Growing up Without Direction, Homelessness & Training Zac Efron I Aaron Williamson DSH #403

How long did they have to transform their body?

For what I did, not long, which is why I became the transformation guy because I was able to do things in very short periods of time.

Normally, if an actor is getting ready for a movie, they might have six months.

Okay.

Three months for me, who knows how long.

But for me, and then we were weeks away from going into, I usually had three, four, five, maybe six weeks.

Jeez, that's not a lot of time.

Not a lot of time.

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And here's the episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got Arian Williamson here today.

How's it going, my man?

It's going good, man.

It's good to be here with you.

Absolutely.

You got great energy, man.

As soon as you walked in, I could feel it.

It's exciting being able to share my story and the journey and just the purpose that I have now.

Yeah, and you've got quite a story, man, from the military to all the trauma you dealt with.

I'd love for you to tell it really quickly before we get started here.

Yeah, kind of a fast-track story.

Broken childhood, no direction.

Joined the military, joined the Marine Corps, and changed my life.

Everything I needed to learn about myself, I learned in boot camp.

And then it was this evolution of really trying to bulletproof my mindset to

achieve things that everyone said I couldn't achieve.

I still kind of abide by that today that was built in while I was in the Marine Corps.

But really crazy that I ended up in Hollywood because it was an industry

I never thought about, I never anticipated being in, but I jumped into it and created a career out of thin air.

And I just,

you know, back to purpose and destiny.

What I'm good at is fitness.

They realized how good I was at what I did.

And I became one of the go-to trainers in Hollywood for transformations, specifically in the action genre.

Wow.

And then just it hit, wiped out the industry.

I needed to pivot to see

what was the next step.

Because as a Marine, I'm all about purpose.

and as as cool as Hollywood is it's very uh very surface layer so I launched my own fitness business met Andy Elliott jumped into his uh

into his family his culture his team and now we have massive purpose together that we're uh we're able to go around the the country and soon to be the world

and just speak on health and fitness and how it can change your life.

Incredible.

Yeah, I got so many questions.

But let's start with this.

Transitioning out of the Marines.

Why do you think you were able to do that successfully compared to other people who seem to struggle?

Well, I'll tell you, transitioning outside of the Marine Corps, coming back to civilian, I lost my dude.

I was homeless, living in my car, trying to figure out what the next step was.

Do I go back overseas?

Do I end my life?

I didn't know what to do.

But back to the sense of responsibility and purpose.

I made it back when a lot of others didn't.

So that really deep sense of responsibility

creeped in.

And

I just knew I had to do something of purpose.

So that's when I was like, you know what, I'm good at fitness.

I'm going to get certified as a trainer.

I'm going to win this local competition, bodybuilding, and I'm going to start promoting health and fitness around the city.

And in doing that,

it uncovered a whole lot of other stuff that I never knew existed.

And that was the film industry in Louisiana at the time.

So it's kind of that release of destiny right there.

Wow.

So people were filming movies in Louisiana?

Yeah, when I got there in the summer of 09, there were more films and TV shows being shot in Louisiana than anywhere else in the world.

What?

Yeah.

How come?

Is there good scenery there or something?

Yeah, that and the tax credit.

Oh,

yeah, Hollywood follows the tax credit.

Right, yeah, Vegas is trying to do that now, I believe.

Yeah, that'll be interesting to see

how that pans out.

But wherever the tax credit goes, you'll see Hollywood follow.

Right, yeah, I know Wahlberg's trying to bring it over here.

So when you were training these guys for transformations, how long did they have to transform their body?

For what I did, not long, which is why I became the transformation guy because I I was able to do things in very short periods of time.

Normally, if an actor is getting ready for a movie, they might have six months, three months, four months, who knows how long.

But for me, I was the guy that production came into town,

and then we were weeks away from going into

production.

I usually had three, four, five, maybe six weeks.

Jeez, that's not a lot of time.

Not a lot of time.

