Getting Strong with Ryan Matt Reynolds

george grombacher 0:00
All right, Matt Reynolds is the founder of barbell logic, one of the largest online strength and nutrition coaching companies in the world. Welcome to the show, Ryan.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 0:12
Hey, man. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be on. excited

george grombacher 0:15
to have you on. Tell us about your personal lives more about your work why you do what you do?

Ryan Matt Reynolds 0:22
Sure I am. Well, I was I was super competitive in high school and college in high school sports. I just wasn’t very good. And so, so I played all the sports was super competitive, but I wasn’t good enough to play in college. And I needed a competitive outlet and in college, and so I discovered in the late 90s, and early 2000s, a sport of powerlifting, and strongman and so I started competing in powerlifting, and did pretty well there and totaled, elite, which was the highest level of classification in powerlifting. And in four different weight classes, and then, in 2005, turn my attention to strongman just like the world’s strongest man in that sport. At that time, there are only two new pros a year and so in 2006, I won my pro card is one of the two pros Brian Shaw was the other guy that won his pro card who has since gone on to win the World tribesman four times, I think. And so I just my life was changed dramatically, and improved by strength. And so as as in 2008, I opened a gym that grew to be one of the largest privately owned strength strength gyms in the country. I’m in Springfield, Missouri, in the heart of the Ozarks, which is not a place that’s probably super familiar, outside of the Netflix TV show, for, for most, it’s not really like that. And so anyway, I opened a gym and the gym went Gray, and we trained really normal people, business executives, and soccer moms and dads and, and train them like power lifters and strongmen and they wanted to train, you know, in a little more, I don’t know, hardcore style, but the gym was very nice. And we really focused on customer service, super clean. And so I started to see that there was this need for normal people to train in an exceptional way. At the time, there was really, if you wanted to train in that powerlifting strongman or strength training style, most of the gyms were very black iron, barbell based and dirty and industrial buildings, and, you know, not not high quality service and, and not very clean and full of a bunch of scary felons, and whatever. And so, or you had the boutique gyms, which were tremendous service, it was almost like going to a spa. But the training was just, it was just relatively worthless. Nobody was accomplishing anything. And I thought, surely we can do both. Surely we can, we can do this well, and so, so yeah, I were in the gym from 2008. Through 2015. I sold the gym at the end of 2015. And a lot of that was I saw, while I loved the opportunity to change, we had a little over 1000 clients, which is pretty big for the for the size town that we’re in, in the Midwest. But really, if you think about it, my client pool was it’s 15 minutes from the gym. And that client pool if they were coming for personal training, one personal training is prohibitively expensive, even even in the Midwest for cost of living is low. So at the time, that was four or $500 a month now it’s often 1000 or 1200, if you live in New York, or San Francisco or LA, it’s 1500 bucks a month. And so it was prohibitively expensive, and it really locked the client and the coach into a location and a schedule. And so I think even while I loved what I did, and I loved coaching, I love changing people’s life and improving their quality of life through experiencing strength, and primarily through strength training, I saw that there was tremendous limitations in the sort of antiquated personal training model. And so in early 16, in January 16, I launched online coaching business and at the time online fitness coaching, was really was really growing. But I think the perception of that I think it still is on some level was basically buying a program from somebody, maybe it’s an influencer, maybe it’s a bodybuilder, maybe it’s something and I knew that’s not what I wanted to do, I wanted to actually coach. And so programming is certainly something that we do. But what I ended up doing was developing systems and standard operating procedures. I had my clients video, all their lifts, upload their videos back in the olden days of 2016. They were uploading them to YouTube, but I was breaking them down via typed feedback. And, but it worked. And we were able to scale and of course, I was able to expand my potential client pool to the entire world and not just Springfield, Missouri. And then I was and then I hired really 30 or 35 of the best experts strength coaches in the world, in the private sector, strength coaches in the world. And that gave us the opportunity to match clients with the perfect coach for them. So now we have you know, Coach and now we have 80 or 90 of those