Follow Zach on Instragram or email him at bigironsportsperformance@gmail.com
Emmalou Penrod 0:00
I’m talking to Zach Gee today. He is a strength and conditioning coach with Big Iron Sports Performance. Zach, welcome.
Zach Gee 0:11
Hi, how are you?
Emmalou Penrod 0:13
Well, I’m doing great. And I am excited to get to talk to you today. Because I understand physical fitness has been a part of your life since you were young.
Zach Gee 0:26
Yeah, it has been. I’ve loved sports and working out all my life, but started really was a little kid I played almost every sport available in the community. At the time, I grew up playing baseball, right in the spring and all summer. I played soccer in the fall, until I was old enough to play tackle football then I changed to that in the winter, I play basketball. And then I just participate in all kinds of sports, whatever that was. I had like a junior set of golf clubs that there were a few weeks in the year, where I’d be out hitting golf balls all the time, just because our family had a little Memorial format, and scrambles to get ready for that recess like most of my friends in first grade. We played sports all year long with baseball, football, basketball. And it’s just something I really liked. And some things that kind of helped shape that foundation is, I still say the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia is still my favorite Olympics, the first Olympics, I can remember watching. But I just remember being kind of mesmerized by all the sports out there. And just all the athletic feats. And one person I remember in particular was a man named Mark Henry. Mark Henry is probably a little bit more famous because he ended up being a professional wrestler in the WWE. So he might be more famous for that. But at the time he had come up, he was a power lifter, very famous for his strength and then he transitioned to the sport of weightlifting, like they have the Olympics, which is the snatch and the clean and jerk. And he was the USA heavyweight. And I remember them doing a little, just a little story on him during the competition, because I mean, he’s a huge guy, he might be like six feet, six foot one, but I think he weighed 400 over 400 pounds for sure. I can’t remember the exact weight. But they did a little profile on him, because he had set a record being the heaviest person to ever dunk a basketball. And I thought that was pretty cool. And then just kind of growing up, just seeing different things on like, whenever the Rocky movies would come on TV, I’d watch those. And when you see Rocky training, whether that’s just running through the streets of Philadelphia and the earlier ones or, or he’s out in the Soviet Union chopping wood and running through the snow. Um, it’s just something as long as like, oh, man, I look so cool. There’s something I must have to do. And then, I mean, there are other things too, like I come home. I mean, I watched all kinds of sports, but some of the fringe sports that you don’t really see on TV like you’d see reruns of the World’s Strongest Man competition on ESPN right after school. I’d watched those and just kind of shaped like I knew, I knew working out was something I wanted to do and is something that I knew would help with my sports abilities when I got to high school. Another person who shaped me was my football coach, Colby Knight. He ran. We had basically weight training classes that he taught and I took all of them and was in his class, I actually learned you could become a strength conditioning coach. And so that was something when I left high school I knew I wanted to do and when I went to the University of Utah, I got involved with that. I graduated with a degree in exercise and sports science. And while I was there I ended up meeting my weightlifting coach, Mike Waller. I started competing in the sport of weightlifting. And I also got to learn under great coaches at Utah by doing voluntary internships with the strength conditioning staff. So I was able to work with a lot of different athletes of different sports and help them out. When I finished at Utah, I went to Utah State. I was a graduate Assistant Strength Conditioning Coach. I worked with the track of build throwers and the gymnastics team. And I helped out with all the other sports when I was there. I worked under Evan Simon, who is an amazing strength conditioning coach. I’ve learned a whole lot about coaching during that experience. And I ended up graduating with my masters of education and health, physical education, recreation. When I finished at Utah State, I decided that even though I love, I love working at both is probably like my favorite thing. But the college field, I feel like was awesome. But I could do more impact, like I want to impact like the youth. That’s kind of why I was more interested in just because I remember being in high schools, like how many, how many high school students are out there like myself who want to work hard, maybe have a shot, maybe don’t have a shot, but they just want to better themselves physically and just see what their body can do. And so I ended up doing some personal training for a couple of years. And that was good. It’s similar to what I do now. And one of my personal training clients ended up giving me opportunity, or Vimeo link to a job. And the last six years I taught weight training at Juan Diego Catholic High School. So just every day, all I taught is like a full full time PE teacher, all the classes I had weight training. And it was very fun. I worked with high school students, grades nine through twelve. I did volunteer time to where some of the students in the middle school on campus came in, and I was able to work with them. And during this time, too, I also I also learned more about football is able to be part of legendary Coach John Colosimo football coaching staff. And I was able to experience the joys of a successful program with that. And I was also able to be part of Chase Kallas track and field staff I coach jumps for two years. And that was a new experience because I actually never seen track before they really had that experience. I just kind of looked at it like being a strength conditioning coach, you’re trying to teach movement. And you’re trying to connect the movement, like you watch the sport, you look at the demands of the sport, and you sit there and think, how, how can I get these exercises, why exercises will give the biggest transfer to better performance, best sport. So that’s kind of how I approached coaching the jumpers, I just kind of analyze a sport and then just kind of look at the best techniques. I tried to get that out of my jumpers. And then I decided this last year, even though I enjoy teaching, that I just wanted to kind of get out of the teaching profession and just focus on a job where I could just straight up coach and not be worried about the grading or any of the other stuff that comes with teaching. So I started Big Iron Sports Performance in June. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I’ve been, I, my goal is mainly to work with youth athletes, and I do have some of those. But really, that’s not the only people I work with. I love working with all people of all ages, as long as they are interested in trying to improve themselves and get better physically, I can help them out. So that’s who I work with.
