Ask Me Anything: Low Impact Exercise and Finding Meaning In A Bad Place

Chris Albert 00:00:01 (link to this point)

The Warrior Soul podcast is written, edited, and produced by me, Albert. Our mission is to provide tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas that help The US military veteran community to show up as the wisest, strongest, most capable versions of themselves in the civilian world. If you're not a veteran, stick around because anything we talk about will most certainly apply to you as well. This podcast is made possible with the help of F Bomb Nutrition. They make delicious packets of fats that you can carry around anywhere with you in little portable packets.

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They don't have any sugar. They also make a lot of cheese snacks. They make meat sticks, and it's just a great company. These guys send packages of this stuff to the troops who are on the front lines overseas to supplement their MREs, and we didn't ask them to do that. They just did that on their own initiative.

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Let's get into today's programming.

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul podcast.

Alright, ladies and gentlemen. This is Chris Albert here with Warrior Soul podcast where we empower US military veterans to live their absolute best lives by delivering tools tactics strategies and ideas to help them to show up as wiser stronger more capable human beings in the civilian world. And if you're not a veteran obviously stick around because anything I talk about here is going to help you as well. We do three types of episodes here. We do interviews where I get to interview some people who are a lot smarter and more capable than I am.

People like Robert Greene, Ben Greenfield, Grant Cardone. We just had on Gary John Bishop. I just had on Mike Ritland. Some amazing guests here at the Warrior Soul podcast, and we get those guests mainly not because of me. I don't have any real talent here.

I'm nobody special. It's because of you guys. These guests want to speak to you. And so if you love this show, if you enjoy this show, number one, please share these episodes out. Number two, please head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review.

I it it helps so much to get this information into the ears of more veterans. And the more veterans who are listening, the more amazing guests we can get. I am looking to get you guys some really awesome people in the coming months. And after this whole COVID nineteen situation blows over, I'm hoping to be able to get even more and even start getting out there on the road to try to talk to some guests. So big things coming up in the future.

And again, I just want to emphasize this. I don't care if you ever spend a dime with me. I just really want you guys to share this show out because it's helping people. I get notes from veterans all the time who tell me that the show has helped them, and, that's why I do it. I don't do it for the money.

I don't do it for the fame because I'm not rich or famous. I do it because I really wanna help those of you who are listening to live absolutely amazing lives. So with that, let's get into this episode. And this type of episode is an ask me anything episode. And I do these once a month.

Haven't done one here in a while. And essentially what I do is I put out on the free Warrior Soul Empowerment and Resilience group on Facebook questions. You know, I say, hey, March edition, ask me anything. And I tell them be serious because given that there's a lot of Marines in there, I get a lot of joke questions like, well I won't even say what they are here but I tell them to be serious and then they end up asking questions about fitness, about business, about life, about podcasting, about whatever you want to talk about. So if you're interested head over to that group and you can ask your own questions.

So the first question from this month is what is the best low impact exercise for overall health? What's the best low impact exercise or set of exercises? And this might be one that you wouldn't think I would say but kettlebells. Kettlebells, anything you do with a kettlebell is essentially low impact. Right?

You're not pounding anything or anything like that, and many of the exercises that you can do with a kettlebell, they're actually very very safe, and they also are very great for flexibility, for mobility, but also for strength and endurance. As you know, kettlebells can get pretty heavy, provide for great strength training, but you can do some amazing complexes with them that are going to get you a great cardio workout and they can be a great substitute, rather than heading out for like a 10 mile jog or a five mile jog or a three mile jog which might be a little bit more impact on your joints. So whenever I'm talking to anybody about fitness, particularly if they don't have time to go to the gym, I just say get yourself a 35 pound kettlebell if you're a man, and if you're a woman get yourself like a 20 pound kettlebell and you can do some really really fantastic exercises with it. You could do anything. You could do squats.

You could do overhead presses. You could do deadlifts with it. You could do kettlebell swings. You can do Turkish get ups. You do floor presses.