coaches and and so if we, you know, we had coaches that were these are highly professional people. We’re talking about surgeons. I got I have a guy who’s a surgeon who he’s in a 60s. And he really just trains people 55 or older, I have female coaches who are amazing that focus on postpartum moms. And so whatever your demographic is, you can get matched with the perfect coach for you. But then, then you have you come back to that limitation of the in person coaching model or the traditional personal training model. And you get rid of all that in flexibility. And so now, because it’s asynchronous coaching, we now have our own software, everything is super clean and tight, you get your programming from your coach, you can train at your home gym, at a big box gym, at a hotel gym, at a resort gym, you know, in your hotel room, if you’re a business executive, and you don’t have access to anything that day, we can program for you, you video yourself. And then your coach breaks down your technique and your workout via an integrated screener quarter within 24 hours. And so and the cost of that is about a fourth of what personal training costs. So you get one of the best coaches in the world, you get to do it on your own time, anywhere, anytime, with the equipment you have available. And a coach gets the same level of flexibility. I I travel all the time from afar, I fly to Austin 530, tomorrow morning, and I’ll still continue to coach and then I’m in Tampa the next week. And I’ve done this from Scotland, and I’ve done it from Mexico. And it doesn’t matter where you are as a coach, if I’ve got internet, I can coach as a client. If you have a cell phone, you can you can get training. And so this has gone very well for both the in the private sector. But we’ve also then expanded to licensing if that software to other professional coaches in the industry. And we started to land government contracts last year, which was great because for soldiers, American soldiers, they’re so itinerant, they’re in San Diego, and then they’re in Ogden, Utah, and then Germany and their dentist, and it doesn’t matter where they are, they can continue to get coaching from their personal expert coach, regardless of where they are. So we’re when we need our soldiers at their best, which is combat ready in combat scenario, they’re still training getting stronger and be more resilient and, and less vulnerable to injury. And so that’s that’s what we that’s what we’ve done. And we’ve just touched a nerve. And I think we carried over that high level of customer service from the in person model into the online model, and really have focused on building relationships with our clients building trust, and really spend a lot of time to make sure you get connected with the right coach. And so, so yeah, I I would make the argument that I think at this point, I think there was some point a few years ago that if done correctly, online strength coaching is better than the in person model. And I didn’t when I launched my business, I actually said the opposite. I said if you have access to a great coach, you should do that. But now, with technology, the way it is a high speed internet with incredible phones and cameras with the ability to connect with great coaches, I actually think if it’s done correctly, then it surpasses in person coaching. Now, of course the problem is and really what we’re trying to do is redefine what online coaching or quality online coaching actually looks like and redefine personal training because I still think that the vast majority people think I’m just going to DM this Instagram, influencer and pay somebody $5 for a program. But that’s not coaching. It’s just a program. And the problem with that is AI is becoming so good that I would argue that AI is already at the point, if they can out program, even the best coaches. And for us, we’ve noticed that programming is a distant third, to consistency. And which comes with accountability and technique. And so if you don’t have someone to hold you accountable is that human relationship piece is going to last for a while. And so And because there’s a technique component to excellent coaching, that’s something that AI can’t do either. And one day, it may be able to, and but right now, certainly we have leveraged AI to automate what we can from the programming perspective and mostly to automate the administrative process and payment processing and things like that. So that it frees up the client to primarily work with their coach and to train and to free up the coach to interact with their client and not have to be, you know, bogged down by all of the administrative tasks. And so, so I love it, man, we’ve got we’ve been able, we’ve we’ve coached, I think, six or 7000 clients at this point, and it’s just been amazing. It’s been it’s been amazing to watch. So many people change their lives. And again, we’re not talking about 22 year old kids, and certainly we have those, but our average client is 47. So people in their 40s 50s we have a handful of clients in their 80s that do this vote. I love it.

