 my time is very valuable to myself. So if I'm to give it to other people, then I have to value that as well. Me today on Candidic Conversations is Chris Gethen. Now Chris Gethen is a monster of a man. Why is it that I'm calling him that? Because he has been training the Hittick Russians for the last 11 to 12 years. As far as I remember, the first time I heard about Chris was back in around 2013, 2014, when the Chris three had released and we came to know that the man behind Hittick's crazy body is the way I have to describe it was Chris. So Chris, welcome to the show and you're really looking big in the video. Did you, was it your chestache today? Did you bench press? I don't know how many hundreds of cases. Yeah, well, I don't know how much I bench. I've never tried to, I always say it doesn't matter how much you bench. It matters how much you look like you bench. Interesting, interesting. So, you know, I mean, I'm going to jump right in and ask what is it really like, you know, training somebody like Hittick Russian. And you can, you can probably talk about right now when you're training him for fighter or you could talk about before I believe it was in 2011 when Hittick came to you and you started training him. Yes, that's right. 2011 and this time round has been very, very different. Over the past 10 years, Riddick has had so many injuries. You know, you definitely can't count them on both hands. And, you know, that's, that's become a very, very complicated. And last time when we did transform, he didn't have work commitments. This time he's got a lot of work commitments. And, you know, there's a lot of stress that's involved. And what I'm trying to do is mitigate the damage of the stress to optimize his recovery so we can optimize the workouts, you know, with the recovery, you do not have the workouts optimized. So that's been quite the challenge at the moment. But, you know, he's about to release a movie. So it's all hands on deck at the moment. Right, right. And, you know, again, so I think back to 2011, from again, from whatever I remember that time he was on bed rest. He had a double slip disc and he had a 36 and a half inch waist, which is approximately the size of my waist. But like, how did you get him back into shape? And, you know, what was the entire process like? Yeah, there was a lot of suffering involved and sacrifices. But in order to achieve the success, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. So the main thing was, you know, we made sure that he was eating six clean meals per day. And when I say clean meals, you know, there was protein within them, you know, that poultry, fish, egg whites, protein powder, along with some form of carbohydrates being rice, quinoa, oats, potatoes, a lot of fibrous carbs and some healthy fats in there, like nuts, seeds, avocado, olive oil, full, you know, egg yolks, things like that, six times a day, but little and often. And then we would train about five days a week, weight train, that is, with resistance training for about 45 to 60 minutes. And then we do some form of cardio every single day, much like what we're doing right now, you know, that could be going outside onto the beach for a run, do an agility work, a lot of body weight work, or it could be just on a stairmaster, on a treadmill, on a rower. Some, but it was just mainly the consistency and making sure that he was in bed at a timely manner to keep the stress levels down as well. Meditating, grounding, earthen, getting sunlight on a daily basis. So try to take an holistic view to the transformations as well. The more healthier a person can be, the more responsive they are to a transformation. It doesn't matter if somebody kind of looks okay, if they're not healthy, they're not going to transform. It's, you know, it's much like an engine. You're going to make sure that it's highly tuned at all times. Right, right. And, you know, I mean, I read somewhere you lay a lot of importance on sleeping in time, getting up in time. Yes. Yeah, there has to be a routine. Your body adjusts after a while. It's very smart. It knows when to burn. It knows when to recover. It knows when to perform. And the more that you can have consistency with that, the better. So we try to train at the same time every day. However, like today, we haven't trained yet. We usually train at eight o'clock in the morning. We did cardio this morning, but he still hasn't trained. And we should be training about five o'clock this afternoon. So things happen, but the main thing is getting to bed early. When we stay up later after dusk, our cortisol levels remain high when we should be bringing our cortisol levels down so we can release melatonin. But now we're exposed to artificial blue lights and screens and, you know, TVs and, you know, going out at a stupid o'clock. So our cortisol levels stay higher, much higher than our ancestors did. So we need to kind of combine some of today's technology and biohacks with a lot of our ancestral wisdom, and that is adhering