Episode #1172
As businessmen, husbands, and fathers, it is easy to let physical health slide while building companies and providing for our families. Many of us reach our 40s or 50s carrying old injuries, stiffer joints, and lower energy, assuming that decline is just part of getting older. We tell ourselves we do not have time for two-hour gym sessions, or we fall into an all-or-nothing trap where we grind until something breaks. Real physical ownership is not about chasing an ideal program on paper; it is about taking practical, consistent action that keeps you capable in real life.
In this conversation, Doug Holt sits down with Franz Snyman, health lead for The Brotherhood
and the TPM Academy. Franz breaks down why the ultimate flex for a man is not a luxury car or a bigger house, but owning your body, staying strong, and having the capacity to lift your kids or handle any physical challenge without injury. They dive into the law of adaptation, explaining how your body rebuilds its cellular structure every 60 to 90 days based directly on the physical signals you give it. If you give your biology a gentle nudge instead of smashing your head against a wall, your joint health, movement quality, and daily energy can shift rapidly.
The discussion outlines the Four Quadrants of Physical Capability: Strength, Power, Mobility, and Endurance. Franz explains why most men completely abandon power and mobility as they age, leaving them vulnerable to sudden tears or persistent back and hip pain. By bringing back low-amplitude power work like skipping and medicine ball throws, alongside daily mobility drills and ground-based crawling, you reactivate your inner ear vestibular system and restore joint freedom. Instead of just aiming for a long lifespan spent sitting in a chair, this approach builds a true health span where you stay functional, strong, and capable straight through your later years.
00:00 - Introduction and Live AMA Overview
01:00 - Overcoming Abdication of Power and Roommate Dynamic in Marriage
02:40 - Building Emotional Safety and Trust Through Daily Consistency
04:53 - Calling Out the Elephant in the Room Without Defensiveness
09:40 - Taking Cognitive Load Off Your Wife to Demonstrate Leadership
13:38 - Rewriting Your Story from Thriving in Chaos to Finding Purpose in Peace
20:44 - Remaining a Grounded Lighthouse During Emotional Storms
22:45 - Mid-Episode Resource Highlight
28:35 - Transitioning After Divorce and Dating Without Falling into Nice Guy Mode
36:30 - Balancing Business Ambition While Prioritizing Your Marriage
45:09 - Calling Out the Elephant and Accepting Support
01:42 - Practical Fitness for Busy Businessmen and Fathers
04:28 - Action Over Theory: Why the Best Program Is the One You Do
06:12 - The Law of Adaptation and Rebuilding Your Biology Every 90 Days
08:58 - Why Less Is More After 40: Stopping Overuse Injuries
13:48 - Leading Men into Action: Balancing Strengths with Weaknesses
17:04 - Introducing Grounded Movement, Bounding, and Plyometrics
22:02 - Mid-Episode Resource Highlight: Fixing What Is Broken in Your Marriage
23:04 - Vestibular System Activation Through Crawling and Rolling
27:24 - Health Span vs Lifespan: Maintaining Functionality as You Age
32:09 - Breaking Down the Four Quadrants: Strength, Power, Mobility, and Endurance
42:51 - Getting Involved in TPM Health Programs and the Upcoming Ranch Workshop
What to Do When You’ve Let Your Body Go Physically, and How to Get It Back on Track Today
An optimal routine on paper is useless if it does not fit into your daily schedule. Taking small, consistent actions creates habit loops, avoids overtraining, and gives your body the steady biological signals it needs to rebuild tissue and adapt over time.
The Four Quadrants are Strength (force generation), Power (speed and velocity), Mobility (controlling joint range of motion), and Endurance (stamina and cardiovascular health). A balanced approach ensures you do not just lift heavy weights, but also stay agile, pain-free, and energetic as you age.
Lifespan is simply the total number of years you live, whereas health span is the period of your life spent in good health, free from chronic pain or physical limitations. The goal for high-performing men is to maximize health span so they remain active and fully functional throughout their lives.
Ground-based movements such as crawling and rolling force your body into non-traditional movement patterns. This activates your vestibular system, described as your inner ear GPS, and helps your nervous system better coordinate vision, balance, and muscle firing, which can help address long-term aches and joint tension.
As men age, recovery capacity shifts, and excessive volume or heavy grinding can lead to overuse injuries and joint wear. Providing a gentle stimulus gives your biology enough signal to adapt and rebuild every 60 to 90 days without unnecessarily breaking down your joints.
To learn more about the 2-day hands-on health workshop at the TPM Ranch or join the free community section, email vip@thepowerfulman.com.
If your relationship is missing the love, respect, and intimacy it used to have, Doug Holt offers a free video training that walks through the methodology to bring it back.
Access the free training here:
https://www.thepowerfulman.com/scales
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Doug Holt 0:00And I think a lot of guys don't work out because they think of the time constraint.
