Tom Boyden: Tricking, Jujimufu, and the New Age of Fitness Media

Yeah, we had a hit. A lot of people came to that channel from it. I wanted to just do it forever. Just one day, I’m like, “Juji, we’ve got to go to the rock-climbing gym. Bring the grip tools and see these rock climbers do grip stuff.” We had been doing grip stuff a lot. That day we brought it. That video went frickin’ nuts.

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

In this episode, I’m talking to Tom Boyden, one half of the YouTube duo, Juji and Tom. Tom and his business partner, Jon Call, better known as Jujimufu, have quickly built one of the most electric YouTube channels in the entire fitness space amassing well over a million subscribers.

Every week, Juji & Tom release videos chronicling their travels and work with personalities and athletes from every corner of the fitness space. From champion powerlifters to arm wrestlers and professional rugby players. They tried Brian Shaw’s diet. Tested the world’s best rock climbers with grip challenges. Lifted natural stones in Iceland. Rip license plates in half and more.

It’s one of the most entertaining channels out there today, but Tom didn’t start at the top. Building such a massive following came with plenty of speed bumps and false starts. Tom gave me the lowdown on what worked and what flat out failed along the way. Including the difficulties of monetizing fitness videos online.

We also talked about creating partnerships and relationships with the strongest athletes on planet Earth. Building a grip training company, and what it was like for Tom as a young and budding filmmaker finding his way.

Just a quick reminder, if you’re enjoying the BarBend Podcast, make sure to leave a rating and review in your podcast the app of choice. This helps us stay on track in bringing you the best content possible week after week.

If there’s someone you’d absolutely love to hear on the future BarBend Podcast episode, let us know on your podcast review. I personally read each and every review so your suggestions will be seen.

Today I am talking to Tom Boyden. He is a master of many things and a novice at none.

All that to say, I do think he’s one of the more interesting people in the strength field right now. I’m excited to learn more about him and his background. Tom, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks, David. I would say I’m a novice at strength, and then a master of all the other things that involve [laughs] what I do, I guess.

This is a great opening question. Do you think it’s tougher to build mastery in strength or mastery in all the other different multimedia skills that you’ve developed over the years?

For me, I’d say it’s strength and bodybuilding and all that stuff is very consistency focused. You can’t just learn everything in a year. It doesn’t work like that, right? I’ve have always bounced from one thing to the next and always gotten an intermediate level in a lot of things.

Then filming was the first thing I really just sunk into and went hard on. I would say strength is a lot harder, man. With YouTube and all the stuff out there, you can learn media way quick.

But it doesn’t build strength and muscles overnight just watching a few videos? Not yet at least.

No. Watching ATHLEAN-X and learning from his exercises, unfortunately it doesn’t take a couple weeks, it takes a couple years.

 [laughs] All right, Tom, and just to give listeners a little bit more of a background, you can tell I’ve been in editorial for most of my life. Give us a bit of your background in sports and then I’d love to segue a little bit more into how you got to where you are today working on some of the most interesting content and strength sports in particular.

 I was this pretty average athlete in the US. I played ball sports, I played football, soccer, golf, basketball, and mostly focused on soccer, I was a goalie. Never really did any strength things during that time and it was just soccer and sports focused.

In 2007 when YouTube became more of a thing, 2006, I saw people doing parkour and free running on videos and these flips and stuff and I was like, “What is that?” I started doing it in just my backyard and found there’s some community on the Internet that does flips that they’ve learned in their backyard.

A lot of people don’t know that Juji had a forum called “Tricks Tutorials,” and we’d do this thing called “Martial Arts Tricking,” a combination of taekwondo, wushu, Bboy, karate and gymnastic flips.

This forum Juji made, because there was no place to learn it, and the only way to learnt it was to film yourself doing it and then watch other people do it. I found myself on his forum, and that was 2008, and that was when he was stepping away from the website more or so. He had a blog, and all kinds or articles that I learned a lot of my first strength and recovery methods.

He had an article in 2008 about frickin’ rolling out with a PVC pipe, thoracic extensions, and rolling out your feet, a lot of foundational things for me. Then I started doing that, I landed a front flip without having any idea what I was doing, then began taking it seriously.

Did trampoline, got good at that, and I was just starting strength when I was 19. I did the cow and the milk thing, and it was idiotic, because I have Crohn’s disease, and I got super sick immediately.

