The Fire You Carry
Hosted by Nole and Kevin, two active-duty Los Angeles County Firemen with over a decade of service each, this podcast explores the fire we all carry within. Join them as they interview respected men and share lessons on how to be better husbands, fathers, and leaders. Drawing from the front lines, they tackle issues like trauma, fitness, and family life, providing universal principles for any man looking to stoke his inner fire and live with purpose.
The Fire You Carry
148: Resilience and Strength with Captain Evan Halquist
Captain Evan Halquist of L.A.Co.F.D. joins Nole and Kevin on this episode to talk about the upcoming Health Summit event that he has organized and will be speaking at, along with several other amazing guys. This event will be held at the Los Angeles County Fire Museum on October 28th, starting at 0900. It is a free event and is currently open to members of the Los Angeles County Fire Association. Both Nole and Kevin will be there and we would love to see you there too! So make sure you follow the links in the show notes and register today. We also get into Captain Halquist suffering what he was told was a career-ending back injury and how he found the methods and discipline to allow him to continue working at performing at a high level.
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This is the Fire you Carry podcast. In this episode, kevin and I are joined by Captain Evan Holquist. Captain Holquist is a guy we have been working on getting on the podcast for quite a while now, and we just recently had the perfect catalyst. He is the driving force behind an upcoming health summit that he is putting on for Los Angeles County Association members. It's something that we are excited about and will be attending, so we get into that. And then we also talk about resilience, fitness, all kinds of health stuff. Captain Holquist has a wealth of information and communicates it in a way that is easy to understand, and I know you'll get a lot out of it. So, with all that having been said, enjoy.
Speaker 3:People look at an injury and they want to fix right, Tell me what I need to do, what pill I need to take and then what surgery I need to have to make me better right here, right now, today. But in reality there's no magic bullet. Reality it's just like most things in life it takes time, dedication and discipline and over time, you'll get better as a result. And that's not comforting to hear, and still to this day I have to practice foundation training and other resiliency training at least 10 to 20 minutes a day to maintain my health and my level of fitness that I want.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the Fire you Carry podcast. We are your hosts on Kevin Welsh, I'm Noel Lilly and today we have a treat. We have Captain Evan Holquist, la County Fire Department, station 33.
Speaker 3:Evan. Welcome to the show, buddy. Thanks for having me. Guys, I'm stoked to be here.
Speaker 2:All captains that we have on the show love it when we call that out right at the beginning, an officer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can see my face.
Speaker 2:Come on guys, it has to be said. It has to be said.
Speaker 1:Yes, noel, start us up. We got a health summit coming up. This to me. I've only been around 12 years, but this seems to be a first that I've seen of this kind of nature that you do and some of our, you know, we know these guys on this thing and they're well known savages and really experts in the field of health and wellness stuff, but it seems cool. I'm going to it. I signed up, but you want to tell us about this health summit that's coming up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely Number one. Thanks for signing up. I appreciate it. So on October 28th at nine o'clock at the fire museum, we're putting on a health summit, and my goal in doing this is getting health and wellness information out there to firefighters by fellow firefighters, and I want to create an atmosphere that's fun, that's interactive and something where we can all learn at and learn something new, and so I describe it to guys as kind of a Ted Talk style interactive event for firefighters. So we're going to have five different speakers, like you said.
Speaker 3:You'll probably know four of them Actually, probably know all five of them. Four of us are going to do 15 minutes to 30 minutes our take on what we want to deliver to the firefighters and what's most important, and then we're going to finish it up with Travis House, and if you don't know about him, you definitely need to check him out. But he's going to talk to us about recalibrating your mind and his experience with being a Marine police officer and a firefighter and how he has developed a system that works for him. So I'm super stoked for it. It's going to be a great day. Please sign up and if you have any questions about it, email me, and my email is on the link that's attached to the bear app underneath the fire sink.
Speaker 2:We'll put in the show notes too, so it's easier to find who's this open to.
Speaker 3:It's open to all association members. So right now we have about 85 to 90 people signed up. We're going to aim for 200. So if we reach a certain mark where it's not looking like enough association members are signing up, then we're going to open it up to other departments.
Speaker 2:So with this health summit, I imagine that one of your goals is to try to put out some information that's going to be I don't know how to say this without sounding negative, but we have in our department, you know, the fitness for life stuff which, depending on the month, is good information. But, guys, because it's online, there's not really any kind of like in person aspect of that. I know a lot of guys are either just ignoring that or you know you're just watching the video while you're watching the game and just kind of clicking through it. So I imagine that's kind of what you're trying to tackle is getting more information out to the guys, better information, and then information from your peers that you can look at and talk to guys that you know are out there. Is that kind of one of your goals Personally.
Speaker 3:I think this puts in perspective. I've taken a deep dive into all this health and wellness information as it applies to firefighters and it's gone through my own personal journey with it and I try to talk to as many people as possible and help out as many people as possible. But I'm only one person and I've had these great conversations, like you guys do, with these other great firefighters that just have a lot to share, and it's hard to get that information out there and I wanted to get it out there so people have access to it. It can be fun, it can be interesting.
Speaker 3:It's not the same old stuff that we have seen since 1980 or nothing against that, what they were coming up with back then, but we've evolved since then. Things have changed and we got to learn to adapt. So it's just a collection of all this great information that these guys have learned themselves. And I say that you know at the beginning, when we talked about the health summit, it's from firefighters. So I think guys can resonate with firefighters a lot more when they've actually been through it, when they're telling you hey, this is what works for me, and so that's the ultimate goal is to get this information that we've learned ourselves out there to all our members.
Speaker 2:And we know we've got a huge problem in the department. I don't know what the numbers are currently, but the amount of guys that are out on injury right now is I mean, just to be totally brutally honest, it's unsustainable. So we have to do something different.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. When I was a PFT, I was looking at the statistics for neck, back, shoulder, knee and hip injuries and the amount of money that we spent on injuries at that time and this was in 2018 was over 90 million, and to me that just seems like a broken system, something is going wrong there and that we need to fix it, and so it's been my goal again to I don't think there's a ton of good information out there from firefighters and how to apply it, you know, to our unique profession, our unique circumstances, so it's been my goal to get that information out there.
Speaker 2:It seems like too. I know that our union and our department and a lot of individuals have been trying to address those issues of guys being out on injury, but it seems to me like the best way to do it is at the individual level, like if we can reach guys and help them understand look, you have to be fit. You can't just sit in the blue chair and do nothing because then when you go on an incident you're going to get injured, but also you can't be overdoing it, which I know we're going to talk about later on the episode with you. So, finding that balance, finding what works for you, if we can fix that on an individual level, I feel like that's the best place to have a positive impact on the workforce, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:It totally does. You got to take ownership, and the talk that I'm going to give is titled the art of resilience and strength. And life is hard. The job is hard. It's not a matter of if something's going to happen and I'm not necessarily talking about something big but on a daily basis things happen and you have to take the ownership to be prepared for that and then make your mind, your body, ready for whatever life throws at you.
Speaker 3:And that's really what I'm trying to put out there, and it's taken me years, decades, actually to do this, because I started at a fire department up here on the mountain in 2003 as a pay call. My father was a firefighter, so I come from a firefighter family. He had a really bad back. Um ended up getting on prescription pills and that was a whole problem in and of itself. So I've seen a destructive path that can happen when things aren't handled properly. So do we just got to get the quality information out there so guys can access it. It can be simple and straightforward and they can implement it easily themselves.
Speaker 2:All right, one more time, tell the listener what the guests, who the guests are, who's going to be there, and then I understand you're going to have some food, right? You're feeding the guys. I am feeding the guys, of course, let's hear about that. You might even have some cookies.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, we're going to have some food. It's going to be at the museum, like I said, which is a fantastic spot. If you've never been to the new new museum and bellflower it's beautiful. So I think it sets the stage for what we're talking about. Number one Um yeah, there'll be a free lunch provided by the catering service that does the events on the second floor, and the speakers are going to be myself, which I talked about the art of resilience and strength, then it's going to be Dave Tebow talking about jujitsu and self-defense.
Speaker 3:And then it's going to be Garrett Barker, who's going to be talking about his own mental health protocol, called overhaul, and how to handle it. And then, lastly, brian Andrews, the firefighter from LA County, who's going to be talking about backing the batch. So he's got a system of setting yourself up, for success is something where to happen to you. And then we're going to be finishing it off with our keynote speaker, travis House.
Speaker 2:I'm just going to tell you right now Kevin signed up, I signed up, we're going to be there. We're excited about this. All of these guys I don't know each one of them personally, but I'm excited to hear all of their perspectives and to have some really good takeaways that I bring out of this. So we want you guys to come down, come hang out with us, come be a part of this awesome event. It's something I don't think's happened before in the department, and if you guys want more of this kind of stuff which you do the way that we make that happen is by showing up and supporting it, learning from it, giving positive feedback and doing more of it. So we'll be there. Come down and hang out with us, for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:Thank you for taking the charge, because I think there are outliers like Noel and I when we first got an ice bath five years ago. People are like those guys are out of control.
