TMGP Ep 09 with physio, powerlifter, and coach Jared Maynard

oo another white boy with a podcast pronouns Jim bro another white boy with a podcast you want to see the video it went viral hi Gaines gurus and welcome to tmgp the muscle growth podcast episode 9 I am your host Rosco and today we are welcoming Jared mayard a seasoned physical therapist with n years of experience in physiotherapy onto the show with a remarkable Journey spanning 17 years in the realm of lifting Jared has dedicated eight years to guiding and supporting individuals in their Fitness Journeys particularly in the challenging environment of the gym despite his extensive background in healthcare Jared acknowledges its shortcomings especially in addressing injuries his personal encounter with health struggles took a significant turn when he felt critically ill spending 5 weeks in the ICU due to hlh disease enduring a 40b weight loss predominantly lean tissue Jared attributes his survival to the initial muscle tissue he had built over the years now weighing over 180 lbs a remarkable recovery from his ICU weight of 150 lbs Jared underscores the importance of muscle for longevity and for overall well-being his story embodies the essence of bouncing back with a focus on strength and muscle memory helping to bring him back to his original 193 pounds from his time in the ICU and his current resilient state in the face of adversity Jared has embraced resistance training since June 2023 making a triumphant return to the early stages of getting back on his feet despite relying on a walker and a cane initially Jared remains determined and trusts the process seeking inspiration and motivation from his own Journey adding to his resilience Jared has Enlisted the help of a coach in his business emphasizing the power of teamwork and support in overcoming challenges now with a focus on resistance training Jared is an inspirational Force motivating others through his courage and determination looking ahead Jared has set ambitious goals aiming to participate in a powerlifting meet this year undeterred by setbacks he plans to compete in two to three meats targeting personal records and pushing his limits beyond the weights and gym Jared embodies a holistic lifestyle balancing marriage and three children with a commitment to time management and ongoing research in his practice his aim is to make the journey sustainable enjoyable and beneficial not just physically but mentally and emotionally join us as we delve into Jared's extraordinary Journey discovering the super inspiration ational individual who epitomizes the power of resilience determination and the enduring Spirit of a true Powerhouse hi Jared rasa how's it going man I'm doing all right just finished a little stunt with Co so getting better and yourself I'm doing okay CO's never fun uh I went through not Co but a b of pneumonia and I had to have three courses of antibiotics through like November December finally doing better so we're making it hopefully you're feeling better too I'm feeling a lot better but it sounds like 2024 is going to be on the on the up for both of us I agree fantastic so Jared can you please give us a little bit of an introduction about yourself absolutely so I'm Jared manard I'm a physical therapist or physiotherapist up in Canada a little west of Toronto um I'm also a competitive powerlifter powerlifting coach U I'm the founder of unbreakable strength which is a coaching platform primarily for strength athletes a lot of powerlifters but really it runs the spectrum of people who are just getting into strength training for whatever reason all the way up to people competing at the international and World level we've got competitors there which is awesome uh I'm also involved in a small business uh incubator called the Honeybadger project which is part of what allowed me to bring Unbreaking aak strength to life as far as my business and now I'm on staff helping other people do that uh and I'm a girl Dad I've got three young girls at home keep me on my toes thank God for my wife she keeps us all alive and uh yeah man I'm excited to be able to chat with you so thanks for the invite only a pleasure and I look forward to hearing everything you've got to tell us what initially got you interested in becoming a fizia so I knew in high school that I wanted to to get into some sort of medical field wanted to be involved in healthare and then I did a bit of research into you know what what it was going to be involving to be a doctor and I realized that I just didn't have the heart to go through all that uh all that extra schooling but physiotherapist was sort of a nice substitution and then I played Sports primarily football in high school a little bit of basketball before that but football was the main thing um didn't have tooo many injuries but that also led to me shadowing some physios at different clinics and then that's what got me uh to make the decision physio was going to be the route to go through so did my undergrad in kinesiology and then got into physio school and then kept trailblazing from there and when did you start unbreakable strength so I kind of unofficially well not unofficially it started under a different name with uh a friend of mine we were business partners at the time in 2016 we started to coach a small number of athletes that he knew or I knew it was a different name at the time uh and it only got so big it was fine it was very much a side hustle and then when he and I the friend and I parted ways um I kept a small roster of lifters who I kept coaching um but in 2020 uh right around when covid hit everybody in different ways but around that time frame my physio Clinic that I was working at closed down for a good while and long story short a a connection of mine through some other people in the physio world I knew he had a very successful digital facing business for Fighters and then my good friend and now business partner his name is John flag had also been scaling his coaching business so I decided you know in the midst of not being able to be in the clinic I wanted to start to revamp my coaching business do it right start to build it bigger so I had the freedom to still work with lifters with power lifters in particular uh and then also have the flexibility and freedom to do it from wherever at home or whatever was going to come around so started 2016 but really revamped it starting 2020 and where where is home uh right now I'm near waterl Ontario Canada so about two and a half hours West Northwest of of of Toronto but I live out in the country where there are horses and Buggies on the road which is pretty cool that is pretty cool and how's the weather at the moment there very snowy yeah cold and snowy so very cold very cold we didn't have much snow through December but we apparently saved all the snow for January so we're good okay exciting you can have a delayed Christmas um snowman yeah exactly and sorry if I missed it what was your previous job you said it was a side hustle originally what were you doing as your main main occupation yeah so I graduated physio School in 2015 so my main job was working in a physio clinic and yeah I I've worked in a clinic different clinics from 2015 until 2021 and then in summer of 2021 was when I went full-time with my business and then also with the Honeybadger project that small business incubator so yeah the side hustle was just something I did something I did on the weekends really when I wasn't in the clinic and wanted to get more of a fix of of working with lifters and help people getting strong so you've been a physio for about nine years and lifting for 17 years is that correct you got it yeah it's been it's been a while and what do you prefer do you prefer helping people or or or getting stronger yourself or a better both definitely has to be both I don't know if I give shoes between the two and helping people it's definitely a calling for me it's the reason I wanted to get into Healthcare in the first place you know helping in some way shape or form in the medical field um and I've I've