I obviously have no desire to do anything that I deem stupid anymore, right?

So my days of gritting through painful anything are long over.

I know the difference between discomfort that is worth pushing through and pain that is not.

But when I think about in particular squats and deadlifts, I'll tell you where, especially around the deadlift, which is an exercise I really, really enjoy, where I feel conflicted.

On the one hand, I feel like now that I'm so tuned in to how to do this movement correctly, it's a really wonderful audit for my stability system, right?

Again, I'm embarrassed to tell you how much I didn't know when I was deadlifting.

At no point did I understand the importance of tension in the arms, intra-abdominal pressure, the variability in foot pressure on the ground, none of that stuff, right?

It was just pure brute force stupidity.

Today, as I know those things, it allows me to modulate force and to, on a good day, push the envelope a little bit in what I perceive is safe.

So on the one hand, I think, yeah, I should be deadlifting my whole life.

I don't need to deadlift 400 pounds anymore, but I should be deadlifting because it's this great audit.

And on the days that I don't feel it, I back off.

And then on the other days, I say, Peter, you don't need to do this anymore because honestly you can still get the same or nearly the same activation for all of the muscles involved using other movements, single leg movements in particular where you don't have a fraction of the axial loading.

And yeah, you might need to do two exercises instead of one, but at the end of the day, there's a lower risk approach to get it.

And in other words, deadlifting is valuable, but you have a narrow operating window in which you can potentially hurt yourself.

So I continue to go back and forth on this, Stuart.

And as such, here I am telling you, I still will go periods of my life where I'll deadlift every week and then I'll take three months off feeling like I don't want to push it.

How would you advise a middle-aged person or even a non-middle-aged person who's sort of thinking through this particular issue?

Again, I have so many thoughts going through my mind.

It's interesting when we have a back pain 50-year-old coming here and I'll say, what are your goals?

Oh, I want to set a personal best in deadlift.

And I said, really?

Okay.

Let me tell you some stories.

Let's talk about Ed Cohn.

Do you know Ed Cohn?

I sure do.

The great powerlifter of all time.

I was with Ed a couple of weeks ago.

I'll tell you a funny story about him if you like in a minute.

But anyway, Ed, when he would set a personal best, he'd take a couple of months off afterwards.

To set a personal best is so demanding of your body.

There are actually, if you set a true personal best, most people experience micro-fracturing just underneath the end plate of the trabecular bone.

If you look at the great strength athletes, they train deadlift.

And again, if you go to our website, look at the testimonials at the bottom.

The number of world-class deadlifters who were on there.

So I've worked with quite a few of these people through their injuries.

Now, those micro-fractures could be a good thing or a bad thing.

The professional powerlifter will take a week off.

They train heavy deadlifts or squats once a week because it takes a week for the bone callus to not only attach through the chemical electro-attraction, but to really scaffold on.

It takes a week.

If you deadlift in another three or four days, the way some trainers, they might deadlift a client three times a week, that allows those micro-fractures to accumulate until finally you've got a full-blown end plate fracture or whatnot.

So these are the people that come here.

And then I say, how about this for a goal?

Do you have kids?

Yeah.

Do you have grandkids?

Yeah.

How about this?

And I've since learned about your centurion decathlon, which I love, by the way.

I'll say, would you rather, as your goal, have the ability to play with your grandchildren on the floor when you're 80 and get off the floor and pick them up?

And they pause for a minute and they'll say, yeah, I like that goal.

I say, well, you can't have both.

If you think you're going to continue having deadlift personal bests, you will have artificial hips and all of these other things because how many old powerlifters do you know?

Do you really want to be like that group of athletes?

So I can talk them into changing their long-term goals.

Now is the time to get on the program and make sure you get there.

If that's the case, we eliminate deadlifts.

We had an athlete here yesterday, and they're at the end of their career.

And I took them out and we went for a 10-minute walk to a hill that we have.

And I'll say, here's why you're not going to do deadlifts, but here's what I want you to do.

I showed them a monster walk, okay, monster walk.

Now we're going to the bottom of the hill, and I want you to lean back into the hill and we're walking backwards.

You're going to align your foot, ankle, knee, and hip and push through the knee, through the knee, through the knee, backwards up the hill.

Do you know, after 30 meters, they were absolutely done.

Here they are doing all this deadlifting, and they don't even have the leg strength endurance to walk backwards 30 meters, totally inappropriate stimulation of their athleticism to make it through to 80.

So good for you.

Let's do it again.

We walked down the hill.

We did three sets.

They could hardly walk.

And then we played the neurological grip, which I like to do a lot of.

Now I said, walk forwards up the hill, but pretend you have $100 in your butt cheeks.

Don't let anyone take it.

Now walk forwards up the hills.

And they say, I've never felt this before.

The brain perceives exhausted quads.

It now has to go and get the glutes.

It's the only thing left.

So quite often we'll do an exhaustion focus to stimulate the thing that we really want to stimulate.

And I convinced that person after that what they're going to do and train now to get a well-rounded and sustainable athleticism that will spare their joints, still have great training capacity, but I think their athleticism is going to go through the roof.

And I've taken some very accomplished power lifters, and we've taken out all the squats and just do sled work, backwards walking up hills, some of these old-time techniques.

And their joints settle down.

They get a sustainable fitness.

They lose this idea of maximum effort, squats and deads.

And now they're thinking of the word sufficient strength, sufficient mobility, sufficient endurance.

And we've been doing this long enough now that we've tracked them, and those are the ones that are getting through.

You know, again, let's go get any one of our colleagues who are orthopedic surgeons.

Tell us who you're replacing the hips of.

Well, 50-year-old Caucasian women who have done yoga for 30 years.

Okay.

And men around 50 who've done deadlifts all their life.

Who are you not?

The middle-of-the-road moderates.

Not the ones who've rusted out, and not the ones who've worn out, but the ones in the middle are the ones who are...

So this idea of sufficient fitness, because I still believe we are all called upon to do things in life at certain times.

I hope we're already enabled.

And it's more fun, too, just to be able to continue to do those things.

So I'm like you.

I don't do deadlifts, but I pick up 100-pound bucked-up logs, as an example.

Big oak log.

So that's my stone lift, load that into the log splitter, and still split my wood.

People comment on my hands.

This athlete who came yesterday, I shook his hand when he came to the door, and he couldn't fit his hand around mine.

And he said, Whoa!

When we were young, we didn't have dumbbells.

My dad would give us a cinder block.

Cinder blocks.

Yeah.

That's how you develop.

Anyway, as you know, the importance of grip strength, I will take any day over how much you deadlift.

Yeah.

People often ask me, Stuart, why do you think grip strength is such a great proxy for longevity?

And I say it's the same reason I think VO2 max is a great proxy for longevity.

Those are probably the two best biomarkers we have.

It sounds crazy, by the way, that your VO2 max and your grip strength are better predictors of how long you're going to live than whether or not you smoke, drink, what your family history is for cancer.

Those things all matter, but it's amazing how dwarfed they are by those two.

And my best explanation for it is that those are the best two integrators for the work you've done.

You can't cram for a VO2 max the week before.

If you have a high VO2 max, you have done the work to get it.

If you have a strong grip, you didn't just buy little grip squeezers on Amazon and filter away at them while you were on calls on Zoom.

You had to do the work.

You had to be carrying heavy things, whatever it be, chopping wood, carrying cinder blocks, doing farmer carries.

And of course, that also speaks to stability.

That speaks to the stability that you have to be able to transmit force from the torso right to the hand.

So agree completely.