#1905 How Hard Is Too Hard? - Bobby Cappuccio

the equator, I don't know. Is that it now? I covered them all.

woke up. I went to an amazing event. It really was a spectacular event, and then went home the next day.

as you can. But that didn't work for me. But I was taking supplements, and uh got the jet lag wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.

and brought it with me. They actually stopped me at immigration and they sent me through like the extra produce inspection, which was really fucking insulting because I feel like I'm getting to the age now we're like, yeah, this guy smuggles produce, Like wow, God no, not like not like you're carrying weapons. Or you're you're smuggling illicit drugs. Like we know this guy has a couple of apples in his back. Look at them, the geezer.

super charged. Last night I think I slept an hour, just could not sleep at all. Was trying to read like the cat was like, you know, eating my book as I'm like trying to turn the pages. And woke up today Today was a struggle. Got to a point where I felt great, and now I'm kind of like a little bit a little bit smashed because like I think it was the pine bar because I was feeling pretty good. You just get to like the evening hours

and you just hit a wall at the conference. I wanted to go out with Boydy and you know, to like just the fellow presenters, and I just couldn't do it. I was like, there's just no way. The room was spinning. So I had, like, I don't know, a cold ham sandwich, which I mean sounds very depressing, but depressing, What is it?

But you know, if you don't want to if you don't want to lift weights or do strength training, or go climb a rock wall or do some pilates or do some body weight stuff, if you don't want to do it for your biceps, do it for your brain.

Do you have a particular protocol around you know, like, is there stuff that you do which is more intentional rather than incidental for optimizing brain function, especially as you know you're in your fifties and I think think about it not all the time, but I'm very aware of trying to keep my brain some way close to what is optimal for me. Now, I just I just stay active.

I was listening to a session over at over in the Gold Coast at the Anti Aging conference, where there was a cardiologist taking a look at the number of people that are I'm home, I'm not stuffing this up, that are dying spontaneously between age fifty and sixty five. And you know, there's a lot of theories on why this is happening. And what's interesting is these are people who are quite fit, and they've been fit their entire lives.

And what they were saying in the session was that a lot of these people because we grew up in that whole environment of go hard or go home, you know, and then and we had a lot more destructive phase phrases than that, which I'm not going to go into on the podcast, but I'm sure you've uttered them, or at least have heard them a couple of times. And I remember training in my friend Oscar's basement and literally

squatting until you vomit. Like if you didn't vomit, or if you didn't pass out and you couldn't stand, it wasn't a good workout. Utterly stupid when it comes to recovery and progress. But that's how hard we trained, because that was the mentality. And I did that for quite a few years. And then it turns out that a lot of these people damage their heart with the extreme

training programs, whether it's extreme endurance or resistance training. But because of their level of fitness in their youth, they were able to compensate. And then you get to a certain age and you're not. And I'm just sitting in that class going one. How much superstition and fucking voodoo was the industry built on that did far more damage than it did good? Too? How screwed am I? Because I was one of those idiots, and that idiot comes

out of me. Like when I was like forty six, went to the gym, everything was fine, a little bit short on time, really fatigued jet lagged because on the road constantly, and it was okay until there was no equipment like the gym. For whatever reason, the mid afternoon was packed. I was like, ah, you know what, I haven't used the Smith press for twenty five years for

very good reason. Let me see what happens if I hop on a smith machine and just loaded up with as much weight as I could possibly move because I'm off my plan. And then I think about two months ago, I dislocated my chromio clovicula joint.

to that. In the eighties, me and a made of mine would put on three plates each side on the leg press, which is sixty kilos each side to one hundred and twenty kilos, so not that heavy, but we would do sets of one hundred and so we would do one hundred reps, and we would have a bucket next to us, well actually a bin if I'm going to be honest, and we would just we would just keep going. And I know, I don't want to ruin anyone's breakfast or day, but yeah, the exact same thing.

You would train until you spewed, and then when one of us would spew the other one would laugh no compassion, zero compassion, and like if he was spewing, I was pumping my arms in the air. Laughing at him as he was like I crouched over his bucket.

had to meditate around getting out of bed. And it's like for me, I would get out and go, oh my god, what a great workout. I was like so excited for that feeling of not being able to walk.

