four kids alone. And so women should also be trying to learn how to write your own paycheck. For example, I work for a school. If I simply relied on that one paycheck, we would not be able to afford any of what we do. And having the underground, none of it was based on making money. Okay, having the online courses, none of it was based on making money. I was so friggin passionate about helping people avoid my painful mistakes, whether it was athletes, coaches, sport coaches, strength coaches. I wanted to share all of it, dying to share all of it. And in my experiences in the two plus decades of doing this, when you do it cheap, and you try to make everything the lowest price, you also attract people who don't respect and don't value what you do. It's a little bit heartbreaking. So if you're going to go to the underground strength conference and you're inside of one of my groups, go on to those forums, you'll see a discount code. If you can't see it, just kind of give me a shout out on the forums and I will help you out. All right, how do you how do you drop a review on it on Apple podcast? You open up the show, strong live podcast, you scroll down and it'll give you the option to leave the five-star review and write a review. And then how do you email me? Respond to my free newsletter, zachstrength.com. All right, team, let's crush this show. So a couple days ago, maybe it was last week, my buddy, Jota sent him, and I were texting back and forth and he said, "Hey, I'm gonna be up in your area. I'm gonna be in Philly and I'm gonna be running a marathon." And he's like, "You should come down. We'll get some content." He's always, he knows that that's a big part of the game of business. Gary Vaynerchuk even wrote a book about it, The Attention Economy. And any excuse to see Joe is a great, it's just a great excuse to be around such a great person. And I put this out in the Strong Life Insider, which is the newsletter. I said, "How do you know you have a great friend? Who is a great friend?" And the answer is this, if you merely think about that person and it inspires you to be more, to do more, to be a better person, well, that is a great friend. That is somebody who you want to spend time with. That is a battery charger, not a battery drainer. And Joe is that guy for me. And so I said, "Damn, man, I'll come and meet you, but I don't think I can run a marathon. Plus, it's the first full week of school I'm coaching. You know, I can't leave." And so, I said, "What marathon is this?" I wasn't sure if there was the Philadelphia Marathon. He's like, "No marathon, just doing it." And so, Joe must have been contacted by this other guy, Joe, who's in the Army, who's also going through his master's degree out in Stanford, where Joe's son wrestles. And there's another one of the kids I've trained when he was at the Underground, then he went to Blair. He's a wrestler there. And this guy, Joe, when he's done with his master's, he's going to go into selection for being a green beret. I have to put him in touch with my boy Rusty Whit, who we've had on a strong life twice. So make sure you do a search for Rusty's name. We talk about football performance, talked about being in the military and transitioning from strength coach into Special Forces back to strength coach. Super inspiring story. But this guy, Joe, is running. He's probably finishing next week, I think three to four marathons a week in, I don't know how many different states. So he travels to a different state, runs a marathon almost, you know, every day, three to four days in a row, hops on, you know, then he's at the next place, and the next place. Well, I told Joe, "Man, I'm going to get there at night because I got a new coach starting. Our new coach, Nate Stout, started coaching full time at the Underground, has been doing awesome." So I said, "I'm going to coach at my school, then I'm going to drive to the Underground, and then as soon as I'm done, I'll just grab a bag from the house, pack some sneakers, change a clothes, and I'll go to Philly. I get to Philly, I get there, it's around 8 p.m. In fact, I want you guys to see the resources linked up in this, because I recorded some YouTube videos, I've also posted some of them to Instagram, that's why you want to keep up on these different platforms with me. And you'll see when I get to the parking deck, and I had told my wife the night before, I'm going to meet Joe at the Rocky Stairs, which I believe is the Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I said, "I'll be kind of catching them when they're going through their push-up marathon. I'm going to do 1,000 push-ups, I'll do 1,000 push-ups." And my wife says to me, "Don't come home with Rob, though." I texted her back. We have a little family group chat. I said, "My generation doesn't get Rob, though." And I got to tell you, you know, it's not to joke, but it is a little bit of a joke. Like, we see these things happening, right? Texas coach punishes kids, do 400 push-ups. They get rapped over the arms. Something similar happened, University of Iowa, like 2010, something like that. Football players come back from break. I think they did 10 by 10 squats, superseded with like 100 foot sprint on the prowler, and I was thinking myself, "Man, when I was 15, I remember we were going to go to Israel for like three or four weeks." And back then, there was no gym in this little town that my grandparents lived in. That little town reminded me a lot about Mansquan, a little town center. