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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show 20-year veteran of FDNY, the director of health and fitness and the co-founder of
Fire Tribe, Rob Cefoli.
So in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his own journey into the fire
service, the importance of fitness in the tactical athlete, some notable calls from
his career, his own powerful mental health story, discovering trauma release exercises
that are able to offload the stress and tension held into the body from the mind, the application
of those methods within FDNY and so much more.
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 almost a thousand 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 Rob Cefoli.
Enjoy.
Well Rob, I want to say firstly, thank you so much for reaching out and secondly, welcome
to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you so much for having me, it's an honor.
I've been following you for a while, so thank you for having me, appreciate it.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this afternoon?
I'm at home, I'm in New York, Staten Island, a small borough outside of the city and this
is where I reside.
But I work in Brooklyn, so most of my career.
Now when you say home, you look like you're in a beautiful gym, so is that your kind of
home gym that you've pimped out?
Right, I built the studio probably seven, eight years ago.
This was at the lapidated pool house in the back of the house I bought and I wanted to
make it a gym.
It took me about five years to get it going and once I got it going, I wanted to turn
it into a nice little business on the side at home.
I haven't been to a gym probably in 10 years, a commercial gym.
So yeah, it works well for myself, my family, my kids, everything.
Brilliant.
So how did that factor in during COVID then when people were scrambling?
Because one of my friends who just started a gym is an FDNY charity, but he also started
a gym for people, especially that are in the sobriety kind of process to be able to work
out and he opened the gym, I think it was a month before COVID hit and he just got completely
smashed.
So how were you able to circumnavigate that by having your own place?
It worked well.
I didn't have to worry about any of that.
I always worry about my three foot rule and controlling my space, so this allows me to
do that without any problems, scheduling issues, traffic, somebody else on the machine that
I want to use.
And it also allows me to have the people that want to learn how to train correctly come
to me rather than deal with big box gyms.
I've been there, I've been 20 years ago, I was a trainer in gyms like that.
At some point you have your own style that you come up with and you need certain equipment
that you like to use and teach people the functionality of fitness and it doesn't have
to be difficult or long-winded.
So this actually worked out really well that I had it.
You know, again, they shut down fitness, which was probably a bad idea, I'd imagine for a
lot of people.
Parks, beaches, gyms, yeah, that should make people more resilient, definitely.
Yeah, it seems to be the opposite effect, right?
We saw it too, yeah, we see it coming into the academy.
Absolutely.
We'll dive into that in a little bit.
Before we do though, let's start at the beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Okay, so I was born in 1980 in Brooklyn and we were there a few years.
We moved out to Staten Island, my parents lived in an apartment, my father was a carpenter
by trade, my mom, they actually met in a bank prior to that, got into the union.
My mom came out, they bought the house, the whole dream of getting from the apartment
to the house and Staten Island at the time was not as populated as it is now and it was
a good place to go to the suburbs, as they call it.
So they get the house and raise the kids and all that stuff.
I have one sister, she's three and a half years older, she's out in Pennsylvania and
I grew up a regular suburban life, riding the bikes, going out, playing baseball and
I went to St. John's University out here on the island, took business management and I
just never really fit into the corporate space I would say.
I didn't really want that, my parents wanted me to go to college for that whole next level,
that was the thing in the 90s is go to college, get a good job, safe, secure job and wanted
to get a secure job that's not so safe but it is secure with a pension.
So I went the blue collar route anyway, even though I had a degree and after college is
when I realized that training was something I liked to do.
I was not the best athlete, I played sports in high school and all through my life but
I liked to exercise, liked to work out and that was kind of the start of that.
I became a trainer right before the Fire Academy, opened my own business, started working in
the gyms, I had a few clients at home, I had a few clients in the gyms but I had the fire
department coming down the road.
I was top of the list on what I rode on and I knew that was coming so that was kind of
like my safety net I would say but I did work for about a year and a half on my own, quit
my job in corporate world after college and I just couldn't stand it.
I couldn't sit at a desk all day.
Fire fighting seemed to be not your childhood, it's a childhood dream but you get pushed
by it kind of in an old direction and then it just came back and it worked out really
great.
I can't say I would see myself doing anything different.
What was growing up on Staten Island like?
When I worked for summer camps years ago, the first year was 94, I met one of the counselors
who lived in Staten Island so I stayed there literally just for I think it was one or two
nights.
Beautiful place to go see the Statue of Liberty for free, just take the ferry there and the
ferry back and then also as anyone who's into hip hop knows, the home of the Wu Tang Clan.
So what was your experience growing up there?
We love the Wu Tang Clan in Staten Island.
It's funny because that's the music that we listened to growing up.
Being close to the city was great, you're able to go in and go out but you said that's
a suburbia feel to it as well.
It was usually a safe community.
You get around Staten Island and bikes and going to the woods and all that stuff.
It's a little more populated now, it's a little more dense with cars and traffic and it gets
a little bit of a monotony especially in the mornings when you're trying to drop the kids
at school or this and that gets to work.
The city has become definitely more populated and condensed in terms of energy.
You feel like the pressure of it.
It is a big city too so you get from our end in terms of how it was then.
It was more trees and parks and all that stuff.
Now all of a sudden houses come up because everybody wants to move out of the city.
That now becomes a very congested place to live.
Everything changes and evolves.
Now you end up not only being in a very tactical athletic profession but you now are in charge
of the health and fitness side.
What was it that you were playing and doing as far as sports and exercise when you were
in the school ages?
Back then it was really not a lot of information.
We had a small program, it was an engineering high school so the sports program wasn't premier
as some other schools might have been at the time.
Very limited access to equipment, very limited access to information and what to do for tactically
or functional for each specific sport I would say.
I see that a lot these days as well.
In talks with a school to become a strength and conditioning coach and it still hasn't
caught up to a lot of the pace of modern training and modern information that we have.
People still doing the body building type of training.
They still have that type of setup in their schools.
We had a classroom with probably a few benches, some military barbell seats and maybe a leg
extension.
We really had no access to what they have today in terms of performance and sports coaching
and stuff like that.
It definitely didn't allow me to excel in terms of what I probably could have done especially
knowing now if I had that then I probably would have done things a lot differently.
We were talking before we hit record about the increasing struggle to recruit because
as we are all fully aware even after the pandemic and shame on us for not reversing it then,
our nation is getting fatter and sicker.
It sounds like a condescending nasty thing to say but it's just statistics and it's
sad.
We wish the opposite.
One of my friends Doug Orchard made a documentary a few years ago called The Motivation Factor
and it highlighted some schools in California that had actually learned from the Russians
and implemented this beautiful PE system where there was like four different colored shirts.
They were in groups so these kids had to work together and you slowly just like martial
arts you kind of mastered each of these skills whether it was parallel bars or run, encumbered
run whatever it was and then you level up to the next shorts and the next shorts.
The best athletes any of them could be on the front of muscle and fitness.
I mean they all these freaking seniors are phenomenal but you imagine even the kids that
really wanted to be in the chess club or pay carinet were still in great shape because
everyone had to do it.
What is your perspective if you could be king for a day especially now that you've found
yourself immersed in high school athletics again, what should we be doing in high schools
to reverse this health nightmare that we're in at the moment?
I think it has to start a lot earlier than high school to be honest with you.
My boys are fourth, three and nine months.
My daughter's 12 and they all work out with me when we're home so it's kind of ingrained
in our culture and I see how if you don't start that early of just appreciating movement,
we run, we walk, we hike, we'll come and do like basic stuff.
We'll do push-ups, we'll do hand from the bar, we'll go to the park when we're at the
park we'll do stuff at the park as well that are similar to how we train.
That's how my brain works.
When my kids are around if we're doing something it's for a purpose so I think we all as parents
have a duty to understand what that means for us first because if you don't take care
of yourself first or you don't have that education you have to go look for some people that have
that information for yourself so you can teach your kids because otherwise it's going to
be a feedback loop that's going to just keep on degrading our population.
The information is not getting put into elementary school, they're taking the PE out of the schools.
That's the first thing.
We used to do push-up tests and sit-up tests and sit and reach and we used to do running
in the schoolyard and races and I don't see that happening.
My daughter is 12, very little of that went on in her elementary school.
I think some schools have a little bit of PE but I believe it's more just games.
They're playing games for fun, they're playing games for inclusion and they're not actually
just making it a workout which it really should be.
If your kids grow up now they're 14, 15 trying to play sports and they've never exercised
in their life.
They have no concept of how their body works, what they can and can't do, how to speed up,
slow down, how to make maneuvers and they're not going to be strong enough to handle that
and you're going to have an increase in injuries, say knee injuries or catastrophic injuries
at a younger age.
It's just because you're deconditioned and you're probably not eating well as well and
that's a whole other area that people miss that it's not just training, it's actually
more your sleep patterns.
2010 social media came involved so now you have kids on their phones and social media.
At night they're staying up late, their brain's being active so they're not getting a good
rest, not doing recovery, starting the day with either nothing or bowl of cereal.
We don't do that here.
We're not eating that here.
I'm sorry.
I won't give my kids, I can't.
You know too much, right?
You can give them a little bit of that leeway I guess because society, it's almost peer
pressure when you're around groups of people.
If you just had your kids to yourself and your own silo you could do whatever you want
but it's the combination of things and having them now understand what's good for them and
what's bad from a very early age.
My four year old could tell you, he'll verbatim because he's repeating what I'm saying but
if I explain something to him how this is good and this is better, a better choice,
that's what I'm looking at my kids to understand early.
And then if you just ingrain in them the better, they can have a better grasp of decision making
and then they'll be able to make better decisions through high school and college and then into
adulthood where they're going to be really good assets to the population or whatever
job they're in or service.
The program in California, one of the philosophies was if you get all the kids in great shape,
especially obviously the ones that really want to be athletes, when it comes to the
sports, all you've really got to focus on is the actual skill of the sport.
And I think the application is exactly the same when you look at the military and the
first responder communities.
And I've had several people, especially from the military talking about the recruitment
crisis and the fact that we're doing a disservice to national security because fewer and fewer
and people are able to fill these uniforms.
But if you put these standards back where they need to be, not only you fostering mental
and physical health, which arguably is the most important thing, it breaks my heart seeing
either an overweight child or a frail child, one that's not overweight, but their spine
was already contorted.
That's heartbreaking to see.
But if you get all these men and women, these young men and women to a certain point of
fitness, some of them may far exceed it, then so many of them potentially could be a soldier,
a firefighter, a police officer, or they could be an accountant or a teacher or something
else.
But at least they're not eliminated from those professions because they weren't taught
how to be physical.
Yeah, it's the daily discipline.
You're building discipline into yourself when you train and when you eat healthy, you're
making better decisions.
You're getting not dissuaded from just what's going on around you and everybody else, the
common folk.
People that aren't awake to it suffer the ailments, they suffer disease, things that
are completely manageable just by managing yourself.
So when you have populations that are going through this phase, you are going to have
liabilities in whatever service you're in or whatever job you take.
And part of Mission Critical in 2022, that was an interesting conference because that
had a lot of these agencies that we were a part of and I was able to attend that in California.
They all have the same problems.
They're all having these recruitment issues, they're having dysfunction in the candidates
coming through and weight issues.
What do we have?
We just have a population that is being fed the wrong things.
They're listening to the wrong information or they're not paying attention.
And when you start to pay attention more of what's in the things that you're eating, let's
say, you notice that there's a lot of extras in there.
And keep it simple, be able to control what you're doing in that sense and your body will
work better.
That's number one.
It's just hard to do because of time.
Everyone works a ton of hours.
We work a ton of hours here in New York.
It's crazy.
It's a good problem to have, I would say, because a lot of people don't have the availability
to work so much.
But we do because we have a manpower issue in our department.
