26:52 – Thundrbro in overview: Fitness plus bodybuilding and a worldwide online challenge.
30:17 – The response from the bodybuilding community.
32:24 – How to join Thundrbro.
Sean: 00:05 – Hi everybody. Welcome to another edition of Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland. On today’s episode I talk with the co-founder of Thundrbro, Dave Lipson. If you’re enjoying this show, I would encourage you to subscribe to Two-Brain Radio. Every week we bring you the best from the fitness and the business worlds. It starts on Mondays when Mateo Lopez fires up the marketing machine and explains how real entrepreneurs are generating huge ROI on ads. On Wednesdays, I bring you great stories from the most interesting people in the fitness world, and then on Thursdays, Greg Strauch and Chris Cooper bring you the best of business, a host of experts who can help you level up as an entrepreneur. So if you haven’t, please subscribe to Two-Brain Radio so you don’t miss a show. And of course, we would love to hear what you think in a review. Dave Lipson is a former member of the CrossFit Seminar Staff, Games competitor and the husband of 2014 Fittest Woman on Earth, Camille Leblanc-Bazinet. He is also the co-founder of Thundrbro, a training and lifestyle brand whose mission is to make the world a better place through physical training, mental toughness with a winning mindset and elevating those around you. I first spoke with Dave about Thundrbro at the Arnold Sports Festival. That was back in March. I talked with him again on my Talking Elite Fitness podcast with Tommy Marquez, and I enjoyed the conversation so much that I had to get him back here on Two-Brain Radio. And we talk about how Dave is bringing together the worlds of functional and aesthetic fitness, what motivated him to do that and how hypertrophy training can help CrossFit athletes of all levels. Thanks for listening, everyone, enjoy the conversation. Dave, thanks so much for joining me, man. How you doing?
Dave: 01:48 – I’m good, man. It’s an honor to be on with you again.
Sean: 01:50 – Yeah, it’s great. It’s always great to talk to you. Yeah. We’re going to get into the hypertrophy stuff and Thundrbro, but I just want to start on how you found CrossFit.
Dave: 02:03 – Yeah, I think that was one of the first questions last time. I found CrossFit, you know, like a lot of people who come off of a competitive athletic career, I got done with my professional baseball career and kind of felt like I didn’t really have much of a reason to train anymore, you know, like it wasn’t that if I wasn’t strong enough I wasn’t going to get paid or something like that. And so I kind of went through a typical lull, and slowly, one of my training partners who had always kind of lifted with me, she found CrossFit and we did a couple of workouts and it was like, felt like being an athlete again, you know, felt like there was a reason to train and it wasn’t you versus someone else, but it was kinda like you versus yourself or just the pursuit of fitness and the fact that it was also kind of this emerging sport, created an athletic outlet and a competitive outlet to be able express all these things you’ve been building your whole life. Like the mental makeup of an athlete. And so yeah, I found it there in New York City. This was back when it wasn’t so popular. There was like one gym in New York City and it had nails coming out of the wall and there was like puke and blood on the floor. And I wasn’t sure it actually was a gym at first. I thought it was some kind of crack house.
Sean: 03:23 – That’s when you know you’ve found a good affiliate.
Dave: 03:27 – That too was such a change to me because I had come through the world of sports performance where, you know, they are like really nice locker rooms with lotions in it and mirrors and brand new equipment and you know, nice floors that had been cleaned. And this was kind of just a throw back to the roots of training, you know, the roots of suffering. And it wasn’t so much about the appearance of fitness, but more just like, you know, what does it actually take to perform at a high level regardless of how nice the gym is. So, yeah, it was a great foundation that I was able to kind of start laying down at the beginning of my athletic training career right when I was transitioning from baseball to get exposed to CrossFit and kind of really getting exposure to the practical application of fitness and training theory. Whereas a lot of the exposure I’d had before was very theoretical and it was more about the science, CrossFit got right to the nuts and bolts and just told you what needs to go where and how things need to happen on the floor.
Sean: 04:37 – You spent time on the Seminar Staff teaching this methodology. What motivated you then to kind of look into how you could meld other training methodologies into what you were doing with functional fitness?