Franz 0:04
I don't do a lot, but I do a little bit every week. It has to give you a positive dopamine hit. You are retraining the connection between your vision, your inner ear, and the rest of your body. Don't get injured. The best program is the one you'll do. You can't get good at doing push-ups by reading about push-ups. Doing nothing guarantees nothing will happen. Your body is a slave to what you do.
Doug Holt 0:42
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of The TPM Show, and we're joined by a very special guest, a friend of mine, Franz Snyman. Franz is... if you know, if you're part of The Brotherhood, which is one of our one-year programs, or the Inner Circle, Franz runs in part with his business partner John the health section of the Academy. The Academy is a four-year curriculum designed for high-achieving men to go through with TPM. So this is going to be great.
Franz and I are just going to have a discussion about: how do you take this aging body that we all have as high performers, and actually accentuate it not only to look better, because everybody wants to look better, but to perform and be better? Franz, thanks for being here, man.
Franz 1:30
Doug, thank you for having me. Excited to be here, excited to be part of The Brotherhood, and excited to help guys unlock a better body and better health. So pumped, man.
Doug Holt 1:42
I mean, you've been doing this professionally internationally for decades now, and one of the things that I was just commenting... I was on a call with some of the guys in The Brotherhood. We were talking about relationships that was the subject matter and one of the things I was telling them about you, Franz, is that you take the concepts of health and fitness that you know so well, and you translate them into meaningful ways for men like myself who are busy business professionals.
I'm a father of two children, a husband, I've got a lot of roles in my life, and I really like how you apply the principles using the four quadrants, which we'll talk about, and just everyday fitness activities and plyometrics into a relatable format.
Franz 2:31
Absolutely. At my core, I'm not a theorist. I'm more of a pragmatic guy. Like, what are things that guys will actually do? What are these concepts?
We talk about the four quadrants, which we can dissect in detail, but that's just a very general framework for saying that in order to be a healthy human, let alone a healthy functioning dad, you need strength. You need some level of power and speed in your body. You need mobility freedom to move and twist and not get injured. You need some stamina, right? You need endurance.
But what I think the most important thing is that guys need to understand that there is no optimal. There's no "what's the best." There is what's practical for you. The best program is the one you'll do.
So I am not dogmatically attached to any one thing. I'm dogmatically attached to whatever fits into that guy's life that is going to impact them positively. So we can come up with all sorts of optimal programs, but screw the optimal, Doug. It's like, let's just get the ball rolling. Let's get these guys understanding the concepts and realize that health and fitness is a verb, right? It's not about researching and seeing what AI programs we can come up with. We can all do that. We can all spend most of our time debating on what's the best.
The best thing to do is just to start, right? Just to get your body moving, be consistent. Then we optimize as you go. And I know you teach something similar in a lot of the work that you do. You just got to know the framework that we're... what's the playground that we're playing in? Then we can make the optimal rules as we go along.
Doug Holt 4:28
I love that. I mean, for the past... gosh, it's been 10 years I was talking to someone earlier about this that I've been involved with TPM, helping men. One of the things we've learned is guys want a methodology, right? They want a process to go through, and if they're not given a methodology, it seems a lot of times it's analysis by paralysis. They'll just go, "Okay, I'm going to listen to an audiobook, then the next audiobook, and the next audiobook, the next podcast," and that avoids action unless they have that catalyst that brings them forward.
Franz 5:01
Exactly. It reminds me of the statement: you can't get good at doing push-ups by reading about push-ups. You got to freaking do the push-ups, right?
So health is no different. You can flex by getting a Lamborghini, or somebody buys a big house like, that's awesome but I think the ultimate flex is owning your body. And that may be kind of offensive to people, and I'm not trying to offend people, but the ultimate flex is being strong, is having the capacity to pick up your kids and go up a hill, right? Or God forbid, you got to race into a house where there's a fire or something, you got to be able to sprint out of there. To me, you can't put a price on that, Doug.
But ultimately, it just comes down to: you need to start and you need to do something. Doing nothing guarantees nothing will happen, right? By default, nothing will happen. But you have to be committed to the process.
And then, yes, we teach in the four quadrants that there are better methods to follow. There are higher-level thinking principles that are going to make your journey, I think, more impactful, a little more effective. But none of that really matters if I cannot get a guy to just buy into his story. You got to change the narrative. You have to change the narrative.
You got to understand that your body, your biology and you know this with your background in fitness your biology, your physiology is a slave to what you do. You give it the right signal... it's not, "Oh, well my opinion is..." No, no, no. Your body is a slave to what you do. It will change. The structure will change. Your cells in your tendons and your muscles they turn over every 60 to 90 days. So that's great news.
If you've got an achy joint, or you think your hips are done, every 60 to 90 days you're rebuilt. And if you put in the right stimulus, you put in the right signals and the right stress response, your body will rebuild itself in a much better way. I've seen it happen for 30 years. It is a biological fact: the law of adaptation.
That's great news for guys. It's phenomenal news because they have so much power to change. Maybe not today you may not see the results today 60 to 90 days. I don't know about you, Doug, but as you get older, it comes quickly, right? 90 days is like a week now. It's just going to be there.