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody knew my grandparents. My grandfather spoke to everybody, you know? And so before going to Israel, I was like, "I ain't got no gym." And I had read about Vic Richards doing, you know, like 50 sets of squats with the gladiator brothers, or the barbarian brothers. And so I did 50 sets of squats. And I didn't do 50 sets with like 135 and shit like that. I was squatting 225, 275, 295, 295, and I was just doing set after set after set. And two and a half hours later, I was done with my 50 sets of squats. And I was fine. Got on an airplane the next day. And I think to myself, we can, we have to be very careful with the generation of today. But back then, if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, it was not odd to like not have water all day unless you saw somebody and you drove by their house and they were watering the grass and you asked to drink from their garden hose. And we were fine. And I joke with my wife, I say, "Today, you know, the kids walk around the block and you're asking them, 'Do you need to leave? Do you need to chiropractor? I'll get you to the physical therapist.' Well, we ain't fucking strong anymore. We're not fucking tough anymore because we don't do tough things. And one of the first things Joe told me, before we even met in person, you know, first time we did a podcast, back then I went there, Zoom didn't even exist. That's how long ago I did a podcast with Joe. I can't even remember what it was. But he said, "The way you change your frame of reference is you have to consistently do hard shit. You got to do hard things." Like even this, like I said, the word shit, you know, many people get upset when somebody curses? It's like, we're just looking for a reason to get upset. Somebody on Twitter is, you know, I don't engage with those people. I just kind of ignore them. But so upset that I encouraged and liked the Presidential Fitness Challenge. And he's like, "Well, you know, a lot of kids didn't like you because they were forced to run." I was like, "Forced? You mean they were encouraged to get fit? They were encouraged to challenge themselves. They were encouraged to compete against others in their school, in their classroom, and others in the country. They were inspired to do something." He's like, "Well, what if people don't like it? Some people don't like to run. They just, they might only like to dance." And it's like, you see, here's a guy that can't stop coming up with excuses as to why you can't do this and you can't do that. Joe Polish calls those guys battery drainers. Well, you need to be around people like Joe Polish and Joe Descenta and my friends at Varsity House. And like the underground strength conference, you need to be around battery chargers. And it is so important in life to be around battery chargers because battery drainers, as I explained to athletes, especially at the college level, the hardest stressor in your life will be emotional stress. So a hard leg workout is hard, but you feel a bit exhilarated after it or a lot exhilarated, but a hard argument with your girlfriend in college will exhaust you and negatively impact not just the rest of your day, but possibly several days and all week. And those are days and weeks lost from your life. So here's the deal. You want to dance? Do you want to dance instead of run? The deal with life is this and I believe part of it is learning it in school. Even though school is certainly not optimal, it's not a good model for the majority. But I'll tell you this, there are many things in my life I don't like to do, but I do them because that's part of life. Sure, when you get to a point where you're making more money, you could outsource a lot of things you don't like to do. But some stuff I don't like to do and I still do it because I know that the first few minutes are uncomfortable physically and or mentally. But I also know that the feeling, the vigor you get from doing this thing that challenges you, which is probably why you don't like it because you're not good at it. I don't love running because I'm not that good at it. But guess what? I feel great when I'm done. I feel great when I'm done. And so Joe and I, I love Joe. Joe and I meet up. He's with a crew of guys as always. He's with a son. He's with that guy Joe. I don't know Joe's last name. I'll have to give him credit next time I'll get his information and the story. We'll get Joe on the podcast because Joe is actually one of our speakers at the Underground Strength Conference. And if you want to see, just go to undergroundstrengthcon.com or check out the links below. Everything I always do, I link it up below. Joe will be speaking and I know he's going to speak about work ethic. He could speak about team building. He'll bring, he'll do Q&A. He'll be there for us. Joe is going to crush the speaking stage. 