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You Can’t Screw This Up (with Adam Bornstein)

Written by David Tao
Last updated on August 10th, 2023

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Today I’m talking to one of my oldest and dearest friends in the fitness industry, Adam Bornstein. (He actually joins us for the second time.) He’s a New York Times Bestselling Author, personal advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, journalist, and all around Swiss Army Knife of all things content. His latest book is call You Can’t Screw This Up, and it’s a new paradigm for dieting and the journey to wellness. I learn something every time I talk to Adam, and this podcast recording was no exception. I hope you enjoy!

Learn more about Adam’s new book.

Adam Bornstein BarBend Podcast

In this episode of the BarBend Podcast, host David Thomas Tao talks to Adam Bornstein about:

  • The most awkward recording experience (2:00)
  • Learning from the first book — and why it didn’t quite go all the way (5:30)
  • The book’s original title (10:15)
  • “Put people through the program” (14:45)
  • When David snuck into Adam’s first book launch (20:00)
  • Is this book antithetical to influencer culture? (24:10)
  • Why are people not able to sustain wellness? (28:00)

Relevant links and further reading:

Transcription

 

If you’re looking for validation based on the people around you, you’re probably missing a little bit. If you get to that finish mat and you’re like, “I don’t care where everybody else is, I know that was the best I had.” There’s nothing more you can do. So you’ll be proud of the result or the outcome regardless of where it is.

David TaoDavid Tao

Welcome to the “BarBend Podcast”, where we talk to the smartest athletes, coaches, and minds from around the world of strength. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao and this podcast is presented by barbend.com.

 

Today, I’m talking to CrossFit coach and former competitive athlete, Adam Neifer. He’s also a CrossFit affiliate owner, and he’s been in the game for a long time. We first met way back in 2013. These days, Adam is best known more broadly in the CrossFit community as the coach of two-time reigning fittest man on earth, Justin Medeiros.

 

This is actually Adam’s second time on the podcast, and we sit down to talk about a lot, including how his coaching philosophy has changed over the years, his approach to owning and operating a gym, working with high-level athletes, because there was a time when Adam thought he was done with that. Then, Justin Medeiros came knocking, and the rest is history.

 

Adam is a super thoughtful guy. I learned every conversation I have with him, and I hope you do as well. Enjoy the episode.

 

Adam, man, it is always great to chat with you. I was thinking back again to the first time we met, which is almost exactly 10 years ago.

 

 Wow, man. Time flies.

David TaoDavid Tao

I think it was at Regionals 2013. Those years blur together for me. 2012, ’13, ’14, they’re all the same for me, but I think it was back then. I got to say, whatever your skin routine is, you got to drop that in the chat because you look better than ever, my friend.

Thanks, man. Much appreciated. It’s all about the lighting. Wear your sunscreen. You know what I mean?

David TaoDavid Tao

What is occupying your time these days? If you had to break it out into a pie chart, what’s a week looking like for you?

 

Man, now you sound like my wife asking me what I’m up to with all my free time. [laughs]

David TaoDavid Tao

That was not my intention, but we’ll go there.

Sure. You know what, to be honest, a lot has changed since 2012, ’13, ’14, whenever that was, but at the same time, so much hasn’t changed. A lot has stayed the same. I would say, in my pie chart, I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I own an affiliate in CrossFit for Vancouver.

 

A lot of things have remained the same, but the part of me that was training a ton, which is maybe too big as part of the pie back then, has shifted a lot more toward coaching. I’m still busy running the affiliate coaching classes, but it’s awesome. From a training standpoint, I work out, in my gym, I usually take three, four, maybe five classes a week.

 

That is the majority of my training at this point, and I love it, man. It’s awesome. That opens up more time and space for other things like coaching, both in the affiliate and the more competitive athletes as well.

 

David TaoDavid Tao

It’s almost like you don’t have to work out nine sessions a week to live the healthy lifestyle. We get in our little echo chamber for elite athleticism. It’s almost like there are diminishing returns after a point for most people. Crazy to think of, I know.

 

It’s exactly like that. Yeah, it is crazy. Also, it’s more enjoyable for me at this point to be able to just go in, be a little bit more unattached to the outcomes of putting pressure on setting PRs or constantly pushing pace on what’s possible, and enjoying the process a little bit more now.

David TaoDavid Tao

Well, it’s always good to hear people who make a transition from being hyper-focused on their own performance as they transition away from that. They rediscover the joy of training. Is that something that you’ve experienced over the last few years?