So it's why I like to work with the action guys because they are generally more in tune with, I know it needs to to be done I can buckle down I can handle pain and I can really go all in so that was the fun part of doing you know working with the action guys the icons and yeah and just helping them transform in a way that I can showcase my work on the biggest screen possible dude that's cool because you just see them in the movies but you don't see what they go through to get to that body yeah and it's got to be tough well the fitness component is just one part of their day I mean they got They've got their acting, their stunt training.

You know, who knows whatever they're doing, if there's specialties in the movie, they'll learn another language, they've learned how to play a piano or sing, or you never know what they're going to have to do.

So you're just one module in the course of their day.

Wow.

That is impressive.

And you trained with Zach Efron, right?

Yeah.

That's incredible, dude.

Yeah, Zach and I met in 2010.

He was the first person I met going into the film industry, getting into Hollywood.

He was playing a Marine Iraq veteran in a movie called The Lucky One.

It's a Nicholas Sparks film.

And that was kind of the entrance into it.

I met a lot of guys on the crew, and that's where I learned just how many productions were in town.

So they started sending me this production report and then I was like,

every week I was hitting every office, making sure everyone knew who I was, giving out free sessions.

I wanted to be the guy that it just made sense.

If someone needed to transform, go to Aaron Williamson.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Did you find yourself falling into the Hollywood travel bit in terms of chasing fame and money?

No.

No, because that stuff is irrelevant to me.

I'm not interested in it and never wanted it.

It's cool sometimes when

you can get get a little bit of press that

kind of showcases your abilities and what you're good at.

But at the end of the day, I didn't really fit into Hollywood because of that.

I didn't want to go to the parties.

I don't like to hang out.

I'm an extreme introvert.

Let me do my job.

Let me go to the gym and train by myself.

Let me eat my food and sleep and do my work.

Wow.

That's incredible, man, because a lot of people get caught up in that, especially just being around them.

You probably get influenced to...

want to be in part of that, you know?

Yeah,

I've been through too much in my life to fall into that trap.

And I've seen a lot of people I know fall into it.

I've helped a lot of people get into the industry and see them fall into it and become someone they said they would never become.

Yeah, so you didn't want to become an actor or a stunt double or anything?

No, but it happened.

It happened.

And again, like back to purpose, I feel like all these things happen for a reason.

When it comes to acting, I learned about...

One,

it is a literal craft.

It's an art.

And you really have to hone that craft and that art to become good.

And when I got into acting, that was what I learned is, oh shit, now I can actually get some therapy out of it.

I can start to use some of these repressed emotions that I would never do anything with.

So it was pretty cool to find that next layer of therapy for me outside of the gym.

Wow.

So you still had a lot of suppressed emotions even years later after the military?

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, when you go through go through things and you see things that are,

you know, the most people don't see, it it gets seared into your brain.

You have to live with it every day.

Yeah.

And it's finding a way to manage it.

And therapy probably wouldn't even work at that point.

Yeah.

Like going to therapy and talking to someone was never something that I found benefit in.

I'm sure a lot of people, it can help, but for me, I need something more than that.

Yeah, Sam.

I tried it.

And I mean, I didn't have the trauma you did, but even for me, I didn't see results, to be honest.

I don't know if it was the specific therapist I used, but it was just a weird thing for sure.

Yeah.

There's other methods, I think.

But growing up, you said you felt kind of lost.

You didn't have direction, right?

Yeah.

Was that from your parents?

Yeah, all through elementary school, I was good.

And then my parents started going through a divorce when I was in sixth grade.

And

I got really depressed and kind of turned inward.

And in doing that, I think the school I was going to was not a good school.

And

I feel like a lot of

the bad kids, I would say, kind of...

fed into that.

They could feel the weakness.

And I just started like getting my kicked.

Like i was getting the bully treatment and then uh i started fighting back one day just something snapped i started fighting back and fighting back i found myself landing in the wrong crowd

and that led me into drugs and uh you know almost died in seventh grade of a drug overdose and dang it was bad man like i i really didn't have any anyone to look up to and i didn't have that that uh

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You know, I wish I had someone like me or someone of influence or someone who could like teach me how to follow the right paths that lead to success and I didn't have that.

Yeah, dude, similar story for me.

My parents got divorced fifth grade.

My dad left and I kind of grew up without a father figure almost.

