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INTRODUCTION 0:01
Welcome to the fit and healthy Denver podcast where we discuss all things revolving around health and fitness and wellness in the amazing state of Colorado so you can get behind the scenes information from industry insiders, special events and more. Coming up is our host physical therapist and strength coach Dr. Jamie buffet. And here we are.
JAMIE 0:27
Today I would like to welcome Brian Anglin of tough motor bootcamp. At the top coder boot camp has been one of the most interesting boutique fitness studios to come out in a while and there’s been a lot of anticipation because of the brand and because of the name and people already familiar with Tough Mudder. So Brian’s going to come on today and kind of tell us a little bit about Tough Mudder about how tough mudder boot camp is and is not related to the race and mindset performance. And a lot of other things. So Brian, welcome to the show. And tell everybody a little bit about yourself how you got into fitness and how and why you wanted to start to learn boot camp.
BRIAN 1:05
Yeah, thanks for having me. Starting where I started in fitness would probably go back to my junior high days. My father had one of those old cable machines in a garage that was getting dusty and I decided I would get on there and try to stop being such a skinny little kid and just kind of grew from there. So I’ve always been involved in doing lots of physical stuff. Actually, for years my main job was actually doing landscape and horticulture which was big boulders and that type of stuff but still didn’t stop me from going into the gym afterwards and working out there. And at some point I kind of got bored of the whole landscape thing and wanted to really pursue something else and it just kind of fell in place. Physical Activity I’ve been working out for a long period of time. You know, I got my personal Chinese certificate. It got weight loss certification, group training, certification, corrective exercise certification, and, you know, training in other places. I didn’t turn a couple places. And then the next step was like okay, let’s open up my own gym. After a while. It just became very noticeable that opening my own gym was gonna be way too much work and it’s a really hard thing to do. So then I started to look at, you know, fitness concepts, studio fitness and stuff like that something I could buy into where someone had done a lot of a kind of the groundwork forming and search to things wasn’t too stoked on on but I was also, you know, avidly into Tough Mudder and run up six races before and since I was kind of in their network, I got an email one day saying that they were playing it open up to this franchise gym so, you know, looked into it, went out to New York at their headquarters out there talk to them, experienced the workout they kind of had a mock studio space there in New York, and I really enjoyed the workout and and it just went from there. And I think the piece that I really like about it and we’ll kind of talk about this more is that, you know, you hear Tough Mudder Do you think obstacles so you know, thinking oh, this is maybe gonna be kind of another gym where they go in and they have big old ramps and are set to jump from bar to bar and things like that. But this was much more of a concept that was scalable to everyone and just in terms of doing the kind of the foundation of fitness and putting it inside that then translates to going to obstacle course racing or anything that you want to accomplish in life. So that’s really what excited me about it, plus the community is if you’ve run a Tough Mudder really a big piece of that right? That partner piece gets you involved with other people helping each other out. And putting that ethos into a gym space is really awesome and something that really inspired me so when I think tougher about boot camp, I think awesome workouts and awesome community.
JAMIE 4:34
And you’re right, the part of the races that I think is just as exciting for people as the race itself. Is that energy fun? It’s helping out somebody you know, and Tipler boot camp is really trying to help with having partners for all the workouts. Why did Tough Mudder decide they wanted to put those partner workouts in and what do you see the benefits of the partner workouts versus maybe a workout without partners? Right?
BRIAN 5:01
So it was coming from a space of another way to extend the community. Obviously another way to get another source of revenue, but like expanding the community out, right? Yeah. And it just kind of fell in place like, Okay, if we have a gym where people can train, then it’s easy for them to transition into doing a Tough Mudder and it just kind of grew from there. Then they realize well as opposed to just trying to funnel people towards doing the race. Why don’t we just open up a gym that is good for everyone that really kind of spreads that personal accomplishment, teamwork ethos, and puts that out to everyone and just lets them feel that same kind of fun and energy that you get during the race.