Absolutely. Not to say I didn’t enjoy it when I was competing, but I felt the last couple of years that I was putting so much time and effort into that part of my life that I wasn’t able to prioritize some other things as much as I wanted to.

 

At this point I find that working out is like…that it is so enjoyable in the sense that it allows me to just go in, have a great time with my buddies, take classes at my gym, then whatever happens, it’s like, cool, I feel better. I feel more energized. I feel just happier throughout my day when I get to do that. Yeah, life is good, man.

David TaoDavid Tao

That’s good to hear. Let’s talk a little bit. I think we last shared it, oh, geez, it was maybe almost three years ago on the podcast. What I want to talk a little bit about how has your experience being an affiliate owner, operator, coach evolved over the last three years?

 

CrossFit, itself, as an organization, we don’t need to go into every detail here, but it has changed a lot over the last three years, we saw a number of folks de-affiliate or dis-affiliate. I’m not sure which way to say it. We saw some folks come back to CrossFit.

 

Boots on the ground, you’re running your affiliate, you’re operating it, you’re also coaching, your managing staff. How has that experience shifted over the last, like over the last three years, if at all?

The shifts have been small over the last few years and really trying to improve one or two percent here and there. There hasn’t been any major changes that we’ve had than our affiliate.

 

From an education standpoint, both myself, my coaches, we’ve had an opportunity to take the conjugate strength seminar, powerlifting seminar here a couple of weeks ago, which was awesome. We had aerobic capacity out last year with Hinshaw. We had the gymnastics course out and our staff and our team is pretty involved in the Burgener Strength CrossFit Weightlifting course.

 

Had more coaches, have more access to more education opportunities, hopefully, levels up just a little bit, all the time. We’ve been really fortunate to have a pretty consistent staff of full-time coaches at our gym. We’re always trying to get a little bit better all the time.

 

That’s hopefully what has happened over the last few years. We’ve grown a little bit as an affiliate, but like I said, not a ton has changed other than continuing to also strive to level up a little bit.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

We don’t have those beginner games anymore. It’s about getting one or two percent better. Your training age, your gym age, your community age, it’s pretty mature. It’s not like you’re opening a brand new affiliate and you can expect 20 percent growth month after month. You just have to build on what you already have while not losing that strength.

You’re right. I don’t know how mature it is, but…

 

…we’ve been around like 15 years now. If there’s something new to try, we’ve probably tried it over the course of that time and learned a lot over the course of that time, what works, maybe what doesn’t work as well.

 

Definitely have a community of a lot of folks that have been doing CrossFit now for a decade or more, but also there’s new people starting their journey and trying to meet people where they’re at and making our gym, making our affiliates a place where people could come in and it makes their life better outside the gym, regardless of what they’re training for is. That’s the goal.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

What year did your affiliate open? Remind me. Is it 2008?

We started right at the beginning of ’09.

David TaoDavid Tao

’09. OK. I do remember I wasn’t CrossFitting back then, but I do remember around that area, probably call it 2010, CrossFitters having such a tough time. I remember hearing about CrossFitters going to weightlifting gyms or powerlifting gyms and begging coaches in these sports to teach them and train them.

 

Many coaches were hesitant because they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to mess around with CrossFitters.” Compare that to today, we have some of the smartest minds in these other strength and athletic disciplines who are running courses affiliated with CrossFit, and they eager to both monetarily and also intellectually work with CrossFitters. It’s amazing how that mindset has shifted in the community.

 

CrossFit is very much a part of the strength community now. It’s not like the keep it at arm’s length, we don’t associate with CrossFitters anymore. It’s like, “Hey, this is a great opportunity. It’s great business opportunity, great opportunity to share knowledge.”

 

That transition still blows my mind because I remember when CrossFitters were begging weightlifting coaches to let them in and they were like, “Ah-ah. No, no, no way.”

Yeah, definitely a lot has changed. Everybody goes through their own experience. Even back then, I remember at the 2009 games, coach Burgener, being at the CrossFit games and being like, “Hey, who lost a snatch?”

 

He’s an international-level coach, Olympic coach. There’s just some people that, they don’t care. They just want to share their passion with others. That’s been, I think, a part of the CrossFit community for forever, but there’s just a whole lot more people doing CrossFit now.