So I didn't have that guidance.

Yeah,

that absence of a parent makes a big difference.

And looking at it now, I understand it more than I did as a kid, obviously.

When you're a kid, you're more in that reputation phase and you think you know best.

And

I feel bad looking back at it,

seeing what I put my parents through.

But I think that's just all part of something to be able to speak to now.

So overdose in seventh grade, after that, was that like a huge wake-up call and you cut every friend off from there?

No, it didn't really change much.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I mean, I ended up going to live with my my grandparents in the middle of the Ozarks in Missouri for a summer.

And when I came back, I kind of fell right back into the same thing.

Ended up going to live with my real father, which didn't work out good.

He ended up bringing me back to Florida to some like rehab kind of residence, like hospital.

I don't even remember really what it was, kind of like a psychiatric hospital or something.

I just realized that I was a mess as a kid.

They were trying to put me on all kinds of medication.

And my mom came and got me before I went into foster care and then brought me back and put me in a private school, which I realized my mom was making a sacrifice to pay for school now for me to do better.

So I needed to try to do better.

And I tried.

It didn't work out the best, but I did better than I did before.

Okay.

Yeah.

So do you think private school, is that something you'd consider for your kids?

When it comes to my kids, I mean, if I had it my own way,

I would homeschool them.

I don't believe in the school system in today's society.

Even private?

I think it really depends on where you are.

Right.

Yeah,

seeing what's happening to this country right now, I have a hard time talking about it because it's infuriating.

You know, being a veteran, having sacrificed and served, seeing the level of narcissism in this country today is...

It's something that I really have a hard time with.

Yeah, it must feel terrible because you were in the military for so long serving our country and now you're seeing what's going on.

Yeah, I mean, look at the military.

It's probably the weakest military we've ever had.

Really?

Really?

I haven't kept up with it.

What's going on?

Bad leaders

from the top down.

And what do you think caused that?

Who's in the White House?

So it's recent.

Oh, 100% recent, yeah.

And at some point, there needs to be a wake-up.

And I just hope that we can wake up

before we have another incident like 9-11 that will wake us up i hope we wake up before then yeah that would be awful man

dude i didn't know the military was that weak yeah it the clown show has infiltrated every facet of society so is it because he cut spending basically on the military it's it's the identity politics that exists in the military now more than they ever have

race gender all that stuff that i have seen shouldn't exist like you're in the military for a specific purpose let's let's

let's, uh, let's live that purpose and leave all the other nonsense to the outside entities because at the end of the day, um, without the military, we're, we're not a free country.

Yeah.

So after high school, you went straight to the Marines?

And that was your decision?

Yeah.

Yeah.

My decision to go in the Marine Corps was something that

sparked from a buddy of mine who was a varsity football player.

He was a linebacker.

He reminded me of Goldberg back in the WWE days.

Yeah.

And when I saw saw him go into the Marine Corps and come back, he was completely transformed.

He looked like a G.I.

Joe.

He was straight lined.

He talked different.

Everything about him was different.

And I was like, I want that.

That's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to go in the Marine Corps.

Yeah.

There's a lot of great skills to learn that you can then apply to other industries, right?

Yeah, but you have to join for the right reasons.

I see too many people joining the military now for college and benefits.

And, you know, to me, that's infuriating as well because

they're the ones who

are making the military today a little bit worse because like for someone like me, I'm like, I want to be special forces.

I want to join the Marine Corps.

I want to serve my country.

I want to do something bigger than myself.

Right.

Not go into it for college and money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Some people get forced also by the parents.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a lot of pressure.

Yeah.

It's got to be the right reasons.

So when you joined, how long did it take before you had to deploy somewhere?

My first,

I mean, it was pretty immediate.

I got to my first duty station and we started doing our first workup for Okinawa.

Wow.

Jungle Justice.

Right off the bat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's part of the military is you're just always going to be somewhere doing something.

You never know where it's going to be or you never know how dangerous it's going to be.

It could be plush.

It could be in a combat environment.

You never know.

Yeah.

And I know one of your incidents, you survived a rocket attack in Iraq, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a...

