BTG 155: Stop Being Lazy and Get Fit

[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. Today's podcast, I'm going to do a little different. I'm going to do it while I'm lifting because the main motive of this podcast is going to be about staying fit, not being lazy, not being fat. And uh couldn't think of a better way of doing it than just by actually working out at the same time. because this particular workout I'm going to do is probably the easiest way of lifting that you can accomplish and basically the easiest workout you can do while still being very effective and increasing power, strength, helping you, you know, burn calories and it doesn't put a lot of physical toll on you. So, it's only going to be three exercises for today is squat, bench press, and bent over row. And my warm-up is going to be very simple. And I'm just going to explain as I go. So, we're just starting off with the bar. This is what I usually do for every lift I'm going to go for, just to make sure that my technique is on point. And I also get to emphasize what I'm trying to get, which is a lot of pop out of the bottom. So that's something I always add into all the lifts. Just going very light. I'll then do one warm up, if you will, which is just going to be a medium weight. Well, in this case, light because when we're doing power, which is that focus of this lifting session, I am trying to move the weight as quickly as possible, but not have it too heavy where I can't do that. So, for me, I'm looking I have another tool here. You guys may have seen it, this little velocity meter which measures the speed of the bar. And I know for myself when it's moving at uh around 6.5 that range for a squat or a bench press or even this bento row. They're all about the same which is kind of coincidental. That's a good weight for me to move around. It's challenging, but it's not too challenging where it's gonna impair my ability to produce power. All right. So, this next one is just 185 lbs. Again, for me, that's pretty light, right? I'm 200, well, 197 today, so it's below my body weight. So you see that weight's not too challenging. Now I'll go to my working weight which is going to be 245. And this has a little bit of challenge to it, but not enough to be an issue. And as you can see, the sets are only three reps. And the reason is that I want to produce a lot of power. And if I go more than that, I'm not going to be doing them with a lot of power. they'll start to slowly wear down and I don't want that. I want each rep to be my best rep. And that's generally how it works when you have the weight set up right. But if you put too much weight in the beginning, then you're going to start to fade out. And for this, I want, like I said, maximum power production, which means moving it very quickly. Now, I've been talking a lot about the actual weightlifting part, but let's talk more about having the discipline to exercise and do sort of fitness training. Now, I'll say out the gate, if you've heard me talk about this before, exercise is not going to be the end all be all of being thin or fit. It's going to help you get muscle, it'll build coordination, and you know, you'll have endurance. But if you eat like a raccoon, you know, just dumpster diving, you're still not going to lose that much weight. You might even gain weight initially just because muscle does weigh more than fat. And if you're not losing any fat and you're just adding on muscle, you might actually put on weight. So, you still need to have good uh dietary discipline. And I've posted so many things on that. Just do what I'm doing now. Animal-based or carnivore is the easiest diet. I think it's the most effective diet. It's also the laziest way to diet. And I think especially for dudes, you know, if you like red meat, it it's a no-brainer. And uh if you look at any of the blog posts I put on my diet, it outlines everything from A to Z. But if you just wanted to lose weight, that's all you have to do is diet, honestly. But if you wanted to get fit, it's different because just dieting well will make you skinny fat, right? Well, you'll be lean, but you won't have any muscle tone. You you won't be able to run effectively or lift effectively. You'll still be weak and thin, but at least you won't be fat. But that doesn't really do that much. Honestly, we want to be fit and lean. All right. So, now, like I said, this is working weight. It's still going to be same three. And I can see there my readouts. I'm in range. So, that's good. Generally, I want to give myself about a minute, two minutes between each set. I should be fully rested so that I can again improve my speed each time. I think from what I saw there, my top speed was 62. So, we'll see if I can get better as we move on. But anyways, if I'm doing exercise, it's because I want to be fit. And I think everyone has a responsibility to do that because life demands it. Maybe not modern life because you can live in a office and have everything given to you as far as like your food. You can just pick it up from a grocery store. You can just order food in and not have to cook, not have to do any manual labor. But in my opinion, real life demands fitness. When all the modern amenities go away, if you're not fit, you're not surviving. And ultimately, it's shown that people who are fit live longer because their body is in better condition because you can't separate the mind and the body. And many people try to do that and they think they're different, but they're not. If your body is weak, your mind will become weak. and or it won't become weak but it will be weakened because you'll be limited by your body's resources to provide with your brain and vice versa in my opinion. So