OptiCast - The Optimization Lab Podcast
Most podcasts are just people talking around problems theyâve never actually solved⌠this isnât that.
OptiCast is what it sounds like when you stop pretending surface-level fixes work and start breaking down why your system keeps stalling even when youâre doing everything âright.â This is physiology-first thinking⌠mitochondria before motivation, energy before hormones, sequencing before stacking.
Youâre going to hear things most coaches avoid because it kills their business⌠why your labs look fine while your output keeps dropping, why your discipline is actually making things worse, why adding more compounds into a mis-sequenced system just digs the hole deeper.
Every episode is a live dissection of real failure patterns⌠the kind youâve already felt but couldnât explain⌠and the decision logic behind fixing them without guessing, without chasing numbers, and without pretending effort alone forces adaptation .
If youâre looking for reassurance, this will piss you off.
If youâre trying to figure out why your body stopped responding⌠this is where that starts getting exposed.
OptiCast - The Optimization Lab Podcast
Mastering Injury Management - Full Peptide and Rehab Guide (OptiCast 22)
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đ ABOUT THIS VIDEO
In this episode of the OptiCast, Nathan and Aubrey delve into the complexities of injury management, emphasizing the importance of understanding the differences between soreness and actual injuries. They discuss the role of fear in recovery, the necessity of modifying training, and the significance of seeking professional help early. The conversation highlights the need for rebuilding trust in one's body and the concept of injury proofing through proper nutrition and training adjustments. Listeners are encouraged to adopt a more informed and proactive approach to managing injuries, rather than relying on quick fixes or outdated beliefs.
Injury management is about understanding patterns, not just symptoms.
Soreness is diffuse and predictable, while injury is focal and persistent.
Rest without reloading can lead to deconditioning.
Fear of pain can prolong injury recovery.
Rebuilding trust in your body requires understanding its signals.
Training modifications should focus on capacity, not just pain management.
Seeking help early can prevent long-term issues.
Repeated injuries indicate a need for training adjustments.
Injury proofing involves building spare capacity and proper nutrition.
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injury management, soreness vs injury, recovery, fear of injury, training modifications, professional help, injury proofing, body trust, movement patterns, rehabilitation
Should I train through pain?
SPEAKER_00Training through pain is literally how idiots turn these small problems into careers and fuck rehab pain is only tolerable when you're constantly rising and you know exactly why it's there in the first place. So if you know that and if you have built that capacity, then you can train through pain as long as that pain is manageable at a like a three out of ten, four out of ten. But if it's more than that within 48 hours, you shouldn't train through pain. This podcast right here is just for instrument purposes. I am not a medical doctor, not a nutritionist, or a personal trainer. I'm a very fucking qualified forated toaster. As Ruth Langworth so wisely said, I don't know shit about fuck, so don't trust me, don't listen to me. We're here just for shits and deals. And if you trust me with health advice, and that's just natural selection at work. Don't do drugs, always listen to your GP, and with that disclaimer out of the way, let's get started. Guys, welcome to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan, and me Afri. Where today we are showing you exactly how to manage injuries. And I know that sounds boring as fuck, but check this out. Because if you're still hurt or you're if you're stuck like in between these injuries all the fucking time and you're always training around the same shit, year after fucking year, it's got nothing to do with your genetics. It really nothing to do with your family history, how often your mom used to get injured, all this shit. It's nothing to do with age. And it's definitely not because your body is fragile. We're really gonna attack that from the core. It's actually because you're reacting instead of sequencing. So we're gonna go back to that like we always do. You're guessing instead of controlling, you're confusing toughness with intelligence. So today we're breaking down the dumbest fucking beliefs that people have about pain, about soreness, about fear, about rest, about movement, and the whole listening to your body thing. And we're gonna show you exactly how injuries get resolved upstream, not by a bunch of hacks, not by just dumping protocols over you guys, or just, you know, doing some magic exercise and pretending you'll go away. If you've ever said something like, oh, this worked last time, so I'm gonna do it again, or it's probably nothing, or I'm gonna just need to push through this thing because it's gonna heal on its own. This episode is gonna be the most useful thing to you to listen and apply right away. So without further ado, Aubrey, what is the first line question that we have being asked about injuries today?
SPEAKER_01How do you know when something is just soreness versus an actual injury?
SPEAKER_00So if you're asking whether like something is like just soreness, you're you're already fucked up earlier than you think. The reason being because soreness versus injury isn't really about the sensation, it's about recognizing which pattern you are actually dealing with. And patterns they are invisible when you're inside of your own fucking head. So you can't really be objective when you're dealing with these patterns. But there are certain things here, right? So soreness is going to be diffuse, it's going to be very predictable, and it usually resolves itself with a very narrow window of time. When we drop load, when sleep starts improving, when you know you fix your calories and your micronutrients, when the well, like when when we're dealing with injuries, on the other hand, like that's gonna be more focal, right? It's gonna, it's gonna stick around for longer and it's gonna show up pretty much in the same way every time that you load the tissue from the same angle, in the same speed or in the same position, even when you swear that you're recovered. And there's the there's this lie that people keep telling themselves that like soreness improves linearly, is sort of an expectation that in reality, like soreness will keep returning in the same tissues. Like, this usually means there's just like a low-grade tissue failure, which is can be masked by a bunch of hormones like cortisol, like adrenaline, and like refusing to back off is usually tied to your identity of just thinking that you need to push through things. An actual injury is going to sort of announce itself through a loss of output capacity before pain shows up. Usually people think about an injury when the pain actually shows up. So you're gonna notice certain things like the bar speed is gonna drop a little bit, your coordination just feels a little bit off, or like unconsciously, you're gonna change the movement to protect yourself from something before admitting that it hurts.
SPEAKER_01So, are you saying that soreness can be an early warning sign of injury?
SPEAKER_00It can be a warning early sign of injury, but it's also like very, very, it's not as focalized, it's not as repeatable and things like that. Like with your when you're dealing with an actual injury, it is very repeatable. There's a pattern to it. Like, like if we're talking about recovery from this, right? Like if your sleep is tanked, right? If you're checking your resting heart rate, which you should, and that keeps creeping up, it's just moving up by a few beats per minute every week. Your appetite just gets a little bit thrown off, and then there's this area that on your elbow or in your knees or your hips that just like feels worse when you are stressed. That's not soreness. You have enough indications at this point that your nervous system is actually downshifting because the tissue can't keep up with it anymore. So you have to deal with the nervous system aspect of it as well. And this is where people get really smart and then they, you know, they go on TikTok and they hear about peptides and they hear about BPC 157, they just throw at it, which like it actually does work because of collagen synthesis, collagen signaling, actually, and because it increases angiogenesis, but it's gonna fail entirely because you haven't actually reduced the mechanical insult that caused the damage in the first place. In other words, you haven't fixed the actual movement patterns or the life patterns that have put you in a position where you would become more susceptible to that injury in the first place. TB500 is also thrown all over the place here because it actually acts uh like uh it improves this thing called acting, remodeling, and um also tissue pliability. So you can gain a little bit of like mobility and things like that. GHQ copper can do that as well, actually. It's uh used for that, and so can SLU PP332. But if you are still loading the tissue like with the same patterns and the same execution in the same way that it's accelerated that injury, you're actually gonna accelerate the process of scar formation instead of restoring that function. And when you're doing that, there are certain compounds like Windstraw, for instance, that can actually improve collagen synthesis at the the the the scarred like formation, like at the level of the actual like collagen fibers. The problem is that they get healed in a disjunction manner if you don't have actual support. So instead of healing and lining up perfectly, they just start lining up like this, which makes the collagen, which makes the the tissue actually more brittle. What do you mean support in what part of the sentence?
