← Mondays with Matt
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You're listening to Mondays with Matt. I'm Matt Reynolds, the founder and CEO of Barbellogic and Turnkey Coach. Each week I share lessons from decades of lifting, coaching and business to help you get stronger, coach better and take action. Let's dive in. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everybody. As you jump on the first Monday with Matt, welcome. This afternoon we're going to start doing this every week. And so at 3:30 central time, going to spend about 30 minutes together and we're going to talk through a topic each week, give you some actionable items that you can take with you. You can ask your questions in the chat, in the comments. Dan is overseeing those. He'll feed those to me if there's extras that come on different social media avenues. And this week will be a little bit different because some of you, I haven't, maybe you haven't met me or don't know a ton about me. So it's going to be a little bit of a get to know you. See you guys hopping on now. So glad you're here. So we're going to dive right in the first Mondays with Matt. I'm going to talk for about 10 minutes and then I'm going to open it up for 20 minutes to questions. It can be about anything. It doesn't have to be about the topic from today, lifting, coaching, business, life, et cetera. So let's dive in. So I've got a few notes. You'll see my eyes dart just a little bit just to make sure I'm following the script and I can get us in and out of here on time. So today I want to talk a little bit about how strength really built my life in business and the value of strength. So let me just say again, thank you so much for joining me for the first Monday with Matt. Plan on doing this every single week. Let me dive in by saying this. Most people think that strength training changed my body and it did, certainly. But more importantly, it changed the person that I became. And I didn't understand that when I started my strength journey. Some of you have probably walked through that refining process and some of you maybe are just at the beginning of it or maybe you're wanting to start. But I want to tell a little bit of my story, really, from athlete to lifter to gym owner to coach to CEO to husband and father, church and community leader. And the process that I've gone through over the past 30 years or so is I've done strength training and 25 years coaching and 20 years business ownership at this point. So this is really how strength training built my life and five lessons learned along the way. So let me tell you a little bit about my origin story. And I was thinking about this today over the last several days. I don't know that I've ever actually told the true, absolute beginning origin story. So my first exposure to strength training, my dad and my uncle went to seminary in Memphis, Tennessee. And my uncle, his son Phil, my cousin, who's still a really good friend of mine, was my best friend. He, my brother and myself, we hung out together all the time. We had moved back to Springfield, Missouri. They were still in Memphis, so we didn't see each other very much. We had spent most of our years growing up. We were probably 12, maybe somewhere in that ballpark. And we moved back to Springfield. We went and visited Phil for summer break. And Phil had hit puberty and Matt had not hit puberty, Even though I'm 10 months older than him. And what I remember was that Phil had bought one of those cheap crappy weight sets at a garage sale, the vinyl dipped or plastic dipped concrete weight sets. And, and he was jacked. Now I thought he was jacked because of the strength training and certainly that helped. Although he wasn't squatting or deadlifting as no 12 year old does. He was curling and bench pressing, doing push ups and sit ups and things like that. But I thought, I can remember we used to wrestle all the time. And I would, Phil was kind of nerdy, still kind of nerdy. And shout out Phil. And he killed us. And I was like, what is going on? I got to get some weights. And so the first thing we did when we got back home, we started going to garage sales every week and we found a crappy set of Sears and Roebuck vinyl dipped concrete. And we started playing around like you do as a kid. You don't really know what you're doing, you don't know how to program, you don't know how to lift properly. But we dove all in. I also remember getting at Barnes and Noble or some store like that. The Arnold's Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. Massive book. Not all true or good good, but it was all I had at the time. This was pre Internet and so that's how I started lifting. And it wasn't really serious until my senior year. My senior year. I had so many credits in high school that I was able to take weightlifting as a class and be a teacher's assistant. As for weightlifting, so I had it two hours a day and I started lifting really seriously. A little more tailored programming by the football coach. The