Luke's Early Career and Poliquin Influence

okay so i mean if you go back to the start i first heard about charles poliquin when i was a kid right so like we had muscle media at the time the the magazine and the testosterone Trone.net came out. I think now it's TMag.com or something like that. So I started studying his stuff. I was way out in the country in Texas, and I'd been lifting my entire life. I started lifting when I was eight years old and then started powerlifting when I got into high school. So when I was 14. And then obviously gridiron football, and we all trained for that type of thing too. And, you know, there wasn't a lot of information back then. Like right now, everyone's spoiled for information. So if you want to know something, it's easy to find. But then there's also a lot of bullshit you got to kind of sift through too. Like you said, you got to be a bit research-based, but you also have to have experience in the gym. And those are two completely different worlds. There's very few people that put both of those together, which is what we try to do, right? So I started studying Charles of Stuff, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, all of these old school guys. And for whatever reason, Charles of Stuff really resonated with me. and I started using his systems and it worked really well and I got brutally strong for powerlifting in high school and also in college and I said, okay, one day I have to go meet this guy, so I saved and saved and saved. In 2007 I went and I did my first PICP level one and my first bioseg sat on that and I was hooked Like the culture that they had at the time was amazing The camaraderie the kind of brother sisterhood type stuff And it was like I like these are my people Like I've grown up my entire life, not having access to people like this that are like me. Because as we know, like back then, like what we do now is pretty common. Back then it was super taboo. Like people didn't work out like they do now. Bodybuilding was really kind of a subculture underground thing. And now it's kind of become a popular thing. A lot of women didn't lift back then. It was nuts. It was kind of the transfer into what we have currently now. And so after I met him and Andre Benoit and some of the other guys, I decided I want to work for these guys at some point. I'm going to do whatever I have to do to work for these guys. And so I put in the hard yards. I was training people, training myself, studying, understanding all of their systems, nutrition, and all that. And then eventually, after a few years, I started working for them as an assistant instructor in North America. So they would call me. I would travel out. I would help teach some of the stuff, talk to students and help instruct and things like that.