you want both of them to be fit and my goal here is to show you one simple way of lifting which will help improve fitness that isn't very challenging and doesn't require a lot of time. Like I said, I'm going to do it during the course of this this podcast. Now, mind you, you might say, "Hey, David, this looks very difficult." This is easy for me, though, right? So, like, you wouldn't be if this looks hard to you, then this is not what you're doing. Maybe you're just doing the bar. Maybe you're doing 135 lbs, like taking off one of both of these plates. It it just depends on like it you have to put it to a level that's easy for you. And having one of these little tools can objectively measure that for yourself. So you're not guessing if something's easy. You know it is based on how fast it's moving. Same speeds this time. Okay. So, if you're not doing any exercise or fitness activities, you have to ask yourself why. Most people say they're too busy, they don't have the time, uh they're too old, they're too weak, they're too out of shape. And these are all excuses. Everyone has a time. If you're working like 12-hour shifts and you're telling me you don't have 30 minutes in a day to yourself, I mean, maybe it's true, but at that point, man, then you're like a literal slave to the work that you're doing. And if there's a meaningful cause, maybe like you're you're supporting like a huge family and it's all on you, then chances are the amount of work you're doing is probably considered a workout if you have not even 30 minutes of time to yourself like to do something that you want to do or that you need to do because I would argue that you need to do some fitness. But if you're so damn busy that you don't even have 30 minutes and by busy I don't mean like I have to sit on the couch and watch TV or you know like I mean you're working a job or you're taking care of something that no one else can take care of that has to be taken care of you at that moment that it basically urgently needs to be done then you I would imagine that that has a physical cost to it as Right? Like if you're a construction worker or something like that, you're probably getting a lot of exercise already. You know, something a manual labor job, you're already getting a good amount of exercise as it is, you know, and if you're out of shape, it's probably because you're not eating well. And perhaps you're not doing the type of exercise that you want to have. Like, you know, there's a difference between what I'm doing now and cardio, for example. They're two different things. I could be great at one and suck at the other. See, that's why I try to do both. [Applause] So when someone says they don't have the time, I don't I almost always don't believe it. Someone says they're too old. Again, I know it's So there is tons of people you can find in their 40s, 50s, 60s,7s, even their 80s that are still working out. Saw a video of another day of a 80year-old woman deadlifting. I think she was like 250 and she was like 120 lbs or something like that. pretty freaking good, you know, double body weight at that age and she looked strong, you know, fit. So, I also don't buy that. You're not too old to do anything. You're more likely just feeding yourself a reason to be lazy, which is what all these things end up being. You like you're too out of shape. That's the whole point of working out is to get into shape. So, you can't be too out of shape to work out. That's the whole point of it. You might not like your performance in the beginning, which is understandable. And if anything, that's motivational because that's going to make you work out better or want to keep coming so that you see the type of results that you would expect for yourself. Perhaps you know, you were an athlete at one point and now you're not and you like look back and and you're saying, "Wow, I don't want to do it because I know I can't perform at the level that I used to. I can understand that you perhaps you don't want to compete anymore because you can't do that. But there's no reason why you shouldn't continue to train. You have to understand that you're changing all the time. So even though you might not be able to perform at the level that you used to, that's irrelevant because that's what you used to do. What's important is right now. What are you capable of doing that you aren't doing, right? Like maybe I used to run a 3minute mile and now I can only run a 5-minute mile. But since I'm not even trying, I I probably only run like a 10-minute mile. Well, I'm giving myself five minutes of difference of the of that run time because I'm being lazy. So, you can't measure yourself against past versions of yourself when you have aged significantly. [Applause] Oh, okay. So, that's four sets in. One more and we're done with this. So, it's just five sets of each exercise of three with two warm-ups. Now, other excuses, and again, they're all excuses. If you're, like I said, old, out of shape, uh, don't have the time. You can always make time. You guys have seen I put workouts in at like 10:30, 11:00 at night, and I go to bed usually at that time. But when I feel like I need to put it in, I just get it done, you know. And you can you can make it happen if you want to. And even as little as 15 minutes is enough to be a difference maker in your fitness than zero. I think 30, especially if we're going to do cardio, will be like the magic number. That's about as much as honestly I feel like you should want to do for cardio. Any more than that, eh, I don't know. I don't think it really gives you much. I think 30 minutes is a sweet spot. But even if you don't have 30, 15 is enough and will make a difference, especially over time. If