Grip Strength Secrets with Nick Delgadillo of Lift. Fight. Win.

About This Episode

In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Nick Delgadillo of Lift. Fight. Win. In this episode Nick talks about the vital connection between raw strength and firearms expertise. He underscores the misconception of neglecting strength in firearms training, highlighting the pivotal role of barbell training in enhancing grip strength and endurance. Watch this episode for a fun and interesting dive into this latest development in the firearms industry.

Insights In This Episode

• Raw strength alone is insufficient; technical proficiency is crucial, especially in activities like firearms training.
• Mimicking elite performers can be counterproductive as it neglects individual differences in genetics and athleticism.
• Balancing firearms training with other activities prevents burnout and ensures a sustainable, long-term commitment.
• Specialization in firearms training involves allocating resources to specific aspects, recognizing the balance needed.
• The misconception that cardio and conditioning alone suffice for firearms proficiency neglects the significant role of strength in stability and control.

About Tactical Business

Tactical Business is the weekly business show for the firearms industry. The podcast features in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs, professionals and technologists who are enabling the next generation of firearms businesses to innovate and grow.

Episode Transcript

Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Show. I’m your host, Virginia Beach based firearms entrepreneur and copywriter Wade Skalsky. Each episode will be exploring what it takes to thrive as a business owner in the firearms industry. We’ll speak with successful firearms industry entrepreneurs about their experiences building their companies, leaders and legislators who are shaping the industry, and tech executives whose innovations will reshape the future of the firearms industry. Let’s get after it.

Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Podcast. I’m your host, Wade Skalsky, with my co-host today, John McCoy, and I am excited to talk with Nick Delgadillo. Nick, how are you doing today, sir?

Nick: I’m doing great. Thanks, guys.

Wade: Walk us through. For those who don’t know you, give us a little background story how you got to where you are today, and then we’ll just start asking you some questions. I know we got John, and I got a lot of cool stuff to talk to you about.

Nick: Sure, man. Yeah. And, Wade, self-reflection is critical. I was talking to the Combatives Association Summit back last September, and my presentation was on strength training and how it applies to performance and longevity. And when I talk about longevity, just being able to do the things that you want to do for as long as possible, when you’ve got adults training, 25 year olds, 18 year olds, even 30 year olds can do whatever they want. They’re going to be fine. It looks like you guys are in your at least in your 30s and beyond, but you guys know how it is if you you do something long enough and then you start thinking about how long am I going to be able to continue doing this. So but anyway, one of the important factors in terms of self-defense, especially, is in terms of deselecting yourself as a potential target for somebody. How you look matters, how you carry yourself matters. And one of the easiest ways to just make yourself a little bit more intimidating is to, is to put on some muscle. So there’s so many benefits to the strength training thing, aside from even just the performance aspect of it, but just how you carry yourself and how you look like there’s a deep seated thing in all of us, especially males, where you know how it is, you see somebody, you almost subconsciously size them up, and the guys that don’t do that, there’s really something wrong with them. Like they were just they were brought up wrong or they just live in a fantasy world. But we all do this.

Nick: We all do this naturally. So I just one of the many positive benefits of getting stronger, especially if you’re using barbells. So anyway, I do a lot of things. I’m a starting strength coach, so I’m a certified coach through starting strength. I’ve been with them for a long time. I actually work at the work with the headquarters here in Wichita Falls. I moved here about nine years ago to do a bunch of stuff. So we run the podcast with Mark Rippetoe. We do that every week on Starting Strength Radio. We have franchise gyms, so I’m oversee in gym operations for the franchise gyms all over the country. We’re opening up in all the major cities as quickly as we can. I oversee the coaching development for the starting shrink Gyms certification. So I think fundamentally my deal is I’m a coach. I was I feel like I was born a coach, I love coaching, I love teaching, and I’ve managed to, at this point in my life, just make coaching my thing and expanded that into all these areas of business that I’m involved in. So I own a jiu jitsu school where I’m the head coach. My wife and I own that together. I am a partial owner of the Starting Strength gym in Austin and I do the seminars. I’m a firearms instructor through Rangemaster. I’m certified through Rangemaster with pistol in the shotgun. So these are all the things I’ve loved for a very long time, and I’ve brought my coaching into all those aspects. And I just teach people all this cool stuff that I love learning.

Wade: Yeah, there’s a lot of depth to firearms, right? But there’s two aspects of firearms that a lot of people will forget about, and that’s medical and the physical part that you’re talking about because it doesn’t do you any good if you physically are unable to do what is required in a situation. And so that’s why I think it’s the physical aspect of what you’re talking about, is just as important as knowing how to be proficient with the firearm.

