Big Dawgs Coach, Henry Torano is really well known as a coach who is outstanding at helping his clients “get their mind right.” We discussed some wonderful questions surrounding how to understand i...

"I know that I need an edge to win" I spoke to Big Dawgs Coach, Will Trujllo, on his birthday, and we got into a really interesting conversation about how he and his athletes find their personal...

Where did #chefsam start?

Sam Smith, for all of the notoriety he receives for working with big name CrossFit Athletes, is extremely introspective. He constantly investigates his thoughts, his actions, and the environment around him. He not only wants to grow, he wants to understand his coaching craft and the world at his fingertips.  It was this reason that struck up my curiosity. I wanted to better understand part of how Sam got to this mindful place in his life, so I asked him to talk about an experience in his formative – teen – years that both shaped his life as well as remains at the forefront of his coaching methodology today. What arose was a wonderful conversation about how Sam approaches the world.

Mizar Fuentes-Ortega (Mizar) has always fascinated me, his clients, and many other people who follow Big Dawgs and Mizar. He speaks 3 languages: English, Spanish (his native language), and French, he was a world-level gymnast + high level CrossFitter and Mixed Martial Artist, he’s an outstanding coach, and he is always 100% present with me and others when he speaks to us. I wanted to explore some of the genesis that helps Mizar be Mizar!

Michael Bann  and I often discuss the successes and challenges he’s seen with some of his clients because he often has complex client puzzles to solve. Michael often works with Military Special Forces clients as they want to prepare for, go through, and thrive after Selection, the Qualification Course, and then multiple deployments into hostile parts of the world.

Whitney Reese has been a competitor for her entire life. From multiple sports to CrossFit, to school, to coaching, she loves to test herself and compete. But what you may not know is that Whitney deeply cares about those around her, and no matter what happens she is the type of person who will make sacrifices to help those around her - perhaps it’s part of the reason she became a Physical Therapist.

In this Coaches Chat, Henry Torano is a master of helping people see what they are doing and then helping them sort out why they may be doing it. This chat with Henry about goals vs. fantasies is timely with the 2020 New Year, as many people want to understand the decisions they are making so that they can learn how to consistently improve.

In this Coaches Chat, Henry Torano discusses the difficulties he faced coming to terms with leaving the competitive CrossFit world.

In this Coaches Chat, Henry Torano talks about a new years goal of his from the past. A timely story as we head into the New Year, 2020. In this particular year, he set out to run an Ironman, however the challenges he fast would teach him major life lessons that would shape him as an athlete and a coach.

Whitney Reese always impresses me with how much breadth and depth she has command over in our conversations. It doesn’t seem to matter what the topic is, she always has such intelligent words back....

When you have created habits that are truly engrained inside of you, you can build on top of them. For macros, if you are sleeping well, eating/drinking well, training consistently, getting sun (when possible), enjoying rhythm and purpose, and you aren’t stressing out to do those things - ie automatic - you'd better be prepared to receive better success from adding macros, as a tool to your arsenal.

To improve movements, you must remove them from challenging workouts. You must bring them up front within a training day so that your CNS is fresh so that you can attack the weakness of the movement first. Only after you work a movement in a non-fatigued way can you begin to challenge it.

Will has so much experience with his athletes needing different things when they are run down or close to injury. He always thinks about what the most stressful, or intense, thing is for people, and he wants to remove that from training when they are close to collapse.

When you are stressed, have gut issues, aren’t sleeping, etc...and then you tack on a workout that puts you just a bit over the line, you can set that forrest fire of inflammation off. When that inflammation goes, it harms your ability to create red blood cells, but it also harms your ability to absorb the micronutrients that help you be more oxidative (aerobic). 

If your intent on a 2k row is “go all out and ‘die,’ that will put somebody into an anaerobic state because it’s not sustainable. However, if you go into a workout with the intent of sustainability and consistency - Michael mentioned a historic Rich Froning interval workout where he rowed 4 1k rows at 3:25 with 60 sec breaks in between - that much more likely allows you to complete the workout at a pace that you can do over and over which yields an aerobic outcome.

