Marcus Filly: From Medical School to Professional CrossFit Athlete to Founding Functional Bodybuilding

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Marcus Filly
From Medical School to Professional CrossFit Athlete to Founding Functional Bodybuilding

Marcus Filly is the founder of Functional Bodybuilding. After leaving medical school, Marcus turned instead to health and fitness to help people more directly with training and nutrition in their day to day lives. Drawing on an extensive training background in soccer and his competitive CrossFit career, Marcus owned an affiliate for years before changing methodologies to help athletes better succeed through individual coaching. After the 2016 CrossFit Games, Marcus was burned out and broken, and about to become a first time father. Functional Bodybuilding was born out of a need to train more for longevity and sustainability – while still looking good and moving well.

We get into how and why Marcus left medical school, went pro, and then synthesized all his experience and knowledge into his own methodology, Functional Bodybuilding.

For more info about Marcus, go to the Functional Bodybuilding website, sign up for their newsletter, and follow him on Instagram and YouTube.

Quotes, Gyms, and PRs mentioned in the episode: 

05:40  Marcus and the Starrett’s live in the same area and have known each other since the beginning of SFCF
06:35  Before CrossFit, Marcus applied to, got in, and went to medical school (and then left after the first year)
09:10  Marcus met the Starrett’s in 2006 before he went off to med school
11:55  Juliet had a similar path to Marcus, becoming a lawyer and practicing law for 7 years before realizing it wasn’t her path
19:30  In medical school Marcus felt really unhealthy but back home teaching CrossFit, lit him up
25:35  Marcus founded Functional Bodybuilding delivering his methodology through an online platform – for people that want to “look good and move well”
28:30  Functional Bodybuilding defined
29:27  The two reasons people go to the gym
30:55  Bodybuilding is the one methodology that is an exact Rx for changing body composition
36:30  Bodybuilders have the best physiques in their 50s and beyond when muscle mass is at a premium
38:56  At 50+ you can still build muscle mass
40:38  Eating and moving is far better than starving and limiting
42:50  Marcus uses free weights and machines and doesn’t believe the methodologies need to be mutually exclusive
45:20  The Starrett’s were at Mark Bell’s gym recently and their kids loved doing every single machine
46:01  There is starting to be a shift in the fitness industry to a rejection of extreme thinking in any direction – the answer should almost always be, ‘it depends’
47:15  While Marcus finds value and uses in gym machines, but no one is saying you should learn the movements on machines
47:45  Sean Pastuch of ActiveRx posed the question, “How many PRs have you had in the gym and in the last year? And how have those PRs made your life better?” which got Kelly thinking
50:28  Juliet is a gamer: she PR’d clean and jerk on 60 Minutes, and PR’d her muscle upping at the CrossFit Games
51:24  Progressive overload done reasonably is really valuable training tool for making change
54:48  Kelly did brutal progressive interval training to train for his 8 day backcountry skiing trip
56:45  Dan John once said, “If you’re not getting better at your bench press, what are you doing?”
56:53  At what point are you strong enough?
62:25  The business side of Functional Bodybuilding
63:45  Functional Bodybuilding is now partnered with Atom (the guys from RPM) for their web platform
67:30  Marcus’ Socials

Full Transcript

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