Nick: Sure, you can look at a spectrum with something like firearms, because firearms isn’t obviously isn’t just about raw strength, and even raw strength is there’s plenty of guys who shoot really well who you wouldn’t consider to be strong guys. Now, I was just having a conversation with some guys about this recently. All the people who’s name, the high level competitors, the guys that are really fast and really good, they are all strong. And when strong you talk about things like like grip strength and they’re fast and they’re athletic and they’re agile, but grip strength. Absolutely. If you’ve spent any time hanging around like competitive shooters, they all talk about grip strength at some point, like you’ll hear a conversation about grip strength come in at some point. So the performance side guys understand, at least in terms of grip strength, that it’s a factor. But when you look at something like handling a firearm and mostly a pistol, right. Because with the rifle you’re just basically hugging the thing and it’s a different situation. You can look at on one side, 100% technical proficiency just dialed in, perfect structural integrity of the grip and where your hands are and how you manage recoil through just sheer skill and repetition and reproducibility.

Nick: And then on the other hand, you have just like bare poor brute strength and just brute strength alone doesn’t get you that far. Like you can’t just hand somebody who’s super strong a pistol and expect them to shoot well, because there’s a high technical component to it. Right? But the thing to understand, and I think the people, the thing that people willingly ignore, is that the more raw strength you bring to the table, the less I hate to say this because people will take it the wrong way, but I guess the best way to describe it is that the more sloppy or the more room you have on the technical side of things. In other words, there is a good enough for the technical proficiency, at least in terms of the grip and the pressures that you apply to the gun that. Strength will support. So you can take that kind of a number of different ways, right? So if you are strong and then you actually put in the time and practice, you’re way ahead of the curve, you’re practicing and you’re getting better and more efficiently because the grip strength aspect is already there. And you can be a tiny bit more sloppy with things there.

Nick: Additionally, if you have both of those in place, you can worry less about that aspect of firing a gun. You can do like the important things like making good decisions, identifying targets, and just taking your training to the next level rather than just actually being able to hit a target because you have grip issues, right? This applies to everything all the time. It just firearms are a great example of something that is fairly technical in nature. Pistols especially are something that fairly technical in nature, but you can definitely see a performance improvement when people get stronger, even just in terms of fatigue and how many reps you can do, how long you can. There’s I’ve been in classes many times where guys like at the end of the day, their shoulders or arms are just toast, just even from drawing the gun. And the reality is that if you’re stronger, all that stuff becomes easier and you can last through a two day, two and a half day firearms class and get productive training because you’re not distracted by the fact that your arms are just toast. And here’s another rep. I got to do it again. So yeah. Am I making sense? You guys have any questions about that?

John: No, no. So I am a disciple of the starting strength method. And I love that you’re repping the shirt. That’s awesome. I found it probably 4 or 5 years ago. Listen to rip on, uh, Tom woods show. And I was like, man, this guy makes sense. And he hates the government. I’m on board with that, you know? And and so I was a skinny, fat runner and had all kinds of back issues and stuff you guys always talk about on your show. And I found your method and I was like, what really attracted me to it was what pushed me away from lifting, because I tried to pick up lifting like a thousand times, and I could never find anything that was consistent, that actually showed results. And that was simple. Like, not easy, but simple. And I’m like, man, this program’s only got like four lifts in it. This is really simple. And then you find out, hey, you can keep getting stronger for years and years. And that’s really rad. So I think what I was going to drive at is that do you need to have be a bodybuilder to be better at shooting, or do you just how do you establish a good baseline of strength that you can work with for a long time, and work that into your shooting regime?

Nick: Yeah, it’s a great question, because the minute you start talking about barbell training, the minute you start talking about strength training, everybody’s brain immediately goes to bodybuilder, powerlifter, strongman. When they see these big, huge, massive gals and guys who are specialists, who are strength specialists. Right. And I think people generally understand the idea of specializing. But whenever you bring in an aspect of something that’s unfamiliar, then all of a sudden things get really conflated and people get confused, and then they start thinking of really silly ideas and getting into training methods that don’t really get you anywhere. We’ve all done it. We’ve all tried to get an extra edge. Try something else, try this new thing that this other guy is doing, or that the best in the world are doing. That’s the kind of the standard model is to mimic whatever the high performers are doing. So a couple things, a lot to talk about there. Number one, anything that that somebody who is very proficient and what I mean by very proficient is somebody who is essentially born to do the thing that they’re doing. Right. So whether that’s in sports, firearms, any fighting, anything, the people whose names, it almost doesn’t matter what they do outside of their sport in terms of its applicability to anybody else, because we’re talking about the point 1% of humanity. In other words, they come with a set of neuromuscular and neurological attributes that have prepared them for some kind of high level performance. So the training methods that they use and even a lot of cases, this isn’t true, but there may be some validity in terms of the specific things that they’re doing for that sport.