Speaker 1:We're with no, was eating keto or paleo or carnivore. And sadly, I do think that there is a cultural or generational shift, but I think it takes guys like you to do that because the cultural norm is a guy could come in hungover, he could eat it like McDonald's three times a day breakfast, lunch and dinner and then they'll laugh it off and that's normal and the guys have time bomb and I think the guys that came, we all came in at a certain level of fitness and unfortunately, sometimes for all the circumstances, we let that go. But it really takes somebody like you to kind of say, hold on time out. And there's so much information out there. We, from Peter Atea to Tim Ferris, to all the guys that we listened to and all the and I think it's great to actually have some department background, but somebody in the department that are actually saying hey, we're, we're bringing these things together. That we kind of all hear individually, but now man having a focused effort to look at it is phenomenal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. It's going to be a great day and if this is something and it is going to be successful, but this is something that is successful that day we reached that number I want to have it be something that we do annually. I think, like you said, kevin, there's so much information to talk about that there shouldn't be an event like that, or there should always be an event like this on a yearly basis, so we can all get together, talk about the latest stuff that we think that we need to be aware of and get better as a result.
Speaker 2:We don't do a very good job in this department of tapping the resources that we have yes, just on hand Like we have so many guys like yourself or Dave Tebow or the other guys are going to be speaking and we just don't. We don't tap into that enough unless you work at those stations or in that battalion or you do something with those guys on the side like you just don't get exposed to that and we have just a wealth of guys that have a ton of knowledge and even though we really technically just met, I know enough about you to know that you are one of those guys. So I'm excited it's going to be. It's going to be a successful event. You are correct, and hopefully we fill the rest of those spots with our podcast listeners.
Speaker 3:I think we will. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Pause the podcast. Scroll down into the show notes.
Speaker 2:We're going to put a link into that as well, right, yeah, I got to go sign up register.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to touch base we talked about briefly but I think there's a personality tribe that's drawn to being a first responder or no was an army ranger. I think there's a personality type you want to get after it. You're kind of that type a dude, and I think, like the CrossFit seemed this unbelievable thing in the beginning where it was melting Olympic lifting and gymnastics and you had these Metcons and there was always something to improve on. You were never going to perfect anything and it was really attractive when I was like going through the fire service to say this looks very functional, like hey, we're pulling, pulling tires, and you know we're doing all that stuff. So I got, I think, nolan, I both got into it in like 07, 08.
Speaker 1:And when I went into the academy I felt super fit. I felt like I was ready to pretty much do anything and anything. But when the academy at the time we did old school military stuff. We ran Shilohill, you know what I mean, and we did kind of a circuit type of thing and then you pulled hose and threw ladders the rest of the day. But so I think I had a base level of fitness. But if you just went back into the military thing, like that's what we were doing, I think, before you kind of took over the PT with us. But I wanted to hear maybe your background with CrossFit and then obviously I know you put in some functional stuff in our academy. Now it's funny, like you hear. I'm like, oh, they don't run anymore because I got to warm up for 15, 20.
Speaker 1:And all the older guys are complaining that there's warm up style, we never warmed up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I got into CrossFit during the same time you did it. I think it was 2007, 2008. I was a fireman up here, like I talked about.
Speaker 2:Where's up here? Hold on, I heard you say that earlier.
Speaker 3:Sorry, Lake Arrowhead. Where do you guys do your retreat at? In CrossFit.
Speaker 2:You're in Lake Arrowhead right now. Yeah, why aren't we in the same room? I'm in CrossFit I know.
Speaker 3:Are you really? Yeah, no way, yeah, that's where I work. Sorry, I worked at Fire Station 25 up on Crest Forest Drive for seven, eight years.
Speaker 2:So that's like five minutes from my house, anyway, carry on.
Speaker 3:I know that Very cool, yeah, great place to start a career at. Had a blast and I got into it. Saw the video of I forget who it was, but some guy that did the firefighter Olympics and he was doing basically Fran right Thrusters and pull-ups, 21-15-9 with his BA on it. I was blown away.
Speaker 1:It's probably not a senior. Yeah, it might have been. Yeah, it might have been.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he's stud, yeah, and I got hooked because I tried that and it smoked me like nothing had ever smoked me before. And, like you said, kevin, it was so similar to what I had experienced when you were on a structure fire that I just needed more. So I took a huge dive into that. I went to every course that they offered. I opened up a gym up here out of my garage. We ran it for two years and they learned a lot. And from there I got hired with the county and I was kind of at the position where am I going to continue this gym thing full-time and go to a commercial spot, or am I going to focus on the county aspect? And it just became too much and it was going to be too costly to go full-time. So I chose to focus on my career path in the county and I'm glad I did, just because everything that it's given me and since then I've gone to a lot of courses and anything that I can possibly get myself into because the knowledge in this arena is huge and I just want to soak up every last drop that's in there.
Speaker 3:But the real catalyst for me in my health and fitness career kind of came out one of my biggest failures, which was when I injured my back and I had never thought about moving the right way or my back not being healthy. Like I said, my dad had had a bad back. He was a fireman in LA City for 25 years at that point, so I saw him go through a bunch of stuff, but I never thought it was going to happen to me. I was young, I was doing crossfit, I was good to go, but I never treated my body the way I should have. And in 2011, 2012, I injured my back. I was doing squat cleans, landed in the bottom position, immediately felt something was off. I'm like, oh man, I messed something up. And then I move around, I try to do some things, and this is different than anything I've ever felt before.
Speaker 3:Go to the Cairo and he basically tells me yeah, you probably herniated the disc. And I'm just at that point, I was 28. I'm going what do I do? This is oh crap, this is going to be horrible. He's like let's get an MRI, let's see what's going on. So I get an MRI. It does show a disc herniation, multiple levels of degeneration, some arthritis in that area. I talked to an orthopedic surgeon and he tells me hey, you're not going to be a fireman anymore. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, I'm like wow, 28 years old, not going to be a fireman anymore. You need to choose a different career path. You need surgery and you're never going to work out the same, you're never going to be able to deadlift. And I was blown away, right, and that kind of threw me into a deep spin of negativity and depression and everything that goes along with news like that, just because I was so associated with being physical, with my identity. So I looked for everything, everything that I could possibly find about recovering from back injuries and there's a lot of bad information out there, it turns out. And then I stumbled upon foundation training from my Cairo, because I went back to him and I kept asking him what do I need to do? He gave me this book with this real fit looking guy, young guy, doing this weird pose position, and I'm like that's it, that's all I need to do. He's like, yeah, just do this stuff and you'll get better. I kind of blew it off. I did it. I tried it one time. It felt like it hurt and made it worse, so I'm not going to do this, this stuff's not going to work. But then I kept hurting. I kept not getting better. No one was really able to help.
Speaker 3:So I decided that I was going to give this foundation training a real go, and I did. I started to follow the 12 minute video online and I think if most firefighters by now are probably familiar with that video and I started doing. It started getting results, but I wanted more. So I went to the certification and I learned their theory about what's happening with back injuries and what's happening with the chronic breakdown of the body, and I started talking to them their team because one of their team members was a who's now a good friend of mine. Jesse Salas was a firefighter at Orlando, in Florida, and then left that to go work for foundation training full time. So him and I really connected and I talked to him. And I talked to Dr Goodman, the one that created the program who has an amazing story, by the way, about how he created it, about the holes that we see in the fire service and how I'm constantly seeing guys like myself and girls that are injured right Knees, hips, shoulders, neck, low back and I'm going, what's going on, and it just keeps happening at a younger and younger age.
Speaker 3:So I dove into that.
Speaker 3:I wanted to make this information more well known, so I started bringing it to the academy, bringing it to the tower, guys starting getting better, started seeing results Not only in their aches and pains but just in their overall performance.
Speaker 3:So from there I just dove into any information that was aligned with that theory of what foundation training was about, which is basically like I talked about earlier what my talk is going to be on is resilience. And so I looked into stuff like Mark Ripitow stuff and I know, kevin, that you've done that starting strength before I talked to Tebo about that and then Strong First, and a lot of these theories and a lot of the information that they're talking about aligns and matches up. And then so I started taking their courses, reading all their books, things like Stuart McGill, who is another phenomenal resource in this arena and from there I took it to the academy, because I became a PFT peer fitness trainer and I became in charge of the PT there and I just saw how all this information fits so well and fits so well with Firefighter. So I know that was a long-winded way about asking my background in fitness, but it's important to highlight what happened and why I really got into fitness.
Speaker 2:Do you think? I know you mentioned that you weren't concerned early on about the quality of your movement, but I know that for me when I first kind of went down the CrossFit rabbit hole, I was doing a lot of overtraining without realizing it. Was that part of what you were doing as well at that time, before you got injured? Do you think?
Speaker 3:Oh, 100%. I think it's really calm. Yeah, I think when you overtrain and you get too glycolytic too often, you're working that energy path of you're using just sugar for fuel. There's the creatine phosphate, there's the glycolytic and there's the aerobic. But when you're in that glycolytic zone which is where I was addicted with CrossFit and I didn't really train any other area I was working out three times a day, was doing Fran, and then I'm doing a 500-meter row and then I'm doing some other random thing in that time frame.
Speaker 2:Chasing numbers. Chasing numbers.
