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Relentless Podcast

Clifton Harski: How to Be a Badass

It’s time for episode 25 of the Relentless: Real People, Real Results, Real World podcast!

In this episode I welcome in Clifton Harski –  Fitwall, Kettlebell Athletics, Animal Flow, and Movnat practitioner, coach/trainer, traveler, and gummy bear lover.

LISTEN UP!

SHOWNOTES: 

  • Morning restorative cardio: “”I think of it as warming me up for the day, repairing me for the day.”
  • Feeling tired and uninspired? “I eat gummy bears…and I go to the gym and have a sweet bro pump.”
  • The Power of Habit as recommended reading: “I’m paying increased attention to the power of habits in people’s daily lives…I think people need to be aware of what they fall into.”
  • Moving around the world every 2-3 years as a result of his Dad’s CIA job: “It gave me a unique viewpoint of the world compared to most people I know.”
  • On training: “I’m not ashamed to say I’d like to be better than other people at things. Training started out to be how can I be better? Then it became a fascination. The body is pretty cool. You do things to it, it adapts and becomes stronger, faster, and more resilient. Since then training keeps progressing into more and more interest into what we can do with different tools and what the results are.”
  • Having issues with gut bloating and tying it to bread and gluten after a 6-week experiment.
  • On creating BA training: “Be able. Be athletic. Be bad-ass.”
  • Becoming a Movnat coach and workshop instructor and traveling to teach 70-80 workshops in 2011.
  • Suffering a rare knee injury via deadlift (and later a torn labrum via barbell Turkish Getup and a torn lat via rings): “I would say that it was a good thing in that I learned about rehab, scaling back training, not chasing numbers. In the longterm for me and for my clients it was a good thing. For the pocketbook and pain for the summer it was less than a good thing.”
  • On lifting human beings: “Human getups are a way safer option than a barbell getup.”
  • Lower level aerobic conditioning (130-140 heart rate) benefiting recovery, sleep, and pain tolerance.
  • His aerobic conditioning prescription:
    • 10-minutes 20-30 degree incline treadmill walk
    • 10-minutes stepper
    • 10-minutes rower
  • Travel recommendations:
    • Keep up aerobic base
    • Take your dose of Vitamin M – movement and mobility (e.g. Animal Flow in hotel room 10-30 minutes or find a yoga studio or travel with a lacrosse ball and hit trigger points)
    • Book a hotel near a Whole Foods
  • On dietary decisions: “I typically don’t eat wheat, vegetable oil, and soy. Whether it’s placebo or in my head or not, I feel better when I avoid them.”
  • 9 elements to Fitwall training: push, pull, hinge, squat, step, resist movement in core, create movement in core, quadruped movement (on all 4s), hang.
  • The difference in training predominantly females in a group setting versus males.
  • The best way to progress somebody? “Doing the same thing with enough frequency to achieve adaptation and results versus doing a bunch of random stuff whenever the hell you feel like it.”
  • Incorporating heart rate training and providing personalized target heart rate zones.
  • Burying the calorie readout: “Calories burned in a workout are not terribly important in the grand scheme of life. What we’re interested in is breaking down the tissue in a way that causes it to build back up. If it builds back up and it’s more resilient then you can do more. Then you can work out more and then you can make more change. The actual calories you burn I don’t care about at all.”
  • 3 pieces of workout advice: “The #1 most important thing is to find something that you enjoy doing because if you don’t enjoy it you won’t do it long-term. #2 you need to do some form of strength training. After that it’s a tie between aerobic training and dedicated mobility style training.”
  • Social media advice: Be active on it. Pick and medium and be consistent.
  • Not adding to the sea of noise online via repetition and only saying something when it’s poignant or different.
  • On individuality: “Figure out what works for you. You can’t read a book and try to do what the book says forever. You can read multiple books and pick up tips that have worked for other people and try them. If it works for you after a legitimate trial period then you’ve found something to do well. But if it doesn’t work for you don’t keep trying to make it work.”
  • Understanding the timing and context of advice: “Anyone that tells you to achieve balance, they have achieved balance after being unbalanced for a long period of time…You’re going to have to be out of balance for a little while to get to where you want to be before you can focus on being in balance.”
  • Endgame? Get FitWall to a couple hundred locations across the US. “I think what we’re offering is as good or better than anybody else. I believe we’ve built ourselves a platform that is scalable.”

RELENTLESS ACTION:

Read Better Than Before, by Gretchen Rubin: “One of the things that I see as maybe the biggest problem in social media is that people are constantly comparing themselves to other people. They’re very worried about are they doing things right? They’re looking at what other people are doing and they think that’s what they should be doing. The number one thing is knowing yourself and being yourself. Do you son. You have to understand what it is you like, how you feel about things, and the way that you handle things in order to be successful for yourself.

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