Dave: 04:50 – Yeah, I mean I worked on a CrossFit Seminar Staff for a really long time, since 2010 teaching the Level 1 and the Level 2 CrossFit Seminar. And they’re both kind of broad-brush courses. The Level 1 is about the theory, kind of the what and the why of training and gives you all the essential skill sets you’ll need to be able to go and start practicing things to become a good trainer. And the CrossFit Level 2 is strictly just development as a trainer where you get evaluated based on a number of criteria and we kind of show you how to continue to develop. And that was an amazing experience for me as a professional trainer and business person because you develop a lot of skills yourself working on staff. The first skill you develop is just the ability to see and correct movement very, very well.
Dave: 05:45 – Because the standards are so high when you’re teaching at these courses, this is probably the last best exposure these athletes and future coaches will have to reference for a really long time. So if we show them a shitty example, we know that they’re gonna do everything we do, just not as good. So the standard is very high. The other thing that’s really great about being on staff is it teaches you how to be, you know, a very engaging and entertaining coach and person that people want to be around. Because, you know, the mantra is to educate, inspire, and entertain. So you might be great at educating, but if you can’t inspire and entertain that education might be lost. So you have to kind of learn how to blend those things together and you get developed on that.
Dave: 06:41 – Every course you get feedback on how you performed as a coach and a presenter and a lecturer. And it also opens you up to that idea of just being in a growth mindset, of being accepting and listening to feedback about trying to make adjustments. And you know, now, almost 10 years later, I feel like I’ve been able to walk away with some really valuable skills on public speaking and interacting with people or being able to try to kind of continue to develop myself outside the scope of the seminar. But the reason why eventually I started developing my own “thing,” unquote, was because, you know, first of all, I believe and I love the content of the Level 1.
Dave: 07:25 – And I love Coach Glassman, his original message, which is a message of fitness. You know, it’s about the idea of actual, you know—when we say forging elite fitness, clinically based, you know, it has a scientifically rigorous definition, but at the same time it eliminates a lot of the bullshit you see in the fitness industry, because it’s not the appearance of fitness, it’s not the correlates of fitness, but it’s coming up with a metric to being able to accurately measure and define it and understanding how to chase that metric with more of a clinical, scientific approach, which makes it very effective. And the other really strong message that CrossFit conveys is the community, which is again, like a completely different dichotomy to the standard in the fitness industry, which is putting your headphones on and training by yourself in a gym of lonely people. And now you’re part of a group of people that’s bonded through shared suffering and are supportive of another. And in addition to the fact that that kind of bonds you close together, it gets everybody on board with I would call the, you know, the mission statement of CrossFit, right? You work hard, show up, support each other and the greatest adaptation that you make is usually between the ears. You know, you learn that you can suffer and that it’s not a terrible or scary thing and that it’s OK to struggle and persevere where everyone else is kind of looking for a quick fix or an easy pill or shortcut, you know. CrossFit is about putting the work in, and those skills really bleed out into everything else. But you know, giving these lectures of Greg’s for 10 years, I love the content and I’m passionate about it. But you know, as you experience more, as you get more exposure outside of CrossFit to different clients, to different coaches, to different methodologies, you start accumulating additional information, maybe things that are not specific to CrossFit that can maybe impact it in some way but are not kind of synonymous with it alone. And I found that I was exploring a new space that I thought had good application within the program but also had the ability to bridge a gap where the program may have been falling short or where people may have been apprehensive for getting into CrossFit, was this huge area of blending performance and aesthetics.
Dave: 10:01 – Cause you know, classically CrossFit got a lot of pushback from the strength-and-conditioning community and the bodybuilding community cause we do things differently. And vice versa. There was a lot of attacking these communities on CrossFit’s part saying, well that’s not really fitness. And maybe there’s almost a stigma. Like, well that’s stupid. Why would you ever do a bicep curl? And my goal was to bridge the gap because I see the value and utility in both. Most people, 99% of people, that ever train are training for the same two reasons: They want to look good and they want to feel good. And so, you know, it doesn’t have to be about, you know, being the fittest on Earth all the time. It doesn’t even need to be about elite fitness all the time. I think the name of the game is playing the rule of averages and seeing how long you can get people exposed to a pretty good training program over a long period of time and consistently see results because, it’s not all or none.