Speaker 3:I chased them bad and hard, but as a result, there's three things that are going to happen when you build up too much, when you're too glycolytic, you're going to get injured, burnt out or sick, or you're going to get all three at the same time, which I think that's kind of what was happening with me, and so your training definitely has to be smart, you have to be methodical and you have to understand what's taking place. So, with firefighters now, with myself in general, I tell people that glycolytic hit you got to do that once every two weeks and then beyond that is too much. Especially, it depends on your workload, your stress level and then where you're at, because if you go push past that and these are coming from experts that are much smarter than me If you go beyond that, then the wheels start coming off.
Speaker 2:Describe to me what glycolytic hit Like. What does that mean? So if I'm doing that once every two weeks, what is that going to look like?
Speaker 3:just as an example, so my favorite thing to test for firefighters is the snatch test, which comes from Strong First. So if you take one 53-pound kettlebell for men, one 35-pound kettlebell for females and you swing, snatch that kettlebell for five minutes, the goal would be to do as many as you possibly can. Of course it's good form. Of course you'd have to build up with it. But the minimum to pass their course at Strong First is 100. And it is brutal.
Speaker 3:It is something that just hits you right in the gut and it makes you feel like you're basically on a structure fight right, everyone's done the hose. Pull where it feels like you're going to throw up Especially you engineers out there done that a couple of times where you just you look back in that hydrant and you're like, oh man, this is going to hurt and it takes you that 30 seconds to a minute to get there and pull that hose. That's that glycolytic hit. So I think the best way to test that is with a snatch test because it's easily measurable and you're covering a lot when you're doing it. You're covering grip strength, unilateral strength, grip endurance, torso endurance, core strength, hip explosiveness.
Speaker 3:There's a lot that's going on and I could tell a lot about how a firefighter or just a person in general is doing health and wellness-wise with their body by just doing the snatch test. And in fact it used to be. I don't know if they still do it, but it was called the secret service snatch test and it was 10 minutes that they would do and they had to do a minimum of 200 for their counter assault team. So I've tried that once and I got 190. I couldn't do it. It was horrible.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Yeah, that's brutal. All right, so let me back up a sec. You have this back injury. Were you off work or were you still working?
Speaker 3:I was still working, I was on probation when it happened, so you're still working.
Speaker 1:Obviously they're saying your career is over and you just started. And then you're wearing 80 pounds of gear, you're still going on the calls, you're still being the guy that's running around. So did you have to take a tactical pause and say I'm not going to do the regular PT, I'm not going to do it and I'm only going to do foundation training? Or did you say I'm still running, I'm still crossfitting, I'm still, you know.
Speaker 3:I ran my head against the wall so many times. I did not want to admit that to myself, that I was injured and that I needed to do something different. I kept trying to do the same stuff that I was doing over and over again, thinking that it would help me, and eventually, like I said, after hitting my head against the wall so many times, I realized, hey, I got to switch it up, I need to take a tactical pause. Like you said, I have to just do foundation training and other resilient type training for a period of time until I start to get better. And I did that.
Speaker 3:And it was one of those things of two steps forward, one step back. And I kept doing that until I basically had days where I was forgetting that I had it injured back, forgetting what it was like to have pain, forgetting what it felt like to feel like you're 80 years old when you're 28. And eventually, through purposeful programming, I was able to get back to a state where I'm far stronger and far more resilient than I ever was at 28. And I'm able to deadlift two times my body weight now, and I'm not saying that like woo, look at me. That's so cool because it's not really that impressive compared to other strength numbers out there, but what's impressive about it is when you have an expert in his field telling you you will never be a firefighter again and you will never deadlift again, and then I'm able to counteract that and then deadlift two times my body weight with no pain and feel better as a result.
Speaker 2:Why do you think because this is a common story that we've heard multiple times why do you think that the I'm going to put them in quotations here the expert, why is that his perspective? Why are they unaware, or are they choosing to be unaware, that there are other ways of handling an injury like that?
Speaker 3:I think it's both through my experience of working because now I work with foundation training and teach at their certifications so I'm surrounded by a lot of high level people that is, pts, ots, chiropractors who do a phenomenal job at addressing issues like this, and I think what ends up happening is both right. Some people choose to ignore it, some people are just unaware of it, because then the reality is is most MDs and or surgeons. The amount of time that they spend getting the education actually on rehabbing an injury is probably not a lot. I don't know how much it is, but it's not a lot. They're an expert in their field. He's an orthopedic surgeon. That's what he does. He doesn't know necessarily how to rehab it from a therapeutic point of view.
Speaker 3:So I think it's that and I think it's also changing the culture, changing the shift and changing people. Look at an injury and they want the fix right Tell me what I need to do, what pill I need to take and then what surgery I need to have to make me better right here, right now, today. But in reality there's no magic bullet. Reality it's just like most things in life. It takes time, dedication and discipline and over time you'll get better as a result, and that's not comforting to hear. And still, to this day, I have to practice foundation training and other resiliency training at least 10 to 20 minutes a day to maintain my health and my level of fitness that I want.
Speaker 1:I love this. So in fitness, to me, you always have to have a goal and I think sometimes fitness routines have competing goals. So, like when I was in my 20s I did triathlons. Well, I had to be lean and mean and strength wasn't a really an important thing at all, it was basically cardio and cardio and cardio. And then I wanted to go on the opposite end of that spectrum and say what's the opposite? It was a powerlifting. And so I joined a powerlifting gym and we did starting strength and my powerlifting numbers went through the roof. But they really told me, like CrossFit was out, running is out, all the everything was out. And like when I'm resting three minutes between deadlift sets, I'm literally sitting down resting. And then I had, we had a brush fire and my numbers went through the roof and it was really fun because I've always been a smaller guy to like really push numbers. It's really fun. But we went on a brush fire and I thought I was gonna die like cause I had no cardio right.
Speaker 1:And so when you look at a firefighter in general that says, hey, we're gonna start in our mid twenties, let's say on average, and you're gonna go to 55 on average, the goal has to be a base level of strength and some sort of base level of cardiovascular fitness. Right, you have to have. I don't know if that, if they're competing goals, but I like when we talked to Rwano he kind of has a cyclical approach to the year where he's doing, hey, brush fires are in the summer and they do more of a body weight. Do you have an outlook to say, hey, if I had a firefighter, you have to have some sort of base level of strength and some sort of base level of cardio. What kind of a program that you would look at? Or do you look at the individual saying, hey, you might have some weaknesses in this area or that area. You gotta build that first.
Speaker 3:Yeah to all that. So definitely it's individual, individual by individual basis. But I break up the year similar or in a same style as Rwano, just slightly different, and it's you know, you gotta work on strength for a period of year, pure strength, it has to be it. Strength is the first thing, or power is the first thing that we lose as we age, but strength is the next thing that we lose as we age, and its correlation to longevity is is undoubtable. You have to get as strong as possible and you have to maintain that as long as possible. I quote this you talked about Peter or Tia earlier. Your risk of all cause mortality, dying of one of four things, which is cancer, metabolic disorder, vascular disease or Alzheimer's by smoking is, excuse me, by diabetes is 25% increased risk. By smoking, it's 50% risk. So that's double. By not being strong enough, it's a 250% increased risk. Wow.
Speaker 2:So, you.
Speaker 3:It just shows you the importance of strength and that goes along with like you gotta be able to grab yourself before you fall maintaining a muscle mass, bone density, ligament and tendon health. So it's huge. So you have to do that and you can keep that up, you know, throughout the year. The next thing and I get this from one of my favorite coaches is Jeff Newpert the next thing you should focus on is a hypertrophy based program, and that's just something where you just build muscle through the time of year and, depending on the person, I'll fluctuate the amount of time that we focus in each one of these areas. If somebody, like you, said if they're weak in one area, I'll include a program that's focusing on those weakness for a longer period of time. After the hypertrophy then comes endurance, and this is for me, it's more of strength endurance and power endurance with the use of kettlebells. And then, lastly, that fourth thing is you gotta work on your weak links. A lot of us have weak links that we are aware of, that we never really address, and it needs to be addressed and worked on. And these are things where you can do, like foundation training, some of McGill's work, some of the other stretching stuff that is not gonna be counterproductive towards your other work. But based on that, I include that with a firefighters overall look and you gear it towards a firefighter and the goals that I'd like to see people be able to have are a few For strength training, it's like what I just talked about. It's two times body weight deadlift. That's what I'd like to see firefighters have and maintain. If you can do that and maintain that, then you're well ahead of the game For conditioning and or like cardio, aerobic or endurance that you're talking about.
Speaker 3:It's the snatch test. Again, for me, nothing beats that in its ability to duplicate what we do Because of a lot of what we do. Unless you're hiking the hills all day and you're in the camps, which is a unique thing is a start stop sort of process. When it's conditioning work right If I'm at 33, we get a commercial fire, we get a structure fire, we run out to the rig and then we put on our gear. Then we're stopping, we're sitting in down and then you're sitting there for a second.
Speaker 3:Then you hop off the rig and, depending on your if you're a fireman, captain or engineer you're usually doing something. Let's say you're a fireman, then you're pulling the hose to the house, then you're stopping for a second calling for water and then somebody's forcing the door, then you're going inside. So it's the start stop type of thing, and a lot of it has to be used through our muscles and muscular endurance. So it's this combination of muscular endurance and cardiorespiratory conditioning. So for me, if a firefighter can get up to a two times body weight deadlift and maintain a conditioning level to pass the snatch test, that is, 100 reps in five minutes, then they're at a really good place and they can maintain that for a very long time.