Nick: But even in those cases it doesn’t matter. So anytime you’re mimicking what high performer is doing, you’re doing yourself a disservice because you’re taking a snapshot of this individual at this point, at their in their career, when they’ve already achieved a very high level, and then you are making the assumption that whatever that person is doing is also going to work for you. And it won’t work for a variety of reasons, because you don’t come with the athleticism that individual comes with. You don’t come with the ability to recognize movement patterns and duplicate movement patterns to produce the amount of force, power, explosiveness that individual can produce. And all of these various factors that go into these high performers, you may or may not have some of them. You probably don’t have any of them. So the answer is that you have to take a methodical and logical process based approach. You have to start at the simplest thing that’s going to produce the most results in the most efficient way possible, and then you see where it goes. Right? So barbell training doesn’t automatically mean bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman. Those are specialized strength athletes who have chosen to go into that thing for all of the reasons. That I just spoke about, right? Because they’re good at it. They’re big.

Nick: They’re strong already. So it just happens to be that the barbell lifts the squat press bench deadlift, and the Olympic lifts are the lifts that produce the highest amount of force production stress. Therefore, they make you stronger, faster and more efficiently and longer terms. Like you said, you can continue to improve your strength on the squat and the deadlift for years, forever for the rest of your life. Now, it’s not going to happen as quickly as it does at the beginning, but you can still predictively keep adding weight to the bar for the rest of your life, and that’ll be setbacks and stuff, injuries and all that kind of stuff. But that happens, and then it’s just a continual process because they’re fundamentals. You’re using your entire body, you’re using a lot of muscle, you’re using a lot of joints. They’re producing a high level of stress. They’re efficient in those ways. So they’re trainable. And that’s where barbells fit in. And that’s why in powerlifting it’s the powerlifting is a test of the squat, the bench and the deadlift. There’s a reason that those three lifts were chosen as the ones to represent the strongest individuals in the world, because they require the most strength, but they also apply the most strength stress the most stress that’s going to produce stress. So again, I’m trying to get around the point here that barbell training does not equal one of these sports bodybuilding, powerlifting those are sports that use the lifts. Right. So barbells are the most efficient way to gain strength.

Nick: People have to come to the realization that strength is the most foundational attribute that they can, number one, train, and that they can train Long Terme and that will support all of their other physical attributes. So if you think about all of the things that you can work on, you can work on balance, you can work on timing, power, speed, agility, all these things if you really think about it. And we’ve done this with starting strength over and over again. There’s articles and videos, but if you really think about it and you drill down, what are those attributes? They’re a combination of force production and neuromuscular like how explosive are you? The neuromuscular part of it you have very little control over, like you were born with whatever genetics your parents gave. So if you’re not an explosive person, which most people are of average, right. That’s the reason it’s average, right? Most people are of average genetics in terms of explosion. That’s all you got. And people that say that they can improve their vertical jump by 20in, that only happens on the internet. It does not happen in real life. In other words, you don’t get much more explosive by training power and explosion through plyometrics or agility because all of those things get more and more specific. And the more specific you get, the less broad applicability it has. So I’m getting to the point that strength is the most general adaptation.

Nick: So regardless of what you bring to the table through your genetics or your training history, the best place to start for everybody is by increasing your baseline of strength. And from there, the starting strength program takes advantage of that fact very well and gets you very strong very quickly without injuring you by teaching you the lifts correctly so you get stronger very, very quickly. And then there’s going to be a point four months, six months, a year down the line where things become more specialized for you as an individual, not for everybody. Right. So in other words, another way to think about that is that everybody who hasn’t trained with the barbell, whether they can squat £70 the first day or they can squat £300 the first day, they should all start at the same point. They should start by doing the squat press, bench, deadlift, power clean, adding £5 every time they come to the gym, and then run that process for as long as they possibly can once they have to start making decisions about trade offs. Right? So what’s it going to take in order for me to make the next weight increase? That’s when you start adjusting programming and you start considering training other attributes, conditioning, for example, or maybe more practice on the range, more practice on the mats. And that’s a proper process. That’s how you do this intelligently. You start at the most simple fundamental attribute that you can train, train it hard for as long as possible and then see where that process takes you and where your deficiencies are.

Nick: In my experience now doing this as a like a professional barbell coach for God, what is it? Almost over ten years, I found that almost everybody ends up barbell training at some level for the rest of their lives and just basically practices their sport. And that’s most of us, most of us kind of hobbyists that are doing things because we love doing them. When you get into the performance aspect, you get your competitive Jiu-Jitsu guy, you’re a competitive shooter, you’re going to be a little bit more specialized. You’re going to have a little bit more stuff to work on in terms of your sport or your hobby, but it really doesn’t like it doesn’t really ever get too crazy. It’s like people always settle into 2 or 3 days of fairly heavy barbell training and then three, four, five, whatever days of practice of what they do. And that’s usually enough for the jiu jitsu guys as they’re getting ready for a competition. It’s like the conditioning ramps up a little bit. And the only reason for that is because how else are you going to get conditioned for a competition? You can roll. More and you can go harder in your butt. That leads to injury, right? So you can add some conditioning there. But typically that’s where people end up. But we’re not talking about converting everybody into bodybuilders and powerlifters. It’s just wherever that process takes you.