Emmalou Penrod 8:55
You know, I think anyone talking to you can tell that you love sports, and being athletic, and being physically active. But it isn’t for the glory of winning. It sounds to me like you enjoy that process, it’s the process. It’s the, you know, you you use the term physical literacy. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Zach Gee 9:23
Yeah, I think physical literacy is something that, if people embrace it, could definitely have a positive impact on their lives. I look at physical literacy. I mean, it comes traditionally, from physical education where they look at kind of your competence and performing different feats and being physically literate that way and I say it’s still that’s where the majority of that comes from. And I kind of look at physical literacy too, when you look at it that way. It’s kind of like looking at a student in first grade, they have a verbal literacy or written literacy. And if you ask them to write a paper on something, they can do a little bit. But it’s not going to be as good a paper as someone in high school, might write who has a greater base of words to use. They can use different kinds of punctuation, can have different sentence structure. And with all this, they produce a lot better detailed paper. And I feel like the same thing with physical literacy. If you are inactive all of your life, then you don’t have a whole lot of movement skills to work with. And if you especially, if you’re getting into sports, if you are very inactive, or you only did one sport your entire life, then you get put in a situation where you’re maybe outside of how your body’s ever moved. And then because of that, you don’t perform as well. And you’re actually more susceptible to injury. And to kind of go off of that, I actually just read a review paper that came out last year in the Journal of Sports Medicine. And in the review paper, they were kind of trying to put together a theoretical model, and they were looking at research from the health field as well to come up with this model. And physical literacy actually is well correlated with kind of how you feel like, what makes you happy, but also what you’re willing to participate in. And even like your social life, it can improve your confidence. And the more physically literate you are, the more likely you are to be active because you’re not afraid to be, or know how to do things. So it’s not like “I’ve never done that activity before. I don’t want to try it because I don’t want to look silly in front of people.” And so because, you know, how to do more things, you’re, you just feel like you are more, like you have more competence, essentially. And that fear of failure, which isn’t bad. Failing is good, that’s how we learn, that you’ll notice in a lot of subjects, not just physical activity, people don’t want to participate, they think they’re going to fail in front of everybody. And so the greater your physical literacy is, just the better you’ll be as far as becoming active and thus, more active, you are better, you’re helpful.
Emmalou Penrod 12:50
Well, I know I’ve noticed myself that athletes are, you know, they’re more graceful. They move with, their movements are more fluid. But it goes beyond that. Beyond that just moving easily and gracefully. It sounds like it goes much deeper than that, it seems to me that their overall health would be better.
