Show Notes

• An athlete from birth
• Mat’s interest in weightlifting
• Filling the void
• The training required to become The Fittest Man on Earth
• The CrossFit season
• Control versus letting go
• Lessons from 2015
• “What story do I want to tell when I’m 60?”
• Hard Work Pays Off
• The time and effort required outside the gym
• Entering a new chapter in life

Connect With Mat Fraser

✩ Website – https://www.hwpotraining.com/
✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/matfras/
✩ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mathewfras

Summary

Mat Fraser is widely considered to be the most dominant and successful athlete in the history of CrossFit, earning five consecutive CrossFit Games titles from 2016 to 2020. Mat shares how his mantra, “Hard Work Pays Off” drives him both personally and professionally, and reveals what it takes to become the Fittest Man on Earth.

Full Transcript

Brian

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field, so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Mat Fraser is the Founder and Chief Product Officer of HWPO Training and a retired professional CrossFit athlete. Mat’s mantra “hard work pays off, “guided him to become the most dominant and successful athlete in the history of CrossFit, and that mantra continues to drive him today in his business endeavors. In his competitive career, Mat earned five consecutive CrossFit Games titles as the fittest man on earth from 2016 to 2020, and he finished on the podium seven consecutive times, starting in 2014. Prior to CrossFit, Mat had a successful career in Olympic weightlifting. He won his first national title at the age of 13 and became the junior national weightlifting champion in 2009. Mat was also a resident athlete at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Since retiring from CrossFit in 2020, Mat has been involved in numerous business adventures, and he also coaches and continues to lead and support his HWPO Training community. He’s a true inspiration, and it’s an honor to have him on the show. Welcome Mat, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence. 

Mat  

Thank you. That was quite the intro. I appreciate it.

Brian

Well, you’re definitely deserving an introduction like that. Mat, I know you were athletic almost from birth. Tell us what it was like growing up and how athletics and fitness was ingrained in you at such a young age.

Mat  

Growing up, I grew up in a very active household, both my parents are former athletes, they grew up there. They were a pairs freestyle figure skating team, senior world champions four times. They went to the ’76 Olympics. But by the time I came along, sports wasn’t a day to day practice for them, they had moved on to different things but we were always very active. My dad always had those party tricks, like the handstand walking up the stairs, stuff like that. So we were always playing around with that, how to trampoline, skiing, water skiing, all that type of stuff, very coordinated and good sense of where my body was in space. In terms of your typical baseball, soccer, I think I played those when I was young, like elementary school, but by the time I hit middle school I had found weightlifting. I liked the independent side of the sport. I didn’t really care as much for team sports at that age. I found weightlifting when I was 12 years old, so very, very early, and it took priority for me almost right away. I did some other recreational sport, played football through high school, but that was more just time with friends. Weightlifting was always my primary sport, and then, graduated high school, moved to the Olympic training center and just started competing right away.

Brian

What surprised me when I was reading about your weightlifting career is not that you were involved in weightlifting, but how early you started; you won your first title at the age of 13. What was it about lifting that really clicked for you and how did that evolve into competitive weightlifting?

Mat  

I’m sure there’s a couple. I’m sure there’s not one singular thing that hooked me on weightlifting, but more the perfect storm of a bunch of little things. I become interested in weightlifting because – I think I was in sixth grade, I was 12 or 13 years old – I was a heavier set kid and just finally got tired of being picked on. So I just was like, I’m done being the fat kid in class, and started working out, cut back my calories, ate nothing but chicken, tuna, spinach, old treadmill down in the basement, and I would just go run, run for an hour or do push ups, sit ups. Lost a bunch of weight. I started training with the high school football team in their weight room when I was in middle school and one of the coaches actually pulled my dad aside when he came in to pick me up, and he was like, hey, I think your kid likes weightlifting more than he enjoys the football side of it. He was like, there’s a guy in the next town over who knows what he’s doing. He knows the technique for proper weightlifting, you should take your kid over there so he can learn how to lift properly. That was kind of the beginning of the end. My dad and I jumped in the truck, a 10-15 minute drive to the next town over, and we didn’t know where he worked. We didn’t know what school he worked at, so we just went to his house. We met his wife, and he coached weightlifting every day after school for free and on Saturday mornings. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I wanted to just load up the heavy weights and lift as much as I could. He forced me to lift on a broomstick, work on the technique. I’m sure it was a little bit of the delayed gratification. It was a lot more on the mental side. It’s not just about physical strength, it’s very much about coordination, timing, speed. And the big, big overarching is technique, which is more like a game of chess, making sure everything’s perfect on the way up. And so I think that hooked me a little bit. Then I’m sure the fact that I was 12-13 years old and there were some cute girls in the gym, kind of kept me around. But then, funny enough – and it’s more common than not – typically the two best weightlifters out of one specific gym will be in the same weight class. It’s held true for every gym I’ve trained at; the number one, number two ranked in the gym, they’re always in the same weight class, and I think that just comes from the daily competitiveness of you’re training with a competitor, so you’re always a little bit more ready to deliver, ready to push the intensity a bit. I was fortunate enough to have that same situation, the kid in the weight room, he was the same age, same weight class as me and so I think every day there was a bit of friendly rivalry, friendly competition going on. I think a combination of all those right away, I think that’s probably what got me hooked.

