Episodes

Just after first light they heard the terrorists praying for the first time all night. Christian Craighead told the Kenyans to get ready, then started singing the Hail Mary. On "amen," four grenades came down the stairs. Part 3 of 3 — the finale. The seventh-floor standoff through the night: the iPhone charger, the fire alarm that ran for fifteen hours, the minibars. Then Iraq, 2003 — three men walking into an armoured division with no air support, the whisper behind the berm, a black dog on a ...

He's inside 14 Riverside Drive alone. His own side is planning his court-martial. Nobody sends him maps, mug shots, or orders — and 150 people are hiding in a hair salon. Part 2 of 3. Christian Craighead — former SAS — walks through the DusitD2 assault door by door: the kitchen full of wounded, the hair salon, the 12-story car park, the police commissioner who asked "Can you lead my men?", and the phone call that put him on the line with the President of Kenya. It ends on the sixth floor of the...

In January 2019, an SAS operator walked alone into a terrorist attack on the DusitD2 hotel complex in Nairobi. More than 700 people got out alive. Then his name started disappearing from the coverage. This is the first time Christian Craighead has told his story. His book, One Man In, was blocked in the UK. He fought it through the courts, lost, was denied appeal, and is publishing in America anyway. Part 1 of 3. This episode covers the morning of January 15th, the phone call, the drive, and t...

Endurance is not a pace. It's not a zone. It's not a finish line. Endurance is how long you can keep going, and almost nothing we call endurance training is training that. Three of us rode 575 miles in 24 hours on an assault bike. I was back on the bike within days. One of us took months. One of us never rode again. Same event, same night, same wattage. The outcome had nothing to do with how fast we went. In this episode: Endurance is defined by duration, not intensity. The word comes from th...

A peptide is legal or illegal depending on a court calendar, not a toxicology report. In September 2024 Eli Lilly sued the FDA over whether retatrutide contains 40 amino acids or 41 — a dispute worth seven extra years of market exclusivity, four extra years of protection from Medicare price negotiation, and the exclusive right to a molecule succeeding a $36.5 billion franchise. Nobody in that case argues the molecule is more dangerous one way or the other. Eight days before I recorded this, Li...

Style is identity made visible. Most men dress in a way that communicates nothing, because they'd rather be invisible than be a liar with their appearance. Tanner Guzy is an appearance strategist — not a stylist — and the author of The Appearance of Power. In this conversation we take the same tools he uses on corporate boardroom uniforms and point them at gym culture, martial arts, aging, the culture war, and the gap between the man you are and the man you're becoming. We cover extegrity, the...

Hybrid training is specialization pointed in two directions at once, not general physical preparation. A big deadlift next to a fast mile is impressive. It is not evidence of general capability. Two above-average expressions don't sum into a generalist, because there was never a general trait sitting underneath them to sum into. Adaptation is specific, and specificity arrives with its deficits attached — you aren't just failing to gain in what you stopped training, you're actively training the ...

Hotel training is filler training. Its job is to keep the practice intact when the conditions won't support progressive overload — not to break records, not to test anything, and not to run the program you'd run at home. Last week in Punta Mita the resort had a genuinely good gym — squat racks, barbells, a cable machine, dumbbells into the hundreds. On the second day they closed it and moved a few pieces of kit into a carpeted, windowless boardroom. This is the framework I've used across fiftee...

After a year and a half building OLLIN, I'm renaming everything. This is why. The short version: OLLIN was a placeholder born out of a dissolution I couldn't talk about, the pronunciation never worked, and the business had grown into something the name couldn't hold — a gym that isn't a gym, a building people don't want to leave, an online practice, a philosophy. One name finally fit all of it: Heavy Meta. In this video I walk through the decision — the name I almost used instead (and the Gree...

Nobody knows what they're doing. Not you, not your heroes, not the guy selling you the answer. This is a conversation, not an interview. No agenda, no promotion, no guest hitting the same talking points they hit on the last five podcasts. Michael Blevins sits down with Josh Tyler and follows the thread wherever it goes: why every business is selling the feeling of certainty, why you crave a Porsche you don't actually want, why relationships are transactional whether you do the math or not, and ...

You don't think your way into a new self. You move your way there — and then you turn around and the person who started walking isn't the person who arrived. ???? Read the full article: https://www.weareollin.com/articles/you-are-not-who-you-think-youre-how-you-stand A client stands in front of me and says, "I'm just not an athletic person." He says it like he's reporting the weather. For years I heard a belief and reached for an argument — and lost every time. Because that sentence was never ...

The best companies in the world aren't the ones that pay the most. They're the ones that refuse to set their most valuable asset on fire. In 2024 I ran a project with a desk of elite commodities traders where the only metric that mattered was money. If they made more, we succeeded. If they didn't, we failed. We spent zero dollars on gadgets — no recovery beds, no biohacking toys — and their sick days dropped by half. The savings from that alone paid for the entire engagement before a single tra...

