Double Edge Fitness

Train Smart, Recover Hard, Have Fun 🎄💪

• Derek and Jacob Wellock

Ever wonder if you’re training too much or just not recovering enough? We break down the real drivers of progress—volume, intensity, and recovery—and share a simple weekly rhythm that lets you feel strong, avoid burnout, and still push hard when it counts. Our goal is long-term health and real-world fitness, not daily demolition. That means tracking what matters, scaling when needed, and building habits that help your body adapt.

We get specific about how to judge a good training week: one or two sessions should feel amazing, a couple should feel appropriately tough, and the rest should support recovery. If you’re wrecked four days out of seven, something’s off. You’ll hear how we adjust day to day based on sleep, nutrition, and soreness, plus how tools like Whoop can guide trends without bossing around every workout. We also pull back the curtain on our programming and how we’re using SugarWOD to add context, intent, and education so your progress is measurable, not guesswork.

Nutrition gets the blunt treatment—clear macros, meal frameworks, and a three-month window to assess results. Prefer more accountability? We outline options for closer coaching too. We also tackle injury realities: how to modify without losing momentum, when to seek imaging, and how targeted strength and technique fixes keep you moving forward. Along the way, we share community updates, HiROX prep, class caps for better sessions, and why we’re leaning into WhatsApp for member-first coaching and conversation.

If you want training that makes you feel better outside the gym while stacking real performance gains, you’re in the right place. Listen, take notes, and then tell us what you’ll change this week—intensity, volume, sleep, or nutrition. Subscribe, share with a training partner, and leave a rating to help more people train smart and recover strong.

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SPEAKER_00:

All right, let's try this again. So, a little different setup here, using some new technology that makes it simpler, faster for me to create this stuff and get it out. So here's my backdrop. All done through, I think, artificial intelligence. I don't know. Either way, pretty short today, but our Monday education, if you will. Some questions come up about I don't know if I'm over-training, under training, and whatnot. I talk about how Build Welded Warrior is programmed Monday through Friday with the intention of people training Monday through Friday. And some people, they're like, I don't know if I can handle that. I don't know, I don't know what I don't know. And this is kind of a hard topic to just pinpoint this is what you should do. There's so many factors that influence our ability to recover from training. How hard are we pushing in the workouts in the gym? Where is our current fitness level at? What is our training history? These are all going to be variables that influence are you over training or under training? Now, in my very loving, kind, and professional opinion, very few people are over training. I can say in the years of double-edged fitness, I could count on one hand how many people I've actually sat down and pulled aside and had a deep conversation about you're doing too much. That's why you're no longer getting results and you're getting burnt out and broken down and whatnot. What are some key things to think about when it comes to overtraining? Intensity and volume. If we're doing too much high intensity and too much volume in various time frames, right? This could be on a daily, this could be on a weekly, this can be on a monthly, this can be on a quarterly basis. It depends on your fitness and overall work capacity where you're at personally. Now, and this is a topic I am very, very happy to sit down and go over with anybody in the gym. Like we can evaluate how you're feeling. I can ask you some various questions. We can look at your schedule, your training habits. Um, if you come to my class, I know how you train. If you go to another coach's class, it'd be advantageous to include the coach that you go to on that conversation, and we can pick it apart and give you guidance on what we think. So when it comes down to intensity and volume, those are gonna be the two things that are gonna drive inflammation in the body, break down the body, and in the recovery process, we adapt. We adapt, the body gets stronger, the body gets fitter, it overcomes. So you can beat down, recover, heal, fitter. That's how it works. You break it down, you recover, you're fitter than you were. The body adapts. And over time, those adaptations keep building, building, and building. So, what I'm getting at there is a person's ability to tolerate volume and intensity is so different from individual to individual. Let's take superstar AI Fei. We call her AI Fei, artificial intelligence fey. She can handle a tremendous amount of training volume and recover. But her training habits and history support that, and her recovery habits support that. If you came in and tried to do everything she does, you could be broken after two days. Right. So if you try, and this is a big mistake I made early in my life when I was competing back in high school, you get in this mindset of more is better, right? As long as I'm doing more, so in high school