Brian

And so you certainly had a successful career as a junior weight lifter. When did CrossFit come into the picture, and what eventually inspired you to compete in the CrossFit Games?

Mat  

The beginning of the end of my weightlifting career was right around, I think, the tail end of 2008, beginning of 2009. I broke one of my vertebrae in two spots – my L5 – obviously, took me out of competition, took me out of training. I then had to seek out a surgeon and find out what surgery was going to be the best. I got linked up with a doctor out in a California that did an experimental surgery. He basically told me, okay, I give it a 50-50 shot of working. But the reason I went with him was he was the only doctor that gave me the possibility of returning to sport. Every other doctor told me, you’re done, you’re never working out again, the best you’ll ever be able to do is maybe a light jog. An 18-19 year old kid pursuing the Olympics, that kind of takes the wind out of your sails. But I found the surgeon out in California that did the surgery and right around then, started focusing on school a bit more. That’s when I transitioned from the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs to the Olympic Education Center in Michigan and made a full recovery. It was about a year worth of rehab and rebuilding to getting back to the competition floor, and then I competed for another year. But there was a huge shift in that time, where I started training in a bad mood all the time. I was training based off resentment, that was my primary motivation with that injury. I heard how many people wrote me off, talking about me like I was broken goods and it just didn’t sit well. I had a chip on my shoulder and had a lot to prove, and so that’s what I did. But that association, going into the gym every day in a bad, bad mood, kind of killed the love for the sport. Competed for another year, hit a pretty good milestone, one that I’ve been chasing in the sport for a while; a 300 kilo total. It’s not anything to write home about, but it’s what I was chasing for quite some time. Hit that, said, I think I’m done with weightlifting. Lived life pretty normally for a little while. Got a job out in Alberta working in the oil fields, was planning on moving back to Vermont to go to UVM, did that, and just went from training twice a day to nothing. I wasn’t working out. Working out wasn’t a part of my daily routine. I did it just for competing. It wasn’t like I did it just for the health and fitness benefits, it was only for competing. Once I was in school, there was kind of a void. I started gaining a bit of weight, something was missing. I literally Googled “CrossFit near me,” and because as weightlifters, when you need to train and you’re not in your home gym, you can drop into most CrossFit gyms, and they welcome you in with open arms, you can use their bars and bumpers, so that’s how it started. I literally went into CrossFit near me, found Champlain Valley CrossFit 15 minutes away from me, and just showed up, introduced myself and started just doing weightlifting in the back; I had my own my weight set. That’s kind of what I knew. That’s what I was familiar with and so that’s what I would do. Some of the other members of the gym, who were competitors, saw what I was doing, and I think they got a bit of a kick out of it, like getting me to try CrossFit things. Because I was great with a barbell I was very efficient. I knew how to move the bar as close to perfectly as you can ask. Then, because my parent’s active background, sports background, I was good at some of the party tricks, like I could walk on my hands. I could do a standing back flip, some of these odd things without practicing. So some of the other competitors were like can you do a muscle up? Can you do this? Can you do that? And one after another, I [did] them. That’s how it started. I was just lifting in the back of a CrossFit gym. Then the owner of the gym was hosting a competition. He signed me up for it and I hit the ground running.

Brian

What happened after? You started out going to CrossFit, really, just to replace the void that was left because you had left weightlifting, competitive lifting, you weren’t really doing anything, you were looking just to find a place to get back into shape, and then you entered the competition. At what point did it start to peak your curiosity, or sort of hit that spark that this might be the next thing, or the competitive replacement for what you were doing in weightlifting? 

Mat  

It was after the competition had finished, after the award ceremony and all that stuff. Coming from weightlifting, you do it for the love of the sport, you pay to play. You have to pay your all your own travel, you have to pay a coach. There’s not a dime in the sport – or there wasn’t when I was competing. Then I do this in-house competition. It’s at the same gym I go to every day, a local competition, and I won some prize money. And so full time college student and I’m burning the candle at both ends, with university, too, I’m doing a double major, double minor. I didn’t like having a job just because I was so busy with school. I just looked at it as I won a little bit of money. I remember turning to the guy who hosted the competition, the gym owner. I was like, oh, I’ve never made a dime weightlifting and I just made a couple hundred bucks at this competition. And then I’m sure I got some free protein, some free clothes from a clothing sponsor or something. It was all so foreign to me. I’m working out in my dad’s clothes because I don’t have clothes. I can’t go to the store. I don’t have enough money to buy good shorts or anything. That competition I was using a friend shoes. He was in a different heat, so we’d swap shoes in between heats. I just saw it as this is a way that’s not going to interfere with school because competitions are on Saturday, Sundays. I can make some pocket money and I can keep focusing on school. I don’t have to distract myself with trying to coordinate a work schedule and my school schedule. I remember, after that award ceremony, I went to Jade, the owner of the gym, and I think my line was, are there more of these competitions? And he was like, yeah, like every weekend. I was, okay, cool. Where do I find them? He gave me a website where every competition would [be] listed. A gym would just put up a posting, hey, we’re having a competition. We’re opening up to this many people, whatever and I would just call. I would go one by one calling and ask…if they said that they were offering a prize, hey, how much is the prize? If it was over a certain amount, I would show up.

