Cathy Meehan: Maybe you’re just getting started training, or maybe you’ve been training and working out for quite some time. Well, it turns out there’s definitely different levels of training. So today’s episode on the Meehan Mission podcast, we’re going to talk with Eric Barber with Barberic Training, and he’s going to help walk us through the different levels, because we want to make sure that we’re avoiding injuries.
Cathy Meehan: We’re staying motivated, and we’re doing what our body’s meant to do. So let’s welcome to the show where he talks about the levels of training for adults, and also his take on levels of training for kids. So sit back, take some notes, share with your friends and let’s get started.
Cathy Meehan: Welcome to another episode of the Meehan Mission podcast. And as you see, I have Eric Barber, our favorite online trainer. Hey, Eric.
Eric Barber: All right. How are you?
Cathy Meehan: Great. So I brought Eric on today because I know a lot of us may be jumping back into training, but there’s also some of you that you might already be advanced or you might be intermediate. And I just wanted Eric to help explain the differences in those levels, because I know some people that are going back to the beginning, maybe they haven’t worked out in a while.
Cathy Meehan: Maybe you’re actually going to be a beginner, even though at one point in time, maybe ten years ago, you were advanced. So, Eric, if you can help walk us through those differences and how, you know, we can navigate our workout plans using those levels.
Eric Barber: I love it. This is right up my alley. Great question. To me, in my brain, everything breaks down to, beginner, intermediate, advanced, and then elite. Okay. I don’t really pay attention with anything. Elite. I’m not training somebody to be a better swimmer or to be, a better basketball player. You know, that extra 10% that professionals need.
Eric Barber: That’s not what 99% of personal trainers and all of us out there doing. We’re more geared towards helping people get fitter, stronger, faster, that kind of thing. So elite training needs to go to the specialists. So that leaves us with beginner, intermediate and advanced. And I think at 56 years old, I think that anybody who has taken a long break from working out should be humble and put themselves right back at a beginner level, even if it’s only for a month.
Eric Barber: Because if if a person builds consistency when the workouts are easy, right? And at a beginner level, they’re going to want to keep going to the gym and you want to leave the gym wanting just a little bit more, especially in the beginning. That’s the that’s one of my secrets. Every time I’ll take a break from working out, let’s say it’s, let’s say life happens.
Eric Barber: And, you know, it’s been two months since I worked out on a regular basis. And I know that if I try to go in and do what I normally do, I’m going to get busted up right? So I need to be humble. And I don’t necessarily take myself down to a beginner’s level, but I definitely go from advanced down to intermediate.
Eric Barber: So the intermediate person who has spent time in the gym years in the gym, but they’ve had months or even years off, they need to go back to a beginner’s level. Just be humble. Even if it’s just for one month. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about on this one. So, if you if you do that and you make consistency, the, the, the main point rather than the intensity or anything like that, you’re going to find yourself getting into the gym on the second month and the third month and the fourth, and then it becomes habit and then you’re back into your, your, your shape again or better.
Eric Barber: Yeah, I know, I.
Cathy Meehan: Know for me, because I had to go back to beginner because it had been years since I had worked out. And really what you taught me was that consistency. Number one, I needed to kind of like reevaluate my daily lifestyle and how I was going to fit in, you know, going to the gym and doing all those things that it was that consistency and, you know, changing my schedule a little bit.
Cathy Meehan: And you’re right, I, I worked out just enough that I wasn’t so sore that I didn’t.
Eric Barber: Right.
Cathy Meehan: Despise going to the gym.
Eric Barber: That’s right.
Cathy Meehan: That I actually wanted to go to the gym. It made a huge, huge difference. I see probably a lot of people fail in that area if they, you know, they wake up and they can’t move, then they have no motivation. They don’t want to go to the gym.
Eric Barber: I see that more often than not, I see people go in there, hit it hard for a week or 2 or 3, and then they’re just like, holy moly, you know? And I just can’t. You know what I mean? That’s that’s not the right way to go about it. As we get into our 40s, 50s, 60s, when you’re young, who cares?
Eric Barber: You’re bulletproof. You can, you know.
Cathy Meehan: Bounce right.
Eric Barber: Back. Yeah. You can beat yourself up and bounce right back. But yeah, as we get older, we get more responsibilities. We’ve got, you know, previous injuries that. You know what I mean? Whatever medical conditions, it’s you have to be smarter now as you have to train smarter than, than ever before as you get older. So yeah.
Cathy Meehan: And I would think in addition to a workout plan, you know, you also have to make sure that you are eating better or cleaner. Make sure that you’re sleeping so that your body can recover. I mean, there are so many things that you also need to do to incorporate just besides the exercise. So you know, that beginner level, it’s really like it’s a opening up, a whole new world of workout nutrition and, just healthy lifestyles, which I think is really important.
