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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
And I apologize for my voice.
I've been cheering on the England team during the Euro cup.
But this week I welcome back onto the show a fellow Brit, David Vo.
Now David spent a career in the London Fire Brigade before transitioning into the world
of osteopathy.
In our first conversation, which was episode 601, we talked a lot about the fire service,
holistic medicine and some of the challenges for ancient medicine when it comes to the
pharmaceutical companies and other industries that we work against.
Now in the second conversation, David comes back onto the show having just written stronger
how to build strength, the secret to a longer, healthier life.
So we discuss a host of topics from the importance of mobility, hormonal disruption, sleep deprivation,
and then we focus on the middle-aged man and woman and how they can forge longevity through
strength training.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of 950 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you David Vaux.
Enjoy.
Well, David, I want to start by saying firstly, it was amazing to see you in London and we'll
get to that in a second.
And secondly, to congratulate you on your book.
And thirdly, I want to welcome you back to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thanks, James.
Good to see you, mate.
We've chatted a bit, haven't we?
I mean, I saw you on the 7-7 in London briefly.
Man, you look tired that day.
We can get into that, can't we?
But it's good to speak to you and thanks for having me back on the show.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's start there.
So 7x, for people listening, we, I say we, a group of Navy SEALs and elite triathletes
and some high level scientists went around the world.
While the athletes, the runners did seven marathons, seven skydives and seven swims.
That was the goal, though he didn't manage all those in seven continents in seven days.
So I think by the time that we met each other in Hyde Park, which I was just at the other
day, I was just came back from London.
I don't think I'd slept, you know, apart from a few hours on the plane itself for four or
five days by that point.
And we were getting some sleep.
We were lying across the plane seats, but jumping straight into the seat deprivation
and the career that we both did, having been out for a bit, I was amazed how much it sucked
going back into that level of sleep deprivation.
Yeah, I could tell.
And, you know, I've been out myself for a while and, you know, I have sympathy because
it did remind me.
I think we touched base, didn't we, the week after.
And yeah, I mean, it takes a while.
And I think as one gets older as well, you know, I think the ability to to deal with
that and go again, you know, it's a good example, isn't it, of of the long term effects when
you when you are suddenly thrown into that and have to deal with that fatigue level on
your body, both physically and mentally, neurologically, all of the above.
So the work that the 7X project we're trying to do is so relevant to First Responder community.
Absolutely.
Well, I remember you brought the book, my book, and I signed it to you, but I didn't
sign it to you.
I signed it, but I put the wrong name in.
I was so tired that I literally signed a different name than the other firefighters that met us
there.
And then I came to you about an hour late.
I was like, oh, give me a book a second.
I scratched it out.
And I think next to it, I wrote, this is sleep deprivation.
Yeah, you did, James.
But that's, yeah, as I say, worthy subject matter, isn't it?
You know, you're in you're in the arena right there, weren't you?
Actually experiencing sleep deprivation in real time.
I look forward to seeing the outcomes, you know, of that project.
I believe there's going to be a documentary.
Yeah, documentary and like a manual or, you know, should be getting finished up pretty
soon.
So we should be telling that story.
Pretty, pretty amazing human stories woven in that.
We're getting to to you.
So we we talked.
I mean, what was that a year and a half ago now?
I think when we were there, almost a year and a half.
Yeah.
And then that kind of spawned the conversation then of writing.
Now I'm still finishing up my book.
Your book Stronger is already released in the UK.
When this goes out, it will be out in the US as well.
So talk to me about the origin story of that.
What were you seeing and then what were you hoping to change by writing your book?
So as you know, I was formerly London Fire Service and.
Experienced an injury that ended that career and so then had to reinvent.
Really my whole identity, to be honest with you, having identified as like, you know,
I was very, very focused on tactical fitness.
In fact, I had a role as well as operationally in London Fire Service in physical education
as well.
So I'd already done a master's degree in exercise physiology and exercise prescription.
And so and that was purely actually to kind of make me better at that job, to make me
individually as good as I could be.
And then had to pivot in my early 30s, having served 15 years because of the injury.
And then went on to become an osteopath and work in private practice.
And it took a long time to be able to wean myself off of the medication for pain and
inflammation that I needed at that point.
And the thing I found was breakthrough pivotal for me was regaining the ability, the, the,
the muscle strength around the joints and to be able to move again with, with real fluidity.
So in a nutshell, when I unpacked that, that was becoming stronger again.
Because I had that background of physical education, tactical fitness, strength and
conditioning.
I wear two hats now.
So in clinic, I work with people who have pain and injury, obviously.
And then I have that other hat of strength and conditioning.
So to ask you a question, I was finding myself having the same conversation multiple times
a day.
And I found and so I started then that was a genesis of the idea to actually put my thoughts
down because the majority of people I treated would benefit and have benefited from becoming
stronger in some form in some way.
Then I did a deep dive into, well, what are the, what are the real benefits of this, not
just the aesthetic or, you know, in my case, the recovery and rehabilitation, but then
the prehabilitation piece, you know, the preventative piece that is a bit of a hard sell.
So I started, as you know, working for a arthritis charity.
And so I had up their therapist team and had up any projects on exercise.
One of them was a UK government healthy aging challenge.
So I found myself around that same time as we met working on a project that was looking
to add five more quality years to people's lives in the UK by 2035.
And they're targeting people in their seventies, realizing that actually that's me.
We're talking about that.
And you know, so I started to really reflect upon those two aspects of that health promotion,
health piece, I mean, I'm clinical work based on my own experiences of knowing what works.
And what really hit me was in, in researching that subject matter for the general population
in the UK.
Yeah, we share a lot of commonalities in terms of exercise levels, people who do and don't
exercise as US, the same kind of demographic, we're very, very closely aligned in terms
of levels of obesity, metabolic syndrome, frailty and injuries as well from falling.
So all these things were there at my fingertips.
And I realized that we're developing a lot of, I'm throwing a lot of money and a lot
of good advice at people who are already detrained, who are already frail, already weakened.
And I wanted to try to amplify my personal message I give to people in clinic, basically
if you're a middle aged person, come into my clinic, irrespective of what it is you're
coming for, you're going to get this message.
So I wanted to give this message to more people.
And as I say, amplify that message.
So I tried to write a book for the middle aged population of the world.
It's quite an undertaking because you know, I genuinely believe that there's an integrity
to the message in that if we can all become a little bit stronger, we can avoid the vast
majority of things that plague older age that we have become accustomed to thinking are
merely symptoms of older age, whereas in fact, they are symptoms of detraining often.
And so that was a genesis.
That was the challenge.
And to write a book, not a clinical book, but write a book for everyone, you know, write
a book that I hope people would enjoy and write a book which is full of conversations
and examples and pauses for reflection.
Because I don't know what you think, James, but any behavioural change that I think works
has to start with a friendly conversation.
Ideally, a conversation which you can reflect and think about your own friends, family and
yourself your own life and put yourself into that situation.
So that was my starting point.
Yeah.
Well, going back to the parallel between the UK and the US, we're about the same age, you
know, you have a pretty unique lens because you spent, you know, decade and a half in
the British Fire Service and then you moved into osteopathy.
What are the reasons why the UK is mirroring the US because I've seen it.
I literally just went home and it breaks my heart because it used to be I'd go home and
people wouldn't look like they do in America and then here we are 20 years later of living
in these states and now when I go home, depending on where I am, you know, if I'm walking through
Hyde Park, for example, obviously you've got a more mobile fitter population are doing
that but, you know, in the regular areas now, the obesity is horrendous in the UK.
So what have you seen through your unique perspective from when we were young to how
we got there today?
