Ben Johns - The Most Dominant Pickleball Athlete In The World #826
Barbell Shrugged
Doug Larson
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, the world's #1 pickleball player, Ben Johns, joins Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane to unpack what it really takes to stay at the top of one of the fastest-growing sports on the planet. Ben walks through the insane travel schedule, the perpetual in-season demands, and the growing physical toll of a sport played in deep athletic stances, high-velocity lateral movements, and multi-hour tournament days. For the past year, Ben has partnered with RAPID Health Optimization to build a data-driven system around sleep, recovery, hydration, nutrition, and personalized strength and conditioning giving him a competitive edge in a sport where consistency and longevity are becoming just as important as pure skill.
The team breaks down how RAPID reverse-engineered the physiology of pickleball by analyzing metabolic demands, movement patterns, travel stress, and tournament structure. Ben shares what has changed the most: HRV-driven sleep routines, hydration and electrolyte protocols, rapid-turnaround nutrition systems during six-day competition blocks, and gym programming that prioritizes leg strength, acceleration, deceleration, rotational power, and the ability to repeatedly produce peak output with minimal fatigue. With only an eight-week "off-season" each year, Ben's entire training plan now revolves around precision dosing of fatigue, auto-regulation, and strategic recovery backed by data from Oura, lab analysis (blood, stool, saliva, urine) and the RAPID coaching team.
Finally, the conversation moves into the strategic side of dominance: pattern recognition, the metagame of adjustments, and the ability to keep learning in a young sport where the rules of mastery are still being written. Ben explains how having a full-stack performance team allows him to focus on playing, developing new skills, and outlasting opponents who aren't managing sleep, travel, workload, or recovery with the same level of precision. If you want an inside look at how the best player in the world trains, prepares, and stays healthy and how RAPID Health Optimization builds elite longevity systems for professional athletes this episode is a must-listen.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Shrug family this week on Barbell Shrugged, the greatest pickleball player of all time, Ben Johns. |
| 0:08.0 | Yo, what's really cool about this is if you had asked me like a year and a half ago |
| 0:13.9 | before I knew Ben and how hard he trains and how much of a meathead he is and how much he values strength, |
| 0:19.8 | conditioning and nutrition supplement, all the things that we do. I would have just assumed that pickleball was kind of like a |
| 0:26.7 | joke sport, but it's not. And when you start to get at the really high levels of this sport, |
| 0:33.5 | that is like the fastest growing sport in the country right now. These people are animals. |
| 0:39.0 | They train hard. |
| 0:40.4 | They eat right. |
| 0:41.4 | They're all in the same kind of click of trying to figure out how to be the best athletes |
| 0:45.5 | possible, knowing that this thing's going to be around a really long time. |
| 0:49.7 | And when we met Ben, I immediately became the largest fan of Ben Johns that could exist. |
| 0:58.2 | Like, how cool is it that the number one pickleball player that literally wins, he doesn't |
| 1:02.7 | just win like men's singles. |
| 1:04.8 | He wins like men's singles. |
| 1:07.0 | And then he wins men's doubles. |
| 1:08.8 | And then he wins mixed doubles. |
| 1:10.4 | And then he wins anything and everything |
| 1:12.6 | that involves pickleball every single weekend he is he dominates the sport it's because he does so |
| 1:19.8 | many things right in the background which is exactly what we are digging into today and i think |
| 1:25.1 | you're really going to enjoy this show as always make sure get over to rapid health report.com. |
| 1:28.9 | Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin, free lab lifestyle performance analysis. |
| 1:34.3 | You can access that over at rapid health report.com. |
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