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Nick Shaw: Building a Nutrition Empire

Written by David Tao
Last updated on November 11th, 2024

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What fuels athletes like Rich Froning, Annie Thorisdottir, and Mattie Rogers? Hint: It’s nutrition, backed by science. In under five years, Nick Shaw built Renaissance Periodization from an upstart seller of diet templates into a nutrition empire. He joins us to talk nutrition myths, information fatigue, and the truth about carbs. 

In this episode of The BarBend Podcast, guest Nick Shaw and host David Thomas Tao discuss:

  • Is RP a “tech” company? (3:10)
  • The early days of RP and the problems Nick sought out to address (5:58)
  • What is the background on the name “Renaissance Periodization”? (10:30)
  • Building relationships with athletes like Chad Wesley Smith, Rich Froning, and more (13:50)
  • Word-of-mouth success and growing beyond Paleo and the “diet of the day” (16:40)
  • The moment Rich Froning decided to get his nutrition in check (18:10)
  • Blending the science of nutrition with the art of coaching (21:50)
  • Fighting information fatigue (24:00)
  • The truth about carbs (27:15)
  • Which sport is the most difficult to program for? (29:30)

Relevant links and further reading:

Transcription

David TaoDavid Tao

What happens when you make better food choices? Well, if you stop eating so-called “junk food” and you replace it with lean proteins, healthy fats like nuts and different oils, and healthy carbs like greens and fruits and veggies, what happens? Has anyone ever gotten overweight in the history of the world by eating lean proteins and fruits and veggies? Pretty much no.

Welcome to the “BarBend” podcast where we talk to the smartest minds and strength from around the world. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao.

Today I’m talking to Renaissance Periodization founder and CEO Nick Shaw. RP, as the company is perhaps best known, is a training and diet services company for world-class athletes. Nick is also a competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder, in addition to his responsibilities running the company.

Nick works with some of the top athletes from across strength sports, including weightlifters like Mattie Rogers and CrossFitters like Rich Froning. Yeah, you’ve heard of some of these people.

Nick and I sat down to talk building his business, including the origins of the name Renaissance Periodization — what was all that about? — and the challenges of helping strength athletes reach their goals via nutrition.

Nick also gives his take on which sports are the most difficult to program for on the nutrition side, as well as the future of performance for strength athletes.

A quick reminder. If you’re enjoying the BarBend podcast, I’d love it if you could leave a quick rating and review in your podcast app. That goes a long way in helping us grow the show. It’s also the best way to let us know who you’d like to see as a guest for upcoming episodes.

Nick Shaw, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. It’s been about two or three years since I know we’ve chatted in person. We’ve gone back and forth online a bit. We’ve been in the same city at the same time a few times, but haven’t run into each other in a while.

It’s good to see your face today. I know it’s a busy time for you all, especially taking RP into the mobile age,

Nick ShawNick Shaw

Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it; always an honor. Yeah, it has been a couple years since CrossFit in Union Square, I believe is probably where we first crossed paths quite some time ago.

It’s been great. RP is becoming a tech company which is weird to think about because a “meathead,” so to speak, so it’s interesting.

David TaoDavid Tao

That can be a triggering term. I have a background in business journalism, and I have a lot of contacts who write for the Forbes and Fortunes of the world. I’ve been lucky enough to contribute to both. Someone pivoting to be called a tech company we’re going through right now with WeWork. WeWork is not a real estate company. They want to be seen as a tech company.

Have you got any pushback from that? Is there anyone who’s giving you any crap for being a tech company now?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

No. I’m kind of joking on that. No real pushback. It’s just more so in the shift from old school Excel files, PDF, which are great by the way; just works super well and all that. The best analogy that’s been made is from our director of customer success, [indecipherable 3:31] customer service.

He said, “What we’re kind of doing…” It’s like when GPS first came out. You have people with paper maps. They’re so used to them. Paper maps worked well. You can get from point A to Point B. It’s laid out right there in front of you but you have to do all the work. You have to do all the thinking. Who knows, you might be getting out your magnifying glass to read everything and see it all.