But there's so many old dudes. You know. Another one who people you'll definitely know, but and a few of our listeners will know, but not a lot. And in fact, if you want to look at something kind of interesting but also sad, is Ronnie Coleman. Bobby Oh so yeah, Ronnie Coleman. One. I can't remember everyone maybe eight mister Olympias, seven or eight mister Olympias and was just he literally like a fucking cartoon character. I mean, this dude in

his heyday and he trained. To say trained hard is like saying that, you know, Texas is a little bit big, you know, it's like no, he didn't. He trained like a maniac all the time for a lot of years and now he's he's and he ain't that old. He ain't that old. He's in a lot of trouble and his back is completely fucked and he spends he can you know, he walks with sticks very awkwardly, or he's in a wheelchair. And you know that's just and he's spoken about it. It's just a byproduct of what he

did to his body. Because you get this, you know, there's a point where training hard is training stupid. So we need to be finding the right level of intensity to create the kind of physiological adaptation we want while not putting ourself in harm's way. And that's you know that. And the complication of that is that there's no equation for that. There's no absolute equation because the equation or the formula or the protocol is different to Bobby, to me,

to you the listener. And that's the thing is trying to figure out how hard, how much, how often, how much recovery, what food, what's good for my genetics at my age, with my background, with my medical issues. And so this is why when someone says to you, oh, you know what you should do. Just say to them, yes I do, and don't let because they definitely don't know.

here's what I'm curious about. If if your goal was to be one of the greatest legends anything, right, So let's see bodybuilding, and you knew you would win let's say seventy eight times the mister Olympia. Yeah, but after that you would pay for it in an extreme way. You'd be wheelchair bound. Yeah, under what circumstances, if there are even circumstances, would you be like, you know what, that is a that is a fair trade?

fucking kidding? Like I look at Ronnie Coleman and you could have said to me, Craig, you could have one hundred million dollars and twenty mister Olympias, but your body's going to end up where you're in constant chronic pain and you can't go no, no, not on any planet, not in any way. But but I think that's the thing is, like, you know, I realized that that my my perspective is just my perspective, and I think what is really what would work for me might not be

the right thing for you. You might go, you know what, fuck it? I would rather go hard and then go home and have, you know, have thirty ridiculous years and then fucking slide into my twilight or whatever. What about you would you do that?

David Goggins. But I've heard a little bit of a story, and he came from a really rough upbringing and experience some things that some people would define as you know, adverse childhood experiences. Yeah, definitely early childhood trauma. And I think about when I got into extra it wasn't just

about exercise. That wasn't it for me, Like I was not thinking when I started exercising, shit, you know, if I do this, I could get better at sport and you know this, this could help my longevity and cognition later in life. That wasn't any of it. What I was trying to do was disappear. First of all doing something where I could be isolated and do it on my own.

it would get a lot of negative attention. A lot of times I would get the piss taken out of me by my teachers that didn't know what it was and just not really dealing with it in a resourceful way. And I didn't do very well socially because people would constantly bring up. Fucking hell, you look like a horror show.

was going through at home. So for me, it wasn't a matter of getting out of pain. It was going deeper into the pain. And I kind of wonder, and you never know, and this is probably might even be a stupid assumption on my part, but I do wonder how many people go deeply into extremism and pain as a way of reconciling a different level of pain that is not as tolerable because you can't define it and

you can't control it. So if you're pushing yourself until you have nothing left, and you make that decision to go one rep more, one step more, you know, at least there's a locus of control as opposed to having that pain be imposed upon you in a state of learned helplessness. So I wonder that a lot. But I mean, I guess when you get older you see things differently. So this is kind of a cliche question, but it's

a very interesting one. If you went to bed and you woke up in like one of those like budget films and you you went back in time and you could talk to eighteen year old Craig Harper. What kind of conversation would you want to have?