JAMIE 5:44
Yeah, so basically trying to create the same atmosphere, the same camaraderie that you have, and I’ve done the workouts and I’ll say it’s fun, like it does kind of build some Rodri when you’re working out with somebody in the way that they’re designed is you want your partner to work out hard you’re you’re working together towards something not just for your son, you are working with yourself and kind of competing against yourself, but you’re also working to build up the person that you’re working out with. And you meet everybody in the gym. You know, I think it’s an awesome model that I think a lot of people will really identify with. So when I have mentioned Tough Mudder bootcamp to people they so far they’ve been like, you mean like the race, they help you. They help you race. So that can be a part of what you do, but obviously you do more. So you’ve kind of mentioned how they’re related. And you’ve mentioned, you know, isn’t just for racing. This is for foundational fitness. It’s to have fun to get fit, but for those people who want to do the races, how are tough mudder boot camp and Tough Mudder related.
BRIAN 6:43
Yeah, so again, it’s just going to a strong, building a strong foundation like if you go and do rope swings and rope climbs and monkey bars and that’s all you train. It’s still not as good as building the foundation first and then jumping on the monkey. I think it’s you know, I’ve been to some of the gyms where they do have all the balls in there. It’s a lot of fun but I’m going to do that every day. I never felt like it was really progressing in any way. So to actually come in and challenge your strength. So you know, we worked on your strength, we worked on your endurance, we worked on your agility, and we worked on your power. These are all things that you’ll need on the course right? Make sense? You’re going to have to keep moving for eight to 12 miles. If you’re doing an obstacle course, like your normal obstacle course race is about that distance. So you have to have the endurance to be able to start at that eight to 12 mile marker and perform at a good, good level during that entire time. But it’s not just like endurance. Running, right? You go out and run like a marathon. You’re gonna have to run and then be able to pull your bodyweight up over a wall or have the strength to pull yourself up over a wall. Make sure that you can hold the grip strength to go up and down monkey bars. Yeah, to have the you know, the agility to change direction fast. In some of those obstacles, you have to jump through the tires or something like that. You gotta have the ability to go through that and then power right for you to jump powerfully up and grab something and all that stuff. So all translates this stuff that you’re doing of course.
JAMIE 8:28
Yeah, I think I think we know, it’s kind of that argument of overall fitness versus specialized fitness. I think one thing is if you just focus on obstacles. Yes, people will do great at obstacles. But maybe they won’t, wouldn’t do great at some general stuff playing baseball with their kids. Right. And so you know, that general our shots shouldn’t say general, overall fitness, cardio, strength, power, everything else. I think it’s much more adaptable to life, which is really what it sounds like you are trying to help people with and getting better at that generalized fitness will help you to be better at the races. Everyone’s either as blue as a Navy SEALs. They did a really interesting study where they put Navy Seals and I forget what kind of problem solving solution it was, but they basically put one group of Navy Seals and only trained on one type of problem. And they put another group of Navy Seals and they never let them have the same problem. They changed the problem and the idea was to see whether specialized problem solving solutions would be better versus a generalized overall approach. What they found when they took both of those groups, and they put them into a new situation. The generalization just killed it. And then even when they put them in the same situation, so the one that the original group was had only trained on and they trained on repeatedly, the group that was in the generalized problem solving. They did better. And so the theory is, you know, you teach one group how to do something very specific, but you teach the other group how to problem solve, and you know, and a lot of tough mudder the actual race is obstacles and it’s problem solving. So, you’ve talked a little bit about mindset, but how do you help people with mindset and how do you help them to process how to overcome the obstacles in the races?
BRIAN 10:16
Yeah, so basically, what we do here is we’re trying to really point out personal accomplishment. We really take people from point A to point B and scale to where they are. So one thing that we see constantly here is push ups are a constant thing as we look at push ups, right? Most people come in and they aren’t doing push ups and not doing them that well. To be frank. We’ll have a lot of comments today. I just can’t. I haven’t been able to do a push up. And just to get them to even just one push up to help build that kind of wow moment of I can accomplish something. And that’s how we do it. It’s really kind of breaking that down and I think the problem with a lot of people’s mindsets is like they look at the big bill first like this is what I want to do. And then they start a workout routine, right? And they’re excited the first week, but after two weeks, they’re not at the big goal, and they start to drop so what you need to do is focus on the little things, and then they surprise me to get to the big thing, right. So, you know, again, if we’re talking about working towards being able to run a tough monitor. You might not have the endurance today, you might not be able to pull yourself up over a wall. And you won’t get there in two weeks. You probably will be there in a month, you know, but let’s focus on your performance. What can you do? What you didn’t do yesterday? And that kind of goes back to the ethos of Tough Mudder you know, in a way it’s like wisdom. First time was the last time you did something for the first time.