GPS, it’s like, just sit back and you’re on autopilot. That’s probably the best analogy that’s been made because it’s the same thing going from paper templates which you could print, hold up on your fridge, all that good stuff. Now it’s all you’ve got an interactive mobile tool.

Obviously it’s just the way everything’s trending out there in the business world to apps and just more tech-based, all that good stuff.

David TaoDavid Tao

The underlying principles haven’t changed. It’s just the delivery method and how people are interpreting the content.

Nick ShawNick Shaw

Yeah, so what is our job? Our job is to take all this crazy information out there in the diet world, there’s just so much conflicting information, and our job is to boil it down to what works, what’s going to get people results and then ultimately deliver in the simplest manner possible, the simplest we can make things.

It’s going to make the user/members experience much better. They don’t have to take as much time thinking, “Hey, what the heck is this? I need 30 grams of protein. I don’t even know how much food is that.” That’s what we got all the time.

The great thing about the templates from [indecipherable 5:07] the original Excel ones, the PDFs, was they kind of got a little prettier over time. [laughs] It ain’t rightfully so, is we were able to collect all this great feedback from all of our members over the four years.

We’re basically able to refine all that and say, “Hey, what are like the main sticking points that everyone had?” Now we can improve it, and now we have an app. Instead of updating the templates maybe once every 18 months, it’s like the apps getting updated every 18 days. It’s just a whole another world.

I’m sure you know all about the Lean Startup stuff and it’s getting new iterations out, all that good stuff. It’s super, super exciting times. The app’s brand new. We’re just scratching the surface. I’m personally super excited for it because I know that’s definitely the way [indecipherable 5:54] .

David TaoDavid Tao

Let’s take it back to the four years ago, to these early Excel files, these PDF templates, the early days of Renaissance Periodization; RP, as it is commonly known in the fitness industry now.

I think that speaks to the power of your brand that if you say RP, just those two letters, people generally will know what you’re talking about. Tell us about the early days. How did the idea for RP first come about?

I know you’re someone with an extensive background in fitness and nutrition. When did it click that you could build a company based on what, ultimately, simplifies complex information and you could build a company based on these simple principles? When did that idea first coalesce?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

We’ve got to go way back. Just a quick side note there. Yeah, you’re like, “RP, people know it.” I think that’s because the name is so crazy. People have to have the shorter version.

I was talking with our main app guy and he was like, “It’s the same as AT&T. What was their original name? American Telephone and who knows?” I can’t even think of the second T there. Can you actually [indecipherable 7:08] ?

David TaoDavid Tao

I can’t off the top my head. It’s just like ESPN. I used to know what ESPN stood for I but now I don’t. People are naming their kids Espen these days because it’s just so ubiquitous.

Nick ShawNick Shaw

That’s crazy. That’s kind of funny there. RP, so that’s great, it just shortens things.

We’ve got to go way back to the University of Michigan days, which is where I met Dr. Mike Israetel. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school. I walked in to the student weight room one day and here was this short, little guy squatting four or five in the student weight room. At school, that’s just unheard of.

One, nobody squats in the student weight room in the school. Two, no one’s squats the perfect form. My roommate at the time, we see that and we’re like, “What the heck?”

We were pretty serious into lifting too but it was probably more [indecipherable 7:57] stuff. Maybe we were squatting down [indecipherable 7:59] a little bit. Anyway, we just kicked it off and started chatting. He convinced me to get started in more serious lifting and that was really the start.

Fast forward. I graduated from there. We both became personal trainers in New York City and that’s when things started to kick off. We knew that we were probably on to something from an evidence-based standpoint because we would see all these guys training in gyms in New York City, and they were really huge, really strong guys.

It seemed what they were doing, to us was like, “Wow, this seems a little weird. It doesn’t really make sense. They could probably be doing things a little bit different,” but obviously, it’s hard to argue with results. At the end of the day, you look at these guys and they must be doing something right.

