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0:59
This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
1:15
All right, guys. If you're listening to this on time, you realize we're getting close to the end of the year here.
1:20
All right. We are just awkwardly close to 2020 to the end of a decade.
1:24
And if you're listening to this on time, you realize there's only two other Thursdays left in this month, right?
1:30
So we release these podcasts every Thursday morning so you can have them for your commute, launch into the weekend.
1:36
But as we wrap up the year, obviously, we're going to do what we normally do.
1:39
I'm going to be giving you guys the best books that I read in 2019 and the best podcasts I've listened to in 2019.
1:47
So those are the next two episodes just to set you guys up.
1:50
This episode should probably be a little bit of a shorter one because those will be a little bit longer.
1:54
I would assume, but I think you guys will really, really enjoy those.
1:57
But one thing I would say to you is if there's a book that is just so overwhelmingly awesome
2:03
that you read this year, make sure you send it to me. I might read it in the last week or two before I put out my list.
2:10
Same thing with individual podcast episodes or actual podcasts. Share those things with me
2:15
because I want to make sure the things that you guys like that I'm listening to so I can have an understanding
2:19
of what it is you guys are attracted to, what it is that you guys are wanting in terms of content.
2:23
So hit me up. My email is info at undaunted.life. That's i-n-f-o at undaunted.life
2:29
or probably the easiest thing to do. Send me a message on Instagram. It's just at undaunted life
2:34
as the Instagram handles. So just send us a message there. So thanks a lot. Get ready for those
2:38
episodes. They're going to be awesome. But today's episode is called the long road back.
2:43
Okay. So long road back. This is going to be me talking about a lot of things kind of in a macro
2:48
sense in terms of what the road back is and what that looks like. But I want to specifically
2:53
talk about a physical recovery that I've been going through this year. Now just spoiler alert.
2:58
This is not probably the biggest physical recovery. It's definitely not the biggest physical
3:03
recovery that you've heard of. But again, whenever I experience things in my life and things personally
3:08
in relationships, whether it's physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever the situation
3:11
might be, I want to kind of bring those things to you because we can learn lessons from those
3:15
things and clean those things. But if you guys stick with us to the end, there's going to be
3:19
some very practical takeaways in terms of what you can look at and what you can do whenever you're
3:23
on your own road to recovery. But for those of you that don't know if maybe if you don't follow us
3:27
on Instagram or haven't heard me talk about it back in June of this year, I had one of the worst
3:32
injuries that I've ever had physically for all the sports I've played all the stupid things I've
3:36
done with my body. And I heard a very, very, very small part of my body. And that was my thumb. So
3:41
this was a jujitsu class on a Sunday afternoon in June. And so basically this is what goes down on
3:46
Sunday afternoons. It's usually an hour and a half long class right in the middle of the afternoon.
3:50
I'll do the afternoon class, I'll come home, I'll eat, I'll recover a little bit, and then I'll go
3:54
and do my Sunday night group. So you guys have heard me talk about the Sunday night crew you've
3:57
heard me talk about on the your foxhole podcast. So so that's my crew. So I normally do a two a day
4:02
on Sundays when it comes to jujitsu. So I'm done for the day, right? So typically on the
4:07
on the afternoon class at the forge in Edmunds one o'clock until two 30. And you know, I'm pretty
4:14
much done for the day. We we had done our teaching for the first hour or so. We had done our drilling.
4:18
And then for the last half hour, we did some rounds. And I'm grabbing my bag. I'm going to the locker
4:23
room. I'm changing. I'm getting out of there feeling good, right? Well, one of my good training
4:27
partners named Avon, he's like, Hey, call you got another round for me. And so it's like, yeah,
4:31
sure, no big deal. Set my bag down. And in the last 30 seconds of that round, I tore every single
4:38
tendon in my left thumb and tore my left palm muscle. Okay. Basically, what happened if you're
4:44
not very familiar with jujitsu, some of these terms aren't going to make sense. But I was trying to
4:47
do a Toriando pass. And so imagine you're standing up. So if you're me, your opponent's kind of laying
4:53
on their back or kind of balancing on their butt. And you're basically trying to get past their legs
4:58
because they're they're not in a bad position until you get past their legs, you know, it's kind of
5:01
passing the guard. And so what I did is I kind of grabbed their gi pants kind of on the insides of
5:07
their knees with each one of my hands. And then you kind of, once you have that grip, you can kind
5:11
of move their legs left or right and try to get past them. And so I grabbed with my left and my
5:16
right hand. But something happened. He's rigged and I zagged something random happened. And what
5:21
happened was is my left thumb got bent all the way back. And it was, I mean, just snap, right? I
5:27
mean, it was quick. And then it was over. I mean, I jump up like I had been bit by a snake and I ran
5:32
off the mat and I'm looking down on my thumb. And you know, it hurts like crazy. And I just didn't
5:36
know what was going on. But the weird thing was, is I looked down on my thumb, I expected it to be
5:41
broken. I expected it to be just hanging there or something like that. But you know, it looked
5:46
bind physically, like, you know, to the naked, I looked fine. But it was on fire. It absolutely
5:50
hurt. I couldn't really move it. It was shaken. Didn't really know what was going on. So I managed
5:55
to get changed. I go home, I told my wife, I'm like, yeah, I messed up my thumb. I don't know what's
5:59
happening. Lo and behold, after I had gone to a doctor got next race, gotten MRI MRI, MRI,
6:04
all the tendons and mainly the UCL tendon in the left thumb just boom, just kaboom pop gone.
