Max Aita: Unpacking a Methodical Approach to Coaching

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:00:02]:
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Weird and strong podcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Gruensteiner. With me today, I've got Max Ada. Max, how you doing today, man?

Max Aita [00:00:10]:
I'm doing pretty well. Yeah. I'm a little early in the morning, but just getting some work done and having a good time. Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:00:17]:
Sunshiny, California in an early morning. Sounds great. Sounds great. Overall, as we do with everybody on the show, I've got a weird question for you. Are you ready?

Max Aita [00:00:28]:
Cool. I'm ready.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:00:30]:
Okay. Describe the most awkward photo you've ever taken.

Max Aita [00:00:36]:
Oh, well, okay. Probably not the most awkward, but one of the greatest photos of me ever taken. That would fall into awkward. But it's one of those photos where it's like, when you see it, it totally is. It's hilarious. But there's a meet. We did a power lifting meet. I did.

Max Aita [00:00:59]:
I didn't compete, but I had a couple lifters compete, and it was at Mark Bell's gym. This is like, God, it's probably, like 13 years ago, and my lifter won the cash prize, right? And so we took a photo of it, like, us kind of hanging out and standing there just kind of joking around, holding the money or something. And, like, a couple days later or whatever, I'm looking at the photo and I'm wearing these pants, these shorts that just happened to, like, drape in in just the right way that, like, my crotch, like, right from my crotch down to where the pocket must have been something in my pocket. It's like this perfectly shaped, like, you know, member that looks like it's, like, it's, like, over a foot long. It's, like, hilarious. Like, it's this, like, you know, ridiculous. Like, and you look at it and it's like, I actually have the photo on my phone. I always joke around my wife, and I always, like, pull it up.

Max Aita [00:02:05]:
But, yeah, it's like this hilarious looking. Like, when you see it, you're like, oh, my God.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:09]:
What the hell?

Max Aita [00:02:11]:
That's got to be the most weird photo of me, for sure.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:13]:
And you still keep it around?

Max Aita [00:02:17]:
Oh, yeah, no, I pull it out regularly. I show people on the street, on the subway. I was, you know, hey. Hey, Jason, you might think.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:23]:
What do you think?

Max Aita [00:02:23]:
Yeah, you might think I'm a loser, but look at this. So, yeah, that's gotta be it, for sure.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:30]:
That's. That's a great kickoff to the weird and strong podcast having. I mean, it's not the first time we've gone down that route with, especially with other coaches, because let's be honest. We're all basically 13. Um, yeah. Especially. Especially when it comes to the humor aspect of it.

Max Aita [00:02:48]:
Oh, sure.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:49]:
You know, we. We talked a little bit off air of, you know, you growing up in, in Montana, and, like, people who are listening to this are familiar with, uh, the weightlifting community and, uh, familiar with you, you know, have that. That, uh, background of your work with Abhijeev, your work that you've done over. Gosh, what is it? Almost three decades of coaching in the sports, of weightlifting and powerlifting.

Max Aita [00:03:11]:
Oh, wow. Yeah. Over 20 years, for sure.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:03:14]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so with that, and, you know, you're. You're affiliated with many known brands and your own gym and your own companies. What's one thing that's unconventional about you that people may not know about?

Max Aita [00:03:31]:
I don't know if. I don't know if there's anything unconventional. That's hard to. It's hard to answer. I think the. The. Probably the one thing. And it's like, also, I don't know what people.

Max Aita [00:03:44]:
I don't know what people don't know. Yeah. So it's hard to answer that. But I would say, like, you know, probably the thing that I get, the thing that I probably got most a few years back was, like, this, the bulgarian thing that, like, that's, like, the thing I do, and that's the, like, you know, the essence of everything that's driven my. My coaching or whatever. And I would say it's not, you know, it's certainly not the case. Like, I don't. I've never been, like, this huge proponent of it or done this bulgarian style training with lots of people, but I've always been kind of, like, I would say, known for that or for the squatting stuff.

Max Aita [00:04:23]:
But I would say the thing that's unconventional is that I feel like my approach to trying to solve these problems is, is a bit different where I see, you know, the problem of trying to get somebody better at lifting or try to improve their performance or try to, you know, trying to produce a champion. Like, is, you know, the approach should be really methodical, and the approach should have some kind of, you know, basically objectivity to it that I think doesn't exist a ton in weightlifting now. I think people, like, like to latch on to. They like to latch on to, like, you know, what's the simplest answer for this? Like, what's the quick factoid? If you look at, like, the general nature of the way people do things now, weightlifting, even at the highest level, the, you know, at the world, you see a lot of just, like, I guess they call it, like, sort of shooting from the hip. Like the, like, methodical approach doesn't. Is not pervasive in my mind.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:05:34]:
Okay.

Max Aita [00:05:34]:
Like, program writing, programming, doing programming, do all that stuff is not pervasive. So I'd say that's sort of my. Where I would say, you know, I fall. And I'm sure a lot of people are like that, too. But that would be the thing is that, you know, it's a little more weird in that way that, like, I would say being more methodical is the sort of element of what I do now.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:05:53]:
Sure. And then in that, you know, for the listeners, uh, do you have an example of that, that of what that looks like from being much more methodical versus perhaps some of the things that you've witnessed at maybe a world's level that do have that shooting from the hip feel sense?

Max Aita [00:06:09]:
I mean. Yeah. So I'd say a good example is, like, a lot of coaches, a lot of people get into this and they, they start with, like, very beginner coaches start with the most obvious stuff they can touch, which is exercises. So you get in the gym and your whole perception, a lot of coaches that have coached for a long time will understand this sort of evolution. But day one, you know, you're a coach. You're just telling people to like, you're. You're throwing cues out and you're like, hey, do this, do that. Like, stay on your.

Max Aita [00:06:43]:
Stay on your heels or, you know, push with your arms or whatever, and you sort of feel like queuing is like the key to everything. I just find the right cue or I, you know, what's the cue for this? Like, whatever. Then you kind of move to exercises like, oh, I discovered a new movement and we're going to do this exercise. And that's the thing that fixes everything. And then, you know, you kind of graduate to like, oh, you know, it's all about this kind, kind of program, the sets and reps and these things, and that becomes this sort of evolution of like, you know, as you progress as a coach, you sort of latch onto these things whereas, you know, methodical approach would be, you know, taking a first principles approach to the way you do things. So looking at, like, what are the principles that govern the training process? What are the principles that govern coaching, that govern any of these elements and starting from there and building a system that emerges out of those principles. So an example would be like coaching and queuing some of the principles behind that would be like, make sure that your queuing is informative in a way that it actually improves the athletes performance. Or in training programming, make sure that you prioritize the principles of training in order that they're of their importance.

Max Aita [00:08:13]:
So specificity, overload, fatigue management, so you don't make decisions based on the little thing you found. So a cue sounds great, and it works for a minute. And so you will see coaches build systems around that. Oh, this is the cue that works, or this is how it should feel. And they build it around that. They build their system around that. Like. Like, a good example is like, the leg strength thing, the squat strength thing.

Max Aita [00:08:41]:
Oh, well, I squatted a lot and my. My lifts went up. So therefore, the program should be built around making your squat bigger. But that violates some principles of training in that, like, it's not necessarily maximizing specificity. Right. So I say all this kind of roundabout in that, like, the methodological approach is one in which you take the principles of training and you build a system that emerges from those principles versus what most people do, or I see a lot is people formulate systems or formulate programs based around sort of, like, you know, gut feelings or intuition that are not necessarily corroborated by principles or evidence or anything. It's just kind of a throw it in the air and let's do it right. And you see this a lot.

