The Wake-Up Call That Changes Everything
Dave Rodriguez sat in his car outside the gym, tears streaming down his face. It wasn’t pain that made him emotional. It was gratitude. Three months earlier, he’d nearly died from pulmonary embolisms, blood clots that had traveled to both lungs. One in three people don’t survive that. Now, for the first time since his health crisis, he was about to walk back into the weight room.
What changed in those three months wasn’t just his appreciation for being alive. It was his understanding of what physical health really means. In this deep dive inspired by our latest episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast featuring fitness expert Andy McGinnis, we’re breaking down why strength training isn’t just about looking better. It’s about building the insurance policy your body needs to survive the unexpected.
If you’re feeling stuck with your physical health, overwhelmed by conflicting fitness advice, or wondering if it’s even worth starting, this post will give you a clear roadmap. Watch the full conversation here for even more practical insights.
Why Your Body Is More Fragile Than You Think
The statistics around physical health are, as author Michael Easter puts it, savage. Less than 5% of adults get 30 minutes of physical activity daily. Forty percent of American adults are obese. More than half of adults over 40 can’t jump off the ground without pain or difficulty.
But here’s what most people miss: these aren’t just numbers about vanity or appearance. As Andy McGinnis, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, explains in the episode, 72% of emergency medical calls aren’t from traumatic injuries like falls or accidents. They’re from symptoms, the result of poor nutrition and sedentary lifestyles catching up with the body.
The gap between what your body can currently do and what it might be forced to do in an emergency is where injuries and life-threatening situations happen. Dave’s story proves this. He was probably in the best shape of his life when the blood clots struck. Did his fitness level save him? We can’t know for sure. But we do know that bodies with more muscle mass, better cardiovascular health, and higher baseline strength have more resources to draw from when crisis hits.
Your body keeps the score. It’s sending you signals right now about what’s working and what isn’t. The question is: are you listening?
Three Non-Negotiables for Physical Health
Andy breaks down physical health into components that anyone can start addressing today, regardless of current fitness level:
- Strength Training Is Your Insurance Policy
Think of muscle as your body’s savings account. The more you have, the more you can draw from when something goes wrong. Strength training isn’t about bodybuilding or vanity metrics. It’s about widening your margin for error.
When you have more muscle mass, your basal metabolic rate increases, meaning you burn more calories at rest. Your body becomes more resilient to falls, injuries, and disease. As Andy puts it: “If you are stronger, more things can go wrong and you can still be okay.”
For older adults especially, strength training is the single most important activity for longevity. When elderly patients fall and suffer pelvic dislocations, the injury itself is often secondary. The real problem is that they don’t have the strength to heal. Their bodies can’t recover because there’s no foundation to rebuild from.
- Start With One Small Victory
The biggest mistake people make is going all-in on day one. They quit sugar cold turkey, sign up for intense workout programs, and burn out within two weeks.
Andy’s approach is different: prove to yourself that you can make one change. If you eat ice cream every night after dinner, can you skip it one night this week? Just Friday. That’s it. One night proves you can master yourself. One night builds the confidence foundation for two nights, then three.
James Clear calls this the 1% rule: small improvements compound dramatically over time. Andy calls it setting your benchmark. The non-negotiable isn’t about perfection. It’s about proving to yourself that change is possible.
This applies to exercise too. If you’ve never worked out, don’t start with burpees and intense YouTube workout videos. Start with bodyweight squats in your living room. Walk to your mailbox instead of checking it from your car. The goal isn’t to transform overnight. The goal is to open the door.
- Movement Must Include Mobility, Stability, and Cardiovascular Work
Andy never has clients focus on just one type of training. A complete fitness program includes:
- Strength training: Building muscle through squats, deadlifts, pushing (pushups), pulling (rows), lunging, and carrying weight
- Mobility work: Increasing joint range of motion to prevent injury when your body gets pulled into unfamiliar positions
- Stability training: Core work that teaches your body to transfer energy efficiently and stay balanced
- Aerobic and anaerobic exercise: Both long, steady-state cardio (walking, cycling) and high-intensity intervals (sprints with rest periods)
The beauty of this approach is that you don’t need a gym. You can do squats, pushups, wall sits, and lunges in your living room. Walking and running are free. The barrier to entry is lower than you think.
The Nutrition Truth No One Wants to Hear
When it comes to weight loss, the answer is uncomfortable in its simplicity: you have to eat less than you burn. Caloric deficit. That’s it.
Your basal metabolic rate is the number of calories your body burns just to keep you alive, even if you sit still all day. Add in your workouts, daily movement, and other activities, and you get your total daily energy expenditure. If you eat more than that number, you gain weight. If you eat less, you lose weight.
Most people eat more than they think. Andy recommends tracking your food intake for one week using an app like MyFitnessPal, not to restrict yourself forever, but to understand reality. That single donut? 350 calories. Those two granola bars while you waited for lunch? Another 200 calories. It adds up fast.
The other truth: balance is sustainable. If you know Friday night you’re going out with friends for pizza and beer, that’s fine. But that means Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday need to be dialed in. You can’t eat in a surplus seven days a week and expect change.
Andy’s advice echoes what your mom and grandma probably told you: eat your vegetables, drink water instead of sugary drinks, go outside and play, don’t stare at screens all day. The fundamentals haven’t changed.
Why Exercise Changes More Than Your Body
Here’s what Dave noticed after working with Andy: his mood improved, his perspective on life shifted, and he had more energy. Research backs this up. When you move your body, your brain floods with serotonin, the feel-good hormone that lifts your mood and reduces anxiety.
Exercise doesn’t just build muscle. It builds confidence. When you couldn’t do a single pushup two weeks ago and now you can, that’s proof you’re capable of change. That evidence transfers to other areas of life.
As Andy observes with his clients, the journey isn’t linear. There are good weeks and bad weeks, peaks and valleys. But zoom out far enough and it looks like a stock chart trending upward. That’s the goal: consistent, compounding improvement over time.
The emotional benefit of exercise is especially powerful for people who feel stuck, depressed, or hopeless about their situation. Moving your body creates biochemical changes that aren’t optional. Your body releases serotonin whether you feel motivated or not. It overrides cortisol, the stress hormone. You don’t have to believe it will work for it to work.
How to Start When You Can’t Afford a Trainer
Not everyone can afford a personal trainer, and that’s okay. Andy’s advice for people starting on their own: do the big movements well.