When you're over there for an extended period of time, you're inevitably going to deal with things and experience things that will live live in your mind for the rest of your life.

And then how you come out of it

really determines your future and how you manage those traumas.

Yeah, that must be so scary.

So rockets are coming at you.

What do you do from there?

Are you looking for cover?

Are you trying to fight them?

Yeah, I mean, you can't fight a rocket.

You don't know where it's going to land.

You just try and find the nearest cover that you can get.

Yeah.

Damn, that is scary.

My cousin served in Iraq, actually, and he was talking about all the landmines there.

Yeah, depending on

what area of the country you're in, you know, there's, you never know what you're going to run into, depending on where you are.

And the urban environment is very, very dangerous and very lethal.

And,

you know, at the time when I was over there, 05 to 09,

it was a really

intense time in terms of civil conflict on top of us being there and just in every way that something could be bad, it was bad.

Dang.

But at the same time, I learned a lot about the culture and the people, and there were a lot of people who wanted us there.

I've got this one quick story.

Out of everything over there that stands out in my mind, I used to drive by this one little shack every morning.

And there was a father and two daughters.

The daughters are probably, I don't know, six to seven years old, maybe 10 for the oldest.

The father was in the backyard.

He'd be, you know, killing the sheep, skinning them, throwing the skin over the fence.

One of the daughters would clean the skin.

The other daughters would be over in this little pit, like this burn barrel with a fire making bread.

And you think about it,

their shoes were water bottles that were just string wrapped around their feet.

Wow.

So it's a lot of perspective into

how we take things for granted here.

I ended up buying them shoes and dropping them off one morning and you'd have thought they won the lottery.

Wow.

But the best thing that you can learn in the military traveling is gaining cultural perspective.

Because at the end of the day, I remember always

saying how fortunate and lucky I am to live in this country because we have it so good.

When you travel the world and you see the different cultures, you understand why.

We are the way we are, but we're falling away from understanding that because of politics and all the nonsense going on right now.

And I think there needs to be a place where

people can understand how good they have it here.

And unfortunately, these people never leave their mom's basement and they think they have the most difficult life in the world because the line at Starbucks is too long or someone put too many pickles on their sub, you know?

Yeah.

No, I love that.

Cultural perspective is so important.

Some people never leave the country, man.

When we used to go to countries, you have education on it.

You understand their customs and courtesies.

So when you go into that country, you know what to do and what not to do out of respect for the country.

Yeah.

I wish that was the same for everyone coming here.

Yeah.

Even if you just look at the numbers, like the odds of being born in the U.S.

and then being born in a decent neighborhood, it's so low and people don't even realize.

You know, other places of the world are so rough to live in.

And I always recommend people traveling.

Some people never leave their own city, dude.

It's crazy.

It's really cool.

Yeah.

And

I find more times than not, those are the people who have the biggest complaints and gripes in life about everything outside of anything they can actually understand because they've never done anything with their life.

That's true.

They don't know what's out there.

Everything is based on what they read on the news, watch on TV, watch on their social media, and it's sad.

It's very sad.

That is sad.

So, how many years were you in the Marines for?

I did seven and a half.

Wow.

And did you leave by choice or what happened near the end?

Yeah, I got out because, you know, I love the Marine Corps.

I had some leaders along the way that

I found that

I didn't align with.

So

I came to find that I had bigger goals than the Marine Corps would allow.

Because essentially, when you are in the military, you have to serve the government and you have a mission to do and you never know what that mission is going to be.

And you don't know how long that mission is going to be.

And you don't know where you're going to go to accomplish that mission.

Right.

But in terms of me, I'm like, there's so much more that I want to accomplish in life.

and I have to be able to be unleashed and go out and do that.

Yeah, so you didn't like the uncertainty and possibly some money wasn't what you wanted to make?

Yeah, there's that, but really, I'm not going to be led by a f ⁇ ing bag.

You know what I mean?

Like, there's too many tools out there.

And unfortunately, sometimes even in the Marine Corps,

people can kind of seep through and somehow become

a very high-ranking person that you have to follow their orders.

Sounds like you start dealing with some politics.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a shame.

And that actually happens at every company.

Yeah.