Max Aita [00:09:34]:
You see this at worlds. You see it all the time. Like, a good example would be like, Carlos Nassar before the. Before the Europeans this year, who watched him warm up in a training hall. And, like, a day or two out, he's doing like a 160 hang snatch triple. And he missed one of the reps. And, like, he won. He did great.

Max Aita [00:09:59]:
He lifted super huge. Like, I would have a hard time sitting there and being like, why did you do that? Like, what was the reason for doing that? And the reason might be it felt good. It felt like I should do it. But it's not really grounded in any kind of, like, principled approach. It's just kind of like, he did it that way. You see the Chinese as well. You know, Chinese will go in and do these super heavy poles, like, a few days before the meet or super heavy squads. Yeah.

Max Aita [00:10:27]:
And it's not to say it doesn't work. I'm not saying that, like, they don't know what they're doing. I'm just saying they could do stuff that's pointless. Like, they're not immune to that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:10:36]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [00:10:37]:
And you look at you like, well, one, like, you're not getting any stronger from doing a few singles. And the poll two days before we know that's not happening. Like, that's. That's obvious. Two. Like, does this really make you any better two days later? Is there some potentiating effect? We don't know. Like, is, like, is there really anything to this, or is it just, like, tradition or someone did it or you kind of just do it because you're all so strong that, like, you can get away with it? And so it's like, those kind of things can exist at that level, but they can also exist at many other levels along the way. Lower level coaches, people that are more, you know, whatever, you know, it's just like taking an approach that's not grounded in, like, what are the first principles that we need to evaluate before we do things or that we assess things through versus saying, hey, you know, my coach used to do this with me, and that's why I do them, you know? And, yeah, so, I mean, I would say that's probably the most.

Max Aita [00:11:36]:
The most obvious explanation of it is that, like, you take some kind of a first principles approach to the way you do things.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:11:41]:
And one of the things that came up as you were talking about that is in looking at that sense of when people are looking for that next thing to glom onto, whether they're a coach or an athlete, it's like they're looking for a new type of hammer to hit the same kind of a nail over and over again. But it's like, okay, well, this hammer is just slightly more shiny, or, hey, this one's got different kind of grip, but ultimately it's still a hammer. Um, and the reality is, is that it's actually a screw that you need to turn versus a. Yeah, a nail.

Max Aita [00:12:14]:
Totally.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:12:15]:
Um, and being able to look at that from a. From a perspective. So, in looking at, like, how you developed as a coach, like, what was that path, like for you to learn how to find, you know, to avoid some of that maybe shiny object syndrome as a. As an early coach, um, what was that path, like for you to come to this much more principled approach or meth methodical approach to being a coach?

Max Aita [00:12:40]:
I mean, I would say it all came from necessity. Like, when I first started coaching, I had a few athletes, and, like, back then, you could kind of do anything and, you know, and, like, with beginners, you can do anything and have success, but back then, there was just so many people just wanting to try crossfitters and everybody. So you would run through a lot of people and learn stuff. As you start doing it professionally or you start doing it on the scale that people are entrusting their future to you, you kind of quickly realize, oh, I have to do a better job. I have to learn more about how to do this well. And so that just kind of, for me, fueled a lot of desire to try to learn and understand what's a better way to do it. What's the, the what? What should I do? What should I not do? How do I be smart about this? And, you know, you tune your coaching style and your, your training to the athletes abilities and goals, right. If somebody shows up to your gym and they work a nine to five and they love weightlifting and they just want to train, but they don't really care about competing or whatever, like, you know, you're not going to necessarily try to maximize everything because you know how hard it is to do with that and recover.

Max Aita [00:13:53]:
You don't want to burn them out. After a year, someone comes to you and they're like, hey, I've got three years left in the quad. I want to try to qualify for the Olympics. I'm this, this and this capable, and they look like they could do it. Then it's a different approach. Right. You're going to ramp things up, put more priority on that, put more effort into it. But as a coach, when you're learning, you know, it's like, you can't apply that same logic to the brand new person and think that you're gonna do well.

Max Aita [00:14:20]:
You can't expect that someone who's paying you to train in your gym and get coached by you is gonna be happy maxing out every day or going crazy or pushing super hard, doing tons and tons of volume. Even though it may technically be the right choice, it's, you know, it's just not, it's not the, it's not sustainable. Right. So, you know, largely, experience is the first thing that drives that. Like, you just have to learn, you know, what, what works. And then as you start stripping away the programming or changing things from what I did as an athlete, you know, you started to, I started to realize, like, okay, there's a lot more to, you know, there's a lot more to this that needs to sort of involve discipline and learning and practice versus just kind of, hey, here's the programs, let's all do it. And treat it as like a, you know, a sort of, like, fun time where you're just, everyone's going crazy in the gym, you know, and then also, like, just getting around other people. I wish that I early on, had spent way more time with mentors.

Max Aita [00:15:29]:
That was a huge problem, a huge short sightedness on my part in that I had a coach and he was a mentor to me. I trained with Abhijeev, I trained with Shaco, I trained with. I was in the gym when Penley was there. I went and worked for juggernaut for a long time. Those guys were all instrumental in learning and being mentors, but I wish I had done more of it and had, I wish I had a mentorship kind of group that was five or six coaches that I knew that I could talk to a lot and learn a lot about and I didn't have that. And I think that kind of, you know, stifled a little bit of progress because a lot of it was something I had to learn on my own. And so I think that, you know, it's information wasn't as available as it is now. So I think that would have been way better for me.

Max Aita [00:16:18]:
But ultimately it was just that it's, you know, getting around coaches being mentored by people learning and then having to apply it and learning really quickly, like, oh, shit, that program just doesn't work and these people are quitting or these people are getting hurt. You got to find something that works better. And so, yeah, it's like, very quickly you start evolving your training and looking into that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:16:42]:
So you mentioned wishing that you had found a mentorship or, like, more camaraderie with more coaches earlier on. Was there? I've noticed that for myself and I've noticed that with other coaches who are just getting started or who are younger or, um, early on in that path. What do you, like? Do you have any ideas of where that resistance of wanting to even pursue that comes from? Or is there to speak from your experience of why you didn't seek that out earlier?

Max Aita [00:17:15]:
Uh, I mean, honestly, it was just, it didn't, it didn't exist. I mean, I don't even, I don't even think. I wouldn't even say it exists today in the sense that there's like a. There's no national dialogue. Like, there's no, like, I will say years ago there was a place called go heavy.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:17:32]:
This boy, I recall the name, yeah.

Max Aita [00:17:36]:
Go heavy was like, yeah, this is like, we're talking like 25 years ago now, but, like, there was a sort of a national dialogue there because everybody was getting on there to communicate and it doesn't really happen anymore. And everyone's information is siloed and it's all, it's all information. Now, about training and coaching is, I would say, largely intended as marketing for products, right. As much as people disguise it otherwise or think it's not, it's purely to develop. Either you're putting stuff on the Internet to build a following to then sell something else, or you're putting something on there as a way to bring somebody's attention to your page to. To drive sales. You know, you look at, like, the most popular Instagram accounts with weightlifting, all the Instagram weightlifting people, and it's like, none of it is really, like, educational information. It's just factoids and tidbits.

