The Athletes Podcast
The Athletes Podcast is a leading source of information, inspiration, and education for anyone interested in optimizing physical performance, maintaining good health, and living an active lifestyle. Join David Stark as he interviews some of the world's biggest athletes and fitness professionals, The Athletes Podcast provides practical advice, expert insights, and real-world strategies to help listeners achieve their health and fitness goals.The goal is to entertain, educate & inspire the next generation of athletes!
The Athletes Podcast
Pro Basketball Player Brian Wallack talks Shoulders, Social Media & "Success" - Episode #263
Brian Wallack shares his journey from professional basketball player in Spain to Gymshark athlete and social media fitness influencer with half a million followers. His transition reveals how he's now able to inspire more people through fitness content than he ever could have on the basketball court.
• Importance of planning training around performance needs, especially for in-season athletes
• Effectiveness of training right after games or before practice to maximize muscle fibre activation
• Brian's realization that playing pro basketball abroad wasn't fulfilling his true purpose
• How social media has allowed him to reach millions rather than thousands
• Behind-the-scenes look at the 12+ hour workdays that fuel his content creation
• Value of doing the most difficult task first thing each morning to train your brain
• Benefits of having an accountability partner or listening to motivational content
• Brian's guiding principle: "If nothing changes, nothing changes"
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I remember the I guess it was a couple months ago or maybe almost a year ago when we, when you, came back from Spain and we went for that cold plunge ripping over there at like 5am cold, pitch black. Turn on the Jeep doesn't even make a noise because it's electric. No big deal. Thanks, cody and Pioneer Auto Group. Yep no-transcript on a daily basis for you team and as well. We're going to have content coming out over a weekly basis showcasing what we've been doing here all weekend. We got these incredible athletes. We're going to be interviewing them in person talking about this incredible event and I want to thank you folks for tuning in this talking about this incredible event, and I want to thank you folks for tuning in.
Speaker 1:This is August 1st, we're halfway through the year. If you haven't achieved the goals that you want to achieve yet, listen to this episode. Brian might be able to provide you with the insight and inspiration that you need to kick off the back half of 2025. Here we go. You're the most decorated racquetball player in US history. World's strongest man From in US history. World's strongest man from childhood passion to professional athlete. Eight-time Ironman champion. So what was it like making your debut in the NHL. What is your biggest piece of advice for the next generation of athletes, from underdogs to national champions? This is the Athletes Podcast, where high-performance individuals share their triumphs, defeats and life lessons to educate, entertain and inspire the next generation of athletes here we go.
Speaker 2:You know who? He was on a podcast talking about this, I think with like the Diary of a CEO guy, but Mr Beast was talking about how he trains clones of himself. Did you hear that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now he has like two of them that are like a year and a half, two years, in that know everything that he does, make decisions on his behalf and such.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's a mini Mr Beast Dude. That was a freaking workout. Hey, it's okay, we didn't go through it all. Three sets less than what you normally do during a typical leg day. Three exercises less. Three extra exercises less Split squats.
Speaker 2:We're going to do barbell RDLs on the Smith and then we're also going to do another calf.
Speaker 1:But it's deload week and David's with you, so you're taking it easy on me?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and honestly it helped me because I would have done all that and I wouldn't have felt good tomorrow and then going into Monday.
Speaker 1:There's a fine line with working out, because you also need to be able to perform the next day or the day after for your sport. Sometimes right like obviously right now, off season you're training, you're trying to add size, but during the season athletes who are training all the time you got to make sure that you're also prepared to perform the next day and not just giving it 100% 24 7 365.
Speaker 2:It's a big reason why, like in the professional sports, they have them do their weight training sessions right after they finish, like on the basketball court. Yeah, and you've seen those viral videos like James Harden dropping 45 points and then these students split squats right after. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they pair the stimulus within the same like two hour time span, so then you don't get clocked the next day when you're supposed to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my cousin Matthew, who plays for the Moose Jaw Warriors in the WHL, just had. He was just part of the Canucks development camp here in Vancouver and he was running the grouse grind with the Sedins getting after it Finished fourth, no big deal, and it was watching their games. This year afterwards they would always train and then come out sweaty and you're like man, dude, I just want to come give you a hug post-game.