SPEAKER_01You said um if they're not lined up because of support, like what support because of the support of the winstru, right?
SPEAKER_00So, like if you if you're adding winstru into this mix, it's gonna create like a jumbled up mix. So, like a lot of these compounds, like yes, they do heal, yes, they provide uh uh support, but the problem is that they do it in a way that doesn't make might not make sense for you at this point in time. Like with any injury though, I do think that GHK copper has its place, just because it improves like uh collagen call up quality and it controls inflammation at the at the local level. But if your mitochondria is actually fucking fried and like energy production is very unstable at the mitochondria level, the tissue repair is gonna be rationed, and this is just gonna become a very expensive process of hoping that this tissue will heal itself when it actually will not heal itself. And like people don't want to hear this stuff, but pain reduction is not healing, like anything that just makes the pain go away really fast without restoring the tissue capacity, it's going to increase the odds of something tearing down down the road later, right? So, like, what are some supplements that that make sense, right? Like supplements like curcumin, but it has to be pythosome just because of the availability. So I know it's gonna be about eight times more expensive than just buying regular curcumin. The problem is it's gonna be a difference between 80% of it being absorbed by your body versus 1%. It doesn't make any fucking sense to take anything but pytosome or C3. C3 is also pretty useful, but there's less research. Omega-3s are also going to reduce inflammatory signaling alongside that curcumin, which like these things are they can help short term, but they can actually create a problem and blunt some of the adaptive signal that you're gonna have if you use it too aggressively, and you're still training around the injury instead of fixing how the tissue failed in the first place. So that needs to be part of your protocol and figuring out how to do that. And people love just like throwing peptides or even like anti-inflammatory medication, things like that, because it it just lets them keep training, right? So people take the Wolverine stack year long, but that only works if your absorption pathways are good, if your sleep architecture is nailed down, if your nervous system tone is actually fucking intact, like otherwise, you're literally borrowing from the recovery that you need to be able to heal that tissue, like you're borrowing recovery capacity that your body doesn't have. Injuries are literally just doing too much too soon. So you already borrowed from the future, and if you're just masking the issue without correcting it upstream at the cellular level, you're just gonna keep borrowing from the future until you don't have anything else to give. And at that point, you're fucked right, and you you you can't really self-diagnose this type of stuff because like your brain is in going to keep incentivizing you to always just label everything as like soreness, so you don't have to change your behavior, so you don't have to reduce your volume, so you don't like don't have to deal with your ego or with the like the timelines that we actually have to modify, right? Like I finished my last bush phase partially because of my shoulders, didn't want to fucking do it, but I did it because I was, you know, every single week fucking doing like you know, 15-minute video check-ins and breaking down everything and spending time and all of this stuff. Like, this is what you need to do with yourself, and this this is also why just copying someone else's rehab protocol or like peptide stack is actually really fucking stupid. The right tool at the wrong time is going to delay the resolution of the problem and it's gonna actually create chronic problems that are never going to fully show up on imaging. So you think that the issue is fixed, it is not fucking fixed, you just don't have pain here. Like the rational move, in my opinion, is to actually have someone outside of this own like bias map and like create this like a control for your load and decide like which compounds make sense and then shut down some of these like instincts that you have about dealing with your own injuries before they turn into these long-term identifiers, which is an actual injury. So going from the numbness and the soreness all the way to an actual like tissue issue. And like just to be clear, just because you have pain in an area doesn't mean that mechanistically there's like something, there's a morphological adaptation, you may not have one or the other. And we're gonna we're gonna touch that down the road. So I just I just wanted to tease that a little bit, but um, that's a that's a good question. But that's basically how I would go about solving this issue without like just masquerading the the the confusion between like soreness and stiffness and actual like an injury, right? But good question.
SPEAKER_01What's the biggest mistake people make right after they get injured?
SPEAKER_00I think is that people just try to feel better like as soon as possible, right? Without trying to understand why the tissue failed in the first place. So like pain relief is very emotional, it's emotionally soothing, and it can actually be systemically destructive when you use pain soothing as a strategy to deal with your injury. So people like immediately, as soon as there's an injury, I get it in my inbox. What can I take? Like, or sometimes, like, thankful to the podcast that we have and stuff, people are asking, like, hey, what signals am I ignoring? That's a very good question. Um, like, but this is also going to guarantee that you're actually going to treat inflammation, which is good, and we need to treat that, but you also have to deal with the mechanical, the neurological, and the energy failure that keeps compounding that issue underneath. And without dealing with that, asking what can I take or what signal I ignored actually doesn't make a lot of sense. So, like another issue that you see instead of like just trying to get rid of the pain is just like rushing straight to rest, or just like the whole the whole icing and then like keeping the position, like your hands up high depression elevation, bullshit has been debunked so many times. I'm fucking tired of it. It literally gives me erectile dysfunction, just to fucking think about it. But like both of these extremes are fucking lazy, right? Like, both just like pushing through training or just resting. They're lazy because the rest without actually reloading the tissue is going to create something called deconditioning. You're gonna detrain yourself, and these tissues are gonna adapt to the lower load. So when you reintroduce the load again, you're gonna have the worst fucking problem. So, like, for instance, with my elbow injury, I took a few months off from like shooting and lifting. When I came back, it came back like this. And it comes back much worse, actually, when you look at the research specifically for tendinopathy. If you keep reloading this tissue like over and over without proper sequencing, without a methodology to actually like reintroduce things according to your recovery capacity and also improve your recovery capacity at the mitochondrial level, you're just gonna keep reopening that wound over and over and over. And again, this is what where like BPC 157 gets abused because it increases blood flow and increases collagen signaling and it makes you feel better really, really fast. But if the tolerance to the movement hasn't been adapted first, like if you haven't rebuilt that, you're literally just healing a tissue to be re-injured under the same stress, you're not strengthening that.
SPEAKER_01Especially if you're like I had an injury in my trap, like my whole trap from doing the exercise in a certain way. I was doing really wide lat pull downs.
SPEAKER_00Which peptides did we put we put in?
SPEAKER_01None. All we did was adjust my hand placement. Yep. And I it had been hurt originally from trying to do pull-ups at the state fair with my hands too far wide, right?