Speaker 1:That's the goal.
Speaker 1:All right, let's start with number one on that list. So I'm visualizing a pyramid that you have with strength as the base and I know, like I've been to Ripple Toes thing and I did starting strength, which is a linear progression, I would say, where you're basically squatting three times a week and then and you can maybe explain that, but would you recommend that Because I recommend that to a lot of females specifically to say, hey, they innately have, let's say, less strength than the average male that I think that it's a really smart program and if you're able to stick with it, like religiously I had to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I was squat, squat, squat and you're adding five pounds basically every week. And my year I started slow with, like, let's say, I was squatting three sets of five at 135. And then the next day it was three sets of five at 140 and then 145. And it was just a very slow, linear progression. Would you suggest that? Is that something that you guys for the number one, for the base of the pyramid, strength, where you put people?
Speaker 3:So I definitely recommend starting strength. It's a phenomenal program in its simplicity and its effectiveness. People often overlook it and dismiss it because it looks so easy. Oh, I just got to do three sets of five of bench, three sets of five of a deadlift, three sets of five to start of a squat, and then the other day I'm gonna do a standing press and that's it. And I do that three days a week, but they don't understand the process that goes behind it and the generation of tension and the health benefits with that.
Speaker 3:But before I, if we're talking about the base pyramid of overall health, if I'm understanding kind of your question, kevin, and like strength being there, it is definitely there, but I'm gonna put a couple of two things before that, because you got to build up these other things before you get to this level, at least with people that I work with. And the number one thing and this goes back to foundation training, but there's other protocols that affect this and that's got to be posture and it sounds super boring, right, posture. So you're gonna talk about posture but people don't realize in our modern lifestyle posture and how much it affects your overall stress level, your recovery level and your performance. And I'll give you an example. So because of modern lifestyle and in foundation training we call this complacent adaptation. You're on your phone too much. You're on a computer too much, you're sitting, you're driving too much. This is gonna lead to a few things your chin is gonna start jutting forward, your shoulders are gonna round, your low back's gonna round and then your hips are gonna externally rotate too much. So not only is that causing compression at each one of those joints, but there's a big thing going on at the base of the skull. There's two things of the base skull called the suboccipital triangle that has the vein artery nerve on either side that exits. This is really important, obviously, for blood flow and for nerve conduction, for your brain to work appropriately. But when your chin is in that forward position, you're in a constant state of chronic stress, so you're just slightly sympathetic all the time, which will never allow you to fully recover as a result of that. And then it's also compressing the phrenic nerve, which controls the diaphragm. And this leads into my next thing that I'm talking about.
Speaker 3:When you don't have full control of your diaphragm and how much breathing matters, there's a whole host of problems that aren't gonna happen. We know we breathe up to 25,000 times a day. You gotta learn how to do it the right way. But when you have bad, poor posture and position, you're breathing too high into your chest and your neck and you're not inflating and using your diaphragm enough. But when you're able to use your diaphragm enough and stack your posture appropriately head on top of the neck, neck on top of the shoulders, rib cage on top of the pelvis, so on and so forth it's pretty amazing what starts to happen. You get full expansion of your diaphragm and you start to be able to fully use your intra-abdominal area to create stability in the pelvis and in the low back and you start to work these inner muscles down there that have never been worked before.
Speaker 3:Things like the transversus abdominis interobliques moltifidize your pelvic floor and your diaphragm and as a result of doing that, what ends up happening is there's less tension on the muscles and you're going into a parasympathetic state.
Speaker 3:More blood flow to the muscles, which means less tension on the joints, which ultimately means less tension and less pain that people have and less injuries.
Speaker 3:So what's pretty amazing about this whole thing is because breath and posture are at the bottom of that pyramid, and then foundation training and other protocols that apply that are important. When you start to do that, then your performance starts to increase in the other areas as a result and everything else just gets better. So there's a lot of firefighters that come to me that are in pain, and one of the first things I do is just lay them on their back, have them put their knees up and have them do something that's called recovery breathing where they're literally just trying to expand their abdomen to the front sides and back as much as possible, and I can't express how important that is and how everybody should be doing that at least five times or, excuse me, five minutes a day, especially after your workout, because it speeds up the recovery process. So I would put breath and posture here at the base of the pyramid and then after that, then I would put the strength it's foundation similar to TNS training.
Speaker 1:We had Stu White on the show who is big on this dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, but it sounds very similar to foundation. I don't know if that's DNS, yes, DNS.
Speaker 3:I'm not too familiar with their work. I know I think DNS was created by chiropractor as well, but I can't quote exactly what they do, but I've heard similar things. But what foundation training does an excellent job of doing is addressing all these things simultaneously posture, position, movement pattern, breath work, you know. Expansion of the diaphragm, and they do it. And then building of endurance in the torso, which I could talk about in the seconds of the importance of back health, but they do it simultaneously and in a really creative and fun way where it doesn't feel like you're doing PT because you're doing a workout, you're falling along on a video watching a guy teaching you, but you're basically doing PT for your body.
Speaker 2:So how do we get firemen or just men in general to buy into something like that? Because I mean, you kind of said it right off the bat Kevin's going, let's talk starting strength and you're telling him, no, we gotta talk posture and breathing, which I mean you know that's boring stuff. It's hard to get guys excited about that. So how do we get guys to buy in prior to them getting injured and then coming to you and needing to fix that? How do we get them fired up about this stuff prior? Because it's not. I'm gonna tell you right now for me, when I have time at the station, it's time to work out, and I'm doing it solo because of the crew I'm with. I don't take time to do stuff like that, and I know that I need to. But I just wanna get into the fun part of the workout. I wanna start crushing it right away, and so I'm not doing stuff like that. So I understand the importance of it and I know that I need to implement that. How do we sell that?
Speaker 3:I think we can sell it in a few ways. I think the first way we can sell it is, you know, number one like I talked about early on, it's not a matter of if but when, and that's just the reality of life. Like you're gonna have injuries, you're gonna have flare ups. Do you wanna be prepared for that, you wanna be well prepared for that, or do you just wanna go through a process like I went through, which I don't recommend? And number two I would say it's going to drastically and I'm not being dramatic but increase your performance in all areas of life.
Speaker 3:I mean, breath, like I said, is something that we do so often that if you do it the right way, it's gonna affect everything. It's gonna affect the mood, it's gonna affect the patients, it's gonna affect outlook, it's gonna affect energy, all these things. And then we could do it in a way that's fun and that's interesting and not overly cumbersome, it doesn't take up a ton of time. So this stuff that I'm talking about the foundation training, the other building of endurance and the torso, the breath work, the posture stuff it takes five minutes before you work out, it takes five minutes after your workout. So it's not a huge commitment and by doing that, like I said, you're just gonna be able to number one, be prepared when something does happen and be able to bounce back quicker, and then, number two, you're gonna be able to reach your goals quicker and faster.
Speaker 2:Kind of the way I look at it. We'll just we'll take it to something that I've spent a lot of time developing and if you're wanting to be a good shooter for example part of your job or just your free time as you wanna shoot if you're gonna get really good at that, you cannot progress directly into okay, I'm clearing rooms and I'm doing stress shoots or competing in three gun or whatever. You have to go back to the basics and when I was back in Ranger Battalion we used to spend literally hours working just on trigger pull stuff. We would balance a penny at the end of the barrel and just trigger pull after trigger pull after trigger pull until you could do that without ever dropping the penny. And that's boring but it translates into when you do start doing the exciting stuff in real, tangible and just incredible ways. And if you ignore that and you don't do it, you don't build that foundation and get really good at the basics. You're never going to excel at the higher level stuff. That's more fun if you will.
Speaker 3:Yeah, couldn't agree more. It reminds me of a story about John Wooden, who's one of my heroes and I think is an amazing person just to look up to. And maybe people have heard this, maybe they haven't, but it's an important story that highlights what we're talking about. At the very beginning of practice, the first practice of the year for basketball for the UCLA Bruins, no matter who you are, you'd have you sit down and he would go over putting on your socks properly, putting on your shoes properly and tying your shoes, cause if people didn't put their socks on right, they develop blisters. And then, when they develop blisters and they moved weird, and when they moved weird, they were distracted and they couldn't remember the place, so on and so forth. So the basics are so important.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 3:I've never heard that story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, john wins Awesome. He's got a couple of really cool books about him and Walton's perspective on him is pretty amazing too. But yeah, so I want to know. At a fire station, so, like Noel and I, when we work together, you know you go in your morning, you have your cup of coffee, you start all your chainsaws, we'd blast music you know what I mean and then at some point you would call lineup, we'd see what's going on for the day, we'd be us a little bit about the families and then we'd go out and pump music in anticipation that we're gonna get a call, we're gonna get erupted, and sometimes we wouldn't. Sometimes we wouldn't but we'd like, we'd want to get into the workout because we wanted to Work out together. We love the camaraderie piece.
