 You're listening to Barbell Logic brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching where each week we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Greetings all and welcome back to the Barbell Logic Barbell Prescription Series brought to you from Grey Steel Strength and Conditioning in Farmington Hills, Michigan. I'm your guest host for this Barbell Prescription Series on Barbell Logic joined once again by my producer and co-host and associate coach Noah Hayden. Hey, Noah. Howdy. And we're joined by our special guest, a Grey Steel athlete, Jamie Collins. Hey, Jamie, thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's wonderful to have you here. And this is our last podcast in this series. And we have left it deliberately unstructured so that we can just have sort of a free-wheeling discussion about the athlete of aging and life, the universe, and everything. So with that all being said, Noah, what are we going to talk about? Well, I just want to apologize to all of the listeners now because I know this is going to kind of go off the rails multiple times. Oh, totally. But we thought who better to join us on this discussion than you, Jamie, since you've had some experience thinking about the human condition. So what do you do? I am a psychotherapist and I work with people that have traumatic brain injuries and they are in a residential program. So I do the individual counseling and some advisory type stuff for the rest of the program. So kind of a little bit of everything, pretty much make it up as I go along. So what background do you have that led to this career? There's a part of me that's always known that that's what I was going to do. It's just kind of what I do. I listen to people and I think about what's happening for them and what they might be feeling. And I've kind of always done that. So it seemed like a pretty easy fit and a really easy undergraduate degree to get. That was the easy part. And then when I tried to get a job, it kind of became pretty clear that a bachelor's in psych was not going to pay the rent. I don't see many psychotherapists wanted science. No, you kind of have to carve your own path. And with a bachelor's in psych, it's they're like, your path is stupid. You made bad choices. So the only thing to do was to double down on this bad decision and go get a master's degree in counseling. So how long have you been doing that now? 10 years, maybe 12? So a fair amount of time. Long enough to be seasoned but not so long that I'm jaded if that makes any sense. Yeah, it does. I don't hate it yet. Not real jaded. But and with the lockdown, that's thrown a real pretty wrinkle into your practice, your clinical practice, hasn't it? You've shared some of that with me. Jamie and I often work out together. It's just the way our schedules work out. She's an amazing training partner and very strong deadlifting in the 225 range. You're a lady of a certain age. And we gotten you to a 200 pound squat yet. I think we have, haven't we? 210. Yeah, 210. And pretty big bench. We've gotten you in the 120 range on the bench. So you're pretty strong for your demographic and pretty consistent trainee. And you're also like a deeply funny and thoughtful yet a little bit. I don't want to say jaded around the edges, but you're real. You're very real. So I really wanted to have you in here for this last conversation. What we haven't mentioned yet is that Jamie is the editor of the Graciel newsletter. And I was going to make a point of mentioning that. We send out a newsletter every week and we're closing in. We're going to get to a thousand subscribers to that newsletter. Most of them are people I've never met. I'd put it up against any other newsletter in the industry. We have a nice big fat juicy over long essay at the beginning of every one and then all sorts of other stuff. And it's Jamie who puts that together for me every week. So that on Sunday night, all I have to do is think, what am I going to write about at the last minute? Try and put something together, drop it in the newsletter and fire it off. And it's an awesome newsletter. And since you became the editor, you've really made it your own and it has your indelible footprint of your personality on it. The distinctive purple stamp. All you have to do is, if you're interested, all you have to do is wander over to our Facebook page, Graciel, easy enough to find and find the latest newsletter link, take a look at it. And if you like it, you can subscribe. There's no cost to it. We don't sell things on that newsletter. It's all just content about what's going on in the world of training master's athletes and you do a really remarkable job with that. Well, thank you. How long have you been at Graciel? I started here in January of 2017. So I was just thinking about that on the way over. It'll be four years in January. So it's been a long time. You started with us at the old gym over in the tapestry soap company. Slash Haunted House. Yeah, Slash Haunted House and the condemned building. And so you've seen us go through some changes. What made you want to start strength training? A couple of years before I got here, I wasn't really happy with the way that I looked or how things were going. And I was getting kind of upset. I couldn't figure out how to put all the pieces together. And I was talking to my husband about it. And he said, the thing that you're doing, it's never going to work. The thing where you restrict your calories and try and run on your busted knee and just starve and move around a lot. It's never going to get you where you want to go. You need to eat heavy and lift heavy. And then you walked out of the room. Good for Josh. And then so I sat there and thought about it for a long time and then googled the shit out of it, which is kind of my behavior pattern. Yeah, that's just kind of what I do. And there's all this information about strength training. Most of it was focused on guys, but I eventually found my way over to some websites that said this is foundationally important for women to do. And then I was listening to podcasts. I read some books, looked around a little bit and was like, all right, I need a barbell. Right. So I went to Rogue and I bought a barbell and was training in my garage for a while. And I kept getting hurt because I read the books and thought I was supposed to do five sets of five across and add five pounds to the bar three days a week. Oof. Yeah. So