The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  This particular challenge was a fundraiser for Alex’s Lemonade Stand. Alex was a little girl who was diagnosed with cancer when she was four years old. She decided to raise a million dollars for cancer research and, by the time she passed away at age eight, she had succeeded in doing exactly that. Since her passing, her charity has continued to flourish. My team and I spoke to Alex’s mother for almost an hour, hearing stories about her daughter’s incredible drive and the battles she fought with her cancer. It was an incredibly moving and powerful experience, and it was a privilege to support Alex’s ongoing work.

  I’ll always be thankful for engaging in competitive powerlifting. It played a vital part in my life for many years. It was important to test myself against the best lifters in the world. Eventually, however, I was ready to walk away from that arena and put my skills to different use. I wanted to educate people, inspire people, and help those in need. Only by stripping away my identity as a competitive lifter was I able to discover a deeper and more meaningful purpose underneath.

  Standing next to my Guinness World Record certificate and the image of the lift that brought me the record.

  The Genesis of Kabuki Strength

  Kabuki Strength is a practical manifestation of a shared vision—a world made better through strength. We stand on four pillars: education, equipment, coaching, and charity.

  Education refers to our foundational understanding of biomechanics and movement under load, developed over many years of work with top clinicians, researchers, and athletes. Thanks to several incredible mentors, I’ve had the opportunity to study pain management, rehabilitation, developmental kinesiology, and several other disciplines across multiple schools of thought. As a strength athlete and coach, I have worked to adapt and deploy this new knowledge, combined with my own observations, into a pragmatic system with broad application to both athletic and nonathletic populations. These years of continuing education and practice have resulted in an integrated movement philosophy now taught around the world.

  The equipment we design, engineer, and manufacture is a practical expression of Kabuki Strength’s education goals. In a hyper-commoditized world, we choose to push boundaries and invest in the development of original tools that solve new and existing problems in novel ways. Our primary driver for new product development isn’t the market, it’s our understanding of how the human body should move and function in the pursuit of strength, health, and performance.

  As coaches, we engage in productive mentorship with highly driven athletes, both locally at our facility and digitally across the world. The purposeful and disciplined execution of our educational curriculum is best seen in the fruitful coach-athlete relationships we nurture.

  Charity is an expression of our deep desire to see the world and its people made better through strength. We choose to use our platform as a company to help others, to partner with valuable organizations in our community, and to bring awareness to incredible causes around the country. Considering my own story, this pillar is near and dear to my heart. I am proud to work with a team that shares the same passion for doing good in the world.

  Kabuki Strength started with a single product, the ShouldeRök. It is a modern take on a classic strength training tool that has been used by Indian wrestlers for centuries, the gada. I believe the gada is the oldest-known weighted implement for the purposes of building strength and endurance. The tool, which looks like a mace, is designed to be swung overhead in a pendulum motion. This movement has a positive effect on the overall health, strength, and longevity of the entire shoulder girdle, while simultaneously reinforcing proper torso rigidity. The Rök, as it’s often called, comes with in-depth educational materials on its proper application. Until I released a modern version of the gada and started the resurgence of mace swinging, very few people were familiar with it. Today, it’s a common training tool, with many companies jumping on the bandwagon and providing their own versions of the product.

  Since that first success, I have designed several other products in a similar vein, each one intended to improve quality of movement and decrease injury risk in athletes. At first, I didn’t have the resources to create strong branding and develop powerful marketing campaigns, but the products soon began to coalesce into a brand of their own accord. Within three months of launching the company, our products were in use by Major League Baseball teams. Within two years, Kabuki Strength products were distributed extensively throughout Major League Baseball, the NFL, and collegiate sports.

  In tandem with product manufacturing, I began to build an educational website to house the hours of content produced by me and my team. Today, the Kabuki Strength team regularly trains and consults collegiate and professional sports teams, along with speaking at prestigious industry events such as rehab and injury prevention symposiums. When we set up a booth at collegiate or professional shows, it is bombarded by coaches who follow our work and want to ask us questions.

  Our philosophy is to provide as much education as we can for free, through YouTube and social media. This approach has paid enormous dividends and allows us to reach the consumer from a position of trust and authority. We don’t believe in making things solely to boost our bottom line. Instead, we have confidence in the quality of our products and stand by everything we do. Working with professional athletes, coaches, and therapists, is a lot of fun, and the feedback we receive from both clinicians and consumers encourages and inspires us to keep pushing.

  When I receive a message from someone whose life has been positively impacted by Kabuki Strength, it makes my day. I recently received an email from someone who told me he had been struggling with back pain and had been unable to train for six months. After spending time digging into and studying our content, he made several critical changes to his breathing and posture and the pain was gone. He walked into the gym, trained pain-free, and quickly tripled his previous personal best in the squat.