That's a great question and I don't have all the answers but I have a theory, I think that
we've, UK and the US, you know, if you grew up in the, well, if you become a teenager
in the 80s in this country, which you'll probably remember James, you know, gyms were just starting
out but they weren't gyms like health club gyms, they were kind of scary, dark places,
usually, you know, under the, you know, in the basement somewhere full of kind of, if
you're a teenager starting out there, you know, it was a very different experience.
And I think the messaging now if you to, I think there's been an invasion of, I think
that social media has hijacked the subject of strength and the problem is that we have
probably over emphasised the importance of cardiovascular fitness over the last 20 years
in both the US and the UK and it's led to something I call strength hesitancy in that
if you do not have a familiarity with strength training and understanding of it, as we have
because we've had to have industrial levels, you know, in our industries and, you know,
you are exposed to these things and so for me it became very fluent, like a language
and normal but for everyone else who potentially hasn't been in the services, been in uniform
or been a sports person, they generally stop strength training and challenging themselves
in that particular way generally shortly after university if they go to university, certainly
by 30 you're done putting yourself in those sorts of challenging situations. However,
a lot of people continue to do their cardio fitness training so I'm not against that at
all, in fact we need to do both but the message gets lost somewhere there. There's a blank,
kind of a blankness that comes across middle aged people if they haven't had those experiences
in their youth or in their formative years which the majority of us have not. So it's
led to this strength hesitancy and this, you know, getting your 10,000 steps in etc. All
of this is fantastic, don't get me wrong and it does a hell of a lot of good but the missing
part is strength because without the strength you won't be able to protect yourself from
psychopenia and frailty and osteopenia, osteoporosis and all the rage, you know, as you and I,
first responders have responded to multiple calls where the only reason that person's
on the floor is they're not strong enough to get back up, you know, and it's heartbreaking
and I think that is a form of, it's insight into what's going on because they didn't get
the message. So I wrote this book really because it's the book that the generation of our parents
didn't get, they didn't get that message, they got the message about 10,000 steps, they
got the message about cardiovascular training as have the current cohort worldwide of middle
aged people. That said, there is a hesitancy and that's an understandable hesitancy because
it's an unknown thing and strength training, the basic movements that I talk about have
to be trained and learnt, it's not difficult but you need to be coached through it and
without sounding like a politician, heaven forbid, I wanted to democratise the opportunity
for everyone to become stronger and older age and the time to do that is not when you're
75. That said, you can do yourself a lot of great benefits in your 70s, 80s and 90s. We
know that you can reacquire strength but it's very difficult to reacquire strength and muscle
mass and the reason I say that is because as a middle aged person if we started and continued
with consistency then we are able to build muscle mass functionally and to maintain our
strength and power production. That strength and power are all important to protect our
fast rich muscle fibres and the reason that that is mentioned is because when we do endurance
training, when we walk, when we do Ironman which is objectively very difficult, we are
actually leaning into the slow twitch muscle fibres and becoming very, very good at that
but it's not the slow twitch that looks after us in older age. In older age if you've ever
had a parent who has suddenly aged overnight or a friend or a family member who has suddenly
shrunk and slowed down in a short space of time and that's because of the exponential
acceleration of fast twitch muscle fibre loss when we get over 65, 70 and unless we are
doing stuff to stimulate those muscle fibres in particular then they're going to accelerate
even further. We can't hedge and we can't offset that loss entirely but we can do a
hell of a lot to slow that decline and that's the name of the game. We are all going to
decline but you can control it and you can offset a hell of a lot of that with resistance
training so that can be resistance against weight, resistance against your own body,
weight and a little bit of faster work as well so combining that with a little bit of
work to do those contractions more quickly or take up a sport which requires fast movement
as well with the cardio training is going to protect us in a more complete way. I say
get your steps and your reps in because without one or the other then you're only doing half
the job and I say the same if people only do strength training I get them to take up
some zone two and some interval training and consequently there's someone who concentrates
on endurance training I get them to do that and incorporate in the very basics really
of strength training as well. I'd love to reverse engineer each of the earlier life
phases before we get to middle age because obviously that's where you're going to unpack
the solutions that you wrote about in the book. When I look back at my son's generation
of course video games and social media devices and all these things are contributing woefully
to the breakdown in physicality in some of our children, the increase in obesity and
being overweight so that kind of poor nutrition and lack of movement is very evident but if
we go back to prior to that one of the things that's interesting when you move from the
United States from the UK to America is we grew up in an environment where you just played
sport but there were no elite performance training centers where we were doing plyometrics
and all kinds of stuff to be the best footballer you could be. You just play football and if
your school weren't shit you'd win and if they were like mine you wouldn't but then
what I saw is that then because there wasn't this high level of performance people seemed
to carry on so you had pub leagues and local leagues and so it seemed like football and
rugby and cricket and some of the other sports and badminton and you know all these things
swimming people kept doing after they graduated from school. Now conversely in the states
what they do is they eke performance but arguably at the expense of longevity of a lot of these
young athletes so you get a super high level 18, 19, 20, 21 and then you know an absolute
just drop with all these guys you know walking around saying I could have, would have, should
have if it wasn't for my ACL, my shoulder whatever it was and so even though there weren't
the devices and those kind of things I look back now and you know I'm trying to kind of
see you and I are existing in a world where a lot of our fellow middle-aged men and women
are deconditioned, are you know overweight or obese so starting at us when we were young
what were the factors that worked well for what we're going to talk about and what were
some of the factors in built-to-culture then that have created this kind of you know disease
and lack of fitness and strength in our population at the moment? Well I think that's a really
great question because you know I think if there was a next book in me it would be the
part that that talked that wrote a book for you know the first half of the book would
be for parents to have conversations with their teenage children and then the second
half of the book would be for teenage children because there's a lot of toxic masculinity
currently and there's a lot of body dysmorphia on both sides of the gender divide that really
doesn't help in terms of putting the message across that strength training in fact movement
based practices, strength training, cardiovascular training, healthy lifestyle choices should
be a lifelong consistency and arc over one's life beginning in school and carrying on and
laying those foundations in. I think you're right that I think often the high watermark
of anyone's athletic career is in school or high school or university. Again unless you
then carry through and you play competitive sport which is often the case. The numbers
are pretty terrible still though. I do occasionally see something popping up on Instagram where
there's a 75 year old or 70 year old still playing rugby or you know the masters sprinters
who I think are actually great and really inspirational still going but they're the
exceptions to the rule and that's why they're on Instagram because you know someone said
this is amazing and they are amazing it should be celebrated. However what we need is a shift
in that that becomes the normal and so there's this top heavy thing where probably near to
90% of people aren't doing the required level of minimum really required level of strength
training. The 150 minutes of moderate exercise or the 75 minutes of intense exercise that
most people know about now. Those numbers are still pretty poor but what's even worse
catastrophic really are the people doing the two sets of strength training that comes in.
This is World Health Organisation NHS or you know across the globe are all saying this
but it's not being done and it's certainly not being educated. That message is coming
out into the middle age and older population. It's not being targeted in schools as effectively.