David TaoDavid Tao

I have to give coach Burgener a lot of credit because he was, I’d say the first or one of the first at least, in Olympic weightlifting and weightlifting to embrace CrossFit as an opportunity to spread the sport of weightlifting. I was weightlifting back then. I do remember some coaches saying CrossFitters are just bastardizing the sport.

 

Definitely had a lot of that experience too.

David TaoDavid Tao

They didn’t want to be seen in the same room. It was like, let’s keep them at arm’s length.

 

Then you see coach Burgener saying like, “Hey, if we get associated with CrossFitters, it’s not going to ruin weightlifting. It’s not going to make us worse. It’s not going to make weightlifters worse, but maybe it would help grow the sport of weightlifting.” Of course, now, we see that membership at USA Weightlifting has basically 10x since then, maybe a little bit more.

It’s so awesome.

David TaoDavid Tao

It’s almost like getting a barbell in people’s hands is a good thing and will have trickle-down effects. I’m not an economist. I don’t know. No, they don’t pay me to make those assumptions.

 

What I will ask now is, let’s talk about you as a coach on the elite side. When we last chatted, for context, and we’re going to link it in the show notes, the previous episode we did, you’re obviously Justin Medeiros’ coach. He is the reigning and multi-time Fittest Man on Earth CrossFit Games champion.

 

When you were first beginning your coaching relationship with him, you weren’t sure whether you wanted to coach elite athletes anymore. Did I remember that correctly?

Yeah, that’s 100 percent spot on.

David TaoDavid Tao

Obviously, you made an exception. You dove back into the elite coaching realm, and it paid off extraordinarily well. You produced one of the fittest human beings in history. To give him some credit, you helped him become one of the fittest human beings in history. It’s not like you did Captain America in a lab and turned him into that overnight. He put in the work.

 

Is that something you look back on as a focal point in your career? How has your mindset around training elite athletes changed over the course of the last three, four years?

Man, that is a great question. I think it’s constantly evolving. I will say that, when I left competing myself personally in CrossFit, not that I ever left it. I’m always a participant in CrossFit, but when I stopped making that a high priority in my life, I was like, I was really set on creating more space for other things in my life.

 

I was like, man, if I’m going to be involved in competitive CrossFit, it’s hard to do that halfway. I was resistant to it at first, and then along came Justin. Part of it is, we just really mashed in personality-wise from the beginning. He’s obviously an amazing talent. Of course, at the time, none of us knew what he was capable of, but we were all really excited to find out.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

To be fair, he probably didn’t know what he was capable of.

No. That was one of the things that was really enticing for me. He was like, “Man, I have a year-and-a-half of college left. I want to qualify for the CrossFit Games before I have to go out and get a real job.” I was like, cool. I think that I have some experience that can help you do that in the next year-and-a-half and let’s see where it goes. It wasn’t really planned beyond that.

 

The fact that that it’s gone so well has been a huge blessing in my life. It’s something that I’m thankful for, grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of his journey.

 

I’ve always said from the beginning, he’s got that, whatever it is, the combination of talent and work ethic and all those things that I think almost whatever path Justin took would have led him to becoming who he is as an athlete. Maybe it would have taken a little longer or looked a little different in different environments.

 

I feel like with that relationship, as long as I can provide value to help him continue to improve, I’m all in. If at any point that’s not happening and I’m not able to provide something that helps him get better, then my job is to help figure out what that environment is for him.

 

Certainly, in the beginning, it was a lot more hands-on teaching and learning basic lessons. The more we’ve worked together, the more it’s become a partnership, that we’re in this together and willing to figure out what the path forward looks like is. You can’t pretend to know what it’s going to look like in a year or two years, three years from now.

David TaoDavid Tao

How often do you and Justin make time and space to talk about continued goals in this work, because it’s very easy to get stuck in the day-to-day of training.

 

We’re in the middle of the CrossFit Games competitive season right now, as we’re recording this. It’s very easy to just look like, what’s the next training week? What’s the next competition? How are we peaking for semi-finals? How are we peaking for the CrossFit Games?

 

How often do you take space and step back and say… I kind of know the answer. I’m teasing it a little bit because you’ve talked to me about it before, but to say, hey, man, let’s check-in. What do you want to do? What are your goals here?

I would say, formally it would be after every major competition is to sit down at the drawing board and be like, where do we go from here? The last couple of years, we’ve gotten into, what I would say is a pretty good routine or like a annual plan of the CrossFit Games are the holy grail.