Brian

Was that primarily on the East Coast, or did you start traveling? How far were you traveling at that point?

Mat  

All east coast. I don’t know if I was at the point quite yet of buying plane tickets, but I would find somebody else in the gym that was competing at the same competition and I would be like, hey, I’ll drive. I’ll do the gas money if you get the hotel, stuff like that. They were all on the weekends. But I just looked at it as a side hustle of train my [bleep] off during the week, take Friday off, drive down to competition, compete Saturday, Sunday try to get back. It was all New England based. I’m trying to think of where they were, like Connecticut, Massachusetts, stuff like that.

Brian

I love this conversation, Mat, because I’m a huge proponent of health and fitness, and I don’t compete, I don’t operate at the level that you do, but I think both cardio and strength training are critically important for health and vitality, (Mat:  Absolutely.) but you’ve obviously taken this to an entirely different level. Let’s jump into the CrossFit Games and the training required to become the fittest man on earth. What did a typical daily workout and maybe weekly schedule look like for you at the height of training for the CrossFit Games?

Mat  

The schedule fluctuated throughout the year. For anyone that doesn’t know, I’ll give a quick synopsis or quick summation of the season. When I was competing, it was primarily three stages. There’s a stage – typically February, March time frame – that’s called the open. It’s an online competition, typically was five weeks long, and they release one workout per week. They release it on a Thursday. You have to complete it and submit your score and video by Monday evening, and then you’re ranked based off that from the open. I think at the peak of the open, when I was competing, there were over 400,000 competitors. To go from the open, then you qualify to regionals. There were 17 regions around the world. They take the top 40 men and women in from the open to each region. Then regionals is a three day competition, six to seven events. Then they take the top one to five from each region to the CrossFit Games, which are essentially the world championships of CrossFit. Competition season starts in late February and then typically ended in early August for us. So it’s a pretty long season, but early in the season – winter time, January, February – my training is pretty minimal. I typically waited until the open to really kick things into gear, just because I felt comfortable enough where I was in my fitness level for qualifying. I knew I didn’t need to show up in top notch shape for the first stage of qualifying, I could just roll through it. Then regionals, training kind of picks up there. I would train through regional so I would never peak for it. As soon as I was done with the open I would basically start training for the games. But then games training, I would say games training would typically last about three months. So you’re training for eight or nine months. But games training, the really intense, really crazy stuff, was probably two to three months long. I would train six days a week. I took Mondays off. Mondays were completely off. I wouldn’t leave the house, really, it was just, I would eat a ton and do nothing but body work the entire day; massages, fair guns, cupping, scraping, stretching, all that type of stuff. It was an all day thing. And then Thursdays were my low impact days. I would still do a pretty decent amount of training, but it would just be a swimming workout and a biking workout, typically three hours or less worth of training but it was all… no barbells, no impact, very, very good on the body. And then the other five days a week, I would train minimum two day, two sessions per day. Then if I had an off-site, like, if I went to the track or had to do a road bike workout, there would be a third session in there. Each session anywhere from, like two, typically two to three hours of actual work. But we don’t know what we’re training for. Essentially, we know kind of what it’s going to involve, we know that anything is allowed. There’s no rule. There were no rules on what was allowed, what wasn’t allowed. Events could be ten seconds long, events could be four hours long. We’ve had to do everything from lift a barbell 100 times, to lifting one barbell as heavy as possible. So anything and everything in between; running, biking, swimming, barbell work, gymnastics work. It was pretty intense. You’re trying to train everything, but it’s impossible. Even then, no matter what you do, you’re going to show up to the competition, and they’re going to have thought of something that they know nobody else has touched, they make up a new piece of equipment that they know nobody has touched before. But it was a full time, all day, every day, eyes opened to eyes closed; the day revolves around it.

Brian

It amazes me that athletes don’t know what the challenges are going to be until you show up for the event. I think that that’s one of the things that makes the CrossFit Games unique. How did you prepare and equip yourself for that, Mat, both physically and I’m sure there’s a huge mental component to that, just not knowing what it is that you’re going to be doing, and again, having to prepare for that, not only physically, but also mentally.

