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There is no strength like dad strength. It is quiet, patient, and persistent. Some would say stubborn, dammit. Dad strength rarely makes the highlight reel. It exists in the in-between spaces....The times when nobody—except maybe your kid—is watching.
The Dad Strength Podcast was created to support and encourage the best in dads like you. Authors, entrepreneurs, artists, and experts from all over share their wisdom with us. We discuss 360º health, doing work that matters, and—of course—fatherhood. These conversations are fun, informative, and always emphasize action and understanding.
The Dad Strength Podcast is hosted by Geoff Girvitz. Geoff is a father, fitness expert, and curious fellow. Based in Toronto, he has been featured in Vice, GQ, and multiple exercise publications. He is known for innovation and real-world success in the fitness industry. Now, Geoff is pointing a wide-angle lens at health and parenthood. Workouts and nutrition are just part of the program. He will be looking at relationships, critical thinking, motivation, and discipline. In short, anything you need to earn the mug that says “*World’s Greatest Dad.”*
“I want to be Mr. Rogers for men over 30,” says Geoff. “There is so much noise and confusion out there.” We *all* need a community devoted to the best we have inside of us. The Dad Strength Podcast is here to make the world a better place through our roles as fathers and as men.
Welcome to Dad Strength, helping you earn the mug that says World's Greatest Dad. My name is Geoff Girvitz, and today, I come in pieces. I have a simple tip for you for happy shoulders and big biceps. We're going to talk about how you contain multitudes or at least a few. We will get ahead of our toughest conversations with our kids.
Geoff Girvitz:And, of course, I've got a book, a quote, and a dad joke for you. Actually, it's not really a book. We'll figure it out. Alright. Let's talk about happy shoulders and big guns.
Geoff Girvitz:You know those mini bands that people use for lateral walks, exercises like that? Okay. Here's a great way to use them for shoulder health. So grab one of these bands, and these are the small ones. Yeah.
Geoff Girvitz:Put the mini band over your wrists and grab a pair of dumbbells. And I would recommend a bit lighter than whatever your default weight for curls is, and then open your shoulders up and, you know, spread those suckers out. Find a position that feels good, and then with your wrists, you are going to stretch the band a bit. You don't really have to crank on it. You just have to take the slack out of it and put a bit of tension into the band.
Geoff Girvitz:From here, you're going to curl the dumbbells. We'll keep these palms up for the whole movement, and you're going to maintain that lateral tension that's spreading on the band from top to bottom in each rep. You're not going to let your hands come back towards center, and this should feel great. And that is because it activates the lateral muscles in your shoulders and helps stabilize the movement in a way that creates more space for your shoulder joints. You are firing up those external rotators, and you may feel this all the way down into more lateral activation in your biceps.
Geoff Girvitz:This one is easy to do well to really get a feel for it quickly, and, it feels great. Alright. Let's talk about internal family systems. This is a school of psychotherapy, and it begins with the idea that there are different parts of you, sometimes working in harmony to accomplish a goal and sometimes not so much. In this idea, in this schema, we have exiles, and they represent psychological trauma.
Geoff Girvitz:This is often carried over from childhood. These parts of you are isolated from the others as part of a protective strategy because the feelings may be too tough to deal with or and I do wanna be sensitive here because sometimes these traumas are pretty big, but I think also a lot of times, these things simply feel like they're too tough to deal with. Meanwhile, firefighters work as protectors. They divert attention away from strong feelings of hurt and shame. These things that exiles experience, the choices that firefighters make are not always ideal, especially from a long term health perspective.
Geoff Girvitz:And that's one of my big interests. So from alcohol and drug use to obsessive behaviors and workaholism, you know, but that doesn't negate their protective value. And that last bit is important. The aspiration here is not to eliminate these needs, but to understand them, why they're there. And from that point, you can evolve your strategies over time.