sports, for me, for instance, as long as I'm doing more work than what I think my opponent's doing, that is going to set me up for success. And there is truth to that. There is truth to that, but it's not the whole story. And it oftentimes leads to burnout. Now I'm gonna go out on a limb here, on a limb. I don't know. Well, maybe Ryan Perry, she might be the only one, if anybody in the gym's really training for professional athletics. It is my understanding, knowing everybody here, that we are training for long-term health and fitness, look good, feel good, and take care of our long-term health. So, with that, how much training do we need? How important is recovery? So, we want to think of consistency as the most important variable, and this goes for athletes and non-athletes. Want to be consistent. Our body needs to be moving every single day, in my professional opinion, to the degree of how well are we recovering from previous days' movement. Now, that movement might include a walk, 10,000 steps. That's it. That's the movement for the day, some foam rolling, whatever, whatever, feel good. Fat movement might include group class. For instance, today's group class is a little different than tomorrow's group class. Today's a little lower volume, a little lower intensity. You didn't feel like your heart was going to explode out of your ass. Tomorrow, that might be a completely different story. And depending on where you're at, how you recover from those dictates on what your next day should be. So you hit Thursday really hard or Tuesday really hard. You feel beat down on Wednesday. Should you go hard on Wednesday? No. Should you move on Wednesday? Yeah, most likely. Motion is lotion, but then we pull down the intensity, we scale, we adjust the reps, we adjust the weight, we adjust the volume, then we pull back the intensity. And then we keep moving and allow our body to recover and feel better. I will say this that I personally believe that one or two days per week in a seven-day training week, you should feel fantastic. I've talked to too many people over the years where it's like you feel like crap or not great every day. There should be a couple days of working out where it's like that felt really good. I felt strong, felt explosive, felt fast. And if you're not feeling one or two of those days per week in a seven-day period, there's something going on in my mind in your recovery. All right. Typically for me, like Mondays, even though I typically take a full rest day, Saturday or Sunday, Mondays isn't always my best feeling day. Oftentimes it's Tuesday and or Wednesday are my two best training days. And then Thursday is typically lower volume for me, lower intensity, and then Friday. I usually typically feel okay, depending on what the training was leading up to Friday. I usually tend to feel pretty good, not necessarily great. And then Saturday or Sunday is typically it's game day decisions. Right now I'm specifically training for high rocks. So one of those two days is a full rest day. One of those two days is a very, well, for me is a very long run. So that's just a couple thoughts and perspectives on are you under training, overtraining? So if you don't ever really feel good, we need to look at why. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you getting enough calories? Are you if you're really trying to lose weight and cut fat and you're really cutting calories, that is going to play in your inability to recover from training. And that needs to be taken into account for how much and how often, how hard you're training, how hard you're pushing. So there's that thought there. All right. If you're eating good calories, quality foods, getting good sleep, hydrating in your electrolytes, limiting your alcohol, chances are you're gonna be feeling pretty good a couple days per week, and you're gonna feel like you trained hard a couple days per week, and you need some rest days, maybe once, twice a week. But if you're feeling beat down four out of the seven days per week, something's going on there, and we should talk about it because that's not optimal. We come into the gym to feel great outside the gym. Doesn't mean we're not sore, doesn't mean we don't feel like we worked out and pushed ourselves, but we should be feeling pretty good. Having some energy and not being beat to crap. I'll say that's one of the big downsides of what CrossFit can lead to is the competitive environment to where every single day you feel like you have to come in here and send it. Full send, max effort, five days a week. And I can attest to if I wish I would have changed my mindset on this in my early 30s, but at my age now, straight up. Maybe once, maybe once a week, sometimes twice, but once a week, I do try to full send a workout for the intensity purposes. But outside of that, I'm just getting a good quality workout most days. So approach your training individually for you, where you're at, how you slept, how you ate, what your nutrition like, how you feel. Objectively, I use Whoop, and it does give me some insights. And if you want to learn more about that, well, I might make a different video sometime. There's I'd have made videos on it, or if you ever want to talk to me about it, there's that. I do use it, it does give me insights into my recovery, and the way I use it is not probably typical. I bet it's typical