you just exercise once in like every month, it's not really going to make a difference. you the the thing that everyone lacks whether it's in the in a diet in life or exercise is discipline because honestly that's all it is about being fit or at least being lean is diet. I mean is is discipline. If you're not disciplined, you'll see something tempting and you'll fold right away. When you're disciplined, you'll see something that's tempting, but you'll realize you have a more important purpose in mind, and you're not going to fold to that, right? Like discipline is self-regulating. You are your own enforcement mechanism. You don't need somebody to hit you with the ruler in the back of the hand. You're doing it yourself. And but you also understand why you're doing it to yourself, right? you know, because you've created the rules for your discipline on your own. So, you know, like when you're when you tell yourself, hey, no, I can't do that. It's not because a bigger authority told you it. It's because you lot reason to yourself like, look, if I want to lose weight, if I eat this cake, I'm not going to lose weight. And if I don't lose weight, I'm not going to have the body that I want to have. I'm not going to have the fitness level I want to have, which is going to affect a lot of my goals. So, I have to forgo this temptation. Let's get this last one in. All right. So, discipline is the key. If you don't have discipline, you're going to have a really hard time getting anything done in my opinion because you're going to rely on motivation. And motivation is a resource, a valuable resource, but it's a perishable one. It doesn't last forever. The shelf life of motivation is probably a couple days, maybe a week. Discipline the last years at the minimum weeks. It's a much stronger, a more sustainable asset because that's what they are. Having good discipline is an asset because if you're disciplined in one area, it's usually very easy to be disciplined in other areas because you can just it's like the same muscle really. It's the same mindset that you're tapping into. So, I've talked about this before where you're starting from ground zero where perhaps you're a glutton or a sloth and you have a really hard time and forcing yourself to do things for discipline, then you're going to have to build up your discipline level. And you could start from the ground up with very simple tasks. They don't have to be challenging tasks. In fact, you probably want to start with the easiest things. If you've listened to me before, you've probably heard this, but like you give yourself little discipline challenges. For example, you could do a discipline challenge of something you probably already do, but don't count as discipline, which is, you know, every day when I wake up, I'm going to make my bed and I'm going to brush my teeth. Simple. But and hopefully you're already doing that. But if you're not, you can add that, which is something you're supposed to do anyways. And now it's one thing under your mindset that you have for discipline. And then you can kind of add little tasks here and there. Like the next one might be every day when I wake up, I'm going to write down one thing that I want to accomplish today. And then every day before I go to bed, I'm going to talk about one thing that I learned today. Very simple things. That's going to take you like what 30 seconds on each part in the morning and then in the and just before bed. They're probably going to be useful for you because now you have a journal that you're actually keeping track of things. And you also have another discipline task and you can do other simple exercise things like 20 push-ups every day. Then you add other things and you can stack all these little discipline tasks. And once you're able to acrew acrew a significant amount of discipline pass like I would say like if you could have like seven or eight things you do every day sunshine or rain no matter what's going on in your life you've become a disciplined person right you're not breaking your habit for anything now you've become wrong in my mind. Once you have that discipline and that strength as I I see it, now it becomes easy to translate that into other areas of your life because you've already been using the the the muscle that drives discipline. And now you can just shift it into something else. And you generally find that very disciplined people can easily create strong habits quickly because they have the enforcement mechanism already in place. As far as the lifting is going here, I am doing bench press. Now, I just did my two warm-ups. Now, we're going into my working weight, which is 225. Same thing, five sets of three. So, building discipline is going to be the foundation for being able to drive you to have a serious fitness routine. The second part is going to be the consistency of it. You want to have some type of regular frequency where if you're just, for example, I'm lifting not only once a week, but I lift every week. I don't miss my lifts. Uh I make them. The only reason I would miss a lift if I was injured, and it wasn't it wouldn't be prudent to do so. And if that's the case, I'm probably going to be doing something as a substitute, like cardio, for example. I'll get into a salt bike. But the time that I allotted for exercise will be used for some form of exercise or rehabilitation. That's an important aspect too. When we start developing discipline tasks, when we want to phase them out, we never delete them. We replace them with something better. Cuz if you delete something, you actually can't because that's a void, like a vacuum. Something's going to fill it up. But if you're not actively putting something useful