Coach Mark Ripito joins the show to talk about the fitness industry, and why it's a problem. He also talks about his own experience with Planet Fitness, and how they are selling cheap gym membership to people who won't actually use it.
00:00:06.000Very glad to have this next guest on not what you're used to on Ladder with Crowder, shifting gears from politics a little bit, but a guy who I've read for a while.
00:00:16.000You can pick up his book, actually, Starting Strength.
00:00:19.000It's probably the single book that anyone who's looking to get strong and healthy should read.
00:01:12.000And they're a very effective sales organization.
00:01:16.000In fact, I'll tell you a story if you're up for it, if we want to segue back into your trolling situation you had with them earlier in the week.
00:01:25.000A long time ago, when I first opened my gym in 1984, a friend of mine was running a promotion, a sales promotion, that really presaged the model that Planet Fitness uses right now.
00:01:41.000They're primarily designed to Appeal to people that are not going to use the membership.
00:01:48.000Their sales model is sell cheap memberships to people who will not use a gym membership, but that are cheap enough that people will not stop the draft on.
00:02:03.000It was drawing kind of a lead box based promotion.
00:02:07.000Back a long time ago that said that you want a free membership to the Wichita Falls Athletic Club as a consolation prize and somebody's going to win a vacation to Hawaii.
00:02:17.000All you have to do to claim this free membership to the gym is to come in and pay the maintenance fees of $96, which was something like $53 a year.
00:02:34.000And you had a two-year membership for $96.
00:02:36.000Now, people that are regular gym members don't put their name in lead boxes anyway.
00:02:45.000So the thing generated quite a bit of cash up front, and it generated a grand total of about five people that used that membership for the next two years.
00:03:02.000I've been a member of some of those gyms that aren't quite Planet Fitness, but they have a few squat racks, and their goal is to get as many to sign up with cheap rates.
00:03:10.000And sometimes you do join up, and you know how to use it properly, and you're the only person in the gym, and it's great.
00:03:15.000There was a gym actually in Texas that I went to, which actually, funnily that you talk about it.
00:03:19.000And that's why I wanted to bring you on, too.
00:07:41.000Extremely talented athletes are extremely talented athletes because they were born that way.
00:07:47.000And in terms of their athletic talent...
00:07:51.000All of the skipping around in the floor and balanced drills and high-level D1 college-looking activities that are designed to hone the abilities of very, very talented athletes are a complete, absolute waste of time.
00:08:08.000Extremely talented athletes aren't made any better by these types of...
00:08:14.000Just look around at D1 college programs.
00:08:17.000They're not made any better by these exercises.
00:08:20.000And activities that are designed to display talent.
00:08:24.000They are displaying talent that's already there.
00:08:30.000And, you know, the model is that strength and conditioning coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, am I saying that right?
00:08:39.000Strength and conditioning coaches are primarily designed, they primarily designed their activity and time In the gym around activities that are designed to display the talent of the athlete, which in the model of the industry is designed to display the talent of the coach.
00:09:05.000A lot of those things now where it started, I know you worked with it, but I have guys come and go, look, I can do a single leg overhead barbell squat on top of a kettlebell.
00:09:35.000You just displayed to me a fantastic talent for balance.
00:09:40.000You know, D1 programs primarily recruit on the basis of...
00:09:47.000A suite of activities that are centered around measuring vertical jump because these indicate the set of explosive athletic genetics that you're looking for.
00:09:59.000You take a guy with a 36 inch vertical, he's going to make any coach look pretty good because he's a good athlete.
00:10:06.000Whether the coach does anything for him or not, Is largely irrelevant because he already looks good because that's why you recruited him.
00:10:35.000Unless you're a strength specialist, anybody can get stronger.
00:10:39.000For anyone, old person that doesn't do athletics, young 18-year-old kid looking to go to college and play sports, the most important thing they can do is the thing that they can make the most difference doing, and that is a strength program.
00:12:12.000You don't have the appreciation for what the baseline actually is.
00:12:15.000Yeah, but I will say this, Mark, and I do, I love your book, and I recommend it actually to my producer here, to everyone who's starting strength.
00:12:21.000You give me crap for the unilateral work that I did earlier, but you have to understand, I did have two severely herniated discs.
00:12:27.000I lost all actual motor function in my legs.
00:12:31.000So there was a time where I had to focus on maximal loading that I could with minimal spinal compression.
00:12:36.000And that was where I found a system that worked for me to maintain strength and actually increase flexibility, mobility, to the point where I felt like I could get back to barbells.
00:13:07.000I did 18 pull-ups at a fat man's body weight.
00:13:11.000Okay, I don't want to get into this competition because here's a fact.
00:13:13.000I said in my 54-year-old father, and he would be the least efficient at lifting barbells, and he would choke everyone in your gym out.
00:13:20.000And that's the skill set that's most important to me, is combat.
00:13:23.000I understand that, but what I'm saying to you, that a guy with extremely high skill lift, extremely high skill lift, that doubles his squat, All of a sudden he got better without improving his skills.
00:14:03.000If I do grappling, even when I tone down the strength train to three times a week...
00:14:08.000It is very hard for me to get above 205.
00:14:11.000What I'm suggesting is that it might be to your advantage to maybe get stronger, which takes twice a week.