Focus on six foundational exercises:
- Squatting (or wall sits if regular squats are too difficult)
- Deadlifting (or hip hinges with light weight)
- Pushing (pushups or elevated pushups against a counter)
- Pulling (rows or assisted pullups)
- Lunging (forward, backward, or lateral)
- Carrying weight (walk with a heavy object on one side)
These movements cover all the major muscle groups and movement patterns your body needs. You can do them at home with minimal or no equipment. Don’t complicate it. Don’t hop on YouTube and try to follow advanced workout programs designed for people who’ve been training for years. Start simple. Get good at the basics. Build from there.
Walking and running are free. Bodyweight exercises are free. The barrier isn’t money or equipment. It’s the decision to start.
The Hidden Cost of Waiting
One of the most revealing moments in the conversation comes at the end, when Dave shares a story about a man who approached him after church. The man was shaken by Dave’s near-death experience. In the conversation, he admitted he never gets checkups because he’s afraid of what the doctor might find.
This fear is common. It’s like ignoring the check engine light in your car because you don’t want to face the repair bill. But with your body, there is no trade-in option. You only get one.
Ignoring symptoms, avoiding checkups, and putting off lifestyle changes doesn’t make problems go away. It just narrows your margin for survival when something inevitably goes wrong.
The good news? Dr. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, is confident that with proper nutrition, exercise, sleep, and regular screenings, many of the leading causes of death are highly modifiable. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, even dementia can be significantly influenced by how you treat your body today.
Your Body Is Your Professor
The episode closes with a blessing adapted from Jen Hatmaker’s book Awake:
“May your body become your professor. Pull up a chair to find out what it wants to teach you. May your body become your most trustworthy advisor. May it illuminate the path of wisdom if you’re brave enough to follow it.”
Your body is already speaking to you. It’s telling you when something hurts, when you’re tired, when you need to move, when you need to rest. The question is whether you’re willing to listen.
You don’t need to overhaul your entire life today. You just need to prove to yourself that you can make one small change. Walk to the mailbox. Skip dessert one night this week. Do ten bodyweight squats right now.
Strength training is your insurance policy. Nutrition is your fuel. Sleep is your recovery. And all of it together builds a life with more vitality, more energy, and more years to enjoy it.
Start small. Start today. Your future self will thank you.
Ready to dive deeper?
Watch the full episode of The Vitality Journey Podcast with Andy McGinnis, or visit destiny-works.com to explore personalized coaching and resources for discovering your calling and building whole-life vitality.
Full Transcript
Dave: You only get one body in this lifetime and how you treat it determines how well it carries you. The topic of physical health can be filled with guilt and anxiety as we struggle with how we look and how we feel. Can there be hope instead? Well, absolutely. And on this episode, we’re going to talk with a fitness expert about simple steps to caring for our bodies in a way that pumps up our vitality. Welcome back to the vitality journey.
So about three months ago now, I realized my calf was hurting. And I just assumed I had worked out the day before and I thought maybe it’s from the dead lifts I was doing or something, but it kept aching. And then I realized I was walking up the stairs to my office. I got to the top of the stairs and I couldn’t breathe. I just could not, I mean, it was that bad and it’s never happened before. And so I thought, okay, calf pain, not able to breathe, so I Google it. Right? So I Google it to say, is there a tie between a calf pain and breathing hard? And basically Google said, get your butt to the ER now. So I went to the Children’s Museum instead with my grandkids, little knowing what was going on inside of my body. I saw my doctor that afternoon. She heard the story. Literally I was out the door in five minutes to the ER.
Making a long story short, I ended up with what’s called a DVT, deep vein thrombosis. I had a blood clot in the back of my leg and they had broken off. It had become two pulmonary embolisms, one in each of my lungs. It was life threatening. And now I know what you’re saying with percentage of the people.
Andy: Yeah, one in three.
Dave: One in three people don’t survive that.
Andy: They do not, that’s right.
Dave: So I tell that story because we’re talking about physical health today. I want to tell you three things I learned about my body. Number one is I’ve got to listen to my body. I could have eased, and I came real close when my, to dismiss it, you know, it’s not a big deal, but here’s what I learned. My body keeps the score and it’s like an advisor telling us what’s going on. So, the second thing is I don’t think I’ll ever take my body for granted again. It’s just, it’s too important. I need to treat my body well. And the third thing is at that moment, when I had that happen was probably as fit as I’ve been in a long, long time. So it doesn’t matter. Sometimes stuff happens. And that’s the big caveat for this whole episode is sometimes things happen. I wonder, then I also wonder this, if my level of fitness prevented something worse from going down. I don’t know.
Andy: And if I could just add to that, so just back on as an EMT, your ability to listen, again, I shared this with you before, just saved your life. Further, being responsive to that. And further, I would say that, hey, your exercise probably, let me say it this way. When a body starts to heal, it’s usually when you start feeling and seeing everything happening. Because now your body’s at a homeostatic place and everything is where it should be. Now you’re like, oh, I feel the thigh. I can feel the thing more. But when you’re under constant inflammation or you’re a chronic malnutrition, your body just becomes numb to these things. So hey, it might have broke because you had increased blood pressures and your vasculature. Yeah, who knows? But it’s great, though, that actually probably saved it.
Dave: God only knows. That’s right. Listen, you’re at the right place, the right time and working out can’t hurt.
Andy: No, it can only help.
Dave: So we are going to talk, let’s talk about physical health today. You know, overall the vitality journey, we focus on emotional health, relational health, behavioral health, financial health, vocational health, and today physical health. But I think everybody knows, you know, in his book, Scarcity Brain, Michael Easton says when it comes to physical health, the numbers are savage. The numbers are savage.
For instance, less than 5% of adults participate in 30 minutes of physical activity each day. Only one in three adults receive the recommended amount of physical activity each week. 40% of adults in USA are obese. 70% of adults report they obtain insufficient sleep at least one night a month. Nearly one quarter of adults say they suffer from chronic pain. Arteriosclerotic diseases like heart disease and stroke kills more people globally than our eight other top causes of death combined. Neurodegenerative diseases affect 43% of the world’s population. I could go on and on and on and I’ll just end with this stat. Americans sit seven to 10 hours a day.
Andy: Man, can I add two more?
Dave: Yeah, go ahead.
Andy: So as an EMT, 72% of all calls that we have are not traumatic injury. They’re symptom related.
Dave: What are they?
Andy: Symptom related. Yeah, so it’s like poor, that’s the result of poor nutrition. It’s not I fell down the steps or I fell off my bike. It is symptomatic treatment and response. Also, more than half of the adult world population over 40 can’t jump. Can’t jump off the ground. It hurts. That’s right.
Dave: Wow. Yeah. If you think about it, you’ll never remember the last time you jumped. But man, for this number, it’s over half. That’s crazy. That over 40. That’s crazy.