Max Aita [00:18:37]:
Try this cue. Don't do this. A 62nd video on why you're a pussy. Because you do, you know, you don't use a hook grip or whatever it is, right? Like, or the. The red, the red x and the green check mark videos, the very black.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:18:52]:
And white lack of nuance, especially as a coach.

Max Aita [00:18:56]:
And it's not really educational. It's informal, it's informative, but it isn't, like, driving further knowledge. It's just stating a fact or stating something. And so, like, there's. I just. There. There was no mentorship group. There was no, like, group of coaches that talked to each other.

Max Aita [00:19:13]:
Maybe there was and I was unaware of it and I wasn't cool enough to be in it. But, like, I feel like. I feel like that's something that I wish was more, you know, more just obvious that, like, oh, there's like, there's a group of coaches that kind of have, like, a big forum where there's a place where people can share information and it's. It's communicated to everybody and people can ask ideas and it's like, sort of a place for everyone to grow. Granted, it's a sport. Everyone's going to want to hide some of their stuff and kind of, you know, they believe that the way that they do different sets and reps is some magic that no one else does, but, yeah, so, I mean, like, that, if it had been there, I would have totally been on it. Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:19:55]:
And it's interesting to me because, you know, I've been part of other coaching, like, groups, not necessarily officially as mentorship, but like that, hey, let's meet monthly and let's. Yeah, let's talk about what's going on. Allow somebody that space to be able to, like, lay it out when they need some support or be able to ask questions about what everybody else is doing.

Max Aita [00:20:20]:
Right.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:20:21]:
In other areas. But I have. I haven't yet seen that necessarily come up organically in the weightlifting world, as much.

Max Aita [00:20:29]:
Yeah. And I. You know, it's like. I don't. It's probably because smaller world. It's smaller in. In that sense, but, you know, it's. It's largely, like.

Max Aita [00:20:42]:
It's largely a. It's a problem, I think, because you end up with, like, you just end up with so much varied information. Like, if you. If you were to sit down. This is one of the things that drives me crazy. If you were to sit down with Greg Everett, Dane Miller, Spencer Arnold, and Will Fleming and Travis Mash, Dave Spitz, and you ask them, what is the name? The different phases of a training cycle in weightlifting, you get fucking different answers across the board, and it's like they're all describing the same thing. They all know how to. They're all great coaches.

Max Aita [00:21:26]:
It's like Dane's gonna have some dumb terminology he invented. You know, Greg might have, you know, traditional terminology. Dave's got something he took out of bonder Chuck's books. Like. Like, Travis might have invented some words. It's like. It's just, like, you know, and I would probably be in there, too. Like, it's just, like, the reality is, like, there's no common glossary, and, like, this is, like, insane to me that, like, because a lot of it has become proprietary or you're trying to.

Max Aita [00:21:54]:
You write your book so you want to, like, put your own spin on it when the reality is, like. Like, we need to, like, get on the same page so everybody can understand what the hell they're. They're talking about, you know? You see with exercise names, too, you know, like, what's. What is a pump snatch? What's a yoyo snatch? Are they different? Are the same? You know, what are they? And then you have the other side of that. The other side of that spectrum, which is, like, you know, just naming things exactly as they are. Like the Russians did. Right. You know, it's a snatch, pull, plus hang snatch, pull below the knee, plus hang snatch, pull below the knee, plus hang snatch above.

Max Aita [00:22:32]:
Like, it's. Yeah, it's like, okay, well, that's just retarded, too. So. Yeah, there's just a lot of. There's a lot of this, like, disconnect between lots of things. There's no common glossary. There's very little, you know, there's very little sort of, like, communication in the sense that, like, everyone's like, hey, let's get on the same page with our terminology, because then we could all benefit from everyone else's knowledge. Absolutely.

Max Aita [00:22:57]:
Yeah. Why? Because, yeah, there's not a.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:23:00]:
There's not an immediate benefit for everybody to necessarily band together to put that level of effort in. And also, you know, it removes the ability for somebody to try to brand a particular exercise even if it had existed beforehand.

Max Aita [00:23:14]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:23:14]:
You know, I've.

Max Aita [00:23:15]:
I've.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:23:15]:
I've had this conversation back and forth with either coaching mentors of my own, fellow coaches that I've worked with, and even my own lifters, because they do get annoyed sometimes where they're like, do you have to be so literal with the name? I was like, yes, because I may not always be in the room to explain what I mean, and I would rather you understand exactly what I'm looking for versus, uh, trying to figure it out, even though there's a video attached to your program so you know what it's supposed to be, oftentimes you'll look at it and go, yeah, I know what that is, and just do it. And especially when we look at things like being able to get some sort of even longer term data over training effectiveness or try to find some way that we can actually utilize much more than just our coach's brain to understand what's going on, to look at larger data sets and whatnot, we don't have any sort of standardization that makes it really tough.

Max Aita [00:24:09]:
Totally. So that's kind of like my, that's been a frustration of mine forever. Is this, like, total, like, lack of cohesiveness between things? Right. Exactly what you described. Like, just naming it exactly what it is makes the most sense in that regard. But trying to just establish this idea of a common glossary where everybody understands what the terms are, everyone understands what something is. This has been a thing that has kind of emerged as a big question mark for me in the sense that, where do you go with this? Does it matter in the grand scheme of things, if all you care about is producing your own thing and selling your own products? I guess it not. But if you want to do something that's meaningful for a larger group of people, people like, you'd want to do something to define these things.

Max Aita [00:25:12]:
Right. To do something, to sort of bring everyone into the same umbrella. It's challenge, you know, that's. You're not going to change anybody, especially if they're making money selling what they're selling. Right.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:25:23]:
Yeah. Putting whatever they're putting their name in front of every exercise or whatever. Yeah. Naming a complex after themselves or whatever that looks like, you know, and it was the. We look at periodization as a whole, like, that was what the Soviets did, was standardize things so that everybody had a central point to work from. And not having that maybe authoritarian specificity to force that to happen, it makes it a lot more difficult. Do you think that the decentralization for USA weightlifting has pushed us into more of these corners of nonspecificity? Or has that just always been there?

Max Aita [00:26:09]:
I think it's. I think it's been around forever. I think people have always kind of named things, different things or created different, you know, different proprietary systems. I think less so in. More so in the US, more so just in the western world, but I think probably even in Europe and whatnot, there was probably some little bit of that sort of individualization, making up names for exercises. I think the decentralization in the US has definitely augmented it. And it's obvious, right? It's like, good example. Like, you write a book and you're going to call things the things you think they should be called because it sounds cool to you or makes sense to you.

Max Aita [00:26:55]:
It's like there's no, there's no incentive not to. Like, what do you get from not doing that? So that decentralization just kind of, again, like, silos people, where it's like people build out, you know, everything basically around the ideas they have and then try to just create, like, a community around it. And, you know, it's like, it's like, it's almost like different countries, right? Like, oh, you're going to train with this guy. He does this, this and this, and, okay, quit him. Go trans is girl. And she does things totally different and has totally different names and everything. Even though fundamentally you're all doing snatch cleaning, jerk squats and pulls. Like, you know, there's a million different little nuances that make their thing better.

Max Aita [00:27:37]:
So.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:27:37]:
Yeah, yeah, ultimately, yeah, that was, that's been a conversation I've had with others, other coaches, athletes and things. Is that, you know, ultimately it's like, well, what's on the menu today? Well, I bet there's a snatch variation, a clean and jerk variation. Like, it's like, there's. There's only so many things that we honestly can do when the sport is so specific.