to fill it up, guess what? Something negative will take its place. So instead of working out for 30 minutes, now you're on your phone doom scrolling for 30 minutes, right? It just it was a vacuum of time. Something had to fill it up. So when you have things that you're trying to uh update or upgrade, don't remove them, replace them, improve them. That's the same same thing with bad habits. That's why it's hard to get rid of bad habits because people try to literally get rid of it. They try to make a void. Well, something else is going to fill that void. Instead, replace it. I want to stop smoking. Okay, I'm going to start, you know, learning how to make cook for the time that I normally used to smoke, right? Or I'm going to, you know, refillosophy. I'm going to do something else in place of that bad habit. And uh especially with the discipline when we start updating it into new things, that's important to do. Let's get this next lift. [Applause] So we have covered quite a few things so far. one, I believe the importance of being fit and the difference between uh fitness and I guess we could say body composition, right? You could be very very fit and still be out of shape. Not out of shape, but let's say fat, right? And you could see plenty of defensive linemen that look like they're obese, but those dudes can run fast, they can do flips, and you know, they're very athletic. So, it's a different thing, right? Fitness is about being able to move effectively, which is independent of your body composition, which is going to be largely based off what you're eating. So two separate things although they're both governed in my opinion by discipline which is your ability to maintain a regimen that you follow regardless of what's going on in your life. And we talked about building up that discipline. And I think it's also important just to backtrack a little bit about the excuses part because if you're somebody who is not working out and maybe you're listening to this and you're getting upset because I'm like I might be uh how does my wife say this when you're not validating people's excuses right the reality is like I said your ego is getting in the way right you don't want to admit that you're being lazy or that you're, you know, succumbing to your temptations of being a sloth or being a glutton because that means that you were able to fix this whenever you wanted to and just didn't. And especially if this is a lifestyle you've been doing for many years, decades even, that's a hard pill to swallow for your ego, right? It's easier just to say some external force that's beyond my control is making me a victim to this situation and I'm helpless to do anything about it. So I just accept it versus accepting the reality of it which is you are in full control of your life and you can make a change right now if you really wanted to but you choose not to. I would respect you more in my honestly if you just said that like look I just don't care. I know I could do things differently. I just choose to live this way. I would think you were foolish, but at least you were self-aware. I'm not sure which is better, being foolish or self-aware or ignorant and and not aware, right? But that's my opinion and it so it requires some humility to accept a flaw about yourself especially something like that where it is creating problems in your life but you have to subscribe it to something else. Cuz I can tell you the hardest part of anything is starting. It really is. If you just get your foot out the freaking door and get moving on something, that's the hardest part. That's why sometimes the best thing to do if you don't want to work out, just get dressed like you're going to work out because now you're wearing the costume of somebody who works out and you're going to look silly not working out when you're wearing the dress of someone that works out. Just like if I want to work in an office, well, I better start wearing a suit and tie, button-up shirt, right? Cuz I'll look silly not being in a corporate environment. Like if I go to the gym with a suit and tie, right? Like what am I doing there? That's the wrong attire. This is meant for the office. So you just got to get yourself moving. Like with this, I was going to film the podcast and then I'm like, well, if I do the podcast, then I lift afterwards, I'm not going to have time to do this other thing, right? So then I was thinking, oh, maybe I just push the lift to later do the podcast. But then I'm like, well, two birds and one stone. Let me just lift now and the podcast at the same time. Let's just let's just get it started. And uh Oh, here we are. And a lot of times when I go to work out, it's usually that way where I'm not feeling great. I'm a little tired. like especially this past week I've been uh working a lot on other projects with my wife and it turns out that I'm getting towards like 10:00 where my time is free which is normally when I'm kind of winding down and I'm like h I haven't done my cardio I would like to get it done but I'm not feeling very motivated to do it and all I do is just walk over to the bike and start pedaling because once I do that now I'm committed and everything else takes over. So, you just have to start. Most people never start. They keep thinking about doing something and they never actually do the thing. They're planning it. They're making excuses. Just do the thing. Even if you do it poorly, it's better than not doing anything at all. If you do something poorly, you're going to learn and you'll improve the next time around. But if you just do nothing, you're not going to get better and you're just going to wonder what if. [Music] kind of lost track of how many sets I've done. Not sure