of most long-term users, but I don't use it on a daily basis to truly guide my training. I use it on a weekly, monthly basis to guide my training and what's going on. So that's a data tracker that can help give you insights in your resting heart rate, HRV, your sleep patterns, and your overall recovery. So there's that. If you guys got questions on this, me, any of the other coaches, I'm more than happy, and I'm sure they are too, to have a conversation with you about it to make sure you're getting the most out of it. Because if you don't recover from your training, your training is junk training. If you're constantly week after week, month after month, feeling beat down, not recovering, something is going on there. And depending where you're at on the curve of life and age, there could be a handful of things going on there, right? And we can get into hormones and that topic. It's more medical, outside of my realm of expertise, but I do have some knowledge and insights there, things you can think about, things you can look at, depending on where you're at in age and family planning and all those things. So feeling awesome is the goal. Training hard, training smart, and recovering from training is the goal. Right? Cool. Next up on the agenda, nutrition. I've had a few people ask me, hey man, can you give me some nutrition advice? Yeah, let's do that. I am here. It is one of my jobs as the self-appointed head nutrition coach of Double Edged Fitness. I'm happy to meet with anybody. I have a calendar. They shoot me an email, I send you my calendar, you book a spot, and we sit down, dive into the details. What I don't do is nutrition micromanaging, is what I call it. I'm not gonna, I don't do the whole thing, I'm gonna check in with you guys every day to make sure you're putting good stuff in your mouth. How it works with me is I set up, we talk about everything that I think is important to talk about. It's about an hour-long appointment, and then I put together a starting point via macros, meal plans, thoughts and ideas, things to look at, and we get an in-body scan. We go three months and see how you do. And like I said, I'm not gonna micromanage the other 23 hours of your day, but I am here as a tool, somebody you can reach out to, ask questions, and we can pivot at that. I'm gonna tell you, my nutrition coaching is blunt. I don't have time to or really care about your feelings about this, that, and the other when it comes to, well, I don't really like doing that. I can't eat the same thing every day. That's fine, but then go figure out what you're gonna eat as long as it fits within these guidelines. All right. Some of our other coaches here, they do do great nutrition coaching on a monthly basis. You do pay extra for it, and they are going to help you and guide you in a little, what do you want to say, more personalized manner? Like daily, right? Daily, weekly check-ins, stuff like that. And if that's something you're interested in, that is a service that is offered by the coaches here. That is not a service I offer because I would charge probably three to five thousand dollars per month just to do that because I'm gonna give you the plan. I'm gonna tell you what to do. We're gonna try it for three months and we're gonna see if it's working. And if it's not working, we're gonna pivot and we're gonna evolve. I can tell you the people that have worked with me and met with me, the ones that do it, and take my not so what do you want to say? I want to say angry, but my and they take my so blunt advice, tend to have pretty awesome results. So take it for what it is. I am here, I'm happy to be a resource. Don't be scared of me. I know I got that walking dick face going on and stuff, this, that, and the other. And the truth is, I'm not that stressed out anymore, feeling pretty good. So I'm here to help. Here to help you guys. So don't be scared, don't be nervous. If you got things going on nutrition-wise, I'm happy to have those conversations to the best of my capabilities, which aren't too bad. I know a little bit about the stuff, been doing it a long time, been around the block when it comes to nutrition things. So please, by all means, just let me know. And I just send you over my calendar, you book a time, and we do that. The other thing in that regard, if you got anything going on, injury, aches, pains, talk to your coach, communicate with your coach. We are here to help you work around those injuries and through those injuries, aches, pains, and tweaks. If you got something real gross going on, this might come as a surprise to you guys, but I've spent a lot of time helping people over the years, rehabbing injuries, taking people from physical therapy through getting them fully back to what they love to do. Fortunately, unfortunately, due to my own injuries, I've accumulated quite a bit of knowledge about injuries, injury prevention, and rehab. So if you guys got something going on, we're here to help. Use us. Our coaches, all of them, have a vast knowledge when it comes to working around injuries and working through injuries, modifying workouts, giving you a great workout without pissing off something that's going on. I'm gonna tell you right now, if you are an active human being, injuries, aches, pains, and tweaks are going to happen. They're going to happen. It's inevitable. So when that does happen, we