6:10
And it was one of those injuries that it was not one of those injuries that that you could just,
6:14
you know, wait it out and you'll be fine. Excuse me. Some guys, you know, have hurt their UCLs and
6:19
maybe they sprained it or they partially torn it and they just maybe put it in a cast and it healed
6:24
itself. This was not one of those injuries. When I went to my sports doctor, it's like, yeah, we
6:28
based, we need to repair this. And so I went in for surgery in July. And so the thing is, is like,
6:34
I haven't really had any surgeries, right? And certainly not for sports injuries. I've had
6:38
my wisdom teeth taken out and stuff like that. This is the first time of all my injuries that
6:42
required a surgery. And what this surgery happened is, you know, you basically get cut on, they put
6:47
a pin in there, they put your hand in a cast, they take it out to check on everything, they put
6:51
it in another cast, blah, blah, blah. Basically, I was out of normal activities until the beginning
6:58
of October, right? So I got my cast off well before then, but there was some atrophy and, you know,
7:03
the thumb basically wasn't able to move all those different things. But that put me out from until
7:08
October. So that was basically from June to October, I wasn't in a normal routine with my
7:13
physicality and the things that I normally do working out, right? And then I had another surgery.
7:18
And I was, I was going to kind of keep this surgery vague. But to be honest with you, I think there's
7:22
a lot of guys that maybe have had something like this happen and they just ignore it. They don't
7:26
actually take care of it. And so I'm going to talk about it in vague detail sort of, but I'll be
7:32
specific in some other ways as well. And guys, sorry, I got a little bit of a cold. So if I cough
7:35
a little bit, I'm not going to edit it out. Don't kill me. But I actually had what's called a
7:39
varicosealectomy. Okay. So basically what the problem was, is I had a varicose vein inside my
7:47
testicles or inside my, my sack, I guess, sorry, if your kids are listening to this, I'm sorry,
7:52
I didn't mean to do all that. I don't mean to be crass. But basically, there was like a blood
7:56
flow problem in, in my nether region, right? And so what it was, what was happening is it was
8:01
causing some discomfort down there, right? Some discomfort in the sack region. You like how medical
8:07
this podcast has become. Anyway, that was causing some issues for me. And the most of which was
8:12
just discomfort, right? I mean, I would just have throbbing pain for no apparent reason. I hadn't
8:17
taken a shot down there in, in any sparring or any jiu-jitsu matches or anything like that.
8:22
But the thing was, is it's something that could go away on its own, or it could, you know, metastasize
8:27
into something a little bit worse later. And so in order to take care of that particular thing,
8:32
what they do is they make an incision a few inches below your belly button, they fish out your
8:36
stuff, right? I keep thinking there's kids listening to this. So if you're a kid, sorry,
8:41
earmuffs, they fish out your equipment, and they basically lop off the, the bad veins or whatever
8:47
the situation might be, stick everything back in, glue you up, stitch you up, and then you're,
8:51
you're on about your business, right? So sorry about that last like two minutes of the podcast.
8:54
It is what it is. But that surgery came right on the heels of being cleared for my thumb,
8:59
but I needed this surgery to be done so I could just be done with it, right? So I could just move
9:03
on. But this one put me out completely for four weeks, because after this surgery,
9:09
you could not work out at all. You could not stretch that region, the lower row of abdominal
9:15
muscles at all. And the thing about it is you don't understand how much you use your lower abdomen,
9:20
like abdomen until you, you can't use it. Your lower abdomen is just used in so many different
9:26
areas. You use it to talk, use it to yell, you use it when you sneeze. I swear, I sneezed once.
