ChatGPT vs Real Coaches for Hybrid Athletes?

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred (00:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. Me and Dave, we're gonna be talking about Chat GPT writing programs for you. Don't act like you haven't tried it, right? You have tried it. You have been like, you know what? I'm just gonna have Chat GPT write my workouts from here on out. ⁓ Obviously, we're incredibly biased, because we wanna write the workouts for you, but is Chat GPT gonna put us out of business as a Garage Gym Athlete?

Programmers, know and ultimately this whole idea was spurred by you Dave So I'd love to hear kind of why you wanted to tackle this why you wanted to see how chat GPT programs workouts for people

Dave (00:41)
Yeah, I GBT, I mean, it's obvious. It seems like it makes it super specific, but I've seen so many problems come up for it in doing ⁓ performance consults over the years and working with people, ⁓ especially on the performance side and then there's the rehab side of it. And I had someone who was training for an Ironman competition and he, ⁓ fairly competitive, and he was peaking for a race earlier this year. It was like his big race of the year. He had done some other ones going into it and he was dealing with some old injuries that

kind of work through. He was feeling really good going into it. I'd been overseeing some of the strength stuff too. I don't know as much on the specific Ironman side, but was kind of looking at where everything fit in. It was probably like six weeks out and he came to me and he's like, he's like, dude, I have like this awesome program. yeah, like let me see it. And he's like, yeah, I went into GPT and like I was able to...

update like I put my Strava info in there and like updated my Garmin metrics and like told him my goals and this and like what pace I need to be hitting and he had this like super detailed program and he showing his friends it and everything and they're like like who wrote that he's like GPT wrote it and he's like he's so he was all amped about it and I told him right away I'm like dude that looks like that looks like a lot because it was a lot more than he was doing but he was six weeks out and he's like I'm behind on my times so he's trying to catch up too and then

It was like less than a week, I think it was less than two weeks in. He got shin splints, like an Achilles thing started acting up and he didn't bounce back from that. And unfortunately it kind of, kind of wrecked his race to be honest, like his big peak race. And he was pretty down about it because these programs seem like it gives you so much specific info. And as we'll see with a couple of examples here, uh, that we're going to do it, it can give the illusion of this like super personalized program. But a lot of times it's too much volume. A lot of times it's

not the right things you need, even if you input as much data as you do. And I've used it just like playing around with it for programs. And I catch a lot of mistakes it makes. And I know what I'm looking for. So someone that is just off the street like, hey, write me this program. It can look like this great thing. But a lot of times it can lead to injury, too much volume, something that's not specific for you.

Jerred (02:46)
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. I obviously, I love nerding out with this kind of stuff. Like whether it's chat GPT, like, Hey, let's personalize data. have all this data on my own, ⁓ you know, health and fitness, my times, like benchmarks, all this stuff. And so I tried something similar. ⁓ and I thought, cause what I was doing was I was doing garage and math programming and I was like, well, maybe if I give chat GPT, like my results, like what I'm actually doing, maybe it will tailor it and make things better and better.

But what I found out and probably what a lot of people found out is that the longer a chat gets, the worse they get. And so it's really not very good at like continuing to personalize. And I'm sure maybe, you know, some people have different experiences, but that's been my experience so far is I eventually, I was kind of trying to use it as a workout log and see if it had any specific, like if it noticed any glaring errors or like something like that, but it wasn't picking up on anything, especially without me kind of already noticing it and prompting it and be like, well, did you notice?

that I wasn't very consistent on my 400 meters splits. And they're like, oh yeah, you weren't very, and I'm like, okay, if I'm noticing it, then what's the point? So I kind of noticed that. And then another time I've been playing around with some kettlebell programming. And so I gave it some parameters, but the parameters were too loose. And so it spit out this program and then I immediately assessed it I was like, this is way too much volume. This would hurt people. And that's what, you know,

You and I, we've been doing this for so long, we see that right off the bat. We're like, no. I don't even care who you are. You're not David Goggins. You can't handle this volume. And most people, they can't see that. They don't notice that right away. And even when you input a lot of your personalization, it still doesn't pop out the way that you want it most of the time. Now, I'm not saying you can't write a good program. I think it can get you there.

Like I'm gonna say that chat GPT programs are trash. ⁓ I just think that they're not as good as they could be. They don't take into account a lot of different things. like, I do use chat GPT, I utilize chat GPT to help me program for garage gym athlete. But what does that mean? You know, what does that mean? It means that if anybody's gone through like our coaching certification, they know that we have some of the most formulaic

Programming on the planet there are rules for everything and we do that to lock things into place. There's measurements of volume There's all of these different things So when I sat down to have I was like I want chat to be to help me Program I wrote out I believe it was eight or nine pages in a Google Doc of Rules for it to follow and like exercises to pull from because I didn't want it to just go do its own thing, right? I wanted to follow my parameters and my rules. And so what that

that does now is like, okay, here are your nine pages of rules that you need to follow. And then I don't let it program very far. I'm like, just give me seven days following these rules. Because if I said, give me six weeks, it'll screw up or it'll say that the this happens to me on on chat, GPT, sometimes it'll be like a lazy approach. It'll be like, yeah, here's the first five days and it would look similar to this for the next two weeks and so on and so forth. It just won't continue to actually give you a good program following the rules. And then even then,

I'll notice it didn't actually follow all the rules that I wanted it to. And so, yeah, these things might get there to a certain degree, but ultimately at the end of the day, I don't think it's good for performance programs, at least. I think if you need a very beginner basic, I just need to start working out again, can you give me a very simple run program? Here's what you need to know about me. Yeah, it's probably fine, but if you're looking to do what we're doing, it's gonna miss, it's not gonna be as good.

