There’s a reason Judd Lienhard’s Instagram videos make people stop scrolling: he looks like a linebacker and moves like a gymnast. It’s not just the size or the control, it’s the contradiction. Most guys who look like they bench press trucks don’t also do banded crawls, pulsing isometrics, or flow-based ground work that looks more animal than athlete. 

But for Lienhard, a former Army Ranger and collegiate linebacker turned performance coach, there’s no contradiction at all. “Your body doesn’t move in unison,” he says. “It moves in sequences.” And his mission is to train people – kids, adults, weekend warriors – to move better, get stronger and do it all without wasting time or breaking down. 

What began as a practical solution for time-starved athletes evolved into a full-blown training method: slow, flow, go, grow, show. It’s a system built around minimal effective dosing, strategic isolation, and movement options for every age and injury history. “It’s not that you need more time,” he says. “You need to change the way you train.” 

In this conversation, Lienhard reveals what makes his system work: how flows replace traditional warmups, how isometrics beat stretching, and why doing less, smartly, is usually more. He’s not selling secrets. He’s just offering a better set of tools and permission to throw out the ones that don’t serve you.

I love this idea of always being an athlete. The 70 year old and the seven year old, both athlete right? So how did you begin to develop that? 

Honestly, it was a way, because I only have an hour with my kids and then the adults are limited, right? So, rather than try to stretch and address one issue at a time, I was always thinking, and I didn’t even realize I developed anything, it’s like, well, how can I get these kids prepared to train very quickly? 

So people look at these exercises and they think they’re ridiculous sometimes. Your body doesn’t move in unison, it moves in sequences. So I just identified sequences that were common across most sports. And just developed exercises that cover the broadest base.  

And then there’s different loads with the flows too. So some of them are faster, some are slower and heavier. And then since it requires the entire body to work as one in an athletic fashion, through several planes of motion, with no impact, and at any given time the person can control their speed, it’s a very safe and time efficient way to prep the body.  

So you use them as a sort of warm up? 

I don’t even say warm up, I say prep the body for the athletic training. And then the cool thing is, because it’s a ground-based activity, and you’re having to put pressure in the ground and control your centre of mass, it serves as an awesome core exercise. 

And not just abs, I mean, you know as well as I do, there’s more to core than abs, like hips and hip flexors and adductors and lower back and everything else that goes into it. And also scapula and warming up the shoulders. It’s an awesome exercise for several things at once. And there is a time to isolate muscles. It’s a very good thing to isolate a muscle so you can overload that one muscle. There’s time to integrate muscles. And to wire in athletic training patterns and also save time.  

So i didn’t even realize it was a thing. I just posted it and people were like, what’s this, I’ve never seen it. To me it was just like, you know, people have been doing wood shoppers and things for years. And I see other guys on Instagram too, doing a lot of this stuff, very similar to what I do. And it’s just, I don’t know why for some reason people thought it was like unique when I had done it. I mean, maybe they never used bands like I had done it or something, I don’t know. 

What does the rest of the method look like in action? 

It’s all about optimisation, right? Minimal effective dosing and things that I did not invent. It’s understanding that if you do things at the right dose, you can get a lot of things into an hour’s worth of training, as long as you’re not being suboptimal in your approach.  

It goes back to a dude spending an hour and a half working on chest. If that’s what you want to do, that’s totally fine. You know, I love a chest pump as much as the next guy. But it’s just not optimal. And if you’re suffering from back pain and knee pain and hip pain. If you feel like you don’t have the time or energy to address it, then you have to take accountability and say, “Hey, I do have time. I just have to be willing to change the way I like to train.” Very rarely can we not do something. It’s just that we don’t want to make the changes necessary — because it’s uncomfortable. It’s not the way we’ve done things. 

The fact is, we do way too much volume for some stuff — and that leaves no time or energy to do volume for other stuff. It’s just about creating a system. So I’ll designate time slots for each system. It starts with — I always say — slow, flow, go, grow, show.The flows are what you see — the prep — like isometrics and pulsing and things like that. 

That’s so useful as well — like the isometrics and stuff really help in getting your joints ready, especially if you’re a bit older, right?  

I have to say this — I do not hate stretching, OK? And a lot of what I do is kind of stretching, you know what I mean? But the thing is — it’s not an optimal use of your time. Isometrics have been proven to be far more effective at getting the joints and muscles ready to train. I’m sorry, but that’s just the truth. 

If people don’t want to accept that — I’m sorry. But you have to put a joint under tension and hold that angle for a while. And the joint — I promise you — will feel a lot better than if you just tug on whatever muscle is attached to it. 

So — you’ve got the flows, like we talked about. Then the “go”. Hopefully by then, I’ve progressed the gos through a spectrum. These are the more athletic moves — the cleans, the jumps, the broad jumps, the push presses, the throws. Things that are dynamic and athletic in nature. And yes — some of that has a muscle-building component. 

Yeah — and firing up the right fast-twitch fibres, right? Which will facilitate everything. 

Absolutely. So the first couple of exercises you’ll see me do — let’s say the primary movement is for chest, like a dip — I’ll incorporate some core into that, because it’s time efficient. My chest still gets a stimulus. It’s still getting prepped. And that stimulus contributes to chest growth — but it also contributes to joint health, fibre health, core health, athleticism. 

Now — no, that is not the most effective way to train chest for strength and hypertrophy. I’ll admit that. The most effective way is to isolate that pec muscle. But the thing is — we’re trying to do more than just isolate the chest muscle. 

So I’ll do that “go” exercise, and then I’ll spend ten minutes doing what those people are talking about — pretty much isolate. It can be a compound movement like a machine press — very heavy. But since you don’t need a lot of volume of that, I can do it in five minutes. I don’t need to do it for an hour and a half. 

And I get 95% of the benefit as someone doing just isolation movements for chest. That’s just the way it is. And I’m sorry if people don’t like that — but study after study shows that you get diminishing returns on volume. The more volume you put in, the less you get back. 

You get 20% more benefit from doing two sets instead of one. Not 100%. And you get only 10% more benefit from doing three sets instead of two. Then you get 5% more from doing four instead of three. 

So at what point does the time and energy investment I’m putting into this one movement pattern become useless? 

And I think that’s such an important point — especially for athletes, and for people trying not to age so quickly. it’s a lot easier to maintain strength and muscle than it is to maintain flexibility, the ability to move well, that bounce and power, right? 

Exactly. And you can still maintain a lot of muscle — if you stimulate it the right way. You don’t need hours and hours. You really don’t. 

It’s frustrating because it’s so ingrained in people that they have to do it that way. I just want to say one thing: people see me doing all these crazy exercises and they’re like, “Well, I don’t have time for all these exercises.” Of course you don’t. 

The point isn’t that you have to do all of them. The point is: it gives you options. So you have options. So it gives you workarounds. If you try something and you like it — that can be one of your things. If you try something and you hate it — throw it away. There’s always something else. 

If you want to work something and it hurts you — like you can’t do power cleans — well, I’ve shown you 30 options to do the same things power cleans do. You don’t have to do power cleans. 

That’s so useful if you’re a coach, or just to have more tools in the toolbox.  

More tools in the toolbox, man. You don’t have to use all your tools, dude.