00:14:26.000Work those two strength training sessions in so that your strength would progress.
00:14:32.000And that total benefit obtained by doing that It might very well make up for the loss of time on the mat.
00:14:42.000Oh, and that's what I'm doing right now because I can't spend time on the mat.
00:14:45.000To give you an idea, that's a great example with your program.
00:14:49.000Obviously, there's only so much recovery you have.
00:14:52.000So when I was doing your program and lifting pretty heavy right now and just did some drilling and mitt work was incredibly sore.
00:15:01.000It was very difficult to recover from both activities, and that's why I've put that on hold, because of the injuries.
00:15:06.000But I do, I advocate your program or something similar, generally your program exactly, for everyone I know who's starting lifting.
00:15:13.000We're actually getting this gentleman here who's, we won't bring him in, but my producer, Jared, who is 145 pounds and needs to start lifting heavy.
00:15:21.000But I do want to get into sort of the macro issue here.
00:15:22.000I'm writing a column right now, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree.
00:15:25.000I believe that we've reached a point in the Planet Fitness thing, it wasn't about the transgender deal or the cross-dressing.
00:15:30.000It was about, I truly believe, and you talk about this with weightlifting, and I think in every aspect of life, you have to look at yourself, correct yourself, and at the end of the day, you have to look yourself in the mirror and say, did I do everything I could do to get better?
00:15:44.000Have I done everything I can to prepare for whatever your job may be?
00:15:58.000Because we've gotten to a point, and I will say this flat out, liberalism creates fat, weak, young men who feel good about being, not just, I'm not talking about physically, in character.
00:16:09.000And if you look at people like Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, that's, I use this term, the strenuous life.
00:16:13.000They talked about every day pushing yourself a little bit.
00:16:16.000Do you have a lot of people who come in, or young men, who just don't have that sensibility of, hey, this is going to be hard, and that's what's beautiful in it?
00:16:27.000I don't know that most people that start this program think in those terms.
00:16:33.000I think that they come in understanding that this is what they need, but they haven't couched it in terms of They're placed on the political spectrum.
00:16:52.000You and I can be philosophical about this, and we didn't, because we've got time to do that.
00:17:00.000But a kid that's, you know, working full-time at Sonic Drive-In, he's 19 years old, he's underweight, he knows he needs to be bigger, he doesn't think about it in those terms.
00:17:09.000He just knows that everything he's tried before hasn't worked.
00:17:13.000And he knows that he's heard that what we can do can help him, so he comes in.
00:17:19.000But stepping back from the immediate nature of such a thing, I agree with your bigger point.
00:17:28.000I agree with your point that the pressure now is to be accepting of complacency, because complacency is easier, and complacency Is the kind of thing that enables people to feel good about themselves when somebody else tells them that that's really all you need to do.
00:20:12.000If obesity is our biggest epidemic, as some leftists say, I go, I mean, if you had to pick your problem out of a pile, wouldn't that be the one you would first pick, a problem of overabundance and choice?
00:20:24.000I can't imagine a better problem to have.
00:20:39.000As I said, this is an interesting time in the history of the human race.
00:20:45.000We've got a giant dichotomy, and I know this is what bothers leftists.
00:20:52.000We have a huge segment of the world's population that don't get enough to eat.
00:20:57.000And then again, here we are in the United States, where you can walk into a grocery store, you can walk into Walmart and buy pre-made pancakes.
00:21:08.000Wait, the pancakes are already made or do you mean the mix?
00:21:10.000I can understand that the dichotomy bothers people, okay?
00:21:14.000But my position is that the dichotomy is not my problem.
00:21:20.000The dichotomy is the problem of the third world who refuses to embrace the idea that private property and free market capitalism provides for pre-made pancakes.
00:22:59.000Like I told you, the vast majority, Planet Fitness is on the extreme end of this continuum.
00:23:08.000You've got the standard industry model gyms, which are basically sales organizations, and then you've got on the far other end of the spectrum, places like Wichita Paul's Athletic Club, out the door here, that It has a sign on the door that says, Wichita Falls Athletic Club is a private strength training facility.
00:23:32.000We turn people away here that don't sufficiently appreciate what it is we're trying to do.
00:23:41.000Okay, well let me real quick, because people are going to attack you.
00:23:43.000In the middle is, you know, there is the functional training expression of the Right in the middle is really where more trainers ought to be and they're not.
00:25:37.000I hear that story that you just tell me.
00:25:40.000And I think how mean are you other personal trainers to rob this woman of that experience of the opportunity to put her Walker in the closet at the age of 91.
00:27:58.000If I may sort of parlay that into something, I don't know if you've ever been on the grappling mats, but I would invite you to go on there once because everyone should get their ass kicked once.
00:28:10.000I've got my ass kicked way harder than one.
00:28:13.000It's good to realize how a Marcelo Garcia-looking character, who you would see in the gym and see as weak, can feel so strong and absolutely end your life at any time they want to, just to realize that strength is important, but it does not make a complete human.
00:29:37.000In other words, you can't learn to play the piano by a combination of attempting to play the saxophone, the guitar, and digging a hole in the backyard.
00:29:50.000What age do you cross over into the nonsensical?