And

I'm in the position in my life where I refuse to work under a bad leader.

Yeah.

I'll never, I'll never,

I, I, I dictate my future.

No one else does.

For sure, yeah.

It just kills your drive, kills your ambition when you don't respect the guy that's giving you orders or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I've been there because I've had a couple jobs where I can't even respect the guy giving me orders.

I just,

there's too much to do in life.

There's too much fun to be had.

There's too much.

There's too many people that are out there waiting for you or waiting to meet you and they don't even know they're waiting to meet you.

Everyone has a message that needs to be shared with somebody.

Someone needs to hear something that everyone has to say.

Yeah.

And for me, I'm just fortunate enough that I'm in a place right now where.

I'm with the right people, finally.

There's trust, there's loyalty.

There's a lot of things that I've never had before.

And that cohesiveness, the camaraderie, all that means everything to me.

And when you can be

comfortable in the position you're in in terms of going out and just really

doing what's on your heart, then you're going to change a lot of lives.

Yeah.

And from going from homeless to this is incredible.

So when you left the military, you were homeless, right?

Yeah, it was.

There was a period of time where

I thought I was going to be able to pull myself through it,

but the work that I had planned on having didn't pan out the way it was originally intended to.

Got it.

And then trying to find work, and

a lot of companies in today's society don't really know how to read a veteran's resume,

which is something that I've really wanted to help companies understand.

But it's because the language is different from a veteran to a civilian, it doesn't mean they're unqualified.

It just means that maybe this word is the same thing as this one, but you don't know what this one is so you're just always going to gravitate towards the things that you know

interesting yeah i never thought about because when they leave the military they have years of experience but not like corporate experience yeah so on a resume it might look a little weird to hire people that are hiring right yeah but but in the military you know what i mean we we have in my opinion we have a step up because we're in a culture of nothing but structure and discipline and which in the civilian world when when when you when you leave the military and get out, you realize that that doesn't really exist

unless you're with a company who has a culture of that, which there aren't many.

Very rare.

I'd say for Sella's, I'd say Andy Elliott, but I can't even think of maybe Cardone.

I can't think of that many that have that.

It's a skill that is

lacking, I'd say.

Yeah, and that was probably the hardest thing navigating through Hollywood was

there's no structure.

You're hustling every job, you know, trying to figure out what this next step is, doing all the networking and dealing with the narcissism and the superficiality.

And it's like, it's a lot, dude.

You keep bringing up narcissism.

Let's dive into this.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, think about it, dude.

Like,

there, in, in Hollywood, like, I've met so many great people.

I really have.

There's a lot of good people in there.

But at the same time,

there's a lot of people who literally just want to be famous.

Yeah.

They just want to get into acting.

for the celebrity aspect of it.

And you run into it so much.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I always heard about the culture there.

But when I got there and you realize how true it is, like when you meet people and it's like you can just, you feel them feeling you out to see what you can do for them.

It's like, it's a really strange thing.

The human relationship aspect in that business is really awkward because.

You really don't know who's your friend.

And again, I've been burned so many times.

I've had to learn the hard way over and over again because when I came back, I'm like, what?

We're going to shake your hand.

And

I'm going to shake your hand.

If I say something, it's ironclad.

That's a contract.

It's done.

Yeah.

That doesn't exist.

No, no.

And I got, dude, I got burned so many times and I had a lot of people who didn't like me.

And

I think there's a part of me that people mistake a lot because I'm a quiet guy.

I'm on the bigger side.

And I'm misunderstood because there is this idea of, oh,

he's just an arrogant

without even knowing who I am.

And I had to deal with that a lot in the industry at the beginning.

But again, it's like I'm just mission focused.

I've been through a lot of in my life.

I'm just trying to make it.

Like, I just want to,

I want to make my family proud.

I want to change the course of my family's history.

I want to do something amazing.

Yeah.

And

it was.

That was probably one of the tougher things for me is being so misunderstood.

And then knowing that you don't really belong in an industry, but that's become your your identity and your livelihood that's how you make money yeah because i went it's like you go from military combat environment to homeless to hollywood wow that's a big 180.

it's extremes of all of all sorts yeah and uh so coming out of it into you know the three years 2020 2021 2022 it was like it was really a time where i was able to

Sit back and assess things, figure out what is the next step.