Cathy Meehan: I mean, and the I think the better your start, the more likelihood you are going to move on to advanced and, you know, more, more difficult things and stuff like that.
Eric Barber: That’s what I try to do with my clients. I try to I try to give them a first month that is so easy to do that at about the two week mark, they’re asking me what happened. Just yesterday I got a new client that was like, should I, should I be doing more? And I’m like, nope, not yet.
Eric Barber: No. Trust me. Yeah. And, you know, this happens over and over and over again so that by the time month number two comes around, I increase the volume, I increase the workouts, I increase everything across the board because at that time, they’ve taken the time to build the right foundation or or rebuild the right foundation. Right. I do it my way.
Eric Barber: We don’t leave any stone unturned. I make sure that they train every single one of the major muscle groups in the human body. You know, chest, back, shoulders, biceps, triceps, quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, lower back and abs.
Cathy Meehan: Other cardio.
Eric Barber: Yeah. And cardio.
Cathy Meehan: So you know.
Eric Barber: What? What I’m looking for in that first month is for them to build consistency, not intensity. And I’m looking we are actively looking for any weak points. And they pop up as soon as people start training with a well-rounded workout program, you’re like, oh, I didn’t realize that one body part is so weak for most people. It’s lower back, and anytime people start training their calves on purpose, their calves just get smoked in the first week.
Eric Barber: But the calves are a very strong, dense muscle group and they catch up really quick. They get strong really quick. But lower back is a big issue. Most people overtrain the front side, their abs, and completely neglect their lower back muscles. So if you think of it as links on a chain they’re super strengthening.
Eric Barber: One part of the one link and just completely neglecting another. And when it comes to your core that’s not a good idea. So yeah I try to give a well-rounded, well balanced approach to a person’s first month every month really. But but just yeah, I scale everything back. What you said about nutrition and sleep. Totally true. But you kind of have to separate them.
Eric Barber: Each one is important in and of itself. Like, like you can go to the gym and you can do everything right. You can start slow, build up over time. The second month, increase everything, increase everything. By the third month. Now you’re back in your groove. You are getting fit. You are getting strong. The human body will do that.
Eric Barber: But if you’re eating like a clown, sorry.
Cathy Meehan: If you’re no, that’s okay, because there are a lot of people that that don’t. They don’t realize. So here’s the deal. Let’s let’s talk this.
Eric Barber: I’m working on my you know, I grew up in the gym.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. No that’s okay.
Eric Barber: So a lot that’s what you get with me. You get a yeah. But if you.
Cathy Meehan: Eat it’s the real deal. But a lot of people don’t realize that most the majority of stuff on the shelf at the grocery store is crap. I mean, it really is. It’s got dyes and glyphosate and chemicals that you can’t pronounce, and, and that’s very key for anybody starting out on a health journey to really just start reading the food labels.
Eric Barber: Yeah. You know, that’s a whole different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I could spend hours to start. Yeah. If you want to talk about that you can.
Cathy Meehan: Give another topic on that. But that’s very important for people to carry. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Barber: So going back to my point, you can train and do everything right and still be eating completely off the rails. Completely wrong. You’ll still get stronger and fitter, thank God. Right. Thank God that the human body will adapt to physical stimuli. But you could be doing so, so, so much better if you include a nutrition approach, a nutrition plan, but but but to keep it on the subject of beginner, intermediate and advanced, we’re talking just training programs only, you know, when we get into nutrition, that’s a whole.
Eric Barber: But you’re right. I mean, yeah, it’s the American diet. The American, the American way of life is set up to make us fail where it is.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Eric Barber: And it’s so sad that we have to pay extra for healthy food, you know? Yeah. For healthy, all food we have to eat, we’re getting charged extra for organic and, you know, grass fed and free-range. It’s just so sad that, you know, we have to, you know, food stamps are just good for for foods that are chemical laden, addictive, you know.
Eric Barber: So yeah, it’s well yeah.
Cathy Meehan: They are changing. They are changing that state wide for what is allowable with food stamps. I know in the state of Oklahoma. Yeah. For some of those places they’ve removed food dyes. And so they, they’re, they’re putting in regulations to make them more healthy, which is getting.
Eric Barber: What.
Cathy Meehan: It’s going to take.
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: It’s going to take me forward.
Eric Barber: Yeah. So yeah. So that’s I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Cathy Meehan: Well I was you can say finish up that and then let’s move up to you. So we know what like beginner is. And then when, when can I call myself advanced or you know what’s that quick.
Eric Barber: So on the on the subject just a to wrap a bow on that beginner idea. Going to the gym and doing three sets on everything is plenty. So if you choose to do three sets of 12, I recommend doing like a half pyramid of like three sets of 15, 12 and ten and you progressively add a little bit more weight.
