ATHLEAN-X Interview - Compare to P90X

For more about ATHLEAN-X: http://athleanx.com/x/vsp90x

Hi, Ian Ali, air personality for Q1043 FM in New York City. I am also a national television personality, a former VH1 VJ, and an individual who specializes in interviewing people. Now, generally, this is people from the music world or the movie world, whether it be David Lee Roth, MC Jagger, uh Robert Plant, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, the list goes on and on, but this is one interview that I’m especially excited about. And I think so because you’re very much in the same place as I am interested in physical fitness and getting yourself back into shape or even just an improvement. And I would now dare I call on the MC Jagger of the physical fitness world.

Jeff Cavalere. Jeff. It’s a pleasure. It’s great to be here. So I guess what I’m going to be here is the the sounding board for all the individuals that are that are watching out there.

I I’ve heard uh fantastic things about the athlete system. Uh, but this is going to be a a a good opportunity for me to ask you all the questions I want to ask and hopefully I’ll be, you know, getting the questions asked that anybody that’s watching this uh wants answered. And tell me about tell me about athleene and and the concept behind it first. Something that’s been evolving I think throughout my entire life um through my own successful and failed experiences trying to train to get to be a better athlete, to get to be uh a little bit bigger, to get a little bit more defined, you know, all the things that most guys like to try to pursue. Um, but then really being refined and fine-tuned through some of the professional experiences I’ve been able to have in Major League Baseball and and since then.

And I think really the main thing that we try to cover here was to create a program that was able to be followed. You know, because I think that one of the problems is a lot of the programs out there have a limitation somewhere or another. is it whether it’s in the programming itself of the of the workouts or whether it be in the nutrition being something that’s just not something that somebody can do for a long period of time. And if one of the two are lacking, you’re not going to see results. So, I wanted to create a program that not only delivered the best results possible in the shortest period of time, but made it something you can legitimately follow over and over and over again to continue to see those results.

Now, you know, the shortest period of time, I mean, that’s that that’s important to people for a number of different reasons. I mean, you know, let’s be honest here. I mean, with with scheduling, I’m I’m the dad of a 3-month old baby boy. So, you know, my my time is limited. At the same time, you know, I I’ve never been a person that likes to spend hours in the gym.

I’ve got other things I want to do. I have other responsibilities. Um, so tell me about the the time limitation because a lot of people would say, what 30 minutes or so is is is your workout? That that can’t possibly be enough time in order to get into shape. Yeah, I said the same thing.

you know, when again, one of my big eye openers was uh that fact alone of the training time, you know, how long are your workouts going to have to be in order to be effective? And I can tell you that when I was working in baseball, my concept, my my my idea of all this when I came in was these guys must train for 2, three hours a day. I mean, cuz that’s all they have to do. They’re athletes and they’re being paid to look a certain way and to function a certain way. But I couldn’t have been more wrong because really you’re talking about not just having to have workout commitments to stay in shape, but they have media commitments.

They have all interviews lined up all day long pregame, postgame, their actual skill work. So if they are a third baseman or if they are an outfielder, they have to work on their skills in order be able to prepare and then they have the game itself. So where weight training falls in in a given day is just one piece of the puzzle and they still would get great results. Like they still would look better than everybody else. And it’s the fact I thought that, you know, maybe there’s something to what they’re doing here.

Maybe there’s something to the the the shortness of their workouts. And the fact is is that the intensity that they brought to their workouts in exchange for the length, that was the key. And I realized that you can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both, right? You just can’t bring that intensity for 60 minutes, 90 minutes. You start to cheat.

You start to find ways out. You start to find ways that you can sort of just get through the rest of the workout instead of being able to attack it because the length becomes an issue. And I think especially when it comes to length is, you know, is is is folks attention span. Totally. And you made a very good point.

We were talking off camera. He said, you know, a lot of guys when they walk into the gym, and I’m just as guilty as anybody, is you kind of wander in and you look around and say, “All right, what am I going to do? ” And then you say, “Okay, well, I want to do chest today. Okay, well, I can basically I can do flat bench or I can do incline, but you don’t really have any sort of, you know, idea of how you’re going to compartmentalize everything that you’re going to do. ” And then you also mentioned, you know, for a lot of folks that go to the gym for an hour, hour 15, hour and a half, they would have done better not even going.

Yeah. Well, it becomes a lot of wasted effort because most often guys wind up overtraining, especially when they have that shotgun approach is what I like to say when they’re when they’re working out. You you don’t approach anything else that way in life. You know, you you wouldn’t approach, let’s say you’re um a baker and you’re going to make a recipe. You don’t just throw stuff in because you think, “Oh, that’s probably good or that.

” You know, there’s usually a recipe you’re following, at least the first time, when you’re trying to create whatever it is. So, let’s say one of the ingredients called for uh, you know, a pinch of cayenne pepper, but you’re just going to do three tablespoons today. You know, it’s not going to taste good. It’s this is in fact, it’s going to probably going to burn your mouth out, but you know, it’s not going to taste good. It’s not going to have the same overall effect at the on the end product.

And the same thing with medication. You don’t just take any kind of medication for a headache. You take a specific medication in a specific dose. So, I think there there needs to be a scientific approach to your training if you’re going to see results from it. And there’s a very specific way to do that.

We talk about, you know, the minimum effective dose. When you’re training, you want to do the minimum effective work, the minimum effective dose of training that’s going to generate a positive result beyond which every single minute that you spend in that gym is going to start to cause negative effects, overtraining, lack of recovery. So we again one more example sun tanning sunburning right this there’s a fine line that you walk let’s say 16 minutes in the sun causes a nice brown tan but every single second thereafter that tan starts to turn to a burn. It’s the same exact thing that applies to your training. I think a lot of people don’t approach it that way.

They approach it in the same way you say. I see that happen all the time. Guys go to the gym and they start looking around. I’m going to do a little bit of that. I’m going to do a little bit of that.

I’m going to do a little bit of that. especially not only is that bad enough, but if they do that for an hour or if they do that for an hour and a half, now they’re overtraining on top of having just a completely haphazard approach to how they’