So just taking that initiative to understand... you just got to make sure the ladder's leaning on the right wall, and just do a little bit. You don't need to do a lot, but you got to consistently just do those things: the strength, the power, the mobility not hours and hours of training, but just the consistent inoculation of positive stress. It changes lives, and it changes the future for that man.
Doug Holt 8:21
I love that. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a DPT a Doctor of Physical Therapy and I've got a series of old injuries from overtraining, from sports, all those fun things. And she was telling me which surprised me, actually that for men, once they hit... she said over 40 (I'm sure there's a different age marker), less is more. She was trying to basically back me down. From being an all-or-nothing type of guy, I'm either in the gym every day, or I'm not doing anything.
Franz 8:58
I know the type, Doug. I know the type.
Doug Holt 8:59
I think a lot of us can be like that. And so her conversation was, she's saying, "Hey man, Doug, just basically hit the gym three times and use the rest of that time for recovery." And I think a lot of guys don't work out because they think of the time constraint.
Franz 9:19
I think that is a very common narrative. But the misconception is... I mean, "more must be better," right? Kobe Bryant talked about it. He was better than everybody because he worked out five times a day, you know. So he did two hours in the morning, blah, blah, blah. They ended up working way more than people, but that really doesn't make a lot of sense because, one, not everybody's Kobe Bryant.
But two, so many people don't have the stamina to get more than about 30 minutes of quality work. So doing an hour or two hours of exercise could actually... it could accelerate the rate at which you blow your knee up, or accelerate the rate at which, you know, your disc... you only have so many reps in you.
In fact, my entire tagline is: "More isn't better; better is better." So it really... it's a hard pill for some guys to swallow, but you only need a couple of quality sets of each exercise. Sometimes it's two, and maybe three, and that includes a warm-up set. So it is not about grinding yourself into the pavement, right?
My brother, who is a... he's a DPT as well I have an identical twin brother, he's a physical therapist, Doctor of Physical Therapy he has a great analogy. I love it. He says most guys, right, they come in and they're like, "I need more, I need more," and he says, "That's like smashing your head into the wall and saying, like, 'I want my body to adapt.'" You don't get to decide how quickly your body adapts.
But what you can do, rather than slamming your head into the wall, he calls it a "gentle nudge." You just nudge gently. You have to push your body, but gently don't get injured. The next, you can show up again.
So if you can't sustain, right, if you can't sustain the workout... what your friend said is brilliant. You do three days of a really impactful, smart workout. You understand what your kryptonite is, right? You understand where those injuries are, where you're lacking mobility, or maybe you don't have coordination, so you work on that.
You also work on your superpowers. I always like to give people what they're good at as well, because that keeps you coming back. So it's a combination of balancing your natural, innate superpowers you have them, Doug; I have them; everybody has them. But if you only work your superpowers, you're eventually going to break.
So that's a brilliant concept, and I wholeheartedly agree that as you get older, it's not about doing more it's about just doing things better. And, you know, understanding that it's about staying in the game, right? It's about living to train another day.
If you get that in your head, weight training is not rugby, it's not BJJ there's no physical contact. If you're getting injured in the gym, something's wrong. It's either too much volume, or... you've got to think, "Where do I want to be in five years? Where do I want to be in 10 years?" I want my body to function. That's the mindset. I love that mindset.
Doug Holt 12:43
I love that, too. It's forward-thinking.
I think what happened, at least for me, Franz, is I never thought I'd make it this old. So when I'm in my 20s, I'm not thinking of Doug at 50. I'm thinking maybe he'll get to 35, right? He's old at that point.
That's why a lot of guys, again, coming off a recent conversation with a group of men, you know, they've put their health on the back burner. But they're at the stage now, in their 40s or their 50s, where they're seeing their parents' choices play out, right? Their parents are starting to be either put in homes, have a lot of medical conditions, or are passing away.
And I think they're starting, Franz, to rethink their strategy, kind of like you're saying: "What's the next five or 10 years going to be like?"
So when you talk to a guy like that who's, you know, "Hey, I got a business to run, I got kids..." what helps him get into a routine where fitness and health become a or the priority?
Franz 13:48
I think that's a great question. I think it's multifaceted, because you kind of have to understand what makes that man tick like, who is that guy?
Accessing... I think maybe that's the art of coaching, is understanding. As you learn somebody, you learn their personality, you learn kind of what they like, what they don't like. You have to give somebody what they want in terms of... whatever. Most guys say, "I want less belly fat," or, "I want my pecs to be harder, I don't want fat on my chest." Typical guy stuff, and that's fine.
I think you need to lead the man into just starting the process, right? So whatever a man will do that gets him to establish the habit first, that's more important. Even if it's not, "Hey, you're not doing everything this guy needs to be doing," but that comes right on the second half of the workout.
We're going to do what you want to do as long as it's not going to kill you, but then we're going to throw in 20% to 30% maybe 40% of the stuff that you hate doing, absolutely hate doing. But if I give that guy everything that he hates, the chances of him sticking around and looking forward to the workout are zero, right?