Max Aita [00:27:56]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:27:56]:
You know, if it's something like a crossfit where you have so much variability, that's where things can get really in, like, necessary, more interesting. But, like, that's where things get to be a lot more. You. You play with way more variables than we do in weightlifting or powerlifting or any other real, like, strength sport like that.

Max Aita [00:28:13]:
Uh, huh? Yeah. And, and, you know, the other reality with all this, too, is that, you know what? What I think it does is it prevents the ability for prevents it becomes. It's not a, it's not a normal thing or it's a typical thing for people to compare programs, right? Like, like, honestly, I have not even seen a piece of software that exists by which you could take two or three waveing programs, plug them in and actually break them down and look at them and say, oh, here's, you know, here's how much volume, intensity, blah, blah, blah. All these things, they just, we don't even, we don't even do that. We just assume that a program is run, it's good or bad based on the results, and then you move on and you rewrite the next thing. There's no learning that takes place. I would be willing to bet that there are very few coaches out there, if any, that actually do true, like a b testing or refinement of their own process and programming from the perspective that they don't just take a program and run it again and again and customize it to a person. Like, let's say I write you your program and you do it, and then once done, I'm like, oh, you made a pr snatch.

Max Aita [00:29:35]:
Let's run that program again. Or you do it and you're like, you don't make any progress. I'm like, oh, that program's not right. We need to do something totally different now. Let's rewrite and start from scratch, rather than saying, hey, we did this program with you. Let's break it down and look, oh, you know what you did? Only 10% of your total volume was dedicated to snatch. That's probably why you didn't get any better than snatching. Let's rewrite the program and bump that number up or, you know, any number of different things like that.

Max Aita [00:30:05]:
I don't think that's happening very often. I don't think it happens a lot. I think coaches evolve a program towards something that's successful. And the, the most obvious thing is going to be cranking up the intensity and doing more singles and doing more classic lifts. And so it's like everything kind of ultimately just, like, deviates to that. Like, train harder, go heavier, be more specific, and, you know, you're going to kind of eke out better performances simply because people are, you know, are pushing harder and they're, you know, they're doing more of the things that we know are going to make them better. But there's no refinement there. It's just.

Max Aita [00:30:46]:
It's just, you know, hey, if the program's not working so well, just make it bigger and harder. Like, just do more of it. Yeah. Versus saying, like, yeah. Have we discovered, like, any kind of, like, more effective methods for teaching or for, you know, for improving different technical errors? Like, yeah, I mean, that's. That's sort of what I think is the reason why there's no need to have common glossary, because it doesn't matter. Every program might as well just be a one off thing that's getting run and then thrown out or running redone or, you know, I'm not saying nobody does this, but it's probably pretty rare, a lot of coaches sitting down and, like, thoughtfully reconstructing the same program and refining the process a lot over and over and over.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:31:32]:
But, yeah, well, even looking, you know, you talked about, like, a software component to this or even, like, having a way to retrospectively look at a program outside of what it was, the. The specific result for a specific individual. Um, right. If you are running the same program across multiple individuals. Like, this was something that I. So, me coming from a software background, uh, before I got into weightlifting, um. Cause I did it later in life, uh, is, uh, coming at that from more systematic, like, learning, wanting to have a much more systematic approach and not wanting to be on this shoot from the hip look and feel. Uh, yes, there's some of that that comes through in the teaching aspects, in the.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:32:17]:
In person coaching that I do. But as far as, like, the program goes, I was like, I should know, like, where we are in a particular phase and if our. If our focus is on building a better snatch. And, like, to your point, if only 10% of our given volume is snatch reps. Yeah. I don't have a way to actually count that for myself. How do I actually know? I may see the word snatch a lot in my program, but that doesn't necessarily equate to percentage of volume, percentage of reps, relative intensities, absolute, like, any of those measures that, you know, the programming nerds in the room want to know.

Max Aita [00:32:53]:
So that. That was a big eye opening thing for me. I had two experiences that I would say really crafted my thinking a lot. And these were after I was very strong, was I was already kind of done with powerlifting at the time. Well, the first. The first was I trained with Boris Shako, who was a powerlifting coach who basically co opted the Medvedevs weightlifting training methodology into powerlifting. And that methodology, I would say largely that methodology is built around a few fundamental things. It's built on a principle based, it's principle based system, but it's built around management of training stressors in a way that is, is kind of capitalizing on a lot of principles in a clever way.

Max Aita [00:33:45]:
But they look at things like, you know, Boris was big on the idea of like you have like this. You're basically like you're constructing your training in a way that you are trying to reach certain targets with say like average intensity and maintain those targets and maintain this consistent application of a training stimulus on an organism or a person and then manipulation of that. Once you're consistent, once that training stimulus is being applied, manipulating that, either increasing in intensity and magnitude or decreasing or, sorry, increasing in volume or just overall training load. When you do this, you can then achieve greater results. And so Medvedev system was kind of built on these ideas of this k value and this sort of like, where's the optimal range for how hard training should be or how heavy it should be? What are the ranges for volume based on different demographic data. And then you take that and you individualize it to a person. But largely your system is based on pretty basic ideas, right? You know, have a consistent average intensity. Slowly drive up the average intensity that the athletes using while maintaining a consistent load and you'll see adaptations.

Max Aita [00:35:13]:
And what was interesting to me is that's not that method. Nowhere within that method lies this idea that like Medvedev, you know, was like, oh, by the way, squat your face off and, and make your squat go up 50 kilo every, by the way, every six weeks or every, every cycle we got to do a squat program, you know, and like try to put 50 kilos on your squat. Or, you know, by the way, guys, we need to max a max out Friday every few weeks, right? It doesn't mean those things can't exist in that system. But the, the thing that was eye opening to me was like, oh, there's a methodology here that makes sense that is one very sustainable. You could apply this kind of training to people and not be in a place where you're, it's not like the bulgarian system where it's like sustainability and just surviving is one of the hardest parts. You know, it's like, it's a sustainable system and you can replicate it because you know exactly what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, we want to increase the average intensity by four kilos this month. And we know if we do that, we're going to have some positive results.

Max Aita [00:36:21]:
If we track all these KPI's, we track all this information. We can then make even better choices in the future. That was the first thing was learning from Shaco and seeing that system actually applied. It worked very well in powerlifting because there's so little technical component in powerlifting. You don't have to worry about any noise in the signal. It's just, just, if you do this, you're going to get stronger.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:36:47]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [00:36:47]:
I was the strongest I ever was when I trained with, with Jekyll, when I was doing that, and it was just like, it was awesome. I love that kind of training. The second was, you know, when I, when I basically took that learning and applied it to weightlifters. And that was years later. Then I was coaching a girl, Alyssa Richie, who was, you know, we were going to translate the, the American Open. I think we had just come off of a world championship, and she had a pretty sort of mediocre performance. And, you know, I was rooming with Spencer Arnold in that, on that trip, and we talked a lot, and it was like he was kind of the first coach that I'd saw in way of thing that was really well organized with a lot of data. And this is before he had some, like, velocity tracking stuff he was doing.

Max Aita [00:37:36]:
But I remember thinking to myself, like, you know, I'm not taking this as seriously as I could from a data standpoint. Like, I need to really track stuff. You know, I looked at what he was doing. I was like, oh, he's like, doing quite a bit of this. Why am I not applying that? You know, this is my profession. Like, I should be. I shouldn't just be writing programs based on principles and sort of like, real broad stroke calculations. I should be, like, tracking everything to a table.