So we have a couple of examples ⁓ that we're going to go over real quick. So let me share my screen. And if you're listening only, don't worry. I will read as much as I can of these. So here we go. got the first one is going to be.

Dave (06:44)
And as you put it

up there too, the longer program gets to, that's where we tend to see problems too is like a lot of people, off the bat it's like seven days people are like, is this a good program or a bad program? It looks like a decent program, but seven days is not enough to, like when we look at cycles, those are 13 week cycles and we're looking like that's just a piece of a cycle of the bigger cycles we're looking at. that's where people get, there's no.

No coaching on like, okay, how do you auto-regulate this? Like what happens if you miss a workout? What happens if you're not feeling good? what, like those are the things that GPT can write a good program from like a seven day basis, but the longer that timeline gets stretched out, it becomes more difficult.

Jerred (07:28)
Yeah, and that's something that really has to be taken into account. Like the building, building a 13 week program is very different than seven days. You're a hundred percent right. ⁓ Okay, so this one I said, and I logged in as like a person without an account, just so it didn't take anything, any of my previous knowledge or anything. And I made the prompts fairly simple. You could make them more robust. So again, all that being said, I just said, I want to get better at the Murph workout, write me a good program for getting better at Murph, give me seven days of the training.

⁓ So we'll just jump into it. ⁓ Day one, they call the volume prep plus partition practice. So it has a simple warm up with running, shoulder and hip mobility, 10, 15 pushups, 20 squats, 10 pull ups, 15 pushups, 20 squats. So just increasing the groove if you will, the main work. Complete five rounds of five pull ups, 10 pushups, 15 squats, rest one minute between rounds. And then you're going to finish with an 800 meter steady run. Thoughts? What do you think about that workout?

Dave (08:26)
I think it's a fair starting point. I think as we get more into how the days stack together, I think for someone starting out, I would say for someone that's a beginner who hasn't done Murph before, think if someone's been training with us for a while and is used to higher volume of calisthenics stuff and they're trying to get better at this, they'd maybe have to personalize the prompt a little more because five rounds, even five to 10 rounds of five, 10, 15 with a minute rest in between might leave some people at an RPE of two.

Jerred (08:55)
Well, and

that's probably my fault in the prompt too because like that's a doubling of volume, which is never something I've written in a program. Be like, yeah, you can do half as much or you can do twice as much. It's up to you. And they're probably doing that because of the prompt itself, right? But that's a huge range. Like do five rounds or do 10 rounds. I'm like, that's run two miles or run four miles. Those are very different things, right?

So I do think again, yeah, maybe the prompt could be a little bit better, but I'm also assuming that people aren't experts in like how to tailor or write, even write the prompt for a good fitness program, right? They don't, that's my assumption with most people. They're not like going to these great lengths to have Chachipati do this amazing prompting for you. okay. So this one I'd say, I don't know, maybe we should rate it on a, we'll go through, we'll rate the whole program at the end, but I would say it's okay for a start.

I would personally like to start almost any program with a baseline test and not do what you did. You get so far into the training, you don't know how much you've actually progressed. So that's the only thing, that's how I probably would start, but if this is just seven days into the program, I think 800 meter steady run is also kind of weak without any kind of pacing. But let's go to day two, running engine, so there's a warmup. The main work.

Run one mile at a moderate pace, not all out. Rest three minutes and then do 400 meter repeats times four. Slightly faster than mile pace. And then optional core work at the end. 30 second plank, 20 leg raises, three rounds of that. All right, what do you think about this one? I don't think it's horrible.

Dave (10:37)
It's not bad. I think it's funny though how like some things are super basic and then they'll just throw in like running drills like someone would know what running drills are like a little more a little more specificity on that in the in the warm-up But again, like you said and not having a baseline for someone Doing someone not familiar speed work. It's like okay 400 meter repeats It makes sense with slightly fashion the mile pace if someone hasn't checked a mile recently It's like are they just guessing on what their goal is or and people can be way off on? I'm guessing some of that if you haven't trained some of these things before

Jerred (10:45)
yeah, that's in the warm up. Do running drills.

Yeah, and maybe that's where you could prompt to get better, but the 400 meter repeats. I normally like a work to rest ratio and not a specific rest time. That's kind of with any interval, especially running intervals. And that's how you can tailor something to someone's individual ability. And that's how we do it at Garage Gym Athlete most of the time, given the fact that not everyone has the exact same biology, physiology with, ⁓ you know, our programming. And so ultimately,

saying, hey, run 400 meters, rest twice as long as it took you to do it is gonna be a better approach.

Sorry, I'll cut this part out though. That thing started blowing on me. Could you hear it? Okay. Okay. We'll go get back into it. So anyway, I think going back to that, like trying to tailor things to some degree, not just saying, rest 90 seconds. Again, that's not a huge thing, but since we didn't give it all that background information, if there's me doing 400 meters versus a guy who just heard that he wanted to do Murph, it's his first week off the couch.

Dave (11:44)
Not really, but you did.