SPEAKER_00I hurt my elbow doing that.
SPEAKER_01Just I'm not gonna do that anymore. Yep. Um, but then I it was fine, and then I did it again wide, and it hurt me again. So now from now on, I'm just keeping my hands closer together, and I just know that's my limitation because of my skeletons like that.
SPEAKER_00I get injured in that exercise by doing like reverse flies in a similar way. So now I actually stand on the machine.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00I'm not I'm not laying down anymore because it it puts me in a very, very like mechanically disadvantageous position, which just means that you're gonna have to load tissues that are not the target tissue and you're gonna end up fucking them up. Um, people also throw in TB500 in here, just like speed things up. And by the way, if you're throwing something just to speed the recovery up, you're fucking stupid. Like the faster healing of the wrong tissue architecture means you will lock in these compensatory patterns that are going to show up later as chronic pain, and they might show up in a completely separate place. So now you think you have two completely unrelated injuries, and it's actually because of the compensatory patterns. So I have literally, this is this is a fact, I have literally corrected people's tendonitis in their fucking wrist by adapting their shoulder exercises because that's where the issue started. It's a compensatory pattern all the way through. If you just threw in BPC 157 TB500, I mean it can help. I get people asking me about this stuff all the time, just like where do I inject it and stuff like that? And I'm like, I mean, inject it on the spot, inject it as close as you can and stuff, but like just letting you know you're probably doing this shit wrong. And like outside of the people who are trying to do this the right way, right? You get people throwing anti-inflammatories, they're gonna do compression, they're gonna do icing, they're gonna do the whole fucking nine yards, but they don't realize that inflammation literally is a GPS signaling, like telling you exactly where the failure happened and muting the inflammation response earlier actually removes the only feedback that you fucking had about what was going wrong. So, like when I had my surgery, my gyne surgery last year, and I started taking pain medications. One of my concerns was okay, well, if I don't feel any pain whatsoever, then couldn't I actually start moving in ways that will not be conducive to my recovery too soon? In other words, doing too much too soon. That phrase again, if you take anything from this podcast, is that injuries are just doing too much too soon, and the way to fix it is by opening up your recovery capacity. There's like also like this thing that like people try to like very, very rapidly reduce their pain in like seven to 14 days, which is like really fucking cool. But this actually is going to increase long-term injury risk. Why? Because you're gonna return to load that before we build the capacity, and your nervous system is gonna calibrate to that danger signal because it doesn't get that danger signal anymore, it doesn't get that pain response anymore, which is a good thing, it doesn't get that inflammation response anymore, right? So, like again, going back to Gracumin and fish oil, absolutely, they will lower that inflammatory signal. But if you don't have enough mitochondrial output, like if that shit is already low from stress, from poor sleep, from under-eating, from like not having enough like micronutrients in place, your recap, like your recovery capacity is going to be capped no matter what pills you fucking swallow. You can be taking fucking 10 grams of both of these things. I've done it before. That's not how you solve the issue. Believe me, I had a not a lot of knowledge about this stuff, and I fucked it up entirely because of the lack of sequencing. And like people trust their own judgment, right? Which is like what I did. They trust their judgment because, like, at the exact moment, their judgment is compromised their identity, right? Like it's compromised by their compromised by their fear of losing progress. You don't want to like step back, right? And they believe that this would just like clear up itself on its own. And that's why these like DLY rehab protocols, they fail all the fucking time. And then you're resorted to going to doctors that are never going to correct the issue at a cellular level, not because the tools didn't work, but because you didn't have fucking timing. You didn't have load control. Your nervous system wasn't in a place where it could decide to actually use these tools and you ended up making the things worse. So if you want to shorten this timeline, actually work with someone who is going to like solve this problem for you all the way through and slow you down when you want to rush, and then apply these compounds only when your system can actually make use of them instead of wasting them because no one likes to waste money. I fucking hate that. Just please stop with the fucking just throwing wolverine stacks every time you feel a nagging pain or anything like that.
SPEAKER_01But anyways, how do you decide when to rest versus when to keep moving?
SPEAKER_00I mean, if you feel like resting, just fucking take a rest day, right? Okay. Um, so like I don't think the decision is between rest and movement. I think it's either like is this movement going to increase my capacity or is it gonna let you tolerate this dysfunction a little bit longer? And most people are gonna confuse these two because like this tolerance is going to feel like progress until we get to that point where the whole fucking house of cards is gonna collapse. So if the movement that you do and improves your coordination, improves your range of motion, and the next day you can actually measure that the pain levels, like they're they're actually lower without you needing fucking adrenaline or painkillers, like keep moving, like keep doing that. But if the movement requires you to brace a lot, requires you to start wearing a bunch of fucking belts and wraps at the gym, requires painkillers, like or just like psyching you up all the time, like or or it actually alters how you move the load unconsciously. You're not training, you're just like slowly negotiating like how much how bad you want this damage to actually be long term. Rest does make sense when the tissue cannot maintain integrity under trivial load. So, like when I got to the point that I couldn't hold a glass of water without feeling pain in my elbow, there's nothing else you can do, bro. You can't hold a glass of fucking water. There's like nothing else that can be done to actually improve your capacity of recovery here, right? So, like these daily movements, like they can actually hurt you more than training did. These movements that we add during the day, these like rehab protocols that we see online, as this like quick little fixes and little gadgets that you can buy off of Amazon and stuff like that. I don't really think that's like a really good approach. I think movement makes sense when the tissue is able to tolerate these low threat signals, like just day-to-day life, and just having someone that's gonna guide you on like a progression makes a lot of sense from the beginning. If your movement feels a little bit more organized, like afterwards, and it's not just numbing the issue for you, like that that is the distinction that you need to be able to make if you actually want to heal this shit. And again, people are gonna take BPC 157, they're like, oh, I can train. When like what actually works is improving blood flow and collagen signaling if the load is scaled properly so that the tissue can organize itself in a manner that will be conducive for you to prevent any further issues down the road. We're gonna talk about prevention down the road because that's also something very, very nuanced. But TP500, again, like it helps restore some of that pliability and the movement in between these fibers, which is which is fucking great. But if you add it and then you're gonna force like a lot of like range of motion, a lot of intensity, you're just gonna make it easier for you to move in a wrong pattern for a longer period of time and continue creating these compensatory patterns. GHK copper like has its place for local inflammation resolution, for collagen quality, but it's gonna fail like absolutely if your sleep is trash or if your energy availability is low. And people don't think about this stuff. Like they just they don't no one thinks like how well is my sleep before I take GHK copper. Like, you don't you don't think that because you're treating peptides as medications, they're not what they are, they depend heavily on the terrain that you're gonna plant the seed first. Now, I also want to say that like total rest is going to usually delay the healing unless there is some structural instability, right? Unless you're literally unable to withstand normal demands of life, because like tissues they heal according to the direction and the demand that you impose on them. That is why when you see people recovering from these issues, like tendinopathy over a course of a year, whether you do PT or you don't do PT, both recover recovery times is about a year. But the people that don't do PT, once they resume the activity that caused the issue, they have pain. Whereas the people that did PT don't. So, like it's healing is actually providing direction and proper demand within your recovery constraints. It's not the absence of stress. You need to be constantly stressing these things for them to be able to heal. At the same time, there's also like active recovery, which is kind of a scam, right? Because it's just like normal training minus one exercise. That's not active recovery, like active recovery is just light movement, it's movement that's going to allow your body to replenish things like NAD plus, like coQ10 reserves, and all these types of things, right? That's what you need to think about. Like you also need to be very careful not to treat like the pain signal as uh like as like the scale to dictate your approach, because pain is going to be very unreliable. And pain is also a very late signal. So, like, if you have loss of like smoothness in your movement, like your timing just feels a little bit off, you just don't feel so confident, like, you know, when you Just go to the gym and you just feel this movement today for some reason just didn't fucking hit. Like that's like the sign that you actually need to like see that, like sometimes I'll apply like daily ondulating periodization. Like today, on my second set, instead of doing a third set that was like a heavy set, I just had a back off set where I did higher reps and just focus a lot on the on the squeeze and everything. Like, that's a good actual like way to provide at enough adaptation, enough stimulus to like create a load, but will allow me to recover still in time. Yeah. Now the the the real way for just to close this up, is like, where does this live, right? Like, is it does it live upstream on the joint? Does it live upstream on the muscle? Does it live like inside of energy, of sleep, stress load, like your like your coordination? Like, like you need to consider all of these things, which is why if you just copy someone else's rehab plan and their protocol, like once it might work, the second time it probably will not miraculously work. And you need something that is repeatable, you need a process that is repeatable. And I've I've already covered a little bit of that, but I'm gonna give you guys a full protocol in a few minutes.