Speaker 2:And smelling like ass, that's the MISI training and come out sweaty and you're like man dude, I just want to come give you a hug. Post game and smelling like ass. Is he training right? What's that? Are they doing that?
Speaker 1:yeah, same thing same thing post game train, um, and a lot of people, even like zach zillner, who I had on the podcast you're familiar coach for miami uh strength and conditioning. He has their athletes trained prior to practice to get that stimulus before working out, before jumping. You can actually fire up those muscle fibers a crazy amount prior and increase performance. So that's what I'm trying to do, like oh Marriott junior boys basketball, do weights?
Speaker 2:before, yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 1:you know, I don't know. I feel like you've talked about that too. You started lifting. You gained like 50 pounds within a few years. You've just been doing shoulders every day.
Speaker 2:Microdosing shoulders, as you call it, like it's a big thing with genetics, but I think a big reason I put on so much weight so quickly is that I had really high calcium diet and vitamin D diet with like just a lot of milk products Really, and that paired with a lot of plyometrics, like the bone density just like gets so much thicker really a perfect example. I have a buddy. He's like same height as me. We have about the same muscle mass, but he was like when I was super heavy, I was 265 and he was only 210. Yeah, but we looked the exact same and, uh, the only thing that that can contribute to is bone mass. Right, so it's interesting.
Speaker 1:If you had known that when you were younger, how would you have done things differently then, or would you have changed?
Speaker 2:anything. I don't. I don't think I would have changed anything, like obviously it made me heavier, but I think it was really smart to like. As soon as you stop drinking milk or having dairy products, you become uh intolerant to it, right, yeah, so if you just keep that up when you're younger, then you're basically chilling, unless you have some predisposed thing that makes you sit on the toilet for 10 hours.
Speaker 1:And then you end up signing with Gymshark, getting a thousand plus people to buy off your 20%. Can I Wellness Supplements provides you four separate sprays that allow you to be your best every single day. That is the blue fresh. That's the purple sleep. That's the green mend and that is the red the boost All four you can get for using the code AP20 at checkout. You can save 20%, whether that's on their website and again, send me that screenshot when you're purchasing them. Our athlete, katie Simonson loves. Send me that screenshot when you're purchasing them. Our athlete, katie Simonson loves them and cannot say enough good things about them. I promise you will enjoy Can I Wellness supplements as well. Use the code AP20.
Speaker 2:Let me know what you think A big thing that's cool about the Gymshark thing is, like a year ago I was playing professional in Spain, like even less than a year ago, and I thought that was like a year ago I was playing professional in Spain, like even less than a year ago, and I thought that was like the be-all, end-all thing. Like, oh, I go play pro basketball. This is it. Like this is all my dreams. That came true. And I get there.
Speaker 2:I'm like this isn't what I like had in mind. Like I'm playing in a city that I don't speak the language. Uh, the living conditions aren't the greatest, the food's not the greatest, I'm not with my family. I'm there on my own and there's no one like that. I'm there to like kind of make proud. Do you know what I mean? So it was really like it hit me in the face and made me realize like, is this really? Like at the end of the day, like I wanted to play pro basketball for myself, but also to inspire others and show that it's possible to do it like coming out of such a hurry.
Speaker 2:But I like I came home and then this gym chart and this online social media presence stuff became more of like a possibility. I was like this is the same avenue in terms of inspiring people and showing them the potential of like being fit, being strong, being athletic, all those pieces, but on such a bigger scale and reaches so many more people. So I was like this is the path that I truly wanted, wanted to do all alone. I just didn't realize that it was a possibility, um, which was really, really cool. So now I've just gone all in with that and it's obviously doing well and inspiring a good amount of people to buy gym shark and change their fitness lifestyle so I think that's why, like, we've gotten along so well over the past years, because we share that kind of goal mindset.