always loved getting strong especially when I started lifting weights in my parents basement at you know 16 uh to get better at football and then I was never naturally athletic so knowing I could go into the gym just keep showing up consistently work hard and I would get better get stronger I build muscle that was pretty addicting to me so I've always loved it from that moment on and then we'll get into it I'm sure but especially this past year uh being strong and having enough muscle on my frame has become that much more important to to the point where it literally saved my life and football is that soccer or American football that's American football yeah the the okay the rest of the world properly called soccer football yeah I'm referring to the American version though okay that's cool and like in terms of injuries and things from American football you said you were actually okay mostly I was yeah I was lucky that way one of the lucky on I was yeah and I think the worst that I had when I was playing was you know a couple of of times where my elbow would smack someone else's face mask and I got a bruise or you know bit of a welt um don't think I ever I never broke anything don't even think I really rolled an ankle um but later on this would have been 2016 uh far after my own playing days I volunteered with a a local football team to be the the athletic trainer for them and uh I saw some nasty injuries unfortunately for some of those boys but I I mostly emerged unscathed I'm glad to hear that you got out Landscapes and and things and uh oh we mentioned there that you got into the healthcare industry let's chat about that we mentioned it in our topic discussion call that the healthcare industry in not for everyone but in general sucks let's elaborate a little bit on on that absolutely so when it comes to healthcare by and large and I know it's going to vary a lot depending on where people live uh which country they're in you know a bunch of factors that go into it but in general especially for people who are athletes or lifters um people who like to stay active when most of us probably can relate to going to either a doctor or a physio or some other health care professional and having some sort of issue that maybe gets in the way of us training competing in our sport doing the things that we love and then either the professional looks at us with a Blank Stare we have no idea what we're talking about when talk someone says I'm trying to do a clean and jerk and every time I try to do it over 120 kilos my shoulder you know gets gets wonky and they're like a clean and what what is that or we hear oh you shouldn't be lifting that heavy anyway deadlifting is bad for your back any number of these things and one it's just it's outdated it's it's usually poorly informed uh because the research would show that the upsides far outweigh any risks and also that the injury risk is usually pretty low especially if we're talking about strength Sports um but even beyond that you know it's tough to it's tough to have a lot of confidence that if you go ask someone for help to deal with whatever the issue is that they're going to give you a plan that makes sense to you and allows you to stay under the bar in the gym playing your sport and also helps to fix the issue and I've both experienced that as the person looking for the help I've been on the other side of it as the professional seeing abysmal support being offered to to people lifters and athletes again especially so it's just a broad problem there's some positive change happening but it's happening slowly and uh we definitely need more of it absolutely I totally agree with you and I've had so many misdiagnoses from doctors and uh for various sports injuries and none of them could agree on the actual injury and um yeah it's it's really sad because like you paying all that money to go to sometimes a specialist and then when the specialist says one thing and another specialist says another thing and you're like well who do I who do I trust now and it's like well you can't trust anyone and got to listen to your body which is also super difficult especially when you have no knowledge in biology you don't have a a do like a degree in medicine or anything like that so you were kind of hoping that you would spend good money and get good advice but like you mentioned the advice is typically don't lift weights or don't lift heavy and it's like that's outrageously outdated uninformed and really bad advice in my opinion I agree don't lift heavy with bad form sure like I get that don't ego lift but like sometimes you're going to go for a PR it's going to be a little bit of ego hopefully a little bit like you don't want to just like you know do a casual PR like there's no such thing as a casual PR unless you're like really new to the gym like I had a similar thing with my Cairo he's one of the best Kyros obviously he's one my CYO so I'm going to be biased but my opinion is one of the best kyos here in South Africa and um his advice was don't deadly because I hurt myself deadlifting and I'm like I'm not going to do that that's that's really not that's like no I'm not I'm not that's not going to going to happen um and the other thing about the doctors a lot of them don't lift themselves and a lot of them are overweight and undertrained and uh like you mentioned uninformed I don't think they stay up to date with the literature because maybe they're just so busy and back in the day they were taught X as as science and as a Undisputed fact but I think that like you mentioned is getting better but how do you think people can mitigate uh the lack of knowledge and the lack of Forward Thinking from professionals when they when they're looking for help and how do you think people can try and get better help and better advice in general yeah um I think you're first I think you're exactly right excuse me uh I can't speak to the medical medical curricula you know across Med schools across the world I haven't attended them but I know for physical therapy schools or physio schools um when it comes to strength and conditioning exercise physiology let alone any particulars about lifting form and what the research says we got one lecture and that was even a pretty poor lecture so you know if that's the case for us as physios I I have to imagine there's probably even less for most of the doctors or whatever the case so I do think there's a systemic issue that way um but as far as what people can do I think we're in a an age might sound kind of dramatic but especially over the last four years or so where there's been so much more acceptance of either consuming information from different people and sources online uh especially who are well-versed in a particular area whether it's rehab and injury whether it's hypertrophy strength training pick your you know your area uh we can we can kind of curate who we get information from uh through social media YouTube any number of resources and then also finding finding professionals especially if you're you know in a position where you're looking for help if you can find somebody who offers Services um that might or that sound like they might be useful for you and especially if you can kind of vet them you can see how they approach situations uh involving injury you know do they care about keeping lifters lifting if so okay there there's a probably a decent start have they done that before is do they have other people like you that they've helped um all those are questions that you can sort to look through and and assess and figure out if that person might be able to help you wherever you are so I think I think curating our our resources is the first step it doesn't mean having to become an expert yourself um we only have so much time and energy and not everyone has the the will or the energy or the time to effectively create their own degree program and zoo or medicine or whatever but uh there are there are good people and resources to lean on and then especially if we're looking for help ourselves uh you know investigating those options