SPEAKER_01What role does fear play in staying injured longer than necessary?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I don't remember who asked me this question, but if you ask me this question, fucking thank you because it's a great one. Fear is the fastest way to turn this short-term problem into a long-term identity problem. So it shifts from being a tissue issue to being an identity issue. Why? Because now you're scared of pain, so you're gonna start protecting instead of adapting. And protection always reduces that capacity of recovery over time. So people are gonna stay longer in this injury state because they're gonna confuse pain with damage. And there we have so many studies on this in which people have severe pain, but when you look at their imaging, there's absolutely fucking nothing going on with the tissue. It's just a nerve signaling. And because of the psychosympath, the biopsychosocial model of pain, which is the most uh new model that we have, the best model that we have to explain pain, there are like dozens of factors that influence pain, and you cannot dictate yourself just based off of that. So when you treat like pain, it's just like a like a like a threat signal from like this nervous system that's heavily influenced by like your sleep, by your prior injuries, by what you heard about what happened to your mom when your mom felt the same thing and stuff like that, and like you're literally catastrophizing the sensation. And you have to remember human beings are not fragile, tissues are adaptive as fuck, and fear literally teaches your brain that certain movements are dangerous, even after the tissue has healed enough to be able to tolerate them. So, like I had a client, Jay, shout out Jay, fucking killing it, drop like 30 pounds already in just a few weeks. Like, he like went to the gym, did an RDL, so much pain, like had to stop the workout, couldn't go to the gym for several days and stuff like that. The first thing that I fucking asked him, Jay, if you're watching this, please comment. I want to see your RDL. I want to see you doing an RDL again. I don't care if you're just holding a book, I want to see that pattern. And we're gonna slowly ramp up that capacity to build that recovery, like with like the recovery capacity to allow you to never have this issue again. We don't want to keep removing things from people. That literally removes capacity. And and that's why like pain can actually persist when like your imaging is clear, when you're getting like x-rays and MRIs and all this stuff. And then like pain can also disappear while the tissue is entirely compromised. It's not a reliable signal because pain is not like this report card that you get, like, oh, now I know exactly what it is. Hurts my elbow, it's an elbow issue. It's actually a prediction error signal. And fear is gonna drive people into one of these stupid extremes that we talked about of just reckless trying to prove that they're not broken and just keep pushing through or rest forever, like we used to do it when we were, you know, fucking 40 years ago. Both of them are just gonna keep your nervous system locked in this threat mode and are never gonna allow you to fully recover and move past this injury. When you when you stop moving because of fear, your cortical maps actually shrink and your coordination is going to like your coordination capacity is gonna drop. That's something that happens like at the spine level because of DHT, dihydrotestosterone, and your movements are gonna feel worse. And when you finally try these movements again, you're and then interpret them as like, no, I'm still injured, I still can't do it. We literally have a friend who's also a client that like every time like goes to the gym, is like feels this minor thing in the back and is like, oh, now we need to fucking take morphine. And is like, no, we need to build a recovery capacity from that point of injury. If all the movement that you're able to do with your hand is this and this causes pain, then we're gonna do this. Whether it takes 24 months for us to get all the way here, that's what matters. We're still fucking loading the tissue and making it like more and more and more. And again, BPC 157, I think here can help indirectly because, like, it's gonna improve that nerve flow into local repair signaling, but it does absolutely nothing to retrain your nervous system's threat perception about that movement. What could actually be used? People are not gonna talk about this, so fucking listen to this because literally people just don't know how to leverage these compounds. SEMAX or CELENC, CELENC specifically, fucking great. Not because they heal the tissue, because they literally don't, but they reduce what it's called the limbic overactivation and they improve that cortical control, which makes this gradual, like this grade graded exposure that we have on loading these tissues tolerable instead of feeling fucking terrifying. So it can literally calm you down, like uh taurine, when you pair that with magnesium glycinate, like and please fucking replenish your taurine levels, it lowers some of that baseline of the stress nervous response that you get, and like it's great, it really works. It does, it's the it does the job that it's supposed to do. But if your fear still movement, like is still dictating which movements you're gonna do, like if you're the body is never gonna get the chance to actually clean this signal and then learn like to like be safe under that same load again, and like eliminating the pain too early is gonna prolong that fear because then the brain is never gonna learn like which movement was safe. It just learns that numbness equals lack of pain, and pain is a threat signal, therefore, we eliminate pain, we solve the issue. Literally, that's how doctors keep people sick, and then the same people were complaining, like, oh, doctors don't treat the root issue, but you are fucking not treating the root issue with your pain either. So, what the fuck are you talking about?
SPEAKER_01I think I think one of the most powerful experiences that I've had with this is from when I was like 16, 17, I had scoliosis surgery. And the very first surgeon, we ended up not going with him. Um, we went with another guy, but he was like so positive and like, oh yeah, you can totally I used to dance. He's like, You can totally get back to dance. Like I've seen people go back like three or four weeks after surgery, yeah. And so, like that empowerment, that's the mindset that I took into it. I'm like, okay, and I literally had my entire back cut open, my spine changed, my whole skeleton rearranged and sewn back up again. And I was back at dance class, like before my waist car was healed. Fuck yes, and now I'm like growing my back, and I do have back pain. I do have things that get all out of whack and weird, and that's a normal part of my life, but like it didn't, it didn't turn into the fear piece.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you you used to have that like brittle mindset of like I can't do this and stuff like that. And we had to like slowly like work through like psychologically, just like and learning about pain and how this recovery actually works because you you were like very afraid of doing certain movements, and so was I.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, any load-bearing things would terrify me.
