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Scot: Today's episode is for the guys that work with their hands, backs, and knees. You know who you are. You don't clock steps because you're on your feet all day. Talking about the toll that physical labor can take on a man over time and how to keep doing the work without breaking down. Because for a lot of men, body equals paycheck.
And I just want to get this out of the way, first of all. We here on this podcast are not the guys that are working 10-hour shifts in steel-toed boots. We're the ones talking into microphones, and every once in a while, we pull a neck muscle looking at that second monitor. But I do want to say we do and have lived around this kind of work, grown up with it, and we've seen what it takes and what it takes out of you. And that's why we think this is an important topic to talk about.
This is "Who Cares About Men's Health." Real talk, not ripped abs, just information, inspiration, and a different interpretation of what men's health actually is.
My name is Scot, and my dad was a rancher. Up before sunrise, out all day every day in the elements, two to three hours a night getting sleep during cabin season. No matter how tired he was or how sore he was, one thing I remember, he'd go out with a 105-degree fever because there was no day off when the animals were depending on him. And I remember even thinking then, "I don't know how he does this." But he did because he had no choice.
Also on the show, Producer Mitch. What is your connection to working life like that, the work we don't do?
Mitch: I come from a line of, on my mother's side, farmers, and my dad has worked in construction. And I would say I have three or four cousins, I have uncles, etc., on that side of the family that . . . everyone works construction.
Whether they swung hammers for years and years and then ended up in an office job later in life, but they're walking sites, they are swinging hammers at the start of their career, etc., and I've personally seen some of the toll it can take on their bodies.
Scot: Yeah. Dr. John Smith, he is on the show as well. What is your experience with the blue-collar world, either personally or professionally?
Dr. Smith: I mean, I grew up as a kid . . . My mom worked in the college landscape, but I delivered newspapers for four years when I was a kid. Did a little manual labor there.
Scot: I don't know if that really counts.
Dr. Smith: Well, we'll count it for that. No, I have a lot of family and friends. My mom's whole side of her family are all dairy farmers. Had a lot of construction workers. Some of my best friends in the world, one of my best friends is a painter. And that guy, I'll call him sometimes at 10:30 to say, "Hey, what's up? How you been?" And he's like, "Oh, I'm painting." "What the hell are you doing painting at 10:30 at night?" He's like, "Dude, I've got a deadline. I've got to get it done."
So I've got connections with a lot of people that are dear to me that do, they work harder day and night, and they provide well for their families doing it.
Scot: And our guest today is Dr. Jeremy Biggs. He's an occupational medicine therapist at 91麻豆天美直播. What is your connection to that blue-collar world? I'd imagine you work with them in your clinic, but do you have some personal experience too?
Dr. Biggs: Like you're saying, more of an extended family kind of experience with construction and building inspections, a lot of farming and ranching. My grandpa grew up in Montana, living on the railroad kind of stuff.
But like you said, now it's mostly in our clinic as occupational medicine physicians. Not therapists, like you said. It's a little bit different there.
Scot: Yeah, make that differentiation for us.
Dr. Biggs: So we are board-certified in occupational and environmental health. We're physicians. We go to medical school, do an internship, and then do a specialized residency and get board certified.
Occupational therapists sometimes will refer patients to them. They're like physical therapists, but they focus more on activities of daily living type activities.
Scot: And you focus on what, again?
Dr. Biggs: We focus on whatever happens at work, is the best kind of quick way to summarize it. If you get hurt at work or feel like you have an illness because of work-related exposures, we're the ones that do the care, take care of it, that kind of stuff. And then on the other end, we work to try to prevent these things from occurring.
Scot: So as we get into this episode, what we kind of wanted to explore today is this idea of, first of all, for guys that are using their body for a living, do they need to exercise and work out? My response if I was in that situation would be like, "I work out all day."
And then I also want to get into a little bit later what are some things that men can do to make sure that their bodies are able to provide for them and their families over the long term?
We tend to talk about . . . from our perspective, we have the opposite problem, right, guys? We have to get up and make sure we move every once in a while, and that sort of thing.
So first of all, Dr. Biggs, if a guy is moving all day, does he really have to exercise?
Dr. Biggs: It's a good question, and we actually get that quite a bit in our clinic, because when we're dealing with injuries, one of the things we talk about is rehabilitation, whether that's with PT, physical therapy, or with our own prescribed kind of regular exercise programs.