BRIAN 12:12
Like that. Sounds good. Sounds like you help people break down their goals into smaller chunks. And once they accomplish that, then they can do the next step. And that process of that mental process, right it is especially with your generalized cup, you’ve done it a couple times. You can look at something like an obstacle and be like, Okay, I’ve never done this before. However, I’ve done 10 parts of this school, you know, and I know I can do all 10 of those. So I should do this and now I know how to do it. And that doesn’t just go for racing that goes for life as well. And I think you know what you guys are doing physically and mentally and you know and especially in times like we have right now you know, we’re gonna wait 5656 months into COVID Depending on how you use it when you start. I think a lot of people have, I would say mentally checked out. They’re mentally strange, they’re stressed, and they don’t always approach problems from the same point of view. So how do you help people with that mindset, just in general life, it doesn’t do COVID and finding purpose.
BRIAN 13:19
So we actually did start kind of a fitness with a purpose program this month, where we’re just kind of giving weekly challenges for people to try to accomplish some fun ones. Some harder ones, lots of different levels of trainers putting nutrition in there. So just trying to gamify and I think fun is a huge thing for me. When I say that’s one thing that we’re trying to do Sorry about that. Come on. They want to hear right now so what was the fun piece that we’re trying to break up the monotony of the workouts by always having a new workout every day. That partner is more fun. So, to me, if it’s fun, it’s easy to get into it and do it you’re less likely to dread it so as much as we can make the process fun the more you want to do it, right. So but yeah, we were noticing when we first opened up, you know after COVID It’s pretty much just like everyone’s coming in, they’re getting a workout in and then we’re going home. And I realized by myself that we were just kind of in survival mode when we first opened up. And in the last month or so I just realized, you know what, no one’s working towards anything right now. Like no one has this goal that we’re working towards. And it’s hard because a lot of things that you were probably working towards you can’t do that are canceled. But I sat down. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a goal. We just have to change how we approach that goal or maybe even change the goal. But we still have some sort of purpose. Right now other than surviving. Because what do you look at it that there is no in day to this COVID thing and I think that’s something that became clear to me. I think for a long time people were kind of looking like oh, this is going to gain a certain amount of time. And I think we need to just get over like just getting the mindset of this might be around Rs probably going to be around for a while. So let’s work with this new place where we’re at and find purpose with what we’re doing.
JAMIE 15:46
The skill of finding purpose is going to be used after COVID as well, right? Like there’s always gonna be something in life that stands in your way and it’s all about how do you overcome that? Go round it over, go through it. But I think I think instead that purpose of understanding it, you’re helping to give everybody skills going forward as well, which is probably even longterm more valuable in right now.
BRIAN 16:09
Right yeah. And I can see a lot of people who had like, oh, I want to lose X amount of weight by this time. And I’m gonna do that by going into the gym this many times a week and doing this nutrition thing and all that. That went off to the wayside. Everyone kind of put that on pause and said, Oh, well, it’s COVID Now, I need to I need to change things and just kind of stop that is like no silver bullets, weight loss are still working towards, you know, getting 25 Pull Ups, whatever it was are under 5k time. Just you know, change tells you how to do it. I look at it. As you’re a person who unfortunately doesn’t have a gym that you can go to, you know, that’s obviously something that’s going to be a little bit harder for you but you can still train for it. You don’t have to wait for things to get different. Yeah, absolutely.
JAMIE 17:06
Well, people have some ideas for your workout. So you know what our I know you have kind of different styles of classes just give us a quick overview of what they are and what you can expect in each one.