football coach came to me and he asked one day. He said it was going well. I wasn't very strong when I started. I can remember struggling to bench 135, but I got where I was decently strong by the end of my senior year. And right before summer break, he came to me and said, hey, do, would you like to come to this lineman challenge? And it's kind of like a. It's kind of like an NFL combine, weightlifting, things like that. I didn't play football. My dad had broken his back his senior year of high school in football, so he wouldn't let me play. So I played all the other sports and I said, sure, I'd like to go. And I don't really even remember being nervous. And I wasn't that great. I didn't feel like I was that strong. But I went to that event and won across all the linemen in the area. And I wasn't even a lineman. I wasn't even a football player. And so I had struggled my whole life as an athlete to be good enough to start and often was barely good enough to start the teams I played for to finally finding something that I was actually decently good at. And so I was really kind of bit by the strength training bug. From there I found Powerlifting USA and articles by Dave Tate and Louis Simmons back in the late 90s. And I was off and running. And so the thing that I recognized even in high school and later looking back, it's much more clear now is that strength training really was the first time that I voluntarily chose something hard. I had a lot of hardships coming up in life. We were very, very poor. But that stuff was involuntary hardship thrown on me. And this was the first time I really chose hard. School came pretty easy. I was a relatively smart kid. And so this was difficult and it really refined me. And so it was the first time I also understood discipline. And so the first lesson takeaway there is that strength introduces us or introduced me to voluntary hardship. The barbell was the first place I learned to do hard things on purpose. Two Strength taught me ownership. The bar doesn't care about your excuses or my excuses. You miss a lift, it's yours. You complete a lift, it's yours. You didn't recover, it's yours. You didn't prepare, it's yours. The lesson to be learned here is that strength teaches personal responsibility, which leads to becoming a better leader. And so one of the clearest themes in my Book undoing urgency is on personal responsibility and that comes straight from barbell training. For me, a quote from that book is that we this is from the core values for Barbell logic. We always accept full responsibility for our actions and performance. Personal responsibility is at the heart of barbell training and at the heart of this company. And then I go on to say the fact that I decided on something gives it no extra weight. This is me now as CEO because it's my responsibility to take ownership. Refusing to change, to take responsibility, or to authentically say I'm sorry or my fault has no place in the voluntary hardship of making decisions. And so the takeaways here, the bar doesn't care about your excuses. It gives us objective feedback every single time. And we either own it or we don't. We own it or we don't get stronger. Right? The lesson it teaches us, I love this quote. Is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. I have things that I have to do every day in life that I don't necessarily want to do. It's a sacrifice. Strength training is even one of those. It absolutely made me better. And I can apply this everywhere. I can apply it to my marriage by saying I was wrong. I can apply it to working hard, often long hours to provide for my family. I can apply it to business and not blaming others or circumstances or competitors or market or anything like that and take ownership for the business. And of course leadership. I can take responsibility publicly. Number three, strength taught me to play the long game by building patience and consistency. You all that have done this, while you know this, you don't PR every workout. Progress is slow. Small adjustments matter. So just like minimum effective dose, what we call med training and programming in life, we still adjust one variable. We stay consistent and we have long term thinking. I can apply this to my marriage by showing up daily. I can apply it to fatherhood, knowing that presence is more important than intensity. And I can apply it to business. And I don't make or don't want to make emotional reactions or change of direction just because circumstances might have changed. And so the lesson learned there is that strength taught me to play the long game in understanding that consistency beats intensity. And that principle saved my marriage, saved my family, has saved my finances and my business more than once. Number four, strength exposed me to voluntary hardship, which I mentioned before. But most importantly, the voluntary hardship taught me joy over comfort. What is impossible without hard work is cultivating and carrying the joy of a life well lived. That's