The Founding and Philosophy of Muscle Nerds

Then I left and started Muscle Nerds and decided to go off on a different route. So at Polycon Group, we're teaching people how to train professional athletes. And I quickly realized no one in class trained any athletes. You might have one or two people out of 60 who only train professional athletes. Everybody else has trained normal people. So when we started our company, my wife and I, we decided we'll go, we'll start teaching how to train normal people, but train them like athletes, but scale it down so it's somewhat feasible for them. So like a zero to hero type of. Awesome. Yeah. I was curious to maybe if the audience isn't too familiar with muscle nerds. First of all, I love the name, right? Muscle nerds. I love that combination there. Yeah. Maybe explain what you just did there, but what kind of got you to start muscle nerds and what does muscle nerds do? I know you've explained it, but I'm curious to hear a little bit more detail there on that. So I had the idea, I registered the name and had the idea on the side, like a back burner, just in case I left Pelican Group. And when I did, it was like, all right, what are we going to do? I've been teaching people how to train Olympic athletes for years. I'd rather look at, nobody's really teaching how to train gen pop correctly. It's either like sports medicine-y type stuff or like really watered down. It's a lot of the certifications that you would take for normal people treated normal people like they were 80 years old. It was all BOSI ball squats and shit like that. And I was like, man, that's not, we can take programs that Olympic athletes train with and we can dial them down and make them scalable for normal people and figure out how to get people strong because you know i when i growing up in the industry when i first became a trainer you saw no women at the gym like the only women at the gym there might be three girls that had to shave their backs because they were on so much diana ball and they were competitors you didn't it was nothing like it is now where there's so many more women and women are now interested in getting strong back then women were they might walk in and do the yoga or they might do body combat or zumba or something like that but now it they actually look at hey look at these strong women on online and they're not bulky and i can be strong too so it's been a really cool transition to that so when when we left paul can group i said we're gonna we'll attack the the part of the industry that no one's talking about just normal people how to train normal people and not You've got like the evidence-based crowd, which they're basically literature-based, they're paper-based, it's all sterile stuff in a lab. How can I blend looking at literature with also my experience under the bar and training normal people and getting them really brutally strong? How do we blend those two together to make something that makes sense? It's still, it's evidence-informed, as Dr. Laura Bannock says, not exactly evidence-based. And so we started getting into that and saying, as well, like no one was selling health. It was like it was performance. If you look at all the courses that were out there, advanced hypertrophy, advanced fat loss, advanced this, advanced that, man, we'll train anybody who's advanced enough to need that stuff. So we said, we're going to teach basic fundamental program design, basic fundamental nutrition, which isn't exactly sexy, but it works and it works across the board for everybody. And that provides the fundamental bottom layer, that tall pyramid that we talk about when we talk about performance. Yeah, no, that's awesome. So it sounds like you're, like you said, you're really hitting the gen pop client, the people that really need to help the most, not the kind of high-end athlete, but it sounds like it's based on body composition, but also like health focus, but also even like performance too. So it sounds like you blend all those together there with, with kind of your methods. That's right. That's right.