And when you're looking at training, for example, and you're thinking about these population
groups, it's the same concept.
If you're not being disciplined from an early age, you're never going to be able to put
it all together because you don't have the amount of reps in.
You have to fail forward in this life and every time you get new information, you should
be able to adapt and evolve to it.
But a lot of people just stay in the same mindset from when they grew up, whatever they
were taught, and they're unable to break out of that shell.
And then they become just the person you can't really rely on in our service.
And you know, you can't have liabilities at a job.
You just can't.
One hole in the equation, that's a missed position.
It's a missed opportunity for success.
One thing leads to the next.
Now you have two holes, three, four holes, let's say, in the future.
Now you have the catastrophic event.
And that's just, they call it swish cheese, right?
When all the holes line up and we have a line of duty death or something like that.
So well, speaking of Swiss cheese, what I'm seeing in the fire service, and it's kind
of what we're talking about, you've got everything from fewer candidates at the front door to
smart candidates with an access to the internet where it can actually see, okay, what does
it look like?
And a lot of fire departments now, these kids are researching and going, well, the pay is
not great, but it's not primarily what I'm doing it.
But now I'm seeing that it's 56 hours a week and I'm hearing from my firefighter friends
that every two weeks you'll get told you can't go home.
So now it's an 80 hour work week and you've got these divorces and you've got these cancers
and you've got these suicides and more recently, these murder suicides that keep popping up.
So this is the thing that I'm seeing is that you've got young candidates, fewer of which
that are now able to be picky because there's so many blooming jobs around and they're actually
doing their due diligence.
Or we just were like, yeah, I want to be a firefighter, we joined the thousands of people
that tested and then fingers crossed, hopefully we got one of the positions.
The Swiss cheese thing though terrifies me because in the meantime, and I'm out of the
service now, so I'm not having to pay this price, but as we get less and less people
in the stations on the rigs, it's the men and women that are already working that have
to keep filling and filling and filling and filling.
And that mandatory overtime is maximizing sleep deprivation, which then in turn is causing
everything from mental health to injuries to cancer to all the other things.
So what are you seeing in FDNY as far as leaning on people who are already working because
of some of the staffing challenges that you've got?
It's a double edged sword.
The guys and girls, they appreciate the money because a lot of them have families where
they will live with kids and schedules, extra money helps us.
What we're not looking at is what that does to our body, like you said, the sleep deprivation.
We all kind of know it, but there's only a few of us that are really talking about it.
It's a big problem.
You're seeing a lot of issues at home.
You're seeing, because you're just not there, number one.
I'm dealing with myself.
I have three children here living full time.
I have my daughter who's part time.
Going through a divorce shocker early in my career.
Again, that was attributed probably on my end to an incident, and we can talk about
that as well, of trauma.
Coming back from that and now you have juggling schedules and this and that and trying to
figure out work.
Then yeah, you're getting forced in.
You have standbys, which means you have to be available at certain times, weekends, nights,
all that stuff.
It has an effect on your family life because you're not able to live like a suburban family
in the terms of what that looks like is, hey, we work all night, five, and give it away
on the weekends.
That's gone now.
Everybody's working all the time.
You've got to fit in the things when you can.
You're trying to fit in kids routines and the sports and all that stuff.
You're just getting less and less sleep.
You're getting more and more runs.
Your body's breaking down.
You're probably not eating that well, additionally, because now the firehouse meals sometimes
aren't the best, as we all know.
Again, it's out of your control.
I like to control a lot of things in my life for me because I know if I suffer, if I don't
sleep, I am not good at parenting.
I am not because I'm too tired.
I'm shocked.
It comes down to that where I don't like to be like that at home.
I don't.
I don't like to be like that in the firehouse because I'm not thinking clearly.
It does play on the roles that yeah, we can get away with it for some times because we're
not always going to fires.
If you're running around three or four nights a week, then you're going home.
I'd say, my son's teething right now.
Now, there's a couple of weeks of teething where now you're home and you're not sleeping
or now your four-year-old comes into bed, wakes you up.
Now you're constantly not sleeping.
Every night, I'm never sleeping fully through the night, ever.
What do I have to do is try to mitigate it through the things that I do for myself.
I had to change my plan of how I train and what I do for recovery and what do I eat.
It's just an attempt to balance it all.
I'm not trying to be a bodybuilder, but I'm trying to mitigate what's happening to my
body because I understand it more now than ever.
I think a lot of people should understand there are certain things you can do to help
yourself.
You can't get around it because this is where you live in and this is your job.
This is your career.
You're not going to avoid it by not working.
You have to work.
What can we do is what I've been trying to work on the last year or so because I've had
some profound progress with a lot of the things that we've put into practice.
Absolutely.
We'll jump into that.
I just want to get to your journey into the fire service.
What was the influence that even made you consider FDNY and then let's walk through
your rock experience?
I think as friends going through the process, I had a few friends ahead of me that were
close.
We were all going to college.
The guys were taking the test.
They had family on the job.
I didn't have any family on the job, but I'm from Blue Collar.
I was told not to go that way.
That was the big issue.
That's why it was never really a dream because I think for the whole time it was a plan that
was put in place by your parents.
That's how we all grew up.
Hey, you got to do this.
This is better than what we did.
You got to get ahead in life.
For us, it was go to college.
Don't be Blue Collar.
Don't go to unions.
You're going to get a really good job if you do that.
Then you're like, you go to school and you don't know what you're doing.
Management business, it's very general.
I went to school, made a ton of friends, joined the fraternity, had some drinking issues then.
It transformed into the fire service issues when I had my issues.
Again, you look it back and you say, it was all for a good reason, but maybe that's not
for me.
You realize that that plan is not my plan or what I should be doing.
You got to really get in tune with yourself to realize that it's something that's innate
in all of us.
It's a physical job.
One of the things, like I said earlier, I like to be physical.
I was a laborer.
I worked in construction.
I did all these things.
I just never liked to sit.
Right now at a desk, it's like I want to move.
I want to do something.
I'm always in motion.
Unfortunately, for my parents' sake, they saw me going to the fire service.
I took the test and I was like, I'm going to do this because I needed something else.
I had nothing on my horizon that was really intriguing to me.
As a kid, I loved firefighters.
My mom called for the gas leak that one time.
I'm out in my pajamas.
I'm probably eight years old and they come in the house and I'm like, these guys are
gigantic.
Look at these guys, the fire truck.
It's every kid's dream.
I think if you've seen the fireman come down the block, everybody gets excited for that.
It's always buried inside of you.
I think for a long time, it didn't come out until I went through the process and said,
I'll take the test and I'll see what's going on.
Then all of a sudden, I'm like really gearing myself up for it and for the physical and
then for getting the academy.
Every time you're being challenged to level up, you have to change who you are.
You have to get ready for the entrance runs.
You have to get ready for the testing.
You have to get ready for the academy.
You've got to physically prepare to be this superhero that we all envisioned as kids coming
through the door to save the day.
Honestly, it wasn't until that point when my friends started going through the process
that I realized, you know what?
Maybe I can do that as well.
I didn't think about it until then because again, I was in the mindset of doing it.
I was going to college.
I was going to go do something with a shirt and tie and that was going to be my life.
That's because I was listening to my parents who thought they knew best and what I needed
to do for my life and my family as what they knew.
All they knew is they were from immigrants and they got this job where they work all
the time and they just didn't want that for me even though we had a great life growing
up.
Where were they from?
My parents are both from Brooklyn but my grandparents are from Italy.
Well, from my father's side, we don't know who my grandfather is.
That's a whole other issue that my dad and myself have dealt with because you don't really
know.
It was a situation that it haunts my father.
His mom never told him and that caused a lot of pain in his heart.
As I grew up, now that I look at my sons, I give them a lot of empathy now that I'm
able to access those emotions through some of the TRE stuff that we worked on that personally
helped me.
But I realized that my dad never got that from a father figure.
To raise me well, he did the best he could not having that role model for himself.
He was a Vietnam vet.
There's a lot of issues from that as well that he buries deep that we all bury deep.
That causes a problem in our bodies.
We hold those things in.
I can attest to that years later as I went through the fire service and having issues
through the job and just realizing what was still kind of clinging to me in terms of residue.
Being an Italian background and something else, I would say.
But that was how we were raised.
My mom was very strict with us and that was a good thing.
We have a lot of that skill set that we developed as kids that most kids today don't have.
Just clean your room, how to pick up after yourself, how to do the chores, how to do
the things that be responsible so you can be an adult that's responsible.
That's how I raise my children.
But I don't see that in a lot of other places where it's easily handed to kids these days.
When you look back at your childhood and the reason I'm back to ask this is when we talk
about mental health, which I know we're going to in a moment in the fire service, more often
than not, people are like, oh, it's because you ran this school.
You were at the World Trade Center.
You were at the Vegas shooting, whatever it was.
As I've gone on almost a thousand interviews now, I realize just how many people in uniform
have elements of their childhood that if left unaddressed contribute to struggles when we're
wearing uniform.
When you reflect back now with this wise 2024 lens, were there elements of your upbringing
that you think contributed to struggles later on?
A hundred percent.
A lot of it's the emotional connection that I never really could process.
I couldn't be close to people, my ex-wife, my wife even currently.
We had issues with that intimacy, just the physical connection that was lacking probably
from when my dad never received that from his stepfather.
Growing up was good.
You were protected.
You had a home.
They didn't let you worry about stuff.
You grew up as best as they could.
But that was one thing I feel was missing that I give my sons now more than anything,
even though I'm very strict with them as young kids, but I still give them the love that
I believe is necessary as a man to have to balance yourself out.
You lose that as part of the fire service as well.
You lose that side of your body, the parasympathetic side for the job that we do because we have
to be on call all the time.
You turn into your job.
Going home and being frustrated and not giving them the hug right away when you're walking
the door like, oh, I can't be dealing with this.
This is not me.
This is my job.
This is my background.
This is what I grew up with.
So it's up to me to change that story, but I couldn't access that really until last year,
I would say.
It was very tough for me to do that.
Still dealing with this, still make a progress.
But I think as we learn, certain people gravitate to that profession as well.
So certain people that have these, some issues always seem to want to go there because we
love to help people.
We're always missing something.
So we have to give it out to other people, if that makes sense.
No, it does.
It does.
There's a thing called ACE score.
So it's adverse childhood experiences score.
And I think it's from zero or one to 10.
And first responders and military and most incarcerated persons all have an ACE of six
or more.
So what that means, and it makes perfect sense really.
If you're hurt and you curl into a ball in your life, obviously maybe you're going to
go down the depression, anxiety, maybe even addiction path.
But there's a lot of people that, I don't want that to happen to someone else.
And they haven't done the work on themselves yet, but they put the uniform on to be a protector.
And I think the other side of these professions is there's the excitement.
You can't think about that shit if you're responding to structure fires or stabbing
or whatever it is.
It's this constant adrenaline that keeps you going.
But it seems to be about that 10 year mark.
If we have buried it, that's when it really starts rearing its ugly head.
Because I don't know if it's the same with you.
About 10 years is when fires became less exciting.
Like I love fires.
But what used to get my heart rate up as a rookie was, you almost didn't call it a fire
anymore.
It needs to be fully involved and people hanging out the windows.
So I think there's another side of that is that the excitement serves as a way of keeping
you distracted from the things in your head.
The problem is one day it won't anymore.
And that's why I think a lot of us struggle.
Yeah, I can attest to that.
More recently, I would say I still love going to jobs.
But again, not every job is good in my eyes anymore.
It's not exciting, like you said.
I think with experience, if you had oh shit moments, then the little things that a guy
who never had that before, it's different now.
So 20 years in, it's like, this is this, this is that.
Not a big deal.
Again, I want to see it out like 10 windows.
Maybe I'll get a little charged up for that.
But it's still going to be calm and cool and collective as much as I can manage that.