Within the first two weeks I was done. Dairy was a bad choice, everyday drinking it. [laughs] That was, in hindsight, very bad decision. I did start doing strength flies for four, five months until I got kicked…I was working, I wasn’t going to school at the time, and I worked out in my friend’s university gym. I used his ID. [laughs]

We were squatting in socks and they eventually kicked me out because they didn’t want me squatting in socks, then they found out that I was using my friend’s ID to go into the gym. [laughs] At that, I didn’t have any money, so I stopped lifting and just focused on tricking for all the way up until 2013, broke my ankle and wrist within six months of each other.

I was sad because I met Juji that year in person. We made our first video together in 2013, doing martial arts tricking stuff, and I destroyed my ankle and my wrist later, playing a soccer goalie. It was bad.

I would say I was not sedentary, but I just bike and did some yoga stuff, and stretching for a long time. I would say about three years until Juji and I started working together.

What were you doing professionally at that time, in the years before you and Jujimufu started officially partnering and working on these videos in a full-time capacity?

Went to school, for a while, I did horticulture, and I worked on tons of farms, organic farms. I ran an urban rooftop garden, a little different than what we do now. I ran a compost bike program that [inaudible 8:35] trail at a huge trailer that we collected food scraps and composted things. I did that and worked in restaurants. I was a wine director. I have a sommelier license. [laughs]

A lot of different food and farming things, then I began filming farming in 2011. I started asking people if I could do interviews with them, and thinking of wild ideas to do, trips, traveling, and food and farming videos. I started doing that on my own dime and got a camera. After having used a camera for tricking, it was nice that I had one already that I was filming myself with.

At that time, we didn’t have smartphone cameras. I didn’t get a smartphone until 2016, I had a video camera. Then I started constantly, trying to get small part-time jobs. I worked for schools, in universities for free and lots of programs, started getting part-time jobs in filming in 2013, ’14, and kept that up until 2015.

I moved to New York City. I went full-time on film making. It was a rough experience, I would say. I had super little money and I moved to New York and it just ate a hole in me. I had to keep buying gear and going into debt.

The problem with the film industry is that you have to buy a ton of things to actually get jobs. [laughs] I went into massive debt, just trying to get jobs in New York. I worked in it but took about six months and then I started getting a lot of jobs.

Stop motion, I do a lot of. I do a lot of music videos, web series, but I was always the director of photography, and the editor. Then I contacted Juji, as my film career was moving forward.

I contacted him right before it started going really well, because I wasn’t getting any work and I needed to find something else to do. [laughs] It was a long process of getting to where I’m at in terms of full-time video stuff.

What was it like, you reconnected with Juji in, it sounds like 2016-ish? He was producing video content and he was already pretty big on social media. He already had a few videos go viral.

On Instagram at the time.

I believe he was still working his full-time job in a completely different industry.

He was, yeah.

It seemed like he was growing, and his presence was growing, but it was a bit informal. When did you all decide to partner in a more formal manner to start producing longer-form stuff, and specifically content for YouTube?

We started it in December 2016. He was at Mark Bell’s super training and did a bunch of his Instagram videos. The funny thing is that his Instagram videos and these other things actually leaked into giving him YouTube subscribers in November of 2016, right before I contacted him. His channel went from like 10,000-8,000 subscribers to 25,000 in a month.

The crazy part is that Instagram never gave us anything ever again. [laughs] He got all these Instagram people that came to YouTube randomly just found him. He wasn’t making much content on YouTube at the time. That was the last time the Instagram gave a shit about YouTube. [laughs] He and I kind of worked together.

We started doing part-time. I was editing and filming some stuff but mainly editing, and then it just started growing from there. We started with educational content, and this crazy style of content that he thought was based on what people wanted on YouTube.

It took a while to realize people didn’t want that. It was like playing into the box of him and fitness at the time. It wasn’t till maybe a year plus later that I took over the YouTube and changed how we did content and the themes of the content.

At what point did this become your full-time thing, working on these videos with Juji?

That was a year later. It took a year of part-time. I would fly from New York to Charlotte and down to Alabama. Nobody goes to Alabama for anything, man. I didn’t go to Alabama for anything before that, and I had to go to Alabama to film with them.

[laughs] It was not the most cultural experience. But his partner Jim was there, so I was part-time until… When was that? He moved to Charlotte in May or April of 2017 and then I moved there in November of 2017.

It was about a year of part-time before I decided to go full-time. Problem was, we got hit by the adpocalypse right when we decided that. It was not a bright time. [laughs]

What does that mean for the listeners at home, the “adpocalypse?”

There’s been numerous ones and numerously, but that was the biggest one. YouTube got in trouble for graphic content. I believe extremist content was the thing at the time. This was before Logan Paul and all that. They decided to redo their system. Basically, your video gets a green monetization sign or a red monetization sign.