Eric Barber: If I were to go to the gym as a beginner and just do three sets across, three sets of 12 across the board, I would kind of get bored with that a little bit. I don’t know if that’s just me, but I like the idea of starting out with a warm weight or a light weight to kind of warm up and kind of wake the muscles up, wake up the tendons, ligaments, add a little bit more weight than add a little bit more weight on top of that.
Eric Barber: So 15, 12, ten is just a beautiful rep range. Keep it simple. Three sets of everything hit one major muscle group or one major body part per, per workout, you know? So if you’re doing upper body, you would do like one for chest, one for your back, one for shoulders, one for biceps, one for triceps. You don’t really have to worry about the forearms.
Eric Barber: They get a lot of work with all the gripping and that kind of thing. You can add it in, but it’s a little bit. It’s a little bit more advanced, you know, it’s a little bit more intermediate, I think when you start getting into that. So when you get into intermediate training, that’s when you want to start bumping everything up to like four sets, you know, and increasing the volume that way, like a 15, 12, ten, eight.
Eric Barber: That heavy set of eight is good for everyone, even elderly. You know, all kinds of research is coming out now that that elderly people would do very well with strength training even at that age. And, and most of their issues are strength issues. Like they can’t stand up out of a chair. Yes, they have cancer. Yes, they have Alzheimer’s.
Eric Barber: Yes, they have all these other different things going on. But strength wise they’re so weak and they do studies on them and they’re finding out, wow, these guys are really responding well to strength training. And it’s like, yeah, man, it’s the human body. You know, we do. Well, God made us to push and to pull into, you know.
Eric Barber: Right. Like that. That is what the human body is meant to do. It’s meant to work.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Eric Barber: So like I heard Greg Glassman say one time that every single person is an athlete, and he got a lot of flack from that. A lot of people are like, that’s not true. You know, you know, some sedentary, overweight person. He goes, anybody that moves their body is technically an athlete. If you lift your arms over your head, that is an athletic movement.
Eric Barber: And if you’re overweight, if you’re severely overweight, they’re lifting a lot heavier of an arm than you are. If you’re 150 pounds and they’re 350. So, so movement is what makes a person athletic. We should all kind of look at each other or look at people, look at everyone. Consider ourselves athletes. Now maybe we’re very, very, very out of shape athletes.
Eric Barber: Maybe we’re very you and I. Just when he said that, I was like, wow, that’s very interesting. You know what an interesting approach the human movement is athleticism.
Cathy Meehan: Right? Yeah. I mean, I mean, and that really should go to let everybody know that no matter what your body shape, size, your weight or whatever it is, you have the potential to be leaner, fitter, stronger. But, you know, it’s that it’s part of that mindset that you’ve got to get through to you. Which, you know, again, maybe making sure that when you’re starting into any type of a nutrition or a health or fitness program, that you start easy, go low, go slow so you don’t get discouraged and give up.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. And and and it also takes patience, you know, really it takes so much patience to actually start seeing those results. I mean, you should see results in a few weeks. But, you know, we, we want to play for real nowadays.
Eric Barber: That’s a, that’s another whole podcast right there. I swear, like we as a society we want everything now. Everything if we get hungry we just get fast food like everything is designed for speed now. So that we can get more hours in our day and stuff like that. And it’s just like wow man we are you know and it’s true.
Eric Barber: Like I need things to work fast. Do I need a fast internet. I need you know I need shorter trips to the grocery store rather than, you know, I get it shorter trips to the gym. Like I want my gyms within a 12 minute drive. I don’t want to drive 20 minutes to go to the gym, so you know what I mean?
Eric Barber: Like, yeah, I get it. But at the same time, I don’t, I don’t know, I think we’re losing.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, well I’m going to give everybody a challenge. And that challenge is to and it’s the benefit is that it’s going to increase your patience. Ditch your microwave. Because if you ditch your microwave, number one, you are saving the nutrients in your food by not using the microwave. And then to warm things up, guess what you have to do?
Cathy Meehan: You either have to put it in the oven, you have to put it in a cast iron skillet, or you have to boil your water on top of the stove. So, that’s the challenge to build patience, increase your nutrition, you gotta ditch your microwave.
Eric Barber: So I, you know, I’m, I’m on board with this whole microplastic thing. I saw I saw Paul Saladino. Paul Saladino, is this, Gosh, I guess he’s a doctor who’s just switched everything over to his whole platform is now nutrition. Okay? And he, he took a knife, like a like a kitchen knife to one of these plastic cutting boards, and he said, oh, yeah.
Eric Barber: Like this right here. You know. And then he turned it on its side. And he had all the shavings fall on to a white piece of paper and he goes, these, these microplastics will stay in your system forever. We can’t digest the.
Cathy Meehan: Blood brain barrier. There’s people that literally.
Eric Barber: Go, is this is leading to autism? This is leading to all kinds of stuff. Yeah. I don’t know if it was autism.
Cathy Meehan: Get rid of your plastic cutting board.