Mat  

Yeah. I’ll back backtrack real quick, even some of the events we wouldn’t find out at all until we were doing the event. We’ve had multiple events where there’ll be a half dozen pieces of equipment out on the competition floor and we were told, as soon as you get to the piece of equipment your judge will tell you what the movement is you need to do, just start doing it, then they’ll tell you when you’re done. They know how many reps you have to do, now you’re playing this guessing game of alright, well, if I’m moving this barbell and it’s five reps, I’m going to pace it differently. I’m going to move differently than if it’s 100 reps so you just kind of take a shot in the dark and hope your strategy holds up. Training for that, you end up training a lot in the middle, you may have to run a 40 yard dash, you may have to run a marathon. We end up doing a lot of 5k training and then the occasional sprint work so we’re not going to be the best at the marathon running, we’re not going to be the worst at it. We’re just trying to be able to complete it competitively. But you try to be creative in training, you try to think of, okay, we’re going to Madison, Wisconsin, what’s the landscape look like there? What other sporting events do they host there? The easy example was, when we were doing our research into Madison, we saw that Madison hosts an off-road triathlon every year; swim in the lake, a mountain bike course and a trail run instead of road course. So you see [that] the landscape offers that and so you start training it on the what if or the maybe that they’re going to use that as one of the events. But we had events where I remember I showed up and had never touched the implement before, did terribly at it, bought that piece of equipment, took it back home, trained it. I genuinely believed I was one of the best at it. Went from failing the event to being what I thought was incredible at it, and then that piece of equipment never showed up again through my entire career. There are things like that, where it’s like, for every one hundred things that you’re trying or that you’re practicing it’s like you hope they show up. You just want to be ready for it when they do, but there’s no guarantee that they will.

Brian

What’s the bigger life lesson encompassed in that need to be ready? Something, Mat, that we can all apply in our lives, even if we never compete in a CrossFit Games.

Mat  

Oh, I mean accepting the things that you can control and being able to decipher between what you can control and what you can’t. I always felt like that was one of my very, very strong suits, was being able to look at an event or a situation or just anything, and really deciding, like, okay, what in this scenario do I have control over? Do I have control about how they’re responding? Probably not. Do I have control of the referee that I was assigned? Probably not. I have control over none of these things. What do I have control over; my effort, my attitude, how I approach this workout, how I pace it, stuff like that. With CrossFit, with it being the unknown; events don’t get announced. We don’t know what they are leading in. You don’t know what you’re training for and so you’ll see a lot of people fall victim to the “what if” game. What if they make us run a marathon? What if they do that? What if they do this? And it’s like, well, what if? What if leprechauns are real and they show up on the competition? It’s like why are we wasting time playing this what if game? As soon as they tell us what is required, or what the competition is, or what we have to train for, well, then I’ll start worrying about it. But getting yourself into a tizzy in your own mind, letting your imagination run wild, that’s kind of a recipe for disaster. So really focusing on the task at hand, because a lot of the events, too, we’ve never done them. A lot of the workouts are never repeated. They’re brand new or the terrain is brand new. Even something as simple as you’re standing at the bottom of the hill, you know what the workout is, and the workout ends at the top of the hill. It ends with a foot race up the hill. And you’re like, is this 200 meters? Is that 400 meters? Is that a 10% grade or 20% grade up? I don’t know. You just have to fall back on your experience and trust it and control what you have control over and not get worried about all the outside variables that are happening.

Brian

What do you see happening at the Games? Do you notice that certain athletes are handling that better than others? (Mat:  Oh, absolutely.) Do you see people getting carried away with the what ifs, or trying to guess about what’s going to happen, rather than just…I guess you probably don’t sit waiting patiently, but whatever the opposite of that is, not expending your energy thinking about what might not happen.

Mat  

It was really interesting, especially once I was a couple years into it and got to know a lot of the competitors – because it’s a lot of the same faces that show up every year – we get to know each other, we kind of know personalities and stuff. I always found it so interesting seeing how different personalities deal with stress. There were some that…it was comical to me. I knew as soon as they started getting chatty, as soon as they were just going non-stop, it’s like, ah, they’re nervous. Or the guys that can’t sit down, you see them in the back, and they’re just constantly pacing, pacing, pacing. It’s like, hey, man, we got two hours before the event goes, like, you should sit down. You’re going to wear out your legs. So you see how different people react to that and some of them, you kind of feed into it, they’re your competitors. You want to get that edge on them whether it’s physical or mental. But I really tried to focus on… as soon as the event was done, I would get out of my competition clothes. You get out of the sweaty uniform and just like industry clothes, sweat pants dry. It was almost like that was the same as putting on a suit going to work. As soon as you do up that tie, you’re like, okay, I’m in work mode now. I’m going to show up to a boardroom. I know the types of conversations I’m going to have. I just felt like, whenever I had my competition uniform on or just the compression and the shoes laced up super tight, it was like, that’s keeping my body in that fight mode. As soon as I was done competing, I would try to change and relax, try to get away from the other competitors, get into a quiet space and turn off, try not to think about the next event that’s happening in two hours. It’s like, nope, the event’s happening in two hours whether I think about it or not and all the preparation is done. All the studying for the test is done. If I’m trying to figure something out right now, it’s too late. That’s like studying the night before an exam. So it was just trusting the capabilities and trying to stay calm through it all.

Brian

How did you find it is as time went on? Was 2014 the first time you entered the games?

Mat  

Yeah. My first year competing in the CrossFit season was 2013 and I didn’t qualify. I made it to regionals, didn’t qualify past regionals, and then 2014 was my rookie season at the CrossFit Games.