Nick: So you draw the line at the point where specialization comes in. And specialization, all that specialization means is that you are now choosing to take one particular aspect of your performance of your life, and you’re going to dedicate more resources to that at the detriment of other things. So if you’re a powerlifter, you will have chosen to train force production at the detriment of conditioning, at the detriment of potentially like your overall like mobility, your joint health, for sure. Possibly, depending on how you’re training. Right. Anybody who is a specialized athlete, who’s a high level athlete, who’s a hardcore competitor, is choosing performance over everything else. And that’s a thing that most people don’t understand. They’re choosing performance over health over time with their family, over eating things they want to eat over legality. Right. Because that’s where like steroids and stuff come into play. So that’s a whole different breed of person to hold different aspects of reality that people aren’t normally familiar with. Getting back to my point here, that’s specialization. So if you’re a specialized competitive shooter, the majority of your time is going to be spent with a gun dry firing on the range, doing stuff to make that better. Now your training is not going to be your priority, right? So you might not want to continue gaining weight getting bigger. That’s fine. Right? But the barbell training is always there to maintain whatever levels of strength that you’ve acquired up to that point.

Wade: There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think if I hear what you’re saying correctly, is that getting better at firearms, for example, just being stronger is better, because what if you’re in a situation where most shootings occur seven yards or shorter, right? And you’ve got to clear someone off of you to be able to draw your pistol? Well, you’ve got to be strong to be able to do that. What if that person is you don’t have the strength to be able to create that space, right? And so from a self-defense standpoint, being stronger is always better. Like this, I forgot to say. And so if everyone’s distracted by this red eye, it’s like I poked in the eye. So it’s like kind of poked in the eye. It’s like I’m having an eye problem. So I’m just drawing attention to it. But this is not a strong line. It’s a weak eye right now. So no. But is that what you’re saying basically is what we want to do is we want to downshift to the most simple thing that we can do to get the most gains that will serve us across the widest results or the widest areas of results, that we would need something.

Nick: Yeah. And I generally try to avoid applying specific circumstances. Right. So when you and not that you’re wrong, but when you say most gunfights are within a certain range and you have to be strong to be able to move somebody, there’s a whole lot to that, right? It’s not just being stronger is going to allow you to win that situation, because you got to be good with the gun. You probably need to have some a little a good idea to have a little bit of grappling, some kind of experience dealing with the scenario and so on. So there’s a lot to that. So what I’d prefer to say and again, not that you’re wrong, but what I prefer to say is that the strength just elevates your baseline capacity for anything. It doesn’t matter like what it is, whether it’s just walking up the stairs or applying it to your grappling or your jiu jitsu, or your your clinch or your pistol, it’s just whatever your baseline is it, it just increases that baseline. So your capacity for training increases or it just makes everything it makes things easier. Right. And anybody who’s done this kind of the main line of thinking that they’ll typically have is that it’s made things easier for them. Jiu jitsu is a great example, and with white belts and sometimes blue belts, it’s hard to see because there is a way that I think you said you’re like three classes in or three weeks in or something.

Nick: Everything you do is fairly inefficient, and you’re learning and you’re trying to learn how to move your body with a resisting opponent on top of you. So just by doing it, you’re becoming more efficient, more conditioned, and better at it. Just by doing the just by doing it. When you take somebody who’s like a brown belt or a black belt, it’s been doing it for eight to 10 to 15, 20 years. And they have a strength. What I would say is strength deficiency. In other words, they have room to be able to bring a lot of strength quickly, bring their strength up very quickly. Those are the people that will see the results immediately. Because how much better is your average brown or black belt going to get over the course of a month training at their academy, even if they’re going to different places, right. They’re not going to improve as much as you are in a month, right? You’re going to get a lot better if you go to class three, four times a week over the next month, that black belt, it’s going to take him some serious, dedicated effort and time to get appreciably better. But you put that guy under a barbell for eight weeks, eight weeks, sometimes six weeks, and they will feel a difference on the mat.