That's my role, especially as a captain.
You have to maintain your sense of poise on the fire ground.
I think you said you start to reflect on yourself when you have that downtime.
I want, I like to get myself better.
I don't want to stay the same ever.
I think we have a short time here on this planet.
We're looking at it as a journey, not a final destination.
Like I'm just going to retire and that's it.
But at this point in my career, I am looking at what I can offer beyond that.
And going to go into the firehouse is still great.
The guys and girls are great.
I love going to work.
I just rather not.
I just rather not spend 100 hours a week in the firehouse responding to calls.
I think my purpose has now expanded and I want to help our population to heal from the
stuff that we've gone through.
I think we found some good methods to do that.
We're teaching it and it's working for me personally.
The last year I've gotten better connections with my family.
I'm physically feeling better and looking different.
I look different from last year.
I look different.
People are like, you look young.
I'm going to be 44 this year.
I'm 20 years on the fire service.
I changed in last year dramatically my training, my eating.
And I was able to do that through just releasing a lot of the baggage and then being able to
say, okay, where are we going now?
And then since then, it's been a nice series of events that have opened a lot of doors
for us.
So we hope to impact a lot of people through what we've experienced.
And like you said, I think earlier is sometimes people go through experiences and they don't
and myself included where it was traumatic and tragic, but you compare it to something
else that it's like in your brain worse.
So that's why you don't address it right away and you don't realize that it doesn't have
to be a crazy situation.
It just has to be your situation.
And it has to be that time in your life that it meets you and it has that impact.
So it could be when an EMS run where you're dealing with a baby or something like that
or it could be a fire where you got life threatening or you went and got injured or something else
happened to someone.
I used to say, oh, I was never a veteran.
So I don't know, my shit is not that bad.
But for me it was because it's really impacted me for about 15 years after that and I didn't
realize it.
You think it's just you and you start to not understand who you are anymore as a person.
In this last year or so, I think I've said that question like, who really am I?
What do I really feel?
What makes me happy?
What makes me sad?
What gets me excited again?
What gives me purpose?
And those are the questions I was asking myself because I really thought to say, I don't even
know what I feel anymore because I haven't felt anything for a long time.
You don't realize you bury everything and then your emotions get put to the side.
So how do you even equate that to understanding yourself?
You don't.
You can't.
So now that you find that out, it's a lot to think about.
So that's another problem.
You have a lot of thoughts and you're kind of like, oh man, where am I here for?
What am I doing here?
Am I supposed to do 30 years in the fire service and just retire and go play golf?
Is that a bad thing?
Is it a good thing or is there more to it?
I think at this point I realized that there's a lot more to be done because we do have a
lot of people that have left the service and have a lot of problems and they're not able
to figure it out.
And I think we're looking in the wrong places.
We're looking up here and we're not looking in here.
And this is where I live.
I live in the body.
I've been in physical for a long time and I think the more we go down that road, we
realize that the body is where you feel calm or you feel stressed.
It's not your brain, but it does affect everything because it's all connected, if that makes
sense.
Yeah, no, it does completely.
Well, you mentioned about an incident 15 years ago.
So before we dive into that, in this last 20 years, what were some of the career calls
that you've had and then let's take our journey to that one call that bothered you?
I think some of the things that stick out for me are very simply when you're in someone's
home and you're dealing with a child.
And I think one of the ones that really sticks out for me was actually when I was not working
on Staten Island, but I was detailed and we had a run for a kid and it tied together
with my mother.
She actually knew the family through work or something.
Maybe her brother went to the school.
So she actually went to this kid's funeral and I worked on that kid.
I remember the father is screaming at just the top of his lungs, my Joey, my Joey, my
Joey as we bring him out of the house.
But that stuck with me forever.
That's never going away.
It still gives me a little bit of feeling, but I definitely got through that part of
it and that was one of the major events.
We had the incident in 2008, which was very big.
As a young firefighter, going to fires was the best thing ever.
The best thing ever.
It's somebody's worst day though, that's the problem.
Looking at it from the adrenaline point and you're like, wow, we get to go to work, but
this is someone's home.
This is somebody's belongings.
A lot of those times, after you go through it and you're like, yeah man, high five because
we got the job done.
You look at people outside and they're like, this is their life.
So it does impact you.
It's like compassion fatigue.
Then you see them upset.
Now you're getting like, oh man, let me try to save some stuff out of their house.
They're asking, can you get this thing?
This has all my photos in it.
So you go back and you try to make sure they have something that's very important to them.
Because it's not just, we can't look at it that way.
I tried to teach my guys, these are civilians.
You're there to help them.
You're not there to get old bravado even though that's what happens because your adrenaline
just goes through the roof and your heart rate's at like 180 beats a minute.
That's what you're there for, you're there to fight fires.
But on the other end, you have to make sure you don't destroy somebody's house for no
reason.
That's number one.
You have to be able to do it professionally.
You have to understand that people are just people and your demeanor matters.
So as we go along in this 2024 year when everybody's kind of jacked up and their anxiety's high
and they're working so many hours, a lot of times now currently I'm like, guys, don't
say that to that person.
That's not how we are supposed to...
You're upset about something and it's not this situation right here.
Because sometimes we get agitated at scenes and we're dealing with public people.
So we have to be very careful with that.
I hope that answers your question.
Yeah.
Well, just to add on to what you said, this is one thing that really turns my stomach
when I see a lot of firefighters' social media accounts at the moment is exactly what you
said.
Like a bunch of guys leaning on pipe poles in front of someone's burned out house.
Firstly, it's a burned out house.
You didn't fucking save it.
Secondly, that's someone's home and you're doing a selfie or an ussy in front of someone's
home.
We need to stop that shit.
That is so fucking disrespectful and inconsiderate.
Absolutely.
If a photographer took pictures of you at work while you were doing the job, that's
a whole different conversation.
But staging a picture in front of someone's tragedy, I think that's just disgusting.
Yeah.
We do that in the New York.
We do that in front of the rigs.
We'll come out and we'll do that.
I do agree with you to that point where it shouldn't be with the house and in front of
people doing that.
I think for us though, it's also a memory of a job done together.
It's like a double-edged sword again with that where yes, it can be very tactless to
do that.
Again, you don't want to be anywhere near the homeowners or anything like that.
For us though, as our community, that's something that I think is ingrained and it's going to
be very hard to unwind that.
Double-edged sword, I would say.
Yeah.
I'm going to let you say it.
You got to be careful with that.
Yeah.
I think it's fine.
PIO takes some great shots, put it up on the firehouse, a thousand percent.
Just don't take a selfie in front of their home or their destroyed car where someone's
still crumpled inside.
You know what I mean?
For fuck's sake.
Yeah.
I haven't seen that, which that's crazy, but if that really doesn't happen, that's just
nuts.
I don't know.
Whoever's in charge of that scene needs to talk to them because you have done that.
Hey, maybe we shouldn't do it right here.
These people are standing right here.
Let's not do that.
It's just a quick decision where it's like pay attention to what's going on around you.
Absolutely.
We are professionals, supposedly, so we have to back that way.
Even when we don't want to, it's important to put that out to the public.
You have to.
You mentioned about 2008, though.
Let's revisit that.
What was the origin story of that journey?
Yeah.
This was a fire that I remember being in the rig.
We were going to get the meal.
We were driving around, we were having laughs, and we get the call on the rig.
It's a high-rise, fireproof, multiple dwelling, call for fire on the 14th floor.
Regular, all right, let's go.
Pull up to the... It's the Abbey's Field where the old Brooklyn Dodgers used to play.
It's now a big 22-story complex, a couple of buildings there.
The first two engines goes up and they give it a 1075, smoke down in the stairwell, opens
the door, it's down, back down to the floor.
All right, we got a job, doors open to the apartment.
We have to get up, the elevators, we're going across the promenade, going up the building.
By the time we get up there, they still haven't found the fire.
It's been a few minutes.
The problem with that job is the doorway is about 70 feet down the hallway.
Door was left open, so the cameras really weren't working too well with the T-hallways.
We were about 70 feet at all different corners, the guys trying to search for the apartment.
We were the third engine, so we are in charge of a second hand line in that type of building
on the standpipe.
Things got kind of wacky.
The second line was already stretched.
By the second engine, they would have been backing up the first line and those two engines
on a hose line, especially in the buildings.
That was one thing that went a little sideways, but that was old way of thinking where two
hand lines down the hallway to hit a wind-driven fire, wind-impacted fire.
They changed the terminology basically after this job from wind-driven to impacted, depending
on which way the wind was blowing.
We had to go down, try to check apartments, couldn't figure it out, trying to get coordination
from the roof guy who was above and us below to see which apartment this fire was in actually,
because it was minutes and minutes and minutes before they even located the right fire apartment.
We had some issues with guys giving urgence, run out of air.
I do remember the first two engines coming out of the stairwell and making their way
out.
They got blown into the apartment when the window fell and the wind was coming in.
I saw guys I used to work with and I'm like, wow, these guys are charred, red faced, black
helmets and black tanks and black face pieces.
They're coming out stunned coming down the stairwell.
What the hell?
We kind of got held up a little bit because it was a little bit chaotic up there.
We had two trucks, squad, rescue, engine company, all on the fire floor.
Trying to figure out any accountability was a big thing then.
Our new radios have an EAB button, it's an orange button on the microphone.
At the time it was only on the unit that you wore on the strap, so that's under your coat.
So to hit an emergency button, you had to go under your coat with your gloves on, try
to go down your antenna, find this little orange button, push the button and then give
you transmission.
That happened obviously.
It only happens about 50% of the time now too with it up here.
So that's another training that I was involved in in 2015, search and mayday training that
we piloted.
It was about two years, we went to the fire houses to do that, to teach guys how to use
the button on the microphone and do search drills.
But going back to the stories, we were finally sent up after a few guys bailed out, some
were ordered to give in to go assume the line.
When we got down to the fire department, there was a guy down, a lieutenant that I had worked
with.
At the time I didn't know who it was.
There was a gentleman in front of me, another firefighter who had gotten there about probably
10 to 20 seconds before I did, getting down to the nozzle.
And he's like, we got a guy down.
And now I have only about three and a half years of time, so a young firefighter still.
And it's just like, holy shit, this is not what I expected.
It was getting very hot, it's in wind and pack, you're going down the hallway, the line's
not operating.
The line was actually right in the doorway about six feet in under the sky.
And at the time, holy shit, we stopped pulling on him.
You go crazy immediately.
So just throw you out there, you're not going to remember right away what to do because
you're going to freak out first.
That's my experience.
And I would say that's common because it's a body's response to it.
It's like a fight or flight response.
Boom, like, holy shit, just grab this guy, we got to get this guy out of here.
Now you start thinking, this isn't going to work because this guy's probably 300, 350
pounds in his gear.
And we're not pulling him like this.
Because you figure if you're 200 to 250 at 100 pounds, that's a fireman.
So you have a lot of dead weight right there.
So I went into the other side of him, now I'm in the apartment, his head's facing the
doorway.
I remember, all right, get the leg, pull one leg over shoulder.
This guy has to pull out the head.
We got to shimmy him out, right?
Get him out of here.
Somebody's got to give him a day.
I'm looking at the guy across from me because I know in my brain as a young firefighter,
he should know more than me.
He's got to do this.
It's not me, I'm the young guy.
I only got three years on.
So you immediately put yourself into place like where you say, well, I got three and
a half years is usually four years, right?
For firefighters, I got four years, right?
Because you always count up, right?
But at that time, now I don't have any time on.
This guy needs to take care of this.
So you're like, shit, he's not doing it.
Boom, give him a day.
Remember down in the apartment, chief heard it and back to getting this guy out as first
priority.
We had a couple extra hands come down the hallway, pushed him out of the apartment.