100%. And so I meet Joe and Philly. I park in a parking deck. And by the way, you see the media on Philly and you're like, damn, is it going to be dangerous? Well, I get into the parking deck. I park second floor and then I fucking hear gunshots. I'm like, fuck. I guess this trip could not be complete without hearing gunshots or getting shot at like that. That is like a blueprint for doing anything with Joe to center. There's danger. There's adventure. There's excitement. I hear gunshots and I'm in a nice area. I was like, holy shit. I get changed with my sneakers and then I head out and I see a black car outside of the hotel. And it didn't say Uber on it. I wasn't sure if it was Uber, but I see the guy dropping somebody off. And I said, hey, man, are you Uber? He's like, if you pay cash on whatever you want. I said, all right, get me to the rocky stairs. He's like, okay. So we he's like, pull up Uber. Show me what it would cost to take you to the rocky stairs. It shows like $9 and change. So I said, it's 10 bucks. He's like, okay, $10. I'm taking you there. We get to the rocky stairs. And I said, do you take credit card? Because in business, you want to write off all it's, you don't have have expenses written off. He's like, oh, man, I don't do that. I said, all right, I have a $20 bill. Can you give me five dollars back? He's like, I got no change. You could go to the right up front of the rocky stairs. The museum was like a food truck selling food, ice cream drinks, all this stuff. I said, no, don't worry about it. Keep 20 bucks. He's like, Oh my God. Oh my God. Today's a great day. Like he was so pumped to have a $10 tip or whatever. Make 20 bucks. I get out. I see Joe doing pushups with the other Joe with another friend of his Mike. I see Jack DeSenna. I see one of Jack's teammates with him, one of the wrestlers from Stanford, who's from the Philly area. And by the time I got there, I feel like Jack was somewhere around like just under 700 pushups. So I was like, okay, let's start banging out these pushups together. At that time, his son was doing 15 in a row. I started doing sets of 20. And Joe, the guy who's in the army, who's also going through his master's degree at Stanford, he saw my pushups and he was like, those are great pushups. He's like, look at that. Chest to the floor, body is straight. He's like, those are military grade pushups. I'm like, yeah, man, I've been here before. I know all about pushups. I've made plenty of videos on pushups. I've said it before. I've said pushups can change the world. Why? Because getting strong changes the world. So by the time the like certain hour was coming about, by the time I got there, I think it was like closer to like 815, 830, maybe there were a lot of roads blocked because I was there Monday night. And Tuesday was the presidential debate with President Trump and Kamala Harris. So the guy, the, I guess the cab driver, whatever we want to call him, kind of was navigating around everything. And he actually took me through a very nice area of Philly. And I was like, oh man, this is the money area. This is not what we see in the media and on the news. And I thought that was very interesting. I forgot what kind of, what area that was near the park. Very beautiful. Long story short, I start doing my sets of 20. Once I get to 200, I start doing sets of 15. And I get up to 280. Then Joe and the other guys, some of the guys are like, hey, I got to go home. The other guy, Joe is like, hey, I'm going to finish running this marathon. I got two miles left. I'm going to run back to the hotel. Joe and I walk back. Joe is in a lot of pain going through that marathon. I'm not sure how old Joe is now. If I'm almost 49, he's a few years older than me. And so he's doing this event on a whim. It's not like he's training for it. The other guy, Joe, I think his name is Joe Nails, which is like fitting, very fitting, like he's tough as nails. He looked fresh as a daisy. He was banging out push-ups. He was running no problem. So Joe and I had back to the hotel. We film. Those videos are up on YouTube and I'll link them up in the blog post episode. And we start talking about doing challenging things, making America healthy again, which is on the comeback. Thanks to RFK. Mark LoBliner has been posting about it for several