Nick: Like they will say, man, my grips are stronger, it’s easier to hold positions. I get less winded, which is weird because people don’t. People think you have to work on cardio and conditioning. You’re already conditioned. If you’ve been doing jiu jitsu for five years, you’re conditioned for jiu jitsu, at least at the level that you’re doing it right now. So add some strength to that and then everything just gets. Easier and then it opens up your your game in a different way, because you can do things that you weren’t able to do before. And people on the mats notice too. I’ve seen it so many times. An underweight guy, he starts training and it doesn’t get much bigger initially, right? But he grabs on to you and you’re like, oh man, you’ve been lifting. And like you’re like, yep. And it’s like the deadlifts. It’s the squats. It’s those things that just immediately show a performance improvement on the mats. Again, things get real mushy when it’s like when you’re not good. And I hate to use terms that sound kind of negative, but when you’re not good and you’re getting strong and you’re also getting better at the same time, it’s really easy for people to get to get lost and confused and distracted by what’s actually improving their performance and what’s just a waste of time.

Nick: And that’s fine. It’s all a discovery process. What I’m trying to do is like organize people’s thinking. It’s like you’re getting better because you’re not good to begin with, right? So get better. And then if you want to spend as little time outside of jujitsu or shooting in the gym, doing things that you rather not do, do barbells, because that’s what gives you that, right? And fundamentally, that’s the point. We all enjoy our hobbies and the things that that like we enjoy doing. Training in a gym for most people is not what you signed up for. Like that’s not what you’re interested in. You’re interested in improving your performance. You’re interested in improving your health. You have to go to the gym. You don’t. It’s not like you get to go to the gym, right? You get to go to the range. You get to go to jujitsu class. You have to go to the gym. So if we’re going to spend time outside of our hobbies doing things, let’s do it as efficiently as possible and spend as little time on that and instead focus our efforts on the things that we that that take longer to improve and that are more technical in nature.

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John: That kind of is a good segue into one of the questions I had. So say you’re a rank novice on all three. Do you try to tackle them all at once, or is there do you start with strength? Do you start with fighting? Grappling? Where do you think you start if you don’t know anything about the three? Yeah.

Nick: Let me turn the question on you. So if what’s the number one thing that like if like people always say this like I wish I would have started this, pick the number right? I wish I would have started jiu jitsu when I was four years old. I wish I would have started shooting when I was six years old, so it’s always too late to start the thing that you enjoy doing right because you could have accumulated all these years of experience. So I’m not going to tell anybody, don’t do the the hobby. Like don’t do the jiu jitsu, don’t do wrestling, don’t do boxing, don’t go spend two, three hours on the range. Like, absolutely not. Because that’s what you’re here for. Right. So so you got to do both. You got to do both at the same time. Right. So it’s how do I do it intelligently where I’m not number one burning out because that’s I think initially that’s the number one risk is like you get super excited about something and it’s like all you do that’s not going to last long. So if it’s if these are things that you’re interested in doing, long Terme, it’s all about finding a balance with the hobby, with training, and with your personal life so that it all works together and it becomes integrated into your lifestyle. And usually that kind of shakes out to training in the gym three times a week, two times a week at a minimum, but three times a week is ideal.

Nick: And then probably doing whatever the the hobby is two times a week, three times a week. If you can get away on a weekend or something like that, and then the rest of your time is filled in with your just normal life stuff, the guys that show up, like at our jiu jitsu school and they’re there every single day. The moment they sign up, it’s almost universal. They’re not going to be there for two months, right? It’s like their wives get pissed at them, they burn out, they get injured or whatever. So it’s the same thing with barbell training. It all works the same. So I guess to answer your question, John, yeah, you got to make it work so that it all fits. And depending on the on what’s going on, you may have to focus on one versus the other. The point I’m at in my life and most of my clients, most of the people I work with, it’s like the barbells, the barbell stuff. The training in the gym is almost required because it keeps you healthy. It keeps you training. It keeps your joints feeling good. Yes. So it’s almost non-negotiable, right? And everything else becomes a little bit more negotiable. At that point.

John: I completely understand that. I actually it rehabbed one of my knees using starting strength, so I completely understand that it’s crazy. It’s totally counterintuitive to what you’d think you’re like, oh, you have a bad joint. How is that going to fix it? But it did, right? So yeah, I totally and I’m 41, I’m probably not going to start grappling because I have to take three days between lifting sets. I have to because I’m old and so I have my own. I have a garage gym. I just bought all the stuff and put it in my garage. So I live in BFE, so I’m not close to any gyms, and I do deadlifts on their own day because I’m old. I’m getting older like it’s recovery is slower.

Wade: Brother. I’m I’m careful.

Nick: Man.

Wade: I’m 51. I just you’re like. I would never do jiu jitsu.It’s like I’m 51. I was like,

John: I don’t have any background in fighting at all. So starting now seems like something that probably I’m not going to do.

Wade: Yeah, well, I did stand up for a very long time, so. But I think the one thing that got me back into to try jiu jitsu, but also started me into starting to lift again, is because as I aged, I could feel myself naturally losing muscle. And I know you hear the stat like, oh, okay, 35 you start losing muscle 35% a year or whatever. And I never really noticed until like one day I’m carrying the groceries in and I was like, oh my God. It’s actually I’m getting tired of carrying the groceries in like, yeah, I’m not strong enough to do that anymore. And and so I was like, when you talk about going to the gym as a requirement, if you don’t go to the gym as you age, then you will become old, frail person, guaranteed.