If I gave you some weird Pilates workout... nothing against Pilates, but I'm definitely... if the zombies take over, I'm not picking a Pilates instructor on my team. I'm picking a guy who can lift kettlebells, like a hunter, right? Those are the guys I'm picking.
Anyway, with that being said, if you just think of your own training, you have some pet exercises, or you have maybe interval workouts or some kind of really intense workout that makes you feel alive. I don't think that should go away. I think it needs to be put in... you got to put borders around it.
So like, "Hey, you keep getting injured doing this workout. We're going to keep the concept, but we're going to make it fit where you are right now not Doug when he was 20, Doug right now." That's great.
But then we're saying, "Your hips don't rotate, your ankles are stiffer than a plank of wood. We need to throw that in, and you're not doing any endurance." Hypothetically... you probably are walking, so I'm just saying hypothetically. I have to put that stuff in, so it's the combination.
But the thing is, the stuff that the guy doesn't want to do... once he starts restoring motion in his body, every other movement the guy does, he's going to get way better results. Why? Because his body's functioning better.
So all of the kryptonite, all of the stuff that a guy has been avoiding... when you start to bring that up, it's like a rising tide lifts all boats. So working on that stuff combined with the superpowers and doing the stuff you love... who am I to say what a guy loves? That's him. So I want to combine both of them. Does that kind of resonate with you?
Doug Holt 17:04
It resonates a lot, because... for guys listening to this, I have an extensive background in fitness and health. I call it my former life. And I got the honor and privilege to attend one of Franz's seminars, along with John. And the thing that I really enjoyed was the bounding I'll call it bounding and the plyometrics.
Even as somebody who's studied this intensely, you can't see yourself, and it's been years. And I would have never added that into my workouts or my routines, because I just didn't think about it. But I found it so much fun, and I carried that over into my workouts.
My wife and her girlfriends work out in my garage three times a week, and I'm showing them stuff. And my kids are now doing plyometrics and things in our garage. In fact, we were evacuated because of the fires, as you're aware, Franz, and that's what we did. We ended up at a friend's house, and they had a small gym, and our kids were out there doing kettlebells and plyometrics, and it was awesome. A six-year-old and a nine-year-old actually enjoying it, and they weren't doing anything crazy.
My point is, sometimes you don't know what you enjoy and want until you've tried it and tasted it at a different stage of life. And before the guys listening to this get jealous because I was able to do a full-day event with you guys, Franz and John are actually putting on a two-day intensive at the TPM Ranch. A small group of guys, so it's going to be very intimate, very private. That's going to be starting September 17th, if I'm not mistaken. Two full days with Franz and John, where you're actually going to learn all the things I'm talking about and a lot more, and get that individualized instruction.
Because Franz, for me at least, I would just stick to old-school bodybuilding, some functional training, and CrossFit, because that's what I like. And the reason I get injured is I'm not doing what you're having that guy do. The stuff I don't like to do just doesn't get done, but that's the stuff I know I need.
Franz 19:15
100%! It's just human nature: you're going to migrate towards your strengths. Why would you migrate towards your weaknesses?
I love speaking; I'm not as good at writing. So naturally, I would much rather just speak and get up than have to write a thesis or something. So it's the same thing with movement: you're going to just say, "Nah, I don't want to do that, that's just not me. I'm not a flexible guy," or, "I'm not a flexible person."
One, you never want to tell yourself that, right? Your ears are listening to that. But even though that might be true, that mindset certainly doesn't help you long-term.
So I think one of the benefits of what John and I do is just because, collectively, we've been doing this 55-plus years. Everybody needs a coach to some degree, right? You might not need a coach seven days a week, but it's really difficult to evaluate yourself from a movement perspective, and even just from almost a programming perspective. Sometimes you get so myopic with what you're doing, you don't really use common sense.
I always say I've trained a lot of CEOs and owners of sports teams, and I still do. You get these brilliant guys brilliant in finances and accounting, and they can pay all these payrolls and then when it comes to their bodies, their IQ is like that of a grilled cheese sandwich! You're like, "What are you doing?"
There's somehow a disconnect between real-life smarts and the body. So you guys are not alone in this. We are sometimes our own worst enemy, where we just hammer the same shit until something completely breaks.
So you have to work on those things, right? If your ankle doesn't move or your hip doesn't move, what do you think is going to happen to the rest of your body? If your hip just doesn't rotate, you're going to overuse your knee, and you keep blowing out: "Oh, I tore my meniscus; oh shoot, I injured a disc."
Well, why do you think you keep injuring your knee? Because the hip is a huge joint that's supposed to rotate on a lot of rotation. And if a guy's been sitting running a company for 20 years or more, and he's lost that, and then he goes and plays pickleball and he ruptures an Achilles... well, it's not that his Achilles was the problem. His entire kinetic chain that's just a fancy word for the way the muscles communicate with each other and work together it doesn't work anymore.
So you have to restore that. But I think it has to be done in a way that is playful, that's challenging. It's got to be challenging, but it has to...
