Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged for the video version. Go to barbellshrug.com

Are you filming it?

Oh, is everything on? You have all the hard drive memory. Is everything bad?

Everything good to go? Are you backing this up as we're filming it?

We shoot this episode. Can you back this up as we filming?

I can edit it. Is it a wreck? Was it here to be a coach? To look insanely jacked and have no hair?

Yes. I feel like every coach I've seen is massive with very to little no hair.

It's an army of ass kickers. I mean, you get efficient here with time management and realizing that I have to mess with your hair is saved you a few seconds

today in the morning so you get to work faster and I have to mess with the between sets.

I love it. The other thing too is you walk in and it's built like another gym that you've been to where maybe

it's like a global facility or whatnot but instead of it being like kind of weird techno panteras playing right and it's so great.

It's like all right. This is this is the gym. I'm going to walk into to get strong.

Yeah. All right. So where are we?

We are in St. Louis. What's up guys? Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm your host Mike McGoldick here with Alex Maclin, CTP behind the camera word and our very special guest Justin Thacker.

Hello. We've had him all this. How many times you've been on this show? This is number 12 I think.

Number 12 fourth episode. What number was it? Thank you. We're on like 34. Wow.

Wow. How many do you have now?

223. It was just up just today or this past week. Wow. So for you. Crazy. Huh. I'm not great with numbers. But that's like you've been on like 10% of our shows. It's not too bad.

But I've never interviewed you. So I'm very excited. I'm excited to ask a lot of questions and we were kind of like putting our heads together, driving up like, what could we ask this guy? I'm like, oh man, I mean, I got a million things. So we're just going to shoot the shit today.

Thanks for taking the time. So for those that don't know who Justin is, tell us a little bit about the gym, your background. You know, let these people know who you are.

Well, this gym is very unique for a reason. I got into personal training around 1999 and did a lot of personal training. I was in school and see University to be a dietician and spend about nine years at college there and spent all those years building up a clientele as a trainer and did a couple different degrees. And I was, you know, competitive weightlifter for many years from 1999 till tried to be till this day. But it kind of dried up around 2007. I opened the gym. But it started off with more of this sort of.

Environment where you have your private sector personal training weight loss preventive health type of thing. And that's really where things started and kicked off. And from there as time went on, we were able to form more building space and CrossFit exploded more people were interested in weightlifting. I was like, wow, I mean, I don't need these bumper plates and platforms just for myself other people actually use this. So it's actually nice. The fact that this can be a business move is outstanding. So time went on and then we started in the new building. We added a team lab, which would be our weightlifting area, which started off with about five years.

...