it didn't. It does hurt. It did hurt, right? I kept getting hurt and it wasn't going well. So I eventually googled that and found your podcast, it was about everybody needs a coach and why everybody needs a coach. And I was like, okay, universe, I get it. And sent you an email and said, I'm not quite in your demographic yet. I think I was 38 at the time. So like, but I've got a like a 60 year old knee, if that's helpful. And you're like, yeah, come on in. And you haven't been able to get rid of me since. That's true. Do you ever, so does your husband train? He is like freakishly strong. Just he was just born that way. So it's kind of irritating, but trains off and on, but nothing, you know, nothing is dedicated and consistent as this. Since you've been training here, have you noticed any changes in your everyday life? How you feel, how you can move? I would say that the changes are like night and day. And it's beyond like what I can do under the bar. It's, I can open any jar and that's the coolest thing, right? I can carry anything, you know, like my hands are strong. The other cool thing that's happened is that I've gotten athletic, which I'd never, ever thought that would be, that would be the case. You're in the sitting in the family room and somebody came in the front door and the dog took off and he was going to run out the front door and into the street. So I jumped over the ottoman and grabbed him and threw him back in the house and everybody sitting around was like, like, but that's not... What just happened? Yeah, like that was pretty athletic. I'm like, yeah, and I can do stuff like that without even thinking about it now. So does you play sports in high school or anything like that? No. Not a jock. No. I went to Michigan State. I didn't know they played football. All right, that's a good answer. That's a good answer. Yeah, but you certainly are athletic now. And like we were saying with Debbie, you look athletic. You're like one of those people, I see you on the street and they're like, okay, that person, she does something. I don't know what she does, but she trains. Fitness related. Yeah, yeah, something. Exactly. Have you dealt with any setbacks or issues in your training? Like physical? Sure. Yeah, or, you know, life setbacks that have affected your training. Well, you have a limb length discrepancy. You have a femoral length discrepancy. And so you would have been really, I think really, really good at like the Olympic lifts, like we tried around the Olympic lifts and it was just like, it just wouldn't work because of limb length discrepancy. And we've had to make some modifications to your squat. So probably a staggered stance, I'm guessing. Well, we had to change your stance width. We've experimented with a staggered stance on her, but no matter where we put it, doesn't seem to change things. The big thing that we see on you, Jamie, is like, for instance, on the deadlift and on the press, she can lock out one knee and not the other, right? Yeah, because one leg is just longer than the other. And because it's a femoral length discrepancy, the shimmings probably not going to be a good answer for her. And she's been able to make progress like a lot of female masters. You have a knee cave issue. It's very common. Very common. We address that with pause squats and it keeps getting better. And Jamie's taught me a lot about knee cave. Working with Jamie and Val, like you too, you're the knee cave sisters. And you've taught me a lot about dealing with that problem. And if you talk to people who have a lot of experience coaching and with this population, Matt Reynolds on the private coaches forum once said, I admit it, I don't know how to fix this. It's a very recalcitrant, a very stubborn issue. And what I've decided with females who knee cave is, as long as your knees are out at the bottom and as you launch your hips out of the hole, if your knees cave a little bit on the concentric, I can sort of live with that. When the knees cave on the eccentric, on the way down, then you know... It's a form issue. It's a form issue. But if your knees cave on the way up and we're doing pause squats and we're doing everything else we can to fix that and your knees are out on the eccentric, I can live with that and keep adding weight to the bar. I have a couple of clients that are really bothered by their knee cave because they see it as an error on their part, which it really isn't. Neve cave can obviously stem from a technique error if you're not driving the knees out actively, the entire movement, even on the way up. Even though they might cave a little, but you still have to be actively driving them out. But especially for some women, the structural mechanics of their lower body will always pull the knees in on a heavy load a bit. And what I always come back to is if you look at Olympic elite weight lifters, what you'll see is they'll receive a heavy clean or a heavy snatch in that deep squat and their knees are out and then on the way up, what do you see? Their knees cave is they bring the adductors into the exercise. So I'm not really bothered by that. And you do actively push your knees out and you have the prettiest pause squat in the whole world because you do a lot of them here. And it really has helped you quite a bit. But aside from that, again, you're pretty athletic, you're pretty fit and you're really strong. You're eminently coachable, right? So you do exactly what I tell you. And that's all I want. If everybody would just do what I tell them, you know, nobody would get hurt. Right. So yeah, it's actually a real joy to coach you. And you're a lot of fun to work out with. So yeah, I think the knee cave issue is a moral failing is really what I decided because I get consistently yelled at for the knee cave, like, get your knees out of the way. So I don't know, I think it's some kind of personality. But there's not as much of an issue as it used to be. So it used to be you wouldn't get to depth because you would do like what I would call the chastity squat, you know, where you'd be on, yeah, and knees would come together. And that has to be fixed. That has to be fixed. Because then the femurs are in the way of your hips going all the way down. Categorically, it has to be fixed. But I think we've pretty much fixed that on you. I hardly ever see that anymore. And instead, what I see is a, you know, a knee cave on the way up. Do we like it? Not really. But