and asking around I think those might be two good places to start absolutely so basically summarize learn the basics so that if the doctor is giving you absolutely wrong advice you can be like okay well I'm going to try someone else and then try and vet the information and try and make sure that the people that you're getting the information from at least use the sence to back up what they say and maybe have other professionals agreeing with them hopefully absolutely in terms of we mentioned injuries earlier what are your steps or key pointers for recovering from an injury let let's actually let's make it make more sense from a timeline perspective let's say first preventing an injury and then secondly everyone's going to get injured like if you live an entire life without getting injured like I don't know what you were doing but you're either really really special or you didn't live like I don't know what you did but you you need to tell me how you did that because injuries just they happen like you can literally injure yourself in the shower like doing nothing that's why it's like might as well injure yourself lifting flipping heavy numbers rather than like getting out of bed you know that's that's my philosophy but rather don't injure yourself obviously but like you know if you're going to do it do it do it properly no I'm kidding just what are your thoughts I agree I agree there's you know people talk about injury risk how do you prevent injury and I mean there's always risk with anything you can get hurt getting out of bed crossing the street doing any number of things uh and we as humans we accept a certain amount of risk for the things that have at least an appropriate amount of of benefit or reward so as far as lifting heavy U I'm absolutely I'm biased but I think it's it's the right bias um not only because lifting heavy is fun and amazing but also because based on the research it leads to uh protective effects from disease from dying early from you know all cause mortality all these different things um and getting stronger becoming more robust physically uh is in itself protective against other injuries and there are ways to still try to keep things as relatively safe as possible in the gym while you're lifting and all that stuff um if the question is all right so say you got hurt you know unfortunately because it might happen What do you do um first thing is I mean first of all it sucks it sucks getting hurt I've been hurt a number of times myself in different ways I had a a hamstring injury that took me two years to figure out I was able to figure it out better once I actually got some help from another physiotherapist who lifts so it's going back to what we talked about before but hamstring back shoulder tendonitis I've had a bunch so first step is to try to remain calm as much as possible there are very rare circumstances where there might be some red flag signs where I mean if you've got persistent and worsening pain that doesn't go away it just keeps getting worse that's a sign you got to go get checked out if you lose control of like your bowel or bladder function that's a red flag you got to go checked out so thankfully those things don't happen all that often when we're talking about injuries in the gym but if you can do a quick check and make sure that you know there's nothing super scary going on that's great if you want to make sure there's nothing super scary going on that's where getting some help uh and getting evaluated by a professional is really helpful doesn't even necessarily have to be someone who lifts but that's step one just kind of cover those bases after that this is the process that I take people through uh when when I work with them is we want to kind of get a lay of the land and figure out what happened when did this injury occur was it all of a sudden on that third deadlift repetition at 4:15 or was this something that kind of built up over the last two months four months six months um what sort of movements or triggers make it worse is it particularly bad when you get up to a certain amount of weight you know he can hit 225 and that's fine pounds I'm switching to pounds now 225 3 15 that's all fine but once you get to 405 and above then you start to feel your back pain that might be an intensity trigger we could identify and figure out what to do with uh same thing with volume you know maybe you've got knee pain with squatting and when you do your three sets of eight the knee doesn't like it but if you were doing you know say lower volume work you're doing sets of four or five on some squatting movement maybe it doesn't hurt fair enough there's a volume trigger there uh we can also look at range of motion you know it's take the same knee problem it hurts when you get to the bottom of the squat but it's fine for the first half or two-thirds of the movement all that helps us to kind of figure out where we're sitting right now what's going on and what what we have to play with because we want to ideally keep an athlete training for their sport competing in their sport if we're talking about people in the gym we want to keep them lifting you know for hypertrophy or strength or whatever it is that they care about and we can do that by manipulating those variables so if there's an intensity trigger for your back pain okay how can we choose exercise variations that still allow you to train your posterior chain your back your lats your glutes your hams uh without bringing on as much or any of that pain or those symptoms that you're having when it's volume okay how can we either reduce the volume or spread that volume out so you still get the stimulus that you're looking for for hypertrophy for strength adaptations but it's just more manageable same thing for range of motion and this is where I find it to be the most fun honestly um working through that process with somebody especially when you find that first win the first kind of foot in the door where someone was afraid they wouldn't be able to able to lift and then you figure out a way that they can still deadlift and deadlift even relatively heavy and feel decent after amazing because I mean we'll probably touch on it more but uh for a lot of us we're not just in the gym simply for the physical changes those are amazing you know adding more lean tissue being able to put up another PR those those Rock um for a lot of us it's an identity thing too you know Jim is our second home home uh it is a release of stress and you know it's an outlet for all that stuff helps us to show up better at home at work uh take care of our clients so as much as possible I try to keep keep that whoever it is um keep that lifter doing what they love and what they care about while we address the issue absolutely makes some fantastic points and some good tips for recover I'd like to just circle back to those preventative measures on making lifts more safe what what typs and preventative measures would you suggest for in general and then some more advanced ones if you want to go into that as well yeah so this is always an interesting thing to talk about because we can get really in the weeds when we talk about the research around injury prevention or mitigating risk uh it can get really murky because you then have to Define what an injury is more often than not people will Define that as some sort of situation where an athlete is missing a certain amount of training time has to take time off of their their training as it normally would happen so first it's going to come down to Progressive overload or thinking more broadly you know um we can think of the stress that we have to endure in the gym for whatever our goals are and our overall capacity to handle it so stresses are going to be the volume that we're lifting the amount of weight that we're lifting um but it's also going to be you know how well we're sleeping uh are we adequately fueling for recovery and performance are we hydrating there are a bunch of different things that go into it and the general rule of thumb is if our or if the stress exceeds our capacity to