  Online, the ShouldeRök has received hundreds of glowingly positive reviews, in addition to the many, many testimonials I hear in person. I’ve heard from people who were expecting to have surgery or believed that they would never be able to lift without pain again, and who are now capable of lifting pain-free, without surgery. Not only are they moving and training again, their success feeds into other areas of their life, enabling them to passionately pursue their goals. This is much more than just lifting weights. We are in the business of changing lives. Playing a part in these transformations is incredibly rewarding and lights a fire in me both to do more and to be more.

  I know from personal experience how profound such transformations can be. A few years back, I was struggling to deadlift 700 pounds. I was hitting 695 pounds, but I felt as though I had reached a ceiling. A few weeks before a big meet, I tweaked my back. It was bad. The only way I could get out of bed was to roll. You might think that this injury would have caused me to abandon my goal of deadlifting 700 pounds at the upcoming meet. Instead, it sharpened my determination.

  In the warm-up room, my strength was way down. I put 585 pounds on the bar, a weight I normally lifted with ease, and couldn’t shift it. My back hurt too much. Even this setback didn’t deter me. When I walked out to compete, I started at 620 pounds. What did change was my mindset. I realized that, with my back injured, the only way I could raise so much weight was by perfecting my positioning and timing. I set myself with enormous care and patience, making minute adjustments to my stance. I sensed that, if I was even an inch out of alignment, my back would flare up in agony when I attempted to move the bar.

  Finally, my back was locked in and the only way I could move the weight was through my hips. I settled into the lift and exerted pressure. It was easy. For my second lift, I moved the weight up to 740 pounds. That, too, went up with ease. I had one more attempt and I decided to see how far I could take it. An hour earlier, I had never deadlifted more than 700 pounds. For my final attempt, I put 801 pounds on the bar.

&nbs
p; I was nervous as hell, with my stomach twisting into a knot. I walked up to the bar, dialed in my position, and waited until I felt the moment was right. The bar moved. All 801 pounds came off the floor. That was when I knew I could do it. I finished the deadlift. I still remember that as the day I truly learned to deadlift, and tell the story as an illustration of how proper movement allows us to tap into reserves of strength we have never known we possess. It’s a principle that has become the backbone of everything we do at Kabuki Strength.

  How Kabuki Strength Almost Never Happened

  Despite the early success of the ShouldeRök, I experienced a lot of self-doubt in the early days of Kabuki Strength. I felt that launching a company with only one product was a big risk. What if it stalled out and died? I was certain that I didn’t want to return to the corporate world, and that I wanted to help people find a way through pain, so I gave serious consideration to working in health care.

  I sat down for drinks with a successful doctor who was also a friend of mine, Dr. Snell. He was known around the country for his work in the field of back rehabilitation, and he was very involved in the education of other clinicians, through hosting seminars, connecting people, and acting as a mentor. As we talked, I told him that I wanted to dedicate myself to helping people get out of pain, and that I was contemplating going back to school to study physical therapy or chiropractic medicine.

  He responded by asking me to clearly define my goals and, after some digging, it became clear that I wanted to have a broad, deep impact on people’s lives by integrating the clinical and strength training worlds. With my passion for biomechanics and kinesiology, combined with a background as an elite lifter and strength coach, I felt that I was in a unique position to bring about tremendous change.

  My friend listened to me and told me that, if that was my objective, I was never going to accomplish it by going back to school. He asked me what I would get from training as a chiropractor or a physical therapist, and I said, “credibility.” “Ah,” he responded. “You want to go back to school so you can get some letters after your name.” It was the first time I’d thought about it in those terms, but he was correct. Much as I love working with people on an individual basis, I didn’t want to restrict myself to working with one person at a time, as I would need to do as a physical therapist or chiropractor. I felt that I had the potential to reach far more people and have a far greater impact.

  My friend continued, telling me that I would be deeply frustrated if I went back to school. He explained that I would already know 98 percent of what I’d learn in a clinical setting, and the extra 2 percent wouldn’t make a major difference in my ability to deliver value. In addition, he said, the graduate programs would take four years to complete, and, with my network, I’d stay up to date with the evolving state of knowledge in the field more quickly outside of the classroom than inside. Instead, he suggested, it would make more sense to invest an eighth of the time and an eighth of the money into self-directed learning. He was right.

  Listening to him, something clicked into place. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I already had personal or professional relationships with many of the researchers who had played key roles in writing the books I would have studied from if I went back to school. I realized that I had been holding onto the belief that the vast body of knowledge and practical experience I had collected over the years was less valid than the attainment of another degree. I told my friend that I would continue with Kabuki Strength and, when I was standing in front of a room full of doctors, I would know that I had gained the credibility I felt was lacking.

  About nine months later, Dr. Stu McGill, the world’s leading researcher on back injury and spine biomechanics, invited me to deliver a presentation at a course he was teaching to over one hundred and fifty clinicians. Today, I am frequently invited to speak on a multitude of topics by some of the most respected researchers and organizations in the industry.

