Introduction and Training for Longevity

Thank you very much for coming on to the podcast. I'm excited to talk about, you know, training for health, training for longevity today, because it is, I guess like anytime people hear health or longevity, it is very ambiguous to a lot of people, because I think still there is a lot of probably too much information that people get from just bodybuilders and, you know, two degree strength athletes, you know because they typically tend to be the loudest as well as some of the most extreme voices online and you know people you know they see maybe a kind of visually striking physique and they're like okay that person must be like the epitome of health whether that's a an influencer or bodybuilder um but then when they look into like training methods you know just doing a push-pull leg split is probably not necessarily the best thing for every single person on the planet is one of every every aspect of their health like when he would i say like training for health training for longevity like what what do you think of where does your mind go to when i say that yeah well you're right it can be it can be a pretty ambiguous thing the first thing is you have to look at the context of the conversation because health and longevity may be different from a bodybuilder versus a powerlifter from your next door neighbor that you're training so So it really comes to, you know, you have those concepts like general physical preparedness and specific physical preparedness and everything that you're doing. You have an element of that. Right. So if we take something like bodybuilding and that's you know, those are the loudest voices. Everybody is massively obsessed about hypertrophy. It's all they talk about. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that a lot of coaches don't understand that if you're training gen pot people, they might not give a shit about that. Like, they don't care. I can count on one hand how many people have ever come to me that weren't powerlifters, that weren't bodybuilders, who said, hey, I want to do a triple bodyweight deadlift, and I want to put on 25 kilograms of raw mass, and I want to starve myself down until I'm 3% body fat. Like, it doesn't happen in the general population unless you're training, like, 20-year-olds. If you're training dudes in their 20s, and now that's traditional, but like nowadays conventional is like women want that too. But it's usually the younger crowds that are looking for that or other coaches. But if you ask people that are in their mid to late 30s, 40s, 50s, they don't care about any of that, right? They want to be strong enough to do stuff outside of the gym. They want to look good, but being less fat doesn't mean being dick skin shredded. So those are two concepts. And that's the problem we have with the industry is people tend to gravitate towards the things that they like. So it's like, yeah, I want to be dick, skin, lean. Yeah, I want big, massive pecs. And that's all they study. And so then they're training people who don't care about that stuff, but they're taking those techniques and that mentality and then serving on a platter for people who aren't – they're not looking for that, right? It's almost like – and it's not like a nefarious thing. other people just don't know any better right so if you went and bought a car and there was a car you had in mind and it was a specific color car that you wanted and this is your dream car and you showed up and they had a model that was similar but not the car you wanted and it was in a completely different color and they sold you that you wouldn't be really happy with that so it's like what we need to get better at doing is listening to people and saying hey uh my gen pop clients want longevity they want to be out of pain they want to be able to they They want anti-aging. They want to age gracefully. They want to improve stuff. They're using the gym to improve life outside of the gym. So we have to reframe our mentality around what they actually are asking us to do for them and what they need. Because if you're a bodybuilder, you think everybody needs to bodybuild. And I would say, you know, if you take the extreme muscle mass and extreme leanness out of bodybuilding, that's a really good model for gen pop. but I wouldn't say like conventional bodybuilding is not the perfect model for gym pop 70s and 80s bodybuilding where they actually still use movements not just muscle centric stuff and not trying to squeeze every motor unit in six sarcomeres in your biceps out in every workout like bodybuilders this it's a highly specifically general sport put tension on the muscle rest and grow. That's it. But if we're talking about longevity for normal people, they want to move better. Right. So you see a lot of bodybuilders aesthetically, they look amazing. Like externally, they look great internally. They're a compensation fucking asymmetrical mess. And do you know, like you, you bodybuild, right. And you know, a lot of bodybuilders, how many bodybuilders do you know that go man I feel great all the fucking time Not that many Not that many especially definitely powerlifters as well Powerlifters are always completely Sometimes ailment or injury or spending about 30 minutes before the training session with like some big metal device. Only a big heavy device just trying to get limber enough to do something. And but that's that's also the stuff we don't talk about that stuff. Right. We talk about drug use and we talk about what you need to do to get there. But nobody talks about all the aches and pains you get and the cost of doing business for that. And if you were to ask a gen pop client, okay, would you, you want to put on 15 kilos of muscle and you want to put a hundred kilos on your squat? Are you okay doing that? And also having back pain, neck pain, knee pain, having a, taking 15 minutes to get off the shitter. They're going to say no. Like they, they're like, okay, let's scale down your expectations and figure out what you want to do. what you're telling me is you don't really care about 15 kilos you want to look better right yeah you want to be unfat yeah you want to be strong enough but you don't want to fuck up your joints getting there correct all right that takes a little bit of a different frame of mind yeah yeah as if you're just taking there there's a big difference between you know when you're maybe in your first few years of training and you know you're getting you're getting stronger and you're excited to go into the gym and hit pure and then like you get like fucking 10 years down the line and you're like scared for about an hour before you go to the gym because you might hit the pure or you might die like you don't talk about that too much and it's like does the general population person want to just be like nervous that they might snap themselves in half before they go to the gym most of the time anytime you get like an inquiry form from somebody who has like a more kind of like general goal and it could be like you know related to improving their health and um you know improving longevity is like i don't want to get injured i want to reduce i want to reduce my chance of injury it's like you know you can't completely prevent it but at the same time there's definitely gonna be some stuff definitely ways to train which are could potentially increase the risk of that happening you know striving for top end one rms and striving for like you know definitely in the like so tree rep range is definitely a kind of area where yeah pop up more yeah because i was thinking i was actually thinking when you sent me the, when you sent me the, the questions you want to talk about the topics you want to talk about, I was thinking about like, cause you get, people get so much conflicting information. It's like, all right, so stretching doesn't reduce injury and this doesn't reduce injury. And you know, there's no such thing as perfect technique. If you're doing perfect technique, you're not hitting your, you know, you're not hitting your potential, but then it's like, okay, if, if we, if we had to wager and I said, all right, use really good technique, like super technique and not get too trashy with your lifts most of the time, or fuck it, just full send it no matter how you get the bar up, which one would you bet on to be the one that would cause you an injury eventually probably lifting like trash. It's like people, people who lift like trash, they tend to just their ego lifting and they're not patient. It's like, you're going to get that PR at some point. Like what's the difference of taking another eight weeks versus like full sending it right now and then blowing out your knee. Yeah. I think like with the technique thing I think one of the maybe misconceptions people have is like that say for example something like on a squat a set of 10 like eight of those reps will look pretty much kind of look pretty much the exact same and then maybe two reps will look slightly different but like the range of difference when you get good at squatting is is minuscule right it's just like maybe slight deviation maybe your knee kind of caved in tiny bit maybe your hips shot back a tiny bit like just as you're kind of getting closer to like the top end the big difference is if from rep number one to rep number 10 there's wide variations in how that looks then that's probably something that needs to be addressed through a variation or regression or something like that um because i think sometimes when people think of like perfect technique good technique sometimes to also kind of limit them from maybe getting to a place where they're actually getting more kind of effective sets or worthwhile sets in and it kind of gets them into this bubble of i need to strip it back i need to reduce the weight to like make this quote unquote perfect but then it's like perfect technique but maybe not stimulating them to like they've got the the range of motion they've got the joint mobility they've access to like those range of motion but they're just not getting strength benefit because maybe they're not lifting heavy enough maybe they're not training closer or close enough to failure to get a hypertrophy benefit i think I think that's where some people fall down on the technique side of things.