Jerred (12:08)
Probably should let the chat GPT know that, but ultimately that's how you can tailor these things a little bit better. But I think it's okay now in conjunction with day one. I think you're all right from a volume perspective. They're kind of following like a concurrent training, like, we did more muscle endurance this day. We're doing running the second day. So not terrible. Day three is pull up and push up strength. So the warmups, gap pull ups, band work, again, kind of arbitrary. Go do your band work. Wrist.

warm up. I've never programmed that before, so make sure you get that wrist warm up in. Then the strength work is pull ups, four sets, five sets of four to eight reps or band assisted to hit four to eight. Final set, max reps, leave one rep in the tank. Push ups, five sets of 15 to 20 reps, slow tempo on first 10 reps each set. And then movement capacity is three rounds of 10 push ups, 10 ring rows, 20 air squats, rest one minute. What are your thoughts?

Dave (13:05)
I think for someone, I mean think more volume is probably gonna be more helpful for people. Again, a lot of this asterisk of where people are starting at, but you know, five by five, five by eight on pull ups will help, but like three rounds of movement capacity isn't, I don't think it's too much movement capacity. ⁓ But again, decent for someone starting out. But yeah, maybe the volume, I think on the movement capacity piece of it could be a little higher.

Jerred (13:33)
Yeah, I honestly don't think I don't really like this because they stated in day three that the goal is strength, like get stronger. And while it's not horrible, again, we got to tailor it more. And it probably would have if I gave it more, you know, more of a prompt, but ultimately that's not going to be enough work to get stronger on any of these areas. And pure strength in these areas isn't really that important to be honest. And so

like doing five sets of five pull-ups, even if five pull-ups is hard for you, that's not very beneficial to Murph. And to be honest, if you can't do five pull-ups, you shouldn't be training for Murph. And like that's another thing. So I think we have to go into the assumption here that like, and it should assume that if you're wanting to do Murph, you have some sort of baseline fitness already, right? We're not getting off the couch here. So, and the movement capacity is not near enough volume for someone who's actually trying to get better at Murph. You got three rounds of the movement capacity.

and it has you resting one minute between. I know this is supposed to be a strength day and maybe things get different as we go further, but I just don't love it. I don't think you get enough. It doesn't move the needle enough. All right.

Dave (14:42)
If you're be resting

a minute in between sets of 10 on pushups, your morph's going be tough, or you're going to have to scale it quite a bit.

Jerred (14:49)
Yeah,

we need to be, and I'll talk about like, cause I've written the Murph burner track before, which is a four week program to get better Murph. And I'll tell you my approach and why it's so much different so far than what they have put together. Um, day four is Murph simulation. You warm up 10 minutes, whatever you want to do, just warm up. Then it's a half Murph, 800 meter run, 50 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 150 air squats, 800 meter run, uh, partition option. can, they say you can partition minute five rounds of five, 10, 15, if you want. Um, is that right?

Should it be 10 rounds? Or no? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Five times five is 25, right? So should be 10 rounds. Okay, I knew it. So there we go. Just crushing it, chat GPT. ⁓ Okay, so what do you think about Murph simulation doing a half Murph, which would be partition option 10 rounds, not five rounds of five, 10, 15.

Dave (15:25)
Yeah, should be 10 rounds. Here we go. Math.

Again, I'd almost rather see that I mean this is classic of how people train for Murph They're like I have the Murph coming up So I'm just gonna like do the Murph or a variation of it or half Murph or quarter Murph or I'm getting farther along I'll do Murph plus a little extra like people just do the workout to get better at the workout Which isn't a terrible thing in at certain points of depending how long you're training for it Hopefully you're training more than seven days for it But I almost rather see this like if someone's starting out put this at day one is like a baseline test of like hey Let's test your half Murph and see where you're at and then

you recheck it later on in the program, depending on how long you're training for it. But just throwing it in there on day four doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Jerred (16:17)
Yeah, and so far there's been no mention of a vest and to me the assumption is that if you're doing Murph you're doing it with a vest. I know you can do it without but the assumption to me is if you just say Murph ⁓ you would be doing it with a vest. This one, other than it straight up saying the partition math is wrong, that's a big error but then, I don't know, it's whatever. Like I don't...

A MRF simulation is fine, I think it's weak on the side of like, it lacks creativity and like getting better at something, but I don't hate it because sometimes to get better at a workout you need to just do the workout. But we are getting, I don't think the volume's too high yet, we're getting towards the end of this week, but I think the volume's okay. So I don't hate it, but again, I don't love just randomly throwing that in there because

In my point, like where my brain's at is like there are better, there are ways to get better at Murph without doing pushups, pull ups, push up squats. There are ways to improve all of those areas without just doing them over and over again. And I think that's sometimes what like chatty PT misses is like, okay, cause what do we do if we're like, we want to do this for a year to really crush Murph that next year. And you just have me doing thousands of these reps every single week.

Would you eventually be like, you know what, maybe there's a, here's a pushup variation we can try, or maybe we just work on your triceps specifically or work on your chest specifically or your shoulder, something like that. Getting more, you know, muscle endurance, muscle fatigue type programming in there. Maybe that would happen, but I don't think so. And so it's just a lot of like, you want to get better at this thing, then go do the thing. ⁓ Day five is active recovery. We can kind of skip. I don't hate that. I think that's fine to throw that in there.