Speaker 1:I think, to your point, coming from small town White Rocks out of Surrey, there weren't maybe those individuals for us to look up to, growing up and you're like, hey, why not us? Yeah, why couldn't it be? You know two guys chopping it up on a podcast, inspiring literally millions of young athletes to pursue their best selves, whether that is in a professional sport or just becoming the best athletic version of yourself. Right, like to your point, you can go play pro basketball. Maybe you'll get, you know, thousands of people watching your games. But now to your point, you could have millions of people looking at what you do every single day, yeah, impacting so many more, not just basketball players, but every athlete right, exactly, yeah, so it's definitely like much bigger scale, which I think is just such a cool opportunity it's got to be cool having your brother and your sister competing both on a national international stage.
Speaker 1:Like your sister down competing for team canada brother back in town, get to train with him. Like it's got to be fun having your your family around too during this whole process 100.
Speaker 2:Yeah they're, they're both killing it. My sister just started playing with the senior national team and they're at the AmeriCup openers, so they play at USA Today. But she's been doing pretty good. She had her last year at University of Washington State, where Clay Thompson went, had a really good year. Now she's going to go play in Franceance in september, but, like her life is just all basketball. That's all she does. She just eats, food, sleeps, basketball and, like this whole summer is just right off for her with team canada and then my brother, on the other hand, like plays d1 hockey.
Speaker 1:So all of them have done, like, uh, some pretty good work I feel like you, like, have been able to see how sport can impact so many people between your brother, sister. Your dad was even a bodybuilder growing up. I remember you saying for you you probably thought basketball was going to be this way, where you get to travel the world, and now you're doing probably 10x the amount of travel thanks to social media. Well, just in this past year.
Speaker 1:I've traveled more internationally than I ever did with basketball, which is kind of cool and is there a part that you I feel like I asked you this on one of the other times we weren't able to actually record and produce? But like, what do people not know about Brian Wallach that they don't see on socials, that you think is either important for them to know or maybe be aware of? You know, because everyone sees social media half a million followers but they don't necessarily see the fact that you know it takes a lot of time, effort, energy behind the scenes to produce the quality of content that you put out yeah, I think that's just the main thing.
Speaker 2:I don't think like I show most of my life online, which is probably one of the downsides to the whole social media thing, which is a very small downside like sharing, sharing parts of your life isn't like the end of the world. But yeah, the one thing that I think people don't realize is that, like they see the videos I put up and they're like, oh, like, you're just lucky genetics wise, which I am, like I got bus with height and some pretty good like muscle genetics but like the amount of work I put in per day to make everything kind of go, uh, go around. Like, yeah, I don't, uh, I don't hang out with a lot of people, I kind of just work in my room. I do minimum like 12 hour days, so, uh, that's stuff that people don't see, other than like the 15 second transformation clips I put online to inspire people yeah, or they'll see, like the day, in the life video that highlights the best 60 seconds of that experience.
Speaker 1:But you know, even myself right now I'm like yo. It's not always fun cracking open a can of tuna tuna throwing on some balsamic vinegar and shoving it down. It's a lot of work to put on muscle, to gain a following, to build a brand, and people are like oh, overnight success. Guy's got big shoulders and he's 6'7", so it must be easy for him. And that's part of what I want to do with the podcast is peel back the layers of the onion so people realize this is what Brian had to do over 10 years to get to this point, not just have blessed genetics, right, yeah, like, obviously that helps, but uh, yeah, definitely put in a good amount of time and the diet thing's huge.
Speaker 2:The one thing I always think about and this is like the, the sentence or, I guess, the paragraph that I kind of stick to is that, like when your life's kind of all said and done, I always say this to myself and I'm looking at that person. That's like the best potential of myself, it's like I want to look the exact same, feel the exact same, do the exact same as that person. I don't want to be like staring across the table and be like, oh, I'm not the same like level as what. You are right, and that's what, like, I think about every day. When I'm like doing, doing something I shouldn't be doing, or I'm doom scrolling or something like that, right, it snaps me right back to the present and like what I'm trying to do.