Max Aita [00:38:05]:
And when I started doing that, it was like, it's like the difference between dieting by feel and dieting with, like, an actual plan. Like, if you don't actually measure out your, you know, your chicken and your rice and your veggies and all this and, like, calculate it. Yeah, you're. You're probably not close to where you think you are.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:38:24]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [00:38:24]:
You know, well, I think the data.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:38:26]:
Is even, like, dietitians will get it wrong 50% of the time. So it's a coin flip, even for the people whose job it is to know at a glance what it's like.

Max Aita [00:38:36]:
Yeah, yeah. And so that was like, this eye opening moment for me was like, okay, when I actually sit down and do this one, the program works way better. Like, my athletes got way, way stronger. Everything improved dramatically. And it was like, like night and day. And it was kind of counterintuitive because I was like, we were training based on the way I wrote the program. I realized, man, we were training too hard, too heavy, too much. And it's not to say you don't train heavy.

Max Aita [00:39:05]:
That's not what the point was. Like, we were in this weird space where it was, like, too much volume allocated to these, like, 85% range, where it's like this, 80% to 90%, where it's like, it's really heavy and hard, but it's just, it's not well balanced. Like, you're not doing enough volume at the lighter intensities, and you're not reaching these high intensities often enough. So you're training heavily, but you're not really developing the right qualities. Right. So it wasn't. It wasn't, you know, well thought out, but also it allowed me to capitalize on getting a lot more out of my athletes because I knew exactly what we were doing. And, you know, Alyssa's clean and jerk went from, like, 100 kilos, 102, to, like, 107.

Max Aita [00:39:54]:
And her front squat increased one kilo during that time.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:39:59]:
And so. And that wasn't the thing that needed to increase anyways.

Max Aita [00:40:02]:
And that, to me, was the thing where it was like, oh, like one you don't necessarily like. Squatting is not as. As intensely correlated as we want to believe. It's just not. I've never seen the example of the guy or girl adding a huge amount to their squat. Then suddenly their lifts jump up. Doesn't mean they don't get stronger, and they make prs after the fact, but they definitely have to snatch a clean and jerk in there to reap rewards. But it was just, like, a very eye opening experience for me.

Max Aita [00:40:32]:
They're like, oh, shit. Okay, data is king here. Like, tracking information, keeping track of data, building a system based around manipulating variables in a subtle way, and maintaining this sort of, like, training process is more important than, you know, like, getting a PR set of five in the squat or maxing your snatch and hitting some pr double or something. Like those things were just not adding up. So that was, like, for me, the moment in my career that I realized there needed to be something very different. I need to approach this from a different way.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:41:10]:
Yeah, totally cool. And I think it's interesting that we get onto this topic because this is this topic and this idea of tracking of where you're going and, like, what are you doing with your athletes is ultimately actually, like, how we got to this conversation in the first place because my introduction to Josh was talking about a big spreadsheet data tracking system that I had built way back in 2020. We had jumped on a Zoom call with a bunch of other coaches and talked about things of like, what we were looking at. And so it's, it's fun to come full circle that the actual connection that led us to this podcast is a topic that we ended up talking about anyways.

Max Aita [00:41:52]:
Yeah, well, so that, that's kind of driven my entire, the last few years of my, my life now is this is, we've been building a, a coaching platform. So we've been developing this software for coaches where, you know, things like, you've seen like true coach and these kind of programs. So we're going to basically, we've built something very similar to this, but it's, it's designed for weightlifting, powerlifting, like Barbell sports, where, you know, we need, we need the ability to track enormous amounts of small data points and take that data and develop meaningful insights from it that a coach can actually use to do things. Cause I was like, you know, something like truecoach when I started remote coaching. Like, I was sending emails and doing whatever, spreadsheet things. And that was insane that you're just an insane person if you do that. You know, it's like, that's not, you know, you're doing twice as much time to get the same result. Foo coach was awesome when I first used it.

Max Aita [00:43:00]:
It was called Fitbot when I first started using it almost ten years ago. And it was like, this is cool. It's like messaging and all this in one spot, and then you kind of realize like, oh, but there's no data. You can't track any data. It doesn't know anything about what's going on. Sure, there's some crappy workarounds that suck, but like, you know, who are you ultimately?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:43:19]:
You're having to do all that data, data entry yourself or hire a va or whatever that looks like.

Max Aita [00:43:24]:
Right? Yeah, it's just not worth it. So, so what we're designing, we've built is, I've lucked out in that I found some people. I found a guy who was a machine learning guy for meta and cybersecurity guy, and I explained to him what the vision is here is what we're trying to build. And he was super on board. I lucked out with that. We've hired a bunch of the whole team, the whole development team. We've been building this thing, but it's basically built around the idea that, look, I want to be able to make programming in an easy way, like a true coach, where I can just write down what I want, or I can add sets and build the workouts that, you know, like, maybe you build a workout, you build some training. I want to know what that looks like in the big picture.

Max Aita [00:44:14]:
I want to know the data about this. How many sets and reps do we have? How much volume? Where is it allocated? What's the intensities? What are the k values? I go, I want to know all this information so that when I go to program for a mom and she's trained three days a week, I still know what we're doing. And it's easy to say, oh, well, the last few weeks, our volume has dropped off a lot. You're not able to make this. That's probably what you do. So let's try and ramp it up or look at somebody who's not making progress and struggling and actually pull insights out of that and say, oh, well, you know, shit, we should probably make some adjustments or should do this or that. And that's, that's, like, largely where I feel like there's just because there's nothing that's easy to use like that. People don't do it.

Max Aita [00:45:03]:
Yeah, right. You can do the spreadsheet thing, but unless you're a spreadsheet person, you know, where it's like, you, you like spreadsheets or you're comfortable doing it, or you feel confident, like, you know you're gonna do it, you're just not gonna, it's not gonna be a worthwhile thing.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:45:20]:
Well, there's gonna be always an inherent limitation there as well, or there's gonna be like, you know, we talked about earlier, is like, I, like, I've had to do many times and was one of the main reasons why I coach very few athletes is that if I want to know what I'm doing or if I want to know what we're like, track those things. I've got to work in two, maybe three systems and figure out how to move that data around and hope that they documented something in the coaching app or, hey, what did we actually do there? Oh, no, we adjusted this on the fly during the day because of whatever was going on. Yeah. And so there's just so many opportunities for human data error of entry, of just manipulation of it, that it's like, okay, it's cool at first, and then you get worn down by it, and it's something that gets by the wayside and you just go back to whatever the old habit was.

Max Aita [00:46:15]:
Yeah. Well, it's like, spreadsheets, too, are such a, are such a poor system for this because. Yeah, spreadsheets are great for sort of, you know, data entry and, like, simple math. Yeah. Storing data in a way that you can analyze it, you know, rudimentary. Right. They're great for, you know, timetables and, you know, accounts and, and budgets and that kind of thing. When you have, like, a spreadsheet on a phone, like, any coach that's giving their athlete a spreadsheet on a phone should just be drug out to the street and shot.

Max Aita [00:46:51]:
Like, like, that's the worst fucking experience you can have on a phone is like, your hands are covered in chalk and you thumb through a Google sheet and you're, like, looking and, like, some of these. Some people, some coaches give out sheets that are insane. Like, like, I talked to some people who had a power listing coach who sent them, sent them the Google sheets for their program, and he must have had so many, like, scripts in it and macros and whatever. They just said it would just crash. It was crash. They couldn't even get it. The other thing, the other problem with this is that if you write a program like that and you try to automate things in the sense that you're like, oh, well, now I have the ability to like, well, if they did this weight, we can calculate it down to this. Or you do a top set, it'll take the calculation.