And then day six, high volume conditioning. So this is main work after we've had a day off. The Murph Density Builder. So we're gonna do 20 minutes of three pull-ups, six push-ups, nine air squats. Move continuously at a sustainable pace, count rounds just for reference. And then you're gonna finish off with a one mile easy run or 10 minute slow jog. What are your thoughts on that?

Dave (18:29)
I think it's okay. think the 369 can scale to different people of, know, assuming someone has some background low enough that people can get through the reps a little lower than what normal partition is. But for someone who's more advanced, move through it quicker.

Jerred (18:45)
Yeah, that's why I don't hate that one either because you could you could go fast on that if you're really conditioned for this and just hit three six nine over and over again ⁓

I so far, because we're in the conditioning and we're going to day seven, there's not near enough conditioning in here to get better at Murph. I'll just go ahead and say that. Like I can just tell one mile easy run at the end of this workout. Like, ⁓ it's just not happening. So anyway, we'll, ⁓ we'll go to day seven and then we'll give them, we'll give you what chat GPT said notes to progress each week.

So day seven, run and squat focus. The main work is 1.5 to two mile run at a steady aerobic pace, rest three minutes, air squat ladder. So do 10, 20, 30, 20, 10, rest 60 seconds between steps. So I guess 10 squats, rest a minute, 20 squats, rest a minute, 30 squats, rest a minute. That's a ton of rest. Maybe go down to 30 seconds. And then that's basically it. You cool down after that. do think about this one?

Dave (19:44)
Again, not nearly enough volume and I want to hear me either after the notes, thoughts on Murph Burner compared to it, because I've done the Murph Burner before and that 102030 is not touching what volume is on something like that. And the Murph Burner got me a whole lot better at Murph. I just think the volume is way too low for getting someone ready.

Jerred (20:01)
Yeah, and their notes for progress, just to wrap this one up, is the increase total volume by 10 to 20 % each week. If pull-ups are the limiter, two to three sets of band assisted pull-ups on days one and three. If running is the limiter, increase the run on day seven to 2.5 to three miles. If you'd like, I can also do more work for you, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so yeah, I will say ⁓ my thoughts on this overall, not, I think I give it a B, minus.

I'll give it a B minus. If you give it a grading, where would you put it?

Dave (20:33)
⁓ I think the prompts a little bit to, we kept it vague on purpose, yeah, I say it, because the program, based on that, I'd probably put it like C, C plus, but I think the prompt could have been, like if someone was more specific with it based on where they're at, it's just so general, but some of that was on our fault of how we prompted it,

Jerred (20:36)
My prompt is a C, but... ⁓

And that

wasn't to just show like ChatGPT like to try and prove ChatGPT sucks. It was just like, I don't know, it's got to be generic enough to apply, right? So you could add more and maybe you get a decent program out of it. ⁓ Okay, so MurphBurner, here's the deal. If you are trying to get better at Murph and the difference between me and ChatGPT is I've done Murph a lot. I've done it every week for years on end. I've gotten some really good Murph times. I've helped people get better at Murph. So just have way more experience on what actually works for this.

And that's always gonna be the case, right? The human experience versus the robot experience. But what I know is if you want to go do Merph, you are saying, want to do a high volume workout and I want to get fast at it. trying to skirt around the fact that the program that you're gonna do needs to be high volume. If this was ⁓ like a baseline week, like you haven't worked out in a long time, that's what that was to me. That's like, you haven't worked out in a long time.

this is a good, like, let's get some knock off some of the muscle soreness and like make sure that you're ready to like put in some work. That's, that's where I would put that program. This would be the week before I actually started training. You know what I mean? ⁓ that's how I would rate or put that program in because what we do in the Murph burner and what we've done to like help people actually get better at Murph is you need to greatly widen your aerobic base. And that's what a lot of people don't understand is like, if I want to get faster at the mile, ⁓ I don't go run miles.

you know, like just one mile at a time. I don't just run one mile over and over again. That'll get you a certain level. Like say I have a seven minute mile and I just keep practicing four by four hundreds and I just keep running miles as fast as I can. Maybe that brings me down to five 30 or five, you know, five 30 realistically, maybe best case scenario, maybe a six if I'm going down from seven. And then it's like, okay, well how do I, I want to get all the way down to that five. What do I do? You have to actually widen the aerobic base. So

It's not as intuitive, but now you need to start doing a lot of broad base aerobic work with the faster stuff. So you have to start doing a lot of, ⁓ zone two conditioning, longer bouts of aerobic conditioning. Cause you're, you know, your aerobic base might not be high enough to peak the pyramid, you know? So you, you have to work on those things. And that's the same with, with Murph. Murph is a highly aerobic, it's an aerobic threshold workout after you get past the strength. It's not a strength workout. it's just a muscular endurance and

Primarily an aerobic threshold workout and so you have to treat it as such and so the other things that you need to be challenging yourself People talk a lot about this in high rocks training now is like compromised running compromised training. It's where you Put yourself in a compromised position, right? You so you if I want to run a mile where I would rather run a mile after I've done a hundred squats You know just to start to get that fatigue and to see what that's like and to be able to work through it because if I did that program and All I did was progress it in volume ⁓

I'm still going to get my ass kicked on Murph because there's a big difference between running a mile as fast as I possibly can and then going to do calisthenics. Even if I'm now stronger from having done that program and then finishing 20 rounds of that or going straight through and then running again as fast as I can, my legs are going to be toast. So there has to be a lot of compromised training. And that's the other thing that we do in Murph, the Murph burner track is a lot of compromised training work. Like I'm trying to fatigue the hell out of your legs and then have you do something else.