years. And there's a lady with a podcast who's been posting about it. So I'm going to dig into that a little bit more. But on our way there, Joe and I are capturing content. And we're talking, Joe and I always re-circle. We always keep coming back to the same topics, which is with too much freedom. And you know, you have all the freedom to eat how you want, do as you want. All this convenience over the struggle is why America is so fat and out of shape. RFK mentioned a statistic where it was something like about 50% either of our population or our youth, I don't recall, is obese. Whereas Japan is only 3% obese. And it's very interesting that I feel like the past 20 years, but especially since the iPhone came out, I say this all the time, but I never know who's a new listener, who's a veteran listener. Once that iPhone came out and then apps started creating these shortcuts and the convenience and the ease of things that our country declined in strength and fitness. You think that there's more people exercising, there might be, but maybe we live in a bubble. As I've said before, I think two years ago I got a new phone. I was in the Apple store because I didn't use their cloud. So I was kind of stuck in there for several hours. I can't remember if it was two and a half, three and a half hours, but they don't allow you to leave the store. And long story short, I'm there. I see a thousand people walk through that store easily. Not one man looked like he exercised, not one man out of a thousand looked like he could do one pushup. And it was like, whoa, I thought this is normal. I thought strength training and exercise was this popular thing, but I'm living in the underground strength bubble. I'm living in the strong life bubble. So Joe and I walking back and as we're walking back and getting near the hotel, there's these two guys that are kind of out and about trying to make money. And you know, we see some kind of the shady stuff going on, but these two guys like, Hey, where are you going? You're going to go to the titty bar. You want to go to this? You want to go to that? What they're doing is trying to tell us where to go. And then we give them a tip for helping us. And I said now, man, we're like the block two blocks away from our hotel. I said, Hey, help a brother out man. What could you do? I said, you do 10 pushups. I'll give you money. And that video is on YouTube on Instagram. It's going to be linked up below where the blog post is going to be. I want you to watch it. And Joe and I said, listen, we'll give you this money after you do the pushups. But don't waste down drugs, man. Go buy food. Go do something positive with it. One of the guys out of the two gentlemen, he's like, man, I used to do this. I used to do that. I said, listen, I got a good friend, more like a mentor to me, Tash, Brian Chantash, legendary Marine, legendary human. And Tash said, I'm not interested in what you used to do. I just want to know performance on demand. What can you do right now? And so I did 10 pushups with those guys bang. I hit 290. We go out to dinner, have an amazing dinner. I connect with somebody I had known thanks to my buddy, Jason C Brown for over 20 years. Phil Migloris. Okay. Guy is a Jiu Jitsu legend. And we got to have dinner. And I had dinner with one of Phil's business partners and students. And I thought it was amazing. Phil owns a bunch of Jiu Jitsu studios called balance. I don't know if they're called balance MMA, balanced Jiu Jitsu. But I thought what was awesome was I said, Phil, I've known about you for 22 years since like 2002. And if we wait another 22 years, I'll be 70. I'll be 70. And I hope this is a stark reminder of how fast time flies, because we can easily put things off. That is human nature. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it next week. I don't have the time for this. I don't have the time for that. Before you know it, you don't have the time to live. And something hit me this past summer. I did a ton of traveling with my daughter, a ton of traveling. And so in early August, after we came back from our lake vacation, normally my wife and I, when we go to the beach in the summer, we go at like six, seven, we walk the sand. And it's kind of like always this work thing, right? I'm like, you're working your body. Well, one day we went to the beach like on a Sunday afternoon. And I fell asleep either in my chair or on my towel on the sand. And I was like, man, we got to do more of this. Let me take a little sip of tea, kids, hold on. So we got to do more of this. We live biking distance to the beach. And that was my second time at the beach. I said, this is not good. It's not good. You see, when you start getting down that rabbit hole, the way Joe and I think about doing hard things, you almost could feel guilty taking care of yourself. I'm not getting a massage. I'm not going to a physical therapist. I'm