9:31
I'm, I'm pretty sure I blacked out and died for a second. And then I came back immediately. It was
9:36
just kind of one of those flash death kind of a things, but you know, incredibly painful,
9:40
hard recovery. You had to be really, really careful with the region had to keep everything
9:44
clean. It's just, it's kind of one of those, one of those deals that it was, it was tough. And the
9:48
toughest part of it was is I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even do yoga. You couldn't do stretching
9:53
of any kind. And that was different for me than, you know, the recovery I had on the left thumb,
9:57
because with the left thumb, I could still do things with my legs. I could still run. I could
10:00
still do ab workouts and stuff like that. But anyway, long story short was, as I was basically
10:06
completely out of my normal physical routine from June of this year until the beginning of November.
10:13
And for some of you guys, that's not going to sound like that big deal. You're like, man,
10:18
I take off six months every year, five months every year from working out. But for me, I haven't
10:23
taken more than, you know, a week and a half off from exercise, except for injury, since I was like
10:29
14 years old. I mean, I just consistently work out like I, I have to plan my weeks off. Usually
10:36
every six weeks, I'll take like an active rest week and just do stretching and maybe some,
10:42
some active recovery, walking or something like that. But I have to plan those things out because
10:46
otherwise I won't take any time off whatsoever until I get hurt, right? And so the thing is,
10:51
is that created an issue for me that starting in November of this year, so about six weeks ago,
10:58
I had to try to get back, right? And I want to talk a little bit about the concept of,
11:03
I guess, quote unquote, being back. There's different meanings for different people when
11:07
they talk about getting back. For some people, when they talk about getting back, they're like,
11:12
Oh, you know, I used to be in shape. So I'm going to get back in shape. So maybe they're thinking
11:17
back to a time in, in high school or college, whenever they were playing sports, and they had
11:20
to go to practice every day and the days, the days they didn't have practice, they had games or whatever.
11:25
And they're like, well, I'm 35 now, I'm going to get back in shape. So back is, is different for
11:30
everybody. And for some people back in shape means, I don't want to die when I have to walk across
11:35
the parking lot at the mall to get back to my car. And so I'm going to try to get back in shape
11:40
for other people back in shape is, yeah, I used to run, you know, ultra marathons, I need to get
11:44
back in that kind of shape. So there's there's a spectrum from all these types of people, right?
11:47
For me, getting back is getting to that point where I can trust my body and trust that I can do
11:54
things with it without having to worry about injury. Because if you've ever worried about
11:58
injuring yourself, you typically injure yourself, right? Maybe you're worried about your left ankle
12:02
and then you end up hurting your right wrist. So I guess just one of those deals, like when
12:05
you're worried about getting injured, you just seem to get injured more often. I don't that's
12:08
anecdotal. I don't have any evidence to support the thing that I just kind of threw out there.
12:12
But at the same time, it's it's a concept that's hard for a lot of people to think about because
12:17
most people don't even go down that road. To be honest, when it when it comes to recovery, right,
12:23
whether from an injury or maybe a sickness, and we'll talk more about that here a little bit.
12:26
But for a lot of people, the concept of back, there's a lot of different types of roads. So
12:31
there's there's short roads, there's medium link roads, there's long roads, there's dead end roads,
12:36
right? So for some people, it's short. Okay, grade one, sprainer, their ankle, they just got to take
12:41
it easy this week. We'll be back to normal next week. Medium is a decent sized injury. Maybe it's
12:47
something where you have to be really, really careful one if for two or three or four weeks,
12:50
something like that, but you can make your way back. Then you've got the longer ones, right?
12:54
And long could be, you know, two, three, four months, it could be years. I know people that have gotten
12:59
serious like Achilles, rupture to Achilles, which is like my number one fear of anything on the
13:05
planet. I hope I don't actually manifest a rupture to Achilles at some point in my future. Like that's,
13:09
that's the old man injury. That's the holy crap, you're going to be out for a really long time
13:13
injury. So I'm really, really scared of that one. But I know guys that have had to go through that,
13:16
and you know, they've never actually got back. And then there's also the dead end roads,
13:20
when it comes to the concept of being back, right? And there's some people that just never
13:25
will get back to where they were. There have been people that have been sick. Maybe they've had
13:28
cancer. Maybe they've gotten some sort of an injury where they've lost full use of a limb,
13:34
or they may even lost a limb entirely. And so that's a dead end road. They're never going to be
13:39
back to where they were. It's literally not physically possible. They can't sprout the lower half of
13:43
their right leg back. They're not going to grow that back, or they're not going to be able to get
13:47
that muscle back from this particular injury or a snake bite or a shark bite or something like that.