Doug Holt 22:02
Hey guys, I just want to share something with you. I'm sure we can both agree that in order to fix something, you need to know what's broken, and not only need to know what's broken, but a step-by-step methodology on how you can fix it. That's the easiest way to do it, right? Otherwise, you're going to be toiling with things.
That's why I created a free training: a training that only shows you how you got to where you are, where your relationship is missing that love, respect, admiration, and even intimacy that it used to have, to how you get it back. How do you retain that, where your wife's looking at you the same way she used to look at you when she said "I do"?
You know, I don't know about you, but for me, when my wife looks at me like I'm her man, I feel like I can conquer the world, and I want that for you. Simply go over to thepowerfulman.com/scales. That's thepowerfulman.com/scales, and I have a free video training for you. You can just click play and see if this resonates for you. Now back to the podcast.
Franz 23:04
It has to give you a positive dopamine hit. And I think for a lot of guys, throwing in some novelty... and I'm not like a guy that thinks you should, you know, change your workout every day. No, I don't, but I think you need to change the environments do some ground-based work.
We do a lot of crawling and rolling, and most guys struggle with that. Number one, it gets people mobile because they're physically just in different body positions. So that in itself is beneficial. Activates this system in your inner ear called the vestibular system, which everybody has. It's your GPS. It just tells you, with your eyes and these little sensors, where you are in relation to the world.
But when you get on the ground, you start crawling and rolling... which you actually do pretty well, Doug! You are pretty good at that stuff. You are retraining the connection between your vision, your inner ear, and the rest of your body.
So a lot of guys will tell us, "It was very difficult, like I really struggled doing the crawling and the rolling." One or two days later, they're like, "I've never felt so connected. That back pain, that weird big toe pain I had, is just like gone."
So it's not a panacea, but at the same time, I've seen weird, long-term ailments just go away. Why? Because you're putting different inputs into the body.
We do that at these courses and you've taken our course. It's a lot of childlike movement coupled with... well, I do think guys should be able to do some kind of a hip hinge, or a press, or some kind of a dumbbell movement, a row. I do those myself; I'm not against those. Those are solid, time-tested movements.
But you have to look at the other qualities. You have to look at the ground-based stuff: the rolling, the crawling. You have to look at the ballistic power stuff: marching, skipping.
For these guys on the call, when was the last time you just skipped with loose arms, and you're skipping and bounding off the ground? When was the last time you did that? That is a different signal to your nervous system. You are telling your body, "I'm capable. I'm athletic. Ooh, he's putting huge forces into the ground; I better stiffen up my ankle so that I don't blow an Achilles," right?
So now, we never do this stuff at full speed ever, ever, ever. Guys come in, and I always tell people, "You can start at any level." You might only leave the ground like that much. You're going to do low-amplitude skipping, low-amplitude everything. Why? Because you're not prepared for it.
And it usually takes anywhere from six to 12 to 18 months of consistent, very low-amplitude power work to get to the point where you could sprint and not rip a hamstring or an Achilles goes flying up.
The great thing is that now everybody's into longevity. I actually have a Substack that I started called The Longevity Project, and it's going so well. Why? Because people are interested in it, and a lot of men are saying, "I don't want to age bad."
So, selfishly, I use that. I know that men are very unsettled looking at the reality of, "Shit, I can't get up and down off the ground as easy as I used to," or, "I tried sprinting with my son and was sore for like two weeks."
That doesn't need to be your reality. I'm 52. I can still do all this stuff. I'm not a genetic freak at all you see me, I'm like a mildly fit guy, right? But I never stop doing it, Doug ever. I don't do a lot, but I do a little bit every week, right?
If you did one skipping workout every week for the rest of your life, that's 52 inoculations of whatever: throwing medicine balls, skipping, five minutes of play, of fun. You can't tell me that in a year from now you're not going to be a different human being. Fundamentally, your cells will have rebuilt in a completely different way because you've told your structure to handle different forces.
Doug Holt 27:24
I love this. I always get so motivated when I talk to you. I'm thinking about... got to fit my workout in.
So the science that I'm reading, Franz, is saying that in the next six to 10 years, humans will be able to live dramatically longer, but what hasn't caught up is that quality of life as much, right?
Franz 27:48
It's healthspan versus lifespan. There's a difference.
Doug Holt 27:51
So for men listening to this that are high performers or otherwise... and this is what I'm thinking, because I keep again, I have that pattern of going into extremes. I'll work out six, seven days a week, do all the things: the sauna, the breathwork. I'll do it all, and then get displaced by the fires, maybe, and don't do it as much. Or traveling around the world coaching, and so I'm constantly catching up.
So what you're saying to me resonates, because my kids... I want to be the active dad, the husband that when we go to the event, my wife's proud of. You know, you want to be the guy that can take his shirt off. You want to be the guy that can coach basketball or baseball or whatever else it is, and play with the kids.
And I want to do that for the next 20 years, not just for the next five years or longer. And I think that's what you're talking about here, is having that mechanism.