 

The entire year is built around performing at top level at the CrossFit Games at end of July, beginning of August, whenever it is. From there, the Rogue Invitational is the second one that’s super important. Then the other one is, the other live competition is semi-finals which is coming up here in about a month for us. After each one of those events, we formally, definitely sit down.

 

We talk about not just how the event, the competition, each individual event, but also training leading up to and all those pieces leading up to competition we went and then, be like, what do we learn? Where do we go from here? That timeline of doing it post-competition and looking forward to the future has worked well for us.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

Has your approach to working with Justin changed from when he was first qualifying for the CrossFit Games to now when he’s trying to stay the fittest man on earth? Has that changed? If so, how has that changed?

 

Man, answers like this are never super simple of yes or no.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

This is not an easy question. I’m not throwing a soft blob here.

Yeah, totally. I would say yes and no. The way that it has stayed the same is really focusing on every year, the version of Justin Medeiros being better than the previous year.

 

We’ve talked about that together since the beginning of like, forget about what everybody else is up to. Forget about anybody else’s performance and let’s make sure that the next year’s version of Justin is better than the previous year. As long as we can keep doing that, it doesn’t guarantee results, but we’ll be set up to have a successful campaign.

 

That really hasn’t changed. I lay awake at night sometimes after the games, and I’m like, man, he’s doing pretty OK. How do I help this individual get better? It’s daunting when you’re like, he’s already pretty good, but then you’re like, “Well, let’s look at all the data.”

 

Let’s look at what we’ve been up to. Let’s look at how we’ve trained, and be like, “No, there’s plenty of room to continue improving,” which is awesome.

 

That simplifies it for me as a coach. There’s some things that are definitely the same. Some things that have changed are that, I have to take a really good look at how I can help. I keep referring to Justin, but he’s not the only athletes that would be in that boat.

 

How do I continue to provide value and to help. I’m absolutely in the CrossFit coaching space, what I would call a generalist, in that I came up to my CrossFit coaching, at least in the competitive aspect, my coaching career as an athlete and as an affiliate level coach and learned a lot through years and years of trial and error.

 

For those high-level athletes, yep, great to have a generalist, and when it comes to competition, I feel super equipped and excited to help them perform. Then you look at all the individual modalities that we do in CrossFit, and it’s like, “Hey, having some specialists on our team that can help in those areas is massive.”

 

We’re about two and a half years in now to Jesse Bifano being a daily member of our team on the strength side. Jesse’s a powerlifting coach, also a CrossFit guy but conjugate system, just a stud when it comes to helping people get stronger.

 

He really meshes with our values, our personalities work out really well.

 

Of course, Chris Hinshaw on the endurance aerobic capacity side, and swimming has been a huge asset to our team. For me to look at, “OK, where are my strengths? Where are my weaknesses? Who do I know that could also provide assistance, value, guidance, direction in helping these athletes continue to level up and improve?” It’s not only useful, but it also makes a lot more enjoyable.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

Where are the gaps that you’re seeing right now? Sensing with your spidey senses, because I know you have those. You’re a dad. You have those spidey senses, those dad reflexes, those hairs on the back of your neck. Where are the gaps that exist in the team and support group around your elite athletes?

 

Shit, we don’t have any. [laughs]

David TaoDavid Tao

 

Oh, yeah, OK. Your day. You’re good to go. Tight ship, no leaks?

 

Yeah. Let’s see. Gaps exist.

David TaoDavid Tao

Here’s a better question, maybe. Obviously, if it was a too big of a gap, it would have been filled or it wouldn’t be working. Clearly, this system is working. You’re producing fantastic athletes.

 

Maybe a better question is if there aren’t any gaps that come to mind right now, what gaps might develop as CrossFit presents new challenges and as our knowledge of performance improves?

 

You could go down a lot of different rabbit holes. Rowing is an example. People that dedicate their lives to becoming Olympic rowers. You could zero in and dive in just on that specific thing. In the grand scheme of CrossFit, to put in a ton of time and effort into one specific thing might help you there but then, what else does it take away from?

 

I think that one thing that we learned last year at the CrossFit Games, and maybe this is just evolution of CrossFit, or maybe this is the result of some changes even in leadership and programming with laws now that it run the show. He brought us back to some basic level of elements. I would say, mostly in gymnastics that maybe we skipped over in the early stages.

 

Stuff we saw last year at the games with press-to-handstand work and realizing, we have a lot of room to improve there. Other examples that I think are probably most common in the gymnastics area, but then we had some strongman elements that entered into the equation as well.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

Yeah, the heavy sandbags being an example there.