You know, same with your pushups. so overall the program itself needs way more volume. It needs way more compromised training and it needs more, uh, you know, aerobic conditioning to like widen that base for people. So those are my like, again, we're doing this pretty much on the fly. We didn't like sit around and like, you know, what's the, let's make it look really stupid. You know, we just, pulled up to right before we started the podcast and then we started. And so these are my off the cuff thoughts on like how I would program this better and how it kind of like.

ultimately failed you if you really wanted to get better at Murph. It wouldn't be the best, in my opinion.

Dave (24:44)
Yeah, I guess one big thing to add is also where does this fit in the overall program again? And we're taking the blame on some of the prompt to we kept a bit like we said, we just literally typed this in before recording. We didn't even look through the whole program. So, ⁓ but like, where does this fit in with your overall things? We talked about compromised running to like having a stronger deadlift, having a stronger back squat, having stronger pressing motion, like all those things are going to make your squats easier. Are going to make like if you're training deadlift and training kettlebell swings, widen strength base as well. that

Jerred (25:09)
So that's like widening the strength base as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave (25:13)
you can tolerate that volume a little better and that you don't get, I mean, I see guys that have only trained body weight stuff and they come in to Murph and throw a vest on and that last mile is just like, like they're folding over because they're just not used to the load of even some of those things as the workout goes on.

Jerred (25:31)
All right, let's hit up one more. We're not gonna go line by line on this one. Let's just like, I don't know, we can kind of pick and choose what we want, but I wanted to get a little bit more personal here with it. So I said.

Hey, chat CPT.

I want to run a five minute mile and back squat 500 pounds in the same day. Give me the first seven days of training.

Dave (25:50)
You still holding on hope for it.

Jerred (25:51)
For me doing it? ⁓ man, I don't know. I don't know. Like I would love to be able to do that, but with how

bad it broke me previously, I don't know if I can, if I can do it. right. would be perfect. So if anyone wants to know, I've, I've talked about this. Why did I get broken? It's because I was, ⁓ I neglected every bit of the recovery side to doing this type of training and I knew I was doing it. I just thought I was going to be okay.

Dave (26:01)
Maybe if GPT was writing it though, you wouldn't have been broken. Maybe you'd have been broken a lot sooner.

Jerred (26:21)
Like that's exactly what happened. And maybe it was ego, maybe was stupidity, but I was just like, dude, you've been doing this stuff for years. Like we don't, like I didn't focus much more or differently on my nutrition. That should have been a major shift. ⁓ I didn't focus any differently on sleep. And then I completely neglected any like good warmups, good cool downs, no mobility work the whole time. So to me, when I, and I've done this a lot over last few years, like a

Post-mortem like what the hell did you do wrong? There was a lot of just like me not doing what I should have done And I think people if you follow chat GPT, you're definitely gonna get hurt because this is a very complicated thing to be able to to handle So let's just look at day one because I Just can see it So day one it wants me to do heavy lower and short intervals. So it has me do a warm-up. Whatever. That's fine Then the track work I'm headed to the track. I'm doing six by 200 meter runs at

my mile pace, plus or minus eight to 10 seconds, I'll rest walk 200 meters between reps. So I'm going, I'm having a track day, I'm doing six by 200 meters. And then, or I'm doing on the treadmill. Then immediately after that, I am going to strength back squat. So I am doing five by five at 75 % of one rep max back squat. Sounds great on paper. If nobody knows much about strength programs, five by five back squat is one of the highest volume strength programs in existence. It doesn't sound like a lot.

But when you're talking about strength, the five by five program, very effective, very high volume, and you need to treat it as such, it should not be in conjunction with anything else. Then after we do that, we're doing two by three pause squats at 65%, incredibly taxing on the CNS, on top of already having sprinted six by 200 meters. And then the accessory is RDL three times eight, reverse lunges three times eight, core hanging leg raises three times 10. So I didn't make the prompt any better, but I made the...

goal way more challenging, right? There are not many people who know how to program this and achieve it. And to be honest, you could argue that I don't either, because I only got the 485 on the back squat and the 512 mile before I got hurt. So I got, was getting close, like I was expanding in both directions correctly. ⁓ but I ended up getting hurt. But ultimately this first day is insanity. This is, this is, this is way too much. And I haven't even looked at day two yet. I hope it's not as crazy as day one, but what's your, what's your thought at day one here?

Dave (28:49)
spot on. hope people can see how much fun that is and I think it even said in the description as I was skimming through I thought I said something about a you already squat so the importance requires years not weeks your first seven days should be about building structure not testing extremes and I'm like if that's how it's starting out and they're talking about if that's like base level week I'm like man because that would that work I would wreck me.

Jerred (29:11)
Yeah, and it does say that this is a safe, realistic seven-day starting plan. Okay. All right. Well, day one is, this is not as bad at like, this is way worse than the Murph one. The Murph one, I'm like, okay, no, I wouldn't do this with anybody. I don't really care about your starting point. That's way too much volume. ⁓ Day two, aerobic base plus upper hypertrophy. Okay, we're running 30 to 40 minutes at an easy conversational pace. Final five minutes, moderate finish, no threshold. And then we're just doing, looks like a bro session.