Before launching the new OLLIN endurance program, I opened a Q&A to the membership and answered what came back. This is that conversation. The through-line: most endurance programs make you good at one thing — one movement, one event, one finish line. That's a finite game. This program is built to develop aerobic ability generally, the capacity to provide oxygen and blood flow across anything you ask your body to do. Running and cycling are in there because they're the easiest ways to extend ef...

How do you describe a feeling to someone who's never felt it? There's no single word for what the 12th hour of a maximal effort does to a person — the pain, the haunting that arrives when it's just you, your effort, and the dark. I can't give you the word, but I've spent more than 20 years in the country it belongs to: triathlons, a decade of road racing, 100-mile gravel, a 24-hour assault bike world record. Next to the athletes I've coached, my own résumé looks amateur. That's the humbling part...

There's a word hiding inside the thing you do every day, and almost nobody who does it knows what it means. Trahere — Latin, to drag, to draw a living thing out of its current state and into a new one. It's the root of "training," and for most of its life it had nothing to do with barbells. You trained a vine. This episode draws the line between training and exercise and refuses to let them be synonyms. Training uses your psychological and sensational capability to alter your physiological stat...

The apocalypse is a useful frame. Not because the world is ending — because it strips fitness down to one question: does this body work when it has to? Most lifters, after years of chasing PRs and stacking calories, are no harder to kill than they were on day one. Just bigger, hungrier, and more expensive to keep alive. In this episode I break down why the strongest guy in the room is usually the easiest to outlast, why specialization is a liability when the demand is unknown, and what training...

Most people confuse the two. Here is how I make an intentional difference. Training is using the psychological and sensational potential to push the physiological boundaries. Exercise is using physiological process to change the psychological or emotional state. This is part of an excerpt form a longer article that will be posted in a few weeks. The full session can be found on www.weareollin.com Playlist: / osdju0ld2xdvct8t0z

Being out of shape is the single highest-leverage position you will ever occupy in your fitness life — and most people waste it because they're too embarrassed to use it. In this episode I cover why untrained systems respond to everything, why no program is appropriate as written for someone starting or restarting, and why formerly fit people actually have a harder time coming back than total beginners. Your nervous system recovers faster than your connective tissue, and that mismatch is where m...

About the episode: In an industry obsessed with 15-second clips and "hack-based" transformations, genuine physical mastery is being lost. In this episode, Stuart Diplock and I attempt to dismantle the transactional mindset of modern fitness. We explore why long-form storytelling is the antidote to superficial trends, how personality traits dictate the sports we choose, and the profound psychological differences between Western (external) and Eastern (internal) coaching styles. We also dive deep...

Today, we're talking about fitness—a topic that feels rigged from the start. You've probably seen people with perfect genetics, natural talent, or the resources to take shortcuts, and you've told yourself, "The whole system is unfair." And you're right. The fitness world isn’t "perfectly efficient." Some people have an advantage. But what if that unfairness isn't a reason to quit, but an opportunity? We're going to stop looking at fitness as a cause-and-effect equation and start seeing it as an...

world, Strange Grayson. We explore our shared history of hitting rock bottom with injuries from traditional training and how a few key conceptual shifts completely changed the game. Grayson details his "Matrix moment" at his first Functional Range Conditioning (FRC) certification, where he realized that despite being able to lift hundreds of pounds, his body was full of untrained "holes" that left him fragile. We discuss why "perfect technique" isn't a magical safety blanket, the crucial differ...

Are you hitting a strength plateau or dealing with nagging injuries despite your training? This episode reveals why your program is likely failing you. We're not talking about reps or sets, but the two inescapable biological laws that govern ALL strength: The Law of Specificity and The Law of Accommodation. To learn more about these training principles, visit: www.weareollin.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Introduction to Strength Concept - Exploring strength as a universal attribute beyond physi...

The UNFVCKD Podcast welcomes, Sean Waxman, a renowned strength and conditioning coach with over 30 years of experience. Sean shares his journey in strength training, starting from his early days in the projects where his father introduced him to weightlifting. Sean discusses how his initial motivation for strength training came from survival needs in his neighborhood, which evolved into a deeper passion for sports and physical development. He describes his methodical approach to learning, study...

In this episode, host Michael Blevins dives deep into the misunderstood world of strength. Explore the ancient history of strength training, uncover common misconceptions that plague modern fitness, and discover transformative ways to redefine how you conceptualize and train strength. Michael shares his personal journey—from a barbell-centric focus to a weakness-driven approach—revealing how chasing numbers often leads to avoidable injuries. Learn practical adjustments to build sustainable stren...