 

Yeah, exactly. I don’t know that there’s a specific area, gymnastics is the one that comes to mind first.

David TaoDavid Tao

You actually made me think of something else. I want to take this in a different direction. I think a criticism that I’ve heard on the media side about the CrossFit Games is, “Oh, they always have to throw something novel and new every year so they’re just like having to make stuff up.”

 

What’s funny is, oftentimes, the making stuff up is them just going back to the very early stages of CrossFit and picking out things that got lost in the growth of CrossFit, but were there to begin.

 

Two examples that come to mind, and one thing you said sparked this in my head. One, the pegboard. I remember, it might have been 16, 17, or something like that. The pegboard was a big deal. It was introduced at the games that threw a bunch of athletes for a loop. Now, you know we’re going to see a pegboard during the year of competition in the CrossFit calendar.

 

You know we’re going to see a pegboard athletes practice that it’s just like pull-ups for these elite athletes now and something they drill. It actually wasn’t that new because it was mentioned in one of the first editions of the CrossFit journal in the early 2000s like a fundamentally great thing that gym should have.

 

It was there were like do it yourself, to build it, instructions to install it on a wall. It wasn’t coming up with something brand new. It was really pulling from the archives and from an era of physical culture that had just gotten forgotten. You saw pegboards in high school gym classes 50 or 60 years ago.

100 percent. That’s a great example.

 

David TaoDavid Tao

 

I think another example is the presses to handstands. I’m not making any normative statements about Greg Glassman, but he had a gymnastics background. Presses to handstands or something, he was talking about in CrossFit content back before CrossFit really took off with its meteoric growth. He was talking about pressing to hand stance. Is pressing to hand stance mentioned in fitness at a hundred words or less?

Yeah.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

Literally in the hundred words that is CrossFit, presses to hand stance. Then suddenly 2022, they were doing presses to hand stance. It’s new at the CrossFit games. It’s like, it can’t really be that new. That’s fun.

 

That’s so true, man. Even the parallel bars that showed up at the games last year is, man, those things, same thing. I’m sure at Greg’s original gym, there was a set of parallel bars over in the corner collecting dust and they’d get on them every once in a while. Then we got away from that and here they come back, and people are like, “Oh, that’s so…” like you said, “that’s so novel and out of left field.” You’re like, “Actually, is it?”

David TaoDavid Tao

It’s so funny you mentioned that. I live in Brooklyn, shout out to Brooklyn. I was walking, there’s a little public park with a small eighth of a mile…It might even be an eighth-of-a-mile track under the elevated subway line, about a half a mile from where I live. They don’t even have a pull-up bar, but they had an outdoor gym space.

 

They don’t even have really a pull-up bar because there’s not a lot of clearance, but they literally have parallel bars. I walked by that the other day, and I was like…I was not doing handstands on that in my street clothes, let me put it this way. I was like, “I’m going to do some dips and I’m going to go back and forth. I’m going to move a few rounds forward, move a few rounds backward, do some dips.”

 

I’m going to do just a few rounds of that because I’m just walking by, because I haven’t been up on parallel bars in years. I just want to make sure I can navigate that with my own body weight forward and back. I was like, it felt good. It felt good to flex those muscles and use that neural pathway. This is in a 50-year-old public park in Brooklyn, New York. This ain’t a new thing.

 

Not at all. It’s cool, man. It does bring up a good conversation in that there are lots of different disciplines within CrossFit. We see in CrossFit, we didn’t really invent anything. We’re just doing stuff that other people have done forever.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

 Except for the thruster and everyone’s pissed about that still.

[laughs] Yes, that is maybe one thing that you can hold against CrossFit. But of the disciplines in the CrossFit methodology, they break it down into three big categories of weightlifting, gymnastics, and then monostructural, which would be weightlifting is not just Olympic weightlifting. In CrossFit, weightlifting refers to any movement of external objects.

 

Gymnastics is anything you’re dealing with your body weight. Then monostructural is basically when you think of a cardio movement, something that you repeat over and over.

 

I think that we, as a CrossFit community, have actually gotten pretty decent in the field of weightlifting. There’s always room to grow, but you look at good CrossFit athletes can qualify for national-level weightlifting meets.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

 They often do.

They do. In gymnastics, there’s a lot of room there. Even good CrossFit athletes lack some basic skills that you see. My daughter’s eight years old and in a gymnastics gym. They’re doing things that would really challenge even some of the best CrossFit athletes.