not going to a chiropractor. All you're doing is kind of work, work, work. Well, how do you really elongate the health process? How do you continue down the path and journey of strength? Well, you got to stay healthy. And health is not just physical. It's emotional. It's mental. It's psychological. It's internal. It's external. And so we started going to the beach a little bit more, not long, usually 90 minutes, but getting sun, relaxing, vitamin D. I think even better next time would be if I'm at the beach, I don't take my phone with me, right? We have our phone all the time. What if the kids need us? What if somebody needs me? The world's not going to end. It is not going to end in 90 minutes. Okay. Now there is a lot of dangerous shit going on out there. And something finally happened to me that I've been talking about constantly in the strong life insider. I say, if you look like a victim, you are a target for criminals. And so when I was, when I was walking back with Joe and one of his buddies, Mike, we walked back to where the guy parked his truck. And he was a couple of blocks away from the hotel. He's like, guys, get in. I'm going to drive you. We're like, no, don't worry about it. He's like, get in, you know, drive you. So he drives us. And it's kind of a narrow road. And I get out. And when I open the door, you know, I should have looked in my side view mirror, there was a guy on a pedal slash electric bike. And I was like, Oh, sorry, my bro. And he didn't have the best English. He's like, no, no, it's okay. I got Joe out of the truck. He's like, no, no, I saw your back. I'm not messing with you. I'm not messing with you. That's what he said. I was like, you see that Joe? You got to look strong. And I've said this many times, your neck, your back, your shoulders, you know, Josh Bryant calls it the shield. It gives it sends a message. It's like it gives off some sort of a sign of strength, so to speak. But it can intimidate people. And being big doesn't mean you're strong. You know, those of us who are strength coaches know that. Okay. You could have the wrong kind of muscle. If you're an athlete, at least, you know, if you're a bodybuilder, you're not worried about how much weight you lift, you're just trying to look bigger and sculpt your body. But that was a reminder to me that people judge and they will thin twice if you look like you could handle yourself. And so after we got dropped off, Joe and I, Joe wanted to get food. And so I looked, I looked up in the hotel, the restaurants found restaurant. And my navigation took me kind of a crappy way because my previous navigation, my previous map had like a second stop and it was like messing us up. So Joe and I walked essentially another two miles we looped around. And we went through some sketchy areas and people were moving out of our way as I was walking down the sidewalk with him. Joe is not a big guy. But maybe I look like a big guy in my mind. I don't. But I think people were less likely to be bothering us because of the appearance I gave off. So I want you to think about that with training. You know, what are you doing to build the neck to build the back as soon as I shut down this recording of the strong life podcast, I'll do some network. I have a neck harness down here. I do it a couple of times a week, sometimes more frequently, sometimes Monday through Friday when I on the way down. It's like, you know, pay $20, you know, it's like monopoly. What is my payment before I cross through the doors into my office? Neck harness, pushups, could be some foam rolling on a rumble roller, smash up those lats. So I got those 290 pushups in, came home at 1230 and did 10 more to make sure I got 300 before going to bed. And this trip was super inspiring, being around Joe, always inspiring. But then the people he surrounds himself with, you know, we went out to dinner and some of the people in the crew, Joe's videographer, that guy Joe, I think Joe Nails, Phil Miggly Reese, Phil had a partner, super sharp guy. We spoke a lot about business. And as a business owner, it's important to have a powerful network. Tim Ferriss said, I feel like I heard him say 20 years ago, your network is your net worth. And that's not always the direct correlation. But who do you want to hang out with? Average people who have average goals, average attitudes, average work ethic, average income, average mindset. No, there's nothing inspiring to be around those kinds of people. So you need to be around battery chargers. You need to be around high achievers. And I'll tell you, I've taught that lesson in my kids many, many times for many, many years. I tell them, if you have friends that are bums, you stay away period and a story you move on. And sometimes it's a little bit lonely because it's hard to find friends. And I got to tell you why it's hard because we spend too much time on the phone. And that was