So I think there's an educational piece there needs to be a change in how we educate our
children. There are some children who are going to have an eye on a professional sports
career they always will be. However for everyone else you know for everyone else see that probably
is at 0.01% people who have a professional sporting career. For everyone else it should
be about consistency of health span you know and introducing the concepts of health span
at an early stage in education. And I think having embedded into that message that you
can't have health span you know which is not just adding you know years to life but adding
life to years because you don't want to be having a terrible terrible time and enduring
your life. You know it's got to be a life where you can say yes to things when you're
75, 85. You know that's really the goal I think of what we would define as a good life
you know to be able to say yes not to have to endure the end of your life but actually
hopefully enjoying it right up to the end of your life which is actually where I open
the book because I give an example of someone you know a patient I worked with into the
mid 90s who did just that. But going back to your question about life stages we seem
to we see high water marching school depending on which school it is you know if it's in
the private sector they tend to get a bit more physical education in this country. If
you're state sector that's a postcode lottery. You then have the university system which
again a lot of students go to university and drink. I'm not judging that at all but you
know unless you're studying something that's active then potentially if it's a difficult
course people don't prioritise physical health and wellbeing. So you then have people stop
really in the mid 20s putting themselves into challenging situations unless you have opted
for a career in the services. And so you have the vast majority of population stop challenging
themselves in physical ways. You know so for instance if you suddenly had to sprint you
know the amount of people I see in clinic the weekend after a parents race at school
because they sprinted for the first time in 10 years and their hamstring or achilles have
gone and laugh but we all kind of go oh yeah yeah yeah that happens to me and it's because
we stop sprinting we stop using fast switch fibre and then a very good example of that
then so if you have detrained and you become a cyclist so you your fast switch fibres have
detrained your slow switch fibres and your cardiovascular fitness is good then have to
run 100 yards which you do because you haven't got the fast switch there your connective
tissue so ligaments tendons cartilage take too much impact and you're injured and it's
as simple as that. So you then become middle aged and a middle age in midlife then you
have to you have to deal with parents and children and career so it is by far probably
the busiest most stressful time and a lot again a lot of people say I haven't got the
time I haven't got the time and so again I was very within the book I was very careful
just to kind of give permission actually to be middle aged because I'll come back to that
point but we know from some of this some of the experts I spoke to to write the book you
know epidemiologists and health promotion experts in the UK that midlife has this this
key period where the habits and the the decisions we make are more profoundly related to our
older age and if we can get into the habit of doing a little bit of more little bit more
strength work training in you know that steps and reps way then the we know from long-term
epidemiological research that as an older person have you made that decision in midlife
you get a real dividend in order age and it's I wouldn't say it's the last chance to make
a meaningful change but I would say that you know the because one is middle age as well
you know that's the that's the debate in itself but that I would say that you when you start
training like that the outcome will be as good as a time you have left so why not start
sooner rather than later just like a pension start investing in it because you're going
to need to lean into that pension one day but I think really the problem is James that
there's lots of really good information out there there's lots of there's lots of good
information but people don't necessarily want to do it when you google strength training
or becoming stronger as a search term you know people like you and me don't pop up you
know it's kind of what pops up is generally a scantily clad man or woman promoting something
which you know a way of working out which is probably going to leave you injured if
you start it when you're middle-aged and probably going to leave you fatigued and burnt out
which means in the long arc of the next 20 years which is where my focus is you're going
to be weaker because the biggest chapter in my book is how to avoid injury and burnout
because that's the biggest challenge for a middle-aged reader don't get injured don't
over train don't burn out keep turning up but being consistent in a challenging way
but in a controlled way so send that message to your body that is still needed in multiple
ways not just to run or or to walk because we know there is a causal link actually between
sending those messages to our deep nervous system and therefore whole self and there
being a dividend 20 years time we know there is a causal link so we just can't really explain
why yet but we know there is one so you know the message is that in the book i tried to
i wrote it for middle-aged people because i didn't really feel like many middle-aged
authors had written something that was that was kind of coherent in that it's not all
about you know getting that beach body it's actually about the next 10 20 30 years consistency
and that that requires i feel a change in mindset um and almost permission permission
to be middle-aged um now what i mean by that is it it sounds a bit perverse but if if if
we want to stop people starting and failing you know in their attempts to in middle age
to become fitter stronger healthier then we need to give a framework and create a framework
within which it's all right to ebb and flow within which it's all right to gain and regress
you know to have a good day a good month a good year or a bad one because that is life
you know the ebb and flow of life you know we talked before about you know what it's
like not to have a good night's sleep that's midlife isn't it um so the problem is that
if you do that if you join something else that's very very intense you know that is
based on like quite militaristic training or quite kind of binary your turn up at four
at 4 30 a.m and you will do this then what about everyone else who can't do that what
about everyone else who thinks well i i'll do it and then you burn out after a month
and think of yourself as a failure so the framework that i propose is something in which
you give yourself permission to keep turning up but you also give yourself permission not
to have to because if you have a period when you're too busy to turn up and then don't
it's not a failure and you know just like eating healthy most of the time i try to eat
healthy most of the time but there are occasions where i don't but i know that over the long
arc of the next 20 years i'm going to be eating pretty healthy most of the time you know 90
95 percent of the time that will be my life and therefore that side of my kind of lifestyle
choice is taken care of whereas if i try to do some sort of diet that's really really
restrictive i'd fall off and then probably eat really badly then fall off and eat really
badly and so 20 years of doing that is going to leave me in a terrible state so think of
strength training in the same way as eating healthy most of the time if you try to strength
train within a controlled but challenging environment that i try to lay out in the book
then you're going to be fine over the next 20 years and it's trying to get that mindset
into people that you know you're never going to fail if you're in a system that gives you
permission to fail occasionally because that's basic um life throws its curveballs at you
isn't it and i i think i just want to have a really honest discussion in the book about
that to say that you know i'm no longer that person i was when i was a tactical athlete
you know when i was you know really defined myself as a rower as a firefighter as a pt
not that anymore you know i'm a middle-aged dude changed by injury um he was actually
reinvent themselves but still want to have that good arc of life and i think it's just
being realistic you know and because the problem is that when people really sell the whole
you know go hard or go home well that's good for business for me because i'll see you in
clinic in a few weeks you know because you know people who get injured and then end up
weaker in the long run is off the charts so a bit of a rambling answer to that but um
yeah that would be my take on life stages and i think midlife being the key life stage
which is why i've kind of dedicated the book to all midlifers out there really we talked
about injury and i want to unpack that so i have a litany of injuries but to be fair
i mean you know i was a firefighter i was a stuntman i was a martial artist some of
those injuries are from being punched in the face or falling or whatever it was but some
of them are hands down the result of taking my job seriously coupled with sleep deprivation
you can never tell you got punched in the face my wife can't shut my nose goes off
to the side um but you know but injuries whatever the origin story they are such a deterrent
to exercise because it hurts because your joints move that way because you know when
you press the barbell overhead you get a sharp pain in your shoulder or you know you got
a deadlift and that old back injury that you rehabbed is still kind of saying oh i'm going
to happen again you know so there's that really kind of scary psychological point to injuries
as well so with that being said whether it's you know the fire service you want to speak
speak you know to our professional or just the average person talk to me about injuries
as we get to middle age because the the thing that i'm realizing now is i'm not trying to
get stronger or faster anymore i'm trying to basically lack of that word unfuck the
things that i did to my body for the last 30 years which will make me faster and stronger
so i am lifting i am moving but i'm not trying to you know find the envelope anymore so what
are the kind of commonalities with injuries in our age group and that as a deterrent to
the very thing that's going to be the solution well there's a reason why the injury prevention
and understanding pain chapter are the largest in this book because you know this is the
biggest challenge i think especially if i'm trying to sell you know it's a hard sell trying
to sell something new and alien to most people which is strength training there's a lot of