And then I just was like, where's the line?
Because now I got to get this guy out, which is like, I came a long way to get here, to
get this guy out of the hole in a hallway that you can't see anything in and is under
fire conditions.
It's going to be tough.
Let's get the line, open it up as an engineman, just to protect everybody else behind the
line, right?
Find the nozzle, I opened it up and it's basically a U-turn.
So as I go down the hallway, it's a U-turn into the apartment backwards to the fire room.
And so you're basically, you're not able to move that line unless you have help, right?
Because it's going right around the door block.
It's coming back right back at you, a U-turn.
So I make it probably five feet to the doorway that leads to the hallway, which leads to
the fire room.
And I have to make a right hand turn.
It's blowing in, it's going out, it's blowing in, it's going out, it's doing one of those
jammies.
It wasn't fully wind driven at the time.
I actually remember I was the hottest I've ever been.
And I just opened the nozzle against the wall and it's obviously doing nothing because I'm
hitting the hallway and the fire room is now to the right.
I have to go that way.
Shut the nozzle down.
I start pulling the nozzle closed, thinking I can walk it into the hallway, you know,
without getting, you're not thinking clearly.
In the middle of the full path, like going right for the doorway, if I can just get those
extra three feet, I'll actually finish this job, you know?
And that was just crazy thinking.
So we winded up, a friend of mine comes around the corner to the room, looks at me, he's
like, your eyes look like an owl because I'm in my face piece.
Like, Mike, help me.
I'm like, I don't know what to do yet.
There's nobody else in the apartment, which is, that was the scariest part.
The scariest part is being on the fire and nobody there.
I kid you not.
Every job we go to, there's a hundred guys, staircases, everybody's going into this.
Everybody wants to be in there.
This guy's banging around everywhere, right?
That's a fact.
To be in there that far, that long, and there's nobody in that apartment, it was kind of like
I was on the other side of Allison in the Wonderland's mirror, where I was looking at
the other side and I'm like, what?
Because now I can see, because there's fire in there, it's like a little lighter, the
smoke's going down the hallway.
I'm like, there's not one person in here.
This is not a good place to be, I don't think, but you got to do your job.
We wanted to back it up, closing the door, regrouping, and finally, I guess the wind
changed, we got in.
I couldn't do anything after that.
I was completely spent.
I was just standing there in days.
I do remember standing up, though, like three feet off of where I was, and I was like, I
can actually tolerate this.
I should have just moved before, though.
I was like, you should have just moved out of the way, and then maybe you could have
moved out in the line where you need to go.
That gentleman was Lieutenant John Martenson.
He went passing away.
It really was something I just... I didn't know I carried it for that long.
I went to county putsching counseling right away.
That morning I went home, dropped with my friend, and we drank wild vodka, like seven
o'clock in the morning, eight o'clock in the morning, just like stunned, like what happened.
You're on the news, and you're like, I can't believe this guy died.
I can't believe it.
To put you out of medical leave, you go to counseling, talking to some counselor.
You don't know what I'm talking about.
I don't even know what I'm talking about yet, because it's the first two weeks of the day.
It wasn't for three months until I started to snap on guys at work, and I was starting
to feel very irritated all the time, and just angry about everything.
Couldn't joke anymore, I was like, you can't joke.
This is a very serious job.
No more fun, for me anyway.
It was drinking.
It was a little excessive drinking.
Then you have the funeral, then you have the picnics, and you're talking to the wife and
the family.
They bring you over like, oh, here's his wife.
I'm like, oh God, I don't want to do this.
What am I going to say?
You know?
What am I going to say?
Try my best?
Then there's guilt.
There's years of guilt.
Should have gotten there sooner.
Could have did this, could have did that.
I think it was in the recordings, he gave an out of air, one out of air on the recording,
and it was about four minutes until I got to the May Day, 45 minutes.
There's no way.
There's no way we were making that.
But you're telling yourself you could have done it better.
Somebody should have let us go sooner.
That was a stupid decision.
I knew something was wrong.
I had that gut feeling like, this is bad.
I just saw the engine leave.
The other engine is right here.
Who's on the line?
There's nobody backing them up.
Nobody's got the knowledge right now.
There's guys up there.
What are we doing here?
Let's go.
But because of the chaos, the chief is, let me account for people before I send more people.
That's a smart move.
Unfortunately, for me, it turned into years of me just holding that guilt on probably
four or five years until I thought I let it go.
I thought I kind of moved on.
Maybe I was just because I was distracted with other things.
I got promoted, I went on in life, fitness unit, a lot of stuff, a lot of projects, kids,
marriage, divorce, craziness.
It really wasn't until I went through the training with Dr. Bricelli and I had that
release and I immediately knew what it was.
I immediately knew what it was.
It was the strangest thing I've ever felt, I would say.
My eye color changed, which is another crazy fact that happened.
They got more blue.
He says to me, he goes, Dr. Bricelli goes, he's got my head like this.
He pitched me on the floor and we went through this TRE and now I get this release, it's
flooding.
It's called the flooding diaphragm, starts to pulsate and all of a sudden people laugh.
I have a great shot of my friend smiling at me, my typical fire department.
I'm on the floor like this and he's just looking at me on the floor like, look at this guy.
We didn't know what that was.
I didn't know what that was until it immediately stopped and I go, holy shit, that was 15 years
ago.
That was that.
Then the next... I actually kept going and I had that Joey event because when you have
that release, the thought that comes in your brain is it.
It's not a coincidence.
It is it.
Why did I think of that right when that happened?
That was coming out of my body.
That was stored in my tissue in the body forever because as soon as I saw him, my body went
holy shit and it has it.
Now everything else after that, the guilt, that just adds on layers and layers and layers
of that tension because you're reliving it constantly.
When you drill out the firehouse, when you read the report, you're reading the line of
duty reports, you're reliving it constantly in your body.
Counseling up here isn't really going to affect down here.
This will affect this.
If the body will affect the mind more, I think, then the mind will affect the body because
we hold everything here.
When we have anxiety and tension, what do we feel?
Stomach ache, heart rate goes up.
It's a physical thing that happens to us.
Anytime the tones go off, your heart rate jumps up.
Three o'clock in the morning.
This is what's been going on to us forever.
Even every run, just having that response.
Now it's constantly dripping on you.
How much tension are you holding in your body from that stress alone, the chronic stress,
never mind the traumatic events that pop up or the things that you specifically impact?
Because 10 feet behind me were all the people in that hallway.
My experience was completely different from the guy 10 feet behind me.
That's what it different.
We teach that when we search too.
Hey, if you could hear somebody in the hallway, you're not alone.
Just move that way.
Your situation might be better.
If you're out of the flow path two feet to the right, you'll feel a difference in temperature.
Your perception, that's what I say, it doesn't matter if you've gone through something and
it's like, ah, it wasn't that bad, but you're still affected by it.
For me, that event was life-altering.
I just didn't realize it how much until now.
This is going pretty deep, but honestly, to release it, you kind of tie it all together
again and say, wow.
Maybe all that stress I've been under, this is a big component of it.
Ever since then, I've been tracking forward.
It's been wild.
That's all I can say.
We're doing things now because of that.
That's the only reason why we're here talking about TRE and getting initiatives going in
this department and then looking at our retirees and talking to counseling services about what's
going on and how their staff is overwhelmed and how there's so many people looking for
services and help.
We're in the right spot right now.
We're supposed to be here.
We had to learn some lessons to get here though.
I want to get to TRE and your pendulum swing back to exceptional health, but just before
we do, from a firefighter perspective, what were the lessons learned from that line of
duty death, if any?
I could say we have to be accountable for each other.
We have to definitely be accountable for each other.
There's a lot of training that we've gone through, especially as firefighters, because
a lot of times the issue is the officers have to maintain accountability for everyone.
What we've been taught into the academies and everything is when somebody's missing,
even if you have to look for the officer, this happens over and over again.
That's where the officer is the one that dies because people aren't looking for him or her.
We're supposed to be the ones looking for everybody else.
I want my guys to know, listen, if you don't see me, there's a problem.
Someone needs to say something.
I know I can keep on... All I'm doing constantly is looking with my guys.
Who's where?
What's going on?
Because as a captain, you're responsible for everyone.
So a lot of it's the reversal.
Firefighters getting the training and the information to look for the officer.
That's a lot of times what happens is the officer is the one that goes down.
We just had a mess in my firehouse for a lieutenant 10 years ago, passed away.
He's in a room, he got isolated and ultimately he died.
It happens over and over again.
That's one lesson that always pay attention to everyone who is around you, no matter what
rank you are.
Know who you're going in the door with and know who you got to come out with.
That's number one.
Sometimes you can't control it.
Sometimes you're not in control.
You might think you are, you might think you got it, you might think you could have done
something, but most of the times you probably couldn't have done, made that big of a difference.
Because it's usually too late.
I found that out the hard way.
Even knowing the timeframe, the time domains of when things happen, you're like, no, we
could have gotten there faster.
That's just your guilt because you don't want to fail.
We have to... Unfortunately, when we fail, people die.
We don't get the job done.
That's why we have all of the equipment we have now.
Everything's built on our failures.
We have to fail forward.
We have to learn from those mistakes so we don't repeat the same line of duty deaths.
We can't have the same issues at fires.
We have to get better.
Training goes hand in hand with that.
Unfortunately, it goes on the backs of people that pass away or get seriously injured.
I think the department is doing a great job with getting information out quicker and more
readily available to the field so we can look at these things as they occur.
We had an overhead collapse recently and the next day there's an information sheet on our
arm.
Anytime things go down right now in the city, we have readily available just tips coming
out and people are reading it with drilling on it.
So innately, we are learning from our experiences.
The last thing I would say with the 2008 would be that we're all put in position for a reason.
As I look back, that reason is now.
What we're doing now, I had to go through that.
I had to recover from that to see that there's a way or a method that some people just don't
know about yet.
I think that's one of the biggest lessons.
Nobody knows about this stuff that we're doing.
It's physically and mentally affecting people to put a positive, which I love, which I can
attest to.
We spoke down the path of this ahead of everyone because it's a year of me messing around with
this and seeing how this works with the body.
It just sprung into action.
A lot of these other ideas, we have retirees coming out, we spoke to them.
We have opportunities that are opening up that people are suffering silently.
I've suffered silently for a long time.
I've dealt with a lot and I could say honestly that yes, I have dealt with a lot even though
I might say, well, it was not bad.
That's a little on your shoulder saying, you didn't go through that, but that's not about
that.
If you've gone through a family upheaval, a divorce, if you've gone through alcohol
abuse, something like that, if you've gone through trauma, if you work constantly, if
you're not sleeping, your body's getting destroyed and you're just walking around like that.
I was walking around trying to work out, trying to be the health guy, trying to... I felt
like shit almost every day.
I had something going on with my body every day.
I would push ahead, push ahead, push ahead because that's what you do.
You just kind of get the job done no matter what.
That's how we are.
That's that sympathetic state you're living in constantly.
Then you're not realizing that maybe I'm doing too much.
Maybe less is more.
Maybe I need to get smarter at what I'm doing.
Maybe I have to find new procedures and protocols for myself and let me see how that works rather
than just kind of beat my head against the wall constantly in fitness per se.
That's what we do.
If we work out three times a day every day, we're not going to recover, but you think
you're going to get in better shape.
It doesn't equal.
Absolutely.
Well, I've been very aware of the book, The Body Keeps the Score, and understanding that
trauma is held in the physical side.
Definitely heard so many stories of everything from CrossFit to hiking to fishing, whatever
it is.
It's an exercise element of down regulating.
Again, in CrossFit, you've got to be very careful of when you're doing it, for example.
But it's only talking to you.
Funny enough, a few days later, someone else mentioned it that I'd ever heard of trauma
release exercises specifically.