handle that stress or stress in general that's when an injury might occur whether it's a strain muscle or a fracture or whatever the case so when it comes to lifting and how to avoid injury as much as possible don't be an idiot is my first piece you know so if you if you're going in you're used to squatting twice a week and you're doing three sets of five on one day and maybe you've got I don't know a hack squat three sets of 10 it's probably not a great idea the next week to do five sets of five on The Squat and four sets of 10 and just have these big jumps in volume or slap on a whole bunch of weight that you're not quite ready for so make sure that you are progressively challenging yourself but don't don't be greedy don't be an idiot little by little I mean you mentioned the the the Newbie Gams earlier and man if I could get those newbie Gams back that would be amazing so if you're new to lifting and you're able to put on five or 10 pounds every week amazing do that but just just make it appropriate make the the increases appropriate for you that's number one it's also an interesting conversation around technique and form and there's you know different schools of thought in the research you know we can look at lifting with quote unquote good form for a particular movement how much does that impact injury risk and it's just not a clear-cut answer however the way I like to look at it is yes lifting with lifting with certain form characteristics on one hand might make injury a little bit less likely but really where I like to focus is making it as efficient as possible mechanically speaking so if we're deadlifting we just can't lift as much weight with a big old rounded lumbar spine as we can with a more flat or neutral spine um again in the research we find that even a flat looking lumbar spine actually has a good degree of flexion to it when you get some super sophisticated Imaging however the point is we can feel better we can lift more weight and lift more weight consistently when we have perhaps that stacked more neutral lbar spine so I'm a fan of that um so again learning learning what the foundations of technique and form are is always going to be in style in my opinion and then the longer that you do it the more that you can kind of play with the technique a little bit depending on your limb lengths and your anatomy and what you find works well for you in certain contexts but starting with with pretty solid conventional form on these movements learning how to get comfortable with them and uh being comfortable and consistent for a while that's always a good a good place and it tends to help knock down that injury risk absolutely and I think you make a a good point about don't be an idiot unfortunately I think that uh the people that you need to tell not to be an idiot they they probably don't think it's them that you're talking to because ignorance is bliss in that in that sense and also if anyone's putting on 5 to 10 pounds of muscle a week you mentioned the Newbie Gams um you should become a bodybuilder 100% if you're putting on 5 to 10 pounds of muscle a week yeah bodybuilding is you're calling it's true I meant 5 to 10 pounds on the bar but 5 to 10 pounds a muscle a week absolutely oh my word I was gonna say I was like I've never heard of that I was like that's completely insane and I okay that makes so much more sense sorry I I was like wow that's that's incredible that was just some this guy's eating 10,000 calories a week and you're looking at the next Mr Olympia they putting on 5 to 10 pounds of MUSC literally I was like I was like damn this is a 50 pound kid okay5 pounds okay that he's eating a lot for the first time jyming this is but he's at now 55 with week one this guy's doing well it's going to be 60 week too that's that's abolutely me so I think what would follow quite well from talking about injuries would be talking about recovery from from disease and from illness and things that we've both gone through recently but you went through a much more difficult uh with an autoimmune disease do you mind talking a little bit about what you went through and your experience and and overcoming that and and everything like that yeah no don't mind at all so basically what happened for me was almost exactly a year ago funny enough is when I went into the hospital uh before that for a few weeks I thought I had just a regular head cold excuse me which my wife and my daughters had they got better but I didn't and then I kept getting worse and what ended up happening was uh I had a a rare autoimmune disease called hlh the full name for it if anybody's interested is hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis um and it's just a situation where the immune system starts to attack normal healthy cells especially red blood cells for me and uh there are two kind of main categories of hlh one is genetic which I didn't have so usually that's something that occurs in like newborn infants uh I had what's called secondary hlh which means or is is caused by either an infection um which I have had and the Epstein bar virus is one of the the main viruses associated with it or by cancer or by different autoimmune disease what it meant for me was I got really sick really fast and I went to the hospital I was admitted within about five to six days I was in the the Intensive Care Unit um and on life support I had kidney failure liver failure uh was getting really close to not making it like down to the last treatment option so uh thankfully I mean obviously we're here thankfully I made it through um I ended up earning the name Miracle Man from some of the doctors and nurses in the ICU um just with how things turned around and uh it's been a long road to recovery because I went into the ICU weighing about 193 pounds and then I was heavily sedated for five weeks as I was on life support and then when I woke woke up I was weighing about 150 so uh I couldn't actually receive much nutrition at all um could receive much nutrition at all while I was in there so what that meant was my body needed to sustain itself on the muscle that I had in my on my body and it and it ate up about 40 pounds of of lean tissue so that's why I said at the start of the show um I've always been in you know in favor or I've always loved getting strong as well as helping people and this is the situation where I if I needed to be strong to actually survive because if I wasn't then I just wouldn't have made it through the ICU so it was a wild ride man sure I'm so glad that you did make it and it's very inspirational that you're back in the gym and I believe that you're competing again in April that's right I signed up for a meet uh fun plot twist that meat is not running anymore not through any fault of my own but I got to find another meat so I do plan to compete at least a couple times this year so yeah I'm back on the hunt now that's phenomenal and and so interesting that you mentioned that the muscle ultimately saved your life yeah absolutely and it's not something that it's probably not ever something anyone PL on or expects but uh you know through my years of training again about 17 at this point uh strength training being in the gym it's done a lot for me uh as far as developing mental resilience and toughness being an outlet for stress um it's something that allows me to be a better husband better father better Coach and now this was just a really extreme very serious example of of how it truly saved my life in that you know I needed that that sustenance and uh the muscle effectively was like an insurance policy I never knew I was investing into it at least not like this but thank God I I did because it was there when I needed it and it's part of why I'm so passionate now about helping people get as strong as possible Crush their goals um not because I hope anybody goes through this I hope no one ever does but because um whether we're talking about keeping quality of life high as we get into our 60s 70s 80s and Beyond we know that having more muscle helps us do that when it comes to you know doing stuff around