#15 Leave a Legacy with Travis Mash
CoryG:
Today we have the ultimate stud, Travis Mash. Ex-world record holder, right?
Travis Mash:
Yes.
CoryG:
And a high-level USA weightlifting coach level five, which is the highest that you get.
Travis Mash:
Yeah. Senior international weightlifting coach.
CoryG:
Travis Mash is a straight-up boss. We've been friends for a long time. Today he's going to talk to you guys about leaving a legacy and what he's got going on right now.
Travis Mash:
Okay. About a year ago, we started having a lot of our friends falling out. We had Glenn Pendlay die, Justin Thacker die, and Don McCauley die. It really made me reflect on, what do I want to leave when I'm dead and gone?
CoryG:
Your friends are literally just dying off.
Travis Mash:
Yes, and two of them were my coaches at MuscleDriver with me. I'm the only one left.
CoryG:
Wow.
Travis Mash:
So that scared me. I'm not really afraid of dying, but I'm afraid of not doing something while I'm on Earth. You know?
CoryG:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Travis Mash:
When I'm gone, I'm like, "What do I want people to remember me for?" You start thinking, "Well, what's your legacy going to be?" Therefore, I want to leave the strength and conditioning world better than I found it. I started thinking, "What could I do? I want to answer the absolutes."
I wanted to speak to individualized programming. How do we want to perfect things? I started thinking about athlete testing. I want to leave athlete testing better than I found it, so we can perfect programs as much as possible. Then the art comes in. That's where I'm at. That’s how I've started making my decisions.
Then I started talking to different universities about starting a weightlifting program. Lenoir-Rhyne is the one who picked us up and they were very progressive. They're going to let me do all the testing. They're cool with all these new ideas I have. They're wanting to also change the way people do college. Colleges are taking a lot of flak right now because people go there and spend all this money, get out, and then they're no better off than when they started.
CoryG:
Yeah, true that.
Travis Mash:
They're cool with me. I want to start programs for every athlete and ask them, "What do you want to do when you're done with school?" That’s when you can start helping them with things like branding, networking, or finding different entrepreneurial chances they might have outside of college.
CoryG:
I vibe with all that. I mean, look, Chris Moore, Barbell Buddha, once he passed away, that made a big difference on me, man. I was thinking his kids are going to know him from his 250 episodes. I thought, "Am I doing and leaving enough for my kids?" And that's why I've stepped my content up too, because I might be teaching my grandkids right now and don't even know it.
Travis Mash:
I'm hoping that we all are. That's another thing. My wife actually bought me this online... It prompts me to do certain blogs directed specifically at my children. For example, what inspired you as a kid? How was your relationship with your grandmother? That one is a major one because my grandmother was pretty much everything to me as a kid. She is the bright spot in my childhood. Like you and me, I grew up rough in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.
CoryG:
He was for real in the mountains.
Travis Mash:
Deep. If you ended up in my house, you took a wrong turn. It was the bright spot. And so, I get to tell my children, "Here's the thing, here's the bright spot in my childhood that I clung to. To be able to say, “I want my children to experience this and only this. I don't want them to experience the bad stuff that I went through.”
CoryG:
It's really starting to think about you not being on this earth. That's hard for a lot of people to think about, but you're like, "What am I leaving every day? Am I pushing myself to further my family or people I vibe with?" And that's a hard thing to think about, Trav.
Travis Mash:
Yes, but if you do that, you'll start cutting away the baggage of your life. You'll start clinging to the things that will make a difference. I know it's a hard one, and it's a hard one for me.
CoryG:
Yeah. It's more real though.
Travis Mash:
Mortality is real. If you can just embrace that and say, "That's just a fact," then you'll start to really enjoy your life more because you'll only be working towards the good stuff.
CoryG:
Yeah. What were one or two things you kind of do on a regular basis? You mentioned something about the blogs that you're challenging yourself to continue and to not get lazy on it.
Travis Mash:
Well, I'm continually writing articles along the way. I want to document the whole journey. Right now, we've already started working on testing. Omegawave for example.
CoryG:
Yeah, I'm familiar.
Travis Mash:
It’s an instrument that measures the DC brainwaves, it measures the echocardiograms, and heart rate variability. Within that, all three of those is a different aspect of being ready. We've already started that, and I've started writing it. I released the article last week on the things that I'm going to do testing on.
CoryG:
Love it.
Travis Mash:
So, I'm going to test the testers.
CoryG:
Hey Trav, I think that this is something that everyone should think about. What are you leaving and teaching for that next generation? Everyone has something to offer, bro. It doesn't matter if they don't do this for a living. I think people are tripping on that, that they have to do what we do. This is not natural for everybody.
Travis Mash:
Another thing too, I do that writing in the morning. Then in the night, when my brain is the most creative before I go to bed, I write for my children. I can be more real. In the morning, it's a totally different mindset. I'm all about school and how can I teach something, but at night, my brain starts to remember things. I get super creative. I'm able to express these things to my children in a whole different way.
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