The Tim Ferriss Show #228: The Lion of Olympic Weightlifting, 62-Year-Old Jerzy Gregorek (Also Featuring: Naval Ravikant)
Client's 10-Year Olympic Snatch Journey
- A 74-year-old client with hip and shoulder replacements achieved full Olympic snatch capability after 10 years of progressive training.
- Jerzy Gregorek adapted exercises inch by inch, focusing first on flexibility, then strength, culminating in dynamic, fast movements like the snatch drop.
Jerzy Calls Tim Fat
- Jerzy greeted Tim Ferriss by pinching his body fat and bluntly calling him fat.
- This intense humorous test established an immediate rapport and defined Jerzy's direct coaching style.
Miraculous Cerebral Palsy Transformation
- Jerzy transformed a severely disabled cerebral palsy patient from barely walking and no energy to exercising, reading, and engaging intellectually.
- The process took years but improved his physical, cognitive, and social capacities drastically.
Jerzy Gregorek (@TheHappyBody) immigrated from Poland to the United States with his wife, Aniela, in 1986 as political refugees. He subsequently won four World Weightlifting Championships and established one world record. In 2000, Jerzy and Aniela founded UCLA's weightlifting team. As co-creator of The Happy Body Program, Jerzy has been mentoring people for more than 30 years. In 1998, Jerzy earned an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review. His poem Family Tree was the winner of Amelia magazine's Charles William Duke Long Poem Award in 1998. Naval Ravikant (@naval) also joins us on this podcast, as he introduced me to Jerzy. Naval is the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList. He is an active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS, which Cisco bought for $635 million in cash. As always, I hope you enjoy this episode! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is the future of financial advice. It's become especially popular among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country because it provides the same high-end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra wealthy -- but for any account size, at a fraction of the cost. Wealthfront monitors your portfolio every day across more than a dozen asset classes to find opportunities for rebalancing and harvesting tax losses, and now manages more than $5B in assets. Unlike old-fashioned private wealth managers, Wealthfront is powered by innovative technology, making it the most tax-efficient, low-cost, hassle-free way to invest. Go to wealthfront.com/tim to take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and it'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio it would recommend. If you want to just take the advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get your first $15,000 managed for free if you decide to go with its services.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.
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