from the book and go on to say there joy is the nostalgia of looking back and being proud not of what you accomplished, but of the life you lived. And this applies in times of great elation as well as times of the deepest possible pain. We, you know, it's funny, I think back to my training and while the PRs are cool and I love PRs, it was actually about the process of chasing the PR. It's the life that you live, not the accomplishments, not the awards, not the, you know, not the great benefits that people handed you or the nice things they said, but the actual life that you lived. And I learned this under the barbell. And so that strength, that's voluntary hardship, it teaches you to choose discomfort and that bleeds into things like saying hard things in business, having hard conversations with your spouse or with your children, ones that need to happen, doing the right thing, even when it's brutal and leading from the front. Strength doesn't just build muscle, it builds your capacity to endure meaningful suffering. And that's what makes you and makes me a better lifter, a better husband or wife, father or mother, CEO, church and community leader. The lesson there is that voluntary hardship teaches joy over comfort. And last and then we'll take questions. Our most precious resource is neither our money nor our time. It's our attention. And strength taught me attention and discipline. Training is attention practice. It's focus under load. If you've ever, ever squatted something incredibly heavy, you know all of the other problems, all the other wonderful things in life go away while that barbell is on your back. If not, you're going to, it's going to crush you, it's going to fold you in half. And so you have to be incredibly focused under load. It's presence under pressure. You are never more present than when you are terrified that a bar is going to fold you in half. And it's intentional reps. And so the lesson here is that the barbell demands our attention. And when you train your attention under load, you get better at giving your attention to your wife or spouse or kids or your team or your church or the people in your life that matter most. And so the primary takeaway from this topic today is that experiencing strength is infinitely valuable at every point in our life cycle, from beginner to novice to intermediate to advanced lifter to student to coach to our occupation to business owner to husband and father, grandfather, church and community leader. And even in the twilight of life, strength matters. So that is the topic for today. I will open it up to questions which I will start to Walk through if hopefully we'll get to your questions. I'll try to rapid fire these as much as I can. Oh my goodness, there's a ton of. All right, let's dive in. Hey, Matt, I start a few. There's no questions, there's a bunch of comments. Well, thanks for all the kind comments. Yeah. All right. I am sliding down. Okay, so from Bo, knowing that your podcast work documented training, thoughts. Well, what have you changed your mind on the Latin in regard to strength or fitness over the last 12, 24 months? That's a great question. Um, not a lot for the beginner, for the novice, and even for the, for the intermediate. Uh, but I, I am really enjoying both in my own training and in my coaching doing more things that are a little more hypertrophy specific. When you have paid the price and walk through the journey of the heavy barbells and you've gotten yourself strong. So again, it's a blanket statement. But if you're a middle aged man and you've pressed 200 and bench pressed 300 and squatted 400 and deadlifted 500, you're strong enough for anything that life is going to throw at you. And at that point you have to decide do you want to keep getting stronger? You've probably heard me say this on the podcast before, or do you want to focus on other things? And So I am 47, pushing 50 and I just want to be healthy. And so I have lost 50 pounds, a little over 50 pounds of body weight. I'm feeling good, I'm eating for three months. I have almost not eaten out at all. I've all home cooked meal with real ingredients, haven't had a drop of alcohol other than church communion in three months and doing cardio, all that sort of stuff. And so I've been able to go in and basically do one heavy lift a day, about five days a week. Then accessory movements that are often stacked circuit style and get good cardio in walk with my wife. I sauna at least once a day, often twice a day. Cold plunge, which maybe helps, maybe doesn't, but I like it and I'm hot natured so it cools me off. I just feel great. And so that's the focus of a lot of my training. And because I coach a lot of people like me, middle age executives and soccer dads and whatnot, then it works really well for them too. So I'm looking at longevity. It's back to that playing the long game. I know that I probably don't have another PR in me in the weight room. I mean, maybe I've got a post 40 PR or post 50 year old PR or something