Max Aita [00:47:44]:
All these things. You just end up kind of making these, like, these pseudo adaptive programs, but they're just deterministic. It's just like, if, else than this. Yeah. And so, yeah, like, ultimately, it's just not a good, it's not a good experience. It doesn't work well. And it's, I think it's stopped people from, it stops coaches from growing. Coaches are now in a place where the technology holds them back from actually, like, really looking at their training systems and looking at their programs and all these things and analyzing and being able to draw conclusions from it.

Max Aita [00:48:16]:
We're just stuck in a place where it's like, you write a program and you do it and then you kind of make up the difference in coaching. You get in the gym and you push them and change it and yell at them and move it forward, do whatever. Does that actually end up, do those changes you've made throughout that process end up in the program? Like, probably not for most coaches.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:48:35]:
Yeah. Or documented in any way that's meaningful for the future? Yeah.

Max Aita [00:48:39]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:48:39]:
How many things do, how many things have happened in a training session for you as a coach that you don't ever remember. Like, yeah, there are many of them. Or even as an athlete, too. Like, there. There are so many of those things that, or even as a coach looking at. Ultimately, it's hard for us to remember the beginning of last week, much less six weeks ago or six months ago or last year without having some sort of hard data to actually reflect back on. And that's what makes it hard, too, especially from a spreadsheet perspective, where we want to treat a spreadsheet like a database. You need a database to be able to relate that data across in meaningful ways that we're never going to be able to get out of a spreadsheet.

Max Aita [00:49:22]:
Yeah, we're not.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:49:23]:
In a way that most people can actually build.

Max Aita [00:49:26]:
Yeah, for sure. And I think it's also, like, the other downside that I've seen, like, with Josh in particular, I talked to him about it is like, yeah, he'll write it. He'll build this great spreadsheet or have someone build a forum and it's beautiful and it's like four day a week template and blah, blah. And then what do you do when you get somebody who needs something very different than that? Do you just rebuild the whole spreadsheet? Got to start from scratch. You start from scratch. You do this. So there's just, like, a lot of, like, I highlight these things as they are massive limiters that we don't realize because I had this experience. I had this experience where I was writing programming a certain way that I believe was good and it was not ineffective.

Max Aita [00:50:04]:
I had national champions doing that, but it was like, oh, shit. When you really sit down and you have all this at your fingertips, you can just do so much better. The resolution you have to look at problems and to diagnose things is so much greater that it makes that process a lot, a lot easier. So, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, that's, like, the biggest area that I feel like in weightlifting is just such a. It just falls so short there. We just don't take it. We don't take it to that level. And so because of that, it feels like we're just not as serious.

Max Aita [00:50:37]:
You know, we're not doing as well. You look at the good coaches in the US, like, I'd say Spencer is probably the most successful right now, and he has, I mean, he is a very methodical coach. He tracks a lot of stuff. All his coaches do things, you know, I mean, these last spreadsheets, but, like, they very much have a. A methodology that is built around data, right. And using data to inform their decisions. And then, you know, you just kind of go down the ranking list and it's like you start seeing, you know, just more winging it more whatever. Hampton.

Max Aita [00:51:08]:
Hampton. Right. I mean, they, they have every single, you know, grain of rice is tracked. He's doing well, right. So it's like, I don't think those are. Obviously, correlation doesn't equal causation, but, like, I don't think those are isolated.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:51:24]:
They're not accidents, you know, by any way.

Max Aita [00:51:26]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:51:26]:
By any, any way, you know. Yeah. In looking at that, too. So, thinking about the things that you're working on with this coaching platform, the proliferation of AI systems for programming that do allow for some of that tracking or crafting of a program based off of a very methodical approach, because a machine is much more methodical in that approach than our human coach brains. Where do you see looking into the future of when tools like that become available are much more normal? Where do you see the, where do you see coaches fulfilling? Or where do you see their ability to change and adapt, to drive better results coming from?

Max Aita [00:52:11]:
I think it's going to come from even further refinement of that. I think that it's like, what we're trying to do is build a system that uses, that leverages technology to. To make coaches more effective. So we have a coaching platform that has excellent data tracking, that uses an LLM to do to sort of give you a natural language explanation as to what's going on. And then we have computer vision components that we've built that will basically be able to help you extract both the kinematics of a lift. So what's going wrong? What is somebody doing during an exercise? And then some kinetic information as well, like, what are velocities and these kind of things. And so with that said, what we're trying to do is extract information from the training process and then hand that to coaches. And they can learn from that and just make, determine, you know, make determinations about what they should change or how they should evolve to make people better.

Max Aita [00:53:20]:
At the same time, they can do the opposite, which is they can just store the training data of an athlete in the system and then evaluate it later and say, why was this effective? So I think that the next layer of improvement is gonna come from having much more data, much more information for coaches so that they can, they'll learn things from that. The next generation of coaches, hopefully, is much more informed, much more data driven and takes that information and learns new things that we didn't know before. Right. I think that's where it's going to come from. More so than it coming from, like, progress, coming from someone discovering some revolutionary new exercise or doing something just kind of like, oh, I found this super talented kid and we're just going to train him and he gets really strong and there it is, like, just luck.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:54:18]:
The same refinement on basically the same cues that we all use.

Max Aita [00:54:23]:
Yes. Yeah, I said the perfect words.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:54:26]:
Yeah. One time. And then I'm going to build a system around that or whatever that is.

Max Aita [00:54:31]:
The biggest limiter to us making athletes better is that no human being can scream the words reach at a high enough decibel. Like, if we could just get to 126 decibels, it would. Everybody would get 10% stronger. So if we could just have that happen, that's the whole thing. That's what's holding us back.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:54:52]:
It's my favorite cue to lift that or to laugh at, rather. I feel like there needs to be, at some national level meet. There needs to be a coach reach off where we actually have the decibel meter to actually see who's got the loudest reach.

Max Aita [00:55:10]:
Yeah, yeah, I I will. Like, I'll. I'll make a comment now about all that, though, too. Like, I feel like there's a. There's a. It's fun to make fun of it. Yeah, it's fun to, like, like, laugh at it. I do feel like there's this weird.

Max Aita [00:55:25]:
There's these weird offshoots in the fitness industry where people will. Will see someone do something and then they. They sort of make fun of it, and then they turns into this thing where it's like. Like. Like, the reach thing's a good example. Like, coaches will, like, criticize other coaches for using it or saying something, and it's like. I mean, like, it's not inherently that bad. Like, it's a cue.

Max Aita [00:55:49]:
Like, it's. No, every cue is dumb, right? Everything we're doing is stupid. We all just think we're not doing something stupid. But it's like this funny thing, because the world is this thing where it's like a person can come up and they can do something, and then as soon as they do something maybe a little weird, or they do. They use a cue like that. They say weird stuff. It's like, now there's, like, this subgroup of people that will mock people for doing that. Like, oh, you're using cues, or, oh, you're using internal cues.

Max Aita [00:56:18]:
Not external cues, you're, oh, my God, what an idiot. And it's just like, there's always another layer of it where there's, like, mocking of the thing. Yeah. When the reality is, like, you know.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:56:29]:
If it works for a person, it works.

