You're listening to Power Athlete Radio, a podcast dedicated to empowering your performance every damn day.

Join former NFL Pro and Power Athlete founder John Wellborn as he dissects the greatest minds in strength, conditioning, and more.

So whether your goal is to be the hammer, destroy mediocrity, or simply move the dirt, you've come to the right place.

Now with the warm up done, let the gains begin.

Hey, welcome to another episode of Power Athlete Radio.

I'm honored that I'm joined by Mr. Victor Hugo and Mr. Philippe Costa.

Thank you for coming.

My pleasure, sir. I know. I know,

Philippe, you don't get to do as many podcasts as Victor. I've been seeing Victor do a lot of

Flow Institute podcasts, ones where you get in there and you're talking about culture and identity

and what it means to create a gym and really create a brand. And I find it fascinating. Because the same

levers that we've pulled to build power out, they are the same ones that you have created with flow. You know, you create the brand, you create the identity, you know, what are the pillars and what are the things that like the company stands upon? And what do you believe and what do you want to extend to your clients and what helps them identify with these things? Yeah, it's so easy when somebody has done it before, you just got a copy, right? Well, like I always think if you have to reinvent the wheel, you're going to take a long fucking time, you know, look at what somebody does and then do it better. No, yeah, no, I think, like you said, like it's been great. It's definitely new, right? It started like as a small school and now I have this vision of like growing, have way more people than we had when he started. So, you know, these tickets are higher, but it feels cool, you know, it's a cool responsibility. And for sure, seeing the work you do with power athletes, it's pretty cool too, because everywhere I go, there's the identity, right? A lot of times when I'm teaching a seminar, there's one guy that know you and he's wearing the rash guard and stuff so it's like it's cool to have you know for me to have the

opportunity to you have, you know, for me to have the opportunity to, you know, learn for you, from Shangji, for these people that have been running their groups for a long time. And, you know, you guys have been in a position for leadership for a long time too. So it's a fulfilling thing, you know. What, um, so when you come to America, I mean, obviously you come for jiu-jitsu and you work as, you know, I guess you could say like a teaching black belt, or you came here with your brown belt. Purple. Oh, you came here as a purple belt. You came as a brown belt. As a brown belt. All right. So you come here, you come to San Diego.

As you're going through this kind of maturation process to be good at Jiu-Jitsu, was there ever an idea that one day you wanted to open your own gym? Not really. It's when you're young, you're not really thinking about those things. I just wanted to compete, train, sleep, and repeat. Over over the years, you know, Alex was a guy that

helped me a lot, kind of like, get that started. You know, he picked on me a lot, like, hey, you got to learn to do things, solo as well. At first, it's someone like the duty. Like, I didn't want to do it. But as I got better, it was like, oh, this is actually an interesting skill to have and as I traveled I got to you know practice that a little bit and people were like

oh you're really good at teaching and stuff so I was like, oh, there's actually an interesting skill to have. And as I traveled, I got to practice that a little bit.

And people were like, oh, you're really good at teaching and stuff.

So I was like, oh, I'm not really trying to do that right now.

But it's comforting to know that people can understand my teaching.

But yeah, as I got a black belt and as I started getting hurt, right, as we met, that opened

my eyes more to like, what what we do after, right?

Because I think we talked about that a lot.

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