And most people think they can do it. What I got from spending time with you in person is: I can't see my own flaws. I think my form is perfect in my own head, my body's doing it. And what I loved about you guys is, "Hey, you're good, but just tweak this just a little bit," and then all of a sudden it felt so much smoother.
And that's where, like anything, working with a professional or having that outlet... and for guys that can't come to the retreat, getting a personal trainer and they're all created differently, just be aware of that but getting somebody to watch your movements so that you can see what you're doing, so you don't get injured. Because every time I get injured, it puts me back a month to three months, and I'm starting over again.
Franz 29:35
I mean, I've had coaches in so many areas of my life. I've had business coaches and mentors, and a lot of exercise coaches that I paid $40,000–$50,000 to over many, many years. I paid so much money into it, not because I think the money's really going to do anything, it's just because it was investing in me.
I just knew, "I'm just not going to do this if I don't put a chunk of money down." I know me. I'm just too weak in certain areas of my life, and I can own it and say, "I just need to hire an expert."
And I'm not an expert in everything, but I'm an expert in movement. I'm an expert in regaining athleticism as people age, and so is John. John is a professional athlete, basically he's an Adonis.
So it's like, guys, this is accessible to people in this group. You can learn and take all this knowledge, but more importantly, it's the application of the knowledge. As you and I know, knowledge without application is kind of a waste.
I always tell people, "Don't watch my content if you're not going to do anything about it." I'd rather you not watch it. It's just an open loop in your brain that causes stress, and you're going to be pissed off at yourself, and you're going to know, "Oh, I should be doing what Franz says."
I always tell people, "Don't even watch my content if you're not willing to apply one thing that I'm going to say." I'm just going to be a man with you: don't watch the content, because you're not going to do anything with it.
So you've got to come to that moment where, "I need to focus on me." "Well, that's selfish, my wife..." No, it's not selfish! I think it's selfish if you're not taking care of your body that's selfish.
I don't think there's a woman in the world that doesn't want her husband to be faster, stronger, more mobile, have a lower resting heart rate, lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, look better naked! Like, how is that a bad thing?
Doug Holt 31:35
Not bad at all. No, it's exactly.
You know, and to your point, like when you pay, you pay attention, right? So investing financially, but also with your time and your energy. Like, guys listening to this right now are investing in their time, right, to hear what you have to say, Franz. I think it's great coming forward.
So you talked about briefly at the beginning... I mentioned the four quadrants. I really think it's a great concept that you guys teach. Let's briefly go over we don't have to go into detail, but just so men can understand like, what are the four quadrants? I guess most of them have never heard that concept.
Franz 32:09
It's just a very easy kind of framework to understand that all of your physical... like, everything you do is going to fit into one of those quadrants. There may be a little overlap, but Quadrant 1 is strength. It's pushing heavy weights, carrying, you know, a heavy box at Costco or something. Your ability to generate force and tension that is strength.
And we like to say it's one of the mother qualities, because when you're strong, you can think of being strong like being a glass. Like, if you're weak, you're like a little shot glass, right? You can't fit much in there. If you're really strong, you're like a big vase; you can put a lot more in you.
So strength makes everything better. It just does. If you're going to hire a friend to help move like a sofa or something or not hire him, but ask him for help you're not going to get your weakest friend. You're just not going to, right? You're going to get a guy you're like, "Well, this guy's capable," right?
So I think strength goes way beyond just like numbers. You're just a more useful dude. You don't need to be world-class, but you got to be strong. You got to have a strong enough grip. You got to be able to pick up something pretty heavy, pick up your kids. I just think there's no excuses. First quadrant is strength, very important.
Quadrant Number 2 is power. Power is your ability to produce force, but unlike strength, it's: how quickly can you apply it? Punching. If I'm sprinting, right, my feet are turning over fast. If I'm jumping, if I'm cutting, right... you think of even like a really good tennis player or pickleball, or like Rory McIlroy the amount of power that that guy generates. So it's speed speed and power.
To me, Quadrant 2, that is a quadrant of vitality, in the sense that people that maintain some power as they age hopefully a lot of power they don't age the same, right? They don't fall and, like, break their hip. Why? Because their feet and their hands are so connected to their nervous system that they never lose it.
The challenge with power is just how you kind of bring somebody... how you onboard somebody into power. A lot of people say, "Oh, I did it, and I hurt my hands." Well, that's because you did it in a dumb way, right? If you start off with very foundational, low-amplitude, light medicine ball throws... if you divorce yourself for 20 years from power, you don't start off at Level 10. You start up at Level 1 can be done.
I do it all the time. I have 80-year-olds out in my driveway, and we're chucking medicine balls, we're doing like skipping with sticks, like bending as we're skipping. Like, it's amazing, but again, you need a little inoculation. So power is the motor quality I think most guys don't really think about. They think of raw, "I need to run," or, "I need cardio."
Quadrant 4 is endurance. So Quadrant 2 is probably my obsession, as you can tell. I was a 100-meter sprinter in college, and I actually ran faster out of college. And it's my passion, it's my obsession. I don't expect anybody to have that same obsession, but one of my legacies is to get guys to understand... we talked about healthspan and lifespan, right?