Geoff Girvitz:Then our 3rd persona here are managers, and they are more ahead of the game than firefighters. They evolve more intellectual and less emotionally reactive strategies. They use more of your executive functioning to do this. However, that's not really to be confused with solving the problem. These are just more advanced coping strategies.
Geoff Girvitz:And just like firefighters, they need to be acknowledged and understood or rather what these guys are attending to. And the fascinating thing here is that many of our inner conflicts or contradictory behaviors are important and they're necessary and they make sense within their own contexts. So if these inconsistencies bug you, you have the option of stuffing them back down, always an option, or of course, evolving them. And there's a time and a place for both. My own biggest takeaway from all of this is once you recognize that there is fighting inside of you, you don't have to fight against the fight itself.
Geoff Girvitz:I've also got an image in the newsletter edition. It is captioned with the first step toward inner peace, maybe accepting that there are multiple inner pieces. And I've got 3 free months of the Dad Strength community edition to the first person to hit reply and call out the reference. On our most recent Dad Strength call, we talked about big tough conversations with our kids, death or you name it. And there are some things that you will feel are best to deal with when your kid brings them up.
Geoff Girvitz:Full stop. There will be others though that you want to get ahead of, that you won't wanna be caught flat footed about. And my questions for our guys were about what these things might be for them. However, the conversation quickly evolved into simple strategies for encouraging the values and skills necessary to deal with problems in a more universal way. And these are things like being kind and being able to do hard things and to honestly listen to people and to understand how you can best learn something and, oh, yeah, to accept being wrong with grace.
Geoff Girvitz:These skills will probably serve our kids more than any kind of specific tactical preparation. There's an insight that someone shared with me, one of the dads on this call, and I'm still thinking about it. And he said, you know, most people are not well taught when it comes to how to apologize. It's true. Right?
Geoff Girvitz:You'd think this would be core curriculum in school, just how to tender a proper apology. It seems so fundamental yet. So many people are missing this. This stuff can be tricky. And that is why we talk it out every Tuesday as a community.
Geoff Girvitz:There is a link in the newsletter to check things out for our weekly calls. Alright. What I'm reading is not a book. It is a lot of research on the accuracy and utility of fitness trackers. This is for a outside project, but I will share that with you when it is ready.
Geoff Girvitz:What else do we have? If you go to the newsletter, I've got a, a link to a website that captures Disney garbage cans from around the world. This has been a personal project this person has taken on for 15 years. And a photo of the Pentium chip as a Navajo weaving. It's kinda cool.
Geoff Girvitz:Our quote today is from Neal Stephenson. Now I mentioned his newest book a few weeks ago, Polestan. Read it. Really enjoyed it. This is a quote from Kryptonomicon, which was the first Stevenson book that I read.
Geoff Girvitz:And he said, like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous bad ass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self replicating gizmo, which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. I love this. I tell people all the time, you know, when they come into our, facility in Toronto, it's not unusual for someone to express this idea that they have bad genetics. And when you think about what your ancestors survived, floods and famines and war and pestilence, bears and killer bees and who knows what.
Geoff Girvitz:Your genes have some incredible stuff in them. Now what is unique and special about your genes? That is a great question. That is something I'm always so intrigued to pull apart and discover. It takes some testing, takes some iteration, but there's stuff in there.
Geoff Girvitz:I guarantee it. There's no way it couldn't be. To wrap things up today, I've got a bit of a a confession that I shared with my son. It's that I'm terrified of hearing letters spoken out loud. You are?
Geoff Girvitz:Oh, I see. Well, that was very silly. But being a dad is also sometimes very silly indeed. So thanks for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week with more dad strength.
Geoff Girvitz:Our title music is by Daniel Ross and additional music by Mike Ford. You can follow and rate the podcast. Please do. This is very helpful. And if you're not already a subscriber, you can go to newsletter dot dadstrength.com.
Geoff Girvitz:You can also opt in to the community edition for just $5 a month to support what I'm doing here. Alright. See you next week. Until then, take care of yourself, man.