We were like, “What happens if you get these people that might be really gifted or whatever and you combine this scientific, evidence-based approach?” That’s when you really start to get some crazy results.

That was really the beginning. Then Dr. Mike went back to get his PhD at East Tennessee State and I stayed in New York. Over time, he was training people online, I was doing it in person and we were just referring people back and forth all the time.

I was like, “Let’s just join forces. That way we can do something a bit more official.” That was really the start of it. From there, fast forward a little bit, getting into more digital products and that’s when really the light came on and it was like,”E-books. These templates. There’s probably really something to this.”

Probably the big turning point was about three months after the first, first version of the templates came out — this way back in 2015, they came out in February 2015, so about April they’re out, about three months — people started posting their results online.

Now [indecipherable 9:43] these RP diet templates and people are like, “What are those?” [indecipherable 9:45] . It’s like a diet coach but you pay $100 instead of $500. People were thinking, “Whoa, and they work?” That’s when it really started to take off.

That’s probably really the long story, short. When the light really came on was, “Hey, this is probably a good idea. We should try it. We should try to do something with this.” Knock on wood, it’s been OK ever since.

David TaoDavid Tao

Still kicking. In the startup world and in the entrepreneurial world, if the business is still running and still profitable four or five years later, that’s generally a success. If it’s grown by several orders of magnitude, which RP has — at least that’s my perception — then I’d call it probably a runaway success.

I do have to ask while we’re still talking about the early days of RP. You mentioned the name Renaissance Periodization. It does stick out because it is such a unique name.

The first time I heard it I thought it had something to do with paintings in a museum, Renaissance Periodization. I was like, “That’s what Michelangelo was doing,” or something like that. Give us the background on the name. I know people are curious. I certainly am.

Nick ShawNick Shaw

I think it’s a really cool story. Periodization is kind of an easy one. If you’re into lifting, it kind of makes sense. It’s basically just the logical sequencing of specific phases to produce more effective, better outcomes.

 

If you’re a lifter, you’re not training 10 by 10 before you go into a meet. You train for [indecipherable 11:18] , and then you train for strength, and then you peak. There’s logical sequencing there. That’s the periodization aspect there. That’s one part of it.

Renaissance kind of has a couple meanings. Sort of rebirth, so to speak, that’s usually what people think of when you think of Renaissance. For us, it was the rebirth of science and evidence-based into fitness.

Go back 2013, 2014, I think there was a lot less of that out there. Now, I think its great evidence-based community has grown a little bit. It’s great for everyone in the lifting circles and all that. At the time, it wasn’t really there.

That was one part of it. Another really interesting part is there’s a hedge fund in Long Island. You probably know this. It’s right in your neighborhood.

Renaissance Technologies is a hedge fund. Instead of normal brokers, and stock traders, and all that, they have PhDs, and mathematicians, and just super, super-smart people. They [indecipherable 12:19] have a formula to beat the market. In 19 or 20 years or something like that, they beat the averages in the market.

Those are the two motivations for choosing that name — the rebirth of evidence based and also the idea of rather than having coaches that maybe just look the part, or they just have abs but maybe they don’t know any background of science, research, all that.

Well, we want to do both. We want to have people that walk the walk and talk the talk. That’s the original true meaning of Renaissance Periodization, more commonly known as RP [indecipherable 12:56] . It’s much easier to say.

 

David TaoDavid Tao

In those early days…It’s interesting, in your industry, it takes a while for people to know the product is working. It doesn’t take forever but you mentioned that it really started taking off a few months, three, four, five months after the first templates were released because this does take time.

People need some time to see the results. It’s not like they get a template and the first day they’re like, “This works amazingly.” You don’t know yet.

A lot of your growth, at least the perception that I saw on social media and being in the fitness base, came from a lot of these top recognizable athletes — many of whom were your customers before they were your brand ambassadors — really posting about it, posting their results, posting the ups and downs of dieting.

