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Dave Tate's Table Talk

#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

🗓️ 4 May 2026

⏱️ 157 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One heavy squat at 400 lbs was the only signal Kalil Sherrod needed to know the poison hadn't won yet. Seven weeks before recording this episode, Kalil walked into elitefts HQ to hit his first heavy milestone since a grueling cancer diagnosis—a moment that bridged the gap between his life as an elite performance coach and his reality as a survivor. Through two stem cell transplants and rounds of high-intensity chemo, he has refined a conjugate-based survival blueprint that proves muscle mass is the ultimate insurance policy for the human immune system.

INSIDE THE EPISODE:

  • The 93% Rule: Why maintaining a high performance floor is more critical than chasing a ceiling during a competitive season.

  • Conjugate for the Court: How to apply Westside methodology to basketball players without sacrificing their vertical or shooting touch.

  • Training Through the Storm: The specific adjustments Kalil made to his training split while undergoing "ICE" chemotherapy to preserve lean tissue.

  • The Youth Developmental Gap: Why the loss of traditional PE and martial arts is creating a generation of fragile athletes and how to fix it.

  • The IV Protocol: A critical, overlooked hydration tip for anyone navigating medical treatments that often gets ignored by hospital staff.

MEET THE GUEST:

Kalil Sherrod is a high-performance coach, author, and the founder of Revenants Coaching. A former DII basketball player, he currently serves as the Sports Performance Coach for the Thailand Titans professional basketball organization and coaches at The Spot Athletics. Kalil 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, he has dedicated his work to helping athletes and fellow survivors use strength as a tool for radical resilience.

CONNECT WITH KALIL SHERROD:

SUPPORT DAVE TATE'S TABLE TALK:

ELITEFTS GEAR:

SPONSORS:

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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