Mentorship and Working for Charles Poliquin

And then I decided, you know what, I'm just going to take that college money that I would have used for that. Cause I was broke too. Like I didn't have pot to piss in. I saved up and then went to see Charles Poliquin who was my biggest mentor in the industry. First time really leaving Texas, flying across the country and spending like three or four days learning some of his stuff. And I was hooked at that point. So the next minute, like I got into the industry, I started selling fitness equipment during the day. I started training people before and after work. Got tired of that, went full on into training and saved up all my money and went to see Charles. Like he said, like you need to find a mentor and stick with that person until you feel like you can't learn anything else. That's what I did with him. But eventually, instead of learning everything I could and leaving, he asked me to come on and start being a teacher. So I got invited into the education realm and started working for Pollock & Gruden. What did that feel like? Fuck, it was crazy because the minute I did the first, so I did the first PICP, which is their program design and coaching for like Olympic athletes, world national level team sports and individual sports. And it was like, it was really, it was surreal. I knew at that moment that the culture that they had back then was amazing. And I fit perfectly in there. So I went, I want to work, like I'm going to make a concerted effort to work for Charles Poliquin at some point. And so I would do anything for free. Like I would go to seminars. I would help people out. We had forums online where I would get on and just help people and not ask for any money. That got me noticed by a lot of guys. So I started doing online training in 2007 when there wasn't, that didn't exist. Like we were sending, we didn't have training management software. It wasn't true coaching. It was Excel sheets and word. And I mean, I can remember sending some programs off on a fax machine. Like that's how archaic it was at that time. but Charles took notice of me helping people and getting on the forums being really interactive and one yeah I was at like I think PICP three and he came up to me it might have been four and he came up to me and said do you do you want to do you want to work for us part-time and start teaching and be an assistant coach and I was like hell yeah absolutely and that's what got it started yeah so I did that for a while and eventually I got uh they hired me to come on full-time which is a whole nother clusterfuck it's uh i showed up and charles was gone like that was when the entire industry turned at least for them that whole company turned so charles was gone his right hand man andre benoit was gone ron finley was gone and i show up and i'm like where is everybody and they're like oh they're not here anymore i'm going i just packed all my shit into storage and drove across the country and you you probably could have told me this before i got here that would have been handy information that would have been real handy information i still would have gone but at least i would have been prepared for what i walked into i mean you you took i mean exclusively you took a lot from charles like you learned a lot from him what do you think like what do you think you that charles taught you that stuck with you i mean got everything i mean it's it's he influenced everything that i do um he but both positive and negative so the part The positive things, he got me interested in physical culture history and knowing that there are some things that are new in there. There's always some few things that are being invented, but most of what we know, we've known for 100 and something years. So what Charles was really good at is studying other people systems and then using those to create his own systems and also to funnel down all this information into usable periodized structure that would work for people And yeah so he got me interested in the part of how important programming is Like not just the coaching, but you have to have a plan. You have to have a long-term plan, short-term plan. It has to make sense. And got me into the science of thinking about what happens in the biochemistry. If I do A, what is the, from the cause, what's the effect? and how is that going to plan out over a long period of time so you're not just throwing exercise at people for no reason. He taught me the importance of looking at people's structure and the structural balance, how they move, and fixing those issues. Yeah, so he's absolutely the cornerstone of everything that I do. But I tell you, probably the biggest thing he taught me is don't just worry about the science and the papers because especially in nutritional science and exercise science, they're always decades behind what we're already doing. So he was one of the only people that had the courage to put these ideas out there while the science hadn't actually confirmed that, and everybody said he was crazy. But you go decades into the future, and everything that he told us back then, pretty much 85% of what he taught us, is now being shown in research to be true. Yeah, I mean, it's clear to see you learn an absolute shitload from him, and it's always fun hearing it. It's weird hearing it in this context, actually, because you've taught me this back over the years. So I kind of know the answers to these questions, but it's nice to hear slightly different things. I suppose here's an interesting question.