fear and hesitancy around that because it's it's the unknown injury and pain are by far
the biggest risk factors closely followed by fatigue and burnout in midlife to maintaining
a stronger older age the the thing about carrying an old injury which you know we both do is
that you might you've got a kind of at some point i think you've got to look yourself
in the mirror and it doesn't matter what other people are doing have they had your history
have they had your life experience have they experienced is that what you've experienced
when you've had that injury and the answer is of course they haven't so firstly don't
try and judge yourself by anyone else this is a very personal journey this is your body
and your journey so the second thing to say is that just like i had to you have to one
day realize that you can't train like a 25 year old anymore i did try that a few years
ago and ended up just laying in a darkened room for i could do it but it's a lot of darker
room for a week of a headache because you know i just completely annihilated myself
and you don't recover and the whole thing about overtraining as well the whole thing
that human nature is interesting when it comes to physical conditioning because you think
and it's still pervasive now in culture that if i put go harder than this if i do more
than is meant to be kind of a safe thing if i do it more often then that means i'm going
to get a bonus i'm going to get exponentially that will equate to me becoming better no
it really doesn't what we know is you know over the long arc consistency counts but not
intensity consistency and not getting injured count if you happen to be starting from a
point of injury then there is always an alternative to the movement everyone else is doing always
an alternative that isn't going to injure you and reinflame something injuries everyone
gets injured whoever you are i don't care who you are everyone gets injured you can't
prevent or injury and you know you can't prevent aging but you can offset aging and you can
slow some of the things that are wrongly associated with aging such as loss of physical condition
and in particular strength so pain i think is a subject that that people you know i think
you know if you've been lucky enough to get injured then great but understanding what
your body's telling you as well having that kind of biofeedback and understanding into
what your body's telling you you know pain is there to communicate with us and i kind
of kind of refer to it a little bit like a like a annoying neighbor at times if it's
there if we're sat for too long we become stiff that's a form of pain is feedback if
we work out we get that burning in our muscles sometimes so that's a form of feedback and
we kind of can judge when we're experienced you know what our body's telling us should
i adjust that or not we've also um we also have delayed onset muscle soreness which doms
as you know which again is an element that we have to lean into and understand what our
body is actually telling us so in that regard pain is something that i encourage all people
to lean into and understand a bit better because um especially and especially if you're dealing
with arthritis or dealing which often middle-aged people are um especially if you're dealing
with old injuries which often middle-aged people are um because understanding what your
body's telling you and then experimenting a little bit with with what we're we're you
know we're trying to do in terms of that movement and finding alternatives um will actually
help us in the long run realize that you know oh you know so i did that movement in the
water in a pool and it didn't hurt me um and you know or you know i did an alternative
that the person the personal trainer or the pt at the gym suggested so um there are all
there are generally ways of unlocking movements um that can that can help with pain and what
i would say is that you know it's impossible in this discussion to give you know an answer
that would cover all the bases for people that's going to be listening to this but um
i do encourage people to try to understand to try to experiment with what they can and
cannot do when it comes to triggering an old response because the long the more you can
move your body around that response the better now what i mean by that is that in my own
example if i give you that you know i had multiple dysprolapses at the same time i suffered
a industrial i was on duty and um you know i had a compression injury a fall a compression
injury and so that led to early onset of arthritis something called modic changes which means
that the bone marrow in the in the um vertical body itself becomes inflamed and that's something
i have to nurse and manage now you know 20 years on every day um i can still be active
and strong but within that i have my challenges of moving so i know what works and doesn't
work but on days even the things that do work sometimes don't so there is no one fix um
the way the way the reason i mentioned that is that back then when i had my original injury
it was a pretty catastrophic injury i had nerve root impingement which means that it's
the equivalent of you know what what a lot of servicemen experience and phantom limb
pain in that i still get um raging sciatica sometimes because the nerve root that i originally
inflamed 20 years ago has changed permanently and even a slight muscle strain at the same
level of the spine that was changed permanently will cause it to trigger i have basically
got a hair trigger i have to deal with but that's not to say i haven't found a plethora
of ways of moving my body which don't trigger that and so after a few days of moving of
moving generally you know in water i'm a big advocate of you know training in pools and
moving in that way i can defacilitate that i send messages to that spinal segment and my brain
that all is well because my body's moving it's not mindfulness it's actually moving my body to
send the signal to say all is well and so that's taken 20 years james and you know i think what
what what i suggest to people is if you can find a way of moving um even if it's in unusual setting
or an unusual movement for you do it even if you're if you've been previously in pain because if
you can find a way of moving which doesn't aggravate what you're doing any movement will
more quickly get you to that point that i just described when i look at a lot of more chronic
pain i'm not talking about getting nailed by a train or you know falling off a fire engine
and compressing your spine but the more kind of slow burn injuries it appears that it's ultimately
muscle imbalance and obviously immobility of joints and muscles so talk to me about the the
prescriptive element the the um uh the healing that you would get with a well balanced strength
training routine around that pain so healing some of this more chronic pain with exercise
i mean any joint um if we take a knee injury for instance um you know any joint is only as good as
the muscles around it even a prosthetic knee you're only as good as the muscles around it
in my experience in physical education and in clinic um if a person is able to just marginally
strengthen those muscles around that joint they will experience less pain it's because the muscles
don't just uh they don't just work as to move the joints they work to brace it and girdle it naturally
as well so there's literally a bracing that is there there's also um that signaling as well so
if you are only doing isometric work on a joint that is difficult to move in full range
just an isometric element of strengthening will benefit that joint as well strengthening the
contralateral side the opposite side because human beings we are very much set up to be
bilateral you know we've got two pairs hands limbs etc so there's this neurological drive to keep us
moving so there's this thing called the crossover effect which means if this arm is injured train
this one i'll get a benefit on this one even though it's in a cast so in regards to the biological
processes of of why that would help well there's a couple of examples there but i think i think for
me the majority of um injuries tend to happen when when someone has um a lack of all-around
fitness and that can be also be the cardiovascular fitness as well because when someone hasn't got the
vo2 max cardiovascular fitness they tend to rely more on their muscular skeletal system
and therefore pick up an injury um and then conversely you know if they haven't got the
you know the muscular skeletal strength then um they'll potentially burn themselves out more
quickly so i i think that with with well the way i look at how to prepare if we're talking about
first responders it's it's not about being um it's not about being able to do the first responders
it's not about being the biggest uh the fastest it's about being consistent it's about being ready
at any time um multiple times uh in one shift often it's about being ready and that's quite a unique
um that's quite a unique ask isn't it on human physiology um but i think that consistency i think
being mindful also of yeah you've got your good program you know so let's look at someone who's
got a great program have they do they do the mobility piece in that do they do they take care
to to mobilize um to stretch and decompress to relax very quickly because the sooner you can get
into that relaxed parasympathetic state um the more quickly your body will start to replenish
and recover so that brings us on to sleep you know sleep deprivation feeds into that um literally
you'll get less hypertrophy less recovery if you are sleep deprived or if you are in a higher state
of anxiety depression or you know some kind of neurological arousal all these things take away
from our ability our body's ability to recover replenish repair um and and to build strength or
and to build strength or cardiovascular training so it has to all be there um and that's a challenge
especially over a 30 year career um i think if you have the knowledge of what works for your body
if you've trained for a while then the thing to do is to i think we're going back to middle age
again when you get to middle age i would say maybe change gears a bit um you have to give
yourself permission to change gears james um if we're talking about avoidance of injury if you
continue to train like you did when you were 25 and you're 55 you're going to get injured and you're
not going to be training like that at 75 at some point you're going to have to change gears and i
always encourage people to change gears when it's their choice not when they have to because there's
been an injury you know it's the old fable isn't it where um a you know someone has a fire then
puts a fire alarm fire alarm in afterwards you know like the barn door when the horse is bolted
you can name probably several others make the choice before you have to in light of your world
i call it the great gamble because the amount of people who uh including myself up until actually
