Name: Ep 525 - Spirit Gym (feat. Paul Chek)
Uploaded: 2024-10-28T21:36:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ep 525 - Spirit Gym (feat. Paul Chek)' from Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ep 525 - Spirit Gym (feat. Paul Chek)' from Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-28. Transcript available.

Ep 525 - Spirit Gym (feat. Paul Chek)

All right. Paul Cech, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I mean, thanks for
coming. I've been
really thinking about getting you on here for years. Is that right? I swear to
God,
you seem like I started watching you probably 10 years ago. Is that right? Yeah.
Yeah. And I think
there's a, cause you're, I guess, what's your title? You're a holistic health
practitioner.
I'm a holistic health practitioner by your license. Yeah. But you're also like
the level
of like depth you go into and stuff, it's like, seems like you're a doctor.
Although you probably
can't say you are. A lot of people think I am. But you know, holistic health
means the whole,
right? So I, I pretty much deal with the physical, the emotional, the mental,
and the spiritual
aspects of life. Yeah. People usually have all those problems at once. Yeah.
And deal with maybe
one physical, maybe. Well, usually the physical problems are, unless someone
falls off a ladder,
you know, gets in a car accident, most 85% of all orthopedic injuries are idiopathic,
which means the patient doesn't even know how they got them.
So when you consider 85 out of a hundred people going to doctors because of
injuries to necks,
backs, muscles, joints, don't know how it is that they actually got injured.
What you come to realize as a therapist, you can either just keep treating
symptoms or you've got
to figure out why is this thing manifesting in their life? And it's almost
always things like diet
problems, lifestyle challenges, relationship problems, beliefs that are disempowering,
being scared of God. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what do you, so what do you think in
terms of like,
so as like a holistic health practitioner, have you ever take, I'm sure, I mean,
I'm sure you have,
but like, what has it been like taking someone who was in like a pretty bad
state physically,
emotionally, mentally, all that stuff, and like really transforming them from
like the,
you know, if they had like, say they had like indigestion, back pain, anxiety,
like how,
how it, like what, I guess what I'm trying to ask you is like, what is it like
to transform somebody
like that and be like, is, are there some people that's just like, there's
nothing you can do or
like, there's always something you can do, but it just depends on how motivated
the person is to
heal and to grow. You know, I created the term, the pain teacher. So when the
pain teacher shows up in
your life, it's a good idea to be a good student. So the first thing I identify
is what are you
willing to heal for and grow for that you're inspired enough to do the work to
heal and grow?
Because if I don't identify a dream bigger than your crisis, then you'll become
so accustomed to
your crisis, then you'll just turn yourself into someone who's taking drugs and
seeing doctors for
the rest of your life. And that's exactly what they want. Yeah. So you're
saying that's kind of
the first area you go into is like, what are you, what are you doing? Like,
what's your point? Like,
what's your purpose? Well, I ask what, what is your dream for yourself? Why,
why do you want to
heal? What are you going to do with yourself? I have to have something that
inspires and motivates them
because it's very, very rare that I can rehabilitate somebody that doesn't have
to make changes in
their diet and their lifestyle and their beliefs and, and, and the behaviors
that led to the problem.
What percentage of people will you deal with have like zero overarching dream
to their life or just
kind of going through the motions? I would say probably about 85 to 90% of
people really don't know
what they're doing in their life other than making money to try to survive.
Yeah. And so that's a real
big part of the therapy is helping them get clear on what's meaningful to them
and what fills their
heart, what gives them a sense of purpose beyond just existing. Yeah. That's, I
think that checks
out. I really, cause that's, I call it the drift. Whenever I get caught up in
just the day-to-day
bullshit of just like, you know, am I selling tickets for standup or this and
my, and I have
no overarching purpose of like, what am I doing? Who am I doing it for? What is
the point of my
existence? Am I actually helping anybody or am I just fucking pumping resources
into myself, like
unconsciously and thoughtlessly? It's called a flatland. Flatland. Yeah. Yeah.
I spent a lot of
time there myself, but that's how I found you. I was on YouTube just finding
like workouts and this
and that. And I'd be like, Oh, that's kind of a cool workout. Then I'd watch
you talk. And I was
like, damn, this guy knows a lot about kind of a lot of shit. So how, how did
you get into that?
Cause you were a pair, a paratrooper. I was a paratrooper in the 82nd airborne
division. Yeah.
And then you got into motocross racing. I was in, I was racing motocross when I
was a young man
before I became a paratrooper. Okay. So that was first. And I was a competitive
fighter.
I was a boxer and a kickboxer and I played a lot of sports, but I became, I
fought my way onto the
army boxing team while I was in the 82nd airborne division. And then I became
the trainer of the army
boxing team. Oh, okay. And the team doctor was an osteopathic physician. So I
was put in charge of
nutrition. Um, I wasn't put in charge of designing and developing all the
training programs for the
fighters. And I took them all through them personally. I didn't just write shit
on the board. I did
everything with them. Um, I was also in charge of managing the gym and I
represented the army and
triathlon at the same time. First, I was a fighter on the boxing team, but I
was also representing the
army and triathlon and my company commander said, Hey, I'm going to bet a lot
of money on you to win
the army triathlon. So if you want to stop boxing, so you can train full-time
for triathlon, I'll let
you do it. You just got to win. And I knew that I wasn't going to turn pro
because my fighting style
is too aggressive. And I already had lots of guys in the boxing team that
showed a lot of signs of
brain injury already as early as, you know, 19 and 20 years of age. You're
saying like from the damage
you were inflicted and you're saying just in general, just getting knocked
around so much.