Dave: 11:02 – And, you know, on the bodybuilding side, there’s a lot of bodybuilders out there who are, you know, it’s not a very healthy or sustainable lifestyle. A lot of them are display models only competing at a high level. And bodybuilding is not a very healthy thing. The same way that trying to compete at CrossFit at the highest level is not a healthy thing. But there was a group of bodybuilders who was kind of intrigued by CrossFit, I think would really benefit from just getting exposed to some fitness and functionality outside the scope of bodybuilding, but there was no outlet to kind of explore that. And likewise, you know, there was a ton of CrossFitters who are really interested in physicality, who want the aesthetics, who are really interested in bodybuilding, where, you know, some of this stuff bodybuilders do, the hypertrophy work, can not only benefit them on the aesthetic side, but also it benefits them on the performance side as well by being able to heal and rehabilitate injuries by being able to work on mechanical weaknesses or just giving them an outlet for their training to match up with their goals a little bit more clearly. So the whole idea here about fitness is compromise, is finding a compromise between bodybuilding and CrossFit or functional fitness and being able to deliver both of these things simultaneously and in support of one another. Not that it can only be one or the other.
Sean: 12:27 – You mentioned hypertrophy training. What exactly is that?
Dave: 12:32 – So hypertrophy is one way to describe how the body adapts to stress. And that stress can include things like, hormonal—I’m sorry. It can be things like an increased workload. It can be a hormonal response. It can be any increased amount of, you know, work you’re putting on the body. It can be inflammation. And when a cell increases in size beyond its normal size, it’s gone through hypertrophy. High muscle hypertrophy is an increase in size or thickness or a bulking of the body, skeletal muscle. So you know, the things that provide action, your skeleton, those muscles which we call striated muscle, that’s what we target with hypertrophy. You’re trying to essentially get those muscle fibers bigger. Now the cool thing about that with regard to performance is that when you make muscle fibers bigger, you increase their contractile potential.
Dave: 13:27 – So you now have more potential to express more strength or power or be able to do more work because essentially you’ve created a more formidable machine with an increased capacity. From the aesthetic side, you know, it’s getting bigger. It’s having quad sweeps and delts and pecs and abs that pop out and biceps that peak. So I think that’s when people think of hypertrophy, they probably just think of it from the standpoint of how it looks, but I also consider it from the standpoint of what it does for your performance as well.
Sean: 13:57 – We’ll be back with more from Dave Lipson after this.
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Sean: 14:47 – Yeah. And that’s the question I wanted to ask you next is, so if someone who is training CrossFit says, OK, well how is this going to help me? What would the answer to that question be?
Dave: 14:54 – Yeah. I mean I can only speak from personal experience and the experiences of our athletes, but you know, I got into hypertrophy after a back surgery. I got injured repetitively trying to compete in CrossFit. And really discouraged along the way, too, to the point where I was like, well why should I train now? And that kinda got me thinking back to, well, why did I ever start training, right? When I was 14 years old and I went into the high-school weight room, why did I pick up that dumbbell and start doing curls? Well, it’s cause I wanted to be big and I wanted to get chicks. So I wanted to look good and I wanted to be a dude. You know, I wanted to be a big strong guy, like a WWF wrestler.
Dave: 15:35 – I wanted people to know that I train, I wanted to be able to wear my training on my body. So that’s where I started kind of exploring it with regard to finding an outlet where I could train through this injury and still be able to get some results. Cause the neat thing about hypertrophy training is it doesn’t have to be super, super heavy and it doesn’t have to be super, super fast. In fact, fast within the context of hypertrophy training is usually counterproductive for muscle growth because you want to keep muscles under tension. So it made sense to me taking those risk factors out like speed and load and just trying to mitigate those. And then, the more I did it I realized like wow, I really like the effects this is having on my body, my back feels good. These injuries that have been nagging me don’t hurt so much and I’m really starting to like the way that I’m looking.