The majority of the patients I see in clinic are going to be blue-collar workers that work quite hard throughout the day. And the answer, unfortunately, is you do need to still exercise even if you have a fairly robust job during the day.
There are a couple of things that kind of lead it to that. To boil it down really quickly in some ways, it's going to be a little bit about heart rate and how long you sustain an elevated heart rate. So it's not just physical activity that's important. We've noticed that it's really that heart rate, getting that heart rate up into those target zones. And we can talk about that here in a few minutes, if you want, on the difference there.
So somebody who's walking around a lot, lifting bags, hammering things, and painting, while that is work and it is actually beneficial cardiovascularly in a way, it's not the same.
Scot: All right. And what about strength training? Should guys that are in physical labor be doing some strength training as well, or is that beating down the body even more?
Dr. Biggs: No. We really should be focusing on strength training, the guys and girls who are doing this work.
If you think about what you do most of the day, it is somewhat repetitive in nature. A lot of times, you're lifting, you're not pushing, or you're pushing and not lifting. Sometimes you're using your upper body more or your lower body more. So balance is really important in maintaining a good, healthy lifestyle and trying to prevent injuries from occurring.
Sometimes we'll get what has been in the past classified as repetitive motion injuries. One that was kind of misinterpreted at some degree was carpal tunnel, right? Certain activities may cause carpal tunnel if you do it for a long period of time. So we have to do exercises, including strengthening, to help prevent those.
Scot: All right. So if I'm hearing what you're saying, Dr. Biggs, a couple of things as far as exercise that even guys that work for a living, do physical stuff, need to concentrate on.
That's some sort of cardiovascular that's going to get their heart rate into a particular range that maybe their job isn't.
And then fitness or strength training is less about . . . it's more about balance, creating balance between the muscles that you use all day and the muscles that you don't use all day.
Is that accurate, and is there anything else that somebody should be considering when it does come down to, "Do I need to work out?"
Dr. Biggs: Yeah, that's an accurate interpretation of what keeps us the healthiest. And so what you're going to have to do and what we do with our patients is we get a pretty good understanding of what the day-to-day job is, what muscles you're using, how often, and in which ways so that we can then tailor a workout program to balance that out a little bit.
So again, if we take a guy who's lifting bags of mulch all day long and carrying them, that's going to be a lot of kind of lifting and carrying, so you have a lot of biceps and stuff, but really very little triceps.
So we will do an exercise routine that focuses first, like we were saying earlier, on cardiovascular health, so aerobic exercise, but then also strengthening that's going to balance out what you have to do during the day.
Scot: This is kind of a new physical labor job, I guess. I had a friend that was a news photog. So one of those guys that carries a camera on his right shoulder all the time. And these were big, big cameras.
He said he struggled with, because it was always that right side, the right side of his back. He said it was so much bigger than the left side of his back because that was doing all the work all the time. So that'd be a perfect example of he might want to do some left-side-of-the-body exercises to balance that out, it sounds like.
Dr. Biggs: Yes, definitely. I mean, when you have an imbalance in strength . . . One of the common ones that we run into is what we call patellofemoral syndrome, basically knee pain. A patient will come in and say, "My knee hurts in certain things, like going down stairs and after standing up."
And it's because a lot of times . . . If you think about your quadriceps, your thigh muscles, there are four major ones. The ones on the outside of your leg are important when you squat down and stand up. You use those a lot. What do we do most of the time as humans? We squat down and we stand back up a lot.
We don't necessarily squeeze our thighs a lot, right? We don't do the ThighMaster kind of thing. If you grew up in the '80s, there was that ThighMaster.
Scot: Yeah, Suzanne Somers.
Dr. Biggs: Yes. We don't do that motion a lot. So what happens is then our kneecap, or our patella, tracks differently because one side of our quadriceps is stronger than the other. And that can cause problems, injuries, pain, and so forth. So you have to focus on that kind of balance.
Scot: That's kind of fascinating. So the work we do and the pain that we feel afterwards could have something to do with a muscle imbalance because of the type of work we do. And the solution to solving that is to actually figure out what muscles are we working, what muscles aren't we working, and work those ones we're not in the gym.
Dr. Biggs: Correct.
Scot: Are there other things that you recommend for guys to do? So we talked about cardiovascular. We talked about strength. What about stretching or yoga or those kinds of things that I think, traditionally, a lot of men are like, "That's not really for me. That's for women"? And especially guys that use their body every day for work, probably even more so. Are those helpful or not, or what?