No, just, you know, a lot of the guys on the team had 300 plus fights. Oh God.
They started boxing,
most of them when they're around eight years old. Jesus. These are like the
best fighters in the
world. The only teams that ever beat us was Cuba and Russia. We're the third
tank, uh, ranked amateur
boxing team in the world. So it's very serious. So, okay. So yeah, it wasn't
just like palling around
like, no, no, no, this is hardcore. We train six, six and a half, seven hours a
day and, uh, traveled
all over, you know, we, our teams travel all over the world competing and, uh,
it's a big recruitment
tool for the military. Okay. Army sports is quite big. That actually makes
sense. And so my team doctor
was an osteopath. So once I left, I told the coaches I was going to leave and
train full-time
for triathlon, they already knew that I knew a lot that they didn't know
because they've always been
stunned. The fact that I could, you know, get up earlier than they did run six
to 10 miles a day,
go swimming in the pool for an hour while they're eating lunch. And then after
work, I'd go ride 25
to 60 miles at night. And while I'm a fighter on the team, I'm also competing
in triathlon and they're
like, how in the hell do you do this? And how did you do that? That's insane.
Well, I was raised on a
farm, a big farm, 142 acre farm by a very, very intense father who did not know
what a child was
and worked us like slaves in a concentration camp. Yeah. And as I said to the
guys in the last
podcast, if you want to know what real fitness is, let me hand you an ax and
let you split firewood
for about eight hours straight. And when your hands are covered in blisters and
your father doesn't
give a shit, you'll know what real fitness is. Jesus Christ. So you had like,
this was like nothing
to you then to be that active and move around. It wasn't that it was like
nothing. I had to train
extremely hard. You know, I was competing at a very high level in triathlon. I
was in the top 10
overall, even with the pros and six USTS races, which is, you know, that's the
full blown elite
triathlon. That's the real triathlon organization. And I was, you know, a
ranked fighter and I did very
well in motocross. And so it was really just that my father built such a strong
work ethic into me
and to all of my siblings that it wasn't out of character for me to realize how
hard I had to
work and I don't like losing. So I just took the work ethic that was built into
me from the farm and
just applied that to something I wanted to do instead of something I was being
told to do.
And that was very freeing.
Yeah, that's kind of nice. And I guess the farm gives people like a sun up to
sun down mentality.
You're not kind of like, well, I'm clocking up. It's like, as soon as the sun's
up, you got to get
out. You're at it. Yeah. My father's rule was you feed and water the animals
before you eat.
And if I ever catch you eating or drinking anything before those animals are
taken care of,
you'll never forget it. And he meant it.
Yeah. I guess he would just dull out some punishment.
He could dole it out.
So you, so you got out of there, I guess that makes sense. You're doing motocross
in the military.
So how did you, did you like start absorbing kind of like, um, like health and
holistic nutrition
stuff? Like my mother's was a Yogi. She became a Yogi when I was 12. She'd been
to India three times
for advanced initiation. So we, my mother joined the self-realization
fellowship, which is the
teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, which is already quite holistic. And my
mother was already
just naturally into holistic everything. You know, we raised our own food, we
slaughtered
our own animals. We pretty much could live off of our farm. Um, we milked our
own cows, made
our own butter, our own cheese, our own ice cream, um, our own bread. Um, so I
lived a very
ground up, uh, ground up life. And I also was very aware when I was young
competing in athletics that
whenever the guys that, that come from the area where I come from out in the
country played city
teams, we destroyed them. Yeah. And so it was easy for me to see the difference
between the guys that
came off of farms, like on football and on hockey, they were just a lot tougher
and they could take a lot
more beating. So I already had an early, early, the handwriting was on the wall
that if you eat too
many Cheez-Its and drink too much soda pop and sit around, then you don't have
the right stuff
to be a good athlete. Yeah. So what would you, if someone is going from like
that state of like
the standard, like cheese, it's, you know, all that stuff. If like, say that
starting at zero,
like total inactivity, terrible diet, like what, what would you tell people to
do if you had to
give them like four, I don't know if this is like an annoying question, but
like how do people get
started? Like if like you want to give someone like a very basic thing to like
start yourself to being
actually like healthy and all that. Well, after many, many years as a therapist
and a specialist in
conditioning and a guy that's worked with countless of the best athletes in the
world,
I synthesized what one must understand in order to be successful in any kind of
endeavor, whether it
be to just be healthy so that you don't have to deal with pain all the time or
to play with your
grandkids or to, you know, be able to hike to the top of your favorite mountain
or to win a gold
medal. And basically I broke it down to four key areas that we have to have
conscious awareness of,
which I call the four doctors. And the reason I call them that is because if
you spend time with
these four doctors, you don't need the ones that give you drugs and do surgery.
The first one,
and that's the most import