Lift upper body, bench press four times eight, pull ups four times six to ten, dumbbell incline three times ten, rows four times eight.

Dave (29:47)
and scap work, rotator cuff. Yeah, like people know what is.

Jerred (29:48)
cuff and scap work for 10 minutes. ⁓

Okay, my initial thoughts on this one. Now, what a lot of people don't know about having a big squat is you need a really strong back. I will say that most people don't actually know that they think that you could just work on the squat over and over it. You need a really strong core and you need a really strong back to be able to lift, be able to squat heavy weights. ⁓ Maybe that's what ChatchiPD is trying to achieve here. So I don't hate it. I think the aerobic conditioning is kind of weak because if you

You give most people 30 to 40 minutes, they're gonna choose 30. And again, we're getting nowhere close to achieving our goal with that. And we'll see what else happens in the week. But overall, I don't love it, but I also don't hate it because you do need a really strong back. There's no core work in that, but you do need a strong back. And we got three things focused on the back there. So what are your thoughts?

Dave (30:37)
Yeah, I think what people don't realize when we talk, and I know you touched on Jared, with like CNS demanding, like central nervous system demanding, that first day is taxing. I think if you've ever done, like if you've ever stacked things on that, like you try stacking workouts the same day and you go high intensity on both of those, there's, it's not like an on-off switch where you just wake up the next morning and you're recovered. And to go do even 30, 40 minutes at an easy conversational pace and like if you're trying to go heavy on this upper body work, I think people don't.

Realize and that's what as I got more aggressive with running and strength goals like how much carryover that has even the upper body stuff and how upper body stuff can you wouldn't think so but like I'm just doing an upper body lift and then I can already I don't see the full next day but you have speed speed work on the track again or something like there's just a There's like a bleeding effect with the CNS if you go too intense Like that's where burnout happens. That's where injury happens. And those are the things that if you're not structuring it, right? So that's already only the big concern with this

Jerred (31:36)
Yeah, and let's, I'm going to kind of skim through the rest and just see big picture what we're looking at for the rest of the week overall. So day three, they do to speed and endurance with a posterior chain strength. three times 600s on the track. And then we're doing damn dead lifts, four point five front squat, three point five, three by five hamstring curls. So a lot of lifting and they're, they're combining everything on the same day. And I'll get to that in a second. A recovery day. Thank you.

But it's more running. It's 25 minute run and then 25 minute mobility. ⁓ and I will say when I was doing my recovery days, I stayed off my feet a hundred percent, not did nothing. I like active recovery, but I'd be on the rower. I'd be on the air bike, something like that. ⁓ not more running, not more mileage, not more pounding on the pavement. because there, there's just, this goal is very demanding on your body, your lower body specifically. So every, I forgot the stat, but every time your foot strikes the ground, it's like a

10x the gravitational force or something like that. You have to take that into account with, okay, I'm trying to load my joints to like these extreme loads. So your recovery days, my opinion shouldn't be on the road, shouldn't be running. And then day five, heavy squat focus. Now we're getting heavy. So we're working up one to three, 80 to 85%. More squatting, beltless squats, Nordic curls, weighted step ups, and then we're doing tempo running three times one mile. Day six, easy aerobic light stretch. Okay, I give this

This is a failure. I'm going just go ahead and go into day seven where it's speed work. We've only had one day off. ⁓ We're going as fast as we can and then we're doing more squats, which I get it. We're trying to get better at the squat. actually would fail if some coach came to me like, one of my clients ⁓ has this goal. Here's my first seven days. I'd be like, you're an idiot. You fail. You're fired. Okay. I probably wouldn't fire him, but I tell him this is a bad program. How do you rate it?

Dave (33:30)
Yeah, same. I was trying to kind of do some math in my head of the volume of heavy squats over the course of week, but in seven days, there's four days of squatting. One of them may be a little lighter, but three of those days at 70 % or higher, and then split squats on a lot of single-leg work on top of the running will be very hard to handle. Post-year chain work, the deadlift and GHDs on a couple days, heavy deadlifts, the neural demand of this is just insane.

Jerred (33:58)
Yeah, and the prompt ends with basically asking to tailor. It's like, I want to write to you the next seven days or full 12 week program. Can I tailor it to you based on your current one rep max, current mile time, training history, available days a week, injuries or limitations. So if I were to say, Hey, my current one rep max is, I don't know what mine is right now. Let's say it's 420 on the squat. My mile time is 540. I've been training regularly for 20 years. I'm available six days to train per week.

And then I mentioned, yeah, I have had a lower back injury in the past. I still think, I think this program gets more insane due to my actual training history is going to be, this guy can handle it. Like, let's fricking go. And I already think that their baseline for just generic person is like really, really crazy. So I think when you're trying to get into these more complex goals, chat CPT might not be the best for hybrid athlete training, concurrent training, because there's a lot of nuance here. So how I was actually making a ton of progress in this regard.

you have to look at concurrent training research and the interference effect or what they call the concurrent training effect, it's a real thing. ⁓ And it's not as big of a deal as people used to think it is, but it still is a real thing that if you're trying to get stronger and you're trying to get faster, they're going to conflict with one another to some degree. There is an effect there. And so the best way to do that is to separate things completely, either by large portions, at least four hours in the day, or by complete days altogether, 24 hour days.