Max Aita [00:56:31]:
Yeah. If Ilya Ilhan's coach was screaming, reach in Kazakh.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:56:35]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [00:56:35]:
And that we found out that, like, would all of the fanboys be like, well, it's actually, like, you know, I mean, that makes sense. Like, it's actually a good cue.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:56:42]:
If we translate it more literally, it would actually make more sense. Yeah, yeah, I get that. Whereas, like, well, I think there was, like, even a comment of, like, the translation of Russian of the third phase of the poll of, like, being translated as jump. And it's like, yeah, it makes sense in Russian. And then, like, the argument of, well, is it really a jump? Is it not really a jump?

Max Aita [00:57:04]:
Yeah, yeah. There's, like, so much of that. Like, there's so much this insane nuance to, like, the, like, I've talked to these coaches, I've talked to these international coaches, and, like, they're not, there's no one sitting there like, abhijeev. If you were to talk to Abhijeev and be like, is it a jump? Is the first pull a push or a pull? You. What the fuck? What the fuck are you talking about?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:57:28]:
Why does that matter?

Max Aita [00:57:29]:
I don't know what you're saying. You sound. You seem like an idiot. You seem like somebody who's not very strong. Like, it's just, like, hilarious. Like, it's like, it'd be like if you were to, like, if you were to, like, you know, talk to, you know, some, you know, ridiculous. Like, just natural talent, right? You go to what, whatever, you know, who knows? Like, a Dennis Rodman, right? Where it's just, like, this totally raw talent. You're like, you know, when you think about dribbling the ball, you thinking about this? Like, no, man, I'm just doing it.

Max Aita [00:58:00]:
Like, I think that there was some.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:58:02]:
Of that in, like, the nineties as some of the ex soviet bloc athletes started to come around and go around to all the places in the US, and you've got these, you know, weightlifting. The US in particular has a bit of, like, uh, overly intellectualized and, like, what I like to call, like, pinky raised, uh, elitism.

Max Aita [00:58:21]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:58:22]:
Um, yeah, that comes with it. And it's like, you know, ultimately, it's exactly what we talked about is, like, we're all going to snatch. We're all going to clean and jerk we're going to pull and we're going to squat. There's not that much deviation. And when we can, when we convince ourselves that our, we're so much more clever than that, that's where we start to, like, get in trouble.

Max Aita [00:58:40]:
Yeah, it's. I think it's like people, people like to fall. They, people want to either make it really simple or really hard. It's like, no, no, it's extremely challenging. Like, every single detail is important and if you don't do this and that's not going to work, and then the other side is like, bro, just train. Just go in the gym and go to buddies. You'll get there. Yeah, just lift heavy, you'll get there.

Max Aita [00:59:02]:
And it's like neither one of those is entirely true. Like, like all of the, the sort of, like, over analytical people that are, that are fixated on the wrong things, they're not fixated on saying, let me take data, let me learn what's going on. Let me check if that's right. If that's all good, then there's something going on in the gym, in the athlete's head. I got to address that or I can make an adjustment. You know, it's not, data is not magic. It's not going to do anything for you. And then the other side of that coin, which is like, you know, the sort of like telling people how to do things in a way where it's like, you know, stop.

Max Aita [00:59:42]:
Stop overanalyzing, stop looking at things like you don't need to, you don't need to think about your list. You just gotta train and just do that for five years and you'll figure it out. It's like, it's like that's, that mentality still exists in weightlifting a lot, where it's just kind of the, just get in the gym and do it and you'll get better. I'll relay a little bit of anecdote because a lot of people in weightlifting don't follow powerlifting, but powerlifting used to be like that. Yeah, it was very much these old school guys that would just be like, oh, you know, just, just train. Just.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:00:18]:
Just come in and do five by five. Who cares?

Max Aita [01:00:21]:
Not even that. Just like it takes ten years to figure it out. You need ten years of training under your belt and then you'll get it and you fast forward. Yeah, and you fast forward to today. And people in powerlifting definitely went this route of much more thoughtful approaches, much more information. People got serious about using data and training and you'll take people. You'll see kids go from nothing to 600 pound squats in such a short time and you see it, you're like, oh, shit. Like, they're doing it really well.

Max Aita [01:00:52]:
Like, everybody in powerlifting and, you know, everybody, the broad majority of people, the vast majority of people in powerlifting that are coaching at a decent level are very good at it. Better than, I would say, most weightlifting coaches.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:01:05]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [01:01:05]:
Because they, they just, they evolved a very much more, like, it's a younger crowd. They got in and they applied, you know, intellectual, an intellectual approach to it and they. It's like, it's, I mean, looking at powerlifting now, it's insane. Like, as a, like, you know, squatting and pulling 600, benching 350 at like, you know, like a local meet is like shit. It doesn't mean anything. Yeah, those aren't, those aren't bad numbers, but it's like that, that's not out of this world.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:01:37]:
And like, Ryan back 30 years and people would like jaws on floor.

Max Aita [01:01:41]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. 600 pound raw squat for somebody under 200 pounds was insane.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:01:46]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [01:01:46]:
And now it's like, yeah, high school kids do that because everybody got good at training and coaching and so that's where I think we're just not there. No one does that anymore. No one says in USAPL or PA or like the sort of premier drug testing federations, those coaches are not throwing information out there. Like, just train for ten years and you'll figure it out because they know that'd be a waste of time and you'd go nowhere in ten years because you could easily do the wrong things for ten years.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:02:12]:
Well, that's also a hard sell as you, as a coach as well. Like, oh, it's going to take you ten years to figure it out and I'm not actually going to help you figure it out, so.

Max Aita [01:02:20]:
Well, competition has driven that, too. I mean, there's a market for it. You can make money as a coach now. Like, there's, there's a lot of money in weightlifting and powerlifting compared to the size they are. There's many coaches making a living as a coach, you know, in both sports, and that's. That drives competition. People are going to try to get better and because of that, everybody benefits because suddenly, you know, just getting someone a pr every few training cycles is not enough. People want to exceed, sell and they're going to find coaches that can do it.

Max Aita [01:02:50]:
And weightlifting, it's still not quite there. The technical element makes a big, a big hurdle for people. But, you know, the fact that you'd still have somebody saying things like, you know, you just got to train. It's just, like, not. It's just not true. Like, you. You should train very smart, use every tool to your advantage to make somebody better understand what you're doing and. And apply, you know, sound training principles to it.

Max Aita [01:03:16]:
You look at. You look at, like, the training, the progressions for teaching have improved so much in the last 20 years. It used to be that people would just show up to the gym and you'd tell them how to snatch. Here's a picture. Here's pictures on the wall. Like, that's.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:03:31]:
Follow that along.

Max Aita [01:03:33]:
Yeah, well, that's how, like, their coach.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:03:35]:
Maybe learned from a magazine in the seventies. The same way.

Max Aita [01:03:38]:
Yeah. I mean, I learned from pictures in a book, you know, and my lifting was terrible because of it. Like, but now it's like, you have, you know, a 62nd Instagram tutorial on how to snatch, and it's pretty good. And, like, they're good. They aren't, you know, they're not bad. They're not. Like, it's not shit. It's like, so we got better at that.

Max Aita [01:03:55]:
Like, we should get everything else to that same level.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:03:58]:
Yeah. Yeah. So there's something that I was reminded of is so a coaching mentor of mine, you know, in talking about what weightlifters, he wasn't addressing this, but based on our conversation, is what weightlifting coaches particularly can take from everything that we're talking about is being able to ask more questions about, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Having a much more curious approach versus a smarty pants, know it all type of coach. Does that ring true to something that, like, the essence of what you're talking about?

