BUILD VOLUME

“I built a business called Gruns. We make gummy vitamins. We started it about three years ago and just recently crossed that billion-dollar valuation mark in the exit. It was a fast ride, but we found a hole in the market where people wanted the benefits of greens powders without the terrible taste and the mess of a shaker bottle.”

“What I would tell my Endurox athletes is, I have this written in the notes, is that decide what you're prioritizing. So, if you're someone who needs to prioritize their endurance, do that first and do your strength second. If you're someone who needs to prioritize their strength, do your strength first and your endurance second. You can just swap them round to, so you're not compromising the thing you're trying to improve.”

“I mean, I think it will be a surprise to many people listening that there's a wide strength endurance and your strength, you know, because strength endurance, power development, strength capacity, those three things is basically all your gym work, really. But so why is my gym work at the top? And it comes back to the very similar thing what we talked about with the cake and the icing is that, you know, if you don't have a robust aerobic conditioning, you can be as strong as you like. It would just all fall apart when you get into a Hyrox, when you become fatigued.”

“I program for their group, I always also follow, it is program for the best, scale for the rest. So I tell everybody on it that like, listen, this is a lot. When they are following it, I tell them, start out doing about 70% of each piece. That means that if I have in there a 60-minute run, go do 45 minutes, 42 minutes, whatever it is, the first week that you are on it. 70% of everything. If there is a four-round workout, do three rounds.”

“So people tend to sit in that kind of what we call the black hole, the black hole of intensity, because it's just that nice feeling of it's not too hard. You're still moving fast. It's still a bit of work. And that's why a lot of people will tend to sink in to that area automatically. Not automatically, but just on perp, not even without thinking about it. It's just the black hole.”

“Training, the good way to think about training is it's a bit like music. It's like there's basically, what is it, how many keys are in music? Is it seven keys, six keys? But to make music is the order. If you just randomly put everything in there, you just randomly bang keys randomly, it's going to make a terrible noise, but that's the same as training. As a coach once said to me, a good session and a bad session look the same on paper.”

“I think the problem comes in newer, more recreational athletes or lesser trained athletes, where when doing a Hyrox is very fatiguing for them. They require a lot of recovery after a Hyrox. And then just to get around the Hyrox, they're going to also require to be quite fresh. I think generally that's the issue. It depends on where you are in your training cycle and what your ego is like. If you can put your ego to one side and just accept that your performance isn't going to be optimal, then by all means, race.”

“I remember one of my coaches from a young age, he explained this to me. He says, you got to imagine your cake. He says, your high intensity and your threshold is your icing. And he said, and then your frequency and volume is your base. In a sport like triathlon or Hyrox, where we are trying to perform and to fatigue. As soon as you fatigue, your icing cracks and your cake falls apart. And if you don't have that base support of your thick frequency and volume, you will just fall apart.”

“I don't want to spend my time on a small business anymore. If I'm going to put in the same amount of effort and stress, I want to make sure the ceiling is ten billion dollars, not ten million. You have to look at categories that are already massive but haven't been disrupted by a modern brand or a better user experience in decades.”

“We didn't reinvent the wheel with the ingredients. We just remixed the format. It's the same thing as taking a successful software product and moving it to mobile, or taking a successful supplement and making it a gummy. You take a proven value proposition and deliver it in a way that fits better into a person's daily routine.”

“We don't test. What we do is we race, and the race is our test. We use that as a performance metric. If I want to run a test on somebody, especially one where I want to get really good data, usually you want to like take a day or two off in front of it, make sure the test is their best ability, and then they're going to have to recover from it, and it could be up to like five, six day process, and then you just lost a week of training.”

“We didn't reinvent the wheel with the ingredients. We just remixed the format. It's the same thing as taking a successful software product and moving it to mobile, or taking a successful supplement and making it a gummy. You take a proven value proposition and deliver it in a way that fits better into a person's daily routine.”

“You have to be willing to fail on ninety percent of your ads. We were pumping out fifty to a hundred different creative variations a week just to find the one or two winners that would actually scale. If you're not testing at that volume, you're basically just guessing with your marketing budget and hoping for a miracle.”

“If you look at how they do their double threshold and their threshold training, the only thing that changes is that as they get closer to racing, the duration of the intervals increases, and generally the recovery between intervals decreases. So you might start off with something really simple, like one minute on, one minute off. Your threshold pace is quite easy, not very hard at all. But then you build on that, you do two minutes on, one minute off, three minutes on, one minute off. And then by the end, you might be doing ten by four minutes with one minute recovery at the same pace.”

“At a certain level of business, the actual product is almost secondary to the access you have. Being able to get into the right distribution channels or get on the phone with the right retail buyers is what separates the billion-dollar brands from the ones that stay stuck in Shopify land forever. Access is the ultimate unfair advantage.”

“I don't want to spend my time on a small business anymore. If I'm going to put in the same amount of effort and stress, I want to make sure the ceiling is ten billion dollars, not ten million. You have to look at categories that are already massive but haven't been disrupted by a modern brand or a better user experience in decades.”

“One of the things that I always have to do is actually pull them back. Hey, let's pull back for a minute. You're running too fast right now, you're getting burned out, you're not able to hit a good day after a good day. So before we get hurt, be the brakes, not their breaking point.”