SPEAKER_00I was terrified of like doing anything with my chest and my back. I had five herniated discs.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, from trying to pick me up, from trying to pick it up on a couch, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So this is a this is a good question, but let's let's move on to the next one because we're gonna start getting into some deep sauce here.
SPEAKER_01How do you rebuild trust in your body after it lets you down?
SPEAKER_00You cannot rebuild trust by just telling yourself that you're fine. You can rebuild trust by proving to your body that you finally understand the signals that it's actually sending instead of just guessing them and hoping that nothing is gonna break again. So you lost trust in your system because you asked for an output demand where your system didn't actually have the energy, it didn't have the clearance, it didn't have the resilience to be able to deliver what you were demanding of it. And your bodies like did the only rational thing to do, which is to shut something down to prevent you from fucking yourself up even more. Now, your body literally doesn't respond to like motivation or reassurance psychologically, yes, but physically, no. Like it responds to predictable energy availability and just a lot of clarity in the signals and a load that's gonna match your capacity. And until you line all of those things up in a row very, very well, your body will keep vetoing you no matter like how disciplined you think you are about your protocol. And this is going to start at the mitochondria. Why? Because if ATP production is unstable, then every stress is gonna start feeling bigger than it should. Your recovery is gonna drag a lot, and then the tissues are gonna get guarded instead of being rebuilt. And then at this point in time, in that protocol, MOTSI actually makes sense because it improves the cellular energy sensing and metabolic flexibility. But it's gonna be useless if your sleep is off. It's gonna be useless if you're under-eating, because you're draining the system that MOTSI relies on. So once you figure out the mitochondrial part of that, you need to deal with absorption and your gut integrity here. Because like you can't really just trust the body that can't extract nutrients or clear inflammation. Your body knows that. So BPC157 in an oral form here actually helps with the gut lining integrity and some of the vagal tone that we have. But if your bioflow is very poor, if it's sluggish, or like if it's actually like thick, or if you have like a lot of endotoxin all over your body, your inflammation is gonna keep leaking back into the system and nothing is gonna stabilize. Another thing that people don't think about a lot, but is actually your thyroid. But like people don't like to hear it, right? Because people are terrified of thyroid. But I but actually, like, low tissue level thyroid output makes literally everything feel heavier. You feel colder, you feel slower, you need more stimulants, you had poor tolerance to caffeine, you need more caffeine all the time. Like T3 medication actually improves cellular oxygen use. That's why people take fucking methylene blue. But like, if you just keep pushing it without fixing the stress signal and the caloric like throughput that your body like actually goes through, you're just gonna teach your body that like the speed in which you recover actually like equals danger. And if you recover too fast, it's gonna become a problem. So, inflammation, I think, needs to be recontextualized here, but and it shouldn't be annihilated as already circled back to before, alluded to before, because inflammation is part of repair and adaptation. So we can use GHK copper here to improve quality signal quality, collagen quality, local tissue signaling. But if you're like suppressing that inflammation with a lot of like anti-pain medications, ibuprofen and all of these things, like or high dose omega-3s and things like that, your brain is never gonna learn that the stress can actually resolve itself safely. And like trust is only going to rebuild itself, like when movement is gonna feel smoother week to week, when your sleep depth actually improves, when your appetite starts getting back to normal, when you start needing like hype and adrenaline and pre-workouts to be able to train, not when pain just hits you on a random fucking Tuesday. And a mistake that people do is that they try to fix one of these issues at a time, right? Because like the body doesn't actually trust pieces, it rebuilds trust in its system. So when you have energy, digestion, hormones, brain, and load all in a way together that is cohesive and doesn't contradict one another, you're literally telling your body, like, yo, this environment is safe for you to be able to heal now. So pain is not gonna correlate exactly with the injury. Like, that matters a lot because, like, if you feel, if you want to feel safe before acting, you're gonna stay stuck. And if you push through without restoring that system underneath it, you're just gonna relapse, which is in this case means re-injuring yourself. Your body doesn't need you to be cautious, it doesn't need you to be brave either. It needs you to actually be very precise with the with the formulation that you're making in your protocol, because trust only comes back when the signals that you're sending back to your body make sense to the organism that you are living in.
SPEAKER_01Okay. How do you modify training without feeling like you're falling behind?
SPEAKER_00Good question. And I'm gonna sit down. So that's a very that's a very solid question because everybody has probably felt before, like when you're having in the middle of a when you're in the middle of a phase and you start feeling like, man, I don't wanna, I don't wanna stop now because I'm making so much progress and yada yada yada. But like feeling that you're behind like that only happens when you think that all phases are supposed to feel like an accumulation of stress, right? So when reality, like accumulation of stress without recovery, without a recovery phase, is just decay that's a little bit more controlled. And it hasn't announced itself yet, but it will eventually. A recovery phase is not time off, it's a completely different objective. It's the same thing that I've been talking about health phases. It's not just a time without drugs, and then a beat up time like during like an actual push phase is like if you're if you're beating up your body like in a push phase, you're literally violating the purpose of that phase, which is for you to grow as much as possible and you're lying to yourself about your progress. You think you're making a fuck ton of progress, you're not making a ton of progress. The goal of this recovery phase for you is to restore capacity so that the next push phase that you have actually sticks instead of stealing a bunch from these joints and tendons and sleep and your nervous system when you don't have anything to fucking give in the first place. So, how do we actually do that, right? Like here's the breakdown. The first lever is going to go back to energy availability because the mitochondria is going to decide whether repair is even fucking allowed. So you bring calories a little bit lower, you uh a little bit higher, you can front load some of your carbs around your training and you have protein that's high enough to support that tissue repair because like under eating is just literally non-negotiably removed. You have to get rid of that. Mod C is gonna make sense here because of that like cellular energy sensing and metabolic flexibility, but it only will work if you like stop pretending that you can recover while you're dieting. So you don't use MOD C to give you energy to be allowed you to push through longer for this phase, you use it to actually improve some of the cellular energy sensing that you need to be able to respond to these caloric adjustments that you just made. Next is absorption and clearance. So, like if your repair is gonna fail every single fucking time when your nutrients don't actually reach the tissue. So you require transporters to be able to get all the way to that place. So if your like digestive regularity or your bioflow or your gut integrity gets handled before anything fancy, then you can use BPC 157. Then it literally earns a spot because it improves that gut lining integrity and a vagal tone, which is going to indirectly improve your nutrient uptake and is going to lower some of the background inflammation in a way that is not going to restrict you from having good inflammation in your body. So it depends on which cytokines is actually dealing with. Sleep and your circadian rhythm also have to get like really, really locked down very early in this phase because fragmented sleep is literally like a veto signal. You can think of like every time your sleep is fragmented, you're not recovering as well as you could, right? So you can have magnesium glycin, you can have taurine, right, to lower some of that basal like uh nervous system tone and improve some of this the sleep depth. And I would uh for sleep quality and the cycle of sleep, I would actually have