Brandon Burns

Brandon Burns cleaned toilets at a gymnastics camp in the Tennessee hills and walked out of it a speaker.

Burns came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast through a mutual connection made at a bar on Broadway in Nashville, which he pointed out was a first for him. He and Brad Banyas traded Nashville stories before anything else got said. Burns lived there for a while and now works out of Atlanta. He walked into the McBastard Studio and called it the most creative studio name he had ever been in.

He speaks, and he coaches fitness and business, and the two are the same argument made twice. His mantra is that every day means every day. He has worked out every day in some capacity for the better part of a decade, and when a man outside the Big Ten Network studios in Chicago asked how often he trained and would not accept the answer, Burns understood how low the bar had dropped. He does not do it for the biceps. He says your soul believes half of what you tell it and all of what you show it, so he would rather have fifteen years of receipts to look back on. On stage he works the same way. Connect before you correct, because nobody takes teaching from a stranger.

He grew up in a 900 square foot house in Huntsville, Alabama, with a single mother, and the family went into bankruptcy when he was eleven. He was homeschooled from third grade through graduation, then walked into a university of 60,000 people and had panic attacks doing the first day introduction in a room of twenty. Between fourteen and sixteen he was dealing with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. He walked on at Michigan, redshirted, and then got cut from the team four years running while he kept showing up. In his fifth year a roster spot finally opened and the head coach offered it to him, then said he would rather have him on staff. Burns took the staff job and won a championship ring as a coach.

At seventeen he ran a crew of junior counselors at Flip Fest in Crossville, Tennessee, cleaning the camp late every night. He gave his kids a two minute talk because nobody else would. The next day a sixteen year old handed him a folded note about nine months of suicidal thoughts and walked off without saying anything. Burns still carries it in his wallet. The camp owner is also the man who wrote the letter of recommendation that got him to Michigan in the first place. His mother's instruction before he ever left home was simpler. If you are going to clean their toilets, be the best damn toilet cleaner they have ever seen.