Zach Gee 13:19
Yeah, um, for the most part, I definitely agree with that. And I mean, you’ve seen countless studies showing that the greater activity levels you have, the less chance of having cardiovascular disease, the more muscle mass you have. So, for instance, older people, to use them as an example, as they get older, they go through what’s called sarcopenia, which is a decrease in muscle mass. And because they have that decreased muscle mass, their strength decreases, their ability to do activities of daily living decreases, and their power goes down. And actually a lot of the falls that the elderly experience are related to power. And if you’re not able to be strong and can kind of react quickly that’s when you end up falling and break a hip and stuff like that. So, I mean, so cardiovascular diseases, sarcopenia really, yeah means really just anything. If you look at obesity too. I mean obese, obesity is kind of a lot of factors, factor of family, of diet, you have emotional, mental, but if you are very active, like one thing I can tell you just with how training for weightlifting, after having to sustain a weight class, and just one thing I can tell you what my clients like, the more physically active you are, you can eat more food. Something I noticed too, like, what that’s kind of harder for me right now, is I’ve been making sure to get 10,000 steps per day. I don’t think there’s really a magical number about the 10,000 steps, it’s just a good goal for a lot of people to shoot for. And I have to really watch my diet a little bit right now. Because back when I was teaching at the high school level, I’d be walking around the weight room all day. I’d have like five or six classes a day walking around the weight room, and then I go out to eat or football or track practice after and on my phone it would sometimes, say anywhere from like, 18,000 to 24,000 steps. And it seemed like, “Oh, I can eat so much more.” And my body composition, my weight would be about the same. And now I’m not doing that I have to watch what I eat a little bit more. Or else my body composition, I started to look a little softer, and the scale starts to move up a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it’s definitely something that yeah, it’s very important for health. Now, I would say at the elite level, health becomes a little bit blurred because, at for the elite athlete, the goal isn’t health, the goal is performance. So they’re always pushing that line to see what can they push to improve without breaking. So I would say, elite athletics isn’t necessarily healthy, because that’s not the goal. You’re seeing what that line is. But for most people, and elite athletes too, I mean, once you’re at that elite level, that’s like a professional athlete, you’re basically, that’s your job, like 24 hours a day is your sport. Where, the youth athlete, the recreational adult, it’s not like that. It’s more just physical activity and fun.
Emmalou Penrod 16:58
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you’ve mentioned the benefits, the variety, increased confidence, reducing injury. I think, I’m sure it would increase your immune system and overall, general health. So how can you support these athletes? Tell me the name of the gym, you work out of. Big Iron Sports Performance is your business.
Zach Gee 17:32
So I’m based in a gym called Big Mountain Barbell, in Midvale. Big Mountain, I’ve known. So I’ve known Zack and Lindsey, who have been the owners for quite a while. They’re great people. They started their gym in a little small space, eventually moved it this big building. Not sure how big it is. But it is a decent sized gym, well stocked. I consider it world class as far as what they have. It’s mainly catered to, I’d say most of people who lift there are competing in powerlifting. They have some weight lifters like me, some people competing in bodybuilding, then they also have a bunch of just recreational fitness people as well. But I mean is an amazing gym. The atmosphere is awesome. I, you know, when you go to a gym, and people are encouraged, not only encouraging, but you see, like World Class feats of strength almost every day. You know, that’s the place where you get better.
Emmalou Penrod 18:40
And it’s open.
Zach Gee 18:41
Yeah, it’s open too. They do a good job. They have a schedule, so they have an app where you have to sign up for your times to come in. So then the gym doesn’t ever get overcrowded. And then they also have spray bottles with sanitizer and towels that you wipe your equipment off after you’re done work. Yeah, that’s where I work at and how I help my athletes really. There’s something magical when about, like, seeing what your body can do. I think that’s the biggest thing, how I help. Whether that’s high school lacrosse player, or like a 46 year old dad. I mean, when you improve, while you’re your body’s capabilities, it’s just so rewarding. And it just improves your confidence. And it’s really cool.
Emmalou Penrod 19:44
So you are helping them, maybe they go in with an idea of limits on what their body can do and you help them kind of push those boundaries. You help them discover what their body can do.
Zach Gee 19:58
Yes, that’s exactly it. it.
Emmalou Penrod 20:00
Awesome, I love it. And I can certainly see the value of it. You know, they say there, there are various types of intelligence. And I’d always thought there’s physical intelligence, I’ve always admired people who just seem to have a stronger Mind-Body connection. They, they can throw a ball exactly where they wanted it to go or, and wondered how much of it is gift and how much of it is skill? Would you say both?