Dr. Biggs: Yes, they are helpful. So there have been a lot of studies done on musculoskeletal injuries and disorders, especially around the low back, right? I don't know of anybody who hasn't met someone who's had low back pain.
So they looked to try to determine what are the most important types of exercises to treat and prevent low back pain. And they classified it as aerobic, strengthening, and then stretching. Aerobic was actually number one, and stretching and strengthening were kind of equal in importance, which showed that stretching actually is important.
There are multiple reasons to talk about that, but that is an important aspect of exercise, and it should be part of everybody's exercise program.
Scot: Some sort of stretching. Hey, John, Mitch, anybody in your life do yoga, anybody that uses their body for a living?
Mitch: Not the people that use their body for a living, but I do know some that do.
Dr. Smith: I tell a lot of my patients to do yoga that have pelvic issues, to be quite fair. That's something that I recommend to a lot of my patients, even after they have prostate surgery and things like that, because a lot of those pelvic muscles kind of get on the defense after they've had surgery. And so getting those things kind of limbered up and feeling good.
I recommend that a lot to folks, just, "Hey, this sounds silly, but you just had surgery and this can help your recovery kind of just to get things moving the way they should."
Scot: Yeah. Jeremy or John, what are guys' normal responses to that when you tell them do some stretching or maybe even yoga?
Dr. Smith: I get a little side eye, I can tell you that. Dr. Biggs probably gets less the side eye because they know that's coming when they come to his office.
Dr. Biggs: Maybe.
Scot: Do you have a story of a guy that reluctantly gave in and was like, "Wow, this actually did make a difference for me. Thanks, Doc"?
Dr. Biggs: Most of the guys that we work with, when we talk about the different exercise regimes and we put in stretching, I'll be honest, sometimes they look at us and nod and are like, "Oh, yeah, I'm definitely going to do that." And then they don't do it.
Then we'll ask them how it's going, and eventually they'll be like, "Yeah, I'm not doing that. I said I would, I told you I did, but let's be honest, I didn't."
But usually, when they start to do it, they do notice a benefit. Especially the ones that come in with kind of more of a repetitive injury, back pain that's just kind of developed over time, or shoulder pain, or elbow, if they're doing all the exercises, including the stretching, those are the ones that seem to get better faster and have a little bit more complete resolution of symptoms.
Dr. Smith: I would agree with that. In my clinic, too, I get the side eye from guys. And the ones that go and do some of the exercises that I'll give them . . . because I've got some from a pelvic floor rehab center that I'll send them as well. I have some people come back, and they're like, "Man, I thought you were crazy. And then I went home, and I did them for three weeks, and I was like, 'Holy cow, this is really helpful.'" And I'm like, "I'm telling you, man. It's helpful."
So, yeah, I think when you get the guys that actually do it, like Dr. Biggs said, I think that it does make a difference for some more than others. I mean, for some people, it really does make a big, big difference. And some, they go, "Yeah, there was improvement." But yeah, that's been my experience as well.
Scot: Dr. Biggs, before we move on to the next area, why don't you drop what are we looking for as far as heart rate is concerned when we do our aerobic stuff? And does this include any type of aerobic stuff? It could be running, biking, anything that you might do in the gym?
Dr. Biggs: Yes. So to the first point, there are kind of sophisticated tests you can do to really try to hone in on your ideal heart rate targets. But most of us are never going to do those tests. They're kind of pricey, take a lot of time. So typically, what we do is we say you take 220 and you subtract your age from that number, and that's kind of your maximum heart rate that you would ever want to try to work out at.
Most of the time, we don't say you should work out at the maximum heart rate. We say between 70% and 80% of that maximum heart rate. So basically, if you're 40 years old, your maximum heart rate would be 180. But again, we're not expecting anybody to sit there and work out for long periods of time at their maximum. You want to do that 70% to 80% range.
And ideally, if you're going to do the best you possibly can, you do it for about 300 minutes per week. So that's a lot, and that's kind of a goal. Any workout is better than none, though.
So you can be like, "Look, I work 16-hour shifts 6 days a week. There's no way I'm doing that." That's fine. If you work out for 20 minutes, it's better than nothing.
And then to your second point of type of exercise, not really. The most important thing we've found over time is getting those heart rates up and for sustained amounts of time. If that's running, walking, biking, swimming, that doesn't seem to make a difference.