really diving into this subject matter you know we we train and we won't change our training
until we're injured and have to and hoping for the best and then when you get injured then you
think actually yeah i've had that niggle for ages and i didn't stop and then it became something
more and more and then i got injured whereas actually if you have that niggle lean into it
understand it lighten your load come back to it in a month train again train up train around the
movement but don't just keep going um with that niggle because if you do then there's a high
expectation in 20 years you'll be weaker and that's a tragedy to me because a lot of people
are trained and they get injured in midlife but it's very reason they might have trained for
quite a long time and then get injured and that's it uh and you know i see a lot of this when people
retire as well you know when they had a certain regime and then they retire and their system
um detrains quite quickly because they stop moving in the same way and you know that's a tragedy
because um yeah but all that investment in time and effort and you're still going to end up weaker
i had an interesting conversation with a journalist a few months ago talking about this project and
this project and she was talking to me about you know the movements in the book and i and she said
that her husband knew she was talking to me that day and he'd asked her to ask a question and the
question was he hasn't done anything he's 45 and hasn't done anything he's literally didn't do
anything from school his work's been quite sedentary a little bit overweight um he's thinking
about taking up some strength training and some cardio training um and taking the advice that that
i've kind of tried to amplify out there and um i said great so what's the question he said well
that you know is it too late and i said no actually no it's not too late this is that this book was
for him because and the lady who was interviewing me was a journalist who trained all her life so
you had really binary you know one and the other but i said that if she was to stop right now and
he was to start because they're both about 45 at 75 he wins because you can't you cannot rely on
former glory it's gone you know you get a detraining effect whoever you are doesn't matter
you cannot rely on former glory uh a former physical fitness or former levels of strength
to protect you in 30 years time when you're 75 so the husband if he starts now and it's consistent
and sensible over the next 30 years wins the aging game because it is i think again from that
regard it should be looked at as that and she was shocked she said well yeah but you know i think
you know she was a and still is a very active very strong very fit woman he wins give it a few years
he wins if it continues he definitely wins the aging game and it's because there's this detraining
effect in the nervous system in the muscular system i think i mentioned earlier in this
conversation that we know that 75 year old 85 year olds can reacquire strength have they've been
detrained for some number of years because there's a neurological component to strength
but they can't require the muscle mass and or certainly not in the way that one would think if
you can regain strength so the reason i bring that up is because strength and muscle are closely
related and we need a bit of both we don't want to be bodybuilders you know but we don't want to be
powerlifters we ideally want to be somewhere in the middle so we get functional hypertrophy
we get functional strength in movements that we're going to experience in our lives moving forward
which is how i try to break up those movements and the reason we want the the muscle mass is because
it helps with pain bracing the joints as i mentioned it also acts as a natural repository
of amino acids which are you know essential to life you know every hormone biological
cellular action are are actually dependent on our repository to be able to do that to be able to
repair replenish those cells make hormones etc if they're not there then our immune system
falls off a cliff as well because the muscular skeletal system our muscle mass
um should be and i believe is now being viewed by more people as an immune organ with definitely
an immune function in its own right which again explains why those older relatives who we see
suddenly shrink and slow and lose postural kind of um you know their postural ability to function in
life also lose their ability to respond to the common cold because that repository isn't there
because that repository isn't there anymore so you know we we need to start thinking literally
about um age like that and so you know if you spent 30 years from middle age
maintaining what muscle you build doing what you can to build functional muscle mass
and strength working on those fast twitch fibers which are important to save us from trips and
falls for that quick foot readjustment when we trip or to pull ourselves up from the floor when
we're on the floor as well as that repository of the ability within our amino acids to replenish
repair our cellular function then we're going to be in great shape compared to the person who
stops in midlife and it's that binary when you talk about the hormonal impact of in the loss of
muscle mass to me it mirrors what we see in our profession and obviously you know there's a massive
element of sleep deprivation um that's contributing to that but there are men's clinics opening up
everywhere where i live now and it's all trt trt and i actually partner with a company called
transcend who are doing it right they do phenomenal blood testing they offer peptides if you just need
to boost your own levels a little bit and then trt for people who truly are devoid of the production
and need to actually have it exogenously but you know conversely sleep is going to help especially
these younger firefighters muscle mass is going to help not just firefighters but the general
population in you know in a country where like i said they peaked at 2021 and have been sedentary
for the next 20 years so just kind of unpack that a little bit more the the the relationship between
physical health and you know muscle health and the very sex hormones that we rely on for longevity
yeah so you know obviously half the population over half the population are female
and so one of the biggest kind of dangers obviously to the menopause is that loss of
skeletal muscle mass and tendency for osteoporosis osteopenia and again with men as you mentioned you
know testosterone levels dropping these hormonal drops if you look at a graph you know male and
female tend to do that whereas an acid they're not making the kind of right healthy lifestyle
exercise choices resistance training strength training if you can then you can blunt the curve
slightly but that slight blunting of the curve means a hell of a lot to your quality of life
and older age is hell of a lot so in terms of trt what i would say in so this country it's
a very different system there are longevity clinics more and more popping up they call
them longevity clinics and you know it's exciting time to look at the research at the moment
because my mission really was to democratize a stronger older age i wanted to talk about things
that everyone can do that aren't really based upon having the money to go to one of these things or
you know to be able to actually see a really good doctor because you know i mean personally
you only want to be seeing a real expert when you're dealing with hormonal replacement my point
being that i think that anything medical like that should be considered if you really do have
a deficiency and should be medically advised but when it comes to the benefits that are there for
everyone then it really is quite simple that the vast majority i think something like in the uk
seven percent of men and four percent of women are the only that amount actually currently
strength training therefore are maintaining that muscle mass and so the numbers are so bad that
i don't really entertain people or don't advise them seeking those kind of medical interventions
certainly in the uk and i would probably stand by that in the in the u.s as well until they've
until they've actually done the the basics of you know you know try to lose a bit of weight in a
healthy way slowly try to gain some strength in a healthy way slowly try to get some cardiovascular
fitness into your life without injuring yourself slowly if you've done that and you're and you've
done all those things and you're still struggling for whatever reason then i think the medical
approach is absolutely valid i really do but i think the the reality is that unless you do that
i think you're robbing yourself of the opportunity to do it naturally because there's so much wisdom
in our bodies that you know we're literally rewarded with feel-good hormones you know if
we get it right there's so much wisdom that if we just commit to six months of trying to change
something it can benefit i know i've seen some one of your um one of your posts ages ago when
um you caught alcohol out you change your sleep routine this is after you interviewed a sleep
expert and you shared your um i think you your your testosterone results and they went up
something as simple as that you know you didn't have to do anything other than just kind of
practice some lifestyle changes and that's my point in that it works it's not sexy is it it's
not you know it's not wrapped up as a package and sold to you it's just actually a bit of practice
a bit of a bit of knowledge and a bit of wisdom that you lean into that's been there for millennia
that you can actually feel when you're doing something right just as you can feel when you're
doing something wrong right you know it's um there's that wisdom in the body so i mean i
used to say um when it comes to you know the boundaries and the um knowledge at this point
in terms of longevity in terms of the best practice we just don't know irrespective of
what people might say in science we just don't know truly yet because we can't put a control
group who do nothing we can put another group who do one thing another group who who have the
exercise regime and the medical advice or medical intervention because that's unethical we've got to
look at things we've got to be epic we've got to look at epidemiological research we've got to look
back and try and learn lessons from there and we've also got to kind of like look and look at the
experience of people who um work with people in this field so um there are some implicit
relationships that are there we just can't definitively say how they're there like for
instance i mentioned we know that in midlife you know certain movements and certain practices
leads to um better outcomes for health generally in older age so things like grip strength leg
strength there is a causal link we just can't quite nail down exactly why yet but it's there
so we shouldn't stop doing it because you don't know exactly how it happens and we don't want to