like that, but I'm probably not going to deadlift 725 or bench press 500. And so the focus now has to be on longevity. So I'm looking at things often metrics, those PR metrics. I do a lot of lab work, blood tests, I'm tracking my HRV, my VO2 max, my sleep, all those sort of things. I want to see those consistently get better. My waist, my height, my weight. I've got one of those smart scales that like, like a nice one that really measures your body fat well, very close to Dexa. And that's the kind of stuff I'm focusing on. So a lot of that stuff, a lot of tempo work for hypertrophy stuff. So after we do the main barbell lift, we'll go in and do tempo stuff for the, for the hypertrophy machines, dumbbells, things like that, body weight, pull ups, dips, chin ups, push ups, sit ups, planks, glute, ham raises, stuff like that. So I love it. All right, going back up the list. If I miss you, Bo, just let me, I mean, Dan, let me know. Can I speak about my experience with GLP1 bad and ugly. I think we have a topic coming up soon, so I'll just very quickly say that several years ago, I just want to be open about this. I started taking Tirzepatide, which is Mounjaro, because I was showing signs of prediabetes at the time. I was like 290, 295. Now I'm 240 and it worked great. But it was $1,200 a month and my insurance wouldn't pay for it. And so for me that was still very expensive. I've recently moved to a different GLP peptide and retatrutide and love it. It's a little gray area, but it works really, really well. It has three agonists that work and I'm really enjoying it. I have no side effects, no nausea, et cetera. So we'll speak to those. Probably more on future topics. So, Riley. Yes. Time to get back at it, man. I'm still coaching. Would love to have you back. What do you hope your last lift looks like? That's a great question. Well, deadlift, right? If you can't deadlift, why are you even alive? John Paul Sigmarson said so. Yeah, I'd love to keep deadlifting and lifting throughout my life. I'm barbell pressing a little bit, but not that much. My shoulders hurt. And so doing a lot of dumbbell presses, doing box squats instead of regular full squats so my hips can handle it. Normal bench press, normal deadlift. And it's working pretty well. So thanks, John. Thank you all for the kind words. Are there any signed copies of my book? There were a lot of signed copies. I think we're almost out. Dan was going to check on those to see if we have some copies of the book. Maybe we can do some giveaways in some future weeks. It's available on Amazon or@ryanmattreynolds.com you can get those Amazon. It's always cheaper. It's totally fine to go get it at Amazon. It's also audiobook and Kindle available, but if you have one or you want to send it to me and have me sign it, I'm happy to do it. And we'll do some giveaways here. Coming up soon. While there's a lot to learn from voluntary hardship, do you also think there are lessons to learn from the stress recovery adaptation process? Yes, because that's voluntary hardship. That's the very first thing that happens when it happens throughout all of training. But the beautiful thing about that stress recovery adaptation process is it literally happens from workout to workout when you're a novice. And so the fun thing about that time period is that you go into the gym every couple days and you're not the same person you were two days ago. And of course that's what gets you hooked and gets you addicted to. That's the crackpipe of strength training, is that stress recovery adaptation in 48 hours process. And so that continues to happen throughout all of, all of training, through your entire training life cycle. It just elongates over a few days to a week, to a month, to whatever. But even that, that stress recovery adaptation process, even for my advanced lifters, we're often making progress every single workout in accessory movements. We might not be hitting PRS 1 rep max PRS or 5 rep max PRS on the big barbell list, but we still are frequently throughout the entire workout and training cycle. So, okay, I'm gonna. Let's go to Alex. What's the idea of long term with the idea of long term thinking, what advice would you give to new business owners? Go slow, take it easy, make sure your stuff's in place, but work your butt off. The thing they can't take from you is that you can outwork anybody. And so in the business, as you're playing that game. One of the things that I wish I had done early on, we went the let's grow it as big and fast as we possibly can. Investors, board of directors, all that sort of stuff. I think the book Profit first, which I hate the name because it feels like it's. It's all about money. The book is not. I've since read it and enjoy it, where from the very beginning, you make sure that you're making profit and that you pay into the profit first and you live off what you've decided you can live off of. You don't go into debt. You start small, but you work your butt off. So you scale through work, not