it doesn't prevent us from making you stronger and your knees are out at the bottom. But other than that, you know, you're pretty strong, pretty good lifter. I wouldn't even say other than that. You just categorically are a really strong, really, really good lifter. We ask almost everybody this that we interview, but what did you start at? What were your starting weights when you showed up? How much I was lifting in the beginning? Zero. Zero, yeah. I came in with my little paper log that I'd kept at home and suddenly just put it away. All right, great. We don't need that anymore. We started over. Yeah, we had to start over. We started over with you on a linear progression. And I think you started with like empty bar on the squats. And we started you out at like 75 or 100 on the deadlift and, you know, 30 pounds on the press and the bench. And you picked up strength rapidly. I mean, you're one of the younger people in our practice. And then you basically did what I told you and you ate the way I asked you to eat and you, again, very coachable. And so I'm pretty proud of your progress and you're massively strong now. It's crazy strong. I remember that. I remember at the old gym, like you would rack the bar and you'd be like, this is crazy. It's crazy. It's just wacko. I can't believe I just did that. And that's one of the things. I don't say it as much anymore because like, can you believe it? Like, yeah, Jamie, we can believe it. You've been, you know, this is crazy. It's been three and a half years. Like, shut up about it already. When we talk about like the transformational process of this whole thing, like, I'm kind of starting to understand that I'm athletic now, right? Like it's now a part of how I think about myself and how I move around in the world and how I take up space. In the beginning, I kept saying, like, you guys don't understand. I wasn't supposed to be able to do this. Like this was not my destiny. This was not my fate, right? I was going to be, you know, chubby and flabby and weak. So what I'm hearing is, is that this has had kind of a transformational effect on your identity. Yes. Right. And that you identify now as somebody who is athletic. I think that allows us to segue quite nicely into this issue of what it means to be an athlete of aging and the term itself. You know, occasionally get called a task where it's like, okay, well, yeah, but calling people athletes is, you know, that's a little bit hyperbolic. And I don't think so. I mean, I'm the idea of an athlete of aging, somebody who lives an athletic lifestyle and who trains and who progresses and uses training variables and brings their training into every facet of their lives. We talked about this in the recovery episode. I think that's a very necessarily about competing. Yeah, that would be my other question. If we're not athletic or if I'm not an athlete, how do you define an athlete? Because I could compete. I don't want to, right? But if you're a runner and you're just running by yourself down a trail, like are you an athlete? Well, the fissile answer would be that you're, you know, that you're competing with yourself. Right. And that you're, you know, you're driving yourself forward. But that is a little bit fissile. But if you look at the root word, athlete, athletes from atlose, which basically means a prize or, you know, a goal. And we have a prize. Which defines it pretty well, I think. Which defines it pretty well. And working towards a long-term goal and it permeates every aspect of your life. And yeah, and the prize is that way of life. So at the end of the day, us training here, we're not doing anything that much different from what a competitor would do. Right. You know, this is, this really is on topic for what we wanted to talk about today, because it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it's not just a semantic debate. The point is that it's a very effective concept when, especially an older person who's frail and is felt out of control of their personal destiny for a long period of time and maybe has never been athletic in their lives comes in here and can start training. And they start to develop this different mental perspective on their life and the way that they can be in control of their life again. And that's, that's very helpful. It is. It's a transformative concept. So now you're not a patient. You're not a victim. You're not out of control. You're not an old weak person, right? You may be physically weak, right? You may be old, you may be beat up, but you're also an athlete because you do what athletes do, right? You manipulate training variables for the long-term progressive improvement in fitness and health attributes. You live a way of life that is fundamentally athletic and you're deeply and progressively connected with your physical being, which is the foundation of your being, although that's another philosophical point that we can address later. So no, I don't back off from that one bit. And, you know, we have this sort of like little ritual that we go through when somebody does the first training with us, you know, they come in, we give them a log, we show them how to log their workouts, they do the squat, press, and deadlift. And there's this point where I like sit down with them, say you have a training log. You're training, right? You have stress recovery adaptation. You're going to bring your sleep into it. You're going to bring your nutrition into it. You're not just going to do sweating with the oldies a few times a week. This is different. What you're doing is training and training is something that athletes do. Changing habits. Right. So you are now an athlete and you will remember when you said that to me and I was like, I'm not. I'm just... Takes a while to sink in for some people. It did. It took a really long time. But it's an important and transformative thing to realize, well, I am actually. And I think that's a real driver of what goes on here. And it starts to bring in everything. I think the key point is that there's an implied question here of, well, what is my long-term goal? What do I want to be able to do? Right? How do I want to look? Which is how do I want to feel? And then all of a sudden these people have control over their destiny again. I think I wrote an essay about this once. We tell people, we tell kids all the time, we tell them this, it's the noble line. The noble line. Like if you just work hard and show