Cutting away, training, falling off the wagon nutritionally, coming back on. You do work with some of the biggest names in the fitness industry.

How have you gone about over the last few years curating and building on those relationships?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

That’s a really interesting one. It goes way back to “Juggernaut Training Systems.” It was the first place we ever really wrote any articles. That’s when Dr. Mike wrote a couple articles. They were really big at the time.

Chad Wesley Smith, a really great friend of mine still to this day, I was actually just texting him this morning. He was making fun of me a little bit about [indecipherable 14:20] football. [laughs] Bad, bad, bad weekend. [indecipherable 14:26] blue. He last wrote some articles.

He had a good team of [indecipherable 14:33] athletes. He took a chance on us. He’s like, “Hey, these guys know what they’re talking about.” We started working with a lot of his athletes. It’s just the whole social media aspect. We were able to grow organically. We started helping these people. They started talking about it, like you said.

Then what happens when one athlete does really good? Usually, another athlete looks around. That led into us getting an intro to the MuscleDriver team. This was back in the day, 2014 or so. We helped Travis Cooper. He dropped from a boy who was at 85 kilos at the time. It was the pre-weight class shifting…

David TaoDavid Tao

I still think of it as the 85-kilo class sometimes, like the 77 and 85s. We’re recording this during the Weightlifting World Championships, and I still get the weight classes wrong, even though I’m a strength sports journalist. [laughs]

Nick ShawNick Shaw

Yeah, no. I’m the same in that. I’m trying to do the math in my head. “What is that in pounds?” Anyways, he dropped from 85, I think he actually started more like 89-90 kilos, something like that. It’s pretty crazy. He went down to 77-kilo class and went on to crush it. He won a couple of national championships at that. [indecipherable 15:49] .

That was a really big eye-opener. A lot of weight lifters and even CrossFitters saw that and like, “Whoa, what the heck. This guy just lost 10 kilos.”

They’re talking about it online. “His strength went up while he dropped 10 kilos.” It’s pretty unheard of. That was a really big eye-opener. You know how it works, one person does something, it’s kind of natural, people want to ask,” Hey, what are you doing?” Like,” I want to do whatever that guy’s doing.”

At the time, weightlifting and CrossFit were so interrelated that a lot of people saw them, and CrossFitters were, “Oh, I can do something besides paleo.” Paleo was so big at the time. It’s still pretty popular but maybe not quite as much as it was five years ago or something. That, I think changed the game a little bit.

More and more CrossFitters started doing it. Just the whole thing. Hey, one person gets really good results and other people, especially the high level, people want to emulate, try to do what the [indecipherable 16:52] influencers are doing.

Just a really organic part of it was people just legitimately wanted to use RP to get better performance, to drop a weight class or whatever. I think that helps them in things like, “Hey, if you really want to, from a performance standpoint, [indecipherable 17:07] the guys that know what they’re doing.” Hopefully that’s going to lead to RP.

That’s what laid the foundation. Then, from there, “Whoa, what do most top athletes know?” They know a lot of other top athletes. It’s a pretty small group and it’s kind of word of mouth.

David TaoDavid Tao

One of the most visible brand ambassadors and names associated with RP these days — I say this in full disclosure — one of our editors in house at BarBend worked with Nick and interviewed him for a video and article series we actually did on Rich Froning’s diet.

Rich Froning, one of the most visible names associated with RP. When he first became someone who was publicly using RP and talking about your brand, he was at the peak of his dominance in many ways, or just coming off of that peak of individual championship runs.

How did you first connect with Rich? How has that relationship evolved over time?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

It was after the year that they took second as a team. It was the first time in six years or whatever, five or six years, something like that. He’s won so many times, I forget the exact number.

David TaoDavid Tao

It was the first time we hadn’t seen Rich on the podium in over half a decade. Or at the top of the podium, I should say, he was still on the podium.