13:52
So it's different for everybody. But the thing about it is when you're on the road back from
13:56
recovery, and this is physical recovery, either from an injury or sickness, there's a lot of pitfalls,
14:01
pitfalls along the way, pitfalls along the way. So there's the obvious pitfall of the physical
14:07
hurdles, right? And so for me, the immediate physical hurdle when I got my cast off is my body was
14:13
uneven, right? If you're if you've done any type of weightlifting in your life, not necessarily,
14:18
you know, bodybuilding or something like that, you want to try to have your body be even. And so
14:24
it's even from left to right, but also top to bottom, like you don't want to be a spark plug,
14:28
you don't want to be one of those Jim bros that only only does bench press and bicep curls.
14:31
And you've got these little, you know, chicken legs, you don't want to be that person. You also
14:35
don't want to be the person that's got just ghetto booty. And then you've never done you can't do a
14:39
single pushup or something like that. But at the same time, left and right, you don't want your
14:43
right arm to be gigantic and your left arm to be like a normal person's arm. But the problem was
14:48
is my left side of my body had atrophied, right? Because I couldn't move the wrist, I couldn't move
14:54
the hand. So the hand, all the meat in your palm that you could like grab right now,
14:58
while you're listening to this, that was gone. All the musculature in the forearm and bicep was gone,
15:03
the deltoid was smaller. You know, the the trap was smaller. Just the whole left side was was
15:10
not even. And so that was a physical hurdle. You got to try to even yourself back out.
15:13
The other obvious physical hurdles, I just couldn't do normal stuff. I couldn't do the stuff that I
15:18
was used to. I couldn't do the stuff that I wanted to do with my body. You know, one of the things I
15:22
was doing during rehab, you know, when I had a cast is I refuse to get fat, I refuse to get that
15:27
out of shape, I made some extreme changes to my diet at that time to just kind of maintain
15:32
a certain weight or something like that. But I would like strap things to my cast, right? Because
15:36
I could do, you know, I could do squat, I could just basically push with my left hand against the
15:41
bar to do squat, I could do front squat, obviously, or anything like that. But I could run, I could
15:44
do all those things just fine. But for upper body stuff, obviously, I couldn't post with the hand,
15:49
I couldn't grab with the hand, there's nothing I could do. So I would take straps like those,
15:54
the straps that you can find at the gym or those bands, and I would strap it to my cast. And I would
15:59
pull with it to get a little bit of back or, or shoulder or bicep work, I would push with it to
16:05
get a little bit of chest and shoulder work as well. Yeah, I just did what I could. But again,
16:09
it wasn't the normal stuff that I could do. The rehab is just an obvious hurdle, right?
16:13
When you hurt something so small, like a toe or your foot or something on your hand, a finger,
16:18
a thumb, the rehab isn't really fun. It's not really sexy. It's not big muscle groups to see
16:23
small motions, these small things that you have to do, these small stretches. And it just doesn't
16:28
seem like that much fun, but you're still exhausted afterwards. So the obvious hurdle is physical,
16:32
that's kind of the first one. But then for a lot of guys, and certainly for me, there was the mental
16:36
hurdles, the mental hurdles that you had to get over when you're on this road to recovery. And again,
16:42
I will reiterate, I know guys that had to come back from cancer, like after having fought it for 24
16:47
months. So I'm not comparing the plight of a hurt thumb to that. So just just to kind of bring you
16:51
back up to speed. But the mental hurdle, again, the body not being even was a mental hurdle as well,
16:56
because you look in the mirror, and you're not used to what you're seeing in your reflection,
17:00
you're used to seeing a certain type of body, you're used to seeing things with, you know,
17:04
a lot more, you know, kind of a mirror image of the other side of your body, those types of things,
17:09
and you just didn't have that. So that was a little bit of a mental thing to kind of get over,
17:13
you know, even just looking at myself. The other part is that my brain was good, but my body wasn't.