if that was three or four. Count it as three. I'll find out later though. But as you can see, even with this workout, very easy, my breathing is only slightly labored for a moment after the lift and then I'm fine. And I've been doing this style lifting now for I think like five weeks. It's probably the easiest I have done. And I switched from doing very heavy lifting just because it was taking a lot of recovery time because I was starting to get towards the top of my potential max lifts. So, every lift was very straining and it just made it harder to get more martial arts in. Whereas this, it's working a different type of capacity. Like I said, it's working speed more or power particularly, but you know, we're trying to get the speed of the bar moving up faster. That it still leaves you sore, but it's not as much of a recovery cost, especially only doing it once a week. I could probably fit two without too much of an issue, but I find that one's good because then I able to train, you know, at least three times a week. ideally five times a week. And then I'm doing my cardio stuff as well. So, I'm getting a lot of fitness training in, a lot of capacity in and uh a lot more volume. So, I like that. And I feel like this is one thing that's very beginner friendly cuz it's not a heavy time investment. It's not uh you don't have to be like, oh, I have to have good cardio because I have to do like 30 reps or whatnot. It's like we're doing three reps at a time with a minute 2 minute break. So, and we're working with what for you would be light weight. It should be very easy to get into. It's not a difficult workout to start. [Music] I will say though that the important thing about this style of lifting is that you want good technique. All right? And that's why the other reason why I always start with the bar is so that when I lift, I can be sure that I'm lifting with proper technique, doing it cleanly and bracing properly, holding my breath, making the keg of air pressure on my abdomen. I have my back tight, all my muscles tight, my hips down, you know, so that everything comes out clean. Because the goal of being a fitness training, especially with strength training, is to make yourself more durable and resilient to life. If I'm getting hurt while I'm doing my strength training, I am then an idiot because now I've done the opposite of the goal. So, it's important to keep that in mind because you can forget sometimes. And I've made that mistake a couple times in my life where as you start getting strong now you start chasing a number. And when you do that, you lose sight of the goal. Your goal is to be healthy. You're stronger. That's not necessarily measured by hitting a certain number of lift on a lift, right? Or a certain number of reps. And especially if that means it's going to hurt yourself because that's another excuse people use for not lifting. Oh, I'm going to like, you know, hurt myself. Like that's if you're an idiot, you're going to hurt yourself. If you're lifting smart, you're doing the opposite of that. You're keeping yourself from getting hurt. And that's why I use this tether actually because it measures the speed. So, I'm not doing it now as much because I'm filming because my phone will normally track this for me. I'm just getting the readouts as I can see them on the device. But this is also an easier lift. I've done this now like I said for 5 weeks. So, I know this is well within my capacity. I'm just trying to push them out as fast as I can. But if I was doing a different style of lifting, that thing would tell me when my lift started dropping. And if it starts dropping below um if it if the differential is 20% or greater, I'm done lifting cuz that means my power production has dropped off and I'm beyond the point of improvement. So remember, when we're lifting, we're trying to express our maximum power. uh to develop the biggest stimulus in your body. So if you're lifting below your maximum, you're now just doing a form of cardio training, which is not that useful in my opinion with with heavy weight. All right. So, that should be five. We're now on the last exercise, folks. Bent over row. So, the bent over row working with 205 as a top weight. Mind you, I am trying to talk and organize my thoughts as I'm lifting. So, pardon me if I'm wandering a little bit and if you're having a slight shortness of breath off here. And this one I do the same things, just the bar. Focus on the form. Then we start adding the weights. This one I'll warm up with 155 and then we'll move to the working weight of 205. But hopefully I've illustrated that this is an easy workout. Like I said, if you're looking at the weights and you're like, "Oh, that's very heavy for me." Change it. You're not supposed to be comparing yourself to somebody else. And especially if you're a noob and you're comparing yourself to me, then you're at a huge disadvantage, right? Compare yourself to where you are now. And just make pick a weight that's easy. And if you never lift it before, just start with the bar. I don't care like what how you know little weight you're doing. That doesn't matter. Like I I I I just I would like to see you become fitter. That's all. The weights are relevant. [Applause] All right. The weights just there to give you the right level of challenge. And the challenge for you is going to vary on your age, your body type, gender, all these things. So the point is with this style of workout, you can craft the challenge where like I said, it's just a little bit challenging, but you can move the weight very quickly and explosively so that you get to work on your power. It's the equivalent of doing a sprint, right? where we're just trying to boom bolt out