Luke's Career Path and Influences

i want to take a step back here and i'd love to get a better idea about like what propelled you to kind of get into the industry in the first place you know what i mean what what spurred your whole interest in in health and fitness and, and how did you get to where, you know, where you are now with muscle nerds? It was a Conan, Conan, the destroyer. Totally. It was Conan. It was, it was the early eighties. Yeah. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan the destroyer. I saw him and I wanted to be Conan. So my parents thought it'd be funny and they bought me a little weight set and, you know, I put the little poster up and I did what every young boy does when he starts doing workouts. He does lots of pushups and bicep curls and then he goes and runs outside. So that's what I did. When I got to be about 10 or 11 years old, you know, I'm from Texas, so it's going to be Friday Night Lights. So we all start training really early for football. So I started training, you know, all through junior high, elementary school, junior high, and then we got to high school and I started the powerlifting team at my high school and really got full on in the powerlifting for a long time. And, you know, I started studying a lot of the guys that I looked up to in the industry over the years, Charles Staley, Charles Poliquin, Paul Sheck, and all these guys started studying them in 1992 or probably 1990 with muscle media. And then, uh, you know, TMAG online, you know, all those guys, every Friday they would have the, uh, the articles would come out and I would just sit by my computer and I just keep hitting return until it popped up. And that's kind of how I got started and really fell in love with it. And I said, man, I want to do what these guys are doing someday. So, and so I did. So in 2007, I went and did a, um, you know, did my PICP one and my first bio-sig and I met Charles and all the guys up there and I fell in love with the culture that they had at that time and, and just went full bananas on it after that. And here I am. And like you said, like you said earlier about being empathetic, like the best trainers become empathetic because they go through all this stuff. So, you know, over the years I've done bad things and good things and I've hurt myself and I've fixed myself and I've gone kind of through the gamut of being shredded and then fattening up and shredded and fattening up. So, So it's just experience under the bar and experience. Doing things that allows you to be a good coach because you know what your client's going through. You're like, yeah, I've seen that before and I've felt that before and this is how you fix it. Yeah, so along that vein, is there any experiences or anything that you've personally struggled with, with your health that's made you exceptionally good at what it is that you do?