george grombacher 9:33
I love it too. We’re certainly we as Americans are struggling with our health. So the more barriers we can remove and more efficient and all those things. That’s that that that that’s all for the better. For sure. When you were when you were competing in strongman I want to circle all the way back well, your height and weight and then dust event.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 9:53
So well. So I’ve said for years I’m six one I had life insurance policy. put in place earlier this year. And they told me I was actually closer to six, two. All right, I was like, I’m six, two. I mean, if I’m 45 years old, you know, typically you get a little shorter. So like, yeah, just six one and three quarters. I said, I’ve told people in six one. So I’m somewhere between 6162 I graduated high school at 155 pounds. And I got that was a 97. I got married in 2001 75. I started competing in powerlifting at 220. And worked up to 308 pounds of body weight by the time I was, you know, a high level power lifter and strongman so and to put that in perspective, so most people would think, Oh, got it, it’s almost six, two and 300 pounds. That’s a big guy. Brian Shaw Thor from the Game of Thrones, if you’ve seen seen that he was he was a rookie, as I was leaving, those guys are 6869 440. I mean, think about that for a second, six 840. And so you know, my body really wanted to be 200 pounds, not 300 pounds, I have small wrists and ankles. You see these guys, their, their wrists are the size of my knees. I mean, they’re, it’s just and so and so, I was a pretty good deadlift, I deadlift, well over 700 pounds in mid seven hundreds. Because I’m kind of long and lanky, I was never a great squatter, but obviously decently strong, and I barely miss bench pressing 500 pounds, I’ve torn both pecs. And by the way, that’s not the goal for what we not only is not tearing the pecs, the goal for our for our clients, but you know, we were trying to get our clients generally strong. And so we do have clients that compete, and we have to have a conversation with them. At some point, when they first start training with us, they are often just sort of weak and unhealthy. And we get them generally strong and healthy. And then we have a conversation and we say do you want to keep getting stronger, because if you keep pushing the strength, and we go into the competitive zone, it becomes a little less healthy or a little more risky, just like you know what anybody would say, if you’re an NFL football player, no one would say that that’s, that’s not risky. And so at that point, a lot of times people just want to maintain their strength. And maybe they want to go do you know, mud runs, or Spartan Races or rucking or, and we love that stuff. And we want to encourage normal activity life, you want to go play, you know, tennis or, or pickleball, or whatever that thing is, or you know, Men’s Basketball League, that stuff is great. So we are not someone who would fight that we think strength makes all of those things better. And so strength is really just the ability to produce force. And and so every aspect of the physical body, things strength being one of those, but also things like power and agility and cardiovascular conditioning and mobility. And all of those are positively affected by strength. But it’s not a two way street, right. So if I take someone off of the couch, who’s watching Netflix, and they’ve never done anything, and I teach them how to do a squat with a full range of motion, then they will get stronger, but they will also get more mobile. But if I take the same person, I just put them in yoga class, and we have nothing against yoga, they’ll get more mobile, but they will not get more strong. And so we don’t only do strength, but we start with strength, because it’s the foundation of all human movement and our interaction with the world. And so it gives us the best bang for our buck. I mean, you know, when we were kids, if someone said, Have you heard your, you know, your parents Ask a neighbor, how you’re doing? The answer was good. Now, if we say how you doing? The answer is busy, busy has replaced good. So everyone is busy, and everyone is urgent. Everybody’s drowning in an urgency. And so we want to use our time wisely. Most of our clients train 45 minutes, three times a week. And that’s enough to get really, really pretty dang stress strong enough for anything that life would throw at you. And so obviously, if you want to become more competitive, maybe you train a little more, but not a ton more. And so that’s really why we focus on strength because it’s the best bang for our buck.