Do I want to keep going the Hollywood route or do I want to shift and have more control over my own life instead of having to rely on others?

And that's when I decided to launch my own fitness business.

That is interesting, man, because even though you were making the most money you've ever made, you aren't feeling fulfilled.

No, it's really empty.

It's a hard thing to describe because there's so many different layers of it.

But again, it's like there are a lot of great people that I still stay in touch with because I'm still a part of the industry, just not like I was before.

I no longer need it.

I no longer have to rely on it.

So anything that happens in Hollywood now is a matter of,

hey,

we'd love to have you come be a part of this project.

Or, hey,

if you're available, we know your work.

There's an actor we would love you to work with because he wants to work with you.

Like, that's the kind of work I'm looking for, not standing in a line of 100 people and

trying to prove yourself and then getting, you know, getting told some like,

I'm a grown man.

If you got something to say, man, just say it.

You don't need to sugarcoat anything.

The amount of politics in Hollywood must have been crazy because there's people probably getting jobs that aren't as qualified as you and you must feel like, what the hell?

Yeah, it's moving to LA, seeing the fitness culture in LA, it's like a clown show because

it's more about trying to

make you move and sweat.

As long as you can make a client sweat, then your training is the best.

And it's just so opposite of what I'm used to.

Nothing beats resistance training.

Getting under free weight, getting under load,

that hypertrophy, that's where you transform your body, not

jumping through a hoop on one leg, you know, with your hand behind your back.

You know, it's like some of the most nonsensical training I've ever seen.

And that's, and that's what you see at the highest levels of the celebrity training space these days.

Wow.

What do you feel about this TRT trend lately just taking over social media?

I don't know.

I mean, I haven't noticed it's a trend, but I do know that right now,

the foods we're eating the sedentary lifestyle

the environmental factors the the things that we're drinking there's so many factors I think that play into

men

not having optimal testosterone and but again it's not just because of that doesn't mean boom I need test TRT yeah like get your blood work done look at where things are see what kind of things you can implement naturally before you decide to go on it because right now a lot of people will get on it too young.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of things that you can do really just by cleaning up your diet, getting some exercise in, eating the right foods.

Losing body fat is a really important thing because just in losing body fat will elevate your testosterone.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, it has to do with estrogen.

And there's a whole number of things that

we've just become so confused today as a society and what to do and what not to do.

You can't, oh, you go on the internet internet to read something,

you're already screwed because you're going to read something that says do this and you're going to read something else that says don't do what you just read.

The confliction of information on the internet is extreme.

For sure.

It's why right now there's so many coaches out there.

But then again, you have coaches that are trying to create their own niche, making things overly complicated.

It all comes back to the basics.

The basics of everything, the basis of nutrition, the basics of training, the basis of just living a simple life.

that's optimal right there.

But

we have the need to, what is it, the shiny penny thing?

Oh, shiny object syndrome.

We're always looking for the next best thing.

And in doing that, you're always going to be looking for the next best thing because as soon as you're done with one, you're looking for the next.

And I like to help my clients just realize

or understand how to create the right lifestyle rather than trying to jump from program to program or shiny penny to shiny penny.

Diet to diet.

Yeah, people focus on the fads when they can just focus on discipline.

Yeah.

Get in it, create the lifestyle, habit, change.

Yeah.

And then when you come out of your program, it's no longer a program.

You're just living this new lifestyle, but you have to find the one that works for you.

Yeah.

Now, you're probably used to giving advice to people overweight and stuff.

What about guys like me that are skinny?

I'm actually 5% body fat.

I used to be a distance runner.

Have you had experience training skinnier guys?

Yeah, I mean, like guys like you are the funnest to train because you're literally like

you're a blank slate.

You're a blank canvas, right?

So you have the type of body

or you have the type of physique that I have, right?

When I graduated boot camp, I was 160 pounds.

Wow.

And what it came down to was I needed to eat more food.

I needed to lift heavy weight.

I needed to sleep.