Dave: 16:25 – And that kind of just was a rabbit hole for me. Just exploring more and more like how can I blend this with CrossFit? How can I get bodybuilders doing more functional stuff? How can I get CrossFitters doing more hypertrophy principles? And we wrote books about it. We did programs about it. We created resources and kind of like a one-stop shop for all things, you know, Thundrbro and hypertrophy. And you know, likewise, we got a lot of similar feedback from people who had been through the same stuff. A lot of people out there who are banged up, who don’t look the way they want to look, who are discouraged because they can’t squat snatch 300 pounds. And you know, what’s funny about all that is that’s not why they were ever there in the first place. You know, like, why do you feel bad about not squat snatching 300 pounds when you just want to look good naked, you know?
Dave: 17:16 – So, I think, yeah, that just kind of opened up this whole category for us to start exploring and evolving and meshing the programs. And I think we’re going to see more and more of that, is being able to, you know, take these people who love CrossFit, who love the community, who love the training but want something to help them get through the injuries, to get to their underlying goals, which may or may not be elite fitness, and be able to do those things kind of simultaneously with each other.
Sean: 17:52 – Can you give me an example of what one of your workouts would look like?
Dave: 17:55 – Yeah, sure. So, I mean, we package this stuff in a bunch of different ways and the way we put the programs together depends on what results you’re looking for and how fast you want them. And most people, who start looking at our programs, they’re usually like, I want to be bigger and stronger. That’s kind of the general, like I want to put on some size, CrossFit does garner some hypertrophy to a point, but due to the extreme variance of the program, you’re never going to look like a bodybuilder doing CrossFit because you’re not exclusively bodybuilding. I mean, that would take some bias or some targeting to be able to get there. So what we do essentially is we just bias hypertrophy a little bit more within the context of functional training. We don’t do as much cardio and we do a lot of stuff that involves time under tension, different types of hypertrophy principles like isometrics, different ranges of motion, variable resistance, even things like tempos that we use are like really effective and it doesn’t require that much to change.
Dave: 19:05 – Our most popular program is the one you’re doing, Sean.
Sean: 19:07 – Yep, giving this a try, just started.
Dave: 19:07 – It’s the 90-day Get Huge program and that’s a pure hypertrophy program, meaning when you train that’s all you do that day. And it is about a 90-minute session of hypertrophy training using more functional movements, not a lot of machines. It limits the amount of isolation movements and tries to keep it to more athletic movement patterns, but still is able to create enough time under tension and metabolic stress and mechanical loading to get a hypertrophic response. And then what we tell people to do is if they are interested in pursuing fitness as well, then what they’ll do on the off days, what you’re doing, some light CrossFit workouts. So if you do your 90-day program Monday, Wednesday and Friday, maybe on Tuesday and Thursday you’re getting in the gym and you’re doing so some lighter CrossFit work.
Dave: 19:59 – And when I say lighter, what I’m talking about is no more additional loading and breaking down muscle tissue, because the hypertrophy work that we give you is extremely damaging. So we want to use it as a way to maybe help you recover, not to break you down farther. And likewise for the sake of injury, you know, we recommend like staying away from like really high-skill stuff because the things that are really fast or require a lot more skill tend to be risky with regard to injury. Right? So there’s a lot more risk in doing something like Amanda, squat snatches and muscle-ups, than there is with like rowing, push-ups and kettlebell swings, because they don’t require as much demand on positions and skills that take a very long time to develop. And a lot of people end up jumping the gun on that end and eventually that ends up to plateau or injury or breakdown.
Sean: 20:50 – Yeah. Yeah. And you’re just to what you said, you know, I did my first one of your workouts the other day, and like I told you before we started here, I was amazed at the response you can get from, you know, light weight and bands. That just leads me to the next question is people might look at this and say, OK, well I don’t have access to a traditional globo gym. I don’t have all these machines, but just like CrossFit, and this is more of a statement that you can just build off, it is scalable.