Brian

You finished second in 2014, second in 2015, and then you won it five years in a row. Tell us about that evolution through those seven years or even those eight years. Did it get easier as as you went on? Did you notice things and did you have a competitive advantage? I mean, obviously, over somebody coming in as a rookie doing it for the first time, you probably did. But what was that like as you got into the fourth, fifth year, as you had a couple wins under your belt and you were the defending champion? I’m sure there are positive aspects to that but there you’re also the guy that people are are trying to beat too, so there are different sides to it.

Mat  

I always said it never got easier, but it got simpler. What I did wasn’t easy, but it was very simple. You wake up, you do everything you can on a daily basis, over and over again, to be the best you can. It’s a pretty simple plan, but I set up some things in my life to allow that simplicity to even be an option. Intentionally never had kids, intentionally never had a job. I wouldn’t leave my house… I wouldn’t leave like my hometown for months at a time when I was training; traveling got cut out completely. Every single day when I was training looked almost identical. It revolved around my sleep, even my sleep was set up to be ideal:  having a cooling pad on the mattress, having AC cranked, having certain blankets, having a bedtime, having a certain alarm clock that helps you wake up better. Even the sleep was choreographed to help my performance. Very simple but monotonous. You’re willingly being bored or willingly miserable because you’re not hanging out with friends, you’re not going out to eat, you’re not staying up late; it’s training, that’s all you do all day, every day. Then the people in my life allowed for that very simple lifestyle. I have my business partner now, but at the time he was my manager, agent, friend. He took everything business related, any contract, anything business, any scheduling. He did that. And then my at the time girlfriend – now wife, mother of my kids, Sammy – she did everything house related. When I woke up… when I say I was concerned about training, that’s about it. That was it. Sammy was basically like a personal chef for me. She made a career out of it. But I was eating 9000 plus calories a day; that, in itself, is a part time job just eating it, never mind preparing it all too.

Brian

That’s exactly what I was going to say, that eating 9000 calories is definitely a part time job.

Mat  

But adding the fact that I’m five foot six and 190 pounds, some of the strong men you see, like Thor and Brian Shaw, eating 10,000 calories, it’s like, yeah, that fits; you’re six foot eight, you’re 400 pounds. Whereas for me, my caloric intake was because I was burning so much, got it tested and found out I was way malnourished in the early years. In the science lab with the oxygen mask and they’re drawing blood every three minutes to figure out how many calories you’re burning and what’s your lactate threshold and all that stuff. So I had the environment around me to set up that lifestyle where I could be singularly focused on this one thing, day in and day out. Then 2014 was my rookie year at the games. I got second place, 2015 second place again, so 2014 I was over the moon. I was so excited. I went in with zero expectations. I didn’t know that the weekend was going to be anything, then I ended up landing on the podium and I’m doing back flips. I couldn’t believe it. Then come 2015 I had the expectation in my head that I’m going to win – first place from the year before, he had retired – I’m second place. So I was like, dude, I got this thing in the bag and ended up not, I ended up losing by a handful of points. I’m not sure, but I know it came down to the final workout. It came down to first place and second place whoever won that workout. It didn’t matter if we finished 20th and 21st, whoever finished above the other guy was going to win, and he edged me out. He got the win. Now I’m looking at it… I get back home… the year prior, same medal, same results, and I’m ready to throw a party but a year later, same medal, same result, and I’m depressed. I am in the ditch about it. I’m gutted. After enough time of that, being down on myself, I just locked myself in a room with a notepad and asked myself, why am I upset? What is different than last year? Why do I have different emotions this year than I did last year for the exact same result? After a couple hours and scribbling on paper, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the results that were bothering me. It was the lead up to it in 2015. I had it in my head that I was going to win and I cut every corner the entire year, training was terrible, inconsistent. My nutrition was terrible, my sleep schedule was all over the place and what really bugged me was I knew that 2015 medal didn’t reflect what I was capable of. I knew I was better than that. I knew I could do more than that and I was trying to pinpoint, put my finger on what was the straw that broke the camel’s back. What was the final fork in the road of the option of you could win or you could get a second, what was that? It bugged me. I was so close to being on top of the podium. I was like, this could have been one night of staying up too late. This could have been one bad meal. That was the deciding factor that finally came down to it, and it kept me up at night, like, what was it? What was the deciding factor? Finally I went, there are too many variables to calculate which one was the one, and so I just fixed all of them. At the time I had just started dating Sammy, my now wife. I was still living alone, we were dating distance and I just made the decision. I was like, alright, for one season, I’m not going to compromise on a single thing. I looked at like, okay, it’s going to be eight months start to finish of hard, hard training. I’m sure you can have some things where you think back to an event that happened, and you feel like it was a month ago, but then you realize it was a year ago, and you’re like, that year went by so fast. I just went, like, okay, that’s what’s going to happen here. I’m going to not compromise on a single thing for one year. If I get to the end of the year and I hate it, I never have to do it again. I can quit. But I knew if I don’t sacrifice a single thing for the entire year, no matter what the results are, whether the first place or 50th place, I’m going to be proud of those results. Through all that note writing, that was the overarching theme; as long as I’m proud of the effort that I put in, I’m going to be proud of the results I get. I knew for the 2015 I was not proud of the effort I put in. I wasn’t proud of the training, I wasn’t proud of how I competed. My whole goal shifted to then just making myself proud leaving the gym every day, proud of the effort I put in. Once I started following those guidelines then I compete in the 2016, I win. I won by the largest margin of victory ever in the sport. That’s when I went, like, oh, okay, one, I wasn’t miserable for the eight months. I liked it and I just went, I got the results I wanted. I’m proud of the results I got. So every year after that, I just kind of doubled down, kept the things that worked every year. Literally every year after I would compete, I would take a week off before I made any decisions. But at the end of every season, I didn’t even know if I would be competing the following season. I wanted to wait, give it a week to get rested, let the body not be sore, kind of lick my wounds, and then have the conversation with Sammy, have the conversation with O’Keeffe of like, hey, are we signing up for this thing again? Because it’s not just my life on hold, Sammy’s sacrificing a lot. O’Keeffe was sacrificing a lot. But after that first year, I got the results that I liked, and I just went, Okay, let’s run it back again and again and again.