glycine here as well. But they're only gonna help if your like caffeine timing is correct. So you need to think about the other shit that you're putting in your body as well. Or like if you pull back on the intensity if you're training later on in the day. The training during this phase it needs to be very constrained based, right? You need to like really pull back and like you need to drop some of the volume, you need to like uh adjust some of the intensity and kappa below your like grinder reps. I'll usually like get like two. I start with like two less reps from last week that might be tried like three or four, something like that. You slow down the tempo a lot, and then that you're gonna do exercises that like don't require a lot of bracing or compensation, like you temporarily are gonna remove them. Why? Because like coordination and smoothness, then they're gonna become part of your KPI, not the load on the bar. As these things improve, as range of motion and things like that improve, then you are able to literally tell whether you're able to move on to the next phase. And at this point, that's where GHK copper actually belongs. Because if we improve that like quality of the collagen tissue under consistent threat like loading signal, it's gonna work if the threat signal is actually low. But it's going to be a complete waste of fucking time if you're still chasing fatigue and soreness as proof that you're like doing something at the gym. If you're still trying to push through in this phase, it's not really gonna do much. And your thyroid here needs to be respected. I would do that by actually taking thyroid hormones, which I'm about to take mine. So what I preach. And by the way, you need to take that away from supplements and other things because otherwise it literally doesn't work. But like if your output is gonna feel like a lot like heavy, if you have like cold hands and feet, like if your body temperature is like not really solid, like let's see what mine is right now. 98.1, that's solid as fuck. 97.7, that's pretty good. I don't want to go lower than 97.6 ever. Sometimes 97.4 is acceptable, but it depends. But like if you have all of this stuff, like don't recognize this shit as weakness in your body, but like recognize that as like low tissue, like tissue level thyroid signaling. It's just like a low signal that your body is telling you that something is not right. So if you support that conversion of T4 to T3 in your gut, if you're giving it all the minerals that it needs, and literally your mitochondria needs minerals to be able to slide all of this energy and the electrons through it, then your energy output is literally gonna matter much more than you're just trying to feel emped up at the gym all the time. So you don't, you're not using thyroid to actually give you the energy, you're using it to restore the control system that we have. And your your brain and your nervous system also really have to be like coming next. So again, Symax and Selenc, control that limbic overactivation that we talked about, and just make the movements feel progressively safe. We're not gonna nuke inflammation and erase all of the feedback that we get from it by just taking NSAIDs, and that just doesn't make any fucking sense. If your pain is eliminated overnight, you fucked up. Like if you resolve the issue too fast, you fucked up. Like that's a good feedback for you to have. The phase is gonna end when the recovery markers normalize, whenever like your movement is gonna feel organized again, whenever your sleep is improving, and training doesn't no longer like doesn't require you to have so many adjustments anymore. Like, and you are able to actually push at the gym without like having to psych yourself up, right? And people feel like they're falling behind in these phases because they literally don't have an understanding of the logic of the phase, and like we talked about, like whenever we're creating a phase, you have to have a specific purpose for the phase. So they're gonna judge the recovery like with the metrics of a push phase, and that's not gonna fucking work because you're gonna fucking panic every time that the phase doesn't feel productive for that purpose. The irony is like the fastest way to actually like honor the phase that you're in is to actually do this, to actually create a purpose for each phase and then abide by it because then the capacity is gonna like deliberately rebuild itself, and that's always gonna outpace stolen capacity. If you if you all always keep stealing from like the future recovery, it's never gonna be able to compete with like actually like recover actual recovery that actually deals with your ego in a way that your ego fucking hates it in the moment, but it's good for you long term. Good question.
SPEAKER_01When should someone seek outside help for an injury?
SPEAKER_00As soon as possible. Like anyone telling themselves they'll just like see if this settle first is uh just lying in a very predictable way, they're self-sabotaging and like in every possible way imaginable. Just like waiting makes zero fucking sense in every other domain of life. Like you don't crash your car and then you say, like, well, I'll rebuild the transmission myself after I just watch a couple of YouTube videos for a week. Like, but somehow with your body you just decide that ignorance is a fucking virtue. And then like the moment something breaks, your objectivity is fucking gone because now your identity is involved, your ego is involved, your goals are threatened, and then like every internal decision that you have is gonna be biased towards minimizing how serious the issue actually is. People wait a lot because they think that early intervention is very dramatic, is very costly, when actually the reality is that the early intervention is the simplest, cheapest, and most reversible one from the get-go. The injuries they don't suddenly like become real when the pain is unbearable, they become like very expensive and they become very slow when you have these compensatory patterns and a lot of like a nervous system that is just under threat signal on top of like all of this stuff. And the the dumbest fucking thing that I've ever heard was like, it feels really bad. I think I would know. I mean, yeah, like by the time, you know for sure, like the organism has already rerouted all of the load, it has downregulated all of your output, and you literally taught yourself a worst movement strategy. So if you're able to catch all this stuff, then you'll definitely know because you're fucked up way beyond recovery right now, and you're gonna need a much more expensive and long way to fix this problem. Like, again, like TB500 BPC 157, you can toss it up in place, but like if you don't have like a lot of like thinking of low distribution, like if you're improving tissue pliability without like guarding yourself to undo a lot of the progress that you made in a lot of months because you're just waiting it out, it's fucking stupid. Like, and people think that like outside help is only for these catastrophic injuries. When the reality is that like it's most useful before you accumulate a bunch of confusion, before you have a bunch of fear, before you have a bunch of bad habits that literally make these fixes impossible, right? So if you if a protocol like this is not fucking working, it's because you literally waited too long. And the rational part is believing that like you'll suddenly make better decisions later. Like, and and I talk to people all the time like this, and they're like, Oh, I'll think about it, I'll do it later. Like, oh, later, like, has that ever worked for you? Or like just not thinking about it so much and distancing yourself from it actually gave you clarity? I was like, that doesn't fucking work because that's not how the brain works. That the more you wait, the more variables are gonna stack, the worse your sleep is gonna get, the more inflammation is gonna rise, the more like your stress is gonna like spread all over your body. And now these supplements, these peptides and these like rehab protocols, they all have to work harder just to undo the damage that didn't need to exist in the in the first place. So, like, smart people, they literally don't wait. Like, not it's not because smart people are weak, it's because they literally move early because they understand the power of leverage. Leverage disappears very fast. Once your system adapts around the problem instead of actually resolving it. And if you ever said, like, oh, but it worked last time, that's exactly a fucking warning sign because like systems rarely fail in the same way twice. A past success is reason, like is one of the reasons why people delay themselves long enough to screw themselves up. Again, the fastest and the cleanest way is hands down to always start with someone to intervene before the story gets fucking complicated, before your identity gets bruised, before the body actually learns the wrong lesson about what is safe and what is not safe. You work with someone from very early on. And I'm not even talking about working with me, I'm talking about working with someone who's gonna actually address this issue for you.