Well, there is good news. Okay. Right. That’s all the bad news. The good news is, and you know that I appreciate Dr. Peter Attia, who has written a book, Outlive. I think it’s back here on the bookshelf over here about physical health. Excellent, I highly recommend it. Here’s what he said. He is confident that with nutrition, exercise, sleep, and screenings, he’s confident that arteriosclerotic diseases, heart and stroke, metabolic diseases like diabetes, cancer, and even neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, listen to this, can be partially and in some cases, highly modifiable.
Andy: Absolutely.
Dave: And those activities, nutrition, exercise, and sleep can have a profound effect, not just on our physical health, but our happiness, our contentment, our self-worth. Man, it is like all purpose healing. All you gotta do is move your ass when you work with your physical health. Right. So we’re gonna talk today with an expert, Andy McGinnis, in fitness and nutrition.
Let me tell you about Andy. He graduated from Purdue with a degree in health and kinesiology. He’s a certified strength and conditioning specialist, certified nutrition coach, certified personal trainer for the last six years. Andy and Katie and their daughter Ava live in central Indiana. And probably the most, the thing I appreciate the most about Andy today is that he’s my personal fitness trainer and it has remarkably changed my life in so many ways. So Andy, welcome to the Vitality Journey.
Andy: What is up? Those are some kind words there. I appreciate it. We’re off to a good start. So yeah, it’s good to be here.
Dave: All right. I’m going to ask you a really basic question. Why are you a fitness coach? Like, why’d you choose that line of work?
Andy: Yeah, so it all started with my love of sports to be completely honest. So I played football, basketball growing up, played in high school and all that good stuff. And I was super, I was good. I wasn’t good enough to play in college or to make a career out of it. So we realized that at a young age, which was great, but I still loved the whole process of it. I loved all the weight room stuff, all the nutrition stuff. And so I thought that would be, honestly, just kind of started with that. I thought that would be a good way to essentially pursue a career.
I went to Purdue, graduated in health and kinesiology, as you mentioned, and then graduated. It was back in 2016. I moved to Dallas and started doing athletic training with some guys down there. Did that for a couple years and then kind transitioned over to what we call Gen Pop, which is general population stuff. The everyday athlete is kind what we call them. People like people like Dave. I’ve been doing that ever since.
Dave: So wait, just call me an everyday athlete.
Andy: We gave that’s right, Dave.
Dave: All right, let’s go. I like that. Yeah, and I’ve noticed obviously your clients. I mean, I’m one of your older clients, Andy.
Andy: Yes, by age, you are one of my older clients.
Dave: And you have some younger clients too. And I just want to know every now and then I look at your other clients and I just see am I pumping more than them or I just, I shouldn’t do that but, you know.
It’s interesting Andy and I have been talking about this podcast actually for a long time and he has known I’ve you know been talking about the vitality journey so this is not news to you. But I’m just curious from your perspective and what you do and the way you see life, when you hear the word vitality, what’s that mean to you, Andy?
Andy: Yeah, the first thing that pops in my head is just energy, right? Like, what are your vitals? Does it keep you alive? What gives you the energy to do what you do, essentially? Like you talked about, there’s lots of ways that you can kind of measure it, whether it’s in physical strength and the weight room kind of stuff, whether it’s vitality through like finances. I think that was one of the chapters you guys were doing, whether you get vitality or energy through your health and nutrition.
And the thing about it, at least in my perspective, is there’s a ton of different stuff at play into it. So how you get your energy, to where you get your energy from. How I live my life and what I do for a living, I find that I get a lot of vitality, a lot of energy through the health and fitness world. Yeah. And I try to kind of push that onto my clients and at least give them to the roadmap to be able to live a healthier life and to have more vitality and to kind of carry them through, you know, tough times in your case or just to, you know, make small, small improvements over time.
Yeah, all about the energy that, you know, something gives you all about the energy that, you know, the weight can give you that food can give you and all that good stuff.
Dave: Awesome. So let me give you a thought. Another word that’s related, but, well, I’ll be curious to see how different it is to you. Fitness versus vitality. How would you describe fitness from your being a fitness coach? What is fitness?
Andy: Yeah, I think fitness is super subjective. I think everybody is capable of some level of fitness, whether you’re the biggest person in your, obese and overweight and all that stuff. There’s always, in my opinion, something you can do, whether it’s, you know, getting up and walking to your mailbox and back, right? Like, that is a form of fitness that may be the most entry level form of fitness, right? And then you see, you know, bodybuilders and stuff like that, Arnold Schwarzenegger and people like that, that their level of fitness is, you know, something that, you know, I’m not even going to get to and stuff like that.
So yeah, I mean, when I think of fitness, I think fitness will give you vitality, will give you that energy, will give you longevity and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I think it’s super subjective. But what I perceive as fitness to me, walking to the box and back, that’s not fitness for me, for somebody else, it may be, that may be the hardest thing they do all day, right? And then there’s everything, you know, in between that person that’s just trying to take a couple steps and then the person that is, you know, competing in Trump man, competition. So, yeah, there’s a lot of a lot of ways you can go with the word fitness.
Dave: So it’s important that first interview I had with you is important because you’re trying at that point, you’re trying to contextualize fitness for me. Right.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah, we do concentrations with pretty much everyone that that I work with. We sit down, we talk. Sometimes that’s a 10 minute conversation. Sometimes it’s an hour. But yeah, it’s gauging gauging what we call readiness. Like where are you at? What can you do? What have you done? Yeah.
Dave: Yeah. So here’s a question. So what I’m hearing you say, no matter what level of vitality slash fitness or you find yourself in, you can start somewhere, right? So is there such a thing as a non-negotiable that a person needs to commit to? Like if somebody’s watching this and they’re saying, I got to do something about my body. I’ve got to do something. If they’re watching this, what are the non-negotiables that you would say then you’re going to have to, what would you say?
Andy: Yeah, from a 10,000 foot perspective, you have to know yourself. You have to be honest with yourself. Yeah, if you’re somebody that is literally starting from the bottom and you know you need to make all these changes and you’ve never done that before, the wrong place to start is probably, all right, I’m not, I’m done with sugar, right? If you, if you eat sugar all the time and it’s led to, you know, heart disease, it’s led to, you know, you can’t wait or any of that stuff.
You have to essentially just prove to yourself that you can do something different, right? So I will start with accountability and knowing yourself. So in that extreme case for that person, I may tell them that, hey, listen, every night after dinner, you, know, you go and you get, cookies or the ice cream or whatever you sit on the couch, you watch your show, do that. That’s seven nights a week. That’s 365 days a year. You know, that’s not good for you, right? I don’t need to tell you that. That’s not doing much.