scale through debt or scale through investors. That's what I would. That's how I take the long view. And then you're thinking about building an institution, often as a business, if you have children, especially sons, if you're a guy and you're building something like a gym, certainly ladies can do this as well. You're building something that you can pass down for generations, often. So that's the way I look at it in the. In the long game. So the brand of smart scale that I use is called Hume. It's a Hume pod. H U M E pod. I did a lot of research on it. It's within 3% of DEXA. And I really like the metrics and I like to nerd out on that and the Apple watch and all that stuff. So no connections, but I really enjoy that. Strength is a journey. At what age should we start getting our son strong? As early as possible. Just let them have fun in the gym. Pre puberty, they're not going to lift heavy enough to hurt themselves. The forces on their body is going to be way more with running down the street or playing soccer or any sports than they're ever going to get under the barbell. Model it. Well, this is one of my clients, Matt. I know you train at home. When you train at home, you get to model it for your kids, not go to the gym. I'm a big. I'm a big Garage Gym home gym fan. For those of you guys who don't know, Coop from Garage Gym Reviews is actually a member of my church. We're really close friends. We talk almost every day. He's here in my town and I could not be a bigger fan of home gym. Some of you can't do it, and if you've got a great gym to train at, that's totally fine. But I love being able to do that in front of your kids and not just your sons but daughters as well, taught my daughters how to squat and deadlift and they can lift with perfect form. So what advice would you give for weight loss with lifting? Lots of protein first. So a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So you weigh 200 pounds, get 200 grams of protein. I think most guys should just shoot for about 200. If you're 300 pounds in fat, you don't necessarily need to have 300 grams of protein. You need to probably eat as much protein as what you would want to weigh. Maybe you're at 225 or something there for your protein. And then with lifting you tend to want to be a little higher carb or say moderate carb and lower fat. It's just fine if your body doesn't handle carbs very well to go a little more moderate fat and lower carb. You just want to balance out the calories with fat and carbs. Protein's always high. Figure out what works for you with protein and I mean with fat and carbs. And then I just track over time and see over about a three week period, I want to lose about a pound per week somewhere in that ballpark. Half pound a week to a pound a week. Probably no more than a pound a week. You're going to be losing fat or losing muscle. Sorry. And probably about a quarter of an inch off your waist per week somewhere in that ballpark. And that's not. That can fluctuate a lot with water. So you want to look at the trend of two to three weeks at a time and then adjust the calories up or down just a little bit, keeping the protein high and adjusting the carbs and fat appropriately. So Dan, still looking to see if we have signed copies. Obese 42 year old male testosterone at 100. Everything is too hard. Where to start? Probably talk to your doctor about getting on TRT. 100 is really, really, really low. I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice. But it's very difficult to make progress when your testosterone is that low. When your testosterone is that that low, it's very hard to bring it up naturally to where you want it to be. Again, I don't know your situation, but if you've had consistent labs, blood tests, certainly losing weight will help tremendously. Training would help tremendously. And even with low testosterone, if it takes a while to get on TRT or if you choose not to go that route, you can make tremendous progress. Even low testosterone when you are untrained overweight, you can probably make really solid progress for three to six months before you start to plateau and hit a wall. And then it becomes a little harder and then I would say get a coach. So probably Dr. First, coach second for you is a good place to go. I've given up on the social media game for marketing. Where I'm finding success is through local networking. Groups have used that avenue. Oh yeah. So if you're a local coach and you have a gym and you're coaching out of a gym or you own a gym or even your home gym, local networking is awesome. So you go to the same barber shop. I would go to the barbershop. I don't have hair, but I would get straight razor shaves. And this is back when I went strong. Gym, same coffee shops, same restaurants. You find those connector people in your network, in your area, other business owners, other people that are great connectors. Church. I'm not going to church to sell coaching but the guys need it and so that's a great place to be. I'm have