Nick: Exactly right. Exactly right. And what you get at the end of that timeline, and this is hard for people to think about when you’re in your definitely like, it’s not even on the radar when you’re 20 and 30 in your 40s, you start to feel it. Definitely 50s and then 60s, for sure. It’s like we all know the parent, the grandparent who had the long 20 year. My my grandmother’s a perfect example. It was almost a 20 year, just slow, gradual decline. And in the last five years of that, or almost like you’re completely dependent on other people and fundamentally what’s going on there is health declines, but it’s really people don’t believe this because the strength coach is saying it. But you can look it up and there’s studies and articles and all kinds of stuff. It comes down to just muscle mass. As you lose more and more muscle mass, your muscles act as almost a as part of your hormonal system and supporting all that. So not only is it like functional in terms of like being able to move and do things for yourself, but blood sugar regulation, all these other aspects of your health that you don’t really consider at an age where you can do things all of a sudden just smack you in the face in late life.

Nick: And then it’s not that it’s too late, but there’s a potential for a lot of lost years there. So ideally what you want is to have a good high capacity life up until the very last moment, and then things end quickly for you. You want to avoid that long, slow decline into dependence on your kids or grandkids, or whoever is going to be tasked with taking care of you at. That age, right? So yeah. And look, in our gyms, we get people who come in in their 70s. We have a couple of three I can think of off the top of my head right now that are in their 90s, and these people walk in with walkers or with assistance, and a year later they’re still around and they’re not using their walkers. One lady drives herself to the gym. She’s 90 something. She drives herself to the gym, which is it’s scary, but also awesome. That is awesome. It works for everybody. What the idea, though, is to build up some capacity earlier in life, because it’ll carry longer when you don’t have to. The moment that all of a sudden you can’t get up off the toilet and it’s like, oh damn, I need to do something about this. And now it’s like, how much time do you have now? Right? Yeah.

Wade: Well, it becomes harder. It becomes harder to get that momentum because if everything is a struggle and your body’s a struggle. And the other thing too, that I’ve noticed in my parents and my dad, for example, is that is every part of your body obviously is interconnected with every other part. So if you if your back starts to get weak, then your hips start to hurt and your knees start to hurt because everything compensating for something it shouldn’t have to. And and you can have an overall strength of your body that everything isn’t stressed out and then you avoid the pain.

Nick: Exactly. Yeah. In other words, if you’re operating at the limits of your capacity, which is essentially what, like the frail older demographic is doing, and that’s not too far away from us in our 40s and 50s, that’s not that far away. So when you’re operating at the limits of your capacity, just think about what that looks like for you. Now. What would you have to do every day in order to put yourself at the performance limit, so to speak, of, like your 75 year old grandmother who is in really rough shape, like she’s living that every single day. Like every getting up off the chair is like one of the hardest things she’s going to do that day. That’s another kind of interesting way to think about it. So you’ve got to keep your capacity high enough that these things just continue to remain, being routine life circumstances, and they don’t become these seriously challenging events. And you guys, I’m sure you’ve been injured before. You know what I’m talking about. It’s like, well, you got a bad knee injury or a back injury. It’s like that thing is at its capacity. And how difficult is it to just function normally? So imagine what it’s like living like that every single day of your life, right?

John: Yeah. Well, I think one cool thing about strength training too, is no matter where you live, you can do it on your own. Like fighting. You gotta have a gym shooting. I own acreage, but Wade doesn’t own acreage. You can’t necessarily do that anywhere. But strength is something that you can achieve. If you have a garage, you can do it. And that’s what makes it so cool. And overall, it’s just been the best quality of life. Increased influence or increase there for me really. So I can’t say enough good things about it. And and it, like you guys always say in your podcast, makes every component of your life better when you start getting stronger. So I know that when you’re saying it, it doesn’t make you an automatically better grappler or better shooter. But I know exactly what you’re talking about. When you increase your baseline of strength by 100%, you’re 100% stronger than those things are going to be done more efficiently. They’re going to be done better. You’re going to have a better experience. Like you said, guys are their shoulders are toast. After two days. I’m like, well, they should be doing presses, getting their shoulders stronger.

Nick: So yeah, and 100% increase in strength is totally realistic within 2 to 3 months for everybody. That number sounds crazy. You can double your strength, no question. Happens all the time with every single demographic, from kids up to elderly people all the time. We do it all the time. It’s not unreasonable.

John: And I’m going to go on a quick diatribe here that I know you guys see these memes. The guys are like, I just don’t want to get too bulky. I’m like, bro, you’re not going to my squat went from 95 to 405 and my legs look the same. Awesome. Don’t worry, you’re not going to be too bulky, okay?