for 10 seconds really hard. This is the same kind of deal, right? This type of workouts like a sprint. If you've seen me talk about sprints, this is also how I would train sprints. I would do a hard sprint, give myself plenty of break between the next one. I'm not trying to do cardio. I'm trying to focus on explosive power and that requires more time between reps to recover from. So, but to be fair, sprinting is a lot more challenging than this because the sustained output is max output. It's mentally more challenging than this because this we're not working with a maximum load, right? We're working with probably like maybe 40% of your maximum load. So, you can move it very forcefully, which is still, you know, a workout, but it's not very intimidating. At least not to me. Like it's very easy to walk into this workout. I'm like, "Okay, let's go crush it." Because like I don't have to worry about failing. Like failing's not going to happen here. Like you should come nowhere near close to failing on these, which for me is the scary part of lifting when you're doing a max type of set where like failure is an option there. In this failure is nowhere near close. The worst failure you're going to suffer is like you move the weight slow. That's it. And if so, you have to adjust the weight because you're putting too much weight. Other than that, it shouldn't be a failure. [Applause] So, we got four sets left and then this workout's done. I've probably stretched it out a bit longer just because I'm talking and uh not staying stricter with the the rest times. I usually have a timer for 2 minutes. So, anytime before that 2 minutes, I will go and hit the next set. But hopefully I have stressed the importance of exercising and also in this case the importance of strength training which is what I'm doing here and introducing a modality that's very simple to do very non-intimidating also very low equipment threshold required for this Right. You just need a bar a barbell and some weights and a bench and I guess some sort of squat rack. Okay, maybe a little more infrastructure, but you don't need any machines or anything like that, right? And if you had to, you could do this with dumbbells, right? I could just put dumbbells on my shoulders and do squats, do my bench presses, do like gorilla rows for the for the bent over rows. You could do this low tech, right? especially if you were starting off. So maybe, you know, putting up 225 is not realistic for you. Well, you know, if you got two dumbbells and you're doing like 40 lbs on each hand and pressing them out fast, that's going to be pretty good. And that's not difficult to acquire, right? And it doesn't require a lot of space either. And you know, you could do it on well, you would probably need some type of bench. I'm sure there's some way you could make one if you don't have a bench, you know. So, it's not too demanding equipment wise. And these are just this is not the end all be all of exercises that you can do for power. You can do push-ups like jumping push-ups and, you know, burpees and stuff like that. So, there's a lot of ways you can mimic this without having to use actual weights. So, as long as you're doing something, it's better than 97% of the people on the planet. I actually checked with Grock because I saw a lot of people were making fun of the uh I guess the mayoral candidate for New York think Mani or whatnot who I guess he was coaxed into doing a bench press and the guy couldn't bench 135 right not even for one rep he needed uh an assist to do 135 which is not cuz he's a young guy and he's not fat or anything, but he's what I told you. He's skinny fat. He's got no muscle in him at all. So, that's sad to be an adult man and not be able to do that. But a lot of people are clowning on him. And I'm like, well, realize most people can't do this way either. And uh I had had people saying, "Oh, you don't know what you're talking about. Everybody can do that." And like well let's let's check with a Grock for what we can trust as far as AI is concerned. 97% of people don't have a gym membership. So that is alarming because that means like very likely 97% of people are not lifting cuz mind you the 3% that do have a gym membership about 50% of them are not going to the gym. They're paying for it but they're not going for it. Right? as somebody who goes to gyms or used to go to the gym, who owns a gym, you know, martial arts has a higher uh retention rate as far as people training, but like a fitness gym retention rate is abysmally low, right? Because of discipline. So even that 3%, I would I would argue probably it's only one and a half% that are actually active gym goers. So there's very few people that exercise in this modern age and then of those that are actually doing strength training workouts because a lot of people just go to the gym to hit cardio. Okay, which is great. That is a form of fitness. That's one of the energy systems that we have to be able to do is cardio. But strength training to me is also a must because if all you can do is run, when it comes time to fight, you're not going to be that useful. You're not going to be able to push anybody around or pull someone away from you. You got to do everything. So even of the one and a half%. Not even all those are going to be able to bench press 135 because first of all if you're a woman which is going to be over half. It's a more demanding ask because generally women are especially if you're a fit gym going woman you're probably around 100 something pound between 100 150 and women do not have the pressing muscles that men have. So it's a bigger ask for a woman to do. So most woman women if they get bench press or body weight it's like