I am always impressed by how much Henry Torano understands about fitness, health, and his clients. He has great breadth of knowledge in so many areas. That is why I wanted to extract his thoughts and experiences with fitness and health tracking devices

CEO Jim Crowell sits down with Big Dawgs Coach Michael Bann to discuss building resilience. In this chat, Michael first helped me to see his definition of resiliency because so many people have such abstract views on what it means in the first place. He went on to make a very interesting comment surrounding the difference between resiliency in higher level performers vs more of everyday competitors. Jim and Michael had a great conversation. Enjoy it!

So many people ask us “how do I get better for a competition,” so I decided to ask coach Sam Smith to help me better understand how athletes can spend a year building the important movements for a competition. More specifically, I asked him how to improve from one year’s CrossFit Open to next year’s CrossFit Open.

We have been discussing the CrossFit Open with everybody inside of Big Dawgs, so I decided to ask coach Sam Smith to help me better understand how athletes can view the Open for themselves to get their best performance inside of it. Something important to note, though, is that this isn’t an article about how to train for a year - or 5 years - to peak physically for it. No, this article and video are about how to take wherever you sit, right now, and put your best result forward.

As you prove that you can control something such as your shoulders/scapulas in a closed chain environment, you would then graduate to an open chain environment, but you can always continue to include closed chain movements because they may be beneficial for ongoing strength, stability, and endurance.

In the video, we hit on these big topics: What is a ring muscle up? - a definition and explanation to give context to the conversation Why are muscle ups challenging for people? - be it technique, strength, or muscle endurance, there are some barriers that people need to overcome. What technique and drills help improve the skill of the ring muscle up? What type of training or programming helps to improve your max muscle ups set? What helps you improve muscle ups in workouts when you're tired?

We had a great conversation about organizing somebody’s season in the best way for them to succeed in their competitions while continuing to improve throughout the year.  Throughout this conversation, Henry and I discussed: -What to do with athletes with the shortened March 2019 CrossFit Open vs the October 2019 and 2020 Opens -How has the 2019 CrossFit Games season been different -How are you laying out competitive seasons for your athletes now

Whitney Reese sat down with me today to break down movement. Movement is near and dear to all fitness athletes because they want to move faster, for longer, with less chance of risk - injury.  Move...

Jim Crowell and Brian Foley sat down to discuss what GOOD means in CrossFit. So many people say that a CrossFitter is "good" but there aren't any qualifiers to that term. Jim asked Brian to qualify what Good means, so Brian discussed data - specific numbers good CrossFitters need to hit, mindset, history, and what good CrossFitters do outside of the gym! Enjoy!

Jim Crowell and Brian Foley discussed some of the broad things that Brian enjoyed, noticed, and was surprised by in the 2019 CrossFit Games. Brian discussed what Mat Fraser has that other athletes do not. Brian also spoke about how athletes can take what they've learned and organize their training to create a successful upcoming season.

Brian Foley wrote a great piece about what he's finding with his athletes and their ongoing growth in fitness, and then he spoke to Jim Crowell about his findings. He's identified a great foundation of stages that fitness athletes go through on the way to their ultimate precipice. There is a lot to learn about yourself as an athlete and as a person as you move through these stages, but just being aware of where you are can be a positive and eye opening experience.

Jim Crowell and Mike McElroy dug into how athletes can build stronger confidence in themselves at all levels of their fitness. From a young kid through his years playing golf, to his time on the floor as a multi-year CrossFit Games Regional Athlete, to now moving into the triathlon world, Mike has learned what he and his athletes need in order to progress through the numerous ups and downs that life throws at them. Enjoy!

Henry Torano is a man of his word. When Henry tells you something, you can trust it because he's a straight shooter. He takes that disciplined truth into all aspects of his life. From a high-level football player to CrossFitter to Triathlete, Henry has felt all of the same things that his clients and athletes feel in their training, so he's able to communicate with them honestly so that they have the best foundation with which to progress from. Enjoy!

Jim Crowell and Sean McGovern discuss how Sean helps his clients build the right environmental support systems, psychology, and consistency in order to optimize their human performance in and out of the gym. We delve into what lead Sean to being fascinated by the other 14 hours outside of sleeping and training and why he focuses so much on that time along with training with his clients.