to be on social media, but I wish I didn't and one of these days you'll never hear me or see me ever again. So it's all good. Can you speak to the enduring value of personal strength coach in the age of ever improving AI? Yeah, so that's a great question. We are right on the cutting edge of obviously the software turnkey coach is outstanding and we have an AI component that none of you have seen yet that we developed for the military but we'll take to the market. So this is probably haven't talked about this much but it's, it's excellent. But it doesn't replace a coach because it doesn't replace the human relationship. And so for poor college kids who could only afford 19 bucks a month or what, you know, whatever that sort of thing would cost, it can help program probably as well as just about any coach at this point if you know how to prompt it well and you know how to use cloud code or, or one of those. The day is coming when it will be able to provide expert feedback, wonderful technical feedback. But what it cannot do is really give you accountability. And so what we found is that that concept of consistency over programming or over technique, consistency beats those every time. And even for guys. I was just Talking to Brett McKay, I don't know if you guys saw that Robert duvall died Augustus McCrae and makes me sad. And Brett named his son after, after Augustus, name is Gus. And I was talking to Brett I've coached Brett for 11 years and Brett says still when he hits record on his phone and he knows he has to upload that to me, it provides tremendous accountability. He knows his form has to be right. He knows I'm going to break it down. He knows I'm going to really make him do it correctly. And so that's the value of a coach. It's that building that trust and long term relationship with a real human. And so I like to think of AI as a tool that coaches and clients can have to basically put incredible tools in their toolbox. I love AI and a lot of people are terrified of it. I'm terrified of it a little bit too. But it's a wonderful tool and when paired with excellent human relationship, I think it's synergistic again. For 19 year old kids, all they can afford is a program and some technique feedback. It's going to be great for them as well. Not strength related. Always cool. When I hear you talk about you need a budget, my wife and I have been using it for years now and it's cool to know that there's a connection between the two companies. Yes, we're really good friends with Jesse Mecham and the YNAB team. For those of you who followed YNAB or Dave Ramsey or anybody like that, it's kind of similar to that. YNAB is my favorite. It's a great way to budget for your finances. Again, for young upstart businesses, YNAB is a great thing to use for your business as well to make sure that you're budgeting correctly and really putting every dollar that comes into work and giving it a job. So all right, last couple here I joined being. Okay, that's for the network. Let's wrap that up. So again, we'll do this every week. Thank you so much for your questions next week. Let me fill you in a little bit about next week. I'll pull up my notes. Next week we are going to dig into whether you should become a coach in the first place. And when you're thinking like should I start coaching, should I just coach family, should I start this as a business? What do I do? If you decide. Yes. What it means to become a great coach, we're going to give you permission to coach if that's what you want to do and the next step. I'm not trying to sell you anything today we've got a free ebook for you. It's a coaching Kickstarter ebook. So those of you that are interested in coaching. You can go to barbell-logic.com matkickstarter barbell-logic.com Matt Matt Kickstarter and you can download a free ebook there again, not trying to sell you anything. If you've ever thought like hey, I'd love to coach but I have no idea where to start. This book is perfect for you. The Coaching Kickstarter is a free practical roadmap. This shows you exactly how to go from lifter to paid coach, what skills you actually need, that what matters, how to land your first clients, how to avoid mistakes that stall most new coaches before they ever get momentum. It's simple. It's actionable. It's built on what actually worked for us at Barbell Logic. So you can get it free again@barbelllogic.com Matt Kickstarter so that is it for week one of Mondays with Matt. Thank you so much. I kept it right at the 30 minute time. I'm glad we did it. Thank you guys so much for being on the call. All of you. You can always ask questions even ahead of time. Dan can give you those. You can put that. I think we'll be at the same link most weeks. I don't know. Dan will tell you and you can feel free to ask questions during the week. You'll see social promotions as well each week to remind you that this is coming up at 3:30 Central every Monday. So with that said, I hope you all have a great week and we'll see you next Monday. It.