SPEAKER_01How do repeated injuries change the way you train long?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I just understand that these like repeated injuries, they're not part of like my body like failing me or anything like that. They just mean that my old way of training was just like asking some questions my system couldn't fucking answer anymore. And then I just like instead of listening, I just kept fucking yelling louder, right? People treat like these incidents as if it was just like, oh, it fucking happened. Like I must be fucking, you know, cursed or some shit. But these patterns, like, they they repeat themselves because you ignore certain constraints. These constraints, you shouldn't see these constraints like an injury that is repeated as a success limiter. They're they literally define the only path that works for your organism. It just narrowed down the path and made it very clear what you need to do to have progress. So if I kept hammering the same movement patterns, I would be getting stuck again in the same fucking injury. But no, instead of seeing that as like, hey, if I keep fucking going this way, I'm gonna keep getting hurt. So let me go in this other direction. And what happens? Oh, I make significant progress. Was it as good as this one? No, but I could only have progress for four weeks. Now I can have progress for 30. Yeah, which one do you think is you're gonna grow more out of? Like every injury is information about like coordination, it's about information about tissue tolerance, it's information about where like energy like is at, and like all these things are gonna be capped before pain shows up. And like pretending otherwise is just gonna guarantee that you're gonna have the same lessons stacking up over and over and over again, just sometimes with a different joint. And then when these injuries stack, like the smart movement is not to like just train less forever, it's actually to like train with guide rails that are gonna force a lot of precision so on your technique, which is one of the reasons why I review training feedback for my clients every single week. I just have them send videos, you know, depending on like what program they're in, they might send up to like 10 videos a week to get enough feedback, right? And I'm breaking down all of those in detail with some of them on like I have live sessions that I'm literally coaching them through the movement or like live on call, like at the gym and stuff like that. Because these things are actually important, like these obstacles that you're gonna that you're facing, they're telling you like what you actually own versus the ones that you actually were borrowing from other things, right? So, like you're borrowing from joint laxity or newer drive, like from adrenaline, and you just you can't sustain that shit for long enough. So this is where like the exercise selection is gonna tighten up a little bit, you're gonna get the the ranges of motion a little bit cleaner, a little bit tighter, you're gonna slow down a lot of the tempo, and the volume becomes very, very intentionally reduced. Not because you're fragile, not because of your identity, not because you're a pussy, not because you're weak, but actually because like wasted stress can no longer be tolerated if you actually want to solve this this like and and people hate this phase, they hate it because it literally removes the option to be sloppy. You have to be so fucking precise with your movement, it's so annoying. I hate training this way. I like just admitting it, I hate training this way. Sloppy is how like I got these results before, and then I got the bill. I eventually fucking got the bill, and then I couldn't fucking deal with it. Now, on the on the physiology side, a repeated injury is like almost always just gonna point back to recovery debt and uh energy availability, right? Like, because you're like the mitochondria is gonna support all of the system and like MOT C goes back here because of that like energy sensing and stress tolerance, but it's only gonna work if you're like not chasing exhaustion yourself at the gym every single time. Like tissue quality, it's a long-term priority, right? Non-like panic response that you just inject GHK copper, but it earns its place on collagen reorganization like over time, but it's gonna fail every time if you just keep spiking inflammation with your training and the way that you're pushing through a phase, and then wonder why these things never work for you. And then you blame the fucking peptide when it's actually you, the fucking idiot, who should be blamed. And BPC 157 again is like why because of gut integrity, but also local tissue signaling, right? Like these things are uh like they're they're very good because they're gonna limit your recovery a little bit, like in the sense of like direction, but you can't use that recovery that has been like limited at a higher rate now as a as an excuse to just go back to poor load management. Like those those things are the bill is gonna fucking come. And like Selen Simax again really has its place to reduce that threat sensitivity and improve sort of the motor control when your movement exposure is very gradual, it's very predictable, it's not chaotic in any way whatsoever. Like these long-term injuries, like they're like you gotta think of training in the long term. You gotta think of these phases over the course of years because that's where the transformations really happen. These this stops being about like what you can tolerate today, and it starts being about what's the capacity that we can compound over and over, month over month, without stealing from other buckets like sleep, mood, coordination, and things like that. And the mistake that people make is thinking that you should like these obstacles mean you should do less forever. When in reality, like they force you into a very tighter and smarter lane where your progress actually becomes boringly reliable instead of very dramatic but short-lived every single fucking time. And people who like keep getting hurt, man, they think that they need these new exercises, they need these new supplements, they need like more motivation. When in reality, what they need is a fucking system that treats these constraints as a design input instead of insults. So it basically creates the guide rails that are gonna tell us exactly which direction to go. Once you train inside of those guide rails, the injuries are gonna stop being setbacks. They're gonna start being feedback. And feedback is the only thing that's gonna let you to finally fucking move forward without constantly having to reset the clock on your progress in the phase that you're in.
SPEAKER_01What does injury proofing actually mean in real life?
