I need to preface this interview with a few things. First, we have been working on this since early to mid December. I don’t know if that means it is a ridiculously fantastic read or if we are just that slow. I prefer to believe the former.

Rog has been mentioned on this blog a few times and, in my opinion, he is not only a super great resource for fitnessy-knowledge, but also an incredible inspiration. His singular goal is to sexify the world (NOTE: totally okay with that) on a grand scale.  I asked him if he wanted to include any images in the interview and he requested a photo of Stacey Dash.

How did you get into the “fitness biz”? I know that’s a pretty cliche first question, but if I am not mistaken, you began as a teacher? I’m curious to know when the switch flipped and you came to the dark side or were you always a workout fiend who just decided to make a career of it.

Getting into the industry was a small chunk of preparation and a giant asteroid of luck culminating in me being able to do something that I love for a living.

In all honesty, prior to 2007 I had never seriously touched a weight. Sure, there was that one time in wrestling practice where we went to the weight room and messed around (I soon quit the team after throwing up a Big Texas Cinnamon Roll that I ate 5 minutes before we started sprints – a story for another day), but nothing longer than a few days.

Oh yeah – there was that time during middle school when I spent an entire week doing non-stop curls with a 10lb weight from K-Mart to try win the attention of this girl that I liked. Needless to say, that didn’t end well.

About halfway through college though, something changed. I started to wander around the internet and somehow found myself on T-Nation. Once I started to mess around with some of the programs there and saw the awesome changes in my own physique and my mindset as well, it was game over for me – I was hooked.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I gave a career in fitness any serious though. I was an English Lit major and after graduation the plan was to go overseas to Asia and teach for a few years while I figured out my next move, but the more I thought about my future beyond that, the less and less I wanted to pursue it. I love teaching, but the idea of being limited to the classroom didn’t mesh well with my soul – too bad it took 7 months prior to graduation to realize this.

I was a listener of The Fitcast then and heard that Kevin Larrabee did his internship at Cressey Performance and learned a ton, so I decided to take a leap of faith and apply for it as well. Since I didn’t have any background in exercise science, I tried to make myself stand out as much as possible – I drove to MA from MI to meet the staff at one of the conferences they were attending, wrote the best application essay that I possibly could, and politely followed up on the status of my application so that they knew that I was serious about this.

I still don’t know how, but I ended up getting the internship and my life has gone nowhere but up from there!

I’m assuming that you probably learned so much during your CP internship that your brain nearly exploded. What would you say is the most valuable thing you got from the experience and do you have any advice for those just now trying to transition into training from a completely different background?

Actually, you’re wrong. My brain didn’t nearly explode – it DID explode. It has taken a few years of reconstructive surgery but I’m happy to say that I finally have all of my mental faculties back (and a pretty cool story about how merely looking at Tony Gentilcore‘s arms caused mine to grow an inch).

Being at CP was like being thrown into a training camp put on by Batman, Superman & The Flash. I’m still amazed by how I went from not having any experience at all with strength training, or even coaching for that matter, to traveling across the country to learn from the best in the industry.

The biggest things that I took away from the internship weren’t so much the technical skills (although those were amazing), but the soft skills that’ve been crucial to my success. Prior to my internship, I had never coached anyone at all. In fact, one of the requirements that I had to fulfill before getting the internship was that I had to get some experience in that realm (I ended up volunteering at the YMCA), and it scared the Coolio out of me!

I was a shy guy before heading to CP, so being forced to interact with hundreds of people on a weekly basis broke me out of my shell pretty quickly. On top of that, being around Eric, Tony & Brian showed me exactly the kind of fitness professional that I wanted to be. They respected and sought after not only because of their knowledge, but because their clients/friends know that they have their best interest in mind at all times and they treat everyone the same; the major league ball player gets the same treatment is the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 14 year old.

As for those looking to get started in the fitness industry without formal credentials, I wrote an entire post about it here and would be doing everyone a disservice if I tried to rush over it here.

Everyone has their own ‘style’ of training, I suppose.  What’s your poison and how do you approach your training?

One answer: Guns & Buns

I’m pretty obsessed with chin ups and glute training – my ultimate goal is to be able to do a 1 arm chin up and while also obtaining THE TOP MAN ASS ON THE PLANET! I’m not sure how to objectively measure my progress towards this goal short of walking down the street in red leather pants, which would lose me some serious man points (only Eddie Murphy could pull that off), but I’ll do what must be done.

As far as the specifics of my own training, I like to keep it as simple as I possibly can – the less time I spend thinking about or tweaking what I’m going to do in the gym, the happier I am. I base my training entirely around movements that I enjoy doing and those that give me the biggest bang for my time invested. Simply put, if I don’t like it, I don’t do it.

Here’s my exact training routine:

Day A:

A) Deadlift – 3 x 2-5
B) Weighted Chins – 3 x 3-6
C1) Glute Ham Raise – 3 x 8-10
C2) Dumbbell Hammer Curl – 2 x 10

Day B:

A1) Weighted Dips – 3 x 5
A2) Weighted Glute Bridge 3 x 5
B1) Pendlay Row – 3 x 8
B2) Back Extension – 3 x 8-10

Day C:

A1) Barbell Reverse Lunge – 3 x 8 each
A2) Weighted Pushups – 3 x 8
B1) Leg Press – 3 x 10

B2) Standing 1 Arm Row – 3 x 12 each

You mentioned recently on Facebook that you are considering doing a transformation. How does your diet look now vs. what you will be doing for said transformation? Will it entail ice cream for breakfast?

There is a deload built into the system, but I’ll be honest: the structured training 4 weeks straight got to me a little. I liked them very much and had a ton of fun, but by week 4 I was a little ‘meh’ (which is why they’re not 5 or more weeks, eh?).  Since I have no goals to risk messing up by doing this, I decided to implement my own deload week between each phase.

Plan? Hit the gym 3x this week and do whatever the hell I want. Oh, and use it as play time Sometimes I just have a genuinely fun time going into the gym and doing random crap. When I stop having fun or get bored, I go home! [NOTE: Obviously this is not conducive to doing regularly and would get me absolutely no where. Throwing it in every 4-5 weeks, though, won't kill anybody if that's how you roll.]

Here’s what I did Sunday:

• High(er) rep bench work (…I may have skipped the last day of phase 1 to go shopping so I felt obligated to do some bench since that was what I was supposed to do the day before LOL)
• pullups
• sledgehammer work on a pile of tires superset with plank variations
• SDHP, which was interesting because we don’t have bumper plates light enough for me. I ended up just awkwardly doing the bar alone (which was prob a little too light).

If I do rock socks, they need to be worth it.