17:18
So there's this concept that a lot of people talk about like in boxing and MMA or Muay Thai
17:24
or something like that. It's that a lot of the young fighters had these incredible physiques,
17:30
these incredibly athletic bodies that can basically do anything that you could ask someone to do
17:35
physically. But maybe they're not there mentally yet. Maybe they don't have enough fight experience,
17:41
maybe they don't have enough life experience, maybe they just don't have that dog in them,
17:44
whatever the situation might be. But then there's that that there's usually that area where your
17:50
physicality is still at a high enough level, but you've got the acumen, you've got the brain to go
17:55
along with that. That's why it's so dangerous for older athletes to use steroids when it comes to
18:01
fighting to use any type of performance enhancer when it comes to fighting. Because if you can get
18:05
your body, V-tor belt for it, if you can get your body to do the things that it needs to do as if
18:11
you were younger, but you've got all that experience and all of that technique in your brain,
18:16
you're an incredibly, incredibly dangerous person. And so for me, the brain was good,
18:21
but the body wasn't. I kind of felt like an old man. It's like, okay, I know what my body to do.
18:26
I know what I want my thumb to do. I know how I want my hand to react, but it just wasn't
18:29
happening for me. But the other thing, and I've talked about this obviously a lot, is during this
18:34
entire period from June until November, I couldn't go to jujitsu. Because obviously it would have been
18:40
really, really, really stupid. Because the type of casts that I had, it left my four fingers on my
18:45
left hand incredibly exposed to injury. There was no hand muscle that could have, you know, prevented
18:51
the fingers from being in the wrong position or any of those types of things. It would have been
18:55
incredibly, incredibly dangerous for me to go in there. And also you train with a cash, you can't
19:00
wash the cast. Like it's gross. It could have got an infection in one of my incisions. It just would
19:05
have been horrible for everybody involved and most certainly me. But the thing about jujitsu is
19:11
jujitsu is one of the things that I do to keep me sane, to keep me even, right? It's one of those
19:16
things that I've encouraged you guys to do for a myriad of reasons, which I won't go into all of
19:19
them again here. But one of the biggest things is that's one of the easiest ways that I've found
19:24
to cultivate mental resilience. Because it's not easy. I mean, it's easy because it's easy to
19:30
define and write it on a piece of paper and prescribe it to somebody. But it's really,
19:32
really hard to do. Getting in the room is really, really hard. Getting the warm up in and, you know,
19:37
getting to the end of practice and while taking care of your partner and taking care of yourself,
19:39
it's really, really difficult. But for me is when I can't lift weights, when I can't do jujitsu,
19:45
my mind starts going bonkers. There's way too much energy inside my soul and inside my gut. I
19:51
got to send it somewhere, right? And so those are a lot of mental hurdles, right? But then there
19:57
are also spiritual hurdles and opportunities, but but certainly hurdles. So I kind of was hearing
20:03
this thing in my head again, thumb injury, right? You know, I can rehab it and get back, but it was
20:07
like, you know, you'll probably never be the same. Hi, you know what, Kyle, you're just getting
20:13
all your 33 now. I mean, you're not spring chicken. I mean, you just can't expect your body to respond
20:18
the way that it used to, right? So that was kind of something that was weighing on me. And certainly
20:23
that was something that I don't think was coming from a very positive area. That was obviously
20:27
something coming from a very, very dark place. But then also, I kind of realized that I found a lot
20:33
of my identity inside of physical performance. And so for me, a lot of people know me if they know
20:40
me even just sort of well, they're like, Oh, you know, Kyle's in, Kyle's in really good shape. Or you
20:44
know, Kyle, you know, he diets and exercises, he takes care of himself. And you know, he's always
20:49
working out. You know, that was just part of my identity. But then for a long period of time there,
20:54
it couldn't be my identity. I couldn't work out the way that I was used to. I couldn't lift the
21:00
way that I used was used to. I couldn't be a part of the jujitsu community. So I kind of fell out,
21:04
of, you know, not a favor, but I kind of fell out of the minds of a lot of the people there,
21:08
just because I literally wasn't there, right? I literally went to a jujitsu class one night and
21:12
I just sat there just so I could be in the room just so I could be around people and watch them
21:16
work out like it was pathetic. But it's something that I did. But another spiritual hurdle that I had
21:21
and, you know, may have turned itself into an opportunity is I could feel God imploring me
21:27
this entire time to just slow down. Hey, Kyle, just my son to just slow down, just slow down.