a big high five. It's like way to go. You're above the majority of women that go to the gym, mind you, the majority of women everywhere. So, of that, you could even argue of the 1.5, let's be generous, we'll say 1% of them are capable of doing it. And then even with the man like I said so like you're talking about realistically in my opinion less than 1% of the population of the world that could bench press 135 which is kind of crazy in my opinion. It should be every adult male could bench press 135. I know there was one point I did a workout routine that was 100 reps straight and I think when I did it I did it with 135 and I if I didn't hit 100 reps straight it was probably like 85 right it's just to tell you how light the weight is right you'll hit fatigue at a certain point but it takes a while you know so For you to be an adult man and not be able to bench press 135, that's pretty shocking, right? Like that should be a wakeup call. If you wanted some simple standards, he should be able to bench press your body weight. should be able to squat one and a half times your body weight. You should be able to row, bend over, row your body weight, should be able to deadlift two times your body weight. These are standards that I would say if you want to consider yourself an athlete, that's where you should be, right? like as somebody, no, we're well, not even an athlete, honestly. If we're going athlete, we have to go higher than that. But to be someone who's fit, let's say, if you want to consider yourself fit, bench press your body weight, squat one and a half times your body weight, bend over row your body weight, deadlifts, let's even say one and a half times your body weight. We don't have to be crazy. You can do all those things. You're fit. And I think at the minimum, that should be the goal, right? You don't care about being an athlete or being the strongest guy in the world. You have bigger fish to fry. Totally understand. I my my life's all about this, so it's easy. But like I understand most people are not making their living doing martial arts or doing fitness. So that doesn't matter. Fair. But for being a human being, and again, those standards for for men, right? Let's be clear. If you're a man, you should be able to hit those things, right? If you want to be an athlete, then you have to up it, right? And mind you, when I say athlete, I'm talking about like world class athlete would be like one and a half times your body weight in bench, double your body weight in squat, two and a half times uh for deadlift. And that's world class level, right? So I mean you can measure off that. For bench, I have world class level. For squat, I'm pretty close. Not there. For deadlift, I I'm up close but not there either. I'm further from deadlift. But for my purposes, that's fine, right? Like I'm I'm good there. But you just have to judge what's important for you. But at the very b bare minimum fitness and like that we're done folks. Right? That's it. Hopefully this conversation is useful for you. Maybe it will still a fire, a wake me up, a pick me up rather, a wakeup call to get moving to do some sort of exercise or fitness. Stop making excuses. Just get it done. And the easiest way, my friends, like I said, just start. Just start and start easy. That's the other problem that people make. They usually start hard, especially if you were an athlete at one point and you're like, "Man, I got to get back to my glory days." Like, well, guess what, buddy? You're not in your glory days anymore. And if you try to jump right back in, you're probably going to hurt yourself or at the very least demoralize yourself because you're going to look and you're like, "Man, this was pretty terrible and I'm embarrassed. I'm not going to do this anymore. So, do the opposite. Start slow because the type of fitness I'm talking about, we're not trying to keep it for a day or a week or a month or even a year. I'm trying to keep it for life. I plan on exercising until the day I die. So, what's the rush? Do I need to be at the best fitness level of my life right now? No. I just need to get there. I need to move towards that path. So, why start with the very high challenge level? It's just like video games, right? The video games don't start you at level 100 when you're level one. They don't put all the strong enemies in the beginning. Like, you'll just get wiped out and it'll be a game. You'll be, man, this is very frustrating. They start you with the very easy little things and then as your character gets better and better and better, you build up, they increase the challenge. And a lot of you guys like love video games. Treat your fitness like a video game. Start at level one. Make it very easy. Make it absurdly easy in the beginning and then slowly progress a challenge. You'll eventually get to the point where okay, now things are getting tough, but you're now have built the capacity to to handle it. Anyways, that's my challenge for you guys. Get moving. Start exercising more. Whether it's for strength training, for cardio, you know, flexibility, any type of fitness, just do some fitness. If you want to eat like a dumpster, you know, like a dumpster diver, that's not the point of this podcast. I don't care about it at this point. I I do care about it, but at this point, that doesn't matter. I just want you to be fit because there's a lot of people that are actually, you know, as far as body mass is concerned, they have what is considered a healthy level of body composition, but they're still unfit, right? They they can't go up a flight of steps without losing breath, right? Or they can't bench press 135 lbs, for example. That's embarrassing as a man, right? So, let's get fit.