I’ve spent most of my life practicing.

Sports were a huge part of my life growing up. Baseball and basketball taught me how to compete, practice, lose, improve, and keep showing up.

That eventually became strength training.

Then it became coaching.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t just interested in making people stronger.

I became fascinated by why people do what they do.

Why does one person keep showing up while another constantly starts over?

Why does someone know exactly what they should do but still struggle to do it?

Why can the same program work incredibly well for one person and completely fall apart for another?

Why do we keep repeating patterns we say we want to change?

Those questions became just as interesting to me as the training itself.

THE EXPERIMENT

I’ve spent more than 17 years training other people and more than two decades training myself.

I’ve worked with everyday people, athletes, executives, kids, older adults, and everyone in between. I’ve coached thousands of sessions and learned from the people I’ve trained just as much as they’ve learned from me.

I’ve also spent years learning from coaches, strength athletes, bodybuilders, martial artists, and anyone else who had something worth teaching.

But I don’t just want information.

I want to know what happens when you actually use it.

If I learn something from a coach, I want to try it.

If I try something, I want to see what happens.

I want to collect the data.

Figure out what worked.

Figure out what didn’t.

Change the variables.

Run the experiment again.

That’s how I’ve built my toolbox.

And that’s also how I’ve changed my mind.

I used to think I needed to know everything. I used to be much more dogmatic about training. I thought working harder was almost always the answer. I tried to make certain exercises or methods work for everyone.

Experience taught me otherwise.

People are different.

Their lives are different.

Their bodies are different.

Their goals are different.

And what works for someone today might not be what they need six months from now.

So I still have principles.

But I don’t believe in being married to a particular exercise, program, belief, or answer.

Context matters.

WHY THE BODY MATTERS

Physical training is where all of this started for me, and it remains the laboratory.

I’ve spent years learning how to build strength, muscle, conditioning, athleticism and physical capability.

But there’s another reason the body matters to me:

I simply fucking love working out.

Most days, I absolutely love it.

Some days I don’t.

I do it anyway.

But without fail, I feel fucking amazing after I finish.

I love challenging myself.

I love the day-to-day grind.

I love coming back from injuries and figuring out how to build myself back up.

I love the discipline and the practice. My dad taught me that through sports when I was young. You practice. You show up. You work on the things you’re bad at. You come back tomorrow and do it again.

I love honing my craft and learning everything I can about it.

I love the pump.

I love performance and athleticism.

I love doing things I’ve never done before.

I love finding new challenges, finding new things I’m bad at, and having something to work on.

I love that it’s on me to get up, get to the gym, and work my ass off day after day.

I love improving my performance for whatever sport I’m playing.

I love looking back over long periods of time and seeing how much I’ve changed.

I love treating myself like a video game character and building my own character sheet—adding strength, conditioning, skills, athleticism, experience, and new abilities.

I love taking my health and well-being into my own hands.

I truly believe one of the best things we can do for our health is train our body and our mind.

This body is the avatar I navigate my world with.

I want to use it to do the things I love for as long as I possibly can.

And the better I get at training it, the less I worry about things going wrong with it.

Maybe most of all, I love the feeling of not being able to do something today, putting in the work, and eventually being able to do it.

There is something fucking satisfying about that.

I’ve also spent the last 7 years practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, striking, and teaching grappling at an MMA gym.

That experience has reinforced something I already believed:

Practice changes you.

You show up.

You suck.

You get your ass kicked.

You learn.

You come back.

Eventually something that used to be difficult becomes normal.

Then you find something new that you’re not good at.

And you start again.

That’s training.

But it’s also life.

WHAT I’M REALLY INTERESTED IN

The body is only one part of the equation.

I’m interested in what happens when you start paying attention to yourself.

Your habits.

Your thoughts.

Your patterns.

Your excuses.

Your environment.

The stories you’ve been telling yourself.

The things you’ve been programmed to believe.

The things you keep doing even though you say you want something different.

You can’t change what you can’t see.

So the first skill is learning to see yourself clearly.

Then you question what you’re seeing.

Then you choose what you’re going to do about it.

Then you practice.

You collect evidence.

You adapt.

And you do it again.

That’s the philosophy behind this place.

WHY THE 36TH CHAMBER?

The idea comes from the old martial arts movie The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. The movie became a major influence on Wu-Tang Clan and inspired the title of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

A few years ago, I got to see something pretty fucking special at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee.

On August 25, 2018, Wu-Tang Clan founding member and chief producer RZA came to Milwaukee to perform a live re-scoring of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. RZA is one of the central creative forces behind Wu-Tang Clan, and his work as a producer, musician, filmmaker and artist has been deeply connected to kung-fu cinema.

We watched the entire movie while RZA performed the music live.

The movie follows a young man through 35 training chambers, where he develops physical skills, discipline, and knowledge. Eventually he reaches the point where he creates the 36th Chamber—the chamber of teaching. The knowledge he gained isn’t meant to stay with him. He has to take what he learned and pass it on.

I remember sitting there watching this movie while RZA was scoring it live with Wu-Tang’s music, and something about the whole thing just clicked for me.

Learn. Practice. Master. Adapt. Teach.

That’s the idea behind The 36th Chamber.

The concept changed me, and I’ll never forget it.

And honestly?

Wu-Tang made the whole fucking thing a million times cooler.

WHAT I’M TRYING TO DO HERE

I’m not here to tell you I have all the answers.

I’m not here to tell you exactly who you should be.

I’m taking what I’ve learned from training, coaching, experimenting, failing, succeeding, studying, questioning and paying attention and putting it in one place.

Maybe some of it will be useful to you.

Maybe some of it won’t.

That’s okay.

Take what works.

Question the rest.

Run your own experiment.

Because ultimately, you don’t have to know everything.

You have to learn how to figure yourself out.