Yeah, that's a good point. So are there like practical things that you're doing to manage

that? Um, yes. So if you listen to some of the other podcasts I've done that are more around mental health, like I, I talk about like, I know I'm very much a people pleaser. And some of that does come from a place of kindness. And some of that comes from like straight up insecurity of how it was raised. And so I developed this mantra that says, um, it's my, I'm responsible for staying integrity with my values. I am not responsible for your comfort. And so when I tell myself that suddenly there's like this guardrail of like, Oh, where are all the places you're like overextending yourself? Because you're taking responsibility for someone else's comfort. Like, Oh, I want to make sure they feel this way or that way. But I'm like, that's totally out of my control. So instead I'm going to say it kind of like trust the process. It was like, I know the, I know the, I know my values and therefore the behaviors they imply. And then your reaction to them, like that I was going to say that's your problem. That that's a little negative. That's out of my control. Right. Right.

I've heard it said that it's your responsibility. Right. And it's a slightly nicer way of saying that, but getting at the same sort of thing. That's really interesting. Yeah.

And then the, the other reflection I've been having is, I think, especially when you get down to something like 56 kilo and you show up with, you know, veins popping out of your abs, there's this like assumption like, dude, what are you doing? This is completely unsustainable. I'm not sure it's unsustainable actually. So I'm taking two mindsets to it where it's like some of this is probably unsustainable if I approach it the way I am. Some of this is like, this could just be a very harsh learning curve. So now that I've done the cut to 56 kilo twice, like the second time was easier, even, even though I didn't nail it, like a, which we, we can talk about how the meat went, but I'm like, well, if the second one got easier, what happens on the third one or the fourth one? Right. So I eventually reached some state where I'm like, yeah, I can make 56 kilo pretty easily and walk around society with veins popping out of my abs, even though people are telling me like you're physiologically not supposed to do that. Like well, maybe you're right, but maybe no one else figured it out. So

I'll go figure it out.

I totally relate to that type of mindset for sure. I think there's a lot of creative solutions that are born from that type of interaction. The prevailing wisdom is whatever X, Y, and Z, you go, well, maybe, maybe that's right, but maybe I'm the guy to figure it out. There's a little bit of arrogance to it, at least in my, just speaking for myself, I guess, but there's a time and place for that, I guess.

I guess it's arrogance, but on the other hand, we're doing a sport where we're all trying to break records. So I'm like, we're literally trying to push the edge of humed performance. Like we saw a 75 kilo lifter squat, almost 700 pounds. That's not supposed to happen. But clearly we're like, well, if he can get to 700, can someone get to 800? I don't know. So it seems like every time we start putting limitations on, someone shows up and says, yeah, well, I did it anyway. Yeah.

So what? I mean, that's a good point about that being kind of baked into the nature of the sport. Like the whole point of it is like, yeah, most people can't do that, but I can. I mean, that's true of all levels of the sport too. Like even if you're kind of just getting into this, you're lifting enthusiast, you know, and maybe you're not even making it under the national scene yet, you're still stronger than everybody. Like if you take a more holistic population approach, you know, so I think you're onto something that that mentality is just kind of baked into it. But I think there's advantages to that. I mean, this ties into something that I've kind of thought for a long time. And one of those things you believe but can't really prove, I think there are things that I've learned, lessons that I've learned through, in this case, lifting, but it doesn't necessarily have to be lifting. It could be just any discipline to pursue that takes place over a long period of time. There's things that you learn that you then export to other facets of life. You know, there's always kind of this debate, I guess, over, you know, does powerlifting just select for people who have that type of mindset or does it cultivate that type of mindset? And to me, from where I sit, it kind of looks like, I'm sure there's some selection, but there also seems to be some cultivation going on.

Yeah, I think there's probably a little of both. So there's this book I like to refer to a lot by Cal Newport. I think it's a CS professor up in Pennsylvania. And it's called So Good They Can't Ignore You. And so when he was about to go get his PhD before he, one did that, he being a scientist said, well, I want to really study like, what is the path for people who become like world class and something? And so I'm going to go talk to a bunch of world class experts across a bunch of fields and see like, hey, what was your story? And what he found was he couldn't find people who they like knew their passion very early on and invested and became world class. Like the only example he could think of was Kobe Bryant. And what he found for everyone else was they found something that stoked curiosity. So they kept going. And then it, you know, they peeled layers of the onion. They found more value in it. So they kept going. And over time you kind of build love and passion for that activity. So like there's got to be enough of your mindset that keeps you curious about this powerlifting thing that you don't quit. But you build the meaning and purpose and passion for the sport over time. So I think it's both, like you need, you need the magical intersection of both.