Nick ShawNick Shaw

Yes, exactly. The team took second. I think that was a little bit of an eye-opener for him. It’s like is he kind of getting up there in age? From a competitive standpoint of course, not overall. I just want to clarify there because I’m about the same age as he is.

That was an eye-opener. He said, “Well, I probably need to take diet a little more serious. Get my nutrition on track,” so he reached out to Trifecta which [indecipherable 18:49] meal prep, things like that. Greg from the Trifecta was like, “Hey, you need to talk to Nick with RP,” and that kicked it off.

I’m super happy that happened. Rich is a really great guy. Super nice, super genuine, all that stuff. I’ve been up to [indecipherable 19:05] a handful of times. He’s always super, super cool guy, very easy to work with. I only have really good things to say about him. His whole family, everyone’s super genuine, all that good stuff.

He knew that he probably can get away with eating his diet that he had been before, which is pretty comical, looking back. I did my research and read all sorts of stuff and he just kind of ate whatever.

That’s a really interesting thing too because I would say the one thing that I’ve seen a little bit over the years of working with some of the very, very, very top level people — and this is probably more so on the meal side of things — the amount of attention that they pay to their diets isn’t as high as a lot of people think.

What is that? Well, I don’t know. They’re males. Maybe they’re used to getting by with just genetics. A lot of these guys are all [indecipherable 20:01] athletes, so very genetically blessed, all that good stuff. That’s been my take on it.

I think that is changing a little bit now. I think they’re starting to see is how competitive sport is nowadays; that people are looking for the little edge and they’re doing whatever they can take to get a percent better, or something like that. As the competition rises, everyone’s looking for the new edge.

I think it’s gotten a little bit better but that’s something that I’ve seen over the years, which was it was a really big eye-opener for me because I’m not very genetically gifted on the athletic side, let’s just be honest here. Nick’s five-nine, two-ten, or whatever. I was never super fast, all that stuff.

I knew that I had to be really on point with diet and training. I had to if I even wanted to stand a chance. Not that I was really ever good competitively, anyways.

I think a lot of these guys just take it for granted a little bit and then as they start to get up there a bit more on the age front, they say, “It’s probably good time to start taking this a little bit more seriously,” and they do, which is rather great.

That’s a long story to say that we started working with Rich and he’s been a great…I will say too, because this is in the interview with the other Nick from BarBend. I think that article just came out about Rich.

Rich is trying to do everything that he could to help fix up his knee that he had some issues with the year that they lost. That’s how he got on to the fasting kick as well. A lot of people say, “RP is all about nutrient timing. You must eat at 3:00 p.m.” We want to take a little bit step back and say that’s not necessarily the case.

The big point that I wanted to make in the article with Nick — we did a video interview, which was great, by the way, and again he just followed up this week about it — was I was trying to blend the science of nutrition and — I’ll make a little air quotes here — the art of coaching.

There is a theoretical optimal standpoint that you can do things from a timing standpoint, from calories, macros, timing, all that. At the same time, you also have to be able to be somewhat flexible in that approach to meet the athletes, I don’t want to say in the middle because that’s probably not a true…it’s not 50/50 in the middle, but there’s got to be some give-and-take with the athlete.

If you throw out this — and I’ve done this before and I learned the hard way — [indecipherable 22:33] and I’d get super excited, the very best CrossFit athletes, first couple of times I got my shot to work with them, I was like, “Oh, yes, it’s awesome. They’re training three times a day. I’m going to time things so perfectly, their mind is going to be blown. It’s going to be amazing.”

Then what happens a month later? “I can’t follow this. It’s too advanced. It’s too complex for me.” That was a pretty big eye-opener for me.

I’m like OK, it’s not time to go back to the drawing board, that’s too strong of a statement, but it’s time to sit back, tweak things a little bit and go, “You know what? If I throw calculus at these people, or whatever, it might go over their heads.”