a big reason why I said underground strength conference must come back in person. I oftentimes feel guilty when I take a weekend away from family. But there's certain kind of events and experiences that I know if I do them and attend them, I come back a better man, a better husband, a better father. So I love to go to summer strong. I hang out with a lot of old friends, friends that I've met at summer strong, friends that I've known in this kind of strength game, strength world. And I come back rejuvenated. And guess what? Sometimes my family needs a break from, you know, from Zach Evanish. That's for sure. They do. I'm sure everybody could sometimes use a break from me. You know, athletes could use a break for me sometimes they, they need it because I'm pretty intense. I'm fired up. Not everybody's like that. So I'm learning to, I guess, understand people more as I understand myself more. And so underground strength conference for those people that are like, I don't know if I could travel. Well, what are you going to do? You're going to stay home. You're going to only learn from your Instagram and YouTube. You're going to never leave. You know, I told Nate, our new head coach at the underground, I said, man, when I was your age, I remember I took a sick day on a Friday, drove all the way down to Florida. The seminar was Saturday, Sunday. Sunday, I left the seminar at like 3pm. Maybe it was four, but it was supposed to go nine to five both days, something like that. And I wanted to learn from Juan Carlos Santana so badly. Sunday, I left a little bit early, and I drove back and I basically drove day and night, get back to New Jersey. I get home. It's like 3.34 AM, full sleep at five because I'm so fired up, woke up at 7 AM. And I went to work that day. I slept two hours. And it's like very interesting that many, not all of the younger generation, but all generations really, but especially younger generation, they're a little weird when it comes to working more than one job. Well, with the current state of the economy, you might need to be ready and willing to work another job. That might be creating your own business, which turns into a side, which starts as a side business and grows. Or you might need another job. If I didn't have entrepreneurial knowledge, let's say I just worked at the school, I would be coaching sports every single season after school, and I would be making more income. And then probably on the weekend, as I learned while going through grad school, I was a bartender on Saturdays. I'd go to that bar at 6 PM. It would close at 3 AM. And by the time cleanup was done, I left at 5 or 5 30 AM. And if that's what it would take for me to support my family, I'd still be doing it today. But those of you who know me, you know, I have a business. We've got the underground. And then we have many things under the underground strength umbrella, underground strength conference coming up, undergroundstrengthcoach.com. That's the academy. Dad's strong, glad he to strong, all the standalone programs I have on train he wrote. We have many of them. We have stronger over 40. We have beginner strength. We have underground strength training for wrestlers level one. We have a combat club, which is kettlebells and body weight for people that own jujitsu clubs. That's a reminder to actually send that to Phil Miglares. We have the certifications. All right. And by the way, we've up been updating and adding more content to both certifications. So well, underground strength code certification has new kettlebell and sandbag training videos in there. From one of my friends, one of my essentially one of the guys that learned it's so funny, learned to train for me as a teenager, beast, rugged fitness lifestyle, Edwin. And so very, very excited Edwin Woods, very excited that we just keep getting better, keep getting better. And with underground strength con coming up, it's an opportunity for everybody to get better. And it's going to be a Friday and Saturday, Saturday, we're going to finish at 5 p.m. For those of you that need to fly back and catch a flight from Newark, go to underground strength con.com or on any of the forums, look for the discount code and get after it. That's all I got for you this time guys. Make sure you hit the links below so you could watch the videos of the push up marathon. And I will also update that post as I see Joe's media team releasing footage of us training and doing the push ups. And by the way, I felt amazing after doing 300 push ups. I'm actually pretty sore today in my lats, shoulders, all of that. But 300 push ups is not going to crush anybody. And you know, the younger generation that got wrapped up from this, listen, as a coach, we can't expect every all kids to be able to do what we used to do. And when I mentioned bartending, when I was a bartender, the guy who ran the liquor store was Coach Stuber. He was