Luke's Early Life and Powerlifting Career

Yeah I guess you know just in a kind of reader's digest version you know I've been lifting weights and being in sports since I was a little kid so I started lifting weights when I was around eight years old, right? So I'm originally from Texas. Now I live in Australia. And if you know anything about Texas and high school football, like I was the true Friday night lights where the entire city shuts down and everyone's at the football game. So we start basically getting ready for that when we were little kids. And so I wanted to be a step ahead. So I started learning I gotta lift weights I you know kind of my start was seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian and I saw I saw Conan and I was like that is what a man supposed to look like right and then I looked at my father who my father is a was a very small man he was about five foot seven and uh and he's not not a big jack guy and I'm thinking I'm looking at my dad going well I'm never going to look like Conan. But then I looked at my mom and my mom's of like German Austrian heritage. She's really tall. And I'm the runt of that side of the family. And I went, okay, so if I lift weights and play my cards, right, I might actually be able to do that. And so I started lifting weights, basically to put on size for football and, and for martial arts and things. And back then, we didn't, you know, this back in, you know, back in the 80s, we didn't have a lot of access to information like we have now. So I just started the standard, you know, push-ups, curls, squats, and running and things like that. And it just kept developing that. And then in about 1992, I got the internet, and that kind of opened everything up to learning about who Charles Poliquin was and Charles Staley and Paul Cech and all these guys that I've learned from over the years. And, yeah, I just kind of went head first into it and started a powerlifting team in my high school. um our powerlifting team dominated pretty much everybody the four years i was in high school left high school decided to try my hand at bodybuilding and didn't really like it too much went back to powerlifting went back to physique stuff went went in a strong man so i kind of did all these everything was about strength right and that uh it's it's six foot one and and 220 to 250 pounds depending on how good i'm a diet and how i'm lifting i'm never going to be a really great runner so I just did what I was good at which was strength and power um and so that's I got to a point where you know I was a at the time a fairly accomplished powerlifter very strong but I could barely walk up the stairs without being out of breath and then I started I went and worked at Polican group for a while being one of the lead instructors and at some point I just had this epiphany that man maybe we've got things all wrong like strength There's just one tool in the box. And I started getting into more of the body weight movement stuff and actually getting my cardiovascular respiratory system into shape. And I started thinking about being more well-rounded.