If I could for a moment lead us all out of our depth, just kind of muse on some things. I've kind of wondered something similar when it comes to the domain that comes to mind for me is like business strategy, but it could be any sort of like long term goal setting environment. There's kind of what appears to me to be the popular narrative of like, you know, you find something that you want to achieve, you set your sights on it and you work really hard and for a long period of time and there are setbacks along the way, but eventually you achieve it. And that's just has not been my experience at all. If I'm being totally honest, it's been more like, you know, if I think back to where I was five years ago, you know, I would be surprised to be sitting in the seat, you know, and it gets a little bit less true, the older I get. You know, like I think life's trajectory starts to become a little bit more predictable later on, but this was especially true. Like in my twenties, even in my early thirties, like you go back five years and you think, man, I would not have predicted to be here five years ago. So what sense does it make to then try to predict where I'm going to be five years in the future? And, you know, like orient my whole life around the pursuit of that. What seemed to make more sense to me was just to take the next step, you know, and be alert to opportunities as they present themselves.

Yeah, I think there's actually a good analogy for us. If you compare like my career and your career, like I think if you, I used to try so people would come to me and say like, Hey, can you, can I get some career advice? Like, how did you move up in your career? And I used to try to like, I don't know, put together a narrative about like, Oh, well, there's a system and you take these logical steps. And what is more recently turned into like, I don't know, man, like I basically, I winged it and I tried to not get knocked out of the system. I tried to understand how the system rewards you. And now that I think about like your journey and my journey, I think it's there's actually a powerlifting analogy here where I basically said like, I need a templatized approach. So I'm going in a big structured organization. Cause like in many ways, I'm pretty risk averse in with my career. So I'm like, Hey, you, you lay out the incentives, you lay out the goals. I'll try to hit them. And then I would do that. And over time as I gained comfort in that system, I'd start to take more chances and say, Yeah, I'm actually going to do this thing. Cause it sounds more interesting. Even though it works counter the incentives and that grew and grew and grew. And now I'm at a point where I'm like, it almost feels like an artistic pursuit where like following the rules and breaking the rules, there's like this fun dynamic between them. Whereas what you just laid out like as an entrepreneur, you're like, Hey, there's no structure here. It's like, Oh, you know, you chose a few things like powerlifting, coaching. I want to develop a methodology towards that sport, but that's a lot of white space. And so I think it kind of like, I'm the one who downloaded a bunch of powerlifting programs off the internet. Here's the one where it's like, I'm going to go in and I'm going to lift some weights and I'm going to follow what's pretty interesting in the gym. Well,

I mean, if I was to comment on kind of how your trajectory appears from where I sit, which is probably pretty low resolution if we're being fair, but it does appear that way. It appears like you started off doing one set of things and then as time has gone on, you've kind of continued to follow your interests and continued to. I mean, you've got to do it, like you said, within the framework of the game that you're playing, you know, you're, you have to keep playing in order to continue progressing. So that's kind of the long term. That's as much like long term as I can put with it. I mean, to tie it back to powerlifting training is kind of the same thing, right? Like your long term approach has to be something that keeps you in the sport. So we can't burn out. We can't suffer long term injuries. There's a lot of things that still comport with that and a lot of valid things to attempt and not to say that all those are worthy of your time, but you know, it does give one lots of options. I see this tying into coaching as well. Like I've talked to coaches have been in a fortunate position to be asked by people, like, what would you do, you know, or what did you do when you were a young coach? What advice would you give me? It looks almost nothing like what I did, to be honest, because I mean, in part, in large part, is because it was a different environment than, you know, and what worked then would not have a prayer of working now. You know, it would just be a, it's a totally different scenario. So. Well,

actually I'm looking on the screen here and I see Kenny, who's, I think you're 20 years younger than

me. How old are you? I'm 25 or just turned 26. Okay.

19 years, just short of 20 years, it feels a little better somehow. But if I think about this, you know, I remember when RTS hired you, I'm like, okay, you found this guy, he's a doctor of physical therapy or about to be, he's already coaching his like university team. Like, like he's starting off with some significant assets and he's joining this, this company, RTS, or it's like, okay, you're going to go work with the best of the best. You have a lot of assets coming in and this sport of powerlifting that you're, you're investing in, it's growing fast. It's evolving every day. As you look forward from where you're at, like, what do you see? Like how do you think about this? And like hearing Mike and I go back and forth and looking backwards. What comes up for

you? But honestly, it's like even a couple of years ago, I would not have thought that this is the position that I'd be, I'm extremely fortunate to be here and have, you know, like you described all of those assets that led me to this spot. But if I think about how quickly that has all changed for me, how quickly the sport has changed in that time and how things are still changing, whether that's like within, like, in federations or within the concept of like money meets or things of that nature, I have absolutely no idea where the sport or I will be even like five years from now. I still plan to have some role in it, but I like, more people can get into me directing, more people can get into coaching. What form can coaching take? Is there a role for other elements like AI? Will that change the landscape? Will that become good enough? Is a coach going to have more of a human role as compared to human and programming and data interpretation? It's all very, very open. And I think being aware of that and willing to adapt to it is probably where I need to keep my focus.