Speaker 1:Well, you have a crew of savages. Somebody that wants to work at 33's is a go-go that they want to get into it. They want to get after it. Are you able to take? I love what you're doing with Dave. Dave Tebow and I are very close and you have a racehorse on your hands. Here's the guy that at one point had a 500 pound deadlift in a sub five minute mile. He's a black belt and jujitsu in the Pan American games and he's telling me that you're getting them on the simple or this, the simple and sinister Pavels program with kettlebell and all these sounds. Can I do it four days? We can I do it six?
Speaker 3:days.
Speaker 1:We can I do it and it's slowing down, so, but are you able to say like, hey, like, give me what the after lineup and I know you lead from the front, I see what you do but are you able to say, hey, we're gonna do five minutes of foundation training before we get into whatever we're gonna do? Or is that something that you've tried to encourage, to say, what does your day look like at work and then at home? How do you incorporate that?
Speaker 3:like you said, I try to leave from the front. I don't force guys to do anything. I think it's important to talk to them about things and I engage in conversations with guys, but by no means is my style to be like, hey, everyone get out here right now and we're doing this. I Talk to him about it and they see that it works, because you know, I tell my story and they see people coming through all the time at the station. But how my day looks, you know at the beginning when I'm going to work, is I wake up super early here at home around three o'clock, and Then I get in some meditation time because I think it's important to train your mind.
Speaker 3:And I don't like the word meditation because it's got a lot of connotations, a hippie-dippy style stuff you think about. But I look at it as mental training. You have to train your mind like you train your body. It is probably, if not it is, more important in your body and I know working out has the capacity to train your mind to a degree. But you got to do specific mental training in some regard. So that's how I wake up my day, because it sets the tone, and then drive there to work, and I'm lucky because it's a two-hour drive, so I got a lot of time to learn some things and I can't tell you.
Speaker 3:You got to keep a positive. I can't tell you how many things I've accomplished through through my drive. All right, just talking out loud, repeating things, for example, like preparing for this upcoming health summit. That's how I prepare for my speech. I spend about a half hour every morning in preparation For some sort of event coming up, and sometimes it's, you know, preparation for a health summit, upcoming foundation training, filming or Just something else going on in life that I have going on, and then usually I like to listen to some sort of podcast or audiobook and then I'm at work and then I have time for probably like a 10 15 minute quick snooze and then I work out before we go in, before you know seven o'clock, get into the gym by 550 and get it in, because I hate being bothered. And, as you know, kevin, strength training it's like once you warm up and you're in that heavy zone, you cannot get a call and then have to come back.
Speaker 1:It's just like there's no time to get the third set in game over.
Speaker 3:So I got to get it in and and I got to get it interrupted and it sets my tone for the day. And then from there it's just like you said guys, at seven o'clock it's time to go to work. I start doing the office work, we start setting up with the day and Then we have lineup and then it's time for guys, and a lot of our guys, like you said, they're savages. These guys like to get after it. So the gym is pretty full at six o'clock in the morning, unlike other places, but sometimes you can't get it in and that is what it is. And then guys get it in. After that.
Speaker 3:I tell guys you have All the time in the world to work out, because it is that important to me that everybody gets a workout in every day.
Speaker 3:So we're so busy that you know, sometimes we don't get lineup because we have three different, four different pieces of equipment running in different directions all over the place. So I tell guys, get it in when you can and then from there, then we usually do some training right after our PT and we go to lunch and then it's time for, as Garrett Barker says, snooze for the crews at twos he's our rhymer. We go from there and then, you know, the rest of the day is for Individual time and preparation, because a lot of guys are involved in different committees and Events and I give them that couple hours to prepare for it in between calls and it's dinner time and it's bro time after that. So you know, that's that's how we incorporate it. We do it but the best we can. I give guys the leeway to adapt to our high-call volume and guys do a phenomenal job with it. Everyone there is a Go-getter and is as fit as they come.
Speaker 2:You mentioned audiobooks. I listen to a lot of audiobooks too, because I have also a long drive. You got a couple that you could recommend that you've listened to over the past couple years. It had a good, positive impact on you.
Speaker 3:I'm a huge fan of anything that has to do with polar expeditions, so anything about people going to the North Pole or the South Pole and in reality they call the third pole right Mount Everest or any of the taller AK peaks. So you probably heard about endurance, about the journey of Ernest Shackleton.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that is a phenomenal book and a phenomenal Story about leadership and how things go the right way. The opposite of that is Madhouse at the end of the earth, which is somebody that goes to the South Pole just like Shackleton did actually did, I think, 20 to 30 years beforehand and it's the complete opposite way. You see how a poor leader, how much that affects the entire crew and people go crazy, people die, I mean, people do some wild things as a result, and if you know anything about the the polar expeditions, it's there spent in half the year in complete darkness, locked in ice with each other, with really poor food and poor health. So things get pretty crazy and wild. And the other one that I'd recommend in that same genre is Kingdom of ice, about the USS Jeanette.
Speaker 3:This was another boat that tried to go through the Northwest Passage. They used to believe in some really funky things like if you got through the Northwest Passage, it was a tropical paradise. So these guys were trying to do it. These poor guys got stuck and they had great leadership and but it was a horrible outcome. And it's just a another example of, even when you have everything set up right, how things can just still go bad. So I'd recommend those three and anything that's related again to the polar expeditions, because it's it's just. It speaks a lot to the human spirit and you learn a lot about humans and leadership as a result.
Speaker 2:Yeah, through putting them into an extreme environment like that, where it seems like it would be impossible to survive, you get all kinds of great Just lessons, like you said, about leadership, but then also just about the human, human nature.
Speaker 1:Yeah, did you guys fascinating.
Speaker 1:Did you hear Colin O'Brady? He was the first guy to go unassisted. He was on Joe Rogan and all the podcast you got a listen to this guy's story. He's the first guy to go unassisted across Antarctica and the training that he did for it and that there was a race with another guy from England To be the first and they both started at the same time and the will that he did to go through it was just absolutely Unbullying. But he was on on rogui. You could look him up, his colonel Brady. But he does motivational speaking now and dudes fascinating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love it, dude. These guys are just on another level. That's it's. It's so Motivating and inspiring.
Speaker 1:All right. So I want to back up because for people that don't know, I don't know 10,000 calls and for 33 is I mean, what is that? What is the yearly call volume? It's absurd.
Speaker 3:It's a the last time I think it was. 12 to 13,000 is somewhere in that range. All right, so if you don't know.
Speaker 1:That's an average of 30 calls per day. A call might take 20 to 30 minutes. That means that you're really not gonna see your bed depending on what you're gonna be and yet. And yet you're waking up at 3 in the morning. You're gonna do immediately, go into a meditation, you're gonna do something positive to put in your brain on the way in, and then You're working out before that 24-hour period ship starts. I think that's heroic and that's incredible. But I I also want to look at, let's say, the next day. It's saying let's say, you got up eight times that night, which is not out of the question for 33s. For me, I don't know. Even if you're on the truck, the tones still go off. I kind of feel like I always sleep with one foot on the floor at the station. Yeah, like, even if you don't get up, I'm up. And so what is the next morning? Look like, do you try to say I cuz sleep is important balance. How do you, what do you do on your day off and how do you maximize the recovery part?
Speaker 3:yeah, I tried every way and Last night was a perfect example, because it was one of those nights.
Speaker 3:Or I was on the engine with some studs Teebo, myself, gorman and Barker and we were, they all, one of the only units moving the whole time, and it sometimes it just works out that way, so I forget what it was.
Speaker 3:Five to seven calls and you know, this morning had to wake up later than normal and I prioritize sleep over anything else, just because of the nature of the decision of me being there. I have to understand that sleep is the most important thing that I can do. So, going back before that, at nighttime, I try to go to bed and be disciplined and go to bed early. I try to go to bed between 9, 30 and 10 o'clock and I try not to look at my phone in between calls and try to fall asleep as fast as possible, because these are just little habits that you can make that can make a big difference along the way, because if I'm coming back from a call and I'm looking at my phone and then the next thing, you know I'm up for a half hour because I went into a deep wormhole about flatter. There's something crazy like that.
Speaker 1:The struggle is real though, yeah, so.
Speaker 3:Then also, you know, going to bed early. Yes, sometimes you're gonna have that midnight call, but if I go to bed at 10, then I got two hours if I didn't get a call before that. And every again Second I look at it from the perspective of every second helps, but the more the next morning. I try to sleep in it as much as I can and I try to line up my Serious training on days that I'm going into work and not days that I'm going home, because there would be no possible way that I could wake up this morning and then, you know, deadlift heavy or squat heavy. That just is not gonna happen.
Speaker 3:And then, depending on how much time I have, I still try to get some movement and some breath practice in or some meditation in, just to set up the right momentum for the day. And then coming home, same process because I got a drive. So I still try to work on the things that I need to do. I've actually found because and everyone's gonna be really surprised and think that I'm a weirdo I don't drink coffee or don't drink caffeinated tea and that's not, as for some, like moralistic choice. It just doesn't work well with me and I can't think as clearly and I can't recover as quickly. I don't have as much patience and I do. I do actually think ultimately that helps me in the long run with my energy and my Stability, because I don't have these really highs and, as a result, I don't have really big lows and I'm able to recover quicker as a result. And you know, keep moving forward. So that's it and the podcast Not friends anymore.