21:34
You know, I'm trying to tell you something here. Now, that's not me saying that God is the reason
21:41
why I hurt my thumb, but I think he was able to use the hurting of my thumb to be able to communicate
21:46
some things to me. But I'll talk a little bit more of that here in a second when I get into
21:50
my takeaways. But in terms of where I'm at now, I'm backlifting. I'm under no restrictions when
21:55
it comes to lifting. You know, I've talked to all the specialists I need to and I'm doing all the
21:58
rehab that I need to. So I can deadlift, I can do pull ups, I can do bench press, I can do squat,
22:03
front squat, I can do all of those things. The wrist is still a little bit stiff, still has to be
22:07
stretched out. And basically all I'm at right now is I'm trying to get back to the weights
22:12
that I was pushing and pulling before all this happened, right? And I'm close, right? I'm getting
22:18
there. So, you know, a lot of this stuff is it's and I'm believably hard and it's just hard to
22:24
see kind of where I was at. And you spend months if not years trying to get to those areas where
22:28
you get that deadlift that you wanted in, you know, those pull ups to where you want them to be.
22:31
And it's just you just got to work your way back just kind of day by day. In terms of jujitsu,
22:36
I think I'm, I think I've taken three or four jujitsu classes so far since I've been back. And,
22:42
you know, I'm basically doing those things one handed. The risk of re-injury on the thumb right
22:46
now is really, really high. I'm pretty much have a clean bill of health on my lower abdomen. You
22:51
know, I shouldn't have any more any more issues there. And the thing about it is is, you know,
22:55
I'm going to train one handed and train with that brace and tape on there until I definitely
22:59
don't need it. But according to the specialist, I'm for the next six to eight months, I pretty much
23:04
need to be really, really careful with my thumb because the risk of re-injury is so high. The gas
23:09
tank, that's kind of one of those things is it's incredibly easy to get your gas tank up to snuff.
23:14
And it's that's one of the first things you lose when you stop working out, whereas you can kind of
23:18
maintain some strength for a long time. I feel like my gas tank is actually popped back pretty
23:23
nicely, which is nice. I was able to maintain doing a lot of cardio workouts while I was out for my
23:28
thumb. I wasn't able to do so whenever I had the lower abdomen stuff. And so that's just kind of how
23:33
how it goes. But that's kind of where I'm at now. And just I'll take a quick second, just say thanks
23:37
to all the guys that have reached out from this podcast or guys that just know me,
23:41
ask me how I'm doing, asking how the recovery is going. You know, it's again, it's not even a
23:46
cool injury, right? It's not like, Oh, I broke my femur trying to defend my wife's honor. Like,
23:50
it's like, Oh, I hurt my thumb whenever I was doing jiu-jitsu with my sweaty buddies. Like,
23:54
it's just different. It happens. And it just it's frustrating. It sucks. But you know, just kind of
23:58
is what it is. But there were four big takeaways that I had from this whole this whole scenario,
24:04
right? Because there were a lot of times where I felt like a punk where it's like, Oh, man,
24:07
this isn't that bad. Like, stop feeling bad for yourself. You'll be back. You'll be fine.
24:11
People take way more time off than this just because they're fat and lazy and stupid and
24:15
whatever you like, you'll be fine. But there were four big takeaways from this time. Now,
24:19
they've had some a little bit of time to reflect that I wanted to share with you because I think
24:22
it would help you guys. Okay, the first is this. Take advantage of the time to slow down.
24:28
Take advantage of it. Because I said earlier, I felt that God was, you know,
24:33
prompting me and imploring me to slow down. I've got some stuff to show you.
24:38
I got some things that I want to going to want to talk with you about that kind of thing. That's
24:44
the feel I got, right? But I just got to be real honest with you guys. I'm not going to play games
24:49
with you. I'm I just didn't do that. Because for me, my mind immediately went to okay.
24:58
Here are the things I can do physically. So let me try to do those things in the most extreme
25:05
manner possible. Let me go buy bands off the internet, strap it to my cast, which you're not
25:11
supposed to do so that I can continue working out. I did not take advantage of the whispers from
25:17
God to just slow down. Hey, I got something to show you. So again, I don't think there's
25:22
something punitive coming that God's going to be like, all right, next time we're breaking
25:26
both of your legs so that you'll listen, I don't necessarily expect that to come, you know,
25:30
knock on wood, sorry, hit the microphone too. But that's that's the idea is I just don't really
25:35
feel like that's happening. But I do feel like I missed out on opportunity. And the thing was,
25:39
it's not as if I came to that revelation after this, like before I recorded this podcast,
25:44
I knew that the whole time, the whole time I was trying to busy myself with whatever I could do
25:50
physically, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I was completely ignoring the promptings of God.