And really,

I mean,

those are the three basic things right there.

Eat, sleep,

train.

Intentional.

Eat intentionally, train intentionally.

Train with maximal intensity.

If you can go in and

get under heavy load and train and give your body proper time to recover, eat the right foods that allow that recovery to happen.

I mean, it'd be cool to see what you could do in 90 days.

That's what I need to do.

I don't lift.

I only do cardio, so that's not helping to me gaining that.

Yeah.

Sleep, decent.

I can improve there, but I think the main thing is just lifting for sure.

Yeah.

How many days a week are you recommending?

Well, starting off where you're at right now, I mean, three to four days.

Okay.

Yeah, three to four days hour And just focus on really big lifts and focus on getting it, like really focus on

strength,

focus on hypertrophy,

full range of motion.

It will be fun to train with you because I train in a little bit of a different way in terms of like really intentional, time under tension focus, full range of motion.

Not too

concerned about how much weight you're lifting.

It's a matter of...

if you have a rep, a rep scheme to fall into,

being able to dump everything you have into your top sets of training so that you fail within those reps, because that's ultimately where your growth is going to come from.

If you have a rep range of eight to 12 reps and

you just have this mentality of, I'm just going to go to 12, but you have eight more in the tank, you really didn't push your body.

Your body has to adapt to stimulus.

And in doing that, that's where growth comes from.

Got it.

Well, next time you're in town, let's get a videographer and let's film some training.

Come down.

I want to end off with Andy Elliott, how you met him, how you partnered with him and your fitness programs as well.

Yeah, so Andy and I met through Renee Rodriguez.

I was traveling with Renee for a while because we had met at an event.

We spoke.

He's like, you got an amazing story.

I think I can help you tell it better.

I'll do that if you help transform me.

So we kind of started doing this health and fitness thing together.

We went to a closer school event here in Vegas back in May.

I met Andy.

And he was like, hey, dude, I think you're the guy I've been looking for.

Come out and visit us next week.

So I drove out, we talked.

He's like, Dude, you're my guy.

I want you to help build out my fitness division.

Wow.

So that's how it happened, man.

I came out there.

We started working together.

And

funny enough, right now, we're actually in the process of really building out the new Elliott Army Fitness Division.

So there's a text-me number if anyone's interested.

It's 602-900-8703.

If you just text that number,

one of us will get back in touch with you in terms of what the next step is.

Because again, right now we are literally building out the new,

let's call it the 3.0 of the

Elliott Army Fitness Division.

But I'm building it out myself in a way that will have

the most results in the shortest amount of time.

But at the end of the day, it's all around health and longevity.

And it's about understanding how to create this into a lifestyle or how to create a new lifestyle so that you no longer fall back into this

program-hopping circle that seems to happen these days with everyone.

Is they do a program, they get out of it, they didn't learn anything, they don't understand their bodies, and then they fall back into the rut.

Except this time, because they were so calorie-restricted, their bodies became sponges, they soaked it up, they put more weight on them when they first started, so now they have more weight to lose.

Then they're looking for the next program, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, so yours is more hands-on, more tangible results.

Yeah, it's like the way I write my programs are very comprehensive because the more I can have my clients understand everything they're doing, if I tell you everything you need to know, the less questions you have, the more you're able to succeed.

But if I'm just having you do something, I don't explain anything to you.

You don't know why you're doing it.

You just know that, hey, he said do this to do it.

And then at the end of it, you don't really know what you learned because nothing was explained to you.

I want to explain everything to you so that way you understand why I'm doing all the things I'm doing with you.

There will be weekly Zoom calls where we get on and we just talk.

I'll have special guests on.

I'm going to have some of my celebrities coming on talking.

So I'm really building this thing out in a way that we haven't done before.

So coming into 2024, there's going to be some bad programs and some really cool people to join us in talking about what I do.

Can't wait to see you, man.

Where can people find you?

They can find me all over the Elliott group with Andy.

I travel with them everywhere, but I'm mostly active on social media, Aaron V.

Williamson.

Perfect.

Thanks so much for coming on, Aaron.

Appreciate you.

Yeah.

All right, guys.

See you tomorrow.