I’ve got to scale it down and present it in a way that’s going to be a little bit easier for them and sort of match, not perfectly where they want to be, but do some give and take. Does that make sense?

David TaoDavid Tao

It does. I think that’s a really good insight into something that you’ve learned over time. Actually, my next question was going to be about things you would optimize if you could go back in time and coach yourself as an earlier-stage entrepreneur in the timeline of Renaissance Periodization.

I think you bring up some really good points about things you learn along the way when it comes to athletes who might be aging a little bit and their different approaches to nutrition.

When it comes to differences between men and women in what they’re paying attention to, I found that really interesting when you said that a lot of these guys weren’t giving nutrition the thought, the time that a lot of the elite women were as well, just an interesting sociological phenomenon perhaps.

I also like when you talk about the evolution of how you present this information, from the early days of the Excel files to the PDF templates, and now, the app. It’s about you can have all the evidence-based information in the world. You can have everything dialed in to the half of a percentage point to make it perfectly optimal.

If people aren’t following it, if they’re getting too much fatigued just by being presented with all this information, it’s intimidating, and they’re not going to pay any attention to it, you might as well not have given it to them in the first place.

Nick ShawNick Shaw

You nailed it. I think back to when is a time that I’ve gone out there as a consumer myself and I’ve bought something? Let’s say it’s like furniture or something, and you started to pull out the sheet and you take your first glance at it, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh. There’s 30 steps here.” It’s too intimidating.

That’s happened to me before, and I’ve seen that and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m going to set it to the side.” And I’m like, “Yeah. I’ll get to it next week.” Then next week becomes 10 years later and it’s still sitting in your closet or whatever.

That’s absolutely a really big thing because you can have the best, most theoretical, perfectly planned diet or training program out there, but if it’s not being used, it is meaningless. How can you simplify things? We’ll do all the hard work. We’ll do all the thinking but we have to present it in a way that is simple for people to consume it.

Take the most popular diets out there, say a keto or paleo, in the simplest core concept of it, it’s incredibly easy to grasp. Keto, don’t eat carbs, OK. It takes five minutes to get.

If you start our thing and, “OK, well we know it’s calories in, and macros, and nutrient timing,” yes, that’s that stuff’s important, but you have to still present it in a way that people can actually go, “Oh, OK. Here’s what I need to do. This makes sense.” The app does a great job of helping with all that because you plug in all your information and then the app spits it out for you.

It really does all the thinking for you. At the end of the day, that’s our job, is to do the thinking for people to make it as simple and easy to follow as possible.

 

David TaoDavid Tao

Changing tack a little bit here, and getting a little bit more general in the nutrition space, not necessarily RP specific, what nutrition myths do you think still persist among the general public and then among the active public? I say active public, I mean people who might not necessarily be elite athletes but they take their fitness seriously.

What are some of the nutrition myths that still exist among or between those two populations?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

I think there’s a lot of overlap there between those two so that’s an easier one to answer. It is the whole idea that you have to go low carb or you have to do really exotic stuff to get results, whether it’s fasting, whether it’s keto, or whatever it is. Let’s take the low carb approach.

That seems to be really big everywhere and so people think when it comes to losing weight, you have to eliminate carbs. It’s not that you have to, but again, what happens when you stop eating carbs? Most people are probably going to end up eating less.

Something that I’ve learned over the years…Whole30 is another great example, really great example. Whole30, keto, fasting, let’s take those three.

A part of it, it’s really about somehow restricting food intake. Keto, you’re not eating any carbs. Whole30, you know you’re not eating grains, and dairy, and sugar. OK, well that’s usually a lot of good-tasting food. If you can eliminate all that, people are probably eating less.

This was an eye-opener for me a couple years ago. I was like [indecipherable 28:16] . I was like, “I know RP is really great and we can help a lot of people out there in the general population, but how do we compete with all these fads and gimmicks that people want? At the end of the day, it’s just because they simplify things so much.