Can that person, you know, get off this podcast today, today’s a Friday and say tonight, I’m not doing it one night, one night, right? You can do it Saturday, do it Sunday, do it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, make Friday your night. Can you prove to yourself that you can make a change and keep that consistent. If I tell that person, you know, today’s the day, we cold turkey, we don’t need any more sugar, ice cream goes in the trash, all that stuff. I mean, maybe they do it for a week. Maybe we get to 10 days. Maybe we’re lucky and we can get to a month, but it’s just not sustainable. So I think if the non-negotiable is you need to know yourself, right? You need to know, have I done this before? If I haven’t, then I need to just prove to myself that I can do something to better myself.
Dave: Interesting. So, so like James Clear in his book Atomic Habit said, know, if you increase by 1% by the end of the year, you’ve increased by 37%. Now, I don’t get the math on that, but that’s how it works.
Andy: Well, and Andy touched on something too. I mean, to reference that book is habit stacking, habit stacking. You know, I have the urge. So instead of getting it and, you know, satisfying a stimulus, I’m going to abate it. And we’re not going to marry ourselves to a cadence at this moment. We’re just going to say, hey, Friday tonight, no ice cream. If you can do that, that’s a notch in the belt of confidence. I can master myself. I can master my flesh.
Dave: Yeah, because we need victories, right, Andy? I mean, something needs to go right for us to feel good about ourselves.
Andy: That’s right. Yeah, 100%. I mean, if you have a long road, it’s daunting. It’s going to take a minute. The weight loss one’s the easy example, whether you’re trying to lose a lot of weight or it could be the opposite side. You’re a scrawny person and you, it’s a body image thing, whatever, you want to put on muscle. It’s not going to happen tomorrow. It’s not going to happen next month. It’s stacking little victories over time. And the roadmap can be long. Yeah, proven, hey, I can do something today to take the step, the first step, then that opens the door to then build the consistency and build all of that stuff going into it.
Dave: OK, so here’s what saying, what I hear you saying. The non-negotiable is not necessarily about sugar. It’s about taking the first step and start meeting that benchmark. Now, sugar may be one of those things. What did you say, Demetrius? Meeting a benchmark?
Andy: Yeah, setting the benchmark.
Dave: Setting the benchmark. Setting the benchmark. That’s right. All right, so discipline equals freedom. Discipline equals freedom. That’s right. The more disciplined you are, the more you’ll be able to freely move your body, freely have a high degree of health, so on and so on. Okay, so you’ve thrown out sugar as one of those. Is there other, that’s a nutrition thing. Is that your statement about nutrition or is there?
Andy: Yeah, that’s, I mean, yeah, sugar is a great one to get rid of. But yeah, that was just more like of an overall example. So yeah, you touched on it, but yeah, just proving to yourself that you can make a change, not even like setting these huge benchmarks to hit like making one change is the benchmark, right? Whether that is, yeah, going back to the mailbox example, I’m not going to get my mail in the car on way home. I’m going to go park my car every day. Now I’m going to walk down the right? That’s a benchmark. We made a change.
So the non-negotiable is just finding something you can do and something that you can do consistently. You’re not going to, you’re not going to cold turkey, you’re not going to stop eating ice cream, not going to go running tomorrow if you’ve never ran, right? But we can all walk. Yeah, you just got to open the door and give yourself that grace and that runway and just show yourself that I can make a change. I can start the process.
Dave: There’s a lot in that. There is. There is. And I was going to ask, so, Andy, tell me this. Is there a trap as to what motivates you to say, you know what, I need to call you? For example, is it vanity? Is it okay that I just want to work out because I want to snatch the body? Or should it be because I want a health benefit? Or does it matter? Listen, at the end of the day, as long you’re moving your body, it’s okay. Or is there an extreme or a trap to any of those? What do you think?
Andy: The answer is, yeah, I don’t care why you want to make the change. And I think all of us, I mean, there’s a little bit of vanity in all of it, right? We want to look little better. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s part of the reason I work out. It’s part of the reason a lot of people that I work with work out. Yeah. Now, unless you’re like doing a competition or something to where like, that is the only goal. Yeah. I would like to tie in, you know, the metabolic processes that go with it, the nutritional component and all that stuff and kind of use like the vanity as like a byproduct of increasing overall health.
But yeah, I mean, people come to, come to me with all sorts of different goals. Sometimes they don’t even know their goals. Sometimes they come in and they just know they need to do something and that’s kind of why they’re sitting in front of me is to figure that out. So yeah, think, think, you know, looking better and feeling better once, once you get somebody, you know, that look in their mirror and they see themselves differently. Like you kind of have them at that point, not even from a business perspective, but from like a motivational perspective. If I’m overweight and I, you know, go up the stairs one day, my knees don’t hurt. Like now we’re rolling, you know, now, now, now I can get you to kind of push you, you know, can we go for a run now? Can we go, can we do a marathon? Can we, you know, at that point, the door is open. Yeah. That’s awesome.
Dave: Well, let me dive deeper into the fitness side, the exercise side for a second here. And some of this is coming from what you have me do. And I’m curious what, why each of these is important from your perspective. Obviously there’s strength training, which is, well, I’ll let you define it. Strength training, mobility training, stability training, and aerobic training. Is that an accurate breakdown, those characters?
Andy: Yeah, I mean, those are all components of strength training, you know, health and wellness, I would say.
Dave: Yeah, are you asking for like the difference between them or how they all?
Andy: Can you touch on them? Like, let’s first start with the obvious. Why is strength training important? Why is it important for me to essentially get stronger? And what it would translate to is I’m building up my muscles, I suppose. Why is strength training important?
Andy: Yeah, I look at strength training as essentially like your insurance policy. Right. The more muscle that you can hold on to, the more strength that you have. The when something does go wrong, the more you have to kind of combat it.
Dave: That makes interesting.
Andy: Oh, I know you told your story at the beginning of the podcast. Yeah. That’s that’s a bad scenario there. But holding on to some strength just to allow your body to fight off, you know, any sort of disease or, you know, everything you went through, is the biggest benefit of strength training now that has a bunch of obviously body image things as well. It relates to, know, the more muscle you hold onto the higher basal metabolic rate goes, which is essentially your metabolism, which means you’re burning more fat outside of the gym. You’re burning more calories, sorry, not fat, but calories outside of the gym. Yeah. So there’s a ton of nutritional benefits for it as well. But overall, yeah, it just gives you, it widens your swimming. If you are stronger, can more things can go wrong and you can you can be okay.
