Introduction and Early Fitness Background

So I recently learned that you actually picked up standard weights when you were like eight. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah. Everyone's going into business coaching. Everybody's going into marketing, but they don't actually have a skill set. So they're basically getting really good at selling a product that doesn't work. So it would be like, it's like they're selling wish.com personal training, but they're really good at selling. they're really good at marketing but they actually don't know how to do a good job welcome to summon your superhuman i'm your host ria mestiza and i'm coming to you from iopc gym in brisbane and with my guest luke lehman he is he is like the og guru of the industry i'm gonna say like he's 27 years he's been a professional in his industry he there's not really anything he hasn't done um and and now he's got this amazing facility. I have to spend a weekend, another weekend with you, and thank you for agreeing to do an interview for the show. Anytime, anytime. So I recently learned that you actually picked up, started weights when you were like eight. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, it's true. And I realized on my top it said 1986, so that's a chunk of your weight. About that time, yeah, yeah. And so your inspiration for picking up weights started as a bit of a joke, I think. And then, but you were inspired by Conan the Barbarian. Yeah. So, well, just to give a little backstory. So I was born and raised in Texas. Yes. In a small town. So if you've seen Barsky Blues, which I did stunts in, it's like, that's a, that's, it's, it's, you know, old MTV movie from the early two thousands, but it's a, you know, it's kind of a parody, but it's also kind of not like, that's really how a small town works. It's like the football guys are like superheroes in town. and the whole town shuts down when it's Friday night to play. So we all start lifting weights really early for American football. But my biggest dream was I saw Conan the Barbarian and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was like, that is how a man should look, and that's what I wanted to look like, Conan. So that got me in love with bodybuilding. Yeah, so I started lifting for football, but with a bodybuilder interest. yeah and i was lucky to have a lot of good mentors when i was running all of our coaches were ex-collegiate football players and power lifters and so they were they really got me on the right road of understanding how to lift correctly and we never used anything fancy it was like bill stars five by five routine and you know just like real old school by power building like real 70s types of lifting that's yeah that's we did for ages ages yeah yeah so I was huge. Like when I was in high school, my senior year, I got to close to 110 kilos my senior year. And trimmed down to like 100 kilos for powerlifting. Big corn-fed country boys. Well, that's good. But like, that's usually it does start from an interest in sports. Cause I asked my dad to buy me a dumbbell when I was 12, because I wanted to be stronger for sports. Yeah. Cause I'm not tall. um so I think well like dumbbells he actually he ended up making it for me at a concrete because he's a Italian and if you know he's like I'll make it for you so um but I already understood then that getting stronger was going to correlate to me being a better basketball player better in whatever I wanted to do um because I had speed but I wanted more strength and power so I I already understood that but like back then like the same with you it's like magazines where like the library you know to study yeah no internet i didn't grow up with that i didn't get that till 1992 when i was 14 was that yeah with muscle and fitness flex magazine and we had uh you know the powerlifting usa magazine and like in my hometown it's like the local library which had maybe two or three like one old old auto books in black and white you know so you just kind of had to be stuck together or you had to you had to some bro or they had to teach right yeah yeah well i had no one to teach me because in australia we don't really have that same kind of culture as you guys have unfortunately now it is getting now yeah absolutely it wasn't you know i joined the gym and it was the only people in the gym were you know meatheads and and athletes yeah because uh how do you um 38 38 okay so so not not that disconnect of the generation because like I tell you guys in class, when I got in the end, when I got in the gyms, you didn't see women there. There might be, it was all guys. And you might see two women there and they were part of the Dollar Shave Club because they were juiced up bodybuilders but it wasn really a thing for women to be in the gym It was really taboo at the time And women thought of making bulkies All the women were into like Jay Fonda stuff And, you know, they'd get a record and records. And they would dance around in their leotards at home or they would go to the yoga class. And you wouldn't see them in the gym. Yeah, everyone thought I was weird. They thought I was strange. And, you know, my mom's Filipino. So she sees her 12-year-old daughter reading bodybuilding magazines with American big bodybuilders on there, and she's like, oh, dear Lord, what is my job? Getting myself into, like, she wants to turn into a big bulky woman. Yeah, she honestly was genuinely worried, but I was like, no, I understand that I want to get stronger, but I don't want to perform better. And that's why I ultimately did it, and I've just loved it ever since. Obviously, I did go through the phase of what women do is aerobic classes and all that sort of stuff when you start out. because it's easier to just go into a class and just follow along, which is why I do empathize with people that say, all I've ever done is classes. It's easier to do. And I said, well, great. But now's the time to, you know, hone in and fine tune what it is you really want. And then that's when they come to people like us is to dial in on, you know, training, nutrition and getting their body right. It's funny that you say that your dad made you some concrete dumbbells. Like I started out with concrete because back then you, You couldn't really buy fitness equipment. And I remember it must have been like seven or eight. And I asked my parents for a barbell for Christmas. And they laughed. They laughed. They laughed about it. They thought it was funny. And then Christmas, I got like a Sears, Sears Roebuck set from DP. And it was just a hollow bar and these purple, plastic, purple weights that had concrete inside. And then you got a little poster and you just follow the potion to your curls and your pushups and all that. That's how I started. Wow. That's awesome. And my sister was five years older than me. And so throughout high school, trying to gain favors with her, her boyfriends at the time would have equipment they didn't want. So one of them gave me a bench. One of them gave me a couple of rusted dumbbells. They were skinny stuff. I was trying to get my sister's pants. I don't know if it works. It's none of my business. But I had a backyard with a bunch of just random equipment I would rest on. then at some point the guy who was like the all-star quarterback um of our high school football team moved across the street and then i wanted to get into like athletic stuff and i would go out for one and a half mile runs with him and he would start running and he would just go down the road he'd come back he goes all right you got about one more mile and then i'll meet you back at the house okay shit you know it was pretty brutal yeah in the texas heat 40 42 degrees wow yeah I um was uh I lost my train oh that's right so before you were muscle nerds you were the muscle nerd right well you had a reputation as being the muscle nerd yeah yeah so like that that whole muscle nerd saying kind of came as a joke so I was working at Follicle Group and we were in Manchester and at the time this was before my wife bought me laser so I I refused to pay for it so I I had glasses from the contacts from the age of eight. And Zoe, we got back to Brisbane. She goes, you need to go to your eye appointment. I go, I just went to an eye appointment in London. Like, I got new glasses. She goes, no, you're getting lazy. But we can't afford that. She goes, I've been hiding money from you for the last two years. I'm like, holy shit, I got lazy. But where was I going with that one?