the wrestling coach. He's a legend in Raleigh, New Jersey, which Don Rock blanks who was in our previous episode of old school gyms. He's from Raleigh. Coach Stuber and I did 100 push ups at the end of every night. Coach Stuber was in his 50s. He would do two sets of 50. I remember working up trying to get to 100 in a row. I think I was at like 90 in a row, 80 something in a row. But it was not odd for me to be able to do 75 push ups in a row back then. Kids today, that's different. So you want somebody to do 300 push ups, build them up to it. Listen to previous episode with Jim Wenler talking about his body weight challenges. Those are excellent. In fact, I'm going to be programming stuff like that into dad strong and gladiator strong. Gladiator strong has more volume. The workouts take a little bit longer, usually about 45 to 50 minutes. You need more equipment, whereas dad strong could be a dumbbell or a kettlebell and body weight. It's good to have dumbbells for dad strong because of dumbbell benching and all those things. But I've done chest presses, flatten incline using two kettlebells. So you can make it happen. That's all I got for you guys. In this episode of the strong light podcast, keep crushing those five star reviews. They are very, very helpful and you have a chance to win. And so our latest five star review, I believe that was Phil, just send an email with a screenshot of that. And I'm going to give you three months free to the Underground Strength Academy, which by the way, underground strengthcoach.com has been getting sick updates, sick updates. Man, the recent updates throw back videos from 2012 and 2014 Q and A video wrestling strength training in season versus off season, a warm up video with speed training, plyometrics, the underground strength gym warm up that we utilize to build work capacity. GPP training video excerpt from the underground strength code certification, a video of middle school and high school combat athletes training together, a video of me training the Cornell Regional Training Center, the Spartan Regional Training Center. Those are the wrestlers who compete internationally and at the Olympic level. There's video footage of me taking them through a warm up. And we've got the workout of the month and the movie of the month. That's where I screenshot our exact training from the underground strength gym and share all the behind the scenes video footage from the gym program design reviewing of our interns. Man, there's I'm just scrolling through. If you are a strength coach or a parent of an athlete and want to help your kids, you got to get inside the academy. There's no two ways about it. That's it team. I'm out of here. Have an awesome week, much respect, much love. Let's keep attacking, stay vigilant, stay strong, build muscle. A lot of crazy shit happening in our country. And step one is govern yourself. Nobody's coming to save you. It's all up to you. I'm out of here. Keep crushing the five star reviews. Underground strength, con.com get signed up and I can't wait to see you in the middle of November. Make sure to head on over to zackstrengths.com and get exclusive content. A badass, free training course along with a special discount code for any of our training courses. Thanks to everyone for leaving five star reviews. People ask me, what warrior? What are you passionate about? It finally came to me years ago. You know what I'm passionate about? I'm passionate about fucking passion. I'm passionate about intensity. All the self help votes, all the motivational books, the inspirational tools that you can buy, the bottom line in them is do the work. Once you get through all the pages and all the rules and all the principles and all the formats and all the plans and all the templates comes down to that. Do the fucking work. And sometimes the only way to go about doing the work is get fucking raw and get fucking intense. Get angry and aggressive and make it fucking happy. The experts, the gurus and health and fitness, they will tell you that rest in recovery, 8 to 10 hours sleep a night is what you need. Let me speak blunt with you. None of those fucking triple gin, punchy belly, pasting face motherfuckers can prove the groin hairs on a warrior. What is that for you? Is it gets you? What is it gets you? Is your fucking enemy? And you need to kill it. Your fears, your doubts, you're like a confidence, you're like a belief in a certain absolute destiny you have to do something unique and great on this planet. Start today at 6.15 a.m. and you're already up and you're already dragging ass by 6.16. You can change your fucking perspective of the world and of your life. My advice? Fucking do it. Dig fucking deep and get it done. Life is not worth living without passion, without intensity. Warrior men, what's your passion? My passion is fucking passion. Intensity for life, whatever you do. [BLANK_AUDIO]