to our circadian rhythm and going to bed a lot earlier to keep our cortisol levels at bay. Cortisol levels can go up during the workout, but the rest of the time it should be down. So acute levels are healthy. It's called Homesis or Hormetic Response. But systemic levels are very, very unhealthy and can lead to heart disease and other complications. Keeping late could also, I mean, bad timings could also lead to heart disease. It can do. Yeah. A lot of people think it's really cool to burn the candle at both ends and have very little sleep and still dominate their work day. You know, kind of like the Gary Vaynerchuk way of thinking, which is not a good way. You know, not everybody's like Gary Vee and that's his purpose in life. I think our purpose should be our longevity and our health span. Right, right. Okay, you know, I saw something very interesting on your website. I went to your website yesterday and I was scrolling through this particular section called the Frequently Asked Questions. And very, I must say that unlike other websites, unlike other personalities, a very frank FAQ section, because there was one question over there called Is This Free? So is this free? So the question over there, apparently, which you get asked a lot, is the training which I'm going to get under this exam for free? And you actually answered over there at North. This is the guy who does this professionally and obviously it's not going to be for free. That's correct. Yeah, you know, I studied in college for three years full time. I had to hold down three jobs while I went to college to study in the mid 90s. And I've been studying ever since my craft. You know, you know, I continue to educate myself whether it be for performance, health span, biohacking, anti-aging, blood work, allergens, food allergies, maltoxins, absolutely everything. I try to continue to do the best that I can, not only for my clients, but for myself. I'll use myself as a big like I am with blood glucose testing at the moment here in India. So, you know, my time is very valuable to myself. So if I'm to give it to other people, then I have to value that as well. The time that I'm not having for myself or reading to meditate to exercise to go on adventure, enjoy my wife or anything like that, it's going to cost. It's going to cost money. But the one thing that I do guarantee is results if people do what I say. Some people are students of learning. They know what to do, but very few are students of application. And if they apply my principles, then they'll get the results they invested in. Right. Right. You sort of remind me of, you know, the very terminator like thing, which sort of reminds me you met other shorts in a cabin. Many times, many times. Many times. Wow. How many people can actually say that? How was it like meeting Arnold? Oh, Arnold's great. You know, he's a phenomenal person. You know, the last time I saw him was probably about, I don't know, a year, year and a half ago. And, you know, he was commenting on how awesome my dog was at the time. Because we both, he's got a place in Idaho where I live at the moment. So there's a place called Sun Valley where I go quite often in the summer for mountain biking or snowboarding in the winter. And he's got a property there. So I often bump into him there. And he's just always been very nice, very courteous to me. Lucky, lucky you. Now, you know, when exactly, you've got your own chain of gyms, right? Own chain of gyms. There's gyms called Chris Gettys Gyms. So when did that start off? And for how long has that been around? And how many sort of how many centers, how many outlets do you have? I think we've got about 10 centers now, nine or 10, because we've just signed the couple. And they've been going for the past seven years we've had. And we launched them in 2015. So, you know, over the pandemic, unfortunately, there's a lot of gyms that were closing down because I don't see other gyms as being partitioned. I see we're all together. We're fighting, we're fighting Netflix and the couch. You know, that's what we're fighting in activity altogether. So unfortunately, several gym franchises closed down. But thankfully, we actually signed contracts to open more gyms during the pandemic. And I think that's because we've really focused on not like a quantity of gyms, but the quality and myself and my business partner, Jagjima, we consider them academies where we have ongoing education. Okay, good going, good going. Anyway, I'm just looking, my eyes are constantly going at the clock. And apparently, I think you've got our training sessions with the come up. So, I don't want to be the reason your training session gets delayed. But thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. And all the best for the future. And definitely, we're looking forward to running into you sometime in Mumbai during the workouts over there. Cool. Thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks a lot. Take care. Thank you. My pleasure. Have a good day.