Walk me through how you even came across that.
I'd love to hear your personal experience, and then let's walk through what you're
doing now for FDNY.
Yeah.
This is the point.
The point is that you never heard about it.
We don't hear about it because it's not a normal thing to do.
Shaking on the ground.
Trauma release exercises is a neurogenic tremor of your body that is innate in your DNA.
You're taught how to activate that to help the nervous system relax back into a parasympathetic
state.
Plain and simple.
How this came up was probably back in February of last year.
I remember there was a specific day that, again, tightness in the body, tightness for
years, just like, all right, this is the way it is.
Running was difficult.
It was getting more difficult.
I also was going through some things with my ex-wife.
I'm still dealing with some things in a legal sense.
I had some increases in job demands with the academy and things that happened there.
I had a death of a probationary firefighter, Vinnie Malvo.
We had to go through that.
We have issues with seeing candidates having rhabdomyolysis in the academy and then investigation.
So there's a lot of upheaval and people looking at what we're doing a lot more.
So even though we're squared away in our training and we're very to the point that we have a
lot of data sets, it was very stressful.
So I think there was a culmination of things happening.
And I was at work.
I had to go and be acting Italian chief for the day, which is a higher rank than I have
currently.
I did some heavy deadlifts in the morning at the firehouse quickly before I went.
And I think I went a little too heavy on one of them, about 10 pounds over where my goal
was and I lifted that last lift.
And I remember really straining, not popping anything, not really injuring myself.
I was like, wow, that was a tough lift.
And I was like, I'm done.
And when I'm having like a third or fourth alarm that I was an all hands chief at running
around, so now my mental side is going crazy because I'm trying to do this job that I'm
not really comfortable with.
But I know what I'm doing and I'm like, okay, this is like a long drawn out operation.
You're wearing a mask for like three hours straight, four hours.
And then my back is like killing me, right?
So let me take a couple of days off and a foam roll.
I'll relax, I'll stretch, I'll do yoga, whatever.
And that started to like, a couple of days later, I'm like, oh, it doesn't feel like
it's getting any better.
Now it's getting hard to sleep.
Getting out of my car was tough.
And for two months, I'm trying to unlock myself and nothing's working.
I'm not even TRE yet, but the myofascial release, getting massage, doing whatever I had to do.
Couldn't run, couldn't squat, couldn't lift, putting my back.
I was like destroyed.
Couldn't get in out of my gear.
I had to like hold onto the wall and put my boots on.
That's like the thing.
And again, we forge ahead.
Like, because I'm not, I was still in the academy.
I'm out of the firehouse.
To me to go sick would be a problem because like we're in the, I just can't, in my brain,
I'm a person that people rely on and I'm not going to just worry about myself.
I'm going to push through this.
So I had the academy coming up and I knew I'd be out of the firehouse where I can kind
of hopefully recoup and recover.
Lieutenant of mine, Adrian Cabane came up.
Lieutenant Anthony Sanantini came up to join me in that class.
So we formed our officer unit that way.
One of my lieutenants, John Callie, was injured and he was going through some stuff too.
So we needed to fill some spots.
And when these guys came together, Adrian is a really good guy to have as our personal
PT.
So he, I'm like, dude, my back's killing me.
And this guy is a massage driver, 20 years, does cupping, does muscle scraping, all that
stuff that nobody talks about.
And I'm like, you got to fix me.
I was like, put every cup on my body right now.
I can't do anything.
I'm really in a lot of pain.
This is killing me.
Can't play with my kids.
I had to hold my breath to get in and out of my car and up and down from chairs.
That pressure in the pelvic region was what I was feeling.
If you could just picture yourself with that, like, Jesus, just loosen up.
Everyone was working.
So he's like, all right, you got no circulation.
So you got a lot of stress.
I'm like, stress?
He striped my back with his thumb.
He's like, you have white stripes up and down your back.
And I looked at it and I'm like, what's your stress?
I'm like, I don't know, maybe.
And then I looked back at my injury history.
Last year, my neck went.
I had two bulging discs.
I couldn't turn my head for a few months.
I was out of work.
I had to get PT to get back, work myself out, okay.
Year before that was a knee injury, year before that was plant fasciitis, which probably caused
a knee injury, right?
So now you go backwards and go forward, like, oh, that was that, this was that.
Things at work were getting intense, still dealing with 10 years of stuff post-divorce,
scheduling issues.
That alone is completely crazy, the legal system and like parenting to different homes.
This actually is something with my daughter too that comes up with TRE.
When I speak on that, we started doing a little bit with her as well.
So all of the things you say, wow, this is why I do have like a lot of stress, apparently.
Maybe this is the root cause of what I'm feeling.
It's not just the deadlift or not just the injury, like the job or not just this neck
injury last year.
These things are all tied together.
And if you go back history, say, wow, I've been through a lot of stuff.
Maybe my body is keeping a lot of this tension in me.
So he mentions the TRE as one of the things he learned about.
And we started to just shake on the floor, like surface level, no training.
So a couple of videos on it.
It looks weird.
Like some people's legs are shaking on the ground.
I don't know what this is.
So we started to do a little bit of that, I guess, you know, 10 minutes a day, I would
say.
And it was about a week and a week and a half later, I was like, I'm going to do this every
day.
Let me see what happens.
Let me just, cause I need to, I need to get this pain away.
I got to move about.
I was going to quit being the head of the fitness unit.
I couldn't move.
I'm like, how do I do this?
Like, how do I run these probationary firefighters?
How do I come off as a captain in this unit if I can't even put a bar on my back and squat?
Like it just doesn't make sense to me.
I was like, I can't do it.
And I think a lot of that was just the emotional side being compressed.
I'm like, I wanted to give up.
Like where you're so just in a bad spot, you don't want to go forward anymore.
I was giving up.
A week and a half later, I was about 50% better in the movement of my back.
I was like, holy shit.
This stuff is opening me up.
And I don't know how, I don't know why, but I'm shaking 10 minutes a day.
My legs are moving.
Nothing else is moving.
I'm frozen.
My upper body, everything.
And I go, this is interesting.
I feel better.
Yes, let's look into this.
And we pitched it as and proposed it to the job as a new training for the fitness unit
at first to say, hey, we want every year I try to get certifications for our guys, different
information, keep continuing education, that type of stuff.
It has to go through our fire foundation because there's really no budget.
So we have to do proposals and we have to get funding if they approve it or not.
So really it's like the sale of it has to be a good reason.
And I didn't really know how to explain CRE.
Adrian was fairly well versed, but he also didn't complete the course.
Something happened with his provider that maybe she got ill and he couldn't finish the
whole course.
So he had a good amount of information just from that one person that he trained with.
We're like, let's call Dr. Bricelli and get him in personally because he's the guy who
started this whole thing.
Learned about his journey over the decades of TRE and where he was and how he kind of
came up with this whole process.
It was very interesting.
We were able to get it funded.
We have six providers, global providers now, that went through a training with Dr. Bricelli
and then had to continually... We went about six months beyond that to finally get all
of us fully certified.
And that comes through Zooms and videoing yourself with working on people with TRE.
There's a lot of safety protocols.
There's some contraindications like epilepsy or stuff like that.
You can't make yourself seize basically when you have seizure issues.
So there's a few of those things, but nothing really that would affect firefighters.
Like schizophrenia, we shouldn't be firefighters if we have that.
So it should be fine for us to use on ourselves.
During our training is when I had that release of 2008 and some other stuff that came out.
And that's when I felt different completely after that because I was feeling better and
I was gradual, but nothing was moving in my body besides my legs.
And when you do TRE, sometimes we see that it's not full body tremors.
You can look online at a lot of videos of people doing that.
But it's a weird thing to see.
It's a weird thing to feel because you're not controlling it.
And as a fire service, you're a control freak.
You're going to control chaos.
So your body starts shaking and you're like, you're thinking, am I doing that?
Maybe I don't like this because I'm not the one physically doing this.
This is weird.
So you have to understand that it's okay to feel that way, but it's good for your body
because it's your own body trying to work itself through the tension patterns that you've
developed all the time.
That's all it is.
It's sending signals through the nervous system.
It creates a vibration and the vibration, I just like, it's like shaking out the shit.
Shake it off.
That's what the fire tribe, our nonprofit, we do the shake it off on the shirts because
you have to be able to relate to firefighters.
Just shake it off, man.
Whatever.
Shake it off.
So now it's for real.
If you learn how to do this, your body can rebalance itself over time.
You can lighten the layers of tension that you've accumulated in all aspects of your
life, which is why it's important because we're not only dealing with trauma on the
job.
Like I said before, it could be something from your childhood, could be something in
your marriage, could be something with your kids.
My daughter was diagnosed with autism in 18 months.
I didn't want to believe it.
We had to go through the help at home and the therapies.
She's high functioning, not physically disabled, but it was not talking until she was five.
The stimulation stems, the anxiety now.
Then we have a divorce, which now she's back and forth.
So it's hard to have consistency there as well.
And I saw her anxiety level go up.
Now we have three maniac little kids here as well.
So she comes here, it's like so much input versus just with mom, where it's more of a
dude.
I can see the difference.
I'm like, I need to help my daughter.
So part of it learning this process for me has helped me work with her as well.
She's made some progress herself, which helps her to kind of alleviate coming here and feeling
like I got to stay in my room all the time and be antisocial.
Because a lot of that is what happens when she gets to my house.
It's going from quiet to chaos.
But we get to manage chaos better if we're better.
And when we did the TRE training with Dr. Selle, it was like, that was when I realized
how much that would work for us.
So we started to bring all the people in.
Those people had positive experiences.
They were like, well, we should probably do this more.
We had the opportunity to work a TRE workshop into the Office of Professional Development
in the health side.
This is a new office that was developed through the fire commissioner.
And we were taking the TRE workshop as part of the health piece.
And it was phenomenal.
It was going to be put into not just TRE, but the postural reintegration through myofascial
release and some other tools, cardiovascular information protocols.
Nobody knows even what zones they have to work in half the time.
So for stress and resiliency, zone two as a base is for your cardiovascular system,
for your conditioning, for your entrance and exit runs, just for your job function.
Your high intensity is something different.
But for zone two, if you include more of that, you do more foam rolling, you do TRE, now
you start to bring the body back down where it needs to be and rebalance it.
And that helps you to alleviate the stress, not only that you have it on right now and
in the future, but also unpacking a lot of that stuff that you might be carrying.
And again, it could be from anywhere because your body, it doesn't know if you're at a
fire or if somebody's going to run and beat you up or if your parents, you're going to
get beat by an adult.
If you're going to get molested as a kid, you don't know that.
It's an autonomic response.
And that's, I kind of want to keep it simple because I don't understand the science as
much, but I know that if the body responds, the body's going to get rid of it.
And when we think, we feel a certain way, we're not thinking what we're feeling, we're
feeling what we're feeling.
This is buried in us.
So the release of that was the ha ha moment.
People started coming in, working with us and they're just like, holy shit.
I'd never felt anything like that.
Let's do it for everybody.
Let's do it for everybody because there's people walking around, like I was, not talking
about shit, grinning and bearing it, piling it on, packing it down until you kill yourself
or until you drink yourself into oblivion or until you figure out a way to get that
out with, maybe I'm gambling every day now.
Maybe there's coping mechanism that aren't good for us, that we do anyway.
Because there's where our outlets, some of it's like competitive running.
That's the same thing.
You're getting going way beyond things to kind of forget about what you're feeling.
And then you turn it into something positive, like exercising a lot like we did.
Like we work out all the time, work out all the time, just work out.
It's not the best thing for us all the time, but it's the way for us to say, I'm going
to go for a run.
I'd rather go lift this thing because you're trying not to feel the shit.
You might be resurfacing a little bit, but you have to go through the process.
You have to heal.