the house when you have to take all your groceries in in one trip you can do that and you know if you ever need it like I did then it's there too you can't do more than one trip with the groceries it has to be one you also like carry the GR you like I carry the groceries out in one trip so how can you then need like it doesn't make sense I guess some people use a trolley but you can't yeah you can't always be sure that the trolley is going to work you got stairs and things sometimes what what was the the final treatment option that that ultimately saved your life yeah well so when it comes to hlh there's sort of a standard protocol for treatment usually involves chemotherapy cortical steroids um I think monoclonal antibodies are typically part of it too and there might be some other medications that they bring in depending on the situation and what's going on so for me I was so sick that I couldn't actually get the full doses of the chemotherapy that they wanted to start me on and I think the last option that we had was a round of monoclonal antibodies uh before yeah before it was really about p options like just the things they could do to make me comfortable while my body did what whatever it was going to do um and yeah again a lot of the treatment options were limited because of what I could handle because it's kind of ironic that you know the things that might help to treat this disease are also toxic in them in and of themselves to a certain degree so yeah that's what it came down to for me sure well I'm very glad that you got some of the few good do well not the few but some of the good doctors there to to save your life and and that that in conjunction with the muscle and everything that you built up over your lifetime was able to pull you through so that was very fortunate agreed and I I'm forever grateful exactly for those doctors those nurses um all the the health professionals who are involved in the journey and uh again we talked about know helping people uh and also being strong there were some some of those professional who who lifted actually my my plastic surgeon because I I had to get a skin graft on my arm because one of the medicines in the ICU didn't go in the vein it stayed in the skin and it damaged all this if anybody's listening I'm just pointing to my left forearm and uh so I had to have a skin graph there and my plastic surgeon was awesome he he was super professional but you ever meet those people who are really great at what they do but you know deep down he's just a bro like you could go get a good lifting session in with him or drink a beer and it would be awesome because he was also jacked so like that was awesome um but him and and everybody else uh they did an incredible job and I'm so fortunate to have have had them in my corner absolutely I'm so glad that you had them and I think you should hit him up at some stage for a lifting session I really should I think I will yeah you should that would be that would be super cool so let's chat about bouncing back and strength coming back and also when we chatted you were sitting it around 177 pound which means that you gained 27 pounds in a mere 10 months let's chat about all of that and getting back to it yeah man so I really started at Ground Zero excuse me because I already mentioned lost about 40 pounds of of lean tissue and when you're lying in bed for about five weeks uh and not moving wouldn't recommend it uh because then everything gets really really hard including just sitting up in bed where I would try to sit up and I didn't have the strength to actually do that at all or easily and then my blood pressure had to get regulated I'd get super dizzy so I really had to learn how to sit up in bed how to stand up had to get my balance back uh I couldn't walk at all unless I had a walker and people around me um and then same thing with going to the bathroom and like uh when we talk about older adults and still keeping quality of life High into 60s 70s 80s part of it is gravity doesn't get weaker gravity is always going to be good old 9.8 meters per second squared heading down so when you sit down on the toilet and try to get back up you have to be strong enough and powerful enough to do that uh and I was not so it was really Ground Zero and super basic rehab exercises talking yellow stretchy bands talking side stepping exercises a large chunk of my exercise in the hospital was just learning to walk starting to go for walks around the unit um and that was a lot but gradually progressed that and then um the process when I got discharged from the hospital which was May 1st of last year was still more of those basic rehab exercises very light weights yellow stretchy bands and one of my teammates at or team members for unbreakable his name is David he's also a physiotherapist he's also powerlifter uh I've coached him for an extended period of time and now he's on my staff he's one of my my team coaches so I asked him hey would you mind helping to coach me because I didn't want to be my own patient uh I knew largely what to do but I wanted somebody else to help Do It um so I don't have to think I could just be the athlete and he's been incredible so yeah we really kept progressing with those banded exercises and slightly heavier weights and then I could finally um hold on to a barbell and do like some limited range Romanian deadlifts which was amazing and then got back onto a bench and had my wife spotting me had the the safety straps set up in the rack just in case I wasn't strong enough to bench it off my chest but I could so that was another win and kind of kept reclaiming these pieces of training that normally I I did do and now I am doing again very consistently um but I had to be very okay with going through the process slowly and just just doing it right and uh and thankfully now we're at a place where rehab really just turned into training uh especially around like like September late August early September of last year and then it's just been a a continued ride uphill as far as you know making the lifts a little more heavy and now my training probably doesn't look a whole lot different than it would have before getting sick other than the numbers but the numbers are coming back too that's amazing to you and I'm so stoked and I can't wait for you to be surpassing your original original numbers before you got sick I'm sure you'll be back there sooner than sooner than we know and um let's talk about strength increases and muscle cell memory absolutely so even before all this went down where I got sick you know we or I had heard of you know quote unquote muscle memory cell memory and I've I've not read a lot of the research firsthand but have read some research summaries about it where if you if your body has been at a certain Point either a certain point of muscularity lean tissue on your frame or fat tissue you know certain level of osity and then you change that either you lose the muscle or you lose the fat it's a lot easier to get back to that point than it was to get there in the first place for many folks so I H got to experience that firsthand because of all the lean tissue that I lost in the ICU and then when I started to when I started to be able to handle a little more stress got the hang hang on of the barbell in the gym and we started to get back into those limited range of Romanian deadlifts and stuff like that then my body uh was a lot quicker than I would have thought to put that muscle back on provided that I had sufficient nutrition to support it excuse me and uh I was not upset at it at all it was wonderful to be able to see the scale go up you know pretty steadily and see uh in the mirror or in my lifting videos oh shoot I can see I can see a vein it looks like my arms are beefing up and my legs are filling up my pants more um so that's continued it still is continuing I'm actually about 180 uh in the couple weeks that between our pre-show call and here so yeah I'm I'm hopeful it'll keep keep on rolling till where at least where I was before and then I still plan to gain some more because