up, you will be successful and you will make progress. And in just about every area of life, that turns out not to be true. So true. Right? That is just not the case most of the time. But here it is. In here, it is. So this is one element of your life where you can walk in here and you can exert some degree of control and thereby have some degree of discipline and mastery right that you can then take out with you into the world. So I think that this is a very foundational point that we're making here. What is in your control in life? So coming in to Grace Steele and taking part in this weightlifting thing is making a choice. I'm no longer just buffeted by the tide and kind of being pushed this way or pulled that way. I'm making a choice and I have control over that. And so getting into all of this has increased my sense of self-efficacy. I can do amazing things. Before, I didn't know that. I didn't know that I could have done whatever it is I wanted to do at the time. I was like, that's not for me. I'm not capable. I'm not smart enough or strong enough or whatever. And coming in here and doing this type of training has said to me, you are strong enough. You do have a choice. You can engage in this if you want. Not only that, I think it gives us a model for when we are confronted by that big almost intractable project or that big intractable problem. What we do in here gives us a model that we can bring to the wider world of how we approach that problem. We don't just jump in and do a 500-pound deadlift. We LP all the things. We do it one thing at a time. We do it one habit at a time. We use progressive overload. We break it up into chunks and we have that same discipline and that sort of cycle of effort that we bring to the bar. We can bring to all those things in our life. But Noah, I feel Noah, he's talking about this issue of what can we control and I feel a segue into stoicism coming on. I can feel it. Yeah, I might have talked to you about that several times in the past. Well, I was thinking about this episode earlier today and what I wanted to talk about in it. What I don't want this to turn into is some stuffy semantic debate about philosophy, which is what a lot of modern conversations on philosophy tend to be. I'm more concerned with doing things. I enjoy a lot of stoic philosophers for sure, but one of the most famous ones was Epictetus and he wrote the Enchiridion, which is Greek for the manual, I think, like a manual on how to live your life. The very first line in it is, there are some things in life that we control and there are some things in life that we don't control. It seems really obvious, but if you don't have control over certain elements in your life, maybe you shouldn't worry about them and maybe you should go so far as to not really even think about them at all because it's not something that you can change. So another philosopher that I was going to bring up and again, it doesn't matter that this is stoicism like these. No, I think that's absolutely right and I think that's absolutely critical. We don't have to feel compelled. It's interesting stories and you can go back and read the history and all of that if you want, but I'm really not going to go into it today. The point is that Stoic philosophy was life philosophies. They weren't about just talking and debating semantics. They were about doing exercises, like LP, all the things. He includes exercises for how to approach life and Stoic philosophy is not one philosophy. There were different schools of Greek Stoic philosophy, but Roman Stoic philosophy had its own unique flavors. So the big point that I wanted to touch on today is that I think the most powerful skill a human can develop for their own personal benefit is focus, being able to block out all distractions and simply complete a task, whatever that task is. So what is your job? What is your job right now? And whatever that task at hand is that you have to complete, no matter what anyone else says or does or whatever happens, just do your job. This episode was supposed to be about the mindset of lifting, a helpful mindset of lifting. That is the mindset of lifting. What is more focused and what has a narrower bandwidth and what shuts out the irrelevant more than the bottom of a heavy squat? At the bottom of a heavy squat, are you thinking about the bills that you have to pay or an argument with your significant other? Well, you shouldn't be. That's the point, because if you do, you're probably going to fail that squat. Yeah, and you're not going to do that more than a couple of times. You're going to learn very, very quickly that your mind belongs in one place and in one time when you're under the bar. So when your timer goes off and you step onto the platform, what is your job? Jamie? To do the squat correctly so that Sully doesn't yell at you. That's my primary job. That's true though, right? To execute the lift. And I think that there's an important distinction here because what some people think is they get up on the platform and they start second guessing the song that they picked on the radio if that's going to be the right one. And they start thinking about, I wonder how heavy this is going to feel. And I wonder if I can complete all of them. And on the third rep, they start thinking about how terrible the first rep was. And if they can't get all five, what does this mean for my programming? And maybe I should gain more weight so that I don't hit a strength plateau. Maybe I should lose weight and focus on hypertrophy for a while. All these thoughts go through their head and none of those things are your job at the time. And I will say this, if you have a coach, programming is never your job. It might be a discussion that you have during rest periods. Sure, decision making, but ultimately it's not your job. Not your concern, right? Someone else will deal with that. You have to... And how strong you are isn't your job either. That's just a physical manifestation that right now you don't have any control to change right in this moment. Exactly. We had gotten stuck in some pattern where I was just not able to complete the bench. The way that it was written, I wasn't able to get that. And you were like, well, we need to figure out how to progress you past this point. And I believe I said, that's not my problem. That's your problem. Exactly. To figure out how to get past that. But as a lifter, one of the things that I love