Dave: I like that that it’s your insurance policy. Yeah. Yeah. I like that too. You know, as an EMT, I think about I think you’re going to touch on mobility, you know, functional training, like a lot of our elder elderly patients, know, when they fall, it usually results always in a pelvic dislocation, right? Like just pops out of socket anterior, posterior, and you just personally on the floor and a leg is like facing the other direction. Because it’s like nothing’s tight. Everything, you know, they haven’t jumped. Everything’s loose. It doesn’t.
Andy: Yeah. And then what happens is the injury is kind of like almost secondary or tertiary. What becomes primary is the healing process. They never rebound from, right? They don’t have the strength to kind of increase that vascular dilation to keep everything tight and make sure you’re getting good blood pressure from your ankles back up, right? Because they’re not doing that stuff.
Dave: I would even say Attia says this. I don’t know if you’d agree with this, Andy. Attia says if the one thing an older person can do to live longer is strength training. Right. So that goes what you’re saying about insurance. Right.
Andy: Yeah. I think there’s a ton, ton of validity to that. Yeah. And just like you guys can talk about, mean, even just from like, yeah, when you get older, your balance, you know, it’s worse if you fall and you have more muscle, better chance you’re to be okay. So yeah, but this isn’t just for old people. I mean, young building strength is crucial. Right.
Dave: That let’s talk about the other thing that you have me do that I do a lot at the beginning of there’s a lot of moving my body that would you call that mobility that you’re helping me work on?
Andy: Yeah. Mobility is it’s, all, you know, interlinked to strength training. Mobility just from like a definition is essentially how far can a joint move through its range of motion. There’s active mobility, there’s passive mobility. Active mobility is you, like if you were raising your knee up in front, how far can you do that with no assistance? Passive mobility is then if I were to grab my knee and pull it further, I get more range of motion, but that’s with assistance, right?
The reason that mobility is important is because there’s a gap there. And that gap is where injuries can happen, right? If I get pulled into a far range of motion, whether I’m weightlifting, whether I’m getting something off the counter, whether you’re living your everyday life and you don’t have control over that range of motion, then that’s, that’s kind of where injuries happen. And that’s where that gap is. So yeah, being able to be mobile, but then be strong throughout that mobility or that range of motion, that just assists kind of all the, all the strength training things that we do. Yeah.
Dave: And then you have me do some things that I think are stability, like I’m walking with a kettlebell or is that aerobic? Is that stability? Or walking with the ball?
Andy: Yes, yes is the answer. Kind of both. So yeah, you’ll get cardiovascular effects for that. Anything that elevates your heart rate will fall kind of into an anaerobic, aerobic bucket, right? Now, the reason we do that, we don’t necessarily do that for that. The reason we do it, yeah, is for stability. It’s a, you can get on the ground and do, know, crunches all day every day. There’s, that’s, that’s fine. That is a way to get core strength, your core.
The reason humans have core is to keep everything stable. It’s used to transfer energy and that has to be stable to transfer energy from your lower to upper body. So the reason we do that is it’s a way to sneak in core work. It’s way to put weight on one side of your body and get used to pulling into your obliques, your abdominals, your erectors in your back and all that in order to achieve stability. Yeah.
Dave: So, and you started talking about aerobic there and there’s anaerobic and aerobic. Can you explain the difference between the two?
Andy: Yeah. So it’s essentially kind of what it does to your heart, right? Right. So long, slow duration, right, is anaerobic and then aerobic is the fast stuff. So it, all, if you’re going for a walk, right? You can do that for a long time. You can walk for assuming that you’re in good health. You can walk for 10 minutes. You can walk for 60 minutes, right? It keeps your heart rate up and then it kind of stays there. The opposite would be like kind of all the head training and stuff like that, where you’re trying to make peaks and valleys through your heart rate. Like if you’re wearing a heart rate monitor, you’d be able to see that.
That would essentially be like Dave, like when we do like the sprints on the rover and stuff like that, and then we’re resting in between. Essentially what we’re trying to do is get your heart rate up and then have it come back down. Yeah.
Dave: So you, part of the overall fitness of Dave is you have me do all these things.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think that’s kind of one of the big takeaways is there’s no like I would never recommend that you just go lift dumbbells, right? That’s good for you, but there’s more to it. I would never recommend that you just do yoga. That’s great for mobility or stability, but maybe work that in with other things. I never recommend that. Hey, maybe you just ride the bike all day every day, right? That’s part of your cardio piece. So yeah, there’s a reason that we kind of, you know, link all those together throughout our program. See them three days a week, yeah, there’s definitely time to get all that in and it just keeps everything more balanced.
Dave: Have you ever wondered what you’re truly meant to do? At DestinyWorks, we help you discover your calling and bring it to life. Through personal coaching, group experiences, and our vitality journey, you’ll gain clarity, energy, and impact in your life and your work. No matter where you are in your journey, DestinyWorks walks alongside you. Visit destiny-works.com today and start living with purpose. Now let’s get back to the conversation.
Yeah. I two questions. Yeah, go I have two questions for, or a question for both of you. So, and you know this Andy, right? Dave, after you get done, the flood of serotonin in your body is pretty pronounced, right? Yep, right. The feel good hormone. How do you feel after you work out? How’s your confidence? How’s your self perception of self image? Part one, and then Andy, as you look at the arc journey of your clients, right? Cause we live the day to day, but you get to see this person in the macro view, right? From day zero to, you know, two years out or whatever.
What does that look like when you see that, that per day brightness in their mood versus over time? Do you see a kind of a steady increase in their mood? So Dave, how do you feel as the client and then how do you feel as the coach? Right?
Dave: Yeah. There’s no doubt in my mind that once I started working out regularly with Andy, my mood changed, my perspective on life changed. Now I’m not saying I became Mr. Woohoo with Mr. Lamp on the head. You know. Sure, you get all the answers now, right? Yeah. It’s just that I felt better about myself and I felt like I had more energy. So, and I know, and I’ve read about this, you know, I’ve known this, the more you exercise has a profound effect on your emotions. I can say it has.
So that’s from the client’s point of view, it definitely changes me. I feel better. A matter of fact, when I, was hard for me after I had the issue three months ago to go a couple of weeks without working out, I felt doubly bad. I felt, okay, I’m broken and I don’t get to do the thing that helped me feel better. Yeah, it became a privilege. Yes, absolutely. It became a privilege. Yeah, I remember, I didn’t tell you this Andy, but this, but the day, the day I came back, the first day I started working out after the whole thing and I came in to see you, I sat in my car and I had to take a moment. I was emotional. How grateful I was that I was alive and grateful that I could get back into the thing that gives me energy. You just talked about this earlier.