that's probably where I need to be to reach my strength potential as a six foot tall powerlifter that's super exciting and and I'm sure you're going to get there in absolutely no time what's your training frequency at the moment or in general what you recommend yeah for me and it it's also what I tend to recommend for most people who are training Force either primarily for strength or at least have strength gains as a a goal they care about I train four days a week with weights and that seems to be a pretty decent frequency for most um how the the work in the gym is distributed might vary from person to person but right now I'm squatting twice a week I'm deadlifting twice I'm benching three times and then I've got accessory work built in uh you could call my training right now kind of like power building since I'm trying to get stronger build the numbers back up and also reclaim some of that that lost muscle tissue so yeah it's it's kind of a sweet spot for me it has been for a long time and I find in general four times a week seems to work pretty well for most people sure that that's a lot of uh CNS on for the three times a week bench two times a week deadlifts and two times a week squat that's that's a big load for you're a central no system man but I guess if it's only four four times a week you've got three rest days so is that kind of why you do four versus five or six yes that is a big reason and you're right it can be a lot of load on this on the CNS um and that's really where I am a fan of let say you're looking at the two squat days you probably have excuse me one of those be like the primary or the heavier squat day this the other day isn't always light per se but I like using different variations that maybe really test certain pieces of the technique so my heavy squat day might be a low bar squat my other squat day right now is actually a safety squat bar Tempo front squat if it sounds awful it's because it is um but it really challenges your your or my position to stay upright helps to build some of the upper back strength so it's naturally limiting the amount of absolute load that I can use um even though feels really hard because it sets of eight and it's a three count Tempo on the way down and that's another example of how I like to play with variables when I'm helping somebody either a just get strong or B come back from an injury I like to play with exercise variation so that someone can still feel like they're training hard even if the absolute load they're lifting is lower and it doesn't fry their CNS it doesn't stress out their injury area too much um I also really like to use variations that they haven't tried before mostly because you tell me if you relate to this but when I've been injured before say I pulled my back uh and then I try to go do some sort of deadlift in my mind I'm thinking man I should be able to lift 405 really easy today but maybe all I can do on that day is 250 275 and it feels like a really big gap between where I should be quote unquote where I am but if I'm doing oh let's say it's a let's say it's an opposite stance if I'm a conventional deadlifter maybe it's Sumo and it's it's a Sumo deficit Boris deadlift with chains and I'm just throwing out a really wild variation I have no reference point for what I should lift that you know in that variation which I find is really useful one in an injury context if we take the elements of that lift and try to make it so that it's not pissing off the injury too much the range of motion is good the amount of weight and the tempo can all play nicely with the person's body great and then it's also nice because if we don't have that frame of reference we're not thinking we should be at a certain amount of weight we're usually more able to make a smart decision and we're back to not being an idiot so yeah it's there are ways to manipulate it and still kind of scratch the itch of getting in the gym lifting something hard absolutely and I feel complet completely the same um when I I've had like I mentioned multiple injuries but the most recent one was a back injury from deadlifts and it was basically yeah it was it was not a good one it was one where I was I I'd come back from from a festival and I had slept properly I hadn't gotten my nutrition in and I at that stage my PR was 235 kg and I was like cool I'm going to just do two 220 and I'd previously done 220 for for five reps so I was like okay it's fine let's do 220 for three reps because yeah you didn't sleep well and it's just three reps three reps so my logic back then which was flawed was I'm not going to take time between the Reps I'm just going to grip it and rip it I'm just going to do three quickly because then if it's done quickly it's over and then you don't have to worry but uh I I didn't really do quick deadlifts up until then for some like I don't know why I felt it was a special day to do it quickly and so I did it so quickly and I'm like I know how to do a deadlift I do deadlifts all the time like my form is good just you know because I'm so used to doing it but without thinking and without and with really just focusing on gripping and ripping it my form went AB absolutely shoddy and on the third rep my back went and uh yeah and then the next week I I was obviously off for a while I literally started deadlifting with just my arms no no bar nothing and then every weeks after that 10 kg 20 kgs 30 kg and I'm back now to hopefully around 200 about but it's really been incremental and that Gap that you mentioned a gap of 235 kilograms is it's a big gap and it's like yo I I'm not happy with that but getting back to it and uh yeah I'm excited to to surpass that my new PR is 240 now so I'm hoping to get 250 by the end of the year but uh that Gap is it's really really challenging but guys just take it slow um oh but whenever you mentioned someone mentions um chains I can't think of anyone except for the that guy on Instagram or YouTube or whatever who does the it's called the I'm not sure exactly but basically the walking carrying man something and he's on a skateboard with chains and deadlifting in a helmet and it's just the it's the least stable deadlift I ever seen and also he has insane weight on the bar I I must send you the video it's completely insane and then he does like a kick flip on the on the board and I'm just like that is that's our new king this guy doesn't care yeah no he literally he just doesn't care about anything he sometimes I think he's done like a a bosu ball as well and but like when I say he has weight he has proper weight and then things hanging from his head he has things like it's just it's just absolutely insane so that's all I can think of when you mention chains and and some kind of variation I don't recommend doing it on a skateboard I don't recommend doing on a Bose ball definitely do a little variation but don't don't make it unstable at least no that we talked about reducing injury risk that's a great way to increase it a lot uh but you got to send me that I have to see that that's amazing I I will do it's it's completely insane um and it's actually this guy is he's aerica he's he's that guy that's never been injured before he has to be that guy we talking that hypothetical guy because it out is just too much so let's chat a little bit about nutrition because obviously you mentioned that a big part of losing a lot of muscle and not being able to maintain SI things was due to you not being able to get nutrition so let's let's touch on nutrition and then after that briefly on supplements totally yeah so you know again mine was kind of an extreme example where I couldn't receive nutrition I was largely unconscious because of I was being sedated um so couldn't take anything my mouth I also couldn't breathe on my own so that was an issue so all severely limited what I could take in leading to how much muscle I lost um recovering in the hospital uh recovering in the hospital was also a head trip because this is something that I certainly didn't think about until I was facing it headon when you lie in bed for five