Do you know the history of Kingsford Charcoal? You’d be floored. The 104 year old company owns 80% of the market and does billions of dollars each year, but it began in quite a peculiar way. You see, Henry Ford purchases a tract of timberland from Edward G. Kingsford on Ford’s way to being the country’s largest producer of wood burning waste: charcoal.  Light bulb moment! Naturally, Henry Ford found opportunity in what seemed like only a cost center. Soon they used the sawdust from the factories to press the waste into briquettes. The product name was later changed to Kingsford as a way t ..read more

A sign hangs on a rusty gate at 110 Lincoln Blvd in Venice, California. The text carved into the wood reads, “motivated people only.” For a long time, that sign represented an ideal that we held, but it did not reflect reality. It should have instead read, “motivated people with an extra $200-$300 a month in disposable income only.” The sign now accurately represents what it takes to be a student at DEUCE. The only requirement is that you show up with willingness.  This change came from a realization that some of the the hungriest, most motivated people were being denied access and opport ..read more

Skill development tends to follow a certain progression. This was first brought to our attention from our friend, Carl Paoli, whose career in coaching is unmatched. In his, Simple-Complex-Simple progression we can see the process of skill-based mastery unfold.  If things feel complex right now, you’re in the messy middle.  Let’s think about weightlifting, for example. The desire may start with a simple premise. “I want to clean and jerk 200lbs,” one might say. Simple enough, right? Things, then, start to get complex. Once you begin to understand how to put a 200-pound barbell over yo ..read more

If you front squat regularly, wear a fitness tracker, and know what your macros are, listen up. I’ve got something to confront you with.. You don’t need advice from the fitness community. If you want to shave thirty seconds off of your mile time, great. Go for it. Want to edge out a few kilos on your clean and jerk, we’d love to help you.  The truth is that if you’ve walked yourself into a strength and conditioning gym over a period of a few years to work your ass off, you might be in a silo. In that silo, you’re told about optimization, facing adversity, doing the hard thing, and all the ..read more

This is adolescence for DEUCE Gym. We’ve got plenty of life in us, but the past thirteen years have been nothing short of remarkable. It’s impossible to not reflect on our humble beginnings in the park, where we’d lug equipment and a whiteboard out to the grass twice a day for years before moving to 110 Lincoln.  The bathroom was 800m away round trip.  Today, we stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us. While some of our students are still here from our original days, most have moved on to new cities and new lives. DEUCE wouldn’t be here without them.  Some highlights ..read more

Olympic Weightlifting is intimidating. The sport is technical, hard, and full of difficult-to-comprehend rules, dogma, and traditions. It can seem impossible for a beginner or an outsider to get right. But there is an undeniable magic to the Snatch and Clean and Jerk. Those movements captivate our imagination and inspire us to dig deep into ourselves to pull our best efforts.  If you are curious about the Olympic Lifts, there is no better person to help demystify the sport and learn the lifts from than our very own remote Weightlifting Coach, Samantha Love.  Sam is a National Champio ..read more

“We fail at the margins of our experience.” -Greg Glassman The above is precisely why our GPP program aims to enhance fitness across multiple metrics and domains. Said another way, it’s why we make you do things you aren’t great at and don’t like. Despite how it might feel sometimes, the goal of our programming isn’t to be hard. It’s to drive adaptation. We try to be as thoughtful as possible about making you a different human.  The primary concern when driving adaptation in an individual for a particular outcome is specificity. Training becomes focused, monotonous, and highly specific to ..read more

If you could bottle this, it’d be worth millions. In fact, I know of just one strategy that requires no money and has the same compounding power of compounding interest investing. Fancy research folks would call it social equity, but we might just call it reputation.  It’s difficult to calculate how much every day preceding this one is with you when you walk into a room. This “social equity” is mostly impossible to understand, because for those with great social capital things tend to come to them. It feels automatic and effortless. The phone rings and emails come in for opportunity and g ..read more

If you bring up a butterfly metaphor, we know where you’re going with it. The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly.. Blah blah blah. But, that’s not where my Agency : Standard co-founder was going when she asked me if I knew about the Monarch Butterfly.  I was shocked!  Sure, the Eastern North American Monarch Butterfly does the whole caterpillar transition thing, too, which is a miracle. But, the way they migrate will blow your mind.  These monarchs, similar to birds, make a two way migration. During warmer months, these butterflies call Northern States and Canada home ..read more

Everyone is on psychedelic drugs these days. While this may be net positive, a timeless quote from Alan Watts comes to mind. It was Watts who said, “If you get the message, hang up the phone.” The quote is in specific response to repeat uses of psychedelics who have seemed to have maximized the intended offering the tool provides and have begun to trend into misuse and/or using them as a crutch.  Don’t confuse this as a license to quit. Instead.. Reframe.  Like any great maxim, the reverberation of truth seems to extend beyond just psychedelics. People misuse fitness in the same way ..read more