about this is when I do approach the platform, I can also step outside myself and watch that process. All of that stuff you just said about, should I gain weight, lose weight, do it this way, do it that way. The first rep was awful. I didn't get my knees out of the way. Now it's the third rep and I am dreading the fifth rep. But you're learning to discard all that as you approach the platform. None of that is helpful. None of that is helpful, but it's constantly in my head. And so there's another part of me that's like, okay, everybody shut up. So another idea that I've told a lot of my lifters more lately is when you're on the platform, you shouldn't be making any decisions of any kind. It's not the time to think about, it's not the time to judge and evaluate and retrospect about what has happened, right? So I think some of my lifters probably hate me for this, but right before they deadlift, I'll look at them in the face and I'll say, how many breaths are you going to take between every rep? And I make them give me a number. And whether it's easy or hard, they better only take two breaths or three breaths or whatever it is that they choose. Because when you're under the emotional duress of the event halfway through a set, you're not going to be thinking rationally. So those decisions have to be made beforehand, part of a plan, right? And just like if you were the captain of a ship, like the Titanic and it's sinking and all the passengers are going crazy and there's chaos everywhere, your job is to be the captain of that ship and calm the passengers as much as you can, send them to the lifeboats, right? You have a job to do. And if you panic, like everyone else is panicking, everything falls apart. And you have to be the captain of your own ship. Nothing will get you yell that more on my coaching shift. Nothing pisses me off more than the lifter who's doing a squad or doing a press. And in the middle of the set, they just shake their head and go, that sucks, right? They're commenting on their own performance and I'll just go ballistic. That is not your job. Your job is to move the damn bar, right? Exactly. But that's something that we can take to our lives, right? If we're doing our best job and our attention is focused on the matter at hand and we're discharging our duties to ourselves and to others. And the way it ends up playing out is not necessarily the way we want, but it's beyond our control at that point. Then we take it and we take it with a certain sort of serenity and know that we have done exactly our job, that we have done what we had to do in that moment. It doesn't mean we can't learn from it. It doesn't mean that we can't improve over time, but yeah, I think that is something that we can take to the larger world and to our larger life. There's a discipline and even a kind of serenity that comes out of learning how to do this. I heard somebody on the private coach's form of barbell logic say, when the timer goes off, it's like I turn into an automaton. Absolutely. I turn into a zombie, right? I am programmed to do this one thing and only this one thing. And the more and more excess noise that you have around you, your body's screaming at you more and more because the weights get heavier and heavier, the more and more you lean into your checklist. So I don't know if we've talked about this concept before, but I have all of my lifters come up with a mental checklist that they go through for every rep, for every exercise. I actually have a checklist for parts of it as I'm going through it. I have enough to think about under the bar without like, well, what should I have eaten or maybe I need a new belt or something like that. I tend to think from the floor up. So I'm getting ready to lift. I have a checklist that goes from the floor to the bar and then I'm ready, right? This is a weird brag, I guess, but my checklist has gotten elaborate enough probably because I'm a systems-minded person, but I approach the bar and put my left hand on the bar first, every time, then the right hand. I mean, it's that precise because it's almost a sacred ritual. It is a sacred ritual. We talked about this last time was sleep. And if you talk to somebody like Kurt Karwaski, right? He, you know, like one of the strongest people ever, and he'll tell you like, when he approached the bar first this foot, then that foot, then this hand, then that hand, doing it the same way every single time without fail. It's a program. You're an automaton. You're executing your lifting program. So you're a machine. So it's going to look the same way every single time. Right. So what's the worst thing that can happen if that checklist falls apart? When you're on the platform? Because this is really what people are afraid of, right? What's the worst possible thing that could happen on the platform? You might sustain a minor musculoskeletal injury, right? I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that if you really screw up, right, you can crash the bar. Right. You'll miss a rep, right? That's really about the only thing. Well, actually, in my opinion, the worst thing that you can do is when the set is over or when the set is first starting and you unrack or rack the bar, people don't understand that as a particularly, those are two particularly hazardous times, the unracking and the racking of the bar. Especially the re-racking. Yeah, especially the re-racking and people are, oh, that's over with. Thank God. And then they miss the hooks. They don't rack the bar properly, which it should be part of that autonomic program that you're executing, right? So the worst thing that can happen is that you do something stupid like that and you sustain an injury. How often do we observe that? Almost never. Almost never. And I've seen a couple of accidents. So have I. Yeah. Some stumbles and things and people are fine. But in general, the worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to miss the rep. You're just going to miss a rep, right? You're going to miss the rep. So what? So if a set is starting to get hard, but you ignore that and just focus on your checklist and set up, let's say in a squat, you set up the bottom perfectly and you start pushing back up, the bar slows down, but you just keep pushing and maintaining a good posture and a good position. And four or five seconds later, you just have to set the bar down on the pins. That is a successfully missed rep. Right. The