SPEAKER_00It doesn't mean you never get hurt, right? It doesn't, it just means that your system now has so much spare capacity that these small insults don't turn into long layoffs. That's it. Most most people they have exactly like zero spare capacity. So like they pretend that these prehab bands and warmups and mobility routines are gonna correct that. Like, that's a fucking lie. Like the the the first lie is that injuries are prevented at a joint level. When in reality, like in real life, like they're actually decided upstream by your energy availability, the tissue quality, and whether the recovery actually completes the cycle before the next stress hits. If you didn't understand what that means, just fucking DM me. I have a whole book on it. Prehab is literally the most bullshit that was ever spilled because the research shows that it doesn't actually reduce rates of injury long-term meaningfully in any way. We can't track that at all. So, like, whenever people are like, oh, but did that like lower injury rates on a study? I know you're fucking dumbass because we can't predict that. There's so many variables to that. Goes back to the biopsychosocial model of pain, right? Like, why is it bullshit? It's like it's not because the movement prep is totally useless. I actually think it is useful, but because doing all of these like isolated drills doesn't change the organism's ability to tolerate load under fatigue. It also doesn't improve your capacity, it doesn't do that at a cellular and energy level. Like, you need to be able to do that first. Now, people do prehab because it feels productive, they don't do it because it works, they do it because it feels like they're doing something and people like to feel busy. That's why people go to the gym seven days a week. Like these same people are fucking wondering why their rotator cuff still like fucking hurts when their like sleep and their calories and their stress are all like all over the fucking place. Like injury injury proofing, if you're really, really serious about injury proofing, it really starts with nutrition. You're gonna support connective tissue, uh like turnover. You're not just gonna focus on macros, you're gonna focus on micros. You have a lot of like high input of uh protein year-round, and your carbohydrates are also sufficient to support that thyroid output that we talked about and glycogen. And like chronic under eating is just literally treated like an injury risk factor. So you you understand that if you stay in a phase of chronic under eating for too long, you will raise your chances of injury. The other way is not going to prevent you from getting injured, but it's gonna allow you to also recover much faster and it's also increase the ability of you tolerating more load in a short period of time. Glycine, I think, is super helpful here because like it's one of these primary amino acids in collagen, and most people don't get enough of it to support tendon and ligament turnover when their training volume is high. So that's something that I also have I like to have in place with most of my clients. Collagen, I think, actually does work if you pair with vitamin C, like and you time it in the right way around like the actual loading. So you need to do all these things at the same time. Otherwise, you're just digesting the expensive fucking gelatin. Like there's just no reason to remodel. You have to give it a reason. On the peptide side, GHK copper, BPC 157, TB500, I think they're all have their place. Uh, but you have to do it in a way that actually allows you to not train through fatigue, but actually are like realigning these fibers and realigning the movement when your load is controlled. I think mitochondrial support is absolutely undebatable, like it's just non-negotiable at all. If you want durability long term for resilience, see it's gonna improve some of the stress tolerance and the metabolic flexibility, but it's gonna do nothing if your sleep is all over the place because you're fucking drinking white monsters all day, right? Um, your your thyroid signaling is gonna like quietly decide the injury risk. How? By regulating the tissue turnover speed, your temperature, and your oxygen use actually. So when all of these things are low, everything feels really tight and slow. You can actually feel a little bit tighter when your body temperatures are lower. And like, but people just look at their labs and it says they're fine, right? It's within the range, so you know, thyroid really just pisses me off when we're talking about how people deal with it. But, anyways, like uh inflammation, again, not the enemy, like unresolved inflammation is the enemy. So you want an inflammatory response that is gonna rise and then resolve itself quickly, not needing to suppress it and then reignite that anti-inflammatory process after every single session. So, real injury proofing, it just looks really fucking boring because like if your tempo is like really, really locked in, if your volume is very appropriate, and if the phases each one has purpose, not because you're fragile, not because you're weak, not because you're pussy, because like wasted stress has been removed, that is what real injury proofing actually looks like. So you look at these people that never get fucking injured, they train in a very fucking specific way. And people are like, Oh, you don't make as much gains, you just need to push through. I'm like, you're fucking 17 years old, bro. You don't get to say, well, works long term. Yeah, you know, you don't even have pubic hairs. The uncomfortable truth is that, like, there's no amount of prehab that can outperform a system that's like fed, slept, and sequenced correctly. There's no banded fucking warm-up that will save your body that's running on fucking fumes. You just can't have that fucking happen. You need to address all of these things at a cellular level, support all of the inflammation, actually detoxing from that inflammation and allowing your body to deal with it in the proper way, and support your brain to actually put yourself in a tone that allows for recovery. If you don't do these things, your injury is gonna come back. It's not just about taking BPC 157 and TB500 and hoping for the best. But great, these are these are fantastic questions that we got from our clients. We also get some questions from Instagram that I'm gonna answer very quickly. So Rapid Fire, what are the questions that we got on Instagram about this topic? And thank you guys for sending these questions, by the way.
SPEAKER_01Should I train through pain?
SPEAKER_00Training through pain is literally how idiots turn these small problems into careers and fucking rehab. Like pain is only tolerable when your capacity is constantly rising and you know exactly why it's there in the first place. So if you know that and if you have built that capacity, then you can train through pain as long as that pain is manageable at a like a three out of ten, four out of ten. But if it's more than that within 48 hours, you shouldn't train through pain.
SPEAKER_01How long is too long to be sore?
SPEAKER_00So if the soreness isn't really shrinking like week to week, if you're not seeing that going down, you're you're you're clearly not adapting, you're just accumulating a lot of damage. And adaptation gets quieter over time. Damage on the other hand gets gets louder and it tends to stick around. So if you're staying sore for too long, constantly and all the time, there's literally a recovery problem here.
SPEAKER_01Is this injury permanent?
SPEAKER_00It can become permanent if you keep doing the same fucking stupid shit. Like, but but again, bodies adapt very fast, but they adapt to whatever you keep feeding them. So if you keep feeding them the same stupid inputs, you're gonna keep getting the same stupid outputs.
SPEAKER_01Am I getting weaker or just protecting myself?
SPEAKER_00You're protecting yourself, like because like your body just stopped fucking trusting your bullshit. So like your body is doing that, like, and your protection is gonna feel like weakness until you realize it's just a system override. And that's just the smartest way to go about it.
SPEAKER_01Should I stop lifting altogether?
SPEAKER_00Quitting, like completely, is usually just fear. It looks like discipline is just fear, man. It's just that uh like mentality of I'm brittle and I'm fragile, like fragility mindset is fucking cancerous. Most tissues they heal very, very fast with the right kind of load, not with avoidance of it.
SPEAKER_01Can I make can I still make progress injured?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, unless your definition of progress is feeling wrecked and then going absolutely nowhere. But like real progress during injury is capacity, it's coordination, is recovering coming back online. So that is progress. Recognize that as progress, and you can make absolute fucking tons of progress in terms of body composition in this time if you do things right. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Why does the same injury keep coming back?
SPEAKER_00Because you're fucking stupid and you silence that pain instead of fucking fixing the issue that fucking caused it. Like these unresolved constraints are always gonna keep resurfacing, just they're gonna keep wearing different hats, and you're not gonna keep able to identify them.
SPEAKER_01How do I stop being afraid to move again?
SPEAKER_00You stop being afraid when you stop lying to your body about what it can actually handle. Like confidence is gonna come from these predictable signals, not from fucking willpower just pretending you're fine and you know, but anyways, guys, that's uh that's about it for this episode. If this pissed you off a little bit, good man, uh, that was the purpose of it, you know, because that's like usually the moment where people are gonna realize they've been managing these injuries like absolute fucking amateurs while calling it discipline. It's not. And if by the if by the way, if you want like a free injury guy, DM me on Instagram and ask for it, there's no funnel bullshit, there's no no fluff in it, there's no marketing around it, and just an actual framework. So you stop guessing it and you stop repeating these same mistakes with just better excuses because you do get learned better excuses with time. And do me a favor, send this episode to their one fucking friend that's always injured, always like coming back and always doing some new rehab thing that they found online, because now you know it's not their fucking genetics or their stuff, it's just that they're ruining their own system because they're fucking stupid. And don't gate keep all the stupid, like, like useful fucking shit that we just shared about, because that's fucking gay as shit. Like, honestly, they need the help that you know that you have, whether they like to admit it or not. But that's it, guys. Thank you for watching. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace out. Peace out.