Zach Gee 20:31
Yeah, definitely both. There’s no doubt to get good at something, you have to work at it. And if you look at athletes say in the professional sports leagues who’re at the very highest level. They’ve had to work really hard to get their talent to where it is. But I will say some of it can be genetic, too. I mean, I saw something you see that separates some of those like high level college players that maybe once college is over, they’re done, from the professionals is, they’re both really good. The professionals, yeah, they worked harder, they have a little bit better skill. But everyone at that professional level is also kind of a genetic freak. And I’ve seen some of those, like, when I was coaching at Utah State, I can’t remember how many, but there were more than more than a handful of bed playing in the NFL some. There’s, I think at least a few still playing in the NFL right now. And if you just look at them, and just kind of watch what just some like crazy, athletic feats they can perform. I mean, I mean, they’re talented football, that’s how they’re playing in the NFL. But, and they worked hard too. Like they didn’t, they weren’t just, oh, I can squat, 600 pounds, benchpress 400 pounds, they didn’t start that way. But their genetic ceiling’s a lot higher, leaving them that opportunity a little bit, make a little bit easier than just your average person. But, yeah, it’s definitely a combination of both. And the one thing that I do think that separates the elite, too, is that they learn to love the process of working out. And that’s something I’d like to try and install with most people I work with too, because you’re going to have your days where you feel like you’re invincible. And it doesn’t matter what’s placed in front of you, you can sprint your fastest time, you can lift your heaviest weight. And then you have your other days where you wake up, and your body doesn’t feel 100%. You’re really tired, you’ve stayed up too late. And you honestly don’t want to do it. Like you don’t really have any motivation. But the best people are the ones who always just kind of don’t care about their feelings in that situation. And because they know how important it is to their goal. It’s like, you know, I’m not feeling good today. But I want this badly enough. I’m willing to go through the suffering right now. And that’s one thing I think that separates the two.
Emmalou Penrod 23:35
Oh, yeah. I agree. That just makes a lot of sense. And so you provide services for people in the Salt Lake area?
Zach Gee 23:46
Yeah. The Salt Lake area. Um, yeah, I coach. Probably most of people live on the southern end of the valley, but Midvale’s basically right in the center. So I mean, yeah, I can have anyone come in and help them out.
Emmalou Penrod 24:07
And it sounds like you can help the whole family, all ages. Anyone who wants to discover what their body can do. You can help them safely discover that.
Zach Gee 24:21
Yes, I can. Yeah. Yeah, my process too, is kind of half progressions and regressions. I don’t believe everybody deserves the same program. Everyone’s their own individual person. And so, even though there are some things that might be the same among people, there’s slight individual differences where we tweak exercises to better fit a body type or to better fit someone on developmentally, like for instance, if you have like, a lot of people have this fear of kids lifting weights, there’s still this. There’s still this myth that stunts your growth. And all this stuff out there when people like researchers like Dr. Avery Faigenbaum has done countless research showing that strength training isn’t the problem. It’s really inappropriate technique and loads. Like if you can play, if you can, if you’re old enough to pay attention, to follow directions, then you can strength train, and you can strength train heavy, but you have to build yourself to that. So for instance, if I have someone very brand new, it doesn’t matter if they’re nine years old, it doesn’t matter if they’re 40 years old, they’re going to be very basic, get the fundamentals down, the load that they’re lifting, it’s probably going to be very light. And the reason why is because a lot of people too, a lot of strength is kind of brute strength. Sometimes people can just pick things up. But if they change their technique, to a more efficient technique, they may be able lift a lot more. And so we’re really just trying to get the technique and get proper, because you want proper movement. Like everything I do is like movement based. Like if there’s a movement flaw, then it’s not good because my goal is to transfer to what their actual goals are. Now very few people, I mean, I have some people that come to me and be like, “Hey, I’m looking to compete in a powerlifting meet, or a weightlifting meet.” Then it’s like their goal is lifting the weight. That’s exactly their goal. And other people, it’s like, “I want to be a better soccer player. I want to be able to hike with my family all weekend without stopping.” Things like that. And then in that situations, like the one thing that always usually helps is getting stronger. But it doesn’t help to get stronger if your posture is in a bad position, your knee is in an awkward position or something like that. So it was always the quality movement that will give the highest transfer. And so we’re basically building that movement, we’re going through a progression. And as they become more proficient with their technique, I’ll load them heavier and heavier, because it is a skill. It’s not just like, oh, I’ll just go with that, you know the skill, you can get more out of your body than someone who just has no idea how to how to perform.
Emmalou Penrod 27:58
Yeah, I love it. I am, and the concept of the physical literacy. How that benefits, you know, children, they’re learning lifelong skills, they’re increasing their confidence, they’re learning to connect with their body and understand it. And then throughout adulthood and for, and as we get older, we still need to maintain that muscle mass. Well, I love what you’re doing. So how do people, what’s the best way for people to contact you?
Zach Gee 28:35
So the best way to contact me is through email. My email is bigironsportsperformance@gmail.com. You can also message me on Instagram. I’m on Instagram @bigironsportsperformance.
Emmalou Penrod 28:53
All right. Thank you so much for your time and sharing your expertise, and you have a great day.
Zach Gee 29:02
Thank you. Thank you for having me on.