EP 617: Training & Recovery Strategies That Help You Execute When It Matters with Rob Wilson

Well, let's tell that story because I, I think f- the, our audience predominantly male, well north of ninety percent male, and, and when you talk or spoke about self-care a few minutes ago, you and I both know that, that there's a lot of eyes that glaze over when you hear that, right? Um, and-

Yeah, 'cause it sounds boring.

It sounds boring, right? And it sounds-

It's boring.

Uh, does this...

I teach it for a living, and so the hyphenated term self-care sounds pretty ick to me, 'cause I grew up...

And like, you know, I'm not, like, a weird chauvinist macho man, but I'm like a dude's dude.

I like rough-and-tumble sports.

I grew up doing, like, wrestling and judo, and, you know, I'm not a hunter, but I love being outside.

I grew up surfing, um, body surfing, surf kayaking, so I'm a outside person, and the idea of, like, self-care sounds like ugh to me, you know? And it's kinda funny, I'm just sort of bringing this up tangentially, but I saw, uh, this post a couple hours maybe before I, uh, came on the podcast, and it was, uh, an unnamed popular sort of health and longevity influencer person, and it was, like, a picture of them on their balcony, and they said, "I didn't sleep very well last night, so I'm gonna mega dose my creatine so that I can stay focused." And I just, my first thought was like, "Jesus Christ." Like, I like having options for giving myself a performance boost when I need to, but now it seems like, oh, sh- we've become so fragile.

It's like if I have a bad day or if I didn't sleep well, like, son of a gun, I'm gonna, you know, the sky's falling, and I have to fix it.

So that kind of communication around self-care, I think, is very antithetic to an audience like yours or the groups that I work with in special operations, who, like, are in harsh environments that are inherently uncomfortable.

It's accepted that the suck is part of the experience, and it's the price you pay for a ticket.

That's it.

If you wanna have this experience, you know, if you wanna...

People watch things like Backcountry on TV, and they go, "Wow," and it's all edited, and everything's so cool, and they're in these remote, beautiful places, and you don't realize all the stuff behind that.

A friend of mine is a, a wildlife videographer-

Mm-hmm

... for, like, Nat Geo, and he goes on these crazy expeditions, [chuckles] and he's like, "It's the most uncomfortable." Ev- all of it is horribly uncomfortable, but it's the price you pay.

He was in the Arctic recently.

Mm.

And he was telling me, like, "You try not to eat too much because you don't wanna have to shit when it's [laughs] thirty below zero because it'll freeze to your ass."

Yeah.

And he's like, "And that's the reality of being in those kind of environments, but that's the price you pay."

Mm.