don't need to be totally derailed on our goals and our fitness plan. I've worked through numerous aches, pains, tweaks, and injuries on myself. And so has many of our coaches. You know, Jason damn near ripped his adductor off his bone. Doing a squat. Happens, shit happens. So I just want you guys to know that we have resources here to help with that. And again, I have a calendar. If you want to set up a time, talk about what's going on joint health-wise and whatnot. I am very happy to book a time with you and we can go through that stuff. I'm here for you. All right. Not going to say I have the answers. If I don't have the answers, I'm going to tell you I don't have the answers, and I'm going to help you find the resources to get the answers. There's been a few people I've said you need to get imaging done and you need to talk to an orthopedic doctor. Once we have that information, then we can build upon that. Some people ended up having to get surgery. Some people found out nothing's torn, and then I can put together a rehab thing that they can do over here on the turf, and in a short period of time, they're feeling a hell of a lot better. And the big thing is tell them what to avoid in group class for a while. We avoid a couple things that piss off certain things, whether it be low back or shoulders or neck or whatever. We avoid it for a while, let that calm down, build strength and stability around the joint, maybe correct a few form deals, a few technique issues, and then that what used to bug you all the time never bugs you again. So that too is a resource yours truly is happy to help you with. All right. So don't be scared. Just hit me up. I'm happy to help. All right. Don't be scared to talk to your coaches during CLAD. If something's going on, work with them. They they're here to help. All right. So I feel like I got side eye in this camera, but it's a much faster setup. See, none of you guys really watch this anyway. So hopefully the notes come through and you get some value out of that. Real quick, let's fly through this. Sugarwad went hard. My brother and I went hard on Sugar Wad the app. I'm really going to try to put in more effort into educating and information into the Sugar Wad app about training and programming and the workouts and so forth. So might have gone a little too hard this week, but take a look. Let me know if you're getting value out of it. If you're getting value out of the information, the way it's presented. And I'm really trying. Some people, some of the fittest people in the gym never ever know what workouts are coming. Ever. They just show up, do the work, go about their day. They're fit, healthy, happy. They trust the process. They trust the programming. They trust the progressions. They show up Monday through Friday because that's what I told them to do. And 10, 12 years later, now there's some of the fittest human beings I surround myself with. So it's kind of cool. But I also know some people really enjoy looking at the programming. So I'm trying to put as much notes and things that I think may or may not be important. And the more you learn, maybe the more buy-in you have in trusting the process. As much as it might seem like it's just a real simple thing to just throw programming together, I'm going to tell you it's not, it's not at all means rocket science. Some of these influencers they try to make training sound super, oh my God, nobody can understand this. So you got to buy my$10 billion program. The science comes in consistency, and our biggest thing is to make sure the programming is effective and it's fun so that you in turn stay consistent. All right. But again, Sugar Wad, lots more notes, lots more efforts going in there. I'm trying to use the full capacity of the software since we pay for it. I've been diving into it to see like, yeah, we need to get rid of this software because of leaderboard drama, or can we use more out of this software to educate, inspire, and entertain our members? And just a reminder in the Sugar Wad app, you can make your profile scores private so that nothing posed to the leaderboard. If you're not into that stuff, I'm not here to judge. All right. But I do firmly believe you should track your workouts. You should track your strength training. You should track things. Okay. The more you track, the more you more you can look back. Like for instance, we had deadlifts today, five by five. I suggested a couple sets should be around 80% of your one rep max. You can go back into your history and look at what you've deadlifted recently, what your one rep maxes are, and kind of give yourself a guide that you can build on and progressively. Overload. If we don't do that based on actual data and it's always based on feel, we never know if we're actually getting stronger. All right. So that's why I love Sugar Wad. Again, make your stuff private. And I'm my brother and I are both going to be putting quite a bit of effort into putting more value to you guys through the Sugar Wad app. HiRocks training is going awesome. We have more people signed up for Vegas. If you're interested, it looks like there's still some openings left. Um a couple people signed up the other day, so it didn't sell out yet. If you're interested in that, we still got about eight weeks or so of good training to be able to prepare for it. Yeah. Ask me questions, whatever. Uh