was surrounded by fucking MENSA candidates or astronauts. I don't know why, but I just, you know, I don't know, don't know, but yeah, I'd probably just want to be encouraging and say, you know, try stuff like I wish. Not that I think going to university is necessarily a great achievement at all, but for me, my first time at university was good, not even for the agree but just for me to go, oh, you're not stupid. You

can study you can apply yourself. You can you can do this stuff that you didn't think you could do. So for me getting into university and getting into Green Exose Science and then maybe even more importantly, getting asked to be a lecturer the following year after my because I was already in my mid thirties and I owned multiple gyms and all of that, so they knew I had a big background in programming people in exercise. But

all of that was you know, very for me. It kind of filled me with confidence and so yeah, and also, I mean, I don't know if I would have listened, but I mean I had so many you know, we all have issues, but I had so many, you know, issues about my body and body dysmorphia and eating and self esteem and ego and self loathing, and you know, I didn't think a lot of myself at all. And they're not I'm not doing this in a self pity way. I just didn't. And what's what's interesting was I didn't

have any of the hardship you had. I didn't have it. Like I didn't even though I was a fat kid and I was called jumbo, it wasn't really spite for it sounds weird, but like I didn't have like my life was really not. I mean, it wasn't a fucking Disney movie, but it was. It wasn't compared to yours. It was a Disney movie, right, And I know what you went through in your life was hard. But for whatever reason, I thought I was shit. So I would just want to, you know, encourage me, I guess, to

to try more stuff. Like I didn't try stuff till I was although I did open Australia's first PT center at twenty six, so that's something. But yeah, I really I really pigeonholed myself in a bad way. So but I don't know. I wonder if you would even listen.

having confidence in your level of agency at eighteen. Do you think younger Craig Harper would have tried different stuff and chosen a different path than the one that you that you did as part of your history.

a while. But I think that's a really good starting point for all the stuff that you know. I am fascinated in mind stuff, body stuff, you know, all all of the kind of the fundamentals around health. I think, yeah, if I went back in time, I would probably start off and do medicine, and that would be for me a platform to other stuff that's interesting.

sometimes your own learned helplessness. And I wonder if that's kind of an issue along with, you know, the expectation that you're going to have shit figured out, like life should be a linear path. Like you you go and you graduate, and then you get a higher degree and then higher education and then you know, you get a job and you just move from like the seventeenth floor to the nineteenth floor. You got a corner office, and then like two years before you die, they give you kind of like.

do with one another. I know that's a regret I have is a lot of the stuff I've done have been in the same category where shit, what would it be like to be a waiter on a cruise ship? You know, what would it be like to be a performer in theater. Because none of that stuff's wasted. You're learning life skills and some diversity that when you come back to your chosen purpose, you have such a broader

depth of experiences and resources to pull from. So I think there's got to be a little bit of screwing around in life if you're going to be serious, like serious play.

that group, but not such high representation. But yeah, I feel very passionately about helping people, helping young people to understand their potential and to try because I didn't understand. And it's not like, oh I was so gifted and I just didn't know. No, it's not that at all. It's just like I wasn't as big a fuck up as I thought. Of course I was a bit of a fuck up, but also at times I was a bit brilliant. At times I did shit great, at times

I did shit terribly. But MY biggest problem between fifteen and thirty was not my genetic potential, my intellect, my innate ability or talent, or environment or situation, but it was how I thought about myself, how I thought, you know, in that metacognitive why am I the way I am? And why do I think I'm so shit? And where does that come from? And why do I have all of these self limiting beliefs and are they true? And

what's the origin story of this thing? You know, all of that stuff which we don't even understand how to do. And I meet people all the time that I'm pretty sure they're pretty fucking gifted, at least at a few things. But when I hear them talk about themselves, I'm like, oh my god, your problem is not that you're not brilliant. Your problem is that you don't know how brilliant you can be. And I know that sounds like a well worn message that people give, but it's true. Which doesn't

mean all people can do all things. That's also bullshit. And all you need to do is you know, outwork everyone in the room. That's also bullshit because there are lots of other variables. But I think in general terms, people underestimate themselves drastically. Yeah.

a week ago, where I forgot what it was. It was a question, and it reminded me of the Chamber Meads study by Aliah Crumb and and Langer, two brilliant researchers, and Aliah Crumb had already proved that your beliefs can alter your physiology. It can alter your hormonal profile. In this case one particular study, it mitigated grellin release you, so people would have a higher sense of saciety just

based on what they believed. This Chamber made study was really interesting where they took eighty five individual believe women across seven different locations hotel chains, and they asked them all, like how many of you are consistent exercisers and they all classified themselves as non exercises, like we're working all day, right, we're part of the housekeeping staff. No, we don't exercise,