george grombacher 14:02
It makes a lot of sense. We graduated high school in the same year were the same age.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 14:08
That I’m 45

george grombacher 14:10
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, for sure.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 14:14
I feel like 50 is still I think when I’m 50 I won’t feel old but 50 still feels that number feels ultimately right now, for sure. That is four and a half years away.

Speaker 1 14:26
So no, for 40 years old. 45 is older and 50s. Even older. Yeah, right. Right.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 14:31
So no, it’s great.

george grombacher 14:32
I know that I made I’ve always been active and I imagined I’m like a lot of other people and let myself get overweight in my 30s started having children and just so much on your plate, but I just I said Is this the body that I want to bring with me into the rest of my life? And the answer was no. I wanted to be functionally strong to be able to chase after my kids and pick them up for as long as I possibly could and to be able to play tennis or pickleball or whatever that might be. So why Don’t ask what the barriers to getting started are for most people.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 15:04
Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. And first, let me just touch on you, you really touched a nerve there that’s important to us. In that, unfortunately, I, while I’m in the fitness industry, I’m not a huge fan of the fitness industry, because I think it tends to be extremely shallow and aesthetic spaced, and often focused around people who want to take pictures of the rear ends of their abs from Instagram, posting on Instagram. That’s just not who we coach and not, that’s not we’re a value based company. We’re trying to, we’re trying to promote family and quality of life. So strength training for quality of life improvement. Of course, everyone wants to look better, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if that’s a singular goal, then we’re probably not the right company for you, if you want to do this, because you’re playing the long game, you don’t just want to walk your daughters down the aisle at their wedding, but you want to see your granddaughters and your great parent granddaughters walk down the aisles at their wedding, then that’s what we do. So barriers to entry are actually really, really small, really relatively low. And so I wasn’t really careful when I come onto a podcast and just try to sell people on something, we put out a massive amount of free content. We’re not a content company, we’re a service company. That’s how we make our money. Content is always free. And so there are ton of ebooks and articles, we have a huge YouTube channel with all the How to everything, we have a program that we use called before barbells. That’s often what we what we saw as we got a lot. So when we first started, we were about 90 95% male. And now we’re about 60% male and 40% female, which I’m really proud of a lot of that are wondering, that’s one degree of separation from it’s often the husband’s life was changed and their wives join or their or their moms or you know, whoever. And so often the female and I realize I’m painting with a broad brush here, but often they’re the females and sometimes guys, especially older guys are a little nervous about the barbell. And so we have, we have a program we use called before barbells. That’s all on you can get the ebook on the website, you can check it out on YouTube, that’s all free, there’s there’s no catch, you can start with bodyweight stuff at your house. So it’s very low barrier to entry. And then with what we use, it’s the very basic equipment, it’s a barbell, and a squat rack and weights at a bench. And that’s it. And those things hold their value forever. I mean, you’ll pass that down to your grandkids, and great grandkids. So the barrier of entry is pretty low. We’re a big fan of home gyms, I think it’s perfectly fine to go to a public gym, especially live in a big city and you don’t have the square footage. But I love the home gym, like my wife and I train together. And I’ve got a 19 year old daughter and a 13 year old daughter, they’ve seen us lift together, you know, obviously I’m a lot stronger than my wife. But it’s a time that we get to spend together she models that for her kids are kids. And and you know, they don’t want to look like dad dad’s a big scary ball biking looking guy. But mom is a beautiful, feminine blond haired, blue eyed and he looks great. And they’re like, and she lifts. And so she has really sort of just destroyed that concept of if if females often think if I lift, I’m gonna get bulky, they’re not you don’t have testosterone, you can’t, you don’t have enough to matter. So. So the barrier to entry is pretty low. So we have tried to think through all of those things, we think a lot about the lifecycle of the client from, I am really nervous to start, I don’t know how, before barbells to I’m ready to start barbells. But I don’t really know how we got a program called beginning barbells to basic novice linear progression to intermediate to advanced, we have an academy for students, we train people to become coaches, we have now watched a ton of our clients do that start terrified of the barbell. And now they’re employees of the business and actually coach on a professional level five years later. And so we’ve really tried to hit on every one of those stages of the client lifecycle to make sure that there’s always content there for them. And so and again, that contents 100% free, we got barbell logic podcast, I think we’ve done 600 episodes of that. The barbel logic YouTube channel, my editor in chief is an attorney. He’s incredible. He’s an incredible writer, free ebooks, free articles on stuff. So I tell people to start with the content, and some of those people so that I’m just being transparent, we’ll funnel down and become paying clients of ours. And the ones that don’t hopefully, they still get tremendous value from the content and the content doesn’t leave people hanging. Like if you want to learn more, sign up here and sign up with a coach. We don’t say that. We give you everything that we know I’ve said everything I know about strength training on the podcast or on the YouTube channel, everything. The only thing you don’t get is the personalized coaching from us that that you have to pay for. So that’s a great place to start. Is that content.

george grombacher 19:36
Love it. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. Give us the websites just where where people can go to get started and how can people engage with you all that stuff? Awesome.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 19:46
Sorry. Yeah, it’s barbell logic.com. You know, barber ledger.com. If you want to just start to explore this concept and go to barbell logic.com/life Li fe. Again, that’ll lead you to a to e book called The Life of strength. It’s totally free. It’s a great place to start a YouTube channel the podcast where I’m easy to find is Matt Reynolds on the you go to the website and and go to the staff page and send me an email I will always answer within 24 hours if you send me an email happy to answer and for free. And yeah, I’m really grateful for the opportunity to tell our story of it. If

george grombacher 20:18
you enjoyed as much as I did show Ryan your appreciation share today show the friend who also appreciates good ideas. If you are somebody who has been thinking about getting back into fitness back in shape getting stronger, this is an awesome opportunity go to barbell logic.com Check out all the great free resources go to barbell logic.com/life pick up your copy of life of strength, check out their YouTube channel, the podcast and go ahead and email Ryan directly. Thanks again, Brian.

Ryan Matt Reynolds 20:47
Thanks, George. Appreciate your brother.

Unknown Speaker 20:49
Till next time remember,

george grombacher 20:50
do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.