Health as a Foundation for Performance

So let's go back into the health performance thing. And we briefly mentioned it there. But do you want to give us like a little bit of more of a rundown as to how health directly and indirectly affects performance? because I feel like when people measure their blood pressure and it's high, they're like, eh, but I can squat heavy. You know what I mean? As in like acutely, it might not matter. Like we talked about at comps, everyone's fucking almost there. But long-term, over say 10 years, how it can be a severe like impact on your performance. One of the best quotes I've ever heard was Broderick Chavez. And I was at a seminar a few years ago that he was here. And he, somebody said, I think it was Dean was like, do your cardio rant, do your cardio rant. And at that time, everybody's calling me like the cardio guy. I'm like, I'm not the cardio guy. I'm just saying, stop avoiding cardio. It's not going to ruin your game. It's going to actually make you stronger and help you train harder. And I'm, I'm in the back going, Oh fuck. You don't want to get down Broderick's radar. But then he got up and started telling everybody you need to do your fucking cardio and start stop calling it cardio. call it what it is cardiovascular respiratory training because it loses the language is important and he was like you know what's really bad for performance dying dying is really terrible for performance and i went that's fucking brilliant yeah right so um and i mean obviously that's the extreme to it and he deals with mostly extreme very very like the most extreme of the extreme but he's got a really good point it's like if you're going to compete you're doing these things that a lifting weights, it's not natural to our bodies. Like we're not designed to do it. We can do it. And some people are really good at it and better than most everybody else in the world, but it's still an artificial thing. We're not really designed to do. We're designed to run and jump and swim and climb and things like that. We lift weights because it's fucking awesome. It's bad-ass to be big and jacked and as bad-ass to put heavy ass weight over your head and impress people because not that many people can do it for the same reason. Getting abs is really cool. Why? Why is that the thing for guys? Guys at some point always want abs because you got to earn them. You got to earn a 400 kilo squat. You got to earn a 200 kilo squat. You can't, you can't just walk in on the streets, do that. You got to work for it. All right. Same thing with abs, same thing with anything else you get. But you also have to concede that what we're doing here is not the greatest thing for our joints.

the pursuit of maximal strength. I think most powerlifters are somewhat aware of that. I've had people go to me, usually people not even involved in sport, like elderly people and that, and they'll try to make themselves feel better and go like, you're not going to be able to walk or your knees are going to be so sore when you're older. And I'm like, yeah, but when I'm 70, things aren't, I don't know, in my opinion, even if I sat on my ass my whole life, it's going to be just as fucking bad. I'm going to be old. that not using, it's going to do the same thing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you're kind of, so it's like you've had extreme unuse or extreme high use and somewhere in the middle is probably the best thing for it. So it's like, if we're going to do these things that we know have the potential to be deleterious, if we take them too far, which is what we do with performance, we need to do things to kind of reverse that. Right. So it's like you get the guys who love lifting weights and i think like the movement guys the guys who are doing fucking break dancing and the handstand shit that's probably the most natural thing but they're all fucking weak as shit right so it's like you talk to powerlifters are like yeah they can wipe their own ass but they can't squat 400 kilos and you're like cool but they can move and they feel good right but then you see most guys you talk to in powerlifting at least if they were have been at a high level at point they're like yeah my back's real fucking stiff when i get up every time they stand up like oh fuck i mean i'm not even strong anymore and i stand up from 10 hours at my desk i'm like fuck my back shit i gotta do these fucking drills and mcgill bullshit on the floor to get my back even feeling okay to walk to the kitchen um the same thing with like joints blood pressure all this stuff has to be managed somehow and so it doesn't help to put your head in the sand and act like an ostrich and just forget about it. It's going to catch up to you if you don't do something about it at some point. But then you have, you know, half the industry saying, Oh, you don't need to do any of this stuff. It's going to fuck up your lifts. You're going to not be as strong as you cardio. That's bullshit. You know, if you do this, the other, that's going to fuck realist. That's a lot of us. It's all the dose makes the poison. And if your dose is pushed too far into one area and you're not catering to the other stuff, you're going to lose that, that stuff. And you're going to end up lopsided in one area. So you have to learn how to divvy out your investment in different multiple baskets so that you reap the rewards of each of it. So it's like when I tell somebody to do cardio to get their blood pressure down, they go, well, it's going to make me weaker. I'm not asking you to run a marathon. I'm asking you to do like 20 or 30 minutes of like, just get on a fucking treadmill and incline walk. Is that hard? Well, that's really tiring. Then you're really fucked. You actually need to do it now. Yeah. Yeah. To extend on that point as well, a lot of people, once they do cross that precipice of, okay, I'm kind of fucked now, they feel like the solution is I'll just stop. And then they believe that stopping the thing that's pushing them forward will pull them back. But it kind of just stops where it is that it just stays there and or gets worse because they ain't doing nothing. It's not a solution to just stop having the input. You need something to pull the input back to where you kind of came from. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.