Max Aita [01:04:36]:
What was the first type of coach?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:04:39]:
So being able to ask questions and look at your data, ask questions of your own data, ask questions of your own methods versus. Well, my method's the thing. And this is it. And we're going to do this.

Max Aita [01:04:50]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think coaching, there's, like. There's definitely, like, two. Two personalities a coach has to have. One is, like, the actual element of communication because the interface from you have all this data and also information, you should be able to understand all of that and convey to an athlete that needs the information, what's valuable to them. Like, I don't think every athlete needs to know everything. I think they need to know what's going to make them feel confident and believe in you and buy into the system them. And beyond that, unless they're curious, you don't need to shower athletes with data and information if it's helpful to raise somebody's spirits or to drive them forward, or be like, hey, look, you're tired, but look, we've done 400 reps this week.

Max Aita [01:05:42]:
Like, that makes sense. Yeah. From the other side of that coin, though, like the sort of authoritarian coach who's like, this is my way. I do think coaches in person, in the gym when coaching, do need to be, you know, the head person in charge to the level that, like, if they say something, the athlete needs to do it. You know, there needs to be a, like, a different kind of, like, you know, a hat worn by the coach. It's kind of the, like, silly as it is, like the warrior poet kind of person. But the coach needs that. Your coach needs to be a badass.

Max Aita [01:06:16]:
The coach needs to be somebody who you believe is. Is a savage who's going to do everything they can to drive you forward and to make you better at the same time. You want them to not be an idiot. Like, you want them to also be like a thoughtful kind of, you know, leader where they're. They're taking information. They're smart, they're intelligent, they're. They're cunning. But when, you know, they're not, like, they're not like a pushover where it's like, if you.

Max Aita [01:06:44]:
Hey, what should I do here? I don't know. I don't feel good. Like, you want somebody who can is a rock that is going to, you know, be. Be kind of dogmatic in, like, hey, do exactly what I say. This is what we're doing not only.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:06:57]:
On training, but also on the competition platform as well.

Max Aita [01:06:59]:
Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:07:00]:
That level of trust is necessary for those. Those great performances as well.

Max Aita [01:07:05]:
Yeah, good example. People might hate me for this one, but you watch the World cup, you watch the 73s, right? Yeah, Rotmont. His dad. His dad was like, I don't know. Like, when I look at that, it's not a criticism of them, but it's like, I don't know who was steering that ship, the whole quad, because he's doing. He's doing b and C sessions, which is like, that's what you do if you're 13 and you think it's cool to, like, max out and do a pr, you know, make a world record in the b or c session. It's like. It's like, so who knows what's going on there? He's about to take that third clean and jerk, and his dad tells him no, and he just doesn't he blows him off and goes and misses it, and it's like.

Max Aita [01:07:51]:
It's like whatever lack of authority his dad had and that. Right. That's so hard to, you know, too many hats. I I can tell you that would probably not have happened with the Georgia sanitize and the georgian team.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:08:07]:
Yeah.

Max Aita [01:08:07]:
It's extremely unlikely somebody's gonna say no to him and just jump out there after 30 seconds and miss. He's gonna tell him to go in the back and do it. You know, there's just a lot of coaches like that that are just like, you're a little bit scared of them. Right. But, like, yeah, it's a good example where it's like, is he a pushover? Is it just the relationship is too soft? It's too. It's family. Yeah, but it's like, yeah, you've got to be. You've got to be absolutely in charge as a coach when time comes.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:08:37]:
Yeah. I mean, like, speaking as, you know, from having lifted myself and whatnot at whatever levels, like, if I'm there to actually compete on the day, like, I only want my job to be lift the thing.

Max Aita [01:08:52]:
Yeah, totally.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:08:53]:
I want to know that I'm, like, I can trust my support system around me to handle everything else. Like, yeah, I know. Like, early on, I wanted to know all the details because I was curious and I wanted to know. But as. Especially as you mature as an athlete, it's like I need the singular focus. I need all the energy and all the mental focus that I have to be driven towards. The one thing I'm here to do, which is lift a heavy weight over my head.

Max Aita [01:09:19]:
Exactly, exactly. You know, like, again, it's like it kind of comes back that same thing. Right? Like, plans. Having plans, having data, having information is what makes all these choices easier. Right. You going into any meet, we always sit down with athletes and ask them, what are the goals? Like, what is the priority? You know? Like, you need to know, like, you need to know before the event happens, like, missing your second attempt or whatever. Before that happens, you need to know exactly what your next choice is and what you're gonna do. So it's like you don't get to a situation where you're coaching and somebody misses their second.

Max Aita [01:09:55]:
Okay. I go to my little matrix that I made for attempts they need to do. They missed their second. That means we should repeat it and make this whatever, or go up a kilo and try to get that, like, whatever it is. Like, you got to have all that planned so you don't have to sit there and make choices. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:10:14]:
Exactly. With that, you know, to be respectful of our time and our listeners. Um, time for us to start to wrap up our conversation today. Um, any final thoughts or anything that you would like to leave the listeners with, um, before we close out?

Max Aita [01:10:30]:
Uh, no, not much. We're. We're gonna, um. Yeah, yeah, I guess I would plug the. Plug the coaching platform. It's.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:10:37]:
That was gonna be my next question.

Max Aita [01:10:39]:
Yeah, we're gonna be. I'll get a. We have a booth at nationals, and we're gonna do a wide release then. It might be an early access. We're not sure exactly where we are with testing, with everybody. We got some people using it now, but we're always implementing new stuff and putting things and continue to build on it. So, yeah, look for it basically at nationals, and right around there, we'll have a big release, and then, yeah, anyone who's using spreadsheets or if you use, like, coach now plus true coach plus the spreadsheet, this is the platform for you. We have all these things integrated, so it'll be.

Max Aita [01:11:15]:
It'll be pretty, pretty special when it comes out.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:11:17]:
Yeah. I'm excited to see that, having been, like I said, somebody who's been in the software world and deep into the nerdery of building spreadsheets and coaching and programming. Like, I'm. I'm. I'm pumped to see this, because it was. That was definitely a. An inkling of a. Of an idea at one point, something.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:11:34]:
Something that was like, we need this with. It's absolutely necessary for the progression of. Of weightlifting as a sport, period.

Max Aita [01:11:43]:
Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:11:44]:
Yeah. So, yeah. Thank you so much for your time, Max. I appreciate being able to have this conversation and having you on the podcast. Where can people find more about you and what you're bringing out?

Max Aita [01:11:55]:
Yeah, I mean, you can find me on Instagram, Max Ada, you can. You can reach us at team ada.com for remote coaching or in person coaching at our gym in Oakland. And then, yeah, you can. You can probably hear my. My irritating, scratchy voice on the listing house tv commentary of Europeans and world championships and whatnot. And then I would say, also check out, look for something around the Olympics. Seb and I are going to put together some kind of a, like, lift companion style, you know, kind of more casual podcast type deal for each session. So I'm excited for that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:12:34]:
Very cool. Yeah, definitely excited. Lots to look forward to coming up this summer with nationals and the Olympics, so.

Max Aita [01:12:42]:
Yep.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [01:12:43]:
With that, folks, very appreciative you the audience for listening to this episode as well. As always, folks, stay strong and most importantly, stay weird.