 

Honestly, the same is true for some of the monostructural stuff. I start looking at just paces and intervals on track workouts and you’re like, “All right, well, even some of the best CrossFitters would be pretty average at a high school track meet.” And so, obviously, we’re constantly pushing limits of what’s possible in terms of a diversity of fitness. If any of these athletes were to specialize in one area, obviously we would expect a higher trajectory there.

 

Still, we’re 15 years into the sport as CrossFit and just scratching the surface of what’s possible. That’s pretty cool to just look at where we are, where we’ve come from, and where are we going to be in another decade from now. It’s going to be awesome.

David TaoDavid Tao

Yeah. I think the best thing to do sometimes in athletics is to eat some humble pie and look at what other sports that have been around for centuries, thousands of years. Some of the first sports, who could lift the heaviest rock, who can run the fastest. Then wrestling and who can disable their opponent.

 

Those are the three original sports, basically, in my mind. Maybe throwing something.

That sounds more right.

David TaoDavid Tao

But that’s it. It is humbling. You talk about, OK, let’s pit these CrossFitters in their average in a high school track meet. That’s fantastic perspective. I think that weightlifting became the first…Different weightlifting disciplines became the first one where we started comparing CrossFitters to everyone else because it was really easy. It was like, what are they snatching? What are they clean and jerking?

 

What are they deadlifting? We can compare that to these elite-level athletes in similar body weight classes. It’s interesting to me that the track numbers, the monostructural numbers, some of the gymnastics elements have been slower to catch up, and how we’re comparing them to the competitive athlete and these other sports. I do appreciate that context.

 

What do you focus on in working with elite athletes, Justin, and others, when it comes to their mental game? Are you all working with sports psychologists? Do you have one of those on your team? Do you have any specialists? Are you just being a little bit more reactionary as those challenges and mindset obstacles come up?

Yeah, I think that’s super individual. We do have an athlete right now that’s working with a sports psychologist for some more general, I would say, mindset growth. Most of that I think happens, I would just say in house.

 

Not that myself or other coaches have any form or professional experience in mindset coaching or things of that nature, but as you go through training and competing, you find areas both physically and from a mental standpoint that might be holding you back. If you’re honest and objective about those and just able to have a candid conversation with the athletes, it’s like, “Well, let’s talk about these things and figure out how do we address them.”

 

I know for Justin, specifically, I don’t think this is unique to him, but he’s a super humble dude. Obviously, you look at him and you’re like, “Man, fittest on earth.” There’s nothing that he’s not good at. It’s easy to see that from the outside, but when you look at it, in the 2020 CrossFit games, he was going to be happy to be top 20 out of 30 in the online stage of competition.

 

Only the top five advanced onto the final stage of the games and he finished third there. Just the idea, and he’s got it written on his wall in his shred shed gym at home now of like, “My best is enough.” I think that mindset for him has evolved. He used to say, “Hey, my best is enough because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.”

 

When you get to the finish mat in a competition, a lot of times you’re looking around to see who beat you and who you beat. If you’re looking for validation based on the people around you, you’re probably missing a little bit. If you get to that finish mat and you’re like, “I don’t care where everybody else is. I know that was the best I had.” Maybe it just takes you a minute to get up off the floor because that was everything you could do.

 

There is nothing more you can do. You’ll be proud of the result or the outcome regardless of where it is. For him now, it’s like, “Hey, your best will be enough, and not only that, history has shown us that it’s going to be pretty competitive regardless of what the event is.”

 

And so, I think just simple things like that, that maybe sound cliche but are maybe a little bit more challenging in practice than in theory are things that we look at on a daily basis and have conversations about too.

 

David TaoDavid Tao

 

I appreciate that. Adam, I know that you’re not a huge self-promoter, so I do appreciate you coming on here, but where is the best place for people to follow along with you, the work you’re doing with your athletes, and at your affiliate?

 

Yeah. Our affiliate, it’s CrossFit for Vancouver. It’s at CF for Vancouver and I’m at Adam Neiffer.

David TaoDavid Tao

 

Easy enough. Adam, I really appreciate it. Always brightens my day to chat with you. Thanks for coming on again.

 

Yeah, David. Thanks for having me, man.

About David Tao

BarBend's Co-Founder and CEO, David is a veteran of the health & fitness industry, with nearly a decade of experience building and running editorial teams in the space. He also serves as a color commentator for both National and International weightlifting competitions, many through USA Weightlifting.

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