  Lesson: A Living Legacy

  The life I live today is a little surreal. I have found my purpose, which I live and breathe each and every day. I spend every waking moment striving to build my legacy. It’s a phenomenal feeling to know confidently that my actions have a positive impact on the world. People know that I’m here and they know that I’m making a difference. Through Kabuki Strength, I have brought original tools to market and helped thousands of people to leave pain behind. Meanwhile, through my own feats of strength, I’m walking the walk and pushing the boundaries of what’s humanly possible. Most importantly, my children are growing up to understand that they can shape the world around them and create the life they wish to live. They can pursue grand goals with no fear and fully believe in their own capacity to effect change. Why? Because they see me doing the same thing, day in and day out.

  In the conclusion of this book, I want to talk to you about what it means to create your own legacy. For now, though, I have a simple question for you. If a poor boy who grew up in the mountains skinning rattlesnakes can do what I’ve done, is there any reason that you can’t? I’ve walked through a life that most people would find hard to imagine, let alone survive. Yet here I am, sharing my story with you, hoping that it will inspire you to fan the flames of your potential, and to choose greatness. What’s stopping you?

  Finding Freedom in a Rules-Based Society

  I’ve never liked rules and authority. Now that you know my background, you can probably understand where that tendency comes from. Beneath all the craziness and nomadic lifestyles, I believe that my parents were perpetually searching for freedom from a world that felt like four constricting walls, slowly closing in on them. They didn’t want to be bound by the rules of society; rules in which they never had a say. They wanted to live the way they chose, chasing their dreams and creating their own meaning.

  As I reflect on my mom’s life today, I realize that she’s found her version of that dream. She lives out in the boonies by herself, working rocks and making jewelry. Meanwhile, I’ve found a way of creating a life that feels absolutely my own within society. I work in a very unconventional way. I come and go from my company as I please. If I’m feeling creative, I may explore a new product or film new content. If I get tired, I take a nap. Every member of my staff understands that, if they find me asleep on the couch in the middle of the day, it’s because I’m doing what I need to do for the sake of my mental and physical health. Over the years, I’ve often struggled to find a balance between work and rest. Now, I make my own rules and discover my own balance.

  Kabuki Strength’s employees are some of the most brilliant people in the industry. As a purpose-driven organization with a clear brand identity, we don’t struggle to recruit. Quite the opposite. The right people come to us because they’re attracted by our purpose and want to be part of what we’re doing. This is exactly the circumstance in which I met my amazing wife Jaqueline. Choose to create an environment of greatness and you will draw people toward you like a gravitational force.

  With such outstanding talent at my disposal, I have no need to micromanage Kabuki Strength’s employees. This gives me the freedom to hand over an enormous amount of control to people who have my complete trust. In essence, I function as a consultant within my own company. There’s no specific area for which I’m responsible. Instead, I contribute to each different area as needed. I’m at the end of a highly productive, world-class company, yet I have the freedom to express myself as I need to. I’m surrounded by rules and authority, yet I feel no need to comply.

  Now that you know my story, take some time to reflect on your own life. The deepest questions in life are often the simplest, but they only serve their purpose when we’re truly honest with ourselves. The greatest lies you will ever tell are not to other people. They are to yourself. Find solitude, peel back the layers, and ask yourself these questions as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

  Where are you going?

  What do y
ou want?

  What’s your vision?

  What obstacles stand in your way?

  I can’t tell you what to value. I do believe, however, that the words in this book can inspire and equip you to take action in your own life.

  As this book draws to a conclusion, I’ll share with you some final thoughts on how you can use the experiences and lessons I’ve shared in this book to reinvent yourself.

  Conclusion

  Many of the stories I’ve shared in this book are incredibly personal. Even today, after writing, reading, reviewing, and rewriting these words, I still get emotional reading them. It’s a little nerve wracking to put them into the public domain. I’ve done it because I believe in the power of story and the impact it can have on an open, receptive heart.

  When I look back on the arc of my life, I’m in awe of what I’ve survived, and how much I’ve learned along the way. By sharing my life story, I hope I can convince you to believe that you, too, are far, far stronger than you think you are. In the modern world, many of us settle for an easy, comfortable life. We can avoid challenges, so we do. My hope is that this memoir will provide you with the momentum you need to start bringing about change, to start asking yourself the hard and simple questions, and to start building a legacy. Discover a mission that feels deeply personal to you. Conquer the fear that holds you back. Be an agent of change, not comfort.

  When your guts begin to twist and you feel like you’re standing on the edge of a cliff, recognize that this is nothing more than confirmation that you’re walking on hallowed ground that leads to your true self. Don’t hide from that sign. Follow it and fight for it. It will take you where you need to go.