Nick: You’re not making a good argument for the guys that want to get huge.

Wade: Man. Like, do you know how much those guys are lifting? Like yeah, a lot of weight.

Nick: Here’s another way to look at it too is how many guys do you know that go to the gym? Or have they went to the gym every single day and work their asses off and look the same? They never grew. It doesn’t happen on accident. It takes intentional, um, dietary changes and takes intentional, like really hard work in the gym. And for the people that are worried about looking like a giant bodybuilder, like you’re not going to pay for or do the amount of drugs that are necessary to look like that anyway, so it doesn’t happen on accident. Right? And here’s the other here’s the other thing. If you look and I tell people this all the time, it’s almost a joke. But I’m like, I’m serious. Because women sometimes will be worried about looking bulky. Now that’s a subjective thing because to me you don’t look bulky. But she may look bulky to herself or whatever, or a husband or boyfriend will say some stupid thing. So but here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I will say. It’s like, look, let’s do this. And then you look at yourself in the mirror every day. And the moment that you decide you’re getting too bulky, we’ll stop. And then what’ll happen is you’ll get bulky and it never happens, right? No. The getting bulky thing never actually occurs.

John: No it doesn’t. It takes a lot of effort to get bulky, like a whole lot. So. Well, yeah. Yeah.

Wade: Well, no, but I think the one thing that I about this whole conversation too, is that it’s very like me focused. Right. Like I’m worried about how I’ll look or I’m worried about how bulky I am. And then once you have kids and you’re like, especially as an older father, right? So I’m 51, I’ve got a five year old and a seven year old. I’m not worried about what I’m going to look like. I’m not worried about getting bulky. I’m worried about being able to run with my kids ten years from now. Right. So when I’m 60, when I’m at high school graduation and I’m 65 years old or whatever it is, I don’t want to be the old dad. I want to be, like in better shape than all the other 40 year old dads that are out there. And I think that’s the cool thing about wanting to get stronger is that when you want to get stronger for outside of yourself, for your family or whatever, it takes away a lot of those, a lot of those concerns.

Nick: Yeah. Exactly. Right. I think from a self-reliance, self-protection, self-defense, whatever you want to call it, if you’re not looking at fitness because people are into the thing, right? They’re either into the guns, they’re into the fighting. And a lot of the guys who lift and and train think they can fight, right? That’s that just comes with the territory. Right? But if you want to be fairly complete, you got to at least dabble in all three, right? And not you don’t have to necessarily go and train jujitsu 2 or 3 days a week, but you definitely should go train with with Craig Douglas and Brian and a chivalric class and spend a weekend and take your gun stuff and learn what they’re teaching and and integrate that information, the Managing Unknown content. Find one of those guys. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of really good instructors out there and programs out there that will give you enough to build off of over time, but you got to be thinking about all three the lifting, the training, the health, fitness, so to speak, shooting, and then also some familiarity with with fighting, for sure. And then, of course, my contention is that if you’re going to be worried about fitness and the most efficient way to do that, and most effective way to do that is through barbells and strength training.

John: Totally agree. It’s not through the cable fly. Are you sure about that?

Nick: Well, it’s not going to get you very far.

John: Looking at this in the grand scheme of things, what’s the most likely thing to happen that you’re going to get into a gunfight or that your muscles are going to atrophy? So I’m going to say the most important, this is just John’s opinion here, which means very little. But I’m going with strength training because I know that I’m going to get older and my muscles are going to atrophy. So that’s a high focus for me. But like you said, if you you should know all three.

Nick: Sure, if you do get into a fight, the first thing that’s going to go is your fitness. You got to have a baseline of fitness. If you’re serious about dealing with another human being who’s trying to hurt you, and how much time you spend on that is up to you and what you’re comfortable with. The longer I do things like jujitsu, like shooting and fighting, the less prepared I feel, which makes me want to always improve. And so it’s a Pandora’s box, almost like the more you do this, like, man, the less I want to be involved in something like that and the more prepared I feel I need to get. So that’s good and bad, right? But that’s the way it is.

Wade: Yeah. No, but the thing is that I think what we get in these worlds. Right. So whereas like we there’s depth to all of these. So there’s a lot of depth to strength training. There’s a lot of depth to firearms. There’s a lot of depth to jiu jitsu especially. And the thing about all that is those and then we get in these bubbles where we think everyone in the world knows jujitsu and everyone in the world knows firearms. Never in the world is lifting. Right. But when you come out of those bubbles, you really only need to to to be proficient, right? If you’re strong, if you’re proficient at a small level in grappling and you’re proficient at guns, you’re going to be fine 99% of the time because everyone else gets beyond that. Proficiency is not the person that you need to worry about. It’s just like if you have a concealed carry permit, the percentage of people that commit crimes that aren’t crimes of passion for concealed carry is zero.