At that time, it was just two. Green means you get ads and you get money on your videos. Red means you have copyrighted content or something bad, and you won’t get anything, or someone else will get that money.

They added this yellow one, which was basically you’re demonetized because of certain types of content. A lot of fitness channels got destroyed by it between August to December of 2017.

We had just hit a spike in July, and everything was looking good and then it just destroyed us. All our videos were demonetized. Constantly, any time we posted anything, I had to learn what titles not to post. I had to learn to not put male nipples in the thumbnails. [laughs]

It was a wild time. Then I believe they fine-tuned the algorithms so that it was less broad. It started getting better in January of 2018.

At the time, pretty much all of the income that you guys had, pretty much all the revenue was based around YouTube ads. With this apocalypse, what percentage drop-off — you don’t need to get into that, I’m not going to ask you these specific numbers. But roughly what percentage drop-off in that revenue were you seeing?

Oh, I’ll say specific numbers. In July of 2017, it was crazy because our deal was, we worked out in the beginning that I would get ad revenue. I wanted that as a thing. I did not want to be paid per video. We did do per video for a bit, just because there was [laughs] $250 of ad revenue per month to start.

It’s not a huge pie to split up there to start.

To start, there was nothing. I believed in my head, “I think I can grow this. I can think I can figure it out.” In July it took a while, but I grew it to like $2,000 a month, and it was fine. It immediately went from 2,000 to…I don’t know, like $400, $500 a month.

We’ve been putting out a ton of videos to try to combat that demonetize, so I was putting out massive amounts of videos at like 25,000 30,000 views, some even less than that. We posted more at this time. That was the crazy part.

It went down to about 500,000 and then kind of stayed there until January and it started going up and becoming a livable. I was just month-to-month for a long period there.

When did it start? In early 2018, it started ticking back up and ad revenue became something you could actually make a living off of them.

At the time due, Juji had multiple revenue sources. His merchandising pants. He had supplement companies he worked with. He had a jeans company and a few other revenue sources. Mine only was the ad revenue. If the ad revenue got to a certain point, we would do per video because it was just…I needed something to make 25 videos a month. January, we went to LA and then started climbing like 2,500 bucks a month. I just figured it out in May of 2018.

It is when I really figured out how YouTube work, how to get views, and what people wanted to see and collaborations. How to do our style video and how to actually make money on there. It just erupted after we got one viral video.

Up to that point, I believe June of 2018, we never had a million-view video which is wild. It’s like so many a year ago pretty much. We had like one 800,000-view video and then a couple between two and three hundred thousand. We had a hit. A lot of people came to channel from it.

I wanted to do it forever and just one day I’m like “Juji, we gotta go to the rock-climbing gym. Bring the grip tools and see these rock climbers do grip stuff.” Because we had been doing grip stuff a lot and that day we brought it. That video went frickin’ nuts. [laughs] So that brought up all the revenue, allowed us to pour more money into the channel, more money into guests.

At that point, we were just pouring money into guests and breaking even. Fly people out or fly us to places and relying on other people flying us places and be on their own schedule. It was at that point and through 2018 we could do more of our own stuff and go our own way.

Where were you guys getting the ideas for most of these videos? How far ahead of time are you planning? Obviously, travel is a big component flying people in flying yourselves out. That’s a big cost expenditure as well that you have to reinvest into everything.

I guess I have two questions. How far in advance are you planning this stuff and where the idea is coming from?

It depends. If you look at Instagram stuff, I help with Juji’s Instagram. He does, I would say, at least 60 percent of it is just his ideas that he…for example, recently he did one where he was in the driveway doing some ludicrous Farmer’s Carry with a crazy frame with a horse mask. That type of stuff is formulated by him.

Mine is like a combination of things. For example, we did a ring dips once, so I was just at the kitchen table and like, “Dude, let’s get the safety squat bar out and let’s do some ring dips.” It just looks so ridiculous.

Those are mine that are like, “OK. I think this will do well on social media.” His are more like way out of the box and his crazy style but it takes a lot of effort from him. To think of them and him to actually do them. It used to be 10 videos a month on Instagram. Now it’s like two and then a lot of other nice posts around it out.

The YouTube was probably 95 percent of the videos. I just figured out a title, figured out who would be our next collaborations. Usually two months in advance, I scheduled it out.

I would say am not very structured in my life. Maybe I am. I don’t know who I look at for structure. I look at Tim Ferriss and all these people who have crazy structure and Michael Hyatt and they’re great, but I feel kind of not as good as them.