25:54
So take that as a cautionary tale that you shouldn't be dumb. Like I was during that scenario. And
26:00
now I got to kind of, you know, backtrack a little bit. The second takeaway and advice for y'all would
26:05
be just basically don't try to recover faster than your body tells you it can. I mean, the number of
26:11
guys that I've trained with or that I've been on teams with that the doctor said, Hey, you need to
26:16
not do this particular thing for four weeks and like two days later, they're back doing that thing
26:21
because some moron on YouTube or whatever, like, Oh, my doctor said did not do this, but then I
26:27
did it on my own because I'm such a smart, tough guy. Those those things are few and far between
26:32
guys. Those guys are lucky. They're not smart. They didn't like crack some sort of physical code.
26:37
And so that's my encouragement to you is just if your body's telling you that it needs a little
26:41
bit of time, just take that time, which goes into the next takeaway, which is listen to your body.
26:47
But sometimes tell it to shut up. I mean, listen to your body. I mean that.
26:54
But there are times when you think your body's communicating to you and it's just your weak brain.
26:58
Okay. So I say this a lot to different people, you know, some feedback that I got is sometimes,
27:04
you know, I may push people a little bit too hard that aren't physically out of place to go any
27:09
further. But this is this is what I say. So I had somebody to give me that feedback on some of the
27:14
workouts that I do on Sunday nights is hey, sometimes I feel like maybe you're pushing guys
27:17
that are physically just not capable of doing certain things to pushing them a little bit too far.
27:23
But the reality of that situation is completely different. Because if I'm looking at somebody
27:26
during the ab workout section and we're on our butts, but our feet feet are off the mat,
27:31
it's amazing. When I notice someone's feet hit the mat so that they can take a rest,
27:35
when I look at them and go, Hey, get your feet off the mat. Every single time they can take their
27:40
feet off the mat immediately. Wow. It's almost as if their mind was weak and their body was actually
27:47
fine. So that's what I'm kind of saying to people is most people have this self preservation technique
27:53
where they kind of dog it during workouts. They don't run as hard as they can. They leave a little
27:58
bit in the tank. And kind of my thing is when I take people through workouts is if they're given
28:02
me 75% effort, I'm trying to push them to 80 85 just for this workout. But then next time I expect
28:08
them to be at 80 85. And then I want to push them to 85 90. You know what I'm saying? And so sometimes
28:13
when you are recovering, whether from sickness or injury, your body's communicating to you. You
28:19
know, you could listen to yourself or whatever the situation might be. But sometimes you're
28:23
fooling yourself. You don't actually need to take another week off. You're just being lazy.
28:28
You just are thinking about, Oh my gosh, putting on my running shoes and hitting the payment like,
28:35
Oh, that sounds miserable. I think I'll watch another season of this particular show on Netflix,
28:40
right? We do that. We try to like bargain with ourselves and tell us it's okay when that's not
28:46
always the case. Okay, so I beat that dead horse moving on to the very last takeaway that I got
28:50
from this time. And guys, use things like this as practice for future hardships. Because again,
28:59
there's this really stupid idea with some Christians that because we're Christians,
29:03
our life should be easy. Again, I've talked about before, I had a buddy of mine years back
29:08
who lost his job. And then he started questioning whether or not God existed because he lost his job.
29:13
It's like, I don't know what Bible you're reading, but how many Christians, how many followers of
29:19
Christ, how many disciples had really easy lives? Like most of these people didn't lead the greatest
29:25
of lives. A lot of them died horrifically bad deaths, but they won in the end because their souls
29:31
were saved, right? But that didn't mean their lives were easy. And so the only thing that's
29:35
guaranteed for us is that life's probably going to get harder from where we're at right now.
29:40
And so for some of you guys, you're actually in the dumps right now. Maybe you're in the middle of
29:45
fighting off a serious illness or sickness or disease. Maybe you're in the middle of a horrific
29:51
injury, multiple body parts, car accident, you know, attacked by wolves. This is whatever the
29:56
situation may be. Maybe you're right in the thick of it. And guys, I'm so sorry to tell you this
30:01
it may not be the worst thing you ever have to go through. And it's probably not going to be the
30:04
worst thing you have to go through physically. And that physical element that is coming in the
30:09
future will affect you mentally and spiritually. And it'll affect you a lot if you allow it to.
30:13
But it's these situations, right? My little old thumb got hurt. All right, I had to have a
30:19
surgery on one of my nuts. Okay, great. It's those situations where you get to learn a little bit
30:24
about yourself. You get to learn about how easy it is for you to learn, how easy it is for you to
30:31
adapt, how easy it is for you to bounce back to respond to be tough, to be resilient.