And so they just took a couple of metrics. So they took BMI, they took blood pressure, they took body weight, and they broke these eighty five people into two separate grips groups and one group they just took the biometrics and that was it. The other group they took the biometrics and they said, you know, based on the total calculation of your daily physical activity, you go beyond what's considered an exerciser. You exercise more than someone who goes to the gym three days a week regularly.

the effort? Now, if you do that across all physically demanding activities in a day, every day, five six days a week, for thirty days, that's going to create a different response, and the only thing that really changed is how they saw themselves, what they believed about themselves that they previously did. No, it's powerful.

and so therefore so does your body. So you know, all your bits go into stressed. You know you you know the deal, your endocrime system and nervous system, and you cartio vascular and respiratory system. Everything goes, everything gets jacked up as though you're actually in some kind of real danger. But your body can't tell the difference between what you think is real and what is real, so it responds accordingly despite the fact that this is well, no,

you're not having a six hundred calorie milkshake. You're actually having this milkshake, so you know, or you're having one hundred calorie milkshake not the three hundred or whatever it is. Or no, that pill you're taking is not actually a painkiller. It's it's a pillful of nothing, but your headache went away because you thought it was a pillful of something.

in New York. I could be wrong, but people who had all these fake knee arthroscopes so there was like I think patience and like ninety hadn't you know, they all had these dodgy knees where they needed like an arthroscope and a clean up because they were all in pain. It wasn't a rico or anything like that, but they

needed surgery. And so half of the people they're all in the kind of similar, you know, medically similar medical position, and half they gave the actual surgery and half they did an incision but did no surgery, but they believed that they were having the surgery. And the surgical outcomes well, firstly, the people who didn't have the actual invasive surgery, they did get an incision in the knee, but there was no further surgery. They recovered obviously quicker because there was

less soft tissue trauma. But then you know, over the subsequent six and twelve months, their clinical outcomes were as good or better because they believed they had the thing but they didn't have the trauma. Like that's just fucking amazing.

not better. Like you know, in the milkshake study, if somebody tells me you're having a six hundred plus Cowaldry milkshake and it's only two hundred plus coroies, I wouldn't doubt that. You know, Like you go to a restaurant and go, well, here's the chicken. My first response is not bullshit. I bet you this fish in there. It's

just you know, you don't do stuff like that. So the only the the way around that is to build an irrefutable body of evidence, like you said, by trying stuff and trying stuff that's not outside of your scope of confidence, but also not too far within it. That's challenging but attainable. Over time, you start to elevate that level of belief.

It is true though. It's like knowing that Placebo's work is one thing, but you can't trick yourself because you know, you know, I wonder how we can leverage that knowledge, and I wonder, like I do remember, I feel like I'm probably going to throw myself under the bus here, but I do remember back in the day, you know, when people would come to the gym, you know, one of my gyms, especially somebody who's brand new and let's say they're twenty thirty forty fifty kilos overweight, or you know,

in pounds whatever, eighty ninety one hundred pounds overweight, and they wanted to you know, they were there for that, that reason for weight last for and they're embarrassed, and they didn't like how they looked, and they were self

conscious in a gym and all of those things. And quite often I would tell them a story about someone who came in, you know, like three weeks ago, who's literally you know, bigger than them, and you know, less fit than them and less healthy than them, and you know, they're they're now three weeks in and they've done this and they've done that, and that person may or may not have existed, right, but just to see that person go oh really, I go, oh yeah, one hundred percent,

you know, or whatever, I'm just like telling a little bit of a white lie because I want them to have a bit of belief. And by the way, of course, I did work with many people like that, so I probably didn't have to bend the truth. But just to like to tell someone, oh, you can do it is not the same as or perhaps not as powerful as well like, here's the thing I used to do where

there's no deception. So a woman would come into the gym, and it's different now, but in the old days women were terrified of weight training, like in the nineties and even the early naughties some such a stupid name the naughties. Anyway, but I'd regularly have ladies who would come into the gym and they'd really balk at the idea of strength training because they would say to me, shit, like I

don't want to end up like you. I'm like, oh, dear, okay, And so I would walk them across the gym floor to meet one of my trainers, who a female trainer who is in great shape, and I'd go, this is whoever you know, blah blah blah, and I'd say, what do you think? What do you think of that shape? Oh, she looks incredible. And then I'd go to her, how often do you lift weights? And invariably they'd say four or five days a week, and I'd go and you

didn't turn into a man, you know. And so all of a sudden, this person who's got a belief that if I lift weights, I'm going to look like a man, meets somebody you know of the same gender, who lifts weights, who lifts heavyweights, who's real strong? Who does not only do they not look like a man, they look fucking like an athletic, amazing female. Then all of a sudden, in thirty seconds, complete mindset shift.