Speaker 1:I went to stand effort in. If you guys don't know, and look that guy up, it's the rhino. But people were shocked with him too. He's no, no pre-workout, no coffee, no, nothing. And he's like, if you need that. And then who was the guy know that? Saying if you need? You know, back in the day used to crank music up during Josh Everett said he didn't need music. Yeah, he's like if you need that.
Speaker 1:And so there was this movement of working on silence and of course Noel takes to that we would be just working out in silence in the rain or whatever it's just savage but I think I do absolutely rely on Like you know, I'm the Zen coffee guy, you know I mean because I'm like oh, I need, I need, I need now, it's just the stope, I mean hit. But I've tried both and I'm just a miserable human being when I try to quit both. But I know, I know the addiction is real and I got to do both of those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think people should. You don't necessarily have to quit it forever, right? People can just look at it, just quit it for a period of time and see how you feel. If anything, you're building up mental resilience and the capacity to do something difficult. That's just something that's important to do.
Speaker 3:That's always valuable yeah it's the most valuable thing, in fact one of the biggest lessons I learned through my back injury and everything that I went through mentally with that. You know, because you get really closed down, you don't, you know, become. You get really shut down to the rest of life and people interaction and I started avoiding things and just started making things worse. So, you know, I had kind of a like inner motto now that if it scares me, I should do it right.
Speaker 3:If it kind of intimidates me, I need to do it. So now it's become that and just happens on its own. So if that's something that scares you, quit and coughing, it should probably just give it a try for a second and see, and I bet you'll be better as a result.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing about caffeine. I'm wildly addicted to caffeine, to drink a ton of it. But I was actually thinking about that this week. It kind of doesn't matter who you are, you're eventually going to have to quit it. There aren't any people that I know that are, we'll just say, older that continue to drink caffeine. Like, at some point everybody gives it up. Like I don't know anybody. I know they're out there, but all the people that I know that are you know, my parents or Other other folks that are just older they all end up quitting it because it starts to have negative effects. So you look at it that way. I mean, eventually you're gonna have to quit anyway. Why not just quit now?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't like to rely on external things and weird like that. I like to be able to just find something from within and then just use that. So, no matter what life throws at me, I'm ready to go.
Speaker 1:I love this. So yeah, your dad's not just pouring pre-workout on his tongue and taking it. I think that's. It's not a thing. No, he doesn't do caffeine no pre-workout.
Speaker 2:I don't do pre-workout either. I haven't done that in a very long time. I'm out on that, but I do drink. You know me, I drink a lot of caffeine, so all right.
Speaker 1:So you're a father of two. You got a three year old and a seven year old. Maybe you could talk about your wife. But I'm always interested in the balance, because if you wanted to, you could do everything for the pft. You've done, you've done training. I mean we can sign up for every cadre and everything if you wanted to. And then you're at a very big cultural station where the guys do stuff together on and off duty, and is there a balance? Is there a way that you've determined to say, hey, when I'm on, I'm on, I'm on off, I'm off to also do, because sometimes some of these things like my goals and fitness or breathing or ice, have interfered. I've noticed that, hey, I prioritize in this, and then it becomes a thing where I'm not flexible. When I'm like, I'm like no, I can't do that now because I have to breathe and I have to meditate and I have to work out and I have, you know I mean and then I'm like one, then my wife is the first one to be like time out bro.
Speaker 1:You're trying to do this so that you could be a better father. Well, right now, you just need to go play blocks with your daughter, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my wife does the same thing. I'm not the best at it either, but what I, what I can tell you, is I do try to prioritize. And taken again from what John Wooden says he always talks about, you know he was a very religious man I'm not necessarily, but you know, I find this very impressive that he would talk about this and he would say he would put his family number one over anything else out there, even his religion, and that's how much it meant to him. And I try to do the same thing. That's absolutely the most important thing. I fail a lot and I'm learning along the way.
Speaker 3:But like I try to combine things together to make the most efficient use of my time. And an example is this morning you know there's a late start, busy night I still needed to get meditation in. I still need to come home, I wanted to get a sauna and coal plunge in, so then I just added my meditation in with my sauna. So that's just a quick 20 minutes combined effort together. So I think it's just being smart with your time. But I think, like you said, kevin, if you're just, this is what comes with mental training. I think it's important sometimes if we just Mental train enough, right, if we're consistent enough with our habits. When the days happen where it's overloaded, it's okay to not do it because we've been training for it the whole time. We're going to be fine if we don't have one or two days of doing this, but at least if we have the awareness and we know that we've been preparing for it, then we can let go and just be in that moment with our kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good to practice that too, because I know I fall into the same thing where it's like I have to get a workout in today, I've got to get in the ice bath, and then the day falls apart and the family needs attention. There's something going on and I can let that. If I'm too focused on the discipline of I have to do this, I can let that actually kind of turn me into a tyrant where I'm just upset all day because I didn't get that stuff in. So I would agree with you on that that it's good to get practice in and have days where I'm not doing that. Today I'm gonna focus on this other thing and not only am I not just not gonna do it, but I'm actually gonna be okay with it, and it really is just a mindset shift there, like you just said, that I've been training this, I'm gonna be okay, and there are things in life that are more important than breathing at this time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think the other thing I'm lucky to have is a wife. She calls me out on my shit. She does a phenomenal job of just saying, hey, knock it off, you're being a dumb, dumb. And so having that is a huge benefit. So picking the right partner, I think that's beneficial.
Speaker 2:Yeah, find yourself a wife that'll call you out. That's important definitely.
Speaker 1:All right. So I wanna ask you this so you talk about the Tuesdays news. Obviously NAPS are critical. I'm 44, I love taking NAPS. I feel like it prepares you for the night. But there's different thoughts. There's like Peter Tia talked about the adenosine buildup in your brain and that when you take a nap, unless it's a 20 minute nap or an actually a full cycle of an hour and a half, that's really not beneficial to you. And he was saying for shift workers to actually just push through and say, try to get into bed at 8 pm and get a full nine hours of sleep that next night. But what's your strategy, knowing that you're going to be up at night If you have a brutal night and you feel run down, do you take a nap during the day, if you can, or do you try to push through and just say I'm gonna get a full eight hours before I go to the next shift?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't try to push through, I'll be too impatient and I take a nap midday. My body's trained to the point where it's like that first half of the day I'll be up, I'll be energetic, become noon one, two o'clock, I go down for a nap and I go down for, you know, 60 minutes, usually if time allows or situation allows, and I found that to be hugely beneficial and I know there's a lot of evidence and research out there. You know, like you were talking about, peter Tia, you know when to optimize this and when to optimize that. But that's just based on my own anecdotal, own evidence. It's just hard when you're just at a random position like 33s or living a life as a first responder, you just can't plan on getting that full hours. You know nine hours of sleep. So I think personally, when you can get it in, you should get it in, because sometimes you're not gonna be able to get it in.
Speaker 1:All right, let's talk about Pavel Kettlebells. This is fascinating because I think you gotta I mean you got a racehorse on your hands as your engineer, dave Tebow, and if you told that guy to move mountains he would. You could tell him to do anything and he's worked through injuries and I think if you pull most firefighters, we all have some sort of nagging injury. And recently you put them on Pavel's program, which is just Strong First, and they have. I don't know if you wanna talk about the difference between the Simple and the Sinister program and what he's doing and how you're building him up through the kettlebell.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Simple and Sinister is a book that Pavel wrote and Pavel is the guy that created Strong First, which is a company that, like their name implies, focuses on strength, and I think he's probably the best strength coach that we have alive today and the smartest strength coach and he came over from Russia and he kinda he's the one that popularized the kettlebell in the late 90s and he brings over a wealth of information. He used to train with a Spetsna and came over here and then now, you know, trained with a bunch of special forces and another high level people using these tactics early on and now it's kind of spilled over to the general public. So his book, simple and Sinister, is the best GPP general physical preparedness program that's out there. If there was one program that I'd have somebody do for the rest of their life that would prepare them for anything, no matter what it was that life would throw at them, it would be this program and it's got a quick warmup and it's got a quick cool down. But the meat of it is the kettlebell use and this is the program that I default to when somebody is usually in mild pain. But they can work through some issues and or needs to, you know, take down some of their inflammation of their body.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of times where we're our own worst enemy, right, we're just doing too much. And this program has got a perfect balance of the right amount of volume. And what it is is you're going to swing the kettlebell 10 swings on the right arm, and then you're going to rest for as long as you need to, and that swings are going to be powerful and explosive. And right now Dave's using the 24K or 53 pound. And then we do what's called the talk test. So if you can talk and say a full sentence, then you're prepared for the next rep or the next set Sorry. Then he's going to do 10 on the left side and he's going to do that a total of 10 rounds, so it'd be a hundred reps total of the swings. And then you're going to do 10 Turkish getups, again with the same concept of hey, I should be able to breathe through my nose the whole time, because that's like auto regulation, and I should be able to pass the talk test.