Nick: Effectively.

Wade: Right? Black belts in jujitsu do not start fights. And so and then that’s the thing as a normal like I’m a normal person right. Is that is all these things are very intimidating for me. But then once I started to get into them, I was like, I just have to become proficient at these things and I’ll be just fine. And that’s the thing I always have to remind myself

Nick: And I wouldn’t even say proficient. You need familiarity with them. So because jiu jitsu on its own is not enough for actual self-defense, going to the range and being proficient with the firearms not enough and then being strong is not enough. So all of these things work. And you keep mentioning the concept of depth. And that’s exactly right. So we’re all you all everybody’s going to pick the thing. That’s their thing which is great right. Do it. And you should be you should take that as far as it’ll go and and specialize right in those things. That’s perfectly fine. I would say at this point in my life, I am specializing in Brazilian jiu jitsu because it’s the thing I do the most, and it’s I teach it three at least three times a week. I really enjoy it. The self-defense aspect is application, right? So you don’t necessarily the depth on any of these things helps. For sure. It supports it. So it’s good to have deep knowledge on any aspect. Shooting fighting fitness, but the application is not doesn’t require the depth. The depth supports it, but it doesn’t require the depth. In other words, the three of us could go to a course like a Shiv works or one of Cecil’s courses, or like our live shoot fight and we will. We all have varying experience levels with either aspect of these things, and we’ll all have a beneficial experience by doing that, because we’re all. On the same page, and we’re all strictly focusing for that weekend on the application, which is more than just fighting. It’s more than just shooting. It’s more than just social interaction. It’s the integration of those things, and that’s what you need to do. So if you go to one of these courses maybe twice a year and then spend the rest of the time just focusing on your thing, I think generally you’re in pretty good shape. You’re doing pretty well on the self defense side of things. In other words.

John: Cool, man.

Wade: Well, Nick, I want to be very respectful of your time. So, Nick, how do people find you? I know you guys have some events coming up. Walk us through all of that, okay.

Nick: Yeah, a few things. So StartingStrength.com, massive website. It’s been running for years now. There’s everything you ever wanted to know about barbell training. We have videos, articles our listing for events. Are there seminars. The Starting Strength gyms are affiliate gyms. We have coaches all over the world. So anywhere you’re at, you’re probably within within a couple of hours drive of a coach. If you want to get a form check, you can also post form checks on the forum. You can post form checks in our Facebook group so all the resources are there to get started. My website is LiftFightWin.com. And just recently, a couple days ago, I went through and made a listing of kind of all the videos at least that that could help people get started in terms of how to learn the lifts, programming, rehab, nutrition, all those things. So that’s my website. Instagram is easy way to find me. It’s at @NickD_ssc  and it’s as far as events go we’ve started strength. We’ve got events all the time. We do seminars, the coach certifications, stuff like that. Myself and John Valentine and Rip are doing Lift Shoot, Fight again in May. I believe that’s May 17th and 18th here in Wichita Falls.

Nick: So no experience necessary. You don’t have to know how to shoot a gun. In fact, we always every time we’ve done it, we’ve had a handful of people who’ve never even touched a firearm before. But we’ll spend spend the first half of the first day in the gym learning the barbell lifts, second half of the first day on the range, just getting everybody familiar and on the same page in terms of drawing and shooting with fire. We spend about four hours there and then day two is four hours with pistols doing each other, using each other’s 3D targets and doing things that you don’t normally get to do in a CCW class or in on a range at all, because you can’t. You don’t want to be pointing guns at each other. And then the afternoon is on. The second day is all dealing with the gun within arm’s reach. So using the the using a lot of the Craig’s Shipworks material and teaching the thumb pectoral index and accessing weapons within arm’s reach. Really cool event. Yeah, we get the full spectrum of people from no experience all the way to former special operations guys. It’s a whole lot of fun.

Wade: That’s awesome man. And and what’s the name of your podcast? We’re obviously very pro podcast here on the podcast.

Nick: Yeah, it’s Starting Strength Radio. It’s available obviously on all the audio channels. And then we do the video version on our on StartingStrengthNetwork.com, which is our our subscription channel, video channel. But the audio podcast is free everywhere.

Wade: Amazing. Well, Nick, thank you so much for coming on. Like I said, there’s I definitely want to have you on the podcast again too sometime. Because if you’re willing to come back because there’s so much depth, we can literally pick any of those three topics and talk for three hours on them. So,

Nick: Oh, I’d be happy to.

Wade: Yeah, man, just really appreciate you coming on and I can’t wait to have you on the show again, man.

Nick: All right. Thank you guys.

Wade: You’ve been listening to the Tactical Business Show by TacticalPay.com. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the firearms industry.