You can do half kneeling presses, you can put all that together into a complex and you get yourself a great cardio workout. You can stick that thing on your shoulder and you can walk for two miles and that's a great workout too. It's literally the most versatile piece of equipment out there and I see a lot of people building home gyms. Literally the only thing you really need is a kettlebell and then maybe a pull up bar for your house. Right?

And then if you wanted to, you can get some TRX straps or something like that. But you do so much with just a kettlebell and you could stick that thing anywhere. It doesn't take up much space. You can put it in the corner. You could get two of them and keep one at home, one at the office.

Well, a lot of you probably aren't going to the office right now. You keep one in the trunk of your car for trips. I mean, it's it's just so versatile and there's so much you could do with it. So that's my answer as far as the best low impact exercises that you could do for overall health. The second question I got, and this is a little bit more in-depth question, and it's from a man named Edson from Brazil, and he said, Hey Chris, I'm Ed, the Brazilian policeman.

Man, I'm losing my faith in my country, our politician and even in the people. So I'm feeling that I'm wasting my time here and doing my work. What tips could you get to me? Now I'm reading Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl as you always recommend. Well, Ed, I think that the answer is right there in your grasp when it comes to reading Frankl in a situation like this.

And the first thing you've got to say to yourself, for Ed and anybody else in a similar situation, is that you've got to start to be grateful for where you actually are. Right? Because if you read Frankl and you see what he went through as a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp, living in absolute squalor for three years, sleeping shivering cold, dealing with absolute starvation, dealing with the prospect of death around every corner, having had his entire family murdered, his friends murdered, and everything taken away from him, he was able to find the good even in that situation. And where did he find that? Well, Frankl found the good by taking care of his patients.

His vocation as a doctor allowed him to take care of people. And that's what drove him to survive through that situation. He wanted to help his patients out. He wanted to be there to provide medical care. And what I can say for you Ed, as a policeman in Brazil, and I've been to Brazil, I've been to Rio, I know that there are significant problems there.

And particularly as a policeman, I I know that you have a very, very tough job. But I would urge you to think of why you're a policeman. Why did you choose this line of work? Now maybe maybe you didn't get into being a policeman because of the service aspect of that. And I'm not saying that that means that that, you know, you're disingenuous or anything like that.

What I'm saying is that maybe it was a good income and and that was the best way of you getting an income. Right? And so that's how it started. But right now, regardless of the situation, you are in a a a situation where you're serving. And what I would say to you is to figure out who you want to help.

Who, through your job, through what you could do right now, that's within your grasp, you help, could you serve, could you maybe make their lives a little bit better. Now, I I understand that that it's probably not going to be something huge. Right? It's probably not gonna be you reforming the entire criminal justice system in Brazil. Right?

It's probably not gonna be you single handedly stopping crime or single handedly going after corrupt politicians or anything like that. Right? Your your hands are probably tied in certain respects when it comes to those things. But what you could do is you could start small. You could figure out which individuals in your immediate surroundings you could begin serving. Who's day could you make better? Whose lives could you make better? Right?

And again, I'm not talking about a massive scale, maybe that's somebody in your immediate circle right now that you know, maybe it's somebody that you'll run into. One of the things that Frankl says is that the meaning of life is not in money or in having anything perfect or even having anything easy. The meaning of life is found in the service of other people. Serving either a cause greater than yourself or a person other than yourself. And I think that's where you have to bring your mind to.

And rather than sitting there and saying, hey, you know what, this situation sucks, my job sucks, my country is irreparable, the politicians are awful and evil, and the people around me are even starting to look evil to me. Start to see where you can find the good. Start to see where you can bring good. Maybe there's somebody in your immediate surroundings who's suffering right now, and maybe you can help to ease their suffering. Maybe there's somebody you'll run into who's suffering you could ease.

But that's the way these things come about. As for everything else and and putting your mind into a better place, and and anybody else again who's in this situation, what I would say to you is this. The first thing you need to do is you need to focus on strengthening yourself. And I don't just mean your body, I'm always about fitness, but I mean your mind and your body. So what I would do is I would start by taking a look at your life and I would start to figure out what you can be grateful for.