do a control blind trial where we put a lot of people who detrain and become psychopathic and
osteoporinic and risk of frailty because that's unethical as i say so um coming back to the
original question um it's an exciting time because i think within our lifetime we will know more i
think within our lifetime there probably will be a product that can um be uh accessible to the
general population without too much expense that can potentially do something to the rate of cellular
aging but right now you know it's important therefore to stay in shape right this you don't
want to be a frail 70 year old you know um having to retrain first before you can even be considered
for some intervention be kicking ass when you're 75 85 um because probably you know if something
does become more accessible in that longevity sector uh or more or there's more understanding
of how the long-term effects of these hormones work um you if you're in good shape anyway you're
probably not gonna be bothered by me you know you know i think you're probably gonna be thinking
it's working what i'm doing is working i don't want to put i don't want to do that so
i've got an open mind to that i think you know let's see but i think
stay in shape so you're around you're in the game when when things are becoming you know more yeah
what becoming clearer you touched on the body's innate ability to not only reward itself when we're
doing right but just the innate ability to heal the innate ability to thrive um and i think this
is you know you mentioned earlier about what it what is middle age you know my grandparents were
99 and 105 basically when they both passed so what i see middle age being a glass half full kind of
a guys i'm not even there yet at 50 years old i got a couple of years before i matched my
grandmother's but you know again it's also the health span as you touched on when you did your
research and you looked at cultures around the world because i shared a haitian man not too long
ago 80 i forget now three absolutely ripped still working in the sugar canes and things what he was
doing and he made a mention of he didn't retire because he didn't want to be a liability to his
children um but this man would have been you know would have would have challenged anyone in the
gym any you know 18 20 year old it was phenomenal watching him and so i think we have such a skewed
perfect perspective on what 50 60 70 even looks like so outside of you know the western kind of
modernized culture when you look at more indigenous cultures around the world obviously
factoring in you know the the disease and a lot of the stuff but when given you know the the diet
that they should be getting and free and disease what are you seeing as far as ability in you know
middle age onwards in some of these less um corrupted tribes yeah great question um
huge tolerance for life you see with people um you know we hear the blue zones around the world
and i think it's because somewhere along the line you know they culturally
the decisions were made that that i think they get benefits from multi-generational living
they get benefits from being an elder not an older person but being an elder they feel valued
they have community they don't stop necessarily working and retire they just carry on in that
community i think it's very interesting i think they can't quite distill the golden pill of the
blue zones but certainly looking at um you know some of the cultures so so for instance in japan
they're not going to the gym in okinawa mate you know they you know but they are doing multiple
squats a day because their desks are on the floor they eat on the floor they socialize on the floor
so on a very basic level you know they're getting their leg strength in there people working in the
fields are getting their leg and hand strength there i'm not saying it's not kind of a hard
and sometimes quite brutal there's that there's that often thing you have to realize that
there was a reason why a hundred years ago there's a lower life expectancy
because people were overworking overtraining a form of overtraining that raising their body
inflammation then dying younger potentially but you know what is middle age i mean i for the
purpose of the book i said 35 to 65 but it's a very as you say if you've got relatives longevity
in the family live into their hundreds then you know what does that mean i mean i would say middle
ages you're no longer young but you're not yet old and the not yet old bit is still very much up
for grabs you know they're not they're no longer young that's gone that boat has sailed right and
but i think the not yet old bit is the interesting bit because i intend to be not yet old for as long
as i could possibly be and i think that's what i'm encouraging people to do is you know i'm not yet
old yeah i want some of that you know let's not yet be old and that is done obviously by
a whole plethora of lifestyle stuff that that that should aim to deliver you as a stronger you
in 30 years that does obviously include strength training also includes nutrition through sleep
relaxation happiness all these things but without the base building blocks of actually doing the
physical practice then you're not going to have it and so yeah it's for me it's it's about it's
about it's about just having a mindset that i'm not yet old and in whatever that means to to to
everyone we might look old but we might not yet be old physically and it's sending messages to
your body and your nervous system that you're still needed you know if we decide to retire
and sit then good luck because you'll become very good at sitting and you're sending a message to
deep cellular self that you're no longer needed to do challenging things and guess what you lose
your fast twitch fibers you know you can no longer when asked do challenging things and what does
that mean what does that life look like that will look like a life that's defined by the four walls
you find yourself sitting it and so i see strength training in a controlled way so regular controlled
strength training as not only building that strength in your muscular system but sending
a very important message to your deep cellular self that you're still needed you still need to
show up and so stick around and it's the fast twitch fibers and the relationship between them
and the nervous system that you're telling that to you're asking that relationship to stay to
stay fast and you're asking those fast twitch fibers to stick around if you lose that if you
do not practice that in any way then you know you might you might be running you might be
cycling you might be swimming and it's all great but you'll be losing that fast twitch part of
what could have been there and in terms of longevity fast twitch is golden and so
you know that that basically summarizes summarizes what i'm trying to tell people really in that you
know if you're only doing half the job if you you don't pay attention to the fast twitch fiber
and to do that you need to do something challenging and controlled don't do something crazy do
something challenging and controlled for the next 20 years regularly but giving yourself permission
to have good and bad periods as long as you return to that practice you'll be already
you'll be all right and the thing to say james is we're not going to keep doing personal bests all
the time for the next 20 years we might have already peaked i don't know you know i equate
physical strength as like you know when you're climbing a rope but you probably did have to do
this in training i did in training you have to climb a rope um and then you know ring a bell at
the top then climb back down then do it again physical strength you know you might get half
out the rope and that represents your high water mark of strength now you're all on a rope there's
a line of you all on a rope and so you're in the middle on that rope and and then hormonally midlife
you might come down a few hands down and then you look around you and you know it's all pretty
similar and then the people who decide not to do any physical practice such as strength training
they go down that rope even further and faster than you and eventually in older life they hit
the ground literally we know people hit the ground in a metaphoric way in a physical way
whereas if you started in midlife to come down but actually the rate at which you come down that
rope is controlled and you don't actually hit the ground when you're older then good you might be
a few inches off the ground but you haven't hit it is my and you're controlling that descent
by your physical practice and then we're on to a winner and it's that simple that's the way i see
aging that whole philosophy of not yet old i do the three four three hero challenge every year
and there i think there's a division that's like 40 and above and i'm 50 now and uh every single year
i enter into the regular one the younger one and it's it's i've got a teammate who is in that age
group but he said to me before you know if you did the other division you might you might um be on
the podium i'm like but it's not about that it's about showing the young firefighters that at 50
years old i'm not yet old i can still show up in bunker gear grab ladder grab hose grab people
and make it happen it's walking the walk and i think where that's powerful is like you said the
psychological point of view because there's a lot of people wearing uniform that are a liability
that aren't that can't do the job anymore you know and that's you know they know it they know damn
well in their heart of hearts if they can or they can't so i think that you know it's less about oh
but i want a trophy for myself and more about i want to stay in that mindset where i can am i
going to be as fast or as strong as the 18 year old probably not but am i still able to move those
tools that i need to for my job or roll with someone you know half my age on the jiu-jitsu
mat or whatever it is yeah you know and it's a you know 80 of what i could do before but i'm
still doing it with this younger group of people and still feeling younger myself rather than going
well you know i'm 50 now i'm going to take up golf you know so i think that there's a huge
very powerful psychological point of that leaning into that not old especially if you're in a
profession where your physicality is a life-saving tool definitely yeah i mean that's not i mean that's
that's that's exactly right and i think you you summarize it perfectly and that you know you're
doing probably 80 percent of what you were doing what would have done when you were 35 30 but it
doesn't matter he's still in the game he's still in the arena doing challenging stuff sending that
message to yourself and you know that's my my metaphor was you're coming down that rope we all
are but you're coming down more slow than the dude who's taken up golf that's for sure 100
percent you know person who's taken up golf is probably already on the floor they just don't know
it yet because you know they haven't had that that that medical event um so that's perfectly