“Everyone was doing powders and pills, but the compliance on those is terrible. People buy them and they sit in the cupboard. Gummies change the habit because they actually taste good. We took the most nutrient-dense profile we could find and put it into a format that people actually look forward to eating every single morning.”

“We started out kind of as training partners, and it didn't go into coach and athlete until I had back surgery. And then after that, it was more like I was just watching her more, but she doesn't like me watching her work out. So we go from there, but then she started to hand it over and she would trust me with it. And that is a heavy load for me that like, look, I don't want to break her trust. She will ask me every single workout, why am I doing this? And I have to have a reason because if there's not a reason for something that I write in her program, it doesn't get done.”

“You should know how a workout is going to affect them mentally and emotionally. Has anybody, and I'm going to speak from experience here, has anybody ever gone through a very hard, long workout and just afterwards you're emotionally drained and you just maybe cry a little bit? Like, your athletes will do that too. And if that happens, how do you get them from there into the next workout?”

“At a certain level of business, the actual product is almost secondary to the access you have. Being able to get into the right distribution channels or get on the phone with the right retail buyers is what separates the billion-dollar brands from the ones that stay stuck in Shopify land forever. Access is the ultimate unfair advantage.”

“There's a massive opportunity in building an ACH distribution layer. Right now, moving money is still slower and more expensive than it should be for most businesses. If you can create a seamless way for companies to handle those high-volume transactions without the typical banking friction, you're sitting on a gold mine that every enterprise will want.”

“Sam Briggs mentioned this about when younger athletes were coming in to CrossFit. And I have the utmost respect for all the young athletes, but I remember her saying this is that they just don't know how bad it's supposed to hurt yet. They don't know. They haven't experienced it. They haven't hit it. And so when they do, they just think that's right. Whereas as we age and we get older, and we know how bad that hurts, sometimes we're like, okay, I'm gonna go almost up to that.”

“But what I would say is that I think the consistency factor comes in when you go for more frequency because your injury risk is a bit lower. So when you're having breaks in between, you're having more recovery in between, you're not doing repetitive strains on the muscles continuously, and the injury risk is less. There's also some great work that comes out of John Hawley's lab based in Australia, and they looked at the molecular signaling pathways of adaptations. The idea is that you can train in the morning and train in the evening, you're kind of always upregulating that signal to adapt, which I think is a positive thing.”

“So typically we're looking for around about a 50% reduction in your normal training volume. But the key is that you maintain the training intensity, and you maintain the training frequency. So that means the number of sessions you're doing. But you're just reducing the total volume. So if you did 8 by 4 minutes on your build week, you're doing 4 by 4 minutes on the taper week, for example. If you're doing an hour run for your long run in your normal week, you're doing 30 minutes in the taper week. But you're kind of just slowly adjusting it to allow yourself to be as fresh as possible. You can see a 10 to 15% improvement in your performance from a fatigued state with a taper.”

“Availability is the best ability. If you're available constantly, always able to work, and that includes, you know, your quality days, your easy days. If you're available constantly, then you can stack good day on top of good day on top of good week, good months, good years, and over time, that's when you see the consistency really start to pay off.”

“Because of how heavy and important the running is in this sport, we don't stop. Yes, if you stop running, you would get stronger faster, but just because you're running doesn't mean you can't keep getting stronger. When I go into a strength block, it usually involves more specific sets and more touches to any type of resistance than it does mean eliminating my running completely. That volume of it goes from maybe 60 miles, 55 miles a week, down to 45.”

“Be an expert in the rule book. You should know the rule book as better or as well as or better than the athletes themselves. You need to be able to tell them what they are and are not allowed to use. They're going to come to you and say, hey, can I bring this with me? Can I take this gel? Whatever it is, you need to be an expert in how the rule book is set up.”

“There's a massive opportunity in building an ACH distribution layer. Right now, moving money is still slower and more expensive than it should be for most businesses. If you can create a seamless way for companies to handle those high-volume transactions without the typical banking friction, you're sitting on a gold mine that every enterprise will want.”

“Everyone was doing powders and pills, but the compliance on those is terrible. People buy them and they sit in the cupboard. Gummies change the habit because they actually taste good. We took the most nutrient-dense profile we could find and put it into a format that people actually look forward to eating every single morning.”

“Understand the difference and how they relate to correlation and causation. What is actually causing something to happen versus what just is happening at the same time as something else? If I program something or a week and the quality day of the next week, the athlete has a great fantastic day. Is it something that I did with the week before? Or is it something, did they get better sleep? Did they get better recovery?”

“What typically you see with, when you compare those two types of individuals or those two types of workouts, you get very quick gains from the threshold individual. So within a few weeks, that threshold individual will be better than the volume and low-intensity individual. But after six weeks, they've stagnated the threshold. And they're not better anymore, whereas the person doing the volume generally keeps on improving. And that's been shown time and time again.”

“You have to be willing to fail on ninety percent of your ads. We were pumping out fifty to a hundred different creative variations a week just to find the one or two winners that would actually scale. If you're not testing at that volume, you're basically just guessing with your marketing budget and hoping for a miracle.”

“I built a business called Gruns. We make gummy vitamins. We started it about three years ago and just recently crossed that billion-dollar valuation mark in the exit. It was a fast ride, but we found a hole in the market where people wanted the benefits of greens powders without the terrible taste and the mess of a shaker bottle.”