Eric Barber: Yeah. So I’m, you know, so I switched over to cast iron cookware. I’ve switched. I threw out all of my plastic spatulas, and I now use wood, you know, that kind of thing. So I grew up on microwaves, microwaving everything, healthy foods, but still microwaves. But, yeah, you know, instinctively, now that I’m thinking about this plastic thing lately, I’ve been like, man, is that microwave safe?
Eric Barber: You know, like I’m, you know, you start questioning the microwave safe. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying is, is, you know, I’m starting that now. I’m questioning everything that I used to call normal.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, well.
Eric Barber: I’m a pretty healthy, foil-hat guy, you know.
Cathy Meehan: Hat society. You know?
Eric Barber: Where.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, where everything that we have predicted or talked about is coming true. But, yeah, the microwaves, they are. So the EMF that comes off of a microwave, which I’ve got a couple of podcasts on EMF with some experts, but, I remember when we got our microwave and I was little and we got the popcorn that would the bag would get bigger.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. And I would just sit there with my face in the microwave.
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Watching that, you know, for like three and a half, 4.5 minutes, just, Anyway, don’t do it. Moms and dads don’t let your kids. put their face in the microwave.
Eric Barber: Yeah, I’d like to. I’d like to do some research on that. I. I didn’t know that instinctively. Lately, I’ve been knowing that it’s true, but I haven’t been part of that whole loop. Yeah. So these other some of my episodes.
Cathy Meehan: The Meehan Mission podcast, I actually have, I believe, two episodes on EMF with two different experts. So you can find some information there. So okay, so back to training beginner and intermediate and advanced I think we kind of skipped intermediate a little bit.
Eric Barber: But we, we we briefed over intermediate but we haven’t gotten to advanced yet. So yeah. Just to wrap up intermediate training, I like to take people from strength training three times a week as a beginner to bumping it up to strength training four times a week in that second month. At that stage, scale back a little bit of the cardio and increase the strength training.
Eric Barber: A more muscular body burns more body fat than a less muscular body. So, if cardio for fat loss is three times a week, it’s not going to be as effective. I don’t think, from all my years of watching people do this as effective as strength training to keep your body fat levels low because of the extra muscle that you put on.
Eric Barber: Now there’s an argument. If you start giving up cardio, you’re going to lose some your your fitness. Yeah, yeah. Cardio means heart. Cardiovascular cardiopulmonary. That’s our heart muscle. Now you can manipulate cardio to tap into your fat stores, or you can manipulate your cardio to tap into your heart training stores, which is fitness, right? So you want to be careful not to cut cardio completely out and just be, you know, I meet a lot of meatheads and they they’re super strong.
Eric Barber: They can run through a house, they can run through a wall, but they wouldn’t be able to go up a couple flights of stairs without gas. Right. You’ve got to still do your cardio for the heart. Strengthening the heart training. Okay. But, I also meet a lot of people on the flip side of that coin that are still married to that idea that you have to do a lot of cardio to burn body fat.
Eric Barber: That’s not a great way you can tackle your nutrition and do a way better job with the other 23 hours of your day, with what you’re putting in your mouth, versus going from a 30 minute session on cardio to 40 minutes. You know what I mean? Like cardio for fat loss should be like the icing on the cake.
Eric Barber: Horrible. Yeah. It should be like last. It should be like a finisher idea, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, but for for beginners, it’s great. We teach. I teach them how to put their heart in a fat burning zone. They do that three times a week. They do strength training three times a week. But for intermediate, I enjoy.
Eric Barber: I recommend having people bump up to four times a week of strength training with that extra fourth set. So 15, 12, ten, eight. And at that point, by the second month, people are feeling great. I get these texts I can show you text on my phone right now from from Holly, who I think you know. Yes. And Holly lets me know whenever she.
Eric Barber: Yeah. Thank you for that recommendation.
Cathy Meehan: Holly’s group.
Eric Barber: Very welcome. Holly sends me texts of how happy she is after her workouts.
Cathy Meehan: Great, great.
Eric Barber: She’s awesome.
Cathy Meehan: I mean, it releases dopamine. I mean, yeah, the. Yeah, the benefits of working out. And, you know, I’m just I’m just going to go back to I mean, you literally have changed my life. I was so stressed out and I was I was eating clean, but I wasn’t eating clean enough. And, you know, I still had some things in my diet that I needed to get rid of.
Cathy Meehan: And I just, I was like, I’m too busy to work out. I can’t do that, you know? And then I’ve, I mean, I have flipped that like you wouldn’t believe. And now I tell everybody, I’m like, you need to go to the gym. I’m like, you got to go to the gym. It you have more energy cognitively, everything’s brighter.
Cathy Meehan: And it’s just the amount of energy that I’ll take. My negative thing is the fact that I have to buy all new jeans, and that is the big negative.
Eric Barber: I feel so sorry for you.