right i think you've got to be sensible you've got to be give yourself permission to be belated
but still turn up and do challenging things in a controlled way you know i think as at the middle
age you know in middle age and you know talking about middle age you know i mean in the uk
generally if a firefighter joins at 18 they've they've left the job unless they're very senior
officer by you know early 50s they're retired and um maybe 55 um that's the the worst thing you can
do is to stop um any any kind of regime you've had um the best thing you can do is now that you
don't have to put yourself in very sketchy physically dangerous situations if you are
lucky enough to have come through that i can still move reasonably well then i'd hate what
a tragedy if someone then injures himself doing something that's meant to be recreational finally
you know so at that point i say change gears build upon that base and that knowledge you've got
and then keep going but don't try and injure yourself you know have try and have a mindset
on on the far horizon to to really look after yourself and not just yourself actually you know
i think being strong and independent is the biggest gift you can give to your family when
you're under and you know we've all got we're all in the same boat again globally you know we're an
aging top heavy population so um you know i mentioned that in somewhere in the book i can't
remember exactly where it was but you know we all die don't we and then we die again when someone
stops saying your name but then there's a time before that i think if you're unlucky enough to
lose that physical independence because frankly you know you've come to that point sooner than
or you know than you needed to or um that's a tragedy that's another tragedy that's another
death really and when we're in layers we've got quite a binary decision to make you know do you
spend the next 30 years playing golf and slowly dying or do you spend the next 30 years being as
strong as you can within sensible control limits and saying yes to everything you know
competing in those things that you want to compete in giving yourself permission to be middle-aged
and compete you know doing the 80% that 21 year olds you would have done if you're still in the
game and you know the challenge James is to try to turn that narrative into not just a couple of
people having a chat about it because i know you and i touch wood we'll be still in the game in
20 years time and we need to and we'll be unusual for that you know we need to kind of make it
unmute we need to make it the usual thing that you know people are still in the game get this message
that you can still compete you can still put yourself in challenging situations you can still
sprint you know you can still lift and lower and press heavy things but maybe not as heavy as you
did when you were in school and that isn't a failure that's a success. I want to hit one more
topic and then we'll go to the the strength training principles that you talk about in the
book but one of the things i think a lot of us see certainly in in america because we do so much EMS
as well is the impact of osteoporosis especially on our older women and the number of hip fractures
and pelvic fractures and things that are you know not just an emergency but more often than not
life-ending because they lose their mobility and then you know psychiatry or psychologically
that's kind of like the end for them so i remember being in university of north london doing exercise
physiology and there was one slide i remember to this day and it was a cyclist and they said
that the only place in this study they found an increase in bone density was in their wrists
where they were leaning on the handlebars as they were cycling because their legs were going in a
circular motion and so you think about the messaging you know when it comes to bone strength
that we were raised on it was drink milk you know and then now as you kind of carry on down the
educational path you're like no it's it's impact you kind of you know you shock the bone and it
rebuilds a little bit stronger you shock the bone it doesn't have to be impact impact obviously
strength training tension from that muscle can do the same thing so talk to me about the imperative
importance for strength training when it comes to bone density and then obviously the
downstream effects of the lesser likelihood of a life-threatening injury like that
yeah so you're right that we're always talking about impact and so all the runners and
joggers out there say great i'm getting that i'm good i'm all good but you're only again you're
only doing half the job because yes there's the bones the the bone itself remodels
more strongly and experienced impact but there's also the the fact that osteoporosis and
osteoporosis and psychopenia which is lots of lean skeletal muscle mass is closely associated so
you don't have one without the other so conversely if you maintain your skeletal
muscle mass you're much less likely to have osteoporosis and it's because in the act of
maintaining that lean sphincter muscle mass you have been lifting lowering pushing pulling ripping
something with resistance that compression that your body feels the long bones especially feel
when you're lifting lowering pushing pulling something directly stimulates specialist deep
bone cells to lay down more bone and that doesn't happen in the same way as if you're just getting
impact so you need a little bit of impact and that can be something like balancing can be tennis
you know boxing drills anything like that running but you need that other compression
and relaxation of the bones to stimulate that very specific bone cell adaptation
so yes you're doing a lot of group of impacts but to cover the bases and to avoid osteoporosis and
psychopenia in one go do some strength training you know it's it really is like medicine so
again i'm a big fan of bones i'm an osteopath i should be and you also see that varied movement
in life leads to beautiful lines if you ever look at a bone or diagrams of a bone in a bone
of someone who's fractured ahead of the femur generally speaking if you look at the trabecular
lines which are the lines of stress that are laid down through life you can kind of tell
how active or not or inactive that person was if you look at the bone of a healthy
person the trabecular on their bone beautiful spiral lines you know like real kind of architectural
beautiful lines and spirals that spiral around the head of the femur they've lived a life full of
movement they haven't fractured the head of the femur when they've fallen you know so so i kind
of went on a bit of a segue there but basically yeah to lift lower compress and relaxation that
movement compression and release of the bone stimulates a bonus if you will by the way
of strengthening bone in a way that merely impact will not beautiful well i mean this is such an
important you know conversation especially i love the way you've just you were talking about seeing
that simply on the bone itself like the rings of a tree so when it comes to my exercise journey you
know early on i was running around a farm you know copying rocky on the exercise bike and
punching dead cows and stuff it wasn't that wasn't that cows but um and then it progressed to you know
the the typical english sports center which was all the bodybuilding machines and you know
it's funny because we when i was 21 i was a lot weaker than i was when i was you know 40 to be
honest um but then i got into crossfit and absolutely life-changing for me you know is
it a perfect system no but it served me extremely well as a firefighter and as a fighter as well i
mean and on the mass it was amazing but what i discovered is it wasn't so much that it was
getting me injured but the injuries in you know in general that i was accumulating weren't getting
better from that practice specifically and i was pretty diligent and i was doing some other stuff
as well but it just wasn't wasn't really kind of you know moving the needle back to where it went
what it should be and recently i've been doing a programming uh called wolf brigade and their
whole philosophy and they're the kind of ex crossfit guy that developed it they lent right back
into the strict movements so there's you know there's a lot of kettlebell pressing there's
some of the barbell movements you know squatting and deadlifting and bench but then you know there's
turkish get ups there's a lot of mace work there's a lot of strict pull-ups and it feels incredible
and the mace work i can feel kind of you know forcing my shoulder for example i think i either
separated my shoulder or broke my collarbone years ago doing stunts day three so i couldn't tell
anyone so i had to just do it you know get on with it and suck it up but obviously it heals in the
wrong way so what i have seen is it's not like oh i'm too old for crossfit anymore but rather than
wait for an injury for me my analysis was all right my in my prior injuries do not seem to be
progressing in this system anymore and so i just you know moved over to a different philosophy that
is slower that is more strict that is a lot of compound pressing and and a lot of getting off
the floor you know the elevator sit-ups the turkish get ups are beautiful just you know to keep
someone being able to get on the floor and then on a jiu-jitsu mat to drive your opponent off you with
with the kind of strength that most people don't have so talk to me about the middle-aged male and
female you know average member of the society or athlete and how in the book you know the the
principles and philosophies shift slightly for that particular age bracket yeah sure so i mean
the book i tried to write the book to represent the equivalent of a calpster 5k but for strength
training because if because i'm a big fan of anything that gets you doing any form of resistance
strength weight training but the my experience in clinic and also just kind of the research bears
me out in that if you go too soon into those things you're going to get injured and so again
long term you're weaker more at risk of health events and older age so it was very much the
challenge was how to take the average detrain middle-aged population from literally no experience
to being able to then walk in the door or wall fit or a cross-fit gym and then carry on their
journey so this is what this quote represents it's like a feeder if you like to hopefully a
lifetime of other choices i don't really recommend how after that i do i i give examples of how you
can you can carry on doing something similar or you have choices i do try to encourage people to
keep the journey moving in in a in a way that kind of you experience a variation as well which is
very important in the long term but you're right that you brought up the importance of compound
i think what i try to do is i broke down and you know i'm not the first person to do this because
this information has been around you know since the ancient greeks frankly