Speaker 1:I feel like you don't have that a lot, like I don't know. I see what you're doing on socials and I see like the behind the scenes too, when we're training, like you don't? You don't seem like you got a lot of uh downsides right now. You seem like you got everything pretty optimized. So I feel like you're you're pretty consistent, individual. Um, if there was pieces that you would be able to suggest to young athletes you talked about it when we were in the gym there earlier you've got a younger following like what are some things, steps, maybe processes that you would put in place as a young athlete to see success both physically, mentally, emotionally if you were to kind of layer a couple out.
Speaker 2:I think the the biggest one. We kind of mentioned it earlier today, but doing the most difficult thing first thing in the morning is probably, like I think, up there with one of the best things you can do like ever, like when it comes to diet, when it comes to working out, when it comes to anything. If you do something incredibly difficult and it could be as simple as like doing a really cold shower in the morning what you're doing is training that, uh, that part in your brain. The court, one of the cortexes prefrontal cortex amygdala it's like a.
Speaker 2:It's a funny long name that huberman always talks about and I keep messing it up, but every time you do something tough, that space grows like david goggins, one's like massive and his brain.
Speaker 2:The rest of his brain is tiny and if you can grow that, especially when you're younger, by doing something extremely difficult first thing in the morning, it could even be as simple as waking up at 5 am compared to 8 am. Uh, that part grows and over time everything else in after that part gets super easy. I like love to think of the analogy imagining you like you have a girlfriend that you want to break up with, but you don't want to break her, her feelings. But once you make that conversation happen, you feel like you could have any conversation in the world. Yeah, like it's just like you just need to make sure that you do something really difficult and then after it everything else becomes so much easier. Yeah, so you do that first thing in the morning.
Speaker 1:Everything after that is just like stepping stones I remember the I guess it was a couple months ago or maybe almost a year ago when we, when you came back from spain and we went for that cold plunge Ripping over there at like 5 am, cold, pitch black, turn on the Jeep doesn't even make a noise because it's electric. No big deal. Thanks, cody and Pioneer Auto Group. And you know like most people aren't willing to do that kind of stuff right and get after it at 5 am, go to the gym at 6. Of stuff right and get after it at 5 am, go to the gym at6. But it's those little things that if you can create those habits early, what is it? 28 days to create a habit?
Speaker 2:yeah, I swear it keeps changing. I heard the new one.
Speaker 1:It's like 66 oh damn, that's a bit longer and you got to try something 21 times before you get used to it or like the flavor of it. So like, hey, give it a month, try those things, it's not that hard. Realistically, you set your alarm. You get in there. It's kind of uncomfortable. You gotta get comfortable being uncomfortable in life, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the biggest one too is like just having someone helping you keep you accountable, so like if you have a friend and then you lock in together, now you have like that accountability partner if you don't have that. One thing that I found really helpful, too is and say, like you don't have people like in your area that are like really motivated, you just get a podcast and you're non-stop of someone that's at a level you want to be, so you constantly have their voice, their tone, their, uh, their vision of like where they're at in your mind and that's kind of like that accountability partner by your side, right yeah, I was experiencing that today in the gym, lifting double the amount that I'm used to, because I got this absolute mammoth beside me.
Speaker 1:You folks are getting Brian Wallach here on the Athletes Podcast. Big shout out goes to you for coming on for like the 42nd time. Hey, we're going to be doing lots more. This is the best part. We're here in South Surrey, vancouver. We're going to be getting a ton of athletes here locally coming on the pod in our new studio. Brian's going to be co-hosting. It's going to be a blast. Perfect Sports is going to be sending more supplements. We're going to be absolutely buzzing thanks to the altered state. Brian, what should we leave people with here today, on this fine Saturday, with Gymshark being 20% off thanks to BWOL?
Speaker 2:I got another quote If nothing changes, nothing changes. Simple to the point, and then got some layers to it. You like that one.
Speaker 1:I love that one because, man, we are in a society now where people are comfortable being stagnant. I know you and I don't have that, so let's keep getting after it, let's keep inspiring others. Thank you, folks, for tuning in. There's been another episode we'll see next week and we'll see more of Brian coming on. Peace.