You have to get it out in order to go forward in life and really understand what you're
here for.
Because you don't really know yourself because you've been disconnected for such a long time,
especially if you've been on a long time.
And then if you retire, you not only lost yourself, you lost your community.
Now you're like six months later, the firehouse goes on and everybody's like, ah, and then
this guy, what do I do now?
And we have a lot of that going on.
And I know you know that.
You have a lot of issues post retirement.
So what are our methods of helping?
Go to counseling.
Here's a counselor.
Here's a meditate.
How can I meditate if I'm in pain every day?
If I have this nagging back pain, how can I sit here and be calm?
It's like, ah, it's a thing.
Or if somebody texts me like, oh, you have a million things going on in your life.
That's going to be very difficult.
You're living outside of your body constantly.
You're living in an outside world.
You're on your phone.
You're at work.
You're doing kid stuff.
You don't even know who you are, what you're feeling anymore unless you come back and say,
I need time to put in to my own self-help.
I got to take care of my three feet first.
Like this was the analogy of putting your oxygen mask on first on the plane.
This is the first step.
If you can regulate yourself and be that personal balance, then you could be that for your kids.
You could be that for your wife or husband.
You could be that at work, for your team, for your crew.
You can be that throughout.
Who you are is who you are.
I'm in a gym right now because I literally come in here all the time.
I work in the gym.
I'm at the Yelp Park Academy gym.
I'm in my gym.
I go to the park.
I turn into a gym.
Being physical helps me.
A lot of people don't do it.
They could probably feel a lot better if they did.
They think it's too massive of a lifestyle change though.
But you're not going to know who you are unless you're able to internalize it.
If people can meditate, great.
It doesn't really work for me.
Right now, maybe it will down the road.
But it can't be the first thing.
I believe that what we have here with TRE and with our other protocols supporting that
as a basis is a great education for first responders.
It's a great way to recover from your career because we're all going to be damaged.
That's a fact.
It depends on how much though.
Like you said, I never knew about it.
And since then, we've now put it into our Probe School curriculum where the incumbents
are coming in with the knowledge.
Fire Cadets is another program which is before the academy.
So again, always early, early, early.
Early help, early knowledge, early education is going to be the only way we get through
the next few decades to have a positive workforce.
You can't wait for them to be on already and then deal with the weight issues.
You can't be retiring and then deal with the trauma issues.
You should have this information ahead of time so you can mitigate it when it comes
up so it doesn't damage you for years.
You're losing experiences.
You lose joy.
You lose happiness.
Like you wasn't happy.
Then you feel it.
Played the part, laughed it off.
But that's not the reality.
The reality is that you're walking around in a shell.
I guess, ah, that's funny.
But am I really happy?
And when I started to do the work with TRE, after that release, it just got better.
The first time my kids were playing and I laughed, I was like, holy shit, that was so
funny.
My own kids.
My son was born in October, so that's three or four months after that and we had a pretty
intense situation with his birth.
I was crying.
I was crying a whole lot because I felt nervous for my wife.
I felt bad.
I didn't know what was happening.
This is my fourth child, so it wasn't my first experience in a hospital or surgery, but this
was an intense situation.
I was like, holy shit.
I started crying.
I came out.
This hasn't happened since I cried on the floor at the cell and before that was probably
gone, I was telling you, 20 years ago.
Crazy.
So you're accessing things again that were either never accessible or they were turned
off because of your job, which is what we say, you become your job.
You become that person.
That's not you fully.
That's just what you do.
And now you have the opportunity to regain some of yourself again and say, oh, I enjoy
this.
I enjoy that.
This made me laugh.
This gives me this is my passion.
I really love to do this.
I love to talk about this.
I love to see people shake on the floor now because their experience after is like, thank
you so much.
Thank you so much.
When you talk about the shaking is funny.
I literally just had someone, I forget which guest it was, but they were talking about
how a deer, for example, if they've escaped some sort of attack, they have what they call
it.
I think it's trauma shiver and you look at a lot of prey animals and they literally will
quiver once they've got themselves safety.
And that was, you know, that was kind of the observation is that we don't have a trauma
shiver.
And it's funny because now here we're sitting talking about how we can actually have a trauma
shiver.
We have it.
We don't know about it.
We, we don't know about it.
It's so, and Dr. Maselli was always like, it's always so easy.
It's so easy.
I don't know why everybody makes a big deal about it.
You know, like the company and it, and, and it is easy to do, but it's weird and you have
to be careful how you do it, how much you do it, especially in the beginning.
Cause again, you get to build tolerance like anything else, but it's an every animal you,
you shake when you're, when people have anxiety, right?
It's like you get, you get the shakes, you get nervous, right?
That's the body's response.
It's not the anxiety.
It's your body saying to chill out.
So it's a nervous system's reaction.
You're not, you're not controlling that with the way you're thinking.
So once I understood that I said, okay, let it happen, right, give up the control.
And then it started to change and it's been ever changing these tremors.
They never the same ever.
Every situation is different because the way I understand it is if I release a layer of
tension, I am now a different person, right?
That's gone.
Whatever, whatever that was holding back to my body in terms of movement, gait patterns,
all that stuff, it changes.
So now going forward, every time I do it, I'm just getting a layer off, getting better,
a layer off, getting better, like reintegrating into my body, constantly going forward, making
progress.
So you're learning more about your body.
You're learning about, like I said before, all the different emotions that you have again.
But now I'm walking around in life, like I can handle so much stuff every day because
it's not getting any better.
It's not getting any easier.
So your resiliency actually goes up as well, which is another fun fact of TRE is that you
become more stress resilient because you're managing your body better and these situations
you can kind of compartmentalize.
They don't have to be such big things.
I can blow things out of proportion.
People that live in an anxious state constantly, everything's a problem.
I don't have really any problems.
I just have this situation that I have to deal with and that's it.
So it used to be dealing with stress for weeks and weeks about something that happened, the
fight you had or whatever, a relationship issue, knots in your stomach constantly.
That's chronic stress.
It doesn't bother me anymore.
It'll bother me for a very short amount of time until I realize what's happening to myself
and I can mitigate it.
And I might have to go shake.
If I have a really tough day with the kids and everything crazy, I'm like 10 minutes
at night, I'm shaking and then I'm going to bed and I'll sleep well because again, it
helps me sleep better, which helps me recover better.
So it's a great tool to utilize as a foundational component of recovery.
Use the word resilience.
And this is something I've been observing a lot recently is in the mental health conversation,
we've gone from stop being a pussy to this last 10 years or so, oh, it's smash the stigma,
smash the stigma.
And I think we've just tripped over that and we were lying on the ground confused because
there's people like, yeah, I'm hurting, but the barriers to entry for people getting help,
the toolbox that they're given is two things, talk therapy and psych meds basically in a
lot of places.
And so when you actually look at what's available, including TRE, you have this beautiful diverse
toolbox from EMDR to equine therapy to psychedelics to TRE.
And I think what we need to do is put that message of hope into the mental health conversation.
The true resilience is you addressing the struggles.
And once you've addressed them, just like the kind of the gold glue in that Japanese
metaphor, that now becomes a strength.
So we talk about resilience, you know, and none of those programs out there where you
go through a collapse maze while they play screaming music, you know, in your ears.
And but I don't think that's how you forge resilience.
I think you forge resilience by simply dealing with your shit and it could be mentally, it
could be physically.
But when you realize that just like you said, that there's a better version of you waiting
on the other side, that puts hope into the mental health conversation.
I think it's hope that is what people need.
I agree 100%.
And that is that is should be the message that is the message that you have.
You have something that can help that people don't know about.
So how many have there's a million firefighters in the nation, you know, how many more around
the world you could easily teach us to everyone and use it as a method for first responders,
fire service, EMS, cops, all the same.
They're all alike.
There is there is a way out.
There is a way out.
You might not even know you need it, though.
You know, I didn't realize how much I was being affected by everything until you start
to unwind it a little bit and unpack it a little bit.
And then it changes your perception on a lot of things in life.
It changes everything you think about because you're now not living in that sympathetic
state so much.
You're not constantly up here all the time.
And that becomes a normal.
That's a new normal for a lot of people.
And it's not a good way to live.
It destroys your body.
It destroys your interactions and your relationships to a point where they're not they're not being
their best.
Right.
You still have them, but maybe they're not the best.
They have a potential that's greater than you think.
You know, yeah, that's kind of how I see it now.
Well, I don't have you see it.
I've been like kind of working my jaw.
I've had clenching at night for a long, long time.
So I'm excited to try this myself for people listening.
Obviously, the goal is to get them to dive into the program fully.
But as an overview, what does it look like for someone who, you know, said, OK, I would
like to try this?
What would those 10 minutes look like?
So obviously, you could look online.
You can see videos of the warmups and how to do it.
It's a very simple process.
I would say you definitely would like to work with a provider, someone to guide you.
That would be my experience.
That's when I got the best results because you could get uncomfortable.
Like I said, you might not understand what's happening.
You might not understand how to change your positions to facilitate different tremors.
And you have to understand the emotional side of that and what could happen to you.
Nobody knows what you're dealing with.
So this therapy without talking is good, but you obviously don't realize how your body
can respond.
So being with a provider, we like to say at least three sessions with a provider.
We've done that in the academy where we have a TRE aware.
So you've done the work with providers, got your questions and answers, got some information.
So now you can take this tool with you whenever you need it.
And then you're at liberty to sort of self manage that and kind of work with it a little
bit and see what way you can take it.
You have to explore that in your own body.
We have a lot of interventions that you can do, different positions that you can be in,
and different ways to stimulate the response in your body.
So there's a lot to learn in terms of TRE and a lot of it comes from exploring it.
I think initially just find a provider that works for you.
Again, for us, we're trying to provide this all around.
A few of the things that we've done is our nonprofit obviously is in the infancy stages,
but we're trying to first get it to our retirees.
We're getting a group together now to do a sample of TRE.
The next thing would be maybe a soft pilot study on what they're doing and make that
where we have some data, right?
Because there's not really a lot of stuff in the fire service on TRE.
We did nothing, really.
We're the first agency ever to be trained with Dr. Bricelli.
We're co-creating the agency training that trains all the departments and all the people
in departments, and that's going to be the standard.
We're developing that with TRE and their blessing and Dr. Bricelli's blessing because he saw
how well we were working with it because of the knowledge we had of the body.
He thinks it's a really amazing idea of how far it came in just less than a year where
we have almost a thousand people in the FDA that have at least done TRE once, where they've
experienced it.
Whether or not they follow through is really a matter of the availability of it right now.
We don't have enough funding and backing to do multiple workshops.
We have one more slated for this year in October, usually about 20 to 25 people, and that's
a full day workshop, eight hours.
They have two sessions there and then there's a follow-up for a third.
That makes everybody TRE aware.
If somebody is looking to get involved with that, I think they need to be with someone
at least three times, I would say, that know what they're doing, that understand the body.
I think for us and our population, we have the best knowledge at this point that I know
of.
That just comes from our experience and dealing with what we dealt with, walking in the shoes.
We're not coming from the outside and coming in and saying, all right, this is what first
responders, this is what fire service members need.
We know what it can do.
I'm walking in it right now.
I see it as, like you said, how many people don't know this even exists?
That's a problem.
I didn't know it existed and it has been out for decades all around the globe.
It's really a matter of timing.
Like you said, we're making a push where we're not going to just get rid of it and say, don't
worry about it.
Nothing happened to you.
We have to acknowledge, number one, that we're working in a service that affects us.
We chose it, yes, but we don't fully understand the impact.
Not only the cancer and the gear and a lot of stuff, but the impact on the nervous system,
the sleep and the trauma come into play and that carries over into our home life.
I would love to have a much better home life.
I want to have a great life going forward with my family.