30:36
Because guys, I don't have any, I don't have any misjudging about what the future holds for me.
30:44
I don't have great genetics, right? I don't have one of these families where, you know,
30:48
the youngest person to die, my family was 98 years old. I just don't have that. And a lot of
30:53
people in my family have died, you know, pretty painful deaths. Some of them have been self-inflicted
30:57
others. You know, that's just the way the cookie crumbled for them. And I figure that no matter
31:03
how much kale I eat, no matter how many miles I put on my feet, it, it's just going to, it's going
31:07
to happen. But when you can go back to these times, when you, when you had to have some grit,
31:14
when you had to recover, when you had to overcome, those are the times that you'll lean on.
31:18
That's why I tell people all the time, like people like Kyle, you know, why, when it's snowing
31:23
outside, are you working out with your shirt off? And, you know, why are you putting a bunch of
31:26
extra sweatshirts on to work out when it's like a hundred degrees outside? It's like, you want to,
31:30
you want to acclimate to those situations and you want to inoculate your body to those circumstances.
31:36
Well, the same thing can happen with your mind. If you can callus your mind and your spirit,
31:40
to be able to deal with those situations that you really never thought you could do cognitively
31:44
intellectually, you never thought you could get through those situations, but you had it in you
31:48
the whole time. So I know this is turning into a little bit of a, yeah, hoorah, do your things,
31:52
speech, but you know, it just kind of is what it is for you guys. Like, I just want to make sure
31:56
that you understand that whatever you're going through right now, even if it's a small physical
32:00
ailment all the way up into some major thing, it's probably going to get worse, but you'll be all right.
32:06
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. And guess what? If your road ends,
32:10
if Jesus is with you, if he's riding with you, right? If you're a disciple of his, you're fine,
32:18
you're fine. So guys, I really appreciate you listening to this podcast. I know it's a little
32:23
bit of a different subject matter didn't want to get into things in too much detail in other areas,
32:28
but this is something I thought might be good for you before we hit the end of the year. All right,
32:32
guys, before we let you go, we're going to do a quick resilience boost. As you know, by now,
32:34
we are immense ministry and our mission is cultivating mainly resilience. And specifically,
32:39
we do that by providing content like this podcast that for just spiritual, mental, and physical
32:43
toughness. So for you today, I got a little thing for you. So a lot of you guys are jocko
32:47
willing fans. And if you're not aware, jocko willing doesn't just write best-selling
32:51
leadership and business books. He also writes best-selling children's books. And so he's got his
32:55
way of the warrior kid, though he I think there's three books there. But I think it was last year,
33:01
he released a book called Mikey and the dragons. So Mikey and the dragons is a story that literally,
33:07
I think jocko described like it was in his head, like in the middle of the night, and he like shot
33:10
out of bed and like wrote this book in the middle of the night. And you know, try to get it published
33:14
through his normal publisher. And they said, no, it can't be done. And it led him to creating his
33:18
own publishing company. Anyway, just this week, he released an official basically movie, where it's
33:25
a it's him actually reading through the book with the illustrations from the book. And it's like,
33:30
I think it's like a let me say 15 minute long video. Yeah, it's 16 minute long video. But it's
33:34
it's awesome. And so for those of you with kids, this is a great book to get for them. That's a
33:39
great Christmas present idea for your kids boy or girl, especially if it's a boy. But even
33:44
hearing jocko read through this book is pretty awesome. So I just thought I'd share that with you.
33:47
All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. We really do appreciate it. If you
33:51
would subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, or Google Play and refer your friends to listen
33:56
and share this on social media. If we deserve a five star review, guys, that is how this podcast
34:00
will continue to grow. So please leave us one. And a few sentences letting us know why you like
34:04
the content. I'm currently booking speaking engagements for the entirety of 2020. So if you
34:08
want me to come speak on your podcast at your men's event at your retreat, hit me up info at
34:12
undaunted.life. Again, the email is info at undaunted.life. The website is www dot undaunted.life. You can
34:18
follow us on Instagram and Twitter at undaunted life or Facebook.com backslash undaunted life.
34:24
Check out our free devotionals on the U version Bible app. Just search undaunted life under plans.
34:27
And as always, we want to thank the band August Burns read for allowing us to use their entire music
34:32
library for our content. The intro alto track on this podcast is our song King of Sorrow,
34:36
which is off their latest record entitled Phantom Anthem. The links to all of this are in the description.
34:41
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience. Keep forging spiritual,
34:48
mental and physical toughness. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
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