Lifespan is just the amount of years that you live, but we've all had family members that, from like 70 to 90 or 70 to 100, they had like no quality of life. They were just unlucky enough to live another 20, 30 years in like a chair. I don't want that for anybody.
So healthspan is whatever years you live, you're fricking... like, you never decline. I want guys to just be like this at the same level until they die. That's typical, right? You saw it in our parents. We're all going to hit the iceberg, right? The Titanic's going to hit the iceberg everybody, reality. But you can hit it going like 1 knot, or you can hit it going like 100 knots. You want to coast in there, but you don't want to lose your functionality ever.
Jack LaLanne never knew a decade or a year ever of bad health and fitness. He was healthy, healthy, healthy, strong, doing one-arm push-ups. I read an article from his daughter a week before he died: he was still doing one-arm push-ups at 88 or 90, whatever he was, and then he got pneumonia and died in like three, four days. Perfect that is the way to go! But he was always a badass.
So I want guys... I want you, I want me, I want us to be freaking badasses. Like, that's healthspan. So in order to do that, you start looking at these quadrants.
Mobility, to me, that's probably the biggest one that guys ignore, right? "Oh, I have a hip..." "Oh, my neck doesn't turn..." Well, you know, they do like a couple stretches and they go play pickleball. It's like, "Ah, whatever, I jogged a lap, I'm going to go play pickup basketball."
Mobility is just the ability to control range of motion consciously like where you can move your body. But here's the thing: you got to work at it. You have to work at it.
And for me, it's the easiest quadrant to improve, but you got to do it daily seven days a week, 365 days a year. And it could literally be, you know, you've got that bum shoulder, or your right hip was injured, whatever. You just pick three to four areas. It could be a shoulder, could be hip, whatever. I usually just say shoulder, shoulder, spine, and hip, hip for most guys.
I'm like, if you just do that every day, it'll take you five minutes before you get out of bed. You could do the stuff in bed if you wanted to. You've got to get that range of motion back in your joints. Tissue around a joint is living, right? It's living tissue.
You got all sorts of tissues in your body. You know, the epithelial tissue in your arteries that's a tissue. You got muscle tissue, cardiac tissue. Got all these tissues. Well, the tissue in your joints is just as active. It's alive; it's a biological system.
When you start going to end-ranges, not only do you teach your nervous system that, "Oh, I have range there," it starts connecting like a skill, but then 60 to 90 days, what have you done? All those cells that are dead and there's just no WD-40 in there, they start rebuilding, and people say, "Dude, my shoulder range of motion is like so much better!" You've been doing this for 90 days, Doug like, of course you're going to get better!
So what I want to do... what we will do at the workshop is, on Day 1, we're going to assess everybody. So everybody's going to get a roadmap: "Hey, we looked at your neck..." We're all going to do it together: look at your shoulders, your hips, your spine. We're going to be objective about it it is what it is, right? It's not subjective: "Oh, you can't touch your toes. Cool, right?"
But then we're going to give you the tools on how to unlock that. It's not as hard as people think. People just don't... they just don't ever do it, and they don't have any method in place to say, "Okay, now I know what I need to work on to restore range of motion in my shoulder, which I haven't used in 15 years, or my big toe's been frozen since soccer, right? I had turf toe and it has never moved ever since."
You have to attack mobility in an intelligent way, but that to me is freedom. When you can move and you can turn in your car... like, if you turn in your car and you're like, "Oh God, my neck!" or you're reaching back to stop a fight with your kids, right? They're punching each other, and you're like, "Hey!" A lot of guys can't do that they just can't turn.
So anyway, those are the four quadrants:
You need to work on all of them, you just don't need to work on all of them at the same time. It's not like 25% power no, no, no, no, no. It's not about equal. It's about: you're going to work your dominant pattern. Like, if you're a strength guy, I'm not going to get you off of strength, but I'm going to bring up endurance, or power, or mobility, and then your body's more balanced, and then your health is better. Your joints are better.
If you walk around in less pain, you cannot tell me that's not going to help your bloodwork, right? Your immune system, like even your cortisol and your stress hormones. I mean, if you can reduce some of that pain just because you're moving better and you've got the tissue around the joints healthier, it's just one less obnoxious stress in your life that you don't have to deal with. But you got to do the work you got to do the work!
Here is the transcript with fillers removed, sentence structures strictly preserved, punctuation/capitalization corrected, and paragraph breaks added where helpful:
Doug Holt 41:16
100%. Like anything in life, and that's what I love.
And I was just talking to a guy, gosh, two days ago, Franz. Ex-athlete, had a health... kind of has a health issue, and he turned to me and said, "Doug, you just don't understand. When you lose your health which happens to a lot of men just gradually over time, you know it's like, 'I can't defend myself when I'm going for a walk, I'm wobbly, I'm scared.'" And he's in a state of fear.