Brian

And it obviously worked very successfully. Mat, you’re obviously very intentional about how you live your life, and I’m curious what drives you, like at the core or underneath. What is it that’s that drove you to become CrossFit Games champion five consecutive times, which nobody has done before?

Mat  

I’m sure this is the same as the weightlifting scenario of what kept me in weightlifting. It was a little bit of this, little bit of that. But I would say the overarching, big theme was me just deciding what story do I want to tell when I’m 60? What do I want to tell my kids? Like, oh, yeah, I did that competition a couple times, I was okay at it. Or do I want to get everything out of this experience that I can do? I want to just ride this thing until the wheels fall off, create some incredible opportunities for myself, for my family, travel the world, have these experiences, and then also figure out what I’m capable of. That was definitely one of my favorite things of competing and doing that. It’s like you’re pushing your body to the physical edge and you’re probably more pushing it to the mental edge, and it feels like the physical edge. But once I would find that place, the discomfort in the comfortable place – I don’t know if that makes sense – but really finding what your body can push. For me, it was the rowing machine that was the staple in my training and I always really enjoyed repeating workouts. In CrossFit, it’s like a big no-no to repeat workouts. You’re supposed to be constantly varied, something different every day. I really like repeating workouts because then I can use that as a measuring stick. I can use it as did I get better from last time? Yeah, I have data that proves it. For myself, I really liked the rowing machine because it was low impact, it was pretty easy on the body. It has a digital display, so there’s no opinion in the matter. If I’m doing 1000 meter repeats, there’s no opinion on if I’m doing better this time than last time; it’s a fact. Your pace is displayed, your times are displayed and it was a very safe place. If you’re going for a one rep max or a new PR with a barbell movement, there’s a lot of force, there’s some danger, like the barbell could fall. If you’re doing ring muscle ups you could fall off the rings, stuff like that. With rowing, if I hit my physical limit and fail, I’m not falling, I’m tipping off the side of the rower and laying down. So that was my place of comfort, or my place of safety, and I would do the same workouts. There’s one workout I would do probably three, four times a year, every year, and is a miserable, miserable workout on the C2 rower. The first time I do it to the second time, I’m shaving off two seconds off my split time. Then the third time I do it, I’m shaving off a half second, and then a quarter second and then, by the end of it, I’m looking at shaving off tenths of seconds over a 20 minute workout. So you’re getting everything you can. I like that; the time before you thought you were at your limit and then you’re like, okay, well, I survived ten minutes after that workout, I was up drinking water, hanging on my buddies, it was fine so apparently I did have a little bit left. I did have a little bit more. By repeating that over and over, I was really able to find what I truly thought was my physical limit, because I’ve now done this specific workout 40 times, 50 times through my career. I know the physical feeling, I know the emotional feeling at every point in that workout. Every time I was able to push it a little bit more, a little bit more. Then once I was able to – in that safe setting – figure out what my limitations are, what my capabilities are, now I can apply that sensation of, alright, how much physical pain can I actually deal with. And now I can go apply that to the new workout that I’ve never experienced before, where fear or emotion are going to rise up because it’s unfamiliar. Now it’s like, no, I know my breathing rate, I know I can hold my heart rate at 200 plus for however many minutes long. It just provided that place of comfort, that place of familiarity a little bit more. 

Brian

You talked about being comfortable and discomfort, and it seems like you really thrive on pushing yourself to the limit, on finding out just what you can do and then striving to do more, whatever the exercise is, whether it’s rowing. You talked about translating that or shifting that concept and that energy into, really, everything that you were doing.