Dave: 21:18 – Yeah. Like the idea is to make it as accessible as possible. So the way that we’ve designed the programs is we’ve designed them for functional fitness gyms, right? We’ve designed them for a CrossFit box or a kettlebell studio or somewhere where you know, you’d have access to a barbell and pull-up bar. And we don’t really require more machines than that, although we do utilize the same movements and patterns you can get on machines by replicating them with bands. So you know, if you’re someone out there who’s doing our program in like a regular globo gym and you have machines, well that’s awesome. You could totally use them and get a lot of benefit out of that. But if you don’t, and you’re doing this in a CrossFit gym, we still provide the substitution, which is still very effective, saves a lot of space and time just by adapting cable and machine movements to bands.
Dave: 22:06 – And to be honest with you, Sean, like most of the band work or isolation movement we do is a minority compared to the functional stuff that most CrossFitters are familiar with. So it’s just a little bit of extra. The real potency in the program is how we utilize tempos and rest periods and ranges of motion and different movement patterns that you don’t get exposed to in a traditional CrossFit gym. You know, for instance, when most people do back squats, they’re usually doing some derivative of like a five by five or a five by three or working up to a one-rep max. And usually there’s very little regard for the tempo that they’re moving or the positions and ranges of motion that they’re working. You know, very, very seldomly do you see somebody do what we call a double contraction set where they do like a half rep into a full rep or a ten-second negative.
Dave: 22:58 – But those things are amazing for getting muscles to grow. So what we want to do is take the same movements and present them differently, where the sole metric for success is not how much weight or how fast you could do it, the metric for success is being able to get the muscle to a specific training state to get it to adapt and grow. And that’s nice because it takes the pressure off of people, too. You know, you don’t have to worry about where your score is on the board or feel bad that you didn’t go fast enough because it’s all about the training effect. That’s what we’re gauging for success. And that’s a nice break for people to not feel like they gotta go as fast or as heavy as they can or to dread the workouts because they know how much it’s going to hurt.
Sean: 23:42 – What has the reaction been from traditional CrossFit people when you meet or approach them with your methods where you just discuss them?
Dave: 23:48 – Yeah, like originally I was the guinea pig, so you know, I was the one who at first was dealing with bad back injuries and I had to stop CrossFitting or modify the CrossFit. And as I started withering away I was like, hey, I got to find out a way to maintain this. And that kind of led me down the road of researching the science of muscle hypertrophy. And then after my surgery, you know, I realized like, I want to compete again, but competing in CrossFit or you know, powerlifting or Olympic lifting is probably not a good idea. I know I like being strong, but bodybuilding was a nice outlet because I never explored that before. And the hypertrophy training works so well with it. I’d be like, oh, well now I have a little purpose to train.
Dave: 24:36 – And as I was going through this process, I was always in communication with CrossFit about some of the things I was learning and the things I was doing. And at one point, some of the directors of training, Dave Castro and Nicole Carroll, asked Camille, my wife, and I if we wanted to do our own course. And I said, oh yeah, I got the best idea. We’re going to do a CrossFit hypertrophy course. It’ll be hypertrophy for CrossFitters and we’ll talk about how to take CrossFit and bias muscle hypertrophy and still keep it functional. And I was really excited about it, but I think they were a little bit scared and worried about it because of the history between those two cultures. So it was a no, but I walked away saying, I’ll tell you what, I’ll write a Journal article about it and I’ll explain the theory so you guys don’t think I’m just talking about bicep curls, right? Which by the way, I think they still do because I’m sure that they’ve read or watched the content yet, but it’s not bicep curls for those guys that are watching. Yeah, there’s some bicep curls in there, but it’s no replacement. In fact, one of our taglines is you’re never going to cure metabolic disease with bicep curls. But that’s what we’re battling. That’s the perception that Thundrbro is battling, is that people think it’s one or the other when we’re very much in support of both. So I wrote this Journal article and it got really fucking long and it ended up being a hundred pages. And I thought, OK, maybe it’s a multiple part Journal article. But when I talked to the CrossFit Journal, they told me that if I submitted to them they would own it.