And I just named a few different things. Number one, you probably have as a policeman a pretty secure job. Maybe it's not the safest job, maybe there's a lot of danger involved, but you have a job. That means you have money coming in and that means that there is also food on the table. So that's a benefit.

Number two, can look at maybe rather than looking at your country as being corrupt and all these different things, I mean Brazil is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. Yes, it's amidst immense poverty, and yes, it's definitely got some problems as far as government goes and as far as other things go, but it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and of all the places I've traveled on earth I found the people to be extremely nice. And maybe as a tourist I didn't get the full picture and things like that. But no matter where you go you're going to find good people. And rather than surrounding yourself with bad people, right, and again as a policeman you probably have to deal with bad people all the time, but when you're not on the job, maybe start trying to surround yourself with good people.

Good people who are trying to do good things. Maybe trying to figure out a way that that you change your inner circle, so that you're not surrounded by people that might be of questionable character or questionable attitude. And you know, I recommend trying to do things to invest in yourself. You know, make sure that you're training hard, make sure that you're studying hard, making sure that you're meditating, and making sure that you are instilling a gratitude practice in your daily routine every day. So that even though all these bad things come up, you can constantly remind yourself of what you can be grateful for.

And then finally, Ed, what I would say is the same thing that I'm telling everybody else here every single week. The way to change things is not to sit there and point out the wrongs or not just to sit there and point out the wrongs. What you have to do is you have to start figuring out solutions. And in order to implement those solutions on a grand scale, one of the things you have to do is you have to constantly work to put yourself into a better position. If you make it your life's quest to make leave this world better than how you found it, Well, then what you can start to do is you can start to say rather than, you know, my country being corrupt and and all these different things that are going wrong, you can start to see how you can change those.

And that takes a long time, but what we're talking about here is life. We're not talking about some venture that you're going to go on. And it might take a long time, it might be a process, you might have to go through a lot of things, you might have to suffer defeat over and over and over again. But that's better than sitting there and saying, well, this is awful. There's nothing that I'm enjoying right now.

Right? And just complaining about it. So again Ed, I understand that the situation you're in might be very difficult and you might seem like you're trapped, it might feel like you're trapped, but you're not trapped, we're never trapped. There's always a possibility of changing things, even if that change is painstakingly slow. And there's always the possibility of finding good, even if it's hard to find.

So I hope that helps, man. If you have other questions, just DM me, and I'm happy to, to talk with you about this further. And that's actually all the questions I got for this month, guys. This one's short and sweet. You know, again, I've been talking about this the last few weeks.

I know that this COVID nineteen situation is difficult, and and I think the world is in a difficult place right now. We don't know what's coming around the corner. There might be an economic contraction like we've never seen, but beyond that there might be an unheard of amount of deaths from from this disease. Nobody who's in the know on any of this stuff, but it's scary times. What I do know is that, as I've always said, hard times breed hard people.

It's up to us to get through this. It's not up to some angel from heaven coming down and swooping down and saving us. It's we can rely on the government for a stimulus package, we rely on the government to try to do things, but at the end of the day it's got to be us who saves ourselves. As we enter this difficult time, understand that there is always opportunity there. There is always opportunity to find meaning in life.

There's always an opportunity to move yourself forward. Whether that's monetarily, whether that's physically, whether that's mentally.

Keep reading, keep working hard, keep training, keep coming up with ideas, and keep enriching yourselves. And above all, keep spending time with your family. Spend time with your loved ones, show your kids the joy of life, hug them, play with them, teach them valuable lessons so that when they grow older, they will be able to approach the challenges of life in a far more prepared manner than we were. With that, guys, I wanna say thank you once again. Please share these episodes out with people who can use them. Please head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review if you enjoyed the episode, and get out there and live your best lives while you can. This is Chris Albert with the Warrior Soul Podcast, and I am out.