I think that if you use this tool, you can help actually redefine those relationships
better.
I'm living it.
I see it.
I hear people talking about it.
They're sharing it with their family members.
They're sharing it with their spouses.
I'm like, oh, you can't teach this yet.
You just learned it.
You got to be able to... Because the problem that I don't want to see is people doing it
once, not having a good experience or not understanding it and then just letting it
go down the shelf.
It's an amazing tool that, again, I feel can be misinterpreted because it's very hard to
explain.
It's hard to explain what your body's going through when shaking on the ground.
But the more we talk about it, the more we have these conversations and the more that
we have groups of people doing it.
The only reason why we're able to continue is that people have great feedback.
We have amazing feedback, amazing testimonials.
If it wasn't that way, we wouldn't be talking on this podcast about it.
I think it's definitely necessary right now.
We're in the right space in terms of mental health.
In the fire service, there's a lot of push on and people looking at a lot of funding,
a lot of grant money out there for departments.
This has got to be put out there.
I think with the IFF now and the new initiative they have with their wellness initiative and
being able to be involved on that platform, hopefully we can get some years and we can
get it onto a larger scale.
Beautiful.
One group that I think always gets forgotten when it comes to the first responder professions
is dispatch.
If you think about taking on trauma but having no physical offset or offloading, they are
the perfect example.
You know, 10 to 12 hour shifts stuck in a chair, probably dark when you got to work,
dark when you leave.
This seems like that would be another fantastic group to maybe give them an ability to do
a 10 minute session to offload some of that stress.
Yeah.
One of our first groups that we did was the dispatchers.
Our very first trial of our workshop was a shorter version, half a day.
We went to the dispatchers that were coming onto the job, we worked with about 12 people.
Again, amazing response with them.
That's 100% all inclusive in the FNY's professional development office.
We're not just doing them with firefighters.
We have EMS, we have fire prevention, legal staff, people working downtown, dispatchers.
They all come to our workshops.
It's a blend of everyone in the department, not just fire operations side.
We're getting that feedback from all angles because everyone has their own stresses.
Like you say, the dispatcher is not being able to physically get that out.
If there's a bad call or there's a mayday going on or something like that.
That's what we spoke to them about as they were going through their classes, that this
could be something that you deal with.
So here's a tool for you to help mitigate that.
We have continuing opportunities down the road lining up with those guys.
EMS, we're rolling it out in their academy now.
They're working with their staff on that side.
It's combining this into a whole organizational piece of wellness.
A lot of people are looking for it.
We have waiting lists for our workshops right now.
We have people waiting on us getting them the samples.
It's just a matter of getting things set up, scheduling, funding, approvals.
You have to go through all this red tape.
We just keep doing it.
Well, anybody wants to shake, give me a shout.
Shake on the ground.
All right.
Well, I want to go to just one more area before we go to the closing questions.
You were in the coaching arena right before you joined the fire service.
What have you seen as far as the evolution of strength and conditioning principles?
For my own personal perspective, I was doing almost the bodybuilding movements.
I wasn't a bodybuilder, but that was what I was doing.
Then I got into CrossFit, really like that for a while.
Then I got into the strong man movements of the sandbags and sleds and found a huge carryover
with that.
Now I'm doing the Wolf Brigade programming, which has put a lot of the one-arm kettlebell
movements, Maces, which I'm loving as a 50-year-old now to, for lack of a better word, unfuck some
of my injuries and immobility.
What have you seen as far as the metamorphosis and what kind of principles do you think should
be being used in the 2024 modern day fire service?
Obviously, functional fitness is where it's at.
We've tried to evolve our program.
Again, we have 300-plus probationary firefighters in our classes.
We deal with a lot of people.
Equipment is always an issue, but we've moved into that realm where we've gotten away from
the basic movement patterns of, say, bodybuilding.
We don't have the space for it, number one.
We don't also have the equipment.
Then it turned into a lot of long runs and calisthenics because that was basically no
equipment.
Now we've been able to have non-impact rope equipment, kettlebells, slam balls, heavy
balls, sandbags, sleds, all those things that are fun to use, but the perception is that
you're not going to get jacked.
That's where it's a misconception.
Your body as it develops into whatever you're doing has to be built the same way as your
job.
What are you supposed to be doing?
If I'm at a fire, I'm not bench pressing.
It may be something I might put into a program, but the functional movements, the cardiovascular
system work, odd object work, like you said, unilateral work, one side versus the other,
these are the things that you have to do.
You have to do your low cardio, your high impact cardio because you have to simulate
what it's like to be at a fire.
That's for your job.
I think that in the fire service, I do see a lot of the guys doing that.
CrossFit is big because it does a lot of those modalities inside CrossFit, but from what
I understand and what I know of it, it can push people too hard when they're not ready,
especially if they haven't had the mechanics.
If you want to learn anything, you can do it.
If you want to learn power lifting versus bodybuilding versus CrossFit versus even jujitsu,
because everything makes the body work differently.
If you put a program together where you're undulating in and out of different programs,
you can keep a lot of the things you like and also work on the things you need.
You don't have to just do one or the other.
You can go from strength training into CrossFit into swimming, into racing, back into strength
training, back into this.
You can use different modalities, A, to keep it interesting because people just get bored
half the time and B, it's going to carry over.
Like you said, having to carry over into being a human being.
Maybe it's for the fire floor, maybe it's to play with your kids as well.
That's something I want to be able to move better.
Being able to create mobility for me is huge.
I have to get down while I'm training my son to walk.
If I bend over, my back's going to kill me, but if I could squat a little deeper and it's
more comfortable for me to walk behind him, then he's going to walk and I'm not going
to kill myself.
I'm going to want to do it more and he's going to excel.
Then teaching my kids how to maintain what they can do now.
These kids are so flexible, it's incredible when they're kids.
Famous line for doctors at Purcelli is like, you're not old, you're just tight.
You're like, hi, that makes a lot of sense.
We think that we get older and that's why we can't do anything anymore.
What's happening is that we're under so much stress all the time and now you're 50 and
you can't move because you got binded down with tension.
You didn't move properly and you haven't moved in probably God knows how long because it's
got gotten worse and worse and worse and injury after injury after injury and now you're here.
We start to say, let's unlock all that stuff and start to move a little bit better and
look at the things you have to do.
Things that work for you that you feel good doing, do more of that.
Don't force things that are just because you used to do it.
That's a lot of people go back to the original set and it's like, that's 20 years old.
Of course, I still use a bench every so often, but most of the stuff I do is not rigid in
one plane of movement.
And then as you do it, you're like, man, this is fucking hard.
This is like offset stuff and rotational torsional things.
Like, man, it's so hard that I might not do it anymore because I like doing the old stuff,
it's easier.
And then you go back to the old shit again.
So just make progress, always change your program.
Be adaptable to it.
Don't be so rigid.
There's something I'm doing now.
If I don't feel my workout, I stop.
I'm like, I'm not pushing this workout today.
I didn't sleep good last night.
Kids are crazy today.
I'm not going to get my workout that I thought I was going to get in.
I'm just not feeling today.
Let me switch it to something else, like recovery day.
I'll come back tomorrow because I'm not chasing a deadline either.
I'm trying to stay in very good shape until I don't wake up one day.
That will be my goal.
I don't want to be in a hospital.
I don't want to be in diapers.
I want to be able to be functional as an adult, as a 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90.
I bless myself if that ever happens.
But at that point, I still want to be able to move.
I'm going to hopefully do things the same and not hurt myself because I'm not looking
at my body in a way of how can I maintain it at the best of its ability.
So with the recovery, 50 years old, I would say half the time, we're definitely looking
at recovery.
Looking at foam rolling, looking at zone two cardio, looking at TRE, looking at mobility
training, core strength.
And then making sure your posture is good throughout your life so you don't hunch over
having the forward head tilt with these cell phones.
And then all of a sudden you're walking around at 80 with a cane and you can't look up and
you get pushed over by the wind.
You break your hip and you die.
I want to go a different way.
I want to be someone who I can race my kids so when they're 20, I'm 60 and I'm like, all
right, let's go.
Still trying to put some work in, still trying to be an asset.
I think that's the only thing we can hold onto ourselves and we can control it.
We have the ability to do that.
You eat a certain way, you train a certain way, you be consistent, you have discipline.
You're pretty much going to stay where you were at throughout your decades of life.
People fall off a cliff and they never come back.
It's a waste.
It's a waste of your body.
You only got one of them.
And if you've given it to a service, you're going to be in a position where you have issues.
You have multiple issues, injuries, surgeries.
There's all trauma to the body.
There's all dysfunction now beyond that if you haven't healed from it.
And if you look at to rebuild, which I've seen physically, I've been rebuilding tissue
that has been at your feet for years from surgeries, from gait issues, calves and chest
tears.
Things are firing again, which is exciting because I honestly was living in a world where
I was doing the same shit all the time.
It helps you to evolve.
You focus on focus, focus on what you're feeling, not how many reps you need to do.
So if you feel a spine that works, I really felt that that's something that your body
needs.
It's working.
You're connecting to yourself again.
And through this process, it seems like you get more connected to your muscle tissue,
more focus in workouts, better understanding of when to stop and how much to use and how
to progress your workouts.
It's very interesting the change in what I'm seeing and the way I'm thinking in terms
of training.
I think we have an opportunity to really simplify it for people because it doesn't have to be
that complicated.
Fitness is not like three hours a day in the gym.
It's like if I have four kids here, can I do 20 minutes of lunches and then I'm good
for today?
Yeah.
What's our goal really?
It's overall wellness and health and to feel better.
If it's bodybuilding, it's different.
If it's play a sport, it's different.
If it's health and the fire service job, that's another thing.
Maybe I have to add in some other things for that job specifically, but most of the things
that we do are for life function, which is normal life.
And if you can just keep it to that where you're not putting too much pressure on yourself
to get somewhere and just to understand that progress over perfection is going to outweigh
everything, it's going to be what you need.
Don't look to be perfect at something.
Make progress constantly.
It's a journey and then you just don't wake up one day.
Don't stop.
It's got to be forever.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to shift to some closing questions quickly before I let you go.
The first one I'd love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
I've read a lot of motivational self-help books.
One that my friend loves to quote from is The Four Agreements.
That's a pretty simple book to read.
I like quick reads too.
Good things.
I just got another one, The Obstacle is the Way.
That's the recent one.
I just started that one.
That's actually pretty good.
And I leans towards what we're talking about.
Overcoming these challenges is a very important thing, right?
To right yourself.
You can't get buried under the stress.
Yeah, I don't know.
I got a bunch of them downstairs.
Everything I read now is trying to just make myself better.
Dr. Brescelli's book is a great book on TRE and the stress.
It has a lot of stories in there about people's success.
Education on that, I do a lot of education on just bettering my family.
Different things that I don't know about.
Now, I'm really in search of information.
Because you live a certain way for a long time, you're kind of like, wow, I really haven't
done as much as I should have done.
Maybe that's just me, but I like to look at things differently now.
I'm listening to progress my relationships, my parenting, and my family's security.
That's really kind of where I hone in on.
In terms of fitness, I like to keep abreast on things, but I think 20 plus years of just
training or dealing with people, how many certifications can you get?
Before you start realizing it's kind of all the same information, you really got to see
how to apply to each person.
Each person's story is different.
When people come to train with me, a lot of what they're dealing with isn't they have
a problem with fitness.
They have emotional issues that stem from trauma or something that happened in life
that causes the habits to change.
If we look at the habits and why are they there, it's more about, like you said, way
back.
This is almost like they're caught in this loop of, I don't understand why I'm like this.
I'll do this for this fad, that fad.
I'll look at this TikToker or this fitness guru or whatever.
But when it comes down to it, you got to look inside yourself and say, I'm really fucked
up a little bit.
I acknowledge it now.