Either way, I would structure it out like I’d have…Here’s Magnus Midtbo, the professional rock climber. I’d have him scheduled out two months ahead of time. We saw rock-climbing video go viral. We need a pro rock climber and then his five days here, I have it scheduled out so that we can film two, maybe three videos a day in a manner that works.

We can do a grip strength video after a rock-climbing video, and then finish with a squatting video. It’s going to take a lot of effort for him to squat, but he can rock-climb for eight hours and grip strength. He can try this, and it won’t affect him that much.

I basically structured that out and allow us to get the most out of guests coming. That’s why it’s a little more difficult when we’re traveling. For example, the Australian trip we just did, we ran two seminars. I planned out every single day and pretty much everything, six weeks, two months beforehand everything was ironed out.

It was super effective. We got eight videos out of it. It’s getting better at the travel part but the guest part when they’re at our place, at the garage gym, I really structure it out.

What’s the value proposition when you approach these guests? You have different people at different tiers. Some of them might be super, super busy. Some of them might not be so busy. Some of them might be full-time strength athletes.

Some of them might be splitting that with a regular career, like Juji did for a long time, right, or like you were doing when you were just getting to this part-time. When you approach a guest that you really want, how do the conversations tend to go?

How are they incentivized? How do you convince them to really invest that time with you? It is truly a collaboration, what you all are doing with them.

It’s an interesting question, because I don’t know why some of the people come.

I get messaged randomly by this dude who works with Jujimufu and what is, “Oh my God Jujimufu’s that crazy dude on Instagram.” It took a bit for us to be actually known for the YouTube.

It was kind of a progression. We worked with people we were in the same zone as, like Clarence Kennedy. You probably know of him, Olympic weightlifter. He started in tricking. He was on Juji’s message board, so we knew him from that.

We had never met in real life, but it was an easy connection. We started with those and worked our way up with going to gyms. I was obsessed with Fitness YouTube. I have a gigantic document. Juji thought I was crazy. I forgot about this, God.

I had a gigantic spreadsheet. I’ve never talked about this, this is weird. I had like 60 channels on it that I tracked everything they did, based on views, subscribers. I had ratios. I had a quality value of how quality their videos are compared to their subscriber count going up every day.

I was very obsessive with figuring out all the fitness YouTubers that were doing well, and who was doing the videos that would work with us, and who was trending at the time. I tracked that for the first year or so. I’ve used that as a way to structure our channel too, like who is the person to look at.

I would reach out and give them the proposition of what type of videos we’d like to make for them. Unless they’ve insisted, we’ve always paid for their flights and their hotels, and their eating when they come to us. We say, “Hey, we want to make videos with you. We’ll fly you out here and do all these things.”

It’s always mutually beneficial. People started to notice how much value I brought to other people’s channels. I really focus on putting them in front of us in our collaboration videos. They’re the first link in the description to their channel.

I’m always asking them about their stuff, bringing people over to their channel because it doesn’t work by just us gaining. I’ve worked with some people that work that way, and it was always like, “Man, I can’t stand this.”

I always want the other person to gain as much from us because I would feel terrible. Someone like Magnus, Magnus is the perfect example. He came to us. I reached out to him when our rock-climbing video started doing well.

I searched for a bunch of rock climbers. I contacted Eric Honnold, Chris Sharma, all these high-level rock climbers. He was the only who responded. There were a few that responded that were a little tentative. They were confused as to what I was offering, what I was asking.

I remember Alex. I forgot his last name. He was like, “Oh, man. I don’t know if my grip strength is any good.” I was like, “Dude, it’s good man.” I was trying to tell him why we were bringing him, and he was like, “I don’t know, man. I don’t think I’m that great.”

Magnus is the only one who was good with it. At that time, he had a YouTube channel. He just started doing consistent videos on. He had a one-armed muscle-up that went crazy. That was his one big thing. He was at maybe 40,000-35,000 when we worked together.

 This was subscribers to his channel.

Yeah, exactly. Subscribers to his channel and he had just retired from pro rock climbing. He worked with us and his channel doubled. He was like, “OK, this is pretty cool.”

The next time he worked with us, his channel doubled again. [laughs] The next time it went up another 100,000. When he realized that he was like, “Holy shit. Now I can make a living on YouTube.”

His ad revenue was $500 then shot up to a way to make a living. Not only did he had views and subscribers, but I helped him, showed him what the best way to do ad revenue was and what the best way to get collaborations. I just figured what his best route to move forward was, always just ask and answered questions.