BRIAN 17:17
So obviously, we’re doing functional fitness because that translates out to the world. All functional movements that are sometimes we like to call mints. So we’re doing that game now with a high intensity interval chain. Using those kinds of things we can do Strength and Conditioning for you. You know we also do a lot of athletic movements here in the studio, lateral stuff, live stabilization stuff, which is great, I think unilateral and stabilization stuff that’s really unique to to less than is missing in a lot of places. kind of gets overlooked for lifting really heavy but again, it goes back to building that good strong foundation, right? Like if you get all your stabilizing muscles, good core muscles going on. You could lift weights on one leg, you know all this stuff is gonna make it so that when you do get back to like a barbell and doing a heavy back squat or something like that, you’re just gonna be so much better at it. So, getting those things to come in, it’s gonna be a 45 minute workout. And we never repeat a workout so it’s always going to be new. We do have 12 different kinds of revolvers between our upper body and lower body, full body pairing that with our endurance, power, strength and agility. So we can have up to like 12 different types of classes or cycles that are 12 days in a cycle. And in those we do have different formats like there’s one where we do bodywork, right, so really getting into working on your power so you have that 20 seconds 10 seconds rest, we’ll get through exercises on that, or during spaced one is going to be like a four minute AMRAP of two different circuits. So that one’s always a blast. Really, really good. A lot of sweat came out of that one. Sweat equity, I guess you could call it and then you know, we have quick and dirty ones like where you’re a minute at six stations, three rounds of it. So really working into that kind of cargo capacity on that one. And then just build are ones where we can either one for two minutes, working on string and all that other nothing was we try to be specific with what we’re doing. You’re not just gonna come in here we’re gonna sweat session and we try to kind of have a through line to all our workouts right so that they carry on from day to day going towards a specific goal. So right now we’re working on endurance as an up because normally you would be working towards like that 5k or Turkey shot or something like that would be what you’re working towards. So we really push into endurance a lot more in these next three months to help you to get there. And then we’ll go into like a cardio progression pull up progression
JAMIE 20:17
periodized over like six, eight weeks, right where there’s a focus like there’s there’s variation in the workouts, but there’s a focus, right, and and that now progresses into a new focus. Yeah, so it’s kind of periodized to kind of build one aspect even though the workouts are different. They just kind of focus throughout all the different workouts.
BRIAN 20:37
Yeah, so this is never just we randomly throw a workout out there. And you come in and you sweat and you leave. It’s always going to be, you know, tied together. building towards that specific goal. Yeah. Another cool thing that we do. Of course, we’re COVID It’s a little different. Right now, but we are trying to get back to our benchmark workouts as well. So, again, going back to those four kinds of pillars that we’re working towards strength, agility power. I think once we test those out, at least three times a year we’ll have a benchmark class and this will be the only class that will repeat. But we’re not only saying like let’s test you but let’s test us as a fitness concept to make sure that we are doing what we’re saying we’re we’re doing so
JAMIE 21:34
yeah. And in your classes, they kind of have to have stations right so there’s different stations and there’s workouts at different stations and you’re kind of rotating in and out and different workouts that he does that hit style but gives you a lot of variability. You know and what I think is really unique about Tabata is you guys have TV TVs at each station, somebody it shows somebody doing the exercises, I know several other groups, you know, you go into a hit workout and there’s 12 exercises, and they’re like, Okay, you do this for 30 seconds, you rest for 30 seconds, us and they give me 12 things and it’s like, I didn’t come here to take a test. You know, and so, you know, I really liked that it kind of takes a little bit of mental arithmetic out of it and you can focus on the physical and athletic. Obviously, we’re pushing hard, and I think a lot of people will like that, especially if they’ve ever felt pressured in another gym to like, pay don’t feel like I have to memorize all these things.