Dave: 26:02 – And after spending six months writing this thing, I didn’t want to just give it away. So I decided, you know what, forget that, I’m just going to publish it myself. And I published a book called “Hypertrophy for Functional Fitness,” which is kind of the theoretical and you know, conceptual application of muscle physiology mechanisms that drive hypertrophy, the scope of it within CrossFit, how to integrate it, different training principles, all different types of examples of how you can put it together. And then along with that book, we wrote our 90-day Get Huge program and that was basically the program to complement the book. And I was very scared when we launched that because I had a partner who kind of put in some money with me. I think we spent about like $5,000 to build a website and to design the books and to make some T-shirts and stuff.
Dave: 26:52 – And we launched it and I remember being so scared that my partner was going to lose this money. He owns a gym, you know, he’s a young, small business owner just trying to get by. I’m like, I hope he makes his fucking money back. And we made it back in like the first hour. It was insane. I was like, good God. And it was so surprising, the insatiable appetite people had for this stuff. A bunch of folks out there just like me with the same story. I love CrossFit, but I can’t compete anymore. I’m tired of getting injured. My dick’s in the dirt cause I don’t feel successful. I just want to look good. Like how do I do this? And that took off like a juggernaut in. Our first year, we sold 10,000 of the 90-Day Get Huge books, and we’ve continued to grow it. We’ve continued to create different programs. We wrote a book called ‘The 110-Minute Hypertrophy Finishers That Crush,” which is a list of a hundred different workouts you can throw in after your CrossFit workout to get hypertrophy in. We have our muscle anarchy online program now, which soon we’re going to have a thousand athletes in this program, and it’s a bodybuilding program with functional movements all meant to be done in the functional-fitness space, but it also has some light, simple CrossFit workouts every day. So it’s kind of a complete program where if you’re still wanting to pursue fitness but you want to get bigger and you want to do some bodybuilding, we mesh it together and there’s coaching and everything in there. And we have the 90-Day Get Huge worldwide challenge now cracking off this month where everyone in the across the world is going to compete to see who can get the biggest doing our programs.
Dave: 28:31 – There’s a cash prize, there’s like a WWF wrestling championship belt for the winner. We do giveaways, we give them T-shirts and we give them discounts. And basically it’s a place for people to do the program and get lots of support so that we can coach them through the process and give them nutritional guidance, give them coaching and you know, scaling or just interaction with coaches to increase their probability of success. And I want to see—I know myself, like in that three months, the most I put on in that three months was almost 25 pounds. So that’s nearly two pounds a week. Granted, I was very motivated, so I was eating a lot and training pretty hard. But the most typical kind of result we get is a pound to a pound and a half a week of progress where people are typically saying like, hey, I’m 15 pounds heavier. Or just like looking at the before-and-after pictures, like the aesthetic changes, the shape of the body changes. Even if you don’t put on that much weight, there’s definitely a recomposition that’s taking place where you’re seeing the shoulders getting broader, the quads getting bigger, the waist getting slimmer, the lats getting wider. So it’s really gratifying, like I said, to be able to wear your work on your body, whereas before, you know, the only proof of how hard you worked was kind of like your score on the board. Now you can actually see it; you walk into a room and people go, oh, that person looks trained. Right? And you’re able to do that while pursuing fitness.
Sean: 30:02 – You have a foot in the CrossFit world and now you have a really solid foot in the bodybuilding world. So that same question, just from the other perspective, what do bodybuilders say to you when you approach them with this, hey, you can mix it and functional training with your hypertrophy training and you can get good results.
Dave: 30:17 – Yeah, I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding when people don’t communicate with each other. And I think that in some ways we’ve closed ourselves off to the bodybuilding community. And in some ways the bodybuilding community’s closed themselves off to us. But you know, I trained at a gym with a lot of professional bodybuilders, Phil Heath, the seven-time Mr. Olympia, trains in my gym. I work with his trainer or his former trainer. There’s a bunch of pros in there and everyone that knows me knows I do CrossFit. I’ve never heard a single negative word come out of their mouth with regard to CrossFit. In fact, there have been a few of them that have reached out that like, hey, can you show me how to do it? I’d like to maybe substitute it for my cardio instead of doing steady state. I think I’d like to try some CrossFit workouts.