Mat  

I’m sure the root of it all is just fear based. That was a big fear of mine. If I’m training by myself the whole 2015 season, I thought I was the best so I trained as if I was looking over my shoulder at people behind me. Then I showed up to the competition, everyone was right there with me and it created this panic and I’m like, oh [bleep], I realized I’ve been resting on my laurels for so long. And then all the proceeding seasons for the most part, I would train by myself, and I would always envision other people beating me. I would always envision someone being better than me. So it came from a place of fear or insecurity. Like when you’re on the rowing machine by yourself; no one else is around, no music playing, it’s hard to find the motivation if it feels like you can taste pennies, but it’s just the blood coming up, like the blood from your lungs. Finding those moments you need some good motivation. For me, it was just I always pictured somebody else beating me. I always pictured somebody else being better than me so I knew I have to get everything out of this. I need to get every pound out of every lift. I need to get every second out of every split time. So it was just always pretending, like when you’re playing tag when you’re a kid and you thought somebody was chasing you and you never felt like you could run faster than when you felt somebody’s fingers on the back of your neck. That’s how I trained. I always felt like there was somebody right there chasing me.

Brian

Mat, your mantra “hard work pays off,” it’s not only a personal philosophy for you, but also the foundation of your business. It’s incorporated into the name of your business. Share what that phrase means to you. I love that mantra and how it shaped your journey to become the fittest man on earth. Why do you believe hard work is such a critical component for achieving success in any area of life? 

Mat  

Absolutely. I think the first disclaimer is… when I always phrased “hard work” I looked at it as just like anything that wasn’t enjoyable. It didn’t necessarily have to be physically hard. A lot of the stuff that I did in training and in practice was very mentally hard. And so it’s those things… it’s when you have to put a lot in. When you put no effort in and you get a gold medal, it’s like, alright, whatever. You don’t realize that it’s the whole process. It’s the work leading up to it. And then reflecting back on, man, because I did all that stuff yesterday and the day before, I’m now capable of doing this today, and I just stretched that out over everything I did. Funny enough that mantra, “hard work pays off” actually came from when I was in university and studying for a class. That’s when the mantra would get played in my head. I was failing a class and I wasn’t happy with it. The problem was I knew so little that I didn’t even know what questions to ask. I didn’t know where to look to get the information, any of that stuff, and I was at a point of desperation going into the final. It’s like, I’m failing the class, I have to ace this thing. I don’t have a choice. And it was kind of the same thing of, well, what do I want when I’m 40 years old? Because this class was a little bit too hard, required a few too many hours of studying, now I never finished my dream of becoming an engineer? Well, no, that seems silly, like just one class got in the way. No, I’ll just dedicate the time needed. I didn’t know how to do it, so I just went, okay, I’m just going to cut everything out of my life:  friends, relationships, everything. I would just sit in the library, and the class I was failing, I read the textbook cover to cover, and anything I didn’t know I would jot it down, learn that thing individually, and then go back. Once I read everything individually, I would go back and read the whole thing again, see if it made any more sense. I just kept telling myself, this will pay off. This will pay off. Then, over time, the dots start getting connected in the class. You didn’t know how to study, but you just started studying and then as you’re going, you start figuring it out and kind of getting a little bit better with it. That’s just what I did with CrossFit. I showed up to a competition, I looked at the events I did well in, I looked at the events I did poorly in, and went, okay, well, why did I do poorly and then broke it down. Was it I wasn’t conditioned enough? Was it my technique wasn’t good enough? Was it I didn’t have the endurance or the strength? What was the component and then break that down so I’m not just looking at, alright, I’m not good, I want to get better at ring muscle ups. That doesn’t mean I’m just going to go do ring muscle ups until I’m blue in the face. What part of the ring muscle up is the bottleneck? What is the limiting factor? Is it my grip strength? Is it my grip endurance? Is it my timing on the turnover? Is my technique smooth when I come over to the top? Is it my press out at the top? I just took everything that I want to get better at, broke it down into all those different steps, identified what the actual weakness was, not just the overarching movement, and then I would just hammer that until I felt like I was good at it. And then, you know how you do anything, is how you do everything. Once you find a life hack of how to learn, like I did in college, well, you don’t forget that life hack. You don’t forget that trick, you don’t forget it. So now it’s like, okay, now I just have to learn how to apply it in a physical setting. I went from university to now with CrossFit; how do I apply it? Then, as soon as I was done with CrossFit, same thing in the business world; there’s no chance I’m perfect. Thinking that I’ve gone through without making mistakes would be silly, but you look back at the end of the quarter or the end of the year, at all the different pieces and it’s like, well, what did I mess up? How can I be better? It’s just applying the same thing in different arenas. 

Brian

We’ve talked about hard work and you and I are definitely in agreement. I always believe that if I’m not working harder than everybody else, then I shouldn’t be surprised when I don’t achieve what someone else has achieved. So hard work for me is table stakes, right? It’s the bare minimum that you need to do. What other traits or qualities are essential for someone who wants to achieve at the level you did, whether we’re talking about an elite athlete, a CrossFit athlete, or just somebody achieving or striving to achieve the pinnacle of success in something completely different, maybe even something unrelated to sports?