BRIAN 22:27
We really tried to make it as easy for the day athletes as possible. So yeah, you’re not having to remember how many reps you’re supposed to do at one station with one thing, right? You can just look up at the TV screen and see what it is. And the cool thing as a coach coaching the class. I mean, a lot of people hear TVs, they think oh no, I’m just gonna be staring at a TV screen and no one’s coming. But as a coach, that means that I don’t have to spend all my time reminding people what they’re supposed to be doing because that can eat up when you have six different stations and other things going on at the stations as a coach that can eat up a lot of your time. Or the TV’s in there to help everyone. That means I can find the right job and make any corrections that I need to be there, you know, say Hey, this looks really easy. Let’s scale it up by doing this. You know, for the new people, you know, really work with a newer person, someone who’s newer to fitness, who has spent a little extra time with them. Make sure that they’re moving properly or we scale skilled movement to, to their abilities, something that they can do and feel good about. And I don’t have to continually say okay, 12 reps have a launch now over here and you guys are supposed to be doing this and oh no, that person out there doing the wrong thing and
JAMIE 23:49
keeps them kind of in it more as well. Right when they have more references for what to do. Let’s talk about aesthetics versus performance a little bit. much about that.
BRIAN 24:03
I do think a lot of people think mostly about fitness in terms of getting themselves to look better. And I think that’s just kind of a secondary benefit of fitness. I think the main thing is performance. And that’s, you know, fitness is to keep the body healthy and functioning so that you can live life the best that you can, right. So and that’s why one thing that we’re trying to do here is not just good people that run an OCR because we realize not everyone really wants to run an obstacle course race. They might just want to be able to play volleyball in the park with their friends as long as possible. It’s probably not even a majority of your people. No, not really. So there are just a few one after the race but yeah, just make sure not to perform your best throughout life and that you’re not you know, turning man I think about it and I even know some people that I went to high school with right now that they just move horribly and they can barely get out of a chair and they they shuffle down the streets and that type of thing and it’s just like, see that is your body’s amazing thing. And it can do so much for you so why wouldn’t you train it to perform at its best so that you can you know, if you get grandkids or you have grandkids that you can, you know, play with those grandkids you can run around in the backyard with them and play tag, you know that’s an amazing thing. Just to be able to train for that. That’s what you’re training for. And the one thing we really want to push here at Southwater boot camp is that we are not the only activity that to do. You come in and trade here so you can go out and do cool stuff throughout the rest of the week. So don’t leave, don’t think of us as like this. I go in and do my workout that is my physical activity for my life. No, no this is the training that you go to do physical activity for your life. So that’s, that’s the thing that I really like about what we do here. And I just think it’s a shame a lot of people get in the mindset of especially it’s like weight loss is such a defeating gold right. It’s a very hard goal to say but I get it. It’s a great goal to have. But it’s so defeated. You control so little in terms of weight loss and in your weight. fluctuates throughout the day. Just from the waterway and all that. So it’s a very frustrating thing to be going towards because it’s very defeating and you can get on that scale and changes but when you focus on performance that’s that’s where you’ll you’ll see changes at a faster, more rapid pace and really kind of start to get stoked about what you’re doing.
JAMIE 27:29
Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. All right, brown to be respectful of your time but I do think that anybody who hasn’t tried an obstacle course race should try it. I think they’re fantastic. They’re fun. And not even just from the physical aspect just from their fun and their the you know, the problem solving and, and the whole environment is great that being said, you don’t have to want to do a matter boot camp. Camp is something that can help you with that as well as something that can help you completely separately from that. So consider giving Brian’s gym a try and Brian where can people find more information about you in Tough Mudder and how can they get in touch with you?
BRIAN 28:14
So we of course have a website at boot camp.com You can find us on Instagram, as well. About a boot camp Denver City Park. You can give us a call here 303-945-4563 We are on Colfax Avenue, just one block west of Colorado Boulevard. So that’s 3805 East Colfax Avenue. Come in and check us out. First Class is free. So there’s no reason not to do it. Come in and check it out. And then you know, make a decision from there. But we’d love to have as many people come in and experience it as possible because I do the day. The thing that really makes me happy is just seeing all the faces come in and have a good time.
JAMIE 29:02
So absolutely great. Well thanks Brian and everybody out there consider getting a tough mudder boot camp try. Alright. See you later.
OUTRO 29:16
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