It’s not that there’s any magical rhyme or reason as to why keto or fasting and all that works. It’s an easy, simplified way to get people to do two things, A, eat less, B, make better food choices.

What happens when you make better food choices? If you stop eating “junk food” and you replace it with lean proteins, healthy fats like nuts and different oils, and healthy carbs like grains and fruits and veggies. What happens? Has anyone ever gotten overweight in the history of the world by eating lean proteins and fruits and veggies? Pretty much, no.

I’m going to say 99.9999 percent that’s not going to happen. That was a big eye-opener for me is all these things, they’re all trending towards the same route, and that route is simplifying things and getting people to make smarter food choices.

If you do that, people pretty much by default, are going to eat less food. Hey, you want the secret? That’s really the secret, so the secret is there is no secret. It’s you got to simplify things for people.

David TaoDavid Tao

You work with a pretty wide variety of athletes at this point. At BarBend, we cover a variety of strength sports, CrossFit, weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, and I know that you’ve worked with athletes from all of those different sports. You’ve worked with athletes who compete in bodybuilding as well.

Including them under this umbrella, which type of strength athlete have you found most challenging to work with on the nutritional front, and why do you think that is?

 

Nick ShawNick Shaw

 [laughs] A really great one. I think that is probably CrossFit athletes and because their schedules are so different. They’re so very varying. Powerlifting’s pretty easy. You go into the gym, you’re in there about an hour and a half, and you’re typically, most of the time, hitting about the same volumes. Kind of the same with bodybuilding.

Strongman kind of falls under that, with the exception being event training, so when you have longer training sessions. What is a longer training session? For a lot of people, it’s pretty similar to a CrossFit workout. If you’re a high-level athlete, you’re training for three-plus hours, something like that.

That complicates things a little bit because with so many different movements, CrossFit’s so hard to be good at it because you’ve got to be good at so many different things. It’s really hard to track and monitor the volume and intensity of things because they’re doing so many different things.

[indecipherable 31:00] it’s very simple and easy in comparison to CrossFit because you go in, you do squats, you’re doing deadlifts, you’re doing presses, you’re doing rows. It’s pretty standard stuff, whereas CrossFit, one day you’re running five miles. The next day you’re doing 50 rope climbs and 5,000 double-under.

You’re like, “How does that relate to the lifting in terms of volumes and all that?” CrossFit’s definitely the most challenging because it’s just such a wide variety of movements.

David TaoDavid Tao

Well, Nick, we’re coming up toward the end of this recording and I do want to ask, where can folks follow along with what you’re doing, what RP is doing, and what’s the best way to keep up-to-date with what’s new in your corner?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

The best way is probably on Instagram. Just follow @rpstrength, and go on to the Google Play Store or the Apple store and download the RP Diet App. It’s free for 14 days, the trial. It’s always being improved.

I can also probably throw this in there because I think this is going to air a little bit after this release. The app always being updated, expanded, made better. The food database is going to expand by about a thousand times here, coming up soon, which I think is going to make a lot of people happy.

That’s really the only main complaint about the app right now in its infancy stage. That’s only been out for about five months now, so it’s still brand new. It’s getting rapidly better here very, very, very quickly. I think a lot of people would be benefited from checking it out. It’s like MyFitnessPal but they don’t provide any coaching aspect of it.

Our app is going to be similar to that, but hey, it’s an actual coach that updates every week for you and based on your schedule, and all that stuff. RP strength, RP Diet App, that’s where we’re at. Come check it out. Let us know what you think too, because we always want feedback to keep making it better.

David TaoDavid Tao

What about you personally, where can folks keep up to date with what you’ve got going on, Nick Shaw?

Nick ShawNick Shaw

Yeah, sure. My own Instagram, it’s @nick.shaw.rp. That’s where I’m at.

David TaoDavid Tao

Perfect. Nick, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. It’s always a pleasure catching up and always looking forward to what’s next for both you and the company you’ve built. Thanks so much for joining us.

Nick ShawNick Shaw

Thank you for having me.

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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