Mat  

One piece that was very eye opening to me was that, for me, with training CrossFit, competing in CrossFit, I was shocked at how much work, time and effort went into stuff outside of the CrossFit gym. Not the physical training, you’re looking at the mental training, the sleep schedules, the diet, the body work. It’s what are you doing when you’re outside of the gym. I look at that the same as when I was in university. What are you doing on Saturday and Sunday? It’s not just are you paying attention during class and taking good notes. No, are you doing extra stuff on the weekend with training? Are you still continuing some work even though it’s diminishing returns? It’s still returns. Are you still capturing those even when you go home? It can get down to the nit-picky, something as simple as, hey, if you’re getting drunk every Friday night now you’re hung over on Saturday. Now your body’s not working ideally. On Sunday that lack of sleep trickles out. Well, the same is true – maybe not as drastic – but the same is true for just staying up late. I don’t think everyone realizes how all encompassing it can be. The people that you see that are the best of the best of the best at their trade, it’s very rare that they’re done thinking about work or done contributing to their craft when it’s not present in front of them. For me, it was an around the clock thing, and I think that I never saw something as worth it or not. It was either a yes or no. It’s not like hey, there would be some benefit but I’m not going to do it. No. It’s either going to make you better or not. I didn’t care about how much and so it’s just like, zero compromises. It was all in, all consuming.

Brian

So that’s a pretty strong filter that you had; either it contributes to what you’re trying to accomplish or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, then it falls by the wayside, it doesn’t get incorporated into your lifestyle. Is that what you’re saying?

Mat  

Yeah, and I held that when I was competing. I was very limited on what I would allow myself to do, because I knew it was a timestamp. I knew it was a very short window of my life that I was going to be able to be capable of doing stuff like that, have an interest in doing that. So it was everything. It just… trying to think of examples. You’re not going out to dinner with friends, even stuff as simple as… I like traveling, I like riding my motorcycle, I like all that stuff, but it’s nope, you’re getting close to competition, you can’t ride the motorcycle anymore. You’re getting close to competition… I’m careful with opening packages with a knife. It sounds so silly, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen where a competitor cut their thumb a week before and everything we do is with a barbell. We use what’s called a hook grip, so you need to hold on to your thumb. There’s a lot of weight pulling your thumb, and if you have a cut; one, it’s going to hurt, but then two, it’s going to bleed on the bar, it’s going to get your hand wet, you’re going to lose grip. I looked at everything like that; make sure I didn’t break a toe a week out from competition. Make sure I didn’t cut my hand a week out. Even little things like that where I’m sure 99% of the time I was concerned about those and took action to make sure they didn’t happen to me it would have made no difference, but you don’t know which variable is going to be the one that makes the difference, so I just cut them all out.

Brian  

Everything matters, right?

Mat  

Yeah, everything matters.

Brian  

Mat, as you know our show is called LifeExcellence and I wonder what does excellence mean to you?

Mat  

Oh, man. What does it mean for myself or what’s my definition of it?

Brian  

Either or.

Mat  

I think excellence probably relates pretty heavily to doing everything to the best of your ability. So, not half [bleep] anything or cutting a corner. I think doing it to the best of your ability. I think personal happiness has to factor in there somewhere. It’s one of those things. Even if you’re the best in the world at it, but you hate doing it, it’s not worth it. I think having good people around you, having that good support system, and then making sure that you and the people around you are all giving everything you can. Because I’m confident when I say that if I truly give everything I can and I get a result that’s anything other than what I initially set out for, I will still be proud of those results.

Brian

That’s well said. Mat, your CrossFit days are behind you, certainly from a competition standpoint. What are you most excited about in this season of your life, and where can our listeners and viewers go to learn more about you and the great work that you’re doing?

Mat  

I think this chapter in my life I’ve stepped back into a bit of a learning phase. Towards the end of my CrossFit I was very cemented into my ways, and I was very confident that that was the way to do it. But now I’m in a whole new chapter of life whether that’s looking at it as a business owner, a friend or a father. I’m a new dad, have a 16 month old home, another one on the way. That’s a whole different set of challenges, or excitement, or however you want to look at it. So putting a ton of effort into trying to create the home life that I see as ideal, but having a ton of fun becoming a student again. I’m a student pilot now, been taking flying lessons and studying for that for a long time. I actually have a written exam coming up in a couple days. But being a beginner again, being a student again, sitting down and looking at a subject matter and going, I have no idea how to do this, or how to get through it, or what it means. Or with fatherhood, how do I deal with people and emotions and all that stuff. I’m really putting a lot of effort into trying to learn, being willing to be a beginner again, asking for advice, asking for other people’s experiences all the time. I’m just in such a new chapter of life. It’s a ton of fun, but it’s unknown, and so you just try to have good people around you, ask plenty of questions and no matter the circumstances I’m in. Always do the next right thing, and it usually works out pretty well.

Brian

Well, you were the fittest man on earth so I have no doubt that whatever you do, you’re going to be great at. I love that beginner’s mind perspective and equipped with that and your engineering background, you’ll definitely figure it out whether it’s flying a plane or parenting two children, which is different than just having one child as you’ll…

Mat  

So, so excited and so nervous at the same time.

Brian

That’s awesome. Mat, thank you so much for being on LifeExcellence. This has been great. It’s been an honor to meet and get to know you, and I’m so grateful for our conversation today. 

Mat  

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This is great.

Brian

It has been great. Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Mat Fraser on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at brianbartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.