Cathy Meehan: That is my negative problem. I know it’s like.
Cathy Meehan: Anyway, but other other than that I, I can’t recommend enough to people to just do it.
Eric Barber: Just what a what a what a small price to pay. What a what a life hack that is. Yeah. One hour of your day to feel like a completely different person three months later, right?
Cathy Meehan: Right.
Eric Barber: Six months later, you’re like, I can’t believe I used to like that. Used to be my norm.
Cathy Meehan: Right?
Eric Barber: Right. Yeah. I’ve been training for so long now, I don’t know what it’s like to be out of shape, you know?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. And I hope that I’m that same way.
Eric Barber: Yeah. When people tell me their stories, I try to understand, but I kind of don’t, I, I really don’t know what it’s like now. I do because I listen to people’s stories and I remember and I, I take notes. So I do understand, but I don’t personally know what it feels like to be super overweight or super, you know, you know, on all kinds of meds and that kind of thing, you know, though, right.
Eric Barber: What a small price to pay.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, it really is.
Eric Barber: A couple hours. There’s 168 hours in a week. And if you give up five hours a week, you know, 3 to 5 hours a while, you got to include drive time and stuff like that. So 3 to 5, 3 to 7 hours a week out of 168. Yeah, yeah. What a small price to pay to feel amazing. You know what I mean?
Eric Barber: Yeah. And I mean, I live it like everyone who knows me, anybody who’s been a friend of mine for decades. Like, I’m not making this up. This is how I live my life, you know what I mean? I just this is my platform. I just preach health and fitness, you know? Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: And and that’s good. I mean, that’s your purpose. That is your purpose. And with it and so and so that’s good.
Eric Barber: When we start getting up into advanced training. Okay. I, I’m really paying attention to the client at that point. Okay? They’ve done the boring stuff. They’ve done the hard work the first two months now we entered into the third month. So I have a 12 week challenge, right, as you know, and the first, the first four weeks.
Eric Barber: Pretty simple. Pretty easy there. Like, I didn’t, you know. Is this it? Yeah. And the weight is falling off and like, I don’t understand how the weight is falling off. And I have all this energy and I don’t even feel like I’m really doing anything. That’s because we’re building. We’re we’re purposefully building a strong platform. Right. The second month we ramp everything up a little bit and, and now they’re kind of hitting their stride.
Eric Barber: Now they’re a gym goer. They’re not a gym rat. They’re just a gym-goer, they’re working out.
Cathy Meehan: So. So what is a gym rat, Real quickly, because I’ve seen that term and I knew enough to not know what is a gym rat.
Eric Barber: It’s a it’s a derogatory. Usually it’s a derogatory term. Okay. Although I do hear people refer to themselves as gym rats. It’s people who basically live at the gym.
Cathy Meehan: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I recognize some of them up at the gym.
Eric Barber: Then I’m. Yeah, I, I’ve been at the gym since 1980, probably 1988. I have been a regular gym-goer since 1988. Okay. But I don’t consider myself a gym rat. I go to the gym, I workout and I get out. Yeah. What bugs the crap. Well, okay. A gym rat is somebody that I go in there, you know, let’s say I want to workout at five in the morning and, you know, and I notice this, this guy come in at 6:00 and he’s not really working out much.
Eric Barber: He’ll do a couple of pump sets here and there. Yeah. And then, you know, maybe the next day I go in at noon and the guy’s in there and I’m like, That’s weird. Like he trained in the morning yesterday and now he’s training at the same time as me around noon. Yeah. And then the next day I go in the gym, it’s 5:00 am and the Joker’s in there as well.
Cathy Meehan: And he’s still in there.
Eric Barber: Yeah, yeah. And you’re like, dude, you’re living at the gym. Like you literally walk around like it’s so short, like it’s. Yeah, you know, and that that’s that’s what that term means. It’s okay. These guys that live there, they’re not trained. Like, even when I was a personal trainer, right in the gym, it’s like working for a gym.
Eric Barber: And I was in there anywhere from 8 to 12 hours a day, right. I still wouldn’t consider myself a gym rat. I would work my I would coach my clients, I would get my workout in, I’d go get something healthy to eat, I’d go back to coaching my clients and then I’m out of the gym, like.
Cathy Meehan: And then you’re out.
Eric Barber: Yeah. Yeah. So so yeah. So advanced training is if the person is doing things right, they’re following it. They’re getting the kind of results that we want. I check in that with them and I’m like, hey are you ready. Are you ready to are you ready to start hitting a hard now. And they’re like yeah I’m ready.
Eric Barber: And that’s when we bump everything up. Five sets. You know we’ll do 1512, ten eight and then maybe a burner set of 15 reps. Just a scorched the muscle before moving on to the next. A lot of times if it’s a dude, instead of doing a burner set, maybe he has different goals 15, 12, ten, eight and then a heavy set of six.