but what i try to do is break it down into recognisable movements you know all compound
or grip strength movements that you're likely to experience in life moving forward that it's a
very good idea to be strong in moving forward and i weighted them um against and what they've
waited i put the importance of them how many of that particular movement in was weighted against
was weighted against i felt the importance of that particular movement in terms of risk in the future
and potential benefits that we know can be gained so for instance there's two grip exercises that i
suggest because we know there's a causal link between grip strength and older age health
we also know that as we age we lose more ability to maintain muscle mass and leg strength in older
age as opposed to upper body strength so there's more legs leg stuff in there so the movements that
i the the foundational 10 are you know are very much weighted against risk and benefit
they're all compound apart from grip which tend to be a bit more isometric
but the way i look at it is
we're working on functional hypertrophy not just hypertrophy we're working on multiple muscle groups
in a movement across a joint that we are likely to experience in life and therefore it's a very
good idea to be strong in that movement and in terms of how to frame it this practice really
you know you know as you know you know that my program if you start very unexperienced or
detrained take about 12 weeks to do you can dip in and out of it if you don't want to start there
there are other options you can do other things in your daily practice of just doing things i call
strength snacking which is isometric stuff and stuff around the house or work you can leverage
you know your your normal life to get stronger which which again there was a lot of work to do
get stronger which which again it was really really great fun to write because what i'm trying to do
is make this accessible to everyone not everyone's going to want to do you know a 12-week program or
any program but what they might be open to is something that you know when the kettle's boiling
when you're waiting for the toys to pop do a wall sit or hold a plank or you know you don't need any
equipment you know you can be as simple as that and if you give me the person who does that against
the person who does nothing the person who does those daily strength snacks is going to win in
the long run so yeah it's uh there's no one program for it's all um but i've tried my best
to create a framework as i mentioned earlier in this chat that gives you permission to be
middle-aged gives you permission to come in and out of it and as long as most of the time
you're in it then you'd be just fine in 20 years if you miss a few months or a few weeks start again
slowly build up go again you need to allow we need to allow ourselves to progress regress to
improve and pause because that's life and i think once we get our heads around that then we're more
likely to come back to it if you have had a delay you've moved house you've been ill someone you
know has been ill you've missed training for a week or two weeks or a month whatever you've been
injured whatever it gives permission to live your life in that way they still come back to it i think
i literally had to press pause while i was writing this book you know i mean literally i i went to
jiu-jitsu i think once a week and didn't do strength training i'm just like i need to prioritize for
everything it wasn't too long it was got 10 12 weeks maybe and i trained you know since i was a
kid so it wasn't like you know i have these massive periods of not working out in the past
but it was just one of those things where i'm like mentally i need to get this done you know and so
i hit pause for a while and i'm just back in again swallowing my pride being sore and you know
getting back into a yet another routine but but there's no guilt just like you said because i'm
like this is more important at this point i'm not going to suddenly be 400 pounds if i just
prioritize writing for 10 weeks you know but i think it's the same with alcohol drugs you know
nutrition whatever it is if you've fallen off the proverbial wagon guilt and shame have no place
all they're going to do is keep you on the ground next to the wheels you know you stand up you go
all right well that was then all i have is now and you climb back on you know but knowing that
there will be another thing and i told you about what happened to to my family today that derailed
my morning you know but you know it is what it is i'm not i'm actually about to go to the gym after
this but had i not i'd be like all right well this happened today i'm going to go walk the dog and
get some exercise and some sunshine but that totally changed trajectory of my day but there
doesn't need to be any guilt or shame you just have to you know as you said go look the i say in
in nursing you know it's trending or in medicine you know is the patient getting better or is a
patient getting worse well if you actually zoom in on that that line it's got all these peaks and
valleys you know because it's not a straight line but if overall you're not going to be able to
you're heading in that good direction that's what's important yeah that's so true and you know that
that's that's basically the the the rationale for for creating the framework that i did in that
i'm trying to help people get to that mindset that you have james and that i have in that in the long
run you know we're trying to blunt that curve and avoid you know bad outcomes in the future
but as yet we are unaware of so if you give yourself permission to live your life to not
feel like a failure if you you know um fall off the wagon or fall off the training regime or fall
off you know a program the key is picking the right program james you know having the right kind of
attitude i think the key is being realistic and i say checking your ego and understanding
that we're in in midlife my message was quite similar in midlife we are we're all about
we're all about um you know not just adding adding the years but adding life to those years
and that is a very different proposal to getting fit for the beach by looking good in the t-shirt
you know this is this is a very different conversation you might still get those two
things with it but the priority shouldn't be about the priority about functional movements that don't
get you injured that are challenging but regular but if something happens like we've discussed then
as long as you keep coming back and honestly the beauty of it is it kind of takes the pressure off
because you think well i've got the next i'm not just talking about next year i'm talking about the
next 20 years because we all know the short-term benefit of crash diets and things done fast
generally don't last right so building something over the long term becoming fluent in a new skill
over time always pays off and has to start with your mind though and so you know the mindset you
just described so beautifully the one that i'm trying to lay out in my rationale is exactly
where the middle-aged person who's who's actually serious about the long-term health who wants to
stay healthy for whatever reason um to start to consider yeah well the i'm not just saying this
because we're friends the book is incredibly well written um you did absolutely blend the science
that's needed behind it with you know the ability to write to the average person like me you know
like i always say firefighter proof that's what we need to do that's why my book store is really thin
but um but you know but it's so important and then obviously you've got the exercises in the back as
well so the book is stronger how to build strength the secret to a longer healthier life people
listening all over the world where can they find this online and are there any other places
yeah so it's available online all good book sellers i think it's being launched in the u.s
territories in july which is exciting so amazon we can include a link to the u.s amazon page
for this for this i'm sure so yeah but if you just google that it will come up yeah so
and i thank you for saying that's very kind uh james you've been part of this in a way because
what people don't know is that you and i both been writing parallel to each other different genres
but we would occasionally meet up and talk about the process in our little writers group which was
great fun and very supportive so thank you for that time you gave me as well yeah i wish i could
be more supportive i remember i was just so overwhelmed that i don't think i was that valuable
as far as my experiences i mean the first one it's good to talk though isn't it it's good just to
talk about it because it's quite uh writing anything um even if it's the first second time
it's quite an undertaking and it's something that uh let's just say that you know
if speaking to someone else even if just chatting about how it's not going well
makes it makes it less scary because you know it's quite an undertaking and so
so yeah that was great that was great i'm thinking in that little group so where can people
find you online social media or websites uh so yeah i'm i really only do a couple of social
media things these days so i do um instagram so it's uh david under slash underscore though
the aux and um i'm also on linkedin so yeah probably instagram is the best place to find me
um probably going to be doing a little bit more on on um on youtube as well this year
uh but yeah you can find me just google my name and the book i'll come up um i'll say instagram
as well we can we can include the link to that as well james and i think the next steps for this
project potentially i'm looking at is um potentially to digitalize some of the assets in the book but
also i'm very keen on the idea of you know writing a book is very new and i'm also quite keen on
exploring the idea of a documentary um that kind of lays out like chapters of the book and speaking
to some interesting people i spoke to in the book and yeah so that hopefully will be the next
chapter of this crazy journey brilliant well i want to say thank you so much i mean the first
conversation was phenomenal obviously we dove a little more into the firefighter side as well
but i mean there's so many people listening that are either in that age bracket now or probably not
too far from that age bracket some may be uber athletes some may be realistically in the best
shape when they were in the academy and looking to get back on that wagon again but uh you know i
think between the people in the professions that are responding to citizens and and the citizens
themselves this is a really important conversation the long-term benefit of proactive nutrition
strength training and mobility on our longevity so i want to thank you so much for such a great
conversation again and coming on the behind the shield podcast james it's always a pleasure mate
and anytime and i hope to see you in person sometime soon