Dave: 31:00 – I think in general they’re kind of intrigued by it, but it’s really scary because bodybuilders are going to be afraid to get small, so you have to present it to them in the right way and also in a thoughtful way that makes sense from a training perspective, because if I take a bodybuilder and I just started doing CrossFit with them, they’re going to get really small, cause that’s not how bodybuilders train. But if you do a little bit strategically at the right time of the year for the right purpose where the goal matches up with the training, it’s an extremely effective tool. I use a ton of CrossFit when I’m preparing two months or a month out from a show because there’s a great fat burning effect and cardio-respiratory effect you get from CrossFit, which is amazing for metabolizing fat, but that would not work during gain season because it’s going to be a catabolic thing for you.
Dave: 31:45 – It’s going to be a muscle-shrinking thing as opposed to a muscle-growing thing. So I think from that perspective, I think that it’s just about framing it the right way and being able to create the right rhetoric where it’s not all or none. Why do you only have to be a CrossFitter, why do you only have to be a bodybuilder? I mean, I guess if you’re a professional, that’s one thing. But most of the people in gym I go to are not professional bodybuilders. They just want to look good and have fun when they train. So, I think that there’s definitely a lot of wiggle room in there.
Sean: 32:15 – If people want to, you know, they’re interested in this, where’s the best place that they can go to kind of start their journey on this hypertrophy training thing?
Dave: 32:24 – The best place to find our resources is at Thundrbro.com. That’s T H U N D R B R o.com. So there’s no E we say it’s like thun-dr-bro, because our tagline is “where bro science means real science.” So on the site, you can find all of our books, all of our training programs, all of our, you know, merchandise that supports the culture and the lifestyle. We wanted it to be kind of like a one-stop shop where every resource you need for getting huge and thriving as a dude is just right there. So we make some really cool stuff like our Conan wraps and our bottles and our supplement packages and our CBD. It’s like all this stuff we talk about is on the site. And then we also have some really cool education as well. I was mentioning to you before that we’re starting Thundrbro University, which is a series of online courses tackling some really hardcore and heavy anatomy and physiology science, but in a fun and entertaining way so that people can actually listen to it.
Dave: 33:23 – Because I mean, I love the science. I love digging through a 600-page text, but for most people that’s pretty mundane and boring. So I try to find the core messages and give athletes and trainers the best information so they understand how to train better and understand the science, not just at a macro level when they’re on the training floor, but in a micro level with regard to the actual mechanisms taking place in the body, which only helps you train more accurately. So yeah, we got all that stuff going on. Our Instagram is @Thundrbro. Also, I’m @DavefreakingLipson, so we’re great at answering DMs. We actually have a whole staff of people that help us sort through these DMs every day and make sure we get back to people. And there’s lots of coaching and training support in some of our private Facebook groups.
Dave: 34:14 – Each of our programs has its own group that you can actually get some really good coaching interaction from. So our muscle anarchy group, we have regular contact with the athletes and we talk about nutrition and training and you know, dealing with injuries and lifestyle factors and how to make themselves more anabolic. Same thing with our 90-Day Get Huge challenges. We have a group of people around the world now competing to get the biggest where they have regular contact with a coach on the Facebook pages. So yeah, as many resources as we can provide and we’re building more and more. It’s growing really fast. But our core message is bringing really good information to people that they may have not heard before and exploring this new territory.
Sean: 34:55 – Dave, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I always enjoy the conversation with you, and best of luck to you and the whole Thundrbro gang.
Dave: 35:01 – Oh, thanks, dude, I appreciate you Sean, thanks so much.
Sean: 35:05 – Big thanks to Dave Lipson for taking the time out of his schedule to talk with me. He did a fantastic job of running down where you can find them online and on social media so I will not repeat that yet again, but I encourage you to definitely check his stuff out. Chris Cooper almost went bankrupt in 2008. Now he’s running a multimillion-dollar company dedicated to helping entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes that he made. He spent thousands of hours mentoring gym owners one at a time, and his new book is packed with advice to help you grow your business and create your Perfect Day. “Founder, Farmer, Thinker, Thief” an Amazon bestseller. Check out the book reviewers who are calling it a must-read and a lighthouse for your business. So if you want to level up, this is the business book you need. Thanks for listening everyone. We’ll see you next time.