weeks your throat musculature atrophies too normally throughout our days we eat we drink we speak we swallow it's not a big deal when you don't do that for a extended period of time uh then it's actually not safe to eat or drink because you could choke on it and potentially die like that too so I had a a tube uh down my nose into my stomach for a while where they would give me nutrition that way and then I eventually had a tube directly into my stomach where they would supplement the nutrition as I worked on getting my throat muscles back so I could eat and drink and it's all back now which is I'm very grateful for um and really the big Focus for nutrition through that recovery time frame was getting enough calories in and then primar or enough calories in for one and also making sure there was enough protein in that caloric intake to support the the muscle building muscle protein synthesis and all that so that's continued um and I'm able to again eat normally I have always or for a long time since I started trying to train for bodybuilding which I never competed in but I trained for it for a while before powerlifting I started tracking my my food I use an app to do that just something that works well for me so able to keep tabs on how much protein carbs fats and total caloric intake I have just making sure that the scale weight's going up we're seeing what we want to see making changes as needed and for when it comes to you know nutrition more broadly for anybody who's trying to build muscle get stronger see the results thereafter in the gym it really does come down to those basic principles there are nuances to nutrition but if you're trying to gain weight you need to be eating in a surplus if you're trying to lose weight you need to be in a deficit you're trying to maintain then you need to be roughly at maintenance um you can split up the energy intake a bunch of different ways depending on what works for you and your digestive system your lifestyle your schedule I'm not I don't have strong feelings at all when it comes to things like intermittent fasting or ketogenic diets or uh kind of a typical mixed diet between the macronutrients I think that's where a lot of the variants may come in I would Point anybody considering what diet should I um should I follow probably that's where you want to bring in like a registered dietician or someone who's a professional in that area to find what's right for you but got to make sure you're eating appropriate amounts for your goal you want to make sure you're having enough protein so that's probably somewhere between I think it's 08 to .2 grams per kilo of body weight um is a range that tends to float up quite a bit um and then make sure you're getting enough fats to support normal bodily functions maybe you fill in the rest with carbs or maybe you do whatever you want with the rest of the calories to hit your Target and then it's about consistency as well as hopefully eating mostly whole unprocessed Foods I'm a fan of having you know some fun Foods in there wherever you want but but uh just largely eating unprocessed stuff trying to get fruits and vegetables in um all the unsexy stuff that most of us have heard aund times already but continues to be true so that's where I kind of sit with it absolutely I totally agree and I think Whole Foods are where it's at try and get as much Whole Foods as you can and um yeah and like you said you can have the odd snack and the odd processed thing I just make sure it is odd and not the regular I guess I mean actually you do what you want um but don't be surprised if you're not getting the results if you're doing just what you want I guess all the time yes and in terms of supplementation what supplements do you recommend which ones are not like nonsense uh which ones are good yeah I'm I'm a minimalist when it comes to supplements I find that the the ones that seem worth it are sort of protein supplement mostly I view it really as another food source just another way to make sure that protein levels are where you need them to be dayto day I'm a big fan of whey protein but there are a bunch of other sources whether it's soy or Pea or other plant-based you know sources there there different options based on what works for your digestive system what your preference is I'm all for that but some sort of protein supplement creates in monohydrate uh and and not any of the fancy other types of creatine so far I haven't seen any research to support that but good old creatine monohydrates been probably the most studied and supported supplement for actual return on investment as far as muscle gain and strength performance um or strength output in the gym I like caffeine uh I would highly recommend people to be wise with their caffeine intake especially with regards to sleep because sleep is one of the most anabolic and necessary things we need to do to get stronger build muscle the things that we care about in the gym all the hard work in the gym we need to sleep so that we can actually repair and rebuild and recover uh and caffeine intake especially too close to bedtime that is going to interfere to some degree with either Sleep Quality or quantity so um that said I still am a fan of using caffeine as an ergogenic or you know pre-workout supplement whether by itself or in a pre-workout formulation and then yeah i' lump this in too maybe a daily multivitamin uh maybe some other vitamins and minerals but that's with the disclaimer of me not being a registered dietitian or nutritionist like that but based on what I've seen and my own personal experience that's kind of where I put the what I'd say would be worth the money everything else is kind of un uh remains to be seen how effective it is but again you could people can experiment and by all means let me know what you find absolutely and I think it's an important one you mentioned there about people experimenting like if if something works for you that's that's great like use it we it doesn't mean it works for everyone but definitely try new things and see what works what um macro calculator do you use right yeah right now I use carbon diet coach if anybody's familiar with really yeah by um L nor you got it there we go sorry Dr get it right biolan shout out that's right yeah okay and you're enjoying it is is it everything that uh he he says he says it is it is yeah I like playing a lot fun fact actually I was at uh ipf Masters worlds in St John's Newland Canada in October of 2022 one of my lifters she's from Finland she competed so I flew out and I coached her on the day it was awesome I was an honorary team Finland member um laye competed and he won I believe it was the 93 kilo men's Master's one category he crushed it uh so I was sitting at the the dinner table at the banquet and Team USA was right next to the team Finland table so I saw Lane and I was definitely like fanboying a lot he like I should go talk to him I didn't I let him enjoy his dinner with his team uh but a I like Lane a lot uh and I think he does a a very fair job representing what carbon does I've used it now for coming on two years and it's great very easy to use uh it makes life a lot simpler I've used all the different functions at this point gain weight lose weight maintain or uh recm I think those are the four and it's awesome so very worth it to me that's great and I'm so glad that you're enjoying it and to the listeners I think we mentioned that looking for a nutritionist or someone to get nutritional advice from Dr Lane Norton AKA biolane he's he seems to be really good he's got a doctorate in nutrition and the thing I really like about him is that he he does disclaimers like for example if he's associated with a company and he's promoting he's say listen like I do have incentive to be promoting this but at the same time I do think it's good and this is why and then he shows the science and he's also not afraid to um call people out and he's also not afraid to admit when he's wrong he does have very very strong opinions um and they they're normally right um sometimes he can be a little bit