Speaker 3:And if you've ever done a get up the right way with the kettlebell, taught by Strong First, it is like loaded yoga. You're going through all sorts of different ranges of motions and positions and I recommend this to anybody with shoulder issues. The get up is one of the best to stabilize, mobilize and just make it better, and it also increases core stability and strength. And again, the carryover, especially if you're a Jiu Jitsu athlete, is next to nothing and the simple and sinister name comes from the weight that you use. So, for men, if you can get to using the simple weight, which is a timeless weight I'm not using a timer but being able to do what I just said with a 32K or 70 pound kettlebell, then you can again, you can be prepared for pretty much anything that life throws at you If it's a street fight, if you're going to snowboarding, if you're going to Jiu Jitsu, if you're going to be a firefighter, you'll be prepared for it Because that's a pretty heavy weight.
Speaker 2:And if you could Turkish get ups at that same weight.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you have a guy like Dave Tebow who could will himself through that, but you started him out at 36 pounds is what he told me.
Speaker 2:Now he's up to 53.
Speaker 1:And now he's just like please let me keep you. But I think that's the thing. It's almost like you're starting him back at scratch to build him up to where he can do that.
Speaker 3:Because you're always going to have time to get better. I think we all, myself included, rushed too quickly and jumped too far forward in these programs and, as a result, we never see it fully through and never get the full benefit of it. So there's no harm in starting too light, and I know that's a lot of our biggest fears. I don't want to start this light. I'm going to lose all my gains. But in reality we're losing all our gains because we're starting ahead too much and too heavy.
Speaker 3:So he started there and the gauge is how are you feeling? Are you feeling broken down? Are you feeling more energetic, because this program does a great job of filling your container rather than emptying it. And the really good programs out there, depending on a few, there's different variations, but the really good programs out there make you feel better at the end of it, not worse, not more broken down, I should say, Not more achy and stiff and painful. The real good programs out there make you feel invigorated, strong, resilient, and that's what this program does. And then, every two weeks, he can push the pedal to the metal and he's got five minutes to complete the swings and then 10 minutes to complete the get-ups. So that's the standard you do. You should be able to do the workout in 15 minutes before you jump up a bell. And if you want to be real beast mode and I wouldn't recommend this for many people the sinister weight is a 106-pound kettlebell, which is just on another level.
Speaker 2:Evan, can I ask you a question that I'm probably going to add out of the podcast? No worries, I do this every episode. Did you write the Arnie Memorial workout? Did you write that?
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:I did not. Who wrote?
Speaker 1:that Do you know I have no idea, because it's Turkish get-ups.
Speaker 2:In that it's Turkish get-ups and swings at 70 pounds, I know.
Speaker 3:It is I wonder. Yeah, that would be really interesting to find out who wrote that. If it was somebody who was in the process or somebody else that would be fascinating to know, Because we do the.
Speaker 1:Arnie, yeah, it's great workout and it's absolutely brutal, but I've never been able to do it prescribed. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Same here. I bet you, if you followed Simple and Sinister and you built up to a beyond 70-pound kettlebell, you probably would be able to do Arnie eventually.
Speaker 2:I love this. I'm putting that on my goals list. All right, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean this is. What I love is that you're absolutely well known as a complete savage and I've seen what you do. But when you talked about the priority in your day being meditation, I think that's a unique thing, and no one I do breath work. We do a lot of that but can you get specific on where you started with meditation and what to it? Did you follow a guided meditation to use one of the apps? Is there something that you use when you start your day?
Speaker 3:I tried it all Just like anything. I took a deep dive and that was like I said early on with my back injury. The mind was messed up. You got to fix it somehow. I got to train it somehow. So I tackle it like I did other things.
Speaker 3:So I dove into every meditation style out there, whether it was yoga, whether it was Buddhism, like the Pots and the stuff out there. I even went to two meditation retreats One was five days, one was seven days and that was probably one of the most difficult things. You just sit there all day and all you get to do is meditate. It just sounds completely horrible, but the discipline that you get out of it and the training that you get out of it are next to none. So that really boosted my ability to enhance the mental training aspect. And then I followed some people that I thought were good out there and I thought that Sam Harris has a lot of good stuff out there.
Speaker 3:But at the end of the day, for me what I find works best is just simply following my breath, just in and then out, and that recovery breathing, like I was talking about, is another way to do that kind of dual, two things into one. So a lot of times I'll just do my recovery breathing with my meditation and you're just focusing on your breath in and then focusing on your breath out and then, depending on what I need for my breath, if I need to. Most of the time it's down regulation. Very, very infrequently should it be up-right regulation, especially with firefighters, I think we're chronically too stressed but the down regulation is four seconds in, eight seconds out and if you just follow that, you just get in this cycle and that works for me and that just keeps it simple and straightforward, because the apps sometimes I don't like the people or I don't like what they're saying, and it's just. I want quiet, I want to have stillness before I just get. After the rest of the day.
Speaker 1:I love it. Have you? Do you count? Did you count your breasts in the beginning, or do you anything like that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely you could do that. You can literally count four seconds in and then eight seconds out. You can use a timer. I've done that before and for me again, because I'm so like regimented the rest of the day sometimes I just need that break away from the regiment and then just focusing like simply on my breath just seems to work, just like a longer exhale. You know, just sometimes if you need to calm your system, one of the best ways to do it it sounds silly is to hum, and when you hum on the exhale it just down, regulates your system and it just relaxes you and allows you to focus a little bit better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's crazy, but I do think that transfers over to the fire service. When you have longer exhales, you're able to center yourself, you're able to follow your breath. I think it works when you're on air, I think it works when you're going to a fire. I think it works to take that second. So I do a lot of box breathing, which is a five second inhale, five second hold, five second exhale, five second hold. And if I notice, even if I only do five of those, I feel like there's definitely a less of an edge to me if I even just did five of those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and here's the question is like we are one of the few jobs that have a limited air supply on our backs. Why are we not experts in breathing? Or why are we not taught how to breathe appropriately in the tower? Why are we not taught? I know we do skip breathing and we just kind of you know, go over that very briefly, but there should be a huge portion about how to breathe, how to preserve your air, how you should be able to upregulate your system if you want to. But, like I said, in reality we should really learn how to downregulate our system to be able to focus more, to be able to detach from the situation more, make better decisions, to prolong our air, to downregulate our system so we have a lower heart rate, lower blood pressure. These are all things that we should really know and be expert in as firefighters, because that air supply is just limited and we know that it's not. You know, 40 minutes. It's going to be down to 20 minutes when you're working hard, if not less.
Speaker 2:It's less right. What's your ice bath and sauna protocol? Look like now.
Speaker 3:I do is 99. So it's like 90 minutes sauna a week and then nine minutes of cold. And I know everyone's listened to all the research from Rhonda Patrick from that's per week. Yeah, that's per week.
Speaker 3:And then you know Dr Peter Atia, and what I have found that works best is number one the sauna should be priority because the sauna has been proven to have the longevity benefits the most. Right, I'm sure you guys have heard about the. You know, if you do three times a week for 20 minutes, 175 degrees, you reduce your risk of vascular disease by 45%, regardless of the other things you do. So for me that's like free time on this earth. So why would I not do that? And I try to go a little bit above that.
Speaker 3:And so when I do when I came home today what I would normally do, but I was tight on time today it would be one minute in the cold to start and I go in the sauna for 15 minutes, then one minute to get out in the cold and then go back in for 15 minutes and then I end with a minute. So then I get to me 30 minutes of the sauna and then three minutes of the cold, and then I do that three times a week. I didn't plan that to like be. You know, work well with numbers, it just works really well. You know, 30 minutes and then three minutes with the cold and then 90 minutes of sauna a week and then nine minutes of cold. It's not that threshold that they're talking about 11 minutes for cold but it's good enough for me and it works really well.
Speaker 1:I love it. So let me ask you this too I was fascinated after a recent neck surgery that I had and I couldn't do much. But I do listen to these things that you do, and peer T and them are all talking about zone two training and how they put that in almost as a priority too, for metabolic reasons on the cellular level, like repairing, but it's horrendously boring. They they recommend like 45 minutes a day of zone two, which is for me it's like a heart rate of 130 what you're talking, but it's it's low, slow death on a treadmill or on a bike or on a stair.
Speaker 1:Master, I did find it beneficial when I was recovering and I couldn't really work out, I couldn't really push anything and I felt I could see the benefits. But I see, I mean it's interesting to see. Like, as far as the longevity piece they talk about recently at wheel Nolan, I have a thing with my zone, which is really nice heart rate monitor, and I did put it and went into an infrared sauna and I sat in there and I realized that for like 30 minutes I was in zone two by just sitting in a sauna with that, and so I was thinking, well, maybe I'll use that in my protocol, if I can find a sauna, to start doing that, as my zone too.
Speaker 3:Hey, I thought about this the other day. I think number one we got to give credit to, like the OG of zone two, which is a doctor math at tone I don't think people give them credit enough and he's this chiropractor, if you don't know, that created the math at tone method, which is if you take your heart rate, heart rate and you go 180 minus your age, that is the heart rate that you should not go above. And he was an ultra endurance athlete that had ultra endurance athletes and what he found is that when he trained them in that zone then they got better, they didn't get worse. You know, people weren't, you know, too glycolytic, so he's kind of the father of that. And super intelligent guys Got a lot of books out there People should check out.
