#412 How Westside Training Saved Me From 4 Years of Cancer | Kalil Sherrod

Dave Tate's Table Talk

Dave Tate

Fitness, Health & Fitness

4.9 • 586 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2026

⏱️ 157 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One heavy squat at 400 pounds was all Kalil Sherrod needed to know the poison hadn't won.

Seven weeks before this recording, Kalil walked into elitefts HQ to hit his first major milestone since a brutal cancer diagnosis. That moment bridged the gap between his life as an elite performance coach and his reality as a survivor. Through two stem cell transplants and multiple rounds of high-intensity chemotherapy, he developed a conjugate-based survival blueprint—one that reinforces a hard truth: muscle mass is one of the most powerful insurance policies for the human body.

Inside the Episode:

The 93% Rule: Why maintaining a high performance floor matters more than chasing a peak during a competitive season
Conjugate for the Court: Applying Westside methodology to basketball players without sacrificing vertical jump or shooting touch
Training Through the Storm: How Kalil adjusted his training split during "ICE" chemotherapy to preserve lean tissue
The Youth Development Gap: Why the loss of PE and martial arts is producing more fragile athletes—and how to reverse it
The IV Protocol: A critical hydration strategy often overlooked during medical treatment

Meet the Guest:

Kalil Sherrod is a high-performance coach, author, and founder of Revenants Coaching. A former Division II basketball player, he serves as a Sports Performance Coach for the Thailand Titans and works with athletes at The Spot Athletics..

He is the author of The Basketball Player's Training Guide and co-author of the elitefts eBook Mastering Conjugate Programming for Athletes. After surviving Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Kalil has dedicated his work to helping athletes and survivors use strength as a foundation for resilience.

Connect with Kalil Sherrod:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kalil_sherrod
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kalilsherrod4882
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/kalilsherrod
The Get Clean Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kalil-sherrod7
The Spot Athletics: https://www.thespotathletics.com
Revenants Coaching: https://linktr.ee/kalilsherro

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A kid could gain a hundred pounds in their squat and not jump higher.
0:03.0	You see that plenty of times.
0:04.0	But what they care about is when they go to the combine, are they going to rank a certain rank?
0:08.0	I did what's called ice, which is an extremely hard chemo.
0:12.0	You do four days of super hard, intense chemo.
0:15.0	That next day, and for about five days, I threw up at least four to five times a day.
0:20.0	Oh, yeah. for about five days, I threw up at least four to five times a day.
0:32.9	It's time to sit down, keep it real, and cut the bullshit.
0:34.9	Welcome to Table Talk.
0:37.2	All right, another episode of Table Talk.
0:40.4	We got a lot of ground to cover, a lot of things to discuss.
0:44.8	Where I want to start with is because your journey started young.
0:50.2	So like at five or six years old, you're trying to deadlift your father 70 pound dumbbell.
0:52.8	Is that true?
1:11.0	As I heard, you know, that's what. So, either way, they both were trainers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was that, right? So I had different places to jump off with. I could jump off with that. Yeah, let's do that. Then there was another one to where there was a pull-up contest, I think, in junior high. No, no.
1:12.1	Or no.
1:30.4	I'll start, but I'll start at the beginning. Like, you were, you were starting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're, both your parents were trainers. Both my parents were trainers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, in, in New York. So my mom was at the original powerhouse in New York, and my dad was at the first Equinox. so like real like real old school and that was before
1:28.6	equinox like got really bougie like it's like it was still like pretty pretty like hardcore and then
1:34.0	she was at like i said the original powerhouse which is another type of bodybuilding gym i actually
1:38.7	want to say it's one of the old school ones where you can actually find like the legosaurus in it
1:43.1	okay yeah yeah yeah so um but they both actually met in the leg ofsaurus in it. Okay. So, so,
1:44.7	um,
	...

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