Andy: You get to.
Dave: I get to. So that’s my perspective. You can ask him.
Andy: Yeah. And Andy, as you look at, you know, Dave, you know, just a general athlete, right? Yeah, thank you. Thank you, General, General athlete. As you look at, you know, people like Dave and others, man, I mean, you talked about this too, right? You kind of the fuel that you get is kind of watching people grow. Talk to me like, share that with me. Right. I mean, what about looking at Dave makes you be like, I can’t wait to see him next Wednesday. Right.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s it’s low hanging fruit, but it’s very true. I mean, seeing somebody, especially when you work with them over the course of years, as you have with some clients, everyone’s journey is different. So you have some people that kind of hit the ground running and they make big changes right away. They’re all gung-ho. They’re, know, I want to be in here five days a week and go, go, go. That’s great.
And then you have some people that, you you have peaks and valleys, right? There’s good weeks, there’s bad weeks, there’s good weeks, there’s bad weeks. You zoom out far enough and it’s like a stock. It’s trending up even though it’s kind of bouncing the whole time. It is super rewarding. You know, seeing something like that happened to Dave and seeing him get better from it and seeing him being back in the weight room, you know, what was it? Dave, four weeks, six weeks later.
Dave: Yeah. Well, I even last week you declared me finally back weight wise, but it took, it took a lot of weeks to get back there.
Andy: Yeah, it did. Like you touched about, touched on listening to your body, we had to do a lot of that when we first started. So we pulled way back. I mean, Dave, we were doing a bunch of stretching stuff, a bunch of mobility, stability, as you mentioned, a lot of body weight stuff, squats, just seeing how your body responded to these sort of stimulus since you’ve been out for a while.
But yeah, I mean, that’s it’s an extreme example, but it is pretty cool. You know, had something that could have literally, you know, killed him and then weeks later, he’s back in the weight room, you know, sitting in his car before he comes in realizing that, it is a privilege. It’s not, you know, necessarily something that, you know, I have to go work out and I to do this. It’s hard, all that stuff. Not that they’ve ever thought that, but that can be a mentality going into it. But then, yeah, getting that privilege to then come back and bouncing back what I thought was, you know, pretty quickly. So, yeah, seeing the whole journey of people, it is pretty cool.
Dave: So can we talk a minute? Thanks for that, Andy. That’s helpful. We talk a bit about motivation because you said this earlier, if it’s not sustainable, you’re not going to do it. So sustaining some sort of fitness and even nutrition regimen is not easy. It’s hard. Let’s just cut to the chase. It’s not easy to maintain. I know this is almost unanswerable, but how can a person stay motivated to keep at it?
Andy: Yeah. It is a great question. And it’s something that, you know, like you said, I don’t have a perfect answer for. It’s something where I’m still exploring that studio space as well. The big thing with what I do a lot of times, going back to the first time that I meet someone, right, we have a consultation and that a lot of times they’re coming to me for some reason, you know, something happened, they need to make a change. They’re sick of whatever’s going on. We have to go a different direction.
Well, a of times when I sit in front of them, that’s, that may be the most motivated they are, right? We’re sitting there, we’re going over things. Hey, I’m, you know, we’re going to get in here a couple of days a week. We’re going to do, you know, all this strength training stuff. Maybe they thought they couldn’t do, you know, we’re going to get you nutrition dialed in X, Y, and Z, all that stuff. That’s typically can be when they’re at their highest. They’re ready to go, know, they’re amped up, they’re ready to get started and all that stuff.
Keeping people motivated long-term pulls into kind of what we talked about earlier, showing them small victories, whether it’s as simple as, you know, you couldn’t do any pushups a couple of weeks ago, we did one singular pushup today. That’s great. You can move your body weight. You weren’t able to do that. And keeping those on like the front of people’s minds is important because a lot of times people can come in, they’re like, all right, I know I’m in Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and it’s just kind of what I do. And maybe they don’t realize their own progress.
I mean, acknowledging the small victories is definitely big. And people respond differently to different things. Some people, you know, they don’t need any thumbs up. They don’t need anything. They’re in, they’re out, they’re happy, no problem. That’s the minority. A lot of people know, want to be told, hey, you’re doing well, you’re strong. So just making making it a point to kind of acknowledge that as you go through the process, whether it’s big or small, yeah, definitely keeps people engaged and keeps them motivated to move forward.
Dave: Awesome. Good. Man, that kind of highlights something, you know, like working out is obviously good for the body, but we talked about how all these health factors are kind of inter correlated, right? And we just kind of talked, we touched on it quite frankly, like emotional health, right? The fact that you feel better afterward. And I would think, and I think we’ve all probably have felt depressed and or maybe inside of, you know, depressive states or phases in our lives. But man, like the biochemical result of moving the human body is brilliant.
All of the stuff you need to feel about like serotonin comes out regardless. Yes, I don’t want to do the push ups. But if you do them, it’s going to come out and you like it has to make you feel it will override cortisol. Yeah, like it can’t not work that way. Anyway, I’m just kind of dovetailing on what you’re saying. And then just like, man, people we forget how brilliant we can be and to be reminded like, man, you are strong. Yeah, that’s right. You know, you like you can do this. And by the way, it might not be extraordinary. No, you’re not pushing 400 pounds, but you literally could not do this two weeks ago.
Andy: Exactly. Yeah. And what he’s really, what Andy’s really good at and it is, it is just about everything I do. What he says is good job. Good job. And I know it’s, it seems like a little thing to you, but for me, I’m going, yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Dave: Well, we’re adult. We don’t hear that. Yeah. Where do you hear that? As an adult. We don’t get complaints. Yeah. And we have bills to pay, but no one says good job. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Andy. Yeah, absolutely.
Andy: No, it’s true. I mean, yeah, even me like everyone likes being told they’re pretty, right? Like saying good job or saying, you you couldn’t do that a week ago and now you can’t. It’s gonna make anyone mad, right? So it’s just knowledge and this thing. So I think we all get, including myself, know, the positive affirmations are definitely beneficial.
Dave: Two more questions and then we’ll let you go. Are there non-negotiables when it comes to nutrition? Like, is there some bottom lines if a person says I need to eat better? What would you suggest?
Andy: Yeah, you gotta eat less. Okay. If you want to lose weight, that’s the volume thing, caloric deficit. Caloric deficit, is that what you’re talking about?
Dave: Yeah.
Andy: That’s the term right there. We, a nutrition community, we have that one pretty much nailed down, right? You have to, it has to be calories in, calories out kind of thing. Yeah. Like I touched on, your basal metabolic rate, right? There’s couple places around India where you can get what’s called an in body and will actually give you that number. It’s measured in calories.