difference being that the moment something gets hard, or if you distract yourself and don't focus on your checklist and bail out, flop to the bottom, you're trying to scramble together to get the bar back up. You push for half a second and then set it down on the pins. That's a failed missed rep, which is a real shame because you spent all of this time driving your weights up higher and higher. And when you finally got to a challenging weight where you finally had an opportunity to get experience with a grinding rep, you bailed out. All of that worked for nothing. And now you didn't get to experience what it's like to grind against a heavy challenging weight. And that's the worst thing that can happen. Right. Is a missed opportunity. Right. Because you can't take a swing at it again. Right. Not today. Not today. Yeah. And it takes a while to get back up to it. Right. And the only reason why you missed that opportunity was your choice. So another favorite book of mine is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, who is a Roman emperor and surprised he was a stoic philosopher too. But in that, he frequently says things like... Well, you say surprise. Right. Limey. So pretty extraordinary. So... It's not a surprise to Sully. Well, no. But actually, it is a surprise. So if you think about it, this guy was like the ruler of the entire civilized world. Yeah. The entire known world. The entire known world. At the time. He was the absolute ruler of Western Europe and the Mediterranean. Right. And he wrote this book of such wisdom and compassion and tenderness and humility. And he was the emperor of Rome. That, like, it never fails to just boggle me. Right. What I wouldn't give for an afternoon, breaking bread and drinking wine with that man. And that is a book that I think belongs on the night's... You know, I shouldn't say the nightstand. But that's a book that belongs in everyone's library. A book that was never meant to be published. It was his personal diary. It was just a diary. That he actually instructed people to destroy it after his death and they just couldn't do it. And, you know, he talks about the same things because, again, he's a stoic. Like, control what you can. Don't worry about the rest. And then a few things that have always leaped out at me. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, saying, all men belong to one another. Right. Right. Or all of these people that bothered him because they were zealots and... Fools and... Liars and cheats and politicians and all of this, right? He would say all these people that you, you know, can't stand to tolerate because they're such bad men when you're also a bad man, just like they are, just as flawed. Or... And this is where you get into, like, is there such a thing, stoic existentialism? But there's a lot of existentialism in Marcus Aurelius and stoicism. One thing that you can't control is that you are temporarily finite. And Marcus Aurelius talks about this constantly. You know, Alexander, Socrates, Zeno... They're all dead. They're all dust. Right. So death is stalking you. So while it is within your power, be good. Right. That just really covers it all. While it is within your power, be good. Be courageous. Live a good life. Live a good life. Have the courage to live a good life. Have the courage and the strength to live a good life. It's almost never easy to live a good life. One of their stoic quotes that I love is, like, why would you think it would be easy? Like, that's not the point. It's... You're not supposed to have fun all the time. It's not about getting your own way and that's going to make you happy. Like, life is going to be hard. It's going to be just as hard for you as it is for me. And it's going to be just as hard until your last day. So quit whining. All of that won't sound dissonant with our listeners who have heard of stoicism. But the other side of stoicism, which is really interesting, you know, when we think stoic, that's what we think. We think, well, it's not supposed to be easy. It's going to be hard. And I'm going to trudge on and I'm going to engage in voluntary hardship and then, you know, life's a bitch and then you die, right? But that's not stoicism. There's a heavy emphasis. If you read Epictetus, maybe not so much Marcus Aurelius, but if you read Epictetus, the word delight pops up. You know, this idea that if you just look at the world and see what is versus what could have been, right? And that was totally beyond your control. Well, yeah, it's raining, but I'm alive and I have warm bread. And maybe standing in the rain is a wonderful experience to have once or twice in your life because you're going to be in a casket soon and you'll never get to experience that again. So when I look at that, I see this idea that, you know, you're part of a larger world, a natural world, which has its currents and flows and almost sort of like Taoist kind of conception that if you conform yourself to the way of the world, which includes rain and thunder, but also sunlight and summer and friendship and love and death, right? And good food and hardship and you conform yourself to that, then you're going to experience more delight and more joy. And I find that- Despite those things. Or maybe even because of them, right? Because you've conformed yourself to the way of the world. So the Stoic is not somebody who's doing battle with the world or with himself. I feel it's a deeply happy person, a deeply content person. Which is not what most people think of when they think of Stoicism. Right. And so my bent is more existential, right? When people think of existentialism, they think of nihilism and they think of Nietzsche and they think of being and nothingness, you know, Sartre's book. And that's not the case at all. So, you know, my view is, and this is very consonant with Stoicism, that what existentialism says is that we have a beginning and we have no control over that beginning. We're born to certain parents at a certain time, speaking a certain language with a certain genetic endowment, and that is all beyond our control. And that places a hard limit on who we are and who we can be, the sort of life that we can reveal in our own living. Like, I'll never be emperor of Rome, right? But I think this is a really good point. Marcus Aurelius was the Roman emperor in the second century AD, I think. Epictetus was alive the same time as him, wasn't he? I believe he was. I