Eric Barber: But I trust them with that heavy set of six because they put in the time, their joints, their tendons, everything. You know, as older people, we you can’t just throw people into heavy sets like that. You’ve got to build up. And we’ve taken the time to build that platform, you know. So some of that, some of the guys like that heavy set of six, but most, most people aren’t looking to get huge.
Eric Barber: They just want to get lean and fit.
Cathy Meehan: And yeah, I do that last set, 15 at a lighter weight and.
Eric Barber: Then lighter weight. Yeah, like a burnout set. So, after they’ve gone through that third month, which I consider, intermediate advanced, right. I then give my clients a chance to continue working with me for another 12 weeks, another three months. And those crazy enough to do that, I take them through what I consider, you know, advanced training.
Eric Barber: So that’s when I’m introducing them to super sets and drop sets and, you know, sets of 20 ones and things like that. Just just more way more advanced than what you see most people going to the gym and doing, you know, a lot of people say, oh, yeah, I do super sets. And then I watch them train and I’m like, that’s not a superset.
Eric Barber: That’s a superset is when you you do a set, you take it to exhaustion and then you immediately pick up a barbell or a dumbbell or a new extra, a new cable, and you immediately move into the next exercise and start moving. Just doing two exercises kind of back to back is not really a superset. It’s there’s no rest.
Eric Barber: You are smoking. Yeah. At that point. And you know, obviously it’s much easier to do a chest and back superset because let’s say you smoke your chest and then you immediately set that bar down or whatever, and then move to a like a lat pull down or at that. And after a row with no rest and now you’re now you’re moving into your back muscles which are fresh and strong.
Eric Barber: They’ve had rest. Yeah. But super sets where you’re doing chest and chest or back and back with no rest. I mean, it’s just it’s just brutal. So that’s where I live. I love that kind of training.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Well, that’s a little intense for me. I like to do the different muscle groups in my superset. So I would do a chest and then I would do back and.
Eric Barber: Then yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Back to chest. But so anyway I’m getting there.
Eric Barber: I’m so advanced training is fun. It’s not for everybody. Most people don’t need that. Most people can live in that intermediate to a little bit of play in the advanced. You know what?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, I think that’s where I live I live there, yeah. Yeah. I’m taught it’s addictive like you wouldn’t believe. And it’s just.
Eric Barber: Now when you start getting into when you start getting really good at advanced, right, you’re out of the beginner, you’re out of the intermediate. And now you’re, you’re literally in the best shape of your life. And then somebody challenges you, hey, we should do a 5K run. And you’re like, oh man, I haven’t done that in forever. Or we should do a polar plunge.
Eric Barber: You know where you do a 5K run, then jump into a a cold pool. You know what I mean? Swim across it or or let’s do one of those survival races. What do you call them, like Spartan.
Cathy Meehan: Like a mud run type.
Eric Barber: Mud run, a Spartan.
Cathy Meehan: You say yes or no. Do those or do not do that.
Eric Barber: Yeah, yeah. I’m saying that when you’re training, when you’re in your best shape, even in your 40s, 50s your body is so used to these controlled beat down workouts that you can go do fun stuff like that and not get jacked up and not get hurt, not blow out your knee and need a full knee replacement, you know?
Eric Barber: Yeah, because you decided to start to bypass the beginning and the intermediate stage and jump right into something hardcore because a buddy of yours challenged you to it at work. Like people, they can do the crazy, awesome extreme things in their 40s, 50s, 60s. You just have to do it right. You have to.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Do it.
Eric Barber: Yeah. Build that foundation and build up to it, you know? Absolutely. Like I could I could enter an Olympic weightlifting competition next weekend if I wanted to, you know what I mean? Like, I train, I still train in all these different ways. I could enter a powerlifting competition. Maybe I’m not going to lift a ton of weight. And either one of those events, you know, you’re prepared.
Eric Barber: Yeah. I, like I go part of my training is once in a while, I’ll just challenge my body to go out to. We have this beautiful. It’s called the Whitewater Center here in Charlotte. And, man, it’s just like my Hoffman. I just love it out there. It’s. It’s got trail running, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, of course.
Eric Barber: Oh, nice. Rock climbing. It’s got all high element obstacle courses, low element where you don’t need to be roped in. You can just be out there in the woods doing them by yourself. So I go out there and I challenge my 56 year old body to being 30ft up in the air, doing these high element, you know, things roped in and you know what I mean?
Eric Barber: Or I’ll do these low element things. I’ve got some videos on my Instagram of me doing that. Because, hey, what if what if I ever do want to want to do a Spartan Race someday? I don’t want to be so out of shape from from that kind of thing. So I don’t know, I have I don’t know if you can tell, but I have fun with my fitness.