wife has a movie or what a movie is. This is just like an advanced learning model. So basically, you can't hold us accountable for lying if we don't know that we're lying, and we don't even understand the concept of a lie. And I'm like, and somehow the conversation went to donuts, and it just seemed like, or maybe I took it in that direction because I've got issues. It just seemed like, at the end of the day, like a really elaborate, intellectual, elitist rationalization for having a donut.

But yeah, so chat GPT is a lot of fun. I actually love chat GPT. I love I love asking questions and seeing the increasingly human like response as it as they learned from not only one another, but as they learn from interacting with me. I mean, I think they could have probably have a better influence than me, Thank heavens, it's just not me by myself. But I'm always impressed at the level of sophistication of these responses. They seem more human, like if you're actually lying, whether

you're aware of it or not. So that's a very advanced form of communication, deceit and quite human.

you know, this, this is a really good whatever. It kind of intersects with your your research, you know, in that's it's in the space of metaperception and da da da da. I'm like, fucking hell dude. It's like because it's read my papers, it's read my work, and it knows about and plus it's got access to all the shit about me on the internet anyway. But also every question that I ask it, it starts it understands me more,

you know. And I like, last last Monday night, I did, like my ten week mentoring is on and I went and I've already got all my notes written by me, not chat GPT. But so the program is set in that, you know, whenever you do the program. Week one, we're going to talk about you know, life design. Week two, it's going to be you and your mind. Week three, it's going to be you and your body. Week four, it's going to be you and your potential and so on. So all that stuff's kind of but where I go

with it as flexible. Right, So I've got all my notes and I went, Hey, I'm doing week six blah blah blah to we're talking about this. I've got like fifty five people in the group and I'm talking about this stuff. This is what I'm covering. Got any ideas for me about an activity or two that we could do online considering it's it's on zoom, you know, it's it's pretty limited. It's not face to faced, like hey, Craig, great, yep, yeah, and it just comes out with all this shit. I'm like, yeah,

that's that's really interesting. Or this is what I'm talking about. Would you change anything? Would you add anything? And the ship is always good.

like trainers? And my response was yeah, definitely and definitely not, because I think that just being in a space of proximity with another human being who is highly skilled at listening and coaching and guiding and encapsulating the conversation, there's going to be a physiological, not just psychological response that

creates openness and self discovery in that conversation. But then if you're on the other side of that where you're not into that because those are quote unquote soft skills and you think your distinct level of knowledge is what makes you a differentiator in the marketplace. Six months from now, chat GPT is going to have skill sets and capabilities at a blindingly fast speed that you could study for the next one hundred years. You're probably not going to have.

We could say that's fair that that might happen. So people who are dispassionate and not compassionate towards their clients aren't a lot of trouble. People who lead with that will probably become more discernibly valuable than they ever have been. But my issue is as we become divided as a society and have an increasingly lower level of tolerance for anyone who thinks differently, who is different than us, and there's all this hostility and people feel invalidated and demeaned.

You're interacting with chat GPT now, who is completely affirming, highly curious, highly supportive, and now you're interacting whatever this this entity is evolving into that understands you better than you feel anybody else understands you.

There's still you know, It's like people can emotionally connect with something that isn't you know, sentient, that isn't conscious, that isn't human, you know, like and you if it makes you feel It's like, why do people take certain things, put certain things in their body because it makes them feel a certain way. It creates a certain physiological biochemical response. So too, when some people are having these interactions, they

feel better they feel seen valued whatever. Oh yeah, there are definitely going to be There's definitely going to be good and bad to come out of it. There's going to be people completely if not already completely addicted to.