That is how I programmed. Because I think when I started, my baseline squat was, it was actually probably in the high threes, low fours, something like that. And my mile time was in the sixes, just so people understand how much progress I actually made. ⁓ So I was progressing in both directions pretty well, but I had to take into account all the concurrent training research. And so I would have a hard day at the track.

but that was it from the CNS standpoint. And then I might do something like that next day would be upper back core work. Cause I knew CNS wise, I needed to chill out a little bit and then maybe day off, then heavy squat day. I think we were squat, I was squatting twice a week, not four to five times a week. And so, and even the squat sessions in of themselves were very different. One was very heavy.

CNS demanding one was more volume based because you need some like actual just muscle mass to be able to achieve a goal like this. And then the running itself, again, we talked about it in the Murph when having you got to broaden that base aerobically, you have to broaden that base with your strength. anyway, this is this would be way too demanding. I think it took me many months to get injured following the program that I was writing. And I talked about why this would probably take you two to three weeks. I think you'd be hurt.

Dave (36:46)
think you've been following that going from six-minute mile and say 400 back squat to where you got to.

Jerred (36:52)
⁓ maybe like seven months, eight months, something like that. Could have been six. It was, it was somewhere in that six to eight month range, I believe. ⁓

Well, and what's crazy would actually hurt me. ⁓ what, like, I guess it was the straw that broke Jared's back, you know, is, it wasn't, I was doing a really heavy back squat and I just like hurt myself and like fell down and like this catastrophic thing. It was doing broad jumps on concrete was like that. And I know that wasn't the singular thing that hurt me, but that's what pushed me over the edge.

And that's when I knew something happened right away. It was that landing. And the only reason I was doing that is because to add, make things worse, I felt like I was in such a good, was like, I was so conditioned garage gym athlete. ran around with a fit week where we're testing all these things. And I was like, yeah, I want to test. feel like I'm like in this, like an amazing shape right now. And I tested my broad jump and I ended up hurting myself in the broad jump that I tested. ⁓ and that's where just everything started to collapse after the fact. So it wasn't even like on the squad itself. It was.

the lack of taking care of myself. I would never add broad jumps to that program. I just did that because we were doing it as a community or whatever. So anyway, enough about me getting hurt, but ultimately, ⁓ this is way worse than what I would have done. I mean, would have been hurt way faster if I did that program.

Dave (38:20)
And that's the people don't realize it's like they think, you know, I've seen plenty of people that are like, I hurt my back deadlifting, deadlifting's bad. It's like, no, you were going to CrossFit seven days a week and doing doubles and like not recovering. And you had done this workout, you had done legs three days before it. And then you tried to max out your dead. Like that's, and that's not always the picture, but you do get people that, or I mean, there's the other side of like movement proficiency and those things going too heavy too soon. But that's with this program specifically, the...

The carryover fatigue effect is where like where things catch up and that's where people are like I just bent down to like pick up something off the floor and my back went out and it's like well those That wasn't the thing that that got you

Jerred (39:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, you can bend over and pick things up. That's perfectly fine. It's more of the training you were doing the rest of the previous three months or whatever. Okay, so I'll say if you want to use JackCPD to create your work house, go for it. I would just say if you are going to do that, I mean, there's a better option. It's go train with us, go to garageymathlete.com, sign up for a free trial and we will take care of making sure the volumes appropriate and everything else. But I would say if you are going to follow JackCPD blindly,

⁓ Know that it makes a lot of mistakes I caught one in the Murph workout where it just incorrectly had partitioned stuff and Dave and I talked about this like in nutrition It's even worse. They're like, they're like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's 200 calories like that's 800 calories It's like it can make a lot of mistakes and if you're not in this world You would just think that it's right, right? Cuz I don't know if people know this about like chat GPT but like they think it's like this God level machine like it just Like it knows everything and so it's read every book on the planet

That's not actually how these things work. ⁓ It's pattern recognition. It doesn't fully comprehend what you're saying. It recognizes the pattern in your words and it spits back a pattern it thinks that makes sense. So it's not as logical as people think that it is. And that's hard to describe to someone because it doesn't work like a human because it's not human. And so if you do these, know that it can make a lot of mistakes. And two, if you follow the program anyway, listen to your body. Like if you're like tired or like

⁓ I'd say if you're hungrier than normal things like that, those are not bad things. just you can tell that you're doing something really demanding on your body and so if you're like if I did day one of this and I was like I'm exhausted and then day two I'm going into something even harder that Might not be a good idea the next day might be okay to just like take the day off or like move the recovery days and most people what I found too If they don't know a lot about that fitness stuff, you know fitness like programming they'll just do any program blindly

Like it doesn't, they're like, well, if I feel like crap today, it's just because I'm not conditioned and I need to do the second day to get more conditioned. It's not really how it works. That's how you go down the wrong bad path. So yeah, I don't, I don't love it. I don't like using chat GPT. Like I said, I've used it to assist, but it takes nine pages of documentation for that to even be somewhat helpful and evil. Even then I have to go back and correct a lot of things. so overall and with my personal bias and professional bias, I'd say don't use chat GPT to.

to write your workouts, at least not in our world. Might be good for, like I said, beginner programs and simple stuff.