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: No. And you know what? That is so important. And you talk about, like, even going to the gym because I know that, I’m very fortunate that at my gym, my daughter’s also a trainer. So, when I go to the gym, I get to see people that I know, and and, you know, it, it’s kind of like a gym rule that when you’re there, you don’t go there to talk.
Cathy Meehan: You go there to workout. And you might, like, talk briefly to people, but it’s.
Eric Barber: So hard to find it. Sure, sure.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. It’s not a, it’s not a conversation place, you know, you go, you work, you respect everybody’s time, and then, you know, you can hang out when you guys are all done work now. So that’s really kind of how it goes.
Eric Barber: You know, on that note, real quick I will. You know, I’ve been in the gym business for a long time. And I will say that the gyms of the late 80s and early to mid 90s did have more of a meat market feel to them. They really did. There wasn’t a lot of comparatively, there wasn’t as many people going to gyms back then as there are now.
Eric Barber: Right. Like now.
Cathy Meehan: So many gyms.
Eric Barber: And gyms are always packed nowadays, whereas, you know, back so so there was more of a meat market. We were outliers, we were different. We we definitely looked different than the average. You know, people in the public back then. But now health and fitness and looking good. And people are, you know, now it’s much more common and you see a lot more people in the gym.
Eric Barber: So, I don’t pick up on the meat market vibe that I picked up on that I, I noticed and wasn’t back in the early 90s. I see people with their headphones on and their hats down low, and a lot of times they’re self-absorbed. Maybe they’re filming themselves, or they might chat with somebody, or somebody will come up and try to talk to them, and they’ll take out their earbud and I’ll be like, yeah, yeah, it’ll be polite, they’ll be nice.
Eric Barber: But, you know, most people nowadays stick to themselves in the gym. Yeah. And I kind of like that I’m. Yeah I walk into the gym, I never talk to anybody and I’m a talker like I can talk, you know what I mean. I am a personable dude. But when I go to the gym I don’t, I don’t from the time I walk in at the time I leave, I rarely say anything to anybody unless it’s like, hey, how many more sets do you have?
Eric Barber: Do you mind if I work in with you or something like that, you know? Yeah, well.
Cathy Meehan: I think I’m a social butterfly at the gym, but I respect people’s time, so. Yeah, make up their time.
Eric Barber: Anyway.
Cathy Meehan: Hey, let’s talk real quick. I want to focus on kids. And because kids, they also have a beginning, intermediate and advanced. And I just think maybe if you could stress to the importance of the parents to monitor that so that they don’t get injuries or burnouts, just a quick what’s your take on that?
Eric Barber: Oh yeah. So we talked a little bit about this on our last podcast. And I have to be very careful when I talk about because I can really offend some parents.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Barber: Well and I don’t mean, but I don’t mean how about this is. Yeah, this is to me this is common sense and this is wisdom. And for those that want to hear it, they’ll hear it and other people will just blow me off. And that’s fine. I’m I don’t want to step into people’s parenting decisions and that kind of thing.
Eric Barber: But I believe when it comes to kids, the training should be fun. And when they’re young, everything needs to be built on fun, not on competition. And I see a lot of parents that want their kid to succeed so bad, and they want them to be this awesome baseball player or whatever. And from a very young age, they’re taught to compete hard.
Eric Barber: I don’t I personally don’t agree with that. I think, sports should be I don’t really think kids should be working out with weights and that kind of thing when they’re young, you know what I mean? That should be sports.
Cathy Meehan: No, I mean, I agree, they’re.
Eric Barber: Getting knocked down and stand back up, beat down, get back up, win here, lose there. Like just it’s all part of life and it needs to be embraced. And when you’ve got a kid that has been trying his best and he fails, you know that’s that’s a good coaching up or two. That’s a good parenting opportunity right there.
Eric Barber: You pull them onto your lap and you hold them and you kiss them and you say, hey, I’m proud of you. But daddy, I lost. It’s okay, it’s okay. What did we learn from that? And you teach that kid how to get back up and fight again. You know what I mean? As they get older, right into, so out of,
Eric Barber: I guess that would be. But, the early years, kindergarten through fourth grade ish, I guess. Yeah. After that, they get into, you know, fifth grade on up into.
Cathy Meehan: Like, middle school.
Eric Barber: Yeah. Middle school. Thank you. That’s when that’s when the parents can be like, you know, really investing in that kid and teaching them and coaching them and encouraging them to be better at this sport. Okay, absolutely. You know, when you get into high school, things are going to get a little crazy, right? Yeah. They got coaches now.
Eric Barber: They want to win. They want to. That’s different that’s all. But but I do think it should be like a beginning intermediate and advanced.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, that makes sense.
Eric Barber: When I see parents and oh here we go. When I see parents losing their cool, games because the parent wants the kid to win more than I, I don’t know, I just, I think, I think that we should cheer our kids on, you know, I don’t think that we should start fights in the stadium or.
Cathy Meehan: I.