Magnus was also a special case because he wanted to grow. There are certain people that we worked with that they’re fine just not existing, but just being around and doing enough videos to make a living, run a gym, or run training programs, or whatever they do.

He was one that I really benefited from because he actually tried to make videos alongside ours and go really hard.

Are there any guests who you haven’t had on or haven’t done collaborations with? I think guests but really, it’s more collaborators at this point. It’s not like you’re just having someone in the studio. It’s not that sterile. It is truly collaborative what you all are doing and more and more so as the channel grows and matures.

Is there anyone that you haven’t collaborated with that’s on your radar as like, “This person, got to do something with them”?

Yes, the Buff Dudes. I love those guys. We’ve been trying to work with them for a while. We’ve emailed them back and forth. They have kids and wives. Our schedules have not aligned.

We did a rugby video lately. I would love to do more traditional sports and ball sports and things like that. Destroyer’s a football YouTuber. He’d be a great to work with and soccer YouTubers.

That’s what we started doing with arm wrestling and all those but there’s not a specific one. It’s more like I like branching out of just the strength sports and trying to do more other movements and circus and ball sports.

Awesome. Well, Tom, I do want to leave a little bit of time here to do some rapid fire questions for folks to get to know a little bit more about your personality and what they may not see behind the camera, so to speak.

We’ve heard a lot about of your several talents and several maybe not mastery but levels of intermediacy, if that’s a word.

Getting there, yeah.

What’s your secret talent that people might not know?

I would say I’m really good at whistling.

You were actually whistling even before we started recording as you were getting your setup and your headphones, and you were whistling. I was like, “This guy’s got skills.” I can’t whistle. I can’t whistle at all so I’m just mad envy right now.

I used to play the bassoon. That was my other hidden skills. I played bassoon up to college and through my couple of years. My theory is that bassoons got this double reed and I think it applies to whistling really well.

I can’t afford a bassoon because they’re $8,000, some ridiculous number for an instrument so I just substituted whistling.

That’s a great YouTube video for you in the near future when things are going really well. Looking back on it, “I did it. I bought a bassoon.” That thumbnail’s just going to be fire.

I know. It’s a freaking bassoon, dude. That’s the thing with bassoons, dude. I just want to have a bassoon because then you’ll just have a random clip in a gym and there’s a dude playing a bassoon. That’s funny, man. That’s a weird sight.

Once you conquer fitness YouTube, you can conquer bassoon YouTube. I’m really excited for that break-off channel.

That’s a hybrid channel I’d definitely haven’t heard of.

All right. Your pet peeve?

That’s really hard. Pet peeve is…oh man.

Gyms without bassoons.

Gyms without bassoons. That’s a lot of gyms that have a problem with. I would say I get selfish…I don’t really have very many things I get annoyed by. That’s why Juji and I work so well together. I can always just flow with things and figure things out.

My pet peeve is working with people that are selfish. Let’s just say I get really upset and I’m trying to hold it in from erupting at this person. They’re the worst person. How can he not even feed us? Just things like that. I would say that’s my pet peeve. People that aren’t really thinking about much other than themselves.

I was going to say strength athlete you most admire. Especially giving your background in the tricking community and parkour, I definitely want to expand it and just say athlete you most admire.

That’s hard. The viewers who are listening will have a great experience when they googled this or YouTubed this. His name is Rasmus Ott, R-A-S-M-U-S, O-T-T.

He’s a Danish tricker. He’s got the most beautiful style, and just very unique and varied tricking. There’s a lot of trickers that are born Taekwondo from five years up. They are very precise and this guy’s backyard and split. Incredible.

He’s got these freaking calves, dude. His calves are the size of bodybuilders because he could jump out of something it made no sense to get air out of. I would say he’s my favorite. People should check that out.

Awesome. Where can folks follow along with the work you and Juji are doing? Obviously on YouTube through your company that sells grip devices, Grip Genie, and just follow along with you personally On Social. I know that’s something you’ve been investing a bit more time into as well.

We got the YouTube channel, Juji & Tom. That just hit a million subscribers yesterday, which was cool. It’s wild to think of where we came from [laughs] .

The Grip Genie is our company that I run that is making cool stuff now. We just got a few new products. We got high-quality wrist rollers for building some big old forearms. We got some Cannonballs and Grandfather Clocks and all kinds of cool stuff.

My social is @TomRBoyden on Twitter, Instagram all those things.

Awesome. Well, Tom, thanks so much for joining us. It’s been awesome to follow along with your journey. It was a real treat to dig into the weeds and hear about the ups and downs that went into building what you guys have been doing. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me David.