Speaker 3:But what I tell firefighters is, I think, zone two training and I might be unpopular for saying this, but I think you should get it from an active lifestyle. I think trying to set it up where we have to do this, this boring treadmill bike thing, I think is going to be unproductive. I think I can get far more out of somebody If I say I want you to live active lifestyle, I want you to go hike with your family. I want you to be active in jiu-jitsu, I want you to mountain bike, I want you to surf, I want you to ski or whatever it is your passion is. That should be where your zone two training comes from. You should do that two days a week, or more if you want, because there's really no harm in it If you're doing it the right way. And then your strength training should be three days a week. But if you're setting yourself up for success, you got to set it up as part of your lifestyle, not something that is a chore.
Speaker 2:That's a great point, because I will not Like. I just mentally can't say I won't. So it has to be part of my life. I've got to be out splitting wood with a boy or hiking around the mountain or something, I think the three of us do that innately because that's our lifestyle.
Speaker 1:But I think that's a great point though. You can absolutely take a bike ride with the kids and not have it be for time and say we're going to sprint to the next stop sign. No, you're just taking a bike ride with your family. But in that, if you do it, you're going to get into a higher heart rate. For me that's like a heart rate of 135. It's not that high. I mean, I'm talking to you and you would know that I maybe I'm breathing a little bit, but it's a bike ride. I'm not going to walk with it. It's a walker with the wife. You know it's nothing substantial.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you could do. You could apply the same principle with training as a firefighter. If you go out there and train, you put your turn outs on and you pull some hose, climb ladder. It's the same thing, it's zone two training.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I think we just became best friends and I think you have to come to the fire program. I'm in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he was talking about it.
Speaker 1:No, I mean really I would love to incorporate because we do a lot of Wim Hof breathing and I like the activity of the Wim because I'm by nature a spaz and like it is a you actually have to count 30 brass and it's very active. So when I do meditation sometimes and it's and it's just me in silence, my mind wanders quite a bit. So I like the activity of it. But I would love to do more of that recovery style breathing, like you're talking about in the foundation, and I can see us doing a lot of that. But man, I know I mean just speaking for myself. I've got injuries. I know nose got stuff, the injury that we have has stuff, but I do think that we neglect probably the glaring thing is those weaknesses and injury prevention. And just even talking to you my head's going back.
Speaker 1:I'm like I'm like watching my posture as you're judging me, but I mean that should be it and that's the thing that I neglect dramatically and I wonder why I keep getting injured.
Speaker 3:Yeah, resiliency training is so important. Like I said, we got to set people up for success and it's like we talked about at the beginning it's not that difficult if you understand it and if you're coached through the right way. So, yeah, I would definitely love to come out and show you guys some things. I think there's huge benefit to it. I love Wim Hof and his breathing. I have gone to his seminar before it's to check it out. I dragged a couple of firefighters there. It was a pretty hilarious experience we have saddest. We met Wim Hof and then there was a room of like 500 of the most, like the biggest hippies ever.
Speaker 1:That's exactly my experience. It was the same thing. It was in LA. It was a serenity and they had, like the, those Afghanistan pants and there's a lot of granola, people with dreadlocks and I was like what are we?
Speaker 3:doing here, yeah, and then Wim put us through like I forget if it was a half hour or 45 minutes of the breathing and then afterwards it was like an evangelical church People are running and high fiving and hugging and doing backflips Like what is happening. But anyways, his breathing is great. But I think people have to understand it from the perspective, as it's a tool, right, what is this tool and what is this tool used for? And this tool is used for to increase energy, to be more sympathetic, and I think it's important. You should be able to apply that.
Speaker 3:But I think also we have to understand that as firefighters, most of the time we're going to need the opposite. If we're going to teach some breathing techniques, it's going to be how do I calm the system to prolong or down, regulate my system to lower my heart rate, lower my blood pressure, so I can make a better decision and I can prolong my air? Because, in route to a call, I don't want guys to practice hyperventilation or controlled hyperventilation, which is the style of breathing what you want to do is you want to be prolonging your exhale, humming down, regulating. So I think it's important that guys understand how to apply the tool and then when it's important to use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, that makes tremendous sense to me because I feel like for me it's in the morning when I try to do the Wim Hof breathing, and I actually will go sit down in the sun and try to get that sunlight in my eye like Atea talks about and try to set my circadian rhythm up and do that whole thing. But I'm looking for energy because we had a bad night, right and then my nighttime I'm not doing Wim Hof, I'm definitely doing more of hey lights are off, phones away I'm doing more of the box breathing and trying to long exhales, things like that, to try to set myself up for a better night's sleep. So, yeah, there's a time and place for me.
Speaker 2:When I first started doing the Wim Hof breathing, I didn't understand what the tool was for. I just thought it was. You know, I was excited about it. It was good felt, good figured, it was good for everything. And I remember going through a time period where I was trying to do it before I went to bed and that's just a terrible idea.
Speaker 2:Like I don't know who is out there, but if you're trying to do Wim Hof breathing before you go to sleep, if you're falling asleep after that, you're some sort of unicorn. Because I would just lie there afterward and be like this is garbage, I can't sleep.
Speaker 3:I'm awake right now.
Speaker 2:But doing it in the morning, getting your day started out that way, is great. When I'm on the rig and we're going to a fire, I definitely I'm not trying to do Wim Hof and I don't count or anything like that, but I just practice slow, deep breaths in and nice long exhales and it works, man, you can calm yourself down and we absolutely need more of that in our line of work because, I mean, you guys have seen it you got the guys sprint to the rig, knocking the chairs down. They're already on 10 and that's just not the way to start.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you default to your training, right? If you're training yourself to be escalated all the time, then you're going to be escalated and you're going to be performing poorly. But if you're going to train yourself to be detached from the situation, have a little bit of space between you and what's taking place. You're going to be. You're going to see the event more clearly. It's still going to be stressful and that's just the reality of it. But just like when we're new firefighters and everything looks like we're just looking through the smallest hole possible when we go to a fire as we get more and more experience, that just broadens the horizon of our ability to see. So is the same with mental training and then applying breath work the right way. It just opens things up a little bit more, creates some space between the situation and what you're experienced and allows you to see things more clearly.
Speaker 1:And where would you start somebody out? I said I wanted to get into some of the breath work, some of the foundation stuff. Where would you say is the starting point? And obviously, and do you have an Instagram handle? Do you have one of those things that said something? They wanted to reach out to you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, they could reach out to me.
Speaker 3:I'm horrible at putting content up, but yeah, it's evan underscore howquist at Instagram. I don't know. I checked my Facebook but you can reach out to me on that. But where I would start with this is, again, look at foundation training they have. We have a streaming site that has all the workouts in there and it takes you from the very basics of understanding what decompression breathing is to the more advanced stuff with all the workouts.
Speaker 3:But where I'd start right now is hey, if you want to like, feel what this feels like, and like this is to bring Wim Hof back into it. He always says feeling is understanding, which I agree with you need to practice it. So try it today, whether it's after your workout or before bedtime. Put your feet up, you know, relax yourself and then you're going to breathe into your stomach like it's a separate cylinder, because it is. You're going to expand the front sides and back just for five minutes and then afterwards just see how you feel. You'll be amazed if you've had a lot of aches and pains and stiffness and or like stress. It tends to melt away, and it's for all the reasons that I talked about at the beginning. So I'd start there.
Speaker 1:I love it. So there's obviously going to be around to because I want to hear about some of the mobility and stretching and nutrition and all the other things there's going to be around to. Maybe it'll be after the health summit there's going to be around to because I'm like I did took a ton of notes and I'm interested to learn more about all that you're doing. But this has been awesome, evan. I really appreciate your time and coming on and educating us Just Neanderthals who just go out and try to kill ourselves every day at a workout.
Speaker 3:I appreciate you guys and having this platform and spreading the word of good information, so thank you guys for having me. It's been a blast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, thank you for coming on. Really good. All right, tell me one last time Where's the health summit? What time is it? At what date?
Speaker 3:October 28th from a 0900 to 1600 at the LA County Fireman's Museum. It's being put on by the LA County Firefighters Association. They're funding it, so they've done a phenomenal job of supporting it and please sign up as soon as possible. There are there should be, some posters at all LA County stations and then you can also access it on the bear applet underneath fire sink.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Come hang out with Kevin, and I listen to Evan. He's clearly a good guy to listen to, along with the other guys are going to be speaking to this has been the fire you carry.
Speaker 1:Podcast.
Speaker 2:All right, awesome. Well, we talked about it quite a bit in the episode, but I do want to reinforce that Kevin and I will both be at this health summit. We will have a booth outside during the lunch hour. So if you guys want to come down and talk to us, probably meet some of the other fire up program guys as well, but definitely come meet Kevin and I. We'd love to see you guys down there and have a good showing of podcast listeners. Show up to this thing. It would be very cool.
Speaker 2:So follow the links in the show notes and go get registered. If you're not an association member, if you don't work for Los Angeles County fire or you're not a member of the Los Angeles County fire association, stay tuned, and if they open it up to other organizations, we will be the first to let you know here on this podcast. You can also reach out to us if you'd like to receive that information directly. But if you are an association member, let's go sign up. Come hang out with Kevin and I. Come listen to some awesome talks by some rad dudes. Thank you again for listening and we will see you next week.