Now, his is a medical condition that brought him there, but so many men listening to this have just gradually gotten into that condition by sitting in their CEO or executive chair all day and over time have gradually become less mobile, less strong, less powerful. Maybe they're watching the aesthetics, but performance in the bedroom goes down, too. Erectile dysfunction starts to happen because blood flow decreases. You don't have the stamina to actually engage in probably one of the activities you enjoy most, right?
And so there's so many benefits that come through this, Franz, and that's why I'm so excited to have you and John as part of the Academy leading the health and fitness courses, and really just leading the men going through that and the calls that you guys are on guiding these guys through each and every week as they go through all four sections.
So for men that are interested... so guys, listen to me. If you, like me, listen to Franz and you're pumped up and you want to go do some sprints and run...
Franz 42:51
Hey, don't do sprints right now! Maybe do skipping. Start with skipping! Start with skipping!
Doug Holt 42:55
Just whatever it may be. You're just pumped up and you're ready to go for it. I am, too.
The event... the arrival date is September 17th, I believe, and the actual workshop will be 18th, 19th, departure on the 20th. Information will be in the Powerful Man app in that community.
If you're listening to this, we got a lot of men that listen to this that aren't in the community. If you want to get in, we do have a free section of the community where we provide information you can get in there. The best way to probably do that would be to email vip@thepowerfulman.com. That's vip@thepowerfulman.com. Just let them know that you want to get into the free part of the community.
And we have... I think there's 100 different spaces in the community, and they're restricted at different levels different courses, different access levels, different interests that men have for privacy and for the coaching. We have a lot of intimate coaching that goes on, as you can imagine. And guys, great men like Franz are in the community as well.
But that's where you want to go, and you'll get the information now. If you're in the community and you're a member of one of our programs, you want to jump on this right away. This is going to fill, and it's going to fill very, very fast.
And guys like Franz, guys like John these are real, legitimate experts. Not just guys that look good, because they do; not just guys that perform well, because they do that, too; but they have a long track record of getting that same performance from other people, and that's what I look for, right? If I'm going to a gym and I'm hiring a trainer, I don't necessarily need the best-looking guy I need the guy that's made other people get to where they want to go and get results.
100%, and that is the key. And it's a key, honestly, Franz, I know you've been in this industry a long time, people miss that, right? They think, "Oh, Fred or Susie, they look great, they can help me." Well, Fred and Susie may have great genetics, they may be on drugs... there's all kinds of things that Fred and Susie could be doing. But you want the person that's got a track record, who's got years under the belt.
We talk about with our programs, we've been around for 10 years, Franz. We've helped thousands of men. So you want a proven track record for somebody, and a man like Franz and John who will be there as well leading the charge are the guys that you want to go through.
Now, if you can't get to the event, guys, go do something. Listen to what Franz is saying: do something in those four quadrants. And what I get from you, Franz, and it's a reminder: the little things, the exercise snacks, the movement snacks the five minutes here, five minutes there it really... if you're not doing it (and I'm speaking to myself right now, guys, because I haven't been doing it), you're just making an excuse. There really is no reason not to.
Franz, man, thanks so much for all that you do, your passion, everything you bring through. Guys, we'll leave it in the show notes, too. Franz does have a social media presence. He is an influencer, if you will, but he's not the glorified influencer he's actually showing people real movement patterns that you can do in your backyard.
And I am one of the guys that follows Franz online, and you deliver awesome content. There's no fluff, it's straight information from a man that's been doing this... gosh, Franz, you've been doing this for 20 years now, maybe?
Franz 46:22
I started in '96. So I got my ACE Personal Training Certification... I was in my last year at Arizona State University, and I was like, "You know what? I had just finished track, you know, running college track." I said, "This is awesome. I should become a trainer. I love this sports stuff." So it's been 30 years as of this July.
Doug Holt 46:48
So 30 years! It's like when I look for... I always use this analogy: a cardiologist... I had a heart scan recently. I don't want the guy that just got out of medical school, right? I want the guy that's been in the trenches for a while, and has been doing it.
And as a recovering strength coach myself, I jokingly say you can tell that there's just different levels to the game in every industry. So guys listening to this, just like your industry, you probably know it better than the guy down the street. It's the same thing here.
So, Franz, thanks for all you're doing for the community. I know you got a mission to give back and really help people, and it just shows, man. So, thank you.
Franz 47:27
My pleasure, Doug. I'm pumped to be on board.
Doug Holt 47:30
Guys, as I always say at the end of these: in the moment of insight, take massive action!
I have a call that I'm going to be doing after this, and I'm literally going to have that guy in my ears while I'm working out, because I'm going to do the same thing. Franz has inspired me, gave me some insight, so I'm going to take massive action.
I want to know what you're going to do. Don't go from one podcast to another I call that educational masturbation. It's just worthless for you. I used to do it all the time, but when you have insight or you have motivation, take action immediately. And that's just going to beget more action, more results, and not only will you feel better, but your family will feel better, and they'll be safer with that.
See you next time, guys, on The TPM Show.