Yeah, like we still haven't seen the generation of coaches who grew up with access to large language models. We're like 10 years away from that. And so I think when you bring up AI that that absolutely has to have some sort of impact, but we're just like right at the beginning of that hockey stick curve. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I'm glad that if you're a doesn't sound like old man, you know, as a cloud. That's just it. And I should probably bring us back to lifting, which I guess is the excuse that we have for bringing you on the podcast. I've enjoyed whatever tangents and rabbit holes we might find, but our stated reason at least was to talk about your experience at us at P.L. And just to talk to you about some of the lessons learned, you always have such good insights on the stuff. And now, especially what we're six weeks a month, a little more than a month, but around that post competition. So the pressure is really on for you to say something very evolved and enlightened for our bed. I guess just to set the stage a little bit for you, you won the 56 kilo open. That was your best total at 56 kilos. You broke a bunch of records. I know that at the time, at least you were kind of disappointed with your squat and kind of the pro card was a big goal that you had leading into that. From where I sat, it looked like this was your most competitive package that you've ever brought to the platform, which was awesome to see. And I guess just kind of overall now that you're thinking back on it, like how do you reflect on what that experience was and how your performance was.

Yeah, it's very mixed. I think there's it'll I'm going to say some things that'll make it sound like I have multiple personality disorder,

but there's anyone that is down. Me will be able to relate. That's fine. Okay.

Yeah. So just to validate everyone and their multiple personality disorders, there's this subset of I don't know if you'd say it's in the field of therapy or what it's called internal family systems. And I what I thought that was was it's about the dynamics within your household, but that's not what it is. It's within your head. You have a family of personalities in there. And so one school of thought would be like, well, you have all these conflicting voices. You need to figure out your overarching being and values and reintegrate those. And then internal family systems would say, no, you don't. You can have like a team of five people in there and they don't have to all agree. You just need to make sure you're the boss of them and the right voice comes out at the right time. And so I discovered this like maybe around, I think this was around the time I decided, you know what? I'm going to cut to 56 kilo and see how far I can push this. And so like the last few years I had like come out of like some pretty significant mental health challenges in my personal life. And I had slowed down in some areas just to heal and recover. And then we did things like we adopt our second child, we moved to LA. So there were a lot of reasons to just build space in my life and reset. Now as things started to settle, I had this like nagging feeling like, you know, there's this voice in my head like, can we start pushing again? And I, you know, via all the therapy had done, you know, there was this theory of like, I don't know, that's, that's a traumatized voice speaking. Like that's intergenerational trauma. That's how you're raised. That's feelings of not worthiness, like maybe. But then I hit this point where I'm like, I don't know what it is. I think it's me, whether it was put on me or it's natively me, it's me, it's not going away. And I kind of want to let that guy out. And so I said, you know what? Okay. We've created space in my life for, you know, the last year or so trying to get back to a better place. I kind of want to run again. And so I started to think about, okay, if I ran and I really pushed in powerlifting, what could I do in the next year or two to be as competitive as possible? And I looked at the numbers around 56 kilo. I looked at where I was in terms of like my own build and like one, one thing that inspired me, there's another M one who is in prime time on when he's a good friend of mine. And I remember we did a meet together at 60 kilo and I'm saying next to him, I'm like, holy crap, you were shredded man. Like and he's bigger than me. So that's how he's making 60 kilo. And I'm like, what could I do if I got that shredded? And I'm like, well, one, it would be awesome. And two, I think I could probably get down to 56 kilo. And so I decided like, okay, let's run. Let's see what we can do. So that's, that's was kind of my mindset going in. I really wanted to push and see like, okay, I'm about to turn 45. I'm not supposed to be up in prime time. I'm not supposed to be competing with the kids. But let's see what we can do here. And so, so I pushed a cut to 56 kilo. I qualified for nationals. I think I came in with the second highest qualifying total, the person with the highest qualifying total, he unfortunately couldn't make it to nationals. So then going in, my training was going great. Like I had my focus dialed in, Mark and I had, you know, I think we have a really good idea of where there's incremental gains to be had on my program. So I was just building and building and building. Just looking at my gym total, I was potentially set up for a 500 dots performance. Like it was quite reasonable to do that. Now going in, I knew that the weight cut was going to be an issue. The timing of prime time, like the amount of time I'd have to stay dehydrated the way and that was going to be an issue.