Eric Barber: With the coach and I think that’s taking sports too far. Okay. Every once in a while, you get a gifted kid, a truly gifted kid that has a chance at becoming a pro at something, right? Yes. That one percenter, right. Every once in a while you’ve been gifted with that kid, and that’s where you get into elite training and now you’re paying for elite training.
Eric Barber: And that’s totally different. And that’s where I step out. I don’t know anything about. Yeah, that level other than what I watch my daughter go through my daughter, was a ballerina her whole life. And when she turned 18, she got accepted to the Russian Bolshoi Academy, which was pretty prestigious. Like she she was training to be a Russian dancer.
Eric Barber: They she I can’t imagine. Wow. Yeah, she she was tall and muscular and didn’t really fit in to the traditional English ballet of the petite ballerinas. But the Russians looked at her and, there was a dance school in Miami as well, if I remember correctly, that looked at her and they were like, that’s exactly what we want.
Eric Barber: And I remember Sophia was going back and forth between choosing the Miami school versus the Russian Bolshoi Academy. And I think the Russians pushed a little bit harder to have her and really wanted her. And, she just I mean, she was. So once she got into that professional field, you know, that’s when the sport takes on a different, you know.
Eric Barber: Yeah. Not as fun at that point anymore. And somebody has to really.
Cathy Meehan: More like a business.
Eric Barber: For themselves. Yeah, they have to. The athlete has to really want that. Yeah. For themselves. Because now you’re seeing the professional side of the sport. And that’s totally different than the grade school, middle school, high school. Yeah. Even college experience like pro level is.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah that’s a whole nother level. Oh yeah. And you’re right, I.
Eric Barber: Think that’s a.
Cathy Meehan: Small percentage of children actually grow up and get in into that one.
Eric Barber: So yeah, I’m very much into into kids being athletic and strong and, and healthy, eating healthy foods. And in sports. You know, my son, I think I mentioned it on my last podcast, he never took to one sport. And I was like, that’s fine. So you’re just going to do all sports? You know, nothing.
Cathy Meehan: Wrong with that.
Eric Barber: You don’t have to be the best you don’t have, but you do have to get in there. You know, we homeschooled our kids, and I didn’t want, you know, I didn’t want.
Cathy Meehan: You didn’t want weird kids.
Eric Barber: I didn’t want a weirdo, you know? So I got.
Cathy Meehan: In that lightly, sport.
Eric Barber: And to this kid, to this day, my son can pick up anything. It doesn’t matter whether it’s ping pong or golf or tennis or wrestling or jujitsu. That kid, he’s had so many different coaches across so many different sports that he, you know, my sister or my my daughter shines because of what she went through, that hard core ballet background, 12 years of it, 15 years, something like that.
Eric Barber: My son shines because of his, exposure to all these different sports and all these different coaches. So, yeah, it’s just fascinating to sit back and watch my kids as young adults and, it’s just I love it. So anyways, yeah, I’m not saying that that my way of raising kids was the only way. I just know that it really worked.
Eric Barber: I made I made fitness fun. I didn’t put a lot of pressure on them other than, you need to go to your sport. You need to show up early for practice and be one of the last ones out. You need to respect your coaches, whether they’re a coach you like or a coach you don’t like. And let’s I just tried to make fitness fun.
Eric Barber: I praise them for their wins and I consoled them in their losses. And it was okay. They turned out great.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, I and I did encourage my children to all be have some sort of extracurricular activity. And it always involved soccer or, you know, softball or wrestling or football. It always involved the sport. So which, you know, it just those life lessons that our kids learn by being coachable and just the exposure to different ways that different adults approach.
Cathy Meehan: Things are so great. But, I appreciate that insight on kids and athleticism too.
Eric Barber: And it was a great podcast. I like this one a lot. This was.
Cathy Meehan: Good. Well, thank you so much, Coach Eric. And if people want to find you, where do we find you?
Eric Barber: Dot barberictraining.com. And it’s Barberic. It’s Eric Barber backwards. So it is a misspelling Barberic Training. On there I’ve got a link to my Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube page and maybe one day I’ll have my own podcast. We’ll see. I don’t know if. Yeah, like hearing me talk or not, but, but I enjoy this kind of stuff.
Eric Barber: I can talk, I can talk fitness all day, all night long. It’s all I’ve known for 35 years. 40 years. So yeah, I love it. Thank you for for having me on here. I really enjoy it.
Cathy Meehan: You bet. Well, we’re going to keep picking your brain and you’re going to be on again next month. And so everybody will see Coach Eric again. And until then, to all of our listeners in our community, I just wish you the best. And I pray that you find the motivation to get out there, workout, focus on nutrition and focus on health.
Cathy Meehan: Because I just want to say you’re never too old and it’s never too late to start. And without help it’s really difficult to do anything else. So peace to everybody. Share this episode where you can like us and have a blessed day. Thank you so much.