again, we got five of us now going to Vegas. It's going to be a good time. Looking forward to it. So online community update. Haven't done anything with Facebook group yet. Trying to figure what I'm going to do there out, but people are joining it. So I should probably figure out something to do there. But I am using WhatsApp. I'm liking it. I'm using it for coaching insights and connecting with the people going to the High Rocks in Vegas and helping them out with how they're training and whatnot. It's been a very good group for that focused objective with High Rocks. But I also have the double-edged community chat in there. All right. So I'm going to put another link in this newsletter for you to join that WhatsApp group because I want to put a lot of my coaching energy and education energy into our members here at the gym. And Instagram, I get it. Quite a few people follow me on there. They follow the gym on there, and we'll still do stuff on Instagram. But my main focus is going to be making sure I'm connecting with our members here and helping you guys here. Yeah, I think it's cool if something I say on Instagram and the dude on the other side of the country is like, hey man, that kind of changed my life or whatever. That's cool. I'm happy that I was able to produce some kind of content that helped change your life. But that's secondary to me helping you guys who are members in the gym. I found out during COVID I am not a remote coach. I love working with people in real life. And that's what I want to do. That's that's what I'm doing. Right. That's where my main focus is is how can I help using these tools, technology, these social media things, and our gym to make you as awesome as humanly possible. So take that for what it is. But look, what's app, less noise? It's just our people in the gym. And it's been working, it's been cool. So I'm gonna try to do probably that's probably a place I'm gonna be hanging out a little bit. All right. Again, quick reminder late cancel fees pretty much only applying to 5 a.m. I haven't charged one single late cancel fee to anybody in any of their class because none of the classes have gone over the cap. It's only relevant if the class goes over the cap because that means somebody potentially did not get to work out because the class went over the cap. And if classes go over the cap, if it's not planned for and accepted by the coach in the class, it creates the potential for a shit show. And those we want to avoid, right? So sign up for class, sign into class, and we good. All right, we're good. No reason to beat this dead horse, but if you get charged and you don't like it, well, talk to me about it. And I'm probably just gonna be like, that sucks. But we got to control chaos, and there are gyms out there that would completely change the way they write workouts and train to accommodate more people. We're not willing to do that because we believe the way we're training and using the barbell and fun workouts are much that's just what we wanted. That's the way we live. That's the way we live. So 25 is the number. We have 25 squat racks and we have space for 25 people to comfortably work out and do our programming the way that we enjoy programming for you guys and coaching it, right? So that's kind of number. Yes, I make it work with a class of more than 25 every single day, but we're all on the same page, and the class is dialed. They kick ass, they're kicking ass. But we're gonna provide there's gonna the structure staying in place, it ain't going anywhere, right? So done with that. Christmas party reminder this Saturday. Uh it's a bring your own dessert kind of deal, potluck style for dessert. Um, we have food being catered. We have food being catered, and um, not even sure where it's from. Chris, she's she's the the master of all of the events, so she has it all planned out. But another thing I want to remind you, guys, I'm not providing an alcohol drinking festival. All right, there will be drinks here. What's out in the fridge might get a couple more cases of light beers. I'll personally be drinking non-alcoholic beverages and maybe one martini. If you're gonna drink something fancy or you have a particular thing you want, bring it. You gotta bring it. I'm not providing this scenario where we just get where people get plowed drunk and don't leave here till one in the morning. All right. I want a good fun hangout, family friendly, bring the kids, Santa Claus will be here, and we just yeah, have some fun. Silent disco going down, people throw on the headphones, have a good dance. My daughter's very excited about that. So yeah, we'll have food catered. I believe it's tacos. Um, some drinks, bring your favorite dessert, and we're just gonna hang out, have a good time. I think that's it. That's all I got. Oh, annual special deal did go out. It might already be sold out. Let me look. Oh, snap. Yeah, it did sell out. Right. Sorry guys, but it sold out. So um, by the time you've watched the end of this video, there well, there's one spot left. So there's that. Um sorry about that. Probably should have put in the front of the video, but I sent it out as a separate email earlier. So if you're reading this email, that that email already went into your inbox, so y'all already got it equally at the same time. Cool, cool. That love you guys. Peace. See you in the gym.