too much but that's part of his character and part of his charm I guess agreed that's the same reason that I or reasons that I like him a lot he's very transparent he does disclaimers he has usually pretty strong reasons not usually he always has strong reasons for believing what he does you're right he can be a bit abrasive personally it's part of why I love him uh but yeah he's it's just something to be aware of if you're going to go experience have the lane experience for the first time but I'm grateful that we have him especially in the the Realms of sport nutrition training uh he helps to cut through a lot of the BS which is awesome and there's so much there's so much BS like and it's mainstream as well that's what worries me it's super mainstream and people they they hear big words and they're like okay that's fact and it might be a fact but the thing is it's been taken out of context normally and just like it's it's actually insane what you like and he's done some really cool things where he shows you how you can get away with saying some absurd things which actually might be true or have some kind of Truth on a rat for example and then people like oh it works on a rat therefore I you can't just you can't extrapolate like unless you are a rat listening uh please let me know cuz that would be pretty cool having rats listening but uh uh no like you can't you can't say because it works on a rat it's going to work in a human exactly the same because we both live and breathe you know oxygen it's okay that's similar enough for some people it's true well on that too I mean you're exactly right um I'm G to butcher what Lane often says in his YouTube videos but mechanisms don't equal meaning or something like that where you can find a mechanism in an animal model or even a human model or whatever but then you have to look at the details okay cool that was like a 75,000 time dose of that particular chemical no one's taking that in um so you know he he highlights the the flaws there and this is where I have a soft spot for kind of your typical consumer and i' would say especially the people who aren't in maybe our space into training nutrition maybe they're maybe they are maybe they're new though and you're right there's a lot of mainstream stuff on social media on TV whatever the form is people with big following saying stuff that sounds authoritative they're using sciencey sounding language we can't you know find necessarily where they're wrong if we don't have that background or aren't trained in actually looking at the research firsthand so I have a I feel for those people because you're just trying to figure out what's true what do I need to care about um how can I build muscle lose weight get healthier for myself and my family and it's hard so you know I've seen that example quite a bit with different people in my own life so that's I think come in Full Circle to what we mentioned earlier in the show where try to trying to find reliable sources um reliable and very transparent sources Lane being an example or other people like I'm a big fan of Greg Knuckles I'm a fan of um Jeff nippard know other people in our our space for those reasons they'll tell you what they think they'll tell you why they'll show you the research they'll also disclose any biases and if they don't know the answer they'll point you to someone who probably does and that just it's a good starting point absolutely I completely agree I think the it might be a different one but in terms of the mechanisms that you mentioned uh one of his things that he often says is CA uh correlation doesn't imply causation and I think that that he made some some really interesting things about something that's correlated but completely unrelated and it just shows you that it it really doesn't true one of my favorite examples of correlation not equaling causation which came in my undergrad it was a statistics class uh was looking at the rates of homicide in a particular City and the rates of ice cream sales and the correlation would suggest that ice cream sales equal increased murder uh but in reality it was having more to do with like the murder rate increased in the summertime when it was hot and like other factors but just to really drive home that same point correlation doesn't equal causation it illustrates some sort of relationship but there could be a lot of factors that influence it too stay away from Ice Cream will kill you or all the people in your town will kill you because you're eating too much and the other thing the the last little thing on these um so-called um experts some of them are highly educated and have doctorates and phds and even some have medical degrees and they just like I'm like you are so smart like don't get me wrong you have a top Ed education you have a doctor like you're not messing around but you're not being honest like or you're not reading the study or you're like I don't know what incentive some people have from from some of the things they say like it's just it doesn't make sense but then you do a little bit of research like land does and he's like oh he actually owns has shares in this company it's like like where's your integrity yeah it's a great point and I think it it really shows how you know at every level of Education of wealth of status of any metric people are people and unfortunately it means that you know there are going to be biases and uh you know whatever that can influence or taint uh what sort of stuff they say or do so again fully agree uh all the more reason to be grateful for the people who aren't afraid to call that out out um and especially the ones who aren't afraid to call it out and provide a better alternative for information for stuff that we can follow along and place our trust in absolutely you make a excellent point about also providing like a better solution than just calling it out it's super easy to be like okay not not that then okay well then then what but you make a good point about then going the one step further to then say how about this one or this resource absolutely so in closing I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on the show I think your journey is inspirational and I think you've got to show a lot of passion and motivation to be doing what you're doing and coming back and giving it horns and I'm super excited to be watching your journey do you have anything you'd like to say in closing absolutely first of all thank you for having me on man uh it's an honor and I really appreciate the kind words um I'm hopeful that you know with my story and my journey and and also the the work that I am doing that it makes a positive impact and just helps more people get strong and again strength saved my life uh in an unexpected way so now my mission is to pay it forward um as far as final words I would encourage anybody and everyone who's listening who's working hard towards a goal or maybe you're thinking about making a change for yourself whether that's uh embarking on a new weight loss loss or muscle building Journey or improving your health or taking a shot at a competition in whatever sport a discipline um I'd encourage you to embrace the embrace the suck if it will or if you will um hard things I don't know I'm just G to butcher it again few things that are worth having or doing are easy so the hard things are probably worth it if it aligns with where you want to be and yeah uh I'd encouraged you also to reach out to anybody who can help or at least go on the journey with you people who can cheer you on celebrate the wins people who you can learn from and make the journey more fun uh and if I can do that for anybody I'm an open book so feel free shoot me a message I'd love to chat and just hear what your journe looks like just drop your Instagram so people can can get you yeah that' be jared. unbreakable strength uh come find me come hang out would love to chat fantastic thank you so much for your time really appreciate it and all the best thanks man you too goodbye Gaines gurus thank you for listening and see you on the next episode of tmgp