This is why I eat this way.
This is why I don't put this as a priority.
This is why I work all the time to block out everything, whatever it is.
Then it comes to you like, hey, I want to work out.
Well, okay.
Well, you haven't worked out in your whole life or you don't know what, you have no mechanical
movement, you're super tight, you have to start with this.
They're like, well, I want to just lose weight.
Well, no, that's not it.
You'll lose the weight when you release all the shit.
When you do that, you start to feel better and then you start to move better.
Then all of a sudden you realize that the stuff that's been bogging you down, you've
could have easily just dealt with it on your own, but you haven't had the tools yet.
So a lot of my sessions come into play with psychology.
I should have fired my psychiatrist.
He's cost me too much money.
I'm like, well, A, you're going to feel better when you work out, but B, I'm trying to get
to the root causes of what you're dealing with and try to help you understand how to
create better habits.
Habits are going to discipline, are going to outweigh everything.
Just stick with that.
Everybody will be just fine.
We've been much better in the population.
Absolutely.
A little bit of a run on.
I tend to do that.
No, no, it was good though.
It's great information.
Great perspectives.
I'm sorry.
What about films and documentaries that you love?
Let's see.
I don't know.
I don't really watch a lot of films to be honest with you.
I've gone away from sports.
I've gone away from TV.
I don't even have cable in my house.
The documentaries that I watch now are kind of like conspiracy theory, I would say.
I think a lot of truth in these things that we know from the lies that we've kind of lived
through.
I question everything now.
I've kind of gotten away from movies and TV and all that stuff.
I can tell you, they got like as a kid, but they just want to watch.
I don't trust anything out there.
I look at people, I try to say, okay, if I just stay within what I know and what I know
I can give people, I got plenty of work to do.
I got plenty of work, I'll have decades of interactions with people coming forward that
can hopefully thank me where I like that feeling.
When people thank me, I like that because I know I've done something good.
I actually look for that.
I look for helping people.
I'm always trying to do stuff.
That's probably my quality and it could also be a curse.
Babe, I'll bring it back.
I got to go do this.
Somebody had a question about working out, I got to go talk to them.
Be on the phone, whatever.
She's like, what are you doing?
I'm like, I was talking to this guy.
It was an hour and a half.
I'm like, we got to a conversation.
I don't know.
That's just who I am.
Sometimes I almost sacrifice my life here for that.
I think there's a lot of people that are just suffering, man.
I think we have something new, not new, but we have something new to our world.
Our little world and where we live in.
You open up the door, you're like, wow, this is some weird shit, but I feel a lot better.
All of a sudden you got a thousand people who did it.
You have trying to figure out a way to give it to our retirees.
I don't know anything about nonprofit work.
They open one up, try to figure it out, make it work, but they're responding to it.
They want it.
I spoke to 120 retirees two weeks ago and guys are signing up their emails.
They want more information because it made sense.
Whatever I say resonates and I just keep talking and the people who want to hear it or need
to hear it will come out of the woodwork and hopefully get contacted and we can get this
to happen.
But I really do want to get this into other agencies.
I want to get this to our retirees, the family members.
My wife does it.
My daughter does it.
Anybody that has stress in their life can feel better and it's one thing that they don't
know about.
They can work exercise.
You can eat right.
You can do all the cardio.
You can do yoga and meditation.
Maybe this is something that people will gravitate to because it's something that your body can
do on its own.
I'm not forcing it.
I don't need equipment.
I don't need very little coaching.
I just need to be somebody to observe me to make sure I'm doing it safely.
And then I can do it forever anytime I want, anywhere I want, as long or as short as I
want and no matter what, as long as that travel starts, I get a positive effect on my body.
It's something really good.
Amazing.
Well speaking of interesting people, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this
podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
I would highly recommend Dr. Bricelli.
I would highly recommend one of my co-founders of Fire Tribe, Adrian Caban, my lieutenant,
the guy who helped and fixes me.
He would be amazing.
He has so much more knowledge on the body than I do.
My staff, I have tons of guys with a lot of experience.
That'd be great.
But my top two would be definitely, David Bricelli is awesome.
I don't know if he would do it, but maybe he would now if we got him on.
Because he's very excited about working with our community and seeing what we did so far
because he kind of like went out on his own.
He was traveling.
He went to Tibet to work with the monks.
He goes all around the world.
This guy is quite a character.
But he profoundly changed my life.
If I didn't meet him, I don't know what I'd be doing right now.
I wouldn't be doing any of this, I tell you that much.
This is a very recent change.
A year ago, I had thoughts about what I want to do when I retire or what we could do with
the fire department.
This thing came out of nowhere.
It really helped me.
It helped a lot of people immediately.
We were like, okay, this is something that we have to share.
Ever since then, it's been just going and going and going.
I appreciate your time.
I'll highly look, maybe we can get him on here because he can share a lot of information
on what this does for the body.
He's worked with so many people all over the world.
It just seems like now it's starting to come into our neck of the woods.
Hopefully through the fire service, we can get it out there as a staple, part of the
WFI initiative, hopefully.
We're going to get down that road and hopefully show this to them and say, listen, for us,
this is from the body.
This is a bottom-up solution.
Nobody talks about it, something like that.
It's all that top-down stuff.
You know that better than anybody.
I would love to work with you on this.
Yeah, let's make it happen.
I'll get you going on this.
This will be awesome.
It's just a great thing to see people when they have that reaction and the change in
them and then if they carry it forward.
Everybody's on the same page.
Anybody who continues to your reading knows the journey is still going on.
That's why you keep doing it.
It's exciting.
It changes.
It evolves.
It helps you deal with today.
It helps you deal with 10 years ago.
It helps you be better going forward.
You tie it together with the whole overall fitness package.
Understanding maybe less is more.
40 to 50 years old, maybe I need less of that high-intensity stuff.
I still need a little bit, but let me scale it down.
More zone two.
Let me look at my nutrition a little bit.
Let me look at my life in general and what's really causing the stressors in my life and
how can I rearrange it so it minimizes so I have a peaceful life, so I'm happy.
I'm an asset.
I think that's the main point here is that we're trying to build people to be assets.
My kids are going to be assets.
They're not going to be liabilities.
I don't care if they can do whatever they want, but ultimately when we train at the
academy I say you have to be the asset to the firehouse.
You have to be an asset to the crew that you're working with.
That's it.
Don't be the hole in the Swiss cheese.
That comes down by taking care of yourself first.
As a fitness guy, I have to speak from that language.
Your physical health, the amount of strength you have in your body, the amount of endurance
you have in your body is totally up to you and what you do every day, but it's also your
profession and you really need to take that seriously because when they pick up the phone
to call they don't want some three slugs coming off the rig.
Slow, discombobulated, out of breath.
We got to walk up to 20 flights because the elevator is out of course.
I got to turn around and be like, why is nobody here?
That's a problem.
That's a hole.
If you look at it from that lens, get on the stand mill a couple of times a week.
Keep yourself together.
Don't fall apart.
Just because you got on doesn't mean you stop.
You're in the best shape of your life.
Traditionally, and probably you know, it's backwards when the new guy gets in.
Fitness is the last thing people think about.
It's like drilling on, make sure you learn your job of course, but this guy's falling
apart because he's not allowed to work out now.
It's frowned upon if the probe has to get in the gym and work, do a 30 minute workout.
I would love that to be different.
I would love it to be every firehouse is supporting that because you can work together and make
everyone better.
You can do team workouts.
You can drill.
I drill my probes when I'm in the train.
I'll come up 20 minutes and we'll do all the radio codes and we'll lift and we'll talk
about it.
It's nothing crazy, but I'm trying to change the culture.
You're looking at tradition versus, you know, fire fighters hate change and they hate the
way things are.
That's the problem we have.
When you're trying to make these big leaps forward in something that's brand new, it's
difficult, but I'm very secure in it because I'm living it.
I'm not just talking bullshit.
Absolutely.
Well, the very last question before we make sure where everyone knows where to find you
and TRE online, what do you do to decompress apart from TRE?
I do a lot of breathing.
I've set my home up where I can go outside.
I built this deck with plants and everything like that.
So serene spaces.
I go on hikes with my kids.
I like that.
That could also be stressing, not de-stressing.
It depends on the day and how they are.
Ground and beach, feet in the sand, stare at the water.
I'm outside all the time.
I like to be inside a lot.
Like when the sun's out, I'm outside.
I just appreciate being out in nature and doing that because we live in the city.
We work in the city.
I'm always driving in traffic.
So I like to get away from that as much as I can.
That kind of helps keep me balanced and relaxed.
But if I can, I breathe deep, slow breathing, belly diaphragm breathing.
That helps me relax.
I do that constantly all day, especially before I'm about to yell at my kids.
I go, take a breath before you say something you don't want to.
It's hard.
It's a constant battle.
But those are some of the things I do.
Exercise.
I work out.
Go to my gym.
Bang out some stuff.
Do some squats.
I don't know.
That helps me.
That's my thing.
I've always done it that way.
And then honestly, one of the biggest things I do is just helping people.
I always love helping people.
No matter what they got going on, if I can work with them, if we can train, you ask me
a question, I get excited about it and I'll help them and then I'll feel accomplished.
And that just keeps me in a nice positive state too.
So those are a few of the things.
Beautiful.
Well, for people listening then, where are the best places online to find TRE and then
you personally?
So right now, if you Google Dr. Braseli, Dr. David Braseli, B-E-R-C-E-L-I, a bunch of
information will come up in videos.
His books will come up.
T-R-E is again all over the globe.
But for the Fire Service, we have firetribe.org, F-Y-R-T-R-I-B-E.
It's an infant website.
So if some of the buttons don't work, I apologize.
We're getting there.
I don't have a webmaster yet.
But we're looking at that as a resource for first responders to go to if they need assistance
with TRE and our workshops and things that we can offer.
We're looking to collaborate with organizations as well.
And through the Fire Department, obviously, you can reach me, my name, fdny, robert.safoli.fdny.
And we have a Gmail as well, so firetribe.gmail.
And we're on Instagram as well.
This is a new thing for us.
We want to get it out there.
It's hard.
We don't really know that side of everything just yet.
We're dumb firemen, right?
But I think the idea is plain and the mission is good.
We'll get the help as we keep talking about it.
We've gotten progress already.
My wife's a huge benefit to me.
She's such a supportive soul.
She's kind of helped me with the website, doing all the stuff I just don't know how
to do.
She designs stuff and makes things look good.
So she's helped us along the way, kind of get that out there, design the logo, just
get our name and our recognition out there.
I think we have a two-pronged approach.
I think we have the nonprofit side, which is our retirees and all that.
And then we have the internal stuff that we've been doing.
And now with the opportunity to share that with the WFR, I believe it'll be a good resource
for them to take on and their holistic approach, it kind of matches their intentions.
So you'll be hearing a lot about it coming down the road, I imagine.
Well, Rob, I just want to say thank you so much.
It's been such an amazing conversation from obviously some of your experiences in uniform,
but also bringing TRE.
I mean, I literally, this is what's so sad.
And it's the same with the sleep deprivation conversation when I was so engrossed in not
only the fire service, but the exercise physiology side as well, is that not realizing the absolute
massive impact that that has.
But again, here I am in the health and wellness space in the fire service and not heard of
TRE either.
So it's been such an invaluable conversation.
I'm looking forward to trying it myself.
And I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time today and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast.
Well, I appreciate you more than you know, and opportunities like this are coming up
and I followed you.
I think you have a great platform and this information should be getting out there.
That's what I'm here for.
I mean, deliver the message and hopefully get this out to the masses, yourself included.
We should set that up.
I'll get you through it.
It'll be all good.
And we'll go from there.
But yeah, it's going to help, man.
I tell you, it's been a life saving tool for me right now.
And I wish I had it sooner.