Mine is somewhere around 1800 calories. And what that tells you is that is what you’re going to burn at rest. So you wake up in the morning, you don’t do anything and you sit around for 24 hours, your body is still burning that many calories just to sustain its everyday functions. There, you do the math on it, right? If you go strength train, you’re burning a couple hundred calories. If you go, you know, run or cycle or do any sort of cardio or in a couple other hundred, a couple hundred calories, you’re adding that to your basal metabolic rate.
Now at the end of the day, if you sit down and you eat 4,000 calories, even though you worked out, we’re still, we’re still in a surplus, right? You kind of, you’re kind of just spinning your tires there. Now that doesn’t mean, you know, when you, when you strength train, you get, you know, metabolic effects and stuff like that. Like you’re still getting that, but from a nutritional standpoint, for trying to lose weight, a non-negotiable is we got to be under, we got to be in a calorie deficit.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean like we’re all human, right? I enjoy having a beer and eating pizza just like the next guy. But you can’t do that seven days a week and expect to make nutritional jumps. So it’s in a balance. If you know Friday night, my friends are in town, we’re going out, we’re going to have a good time. Well, that means Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, I got to be pretty dialed in on these couple things so that I can go enjoy myself and I can be a human on Friday. I know I’m going to be in a surplus on Friday. So that means a couple other days before and after I got to be under if you are really tracking and moving towards some nutrition.
Dave: So as far as weight loss goes. Let’s get back to our previous conversation. We had a guest, we talked about financial health. You got to keep you have to track every dime you spend. So what you’re saying is you need to track your calories. That’s important. You track it. And what I’m also hearing is like, you got to burn more than you eat. Exactly. Yeah. You know, if you’re eating more than you’re burning, it’s upside down. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Andy: And that doesn’t mean you have to track everything forever, but I always recommend that people, at least if they’re new to this, just MyFitnessPal is, you know, the big app that people will use. You can track everything on there. Do it for a week because most people eat more than they think.
Dave: Yes.
Andy: Like, oh, you know, I don’t eat that much. I eat, you know, a couple, you know, thousand calories a day. And then you start typing it in and it’s like, oh yeah, did grab that bag of chips while I was waiting for, you know, my chicken to get done for lunch or oh yeah, I did have two granola bars, which are fine, but still a couple hundred calories.
Dave: Or I had one donut and it was 350 calories. Or you don’t know what equals what. Yeah, I had one donut, right? But you’re right. It’s 350 calories.
Andy: So that’s the non-negotiable. That’s the bottom line. It’s got to be caloric balance or caloric deficit if you want to lose weight. Anything else on nutrition that you would say, here’s these are non-negotiables?
Andy: Yeah, it’s to lose body fat to be super specific because sometimes you will wait. If you’re strength training a bunch, like you can gain muscle and it kind of nets out to be even even though your body fat’s down and your muscle mass is up, it shows up on the scales the same thing. Yeah, calorie deficit to lose fat is key.
Other than that, I mean, the low hanging fruit, I always, I always say, do all the things that, know, your mom and your grandma told you, right? When you’re young, it’s, go outside and play. It’s, it’s eat your vegetables. It’s, you know, don’t stare at the TV all day. It’s kind of all of that stuff. Like still rings true today. That will definitely help, drinking water, you know, don’t drink as much of the sugary stuff, just all of those kinds of wasted calories or easy ways to, yeah, still feel full, but not essentially get into that calorie surplus. So, yeah, good.
Dave: Would you also add to that, Andy, sleep hygiene? Right, like just going to sleep while I’m staring at my phone or, you know, checking in every two hours while I’m checking, you know, all that.
Andy: Yeah, yes, I would. Yeah, I don’t know how deep you guys want to get into the sleep. But yeah, the sleep, that’s when your body repairs itself. Right. So if you’re not getting sleep and then you go try to work out like early the next day, like, yeah, you’re going to be tired, but just like from a nervous system standpoint, your body’s not going to be able to fire and recruit the kind of muscles that it needs to move weight. Like it’s just going to, you’re going to feel sluggish, right? You’re not getting as much out of your workouts. Now you’re again, just kind of spending your time. So yeah, sleep’s a big one. It’s, hard. I get it. We all have lives, we, you know, do stuff and sometimes it’s just hard to sleep, but some I could be better at. It’s definitely something that needs to be in there if you’re trying to live a healthier life.
Dave: Yeah. Well, I think what I’ve heard just underscore is if you work out with someone like Andy, you will sleep. Yeah. Generally, speaking. Yeah. But if I work with somebody like Darren on having to do podcasts, that’s then I lay awake at night. Sorry, Darren, just threw you under the bus. But yeah.
Hey, one last question, Andy. It is a blessing for me to be able to say I’ve got a fitness coach. Not everybody can afford a fitness coach. I just, I’ve made it a priority, you know, in my life. But if a person says, gosh, I can’t afford a fitness coach, but I do want to increase my physical health, are there, what would you say? What are simple ways that a person could go about say, here are the steps I’m going to take to increase my physical health?
Andy: It’s great question because yeah, there’s definitely a financial commitment that comes with it. And I understand that, you know, it’s not for everybody. Do the big things well, right? So the big things when we’re strength training is squatting, it’s deadlifting, we got to push some weight. So push ups, we got to pull some weight. So pull ups or rows or something like that. Lunge a little bit and carry some weight. There’s six of them, right?
If you can just start there and do those consistently and get very good at those, like you can do those in your living room, right? A squat you can do in your living room. If you can’t do a squat, no problem. You can do a wall sit. That still kind of checks the same box. Same thing. If you can’t do pushups, well, I’m sure most people have a counter in their house. You can do some elevated pushups. Like you can always kind of start with that.
And if you kind of, that’s a good way to keep workouts balanced throughout the week. And it’s a good way to, you don’t have to complicate it. I think in my opinion, one of the worst places to start is hopping on YouTube and go and give, you know, 10 minute workout in home. They’re going to have you doing burpees. They’re going to have you doing links. They’re to have you hurting yourself. Yeah, exactly. Which, which those are fine movements in a nutshell, but for somebody that’s new to working out, like doing a burpee, doing a pushup and then getting up and jumping, we talked about jumping. A lot of people don’t jump like, yeah, you’re not going to able to do it. Right. So start with the simple stuff. Right.
Get good at squatting, get good at deadlifting, push a little weight, pull a little weight, move in different directions with your lunges and just get used to doing that. And then yeah, you can, I mean, there’s a lot of online places that’ll write you programs that are a little cheaper. You can find templates and stuff online. You can come visit us at Fitness By Sign, all that good stuff. But yeah, just do the big things well. You’re good at doing those. It’s a good place to start. You’re not going to go wrong.