thought Epictetus was earlier, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong too. But the point is, Epictetus was born a slave, the absolute extreme opposite ends of the social caste possible. And they both found ways to live good lives, content lives. Epictetus was also a cripple. By encompassing what an existentialist would call their facticity, the idea that we're just thrown into the world and we're dealt a certain deck of cards, we're dealt a certain hand. And you make the best of it. And you play that hand as best you can. And then if you extend that horizon all the way, right, where do you end up? You end up with my death, right? I am a temporarily finite being. And so what I take from all of that is, you know, I have a beginning and there's nothing I can do about that. I have an end and there's even less I can do about that because while my beginning is fixed in time, my ending is not. And so I view like we are given a form and our life is like a poem or a composition that we have to make for ourselves. It's not given to us. Our meaning, our purpose is not given to us. And we have to live that life in such a way that no matter where that period falls, no matter where that last stanza falls, it still hangs together. Like that's my goal is to try to make a life so that if the period falls tomorrow, it would still make sense. It would still have meaning. Does that make sense? I don't feel like I'm given a meaning in life. I wasn't born with a purpose. I had to forge one for myself given the cards that I was dealt. And I think that's the beauty of this mindset, is that you get to pick what your job is from maybe a set of options, but you get to pick. Right, a limit, right. So this is the point that I was going to make about Marcus Aurelius in meditations like to 15 minutes ago. But you can think of it this way. You can frame everything that happens in life as a greater or lesser opportunity to practice being in control of your fate. And that's what Marcus Aurelius frequently goes back to in meditations. And Epictetus too, like everything that comes along is an opportunity for you to practice that goodness and that strength and that serenity. Right. So a great example of this in everyday life is you're driving and someone cuts you off in traffic. It happens all the time. It's a great opportunity to not get angry and have an outburst for a couple of pretty obvious reasons if you think about it. One is, have you ever driven a day in your life where someone hasn't driven like an idiot around you? So why wouldn't you expect before you even get in the car that you're going to encounter that on your drive? It's going to happen. So it shouldn't surprise you. Secondly, the other person in the other car can't hear you when you yell at them. In fact, they're already gone and having a great day and you're upset because of their bad driving. And so you have ceded- You're paying the price for their incompetence. You have ceded your autonomy to some stranger. And that's the saddest suffering that a person could ever have because you chose to let it go. You gave that power to someone else. I like to think about it in terms of being aware of what's happening for you right now. So let's say you cut me off in traffic and it makes me feel some kind of way, right? You know, my heart starts to race or I'm having a hard time breathing or whatever and I look at that and say, okay, you're feeling this way. You have a choice to make about your behavior related to that feeling. So acknowledge that you do have this feeling. It should piss you off when somebody cuts you off in traffic. It should make you mad if somebody, you know, pees in your Cheerios or something. It's okay. And it's okay. This is the issue that I have sometimes with the Stoics and with some of the other predominantly male philosophers is that we have to acknowledge that we are 100% emotional. Emotional creatures. We are emotional visual creatures. We're not 90% emotion and 10% logic. We're 100% emotion. So if you can raise the awareness of what emotions you're having, then you can make more reasonable choices about your behavior. Like, okay, that happened and I'm mad. Am I going to let that destroy the rest of my day? Exactly. Or am I going to come in and take it out on you? Am I going to complain? Bring it back to the barbell. Right. Like, I don't feel necessarily good. Is my belt tight enough or too tight? Maybe that weight is too heavy for me. I'm not happy with my last set. I'm really, really bored with lifting today. I'm really, really angry with my coach. What does any of that have to do with what you have to do when your timer goes off? Nothing. Right. And so you have a choice. All it can do is serve to distract you from the present moment. But I think what Jamie is saying is, I can be mad when somebody cuts me off. I have no control over how it makes me feel. But that's actually an epictetus too. And Marcus wrote this. Absolutely. They recognize that we don't have any control over our emotional responses. What we have control over is what we do next. So what do I do? Do I engage in some sort of freeway duel with this asshole and putting my life and the life of a whole bunch of innocent people at risk? Or do I just say, yeah, God, what an asshole. There's another one. Yeah, there's another one. No big deal. But isn't it a beautiful day? I love this song that's coming on next. Because that's really all you can do. You can make a decision to act on anger or you can let it pass. Mike, concern with these types of paradigms is that it can border on dismissive positivity. Just let it go. Which is a frequent criticism of stoicism. And that bugs me because telling somebody with anxiety or depression to cheer up or calm down or let it go, that's just not how it works. So there has to be an acknowledgement of this. No, you have to own it. No, you do. You have to own it. Because how can you avoid letting your emotional response to a situation control your actions if you don't own and acknowledge the emotional response? The real emotional response. A real emotional response. So give us an alternative. What do you think about life, the universe and everything? And how does training inform that for you? So I have to do lists kind of in general, but I have never in my life been able to follow a checklist. That just doesn't fit for me. So I think in pictures and I think about animals and I think about color. So if I'm