Dave (41:31)
basic bodybuilding stuff maybe I'm sure you can get a decent like split but you can find those online anywhere in the old bodybuilding forums too but once you get into concurrent stuff and all those things and especially nutrition I know you touched on it but we were talking about it before we hit record is like there's so many mistakes and that I've seen it even just trying to log stuff and playing around with it I'm like catching things all the time it's hundreds of calories off and like if someone's trying to lose weight that's significant.

Jerred (41:36)
yeah.

Yeah, and like, there's so many basic lifestyle guidelines that, I mean, we can just get into everything, but, and maybe it would do that again if you prompted it better, but it throws in like little caveats, like, yeah, make sure you have adequate sleep, but there's like so much to making sure that you are getting in the proper amount of movement, you have the recovery locked in, just like, there's gotta be that side of things. So I would like to see that in there as well. But we'll move on. I wanna just talk real quick to, you know,

Just to the community, the athletes. So I did that podcast last week, talked about how I almost left garage gym athlete and then ultimately swung the pendulum 100 % the other way. I'm fully back, fully committed to doing everything here at garage gym athlete. We have a lot of awesome stuff coming. Like we, I mean, we're just like chomping at the bit to get everything released to athletes and like get going for 2026. Like we're getting

We're using the rest of this time in 2025 to make sure everything's locked and loaded and ready to go. But we're going to be posting so much more in the community, which is looking like it's going to be Facebook, not our circle community. Did that one shock you? you, what do think about that?

Dave (43:13)
Well, I shocked myself because I'm like, I'm not anti-Facebook totally, I'm just not on it. I'm like, Circle community, the community platform is so robust and the things we can do on it to make an awesome community is there. But I think I was shocked at how my thought process, I was so committed in my head, biased on Circle. I'm like, yep, we're staying here. And then by the end, I was trying to sell you guys on Facebook. I'm like, Facebook, it just makes sense as I looked more into it actually looked at what's best for the community.

Jerred (43:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and that's what I wasn't expecting. So I went in the community, I did a video, it wasn't even like, hey, take your vote on Circle or Facebook. I was just trying to ask people like, do people still use Facebook? And then it got to this like vote situation between Facebook and Circle, because I posted in both. I don't know, we probably got a hundred plus comments of people basically saying Facebook. ⁓ But a lot of, everyone has the same feeling. They're like, yeah, I don't like it, but it's better. And then there are only like two or three people who are like, no, keep it in Circle.

So apologize if you're one of those people, but it just seems like that's where everyone wants us to be. ⁓ and when the community was out, it's most active and engaged, you know, that's, that's where it was. So it looks like we're moving back there. And so if you're not there, figure out how to get there. We're, not shutting circle down at all, ⁓ for awhile. So don't worry about that. If you still, if you prefer circle, ⁓ we're not going to ghost it. We'll still be in there. ⁓ we're not, I'm not trying to run two at the same time. I just don't like to cut things off.

really hardcore, you know, anything like that. So get fired back up in the Facebook community. got the daily over decades challenge coming in 2026. A lot of things that we'll be talking about the podcast, but I mean, overall, I'd say the responses were awesome to that podcast. So I really appreciate each and every single one of you. When I say responses, I mean, I was getting Instagram messages, emails, ⁓ people who garage gym athletes who previously had my personal phone number, like were text messaging me several.

Probably close to a dozen athletes text messaged me. You know, we got a lot of comments and Facebook and messages and everything. So I really appreciate your support. I really do. And I'm just actually really happy that everyone's still around and still supportive, even with me having like taken that step back. And like I said, there's kind of a lull and engagement from me having done that. But I just want to reiterate my commitment to like, let's do it. Let's let's make this the

the community everybody wants to see and we're going to be working on that really hard.

Dave (45:39)
Yeah, it's gonna be fun to, got lot of exciting things that we're to roll some things out so we don't overwhelm people out once, but throughout the next few months there's gonna be some good things coming.

Jerred (45:48)
Yeah, I've almost

got too much. if we, if he rolled it all out at once, it would be, people would be like, chill out. But that's what I want you to tell me in 2026 is like, Hey, you're doing too much for the community, bro. Like chill out. Yeah. All right. Well, if you do want to be part of that community, go to garage.dumathlee.com. Sign up for a free trial and you'll be in the community. You'll get in the beginning, the programming, not chat, GPT programming, really good programming. And then if you are one of our athletes who, you know,

You've been an athlete, you were an athlete, you're looking to come back. Now is the time. Now is the time. I really mean that. 2026 is gonna be awesome. We've got a lot of stuff planned because at the end of the day, GPT can write your workouts. It actually can. No matter how much I wanna sit here and take a crap on them. ⁓ It can. It can fill that void for you. It can be the thing that ⁓ ultimately writes your workouts and takes care of your fitness and nutrition and everything else. But it will never replace community.

All right, so if you really, really want a supportive community where we're doing a ton of stuff to keep you engaged, keep you accountable, having the small wins here and there each and every single week, that's what you want to be a part of. You want to be a part of a community. You don't want to be a part of a robot that can push out workouts. Community is everything when it comes to succeeding in life, who you do life with. And we're going to be doing life with garage gym athletes who are going to be better, fitter, stronger, faster for not only ourselves, for our families, for our friends.

We're to take care of ourselves and that's what the community is going to be about in 2026. And so if you are on the fence, been an athlete coming back, whatever, just join, just join for 2026. It's going to be awesome. And I cannot wait to see you there, but remember you don't kill comfort. Comfort will kill you.