Dave: So awesome. And if I could just underscore that, I just for our viewers, man, I sometimes we get wrapped around the axle thinking, well, I can’t afford to go to the gym, so I can’t work out, man. Walking and running is free. Ninety nine. Yes, it is like it’s free. Ninety nine. Yeah. I mean, whatever piece you want to, it’s always going to be free. Yeah. To Andy’s point, bodyweight squats in the house, hold on to a chair. You can do them assisted. There’s always a way to move your body in a repetitive way to get stronger. And so I think I just want to underscore the point like guys, you got to be sick and tired of being sick and tired. Yeah. And there’s no excuse. Yeah. It’s not money. It’s your it’s something else. But it’s not that you need equipment. It’s not money. It’s not that you have all the things you need. You just got to go. Got to start here too. Just got us right. You just have to go. Yeah.
Andy: Awesome. Andy, good point. I mean, the barrier to entry, it’s low. It’s not. Yeah, you don’t you don’t have to go set up all these accounts. You don’t have to go reach out to 10 different people. You don’t have to do any of that. You can listen to them to the podcast. Don’t pause the podcast, but listen to the end of this and then you can literally exit out of the podcast app. Do some squats. It can start and there you go. 30 seconds for you. It doesn’t have to be. Don’t wait till tomorrow. So yeah, move your body.
Dave: I’m here. You say don’t complicate it. Don’t complicate it. Don’t complicate it. And I love that right after this podcast, everyone, 10 bodyweight squats and you need do assisted, grab a chair and do it. There you go. And no ice cream for no ice cream for at least Friday. No ice cream on Fridays.
So Andy, thank you. This is a great conversation. Get us moving down the road. And again, I’m thankful for your work with me and thankful for your advice for our listeners. Yeah. Grateful.
Andy: Absolutely. And Andy, can you tell, I mean, for those that are local to the area, I’m sure they’ll be able to find you. But do you offer like remote plans? Can someone just reach out to you and grab a nutrition plan or consult with you online? And if so, how would our guests reach you?
Andy: Yeah, I do all my business through Fitness by Design. So all on their website, you can just Google Fitness by Design. All my information is on there. You can reach out to me. And yeah, whether it’s, you know, you just need some help on where to start or you want to come in for a consultation. We do those free. Those are complimentary. So meet with anyone just to see where you’re at. I’m a resource. So please feel free.
Dave: Awesome. David, tell them David, Demetri sent sent you to Andy. So we’ll tell our guests that he will tell you that you will do a good job. Yeah. There you go. Yes. Those are good take on messages. All right. Thanks, Andy.
Andy: Absolutely. Thank you guys.
Dave: So it’s helpful to hear from Andy and get us thinking about fitness and maybe some easy first steps, right? For those who haven’t done anything on working on their physical health. But there are other issues we’re to have to come back to. You touched on, you brought up sleep. I think it’s a whole thing. I mean, and Andy touched on it too. I we could probably burn a whole episode just on sleep hygiene. Yeah. I think it’s, and it’s interesting, it’s called sleep hygiene. So that’s something I can manage. There’s something I can be engaged in. It’s not just going to happen to me. Right. It helps people. Like he said, there’s a spectrum. You can wash your hands, but not wash them well. You can sleep. You’re just not getting quality sleep. So we just want to increase your sleep hygiene.
Someday, we don’t have to take a whole episode on this, but I’m fascinated with the importance of breathing. Deep breathing. I think I want to talk a little bit about water, how important it to our bodies. Mostly our bodies are made of it, right? Yeah, one thing that people don’t want to talk about very often, and I think sexual contentment. Yes. Now that’s a tie between like physical health and emotional health and relational health. Someday maybe we can find an expert on sexual contentment. I mean, here’s the thing. I know I keep saying this, but all these health factors and their subparts and components are just directly inter-correlated.
Yeah, you know, they all affect and as you get better and one, some of them kind of all increase. I can imagine that if you were not working out and not active and became active, maybe your sleep hygiene would be better. Right. Your sexual life and contentment could be of higher quality. Yeah. That’s exciting to kind of explore.
One last thing I want to say and then we’ll we’ll wrap this up is I talked to a guy. This was right after my incident in the hospital. And he was all agitated. I mean, it ran it was after church. We’re standing in the law. And I mean, he was emotional about it. He said it really shook him up. So I was trying to probe, you know, what was so emotional about it. And then I in the course of the conversation, he said, I never get checkups on my body. He is, I picked up the idea that he was afraid to even go to the doctor.
What is that man? Because it’s kind of like your car. When that engine light comes on, it’s gonna be $1,000. You know, it’s gonna be something I can’t afford or can’t fix. Same thing with medical, right? It’s like whatever, especially if you haven’t gone on long time and you’re older, you’re like, man, they’re gonna give me a long list of stuff I can’t do, can’t afford, can’t. And that is within itself is an emotional state that for people from moving forward and executing better health.
And so I think that’s what it is. It’s like, I’d rather not know, especially what’s deep and what’s inside the body. You’re like, man, let me just die or pass out and just not worry about it. I don’t want to have to, especially if you can’t do anything about it. There’s an insanity to know that, oh, I have this thing. I can’t really do anything about it. And now I know, I wish I didn’t know.
Well, okay. So I’m seeing a whole episode on the motivation to go see the doctor for heaven’s sake. And as EMT too, it’s like, man, some of the things when we come across our patients, like, man, why did you wait so long to call us? Yeah, right. Call. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Physical health. There we go. We’ll come back to it. Absolutely. So many big things to follow. Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s been great having you watch and listen to us as usual. Destiny dash works dot com. Same on all platforms. Again, Spotify, YouTube and as usual, all the references and resources for this episode will be on this this video. You’ll be able to reach out to Andy and Dylan and get your nutrition plan kind of kicked up. Do a free consultation. And as usual, we will catch you guys on the next episode. Yeah.
So let me send us out with a blessing. Now this blessing is one I took from a book by Jen Hatmaker called Awake. Fascinating book, but she refers, she’s talking about her body. So I took this paragraph that she wrote about her body and I turned it into a blessing. Okay. Okay. Here we go. I love this first line.
May your body become your professor. Pull up a chair to find out what it wants to teach you. May your body become your most trustworthy advisor. May it illuminate the path of wisdom if you’re brave enough to follow it. There is something important to learn right now. May your body’s immediate physical response grab your attention. Ignore this at your peril. Man. See you next time on The Vitality Journey.