having a red day or a blue day. Well, that's fascinating. So it's when I approach the bar, I'm like, okay, guys, we have to go lift now. What are we going to do about it? And for a while I was telling myself, it's light as a feather. It's light as a feather. And eventually I was like, it's not. Like that's just a lie. Very heavy. You had to pick a different like mental image. So we had been reading Norse mythology at the time and I decided that I was going to be as strong as Odin's horse with eight legs, right? So for six months or so, I was like, sleep near could pick this up, you know, strong as an ox or big as a horse. Thinking about like strong animals and how they're trained to carry heavy loads or pull heavy things. Sort of without protest. Right. It's their job. If you're a draft horse, you pull stuff. That's what you do. So instead of having a left foot, right foot conversation, it's like, okay, ox, go do this heavy thing. The ox and the right, right. So because I don't see you engaging in a freeway duel with somebody who cut you off in traffic, right? What's your cognitive approach to that sort of situation where somebody aggresses on you or transgresses on you and you have a strong emotional response? How do you handle the situation like that? Do you become an animal again? Is there some particular sort of cognitive or heuristic approach that you bring to that sort of situation? In a way, I do this all the time. Like I'm aware that this is happening for me. Like you just upset me or this made me mad and I'm feeling this kind of way. And I also try and rewind back to the last couple of hours. Like, am I already like primed to be angry because of like seven other things that happened that day? And if that's the case, then you need to tame that lion before it starts running around and breaking stuff because that's not an appropriate response. So yeah, I think there's animals there too. Hard Varks? Yeah. Hard Varks. Anteaters more. I'm sorry, anteaters. Jamie loves anteaters. She has the most awesome anteater tattoo. I wish you could all see it. What about birds? Birds are a lie. And because of that, you kind of disregard anything that they do, pretty much. Noah got... I was deeply confused this morning. Initiated into the cult of birds are a lie today. Jamie opened my eyes. Birds are a lie. Can you tell people about it real quick? Well, birds are actually a government conspiracy. They're drones and they're operated by batteries or they can recharge by perching on electric wires. So when you see them doing that, just know they're backing up to the cloud. It's really what they're attempting. Sounds legit. Noah, you got to get us out of this. I don't know how. Are you going to edit this part out? Because you guys are going to lose all credibility. I can't see it. It won't be edited out. It's for the ages now. So I think ultimately where this needs to go is not that everybody listening to this should become a stoic or an existentialist or have a spirit animal or be concerned about birds. I think what needs to come out of this is that when we transform our bodies with barbell training and voluntary hardship, we should anticipate that it's going to change more than just our bodies. It's going to change the way we approach problems and the way that we live our lives. And different people are going to have different philosophies of life and of living. And that's okay. What's not okay is to not have one of those, is to not have an evolving thoughtful idea that there is always an improvement that we can make on the way. Was it Socrates who said, or was it somebody else? The unexamined life is not worth living. I think it was Plato. I should remember who said this, but I don't. The unexamined life is not worth living. And the unexamined life is not for the athlete of aging. The athlete of aging is temporarily finite proposition. And we should all think about our purpose and our meaning and the best way to live our lives in a way that does justice to ourselves and our fellow beings. And it's just one more aspect of living life strong and healthy and to the fullest. And I don't know, perhaps this conversation will get you thinking about these kinds of things and maybe make some changes to your reading list accordingly. You know, I think that I heard you say one time, and I'm going to have to paraphrase this, but I think that I heard you say, when you step on a platform and do something difficult, it's a courageous affirmation of life. And I think that's the point. It is. Things can happen, but you still can make that choice. When you might not even remember that you said this, but a real life example, I was bitching about making dinner and how much I hate making dinner. And that continues to be true. You were exasperated with my attitude and said, Jamie, you can squat 180 pounds for a set of five or whatever the number was at the time. Like you can make dinner without complaining. I was like, oh, you know, that sounds like something I would say. Yeah. And I think about that probably once a week when I'm like, I really don't want to do this. I really shouldn't have to empty the dishwasher or fold the laundry or do any of that stuff. Like, yeah, but you can do so many amazing things. You can do this. So be honest, did it help? Oh, yeah. It was one of those, like, you know, I was a bit abashed in the moment. Like, you're right. I have been, I was complaining a lot that day. You know, so it was, but it's one of those life-changing moments where you'd like- Sounds like I did a good day's work. And I can't think of a better place to leave it than there. I am extremely grateful to Barbell Logic for extending this invitation and this opportunity to Noah and I and all of our guests for this Barbell Prescription podcast series. We went pretty far afield. We had a lot of fun. I want to thank all of our guests. Again, John Clausen and Bazaar, Debbie Roslowski, Jamie Collins that I miss anybody. Laura. And Laura Walter. You guys all brought a lot to the table and made it a very rich experience for me and Noah. And I'm sure for our listeners as well. Noah, thanks for a great job producing this and setting it all up and making sure it all happened the way it was supposed to. My pleasure. And thank you all for listening. Once again, this is Jonathan Sullivan from Grays Teal Strength and Conditioning in Farmington Hills, Michigan with the Barbell Logic podcast, signing off. Bye for now.