Certain injuries, of course, are going to make certain activities less desirable. Swimming is a great one, unless you have really bad neck pain and you have to look up and move your neck a lot to swim, mostly.
Scot: Yeah, and to breathe.
Dr. Biggs: Right. So obviously that's not going to be a good one for you. You do have to tailor it, but any exercise is good exercise.
Scot: And is this just strictly for heart health, or does this actually help some of the other things that working men might struggle with?
Dr. Biggs: It definitely focuses on the cardiovascular health. But as most physicians who work with people who have different injuries, illnesses, different parts of the body, if you have good heart health, you're going to have good blood flow. Good blood flow results in multiple benefits throughout the body.
Scot: All right. So we've got an idea that if you're a blue-collar worker, you do have to exercise. You might want to consider some strength training to balance out those things that you do all day at work. You're going to want to do some cardiovascular stuff with that heart rate 70% to 80%. Some stretching or yoga or something like that could be beneficial for you.
What about after work? You come home after a tough day of work, and you've done those things, and you're sore and you're hurting. Are there other things that you can do to help you get ready for the next day?
Dr. Biggs: For sure. I mean, if you're sore whether because of a workout or because the day was just an extra hard day, that's when those things like the stretching, the yoga, kind of the core isometric are important. Those are going to help.
You can do the basics, right? You can do the icing and the heating. There are a bunch of studies out there to look at. There's always been this kind of dogma, I would say, that when you first are sore, you should always use ice and then you switch to heat after a certain amount of time, 48 hours, 72 hours, whatever it is. The evidence doesn't really truly support that. It's kind of whatever works.
If you notice that icing a certain area makes it feel better, then that's what you do. If putting heat on it makes it feel better, then that's what you do. Or if both feel good, then use both. So those are important things to do.
And then, like you were saying, rest is important. Sleep is when our bodies recover. Most of your recovery for your muscle growth and all that stuff is going to be happening while sleeping. So that's a very critical point.
Mitch: One of the things I'm kind of wondering about is . . . I think of my dad, especially when I was younger, and a lot of his day job was swinging hammers, putting up drywall, whatever. When we're talking about after work, he would come home, he would have some jobs he had to do around the house, some errands that had to be run, whatever.
If there were one thing, maybe two things, that they could do after they're home, after the projects are done, before the next day starts, that would give them the most bang for the buck, what would that be?
Dr. Biggs: I think it's going to be kind of two areas you need to focus on. One is going to be, like we talked about, your physical recovery. So stretching, relaxing, that kind of thing. The second is going to be a mental recovery. And again, that kind of goes back to the importance of sleep. Our mental health is really important in figuring out what kind of sleep we can have.
Now, when we talk about good sleep, and we won't talk about it a lot today, but talk about good sleep is not just the hours, right? It's not saying, "Hey, I slept for six hours," or, "I slept for eight hours." That is important, but there's a lot more nuance to it than just that alone.
So whatever it takes for you to be able to mentally relax, to wind down, that gives you joy. And that can be anything. Some guys like to walk, some guys like to do video games, some guys like to read. Whatever it is, you have to try to take that time for yourself.
Because it is hard. You work long shifts, then you come home, and if you have a family and a home and stuff, there's a lot more to do when you get home. But there is an important part of that where you have to take that time.
Scot: So that's not a luxury. That's a necessity, in your opinion.
Dr. Biggs: It is. In my opinion, it is a necessity.
Mitch: It's funny because I think of, again, my own dad or whatever. It's when he started bike riding . . . he went mountain bike riding with his friends multiple times after work in the evenings . . . that I saw a real shift in mood, in just how he wasn't as exhausted the next day, etc. And it was kind of almost counterintuitive. It's like, "Well, I went and got a crazy score on my Strava last night," on top of everything else he was doing. It was kind of cool to see that.
Dr. Biggs: It is. Mental health is really important to our physical health. So you have to take your time to, again, do whatever that activity is that gives you that mental boost.
Dr. Smith: So I've got a question on that as well. The days when you go out, you come home, you've worked hard, your body is sore, I've heard mixed messages on maybe taking ibuprofen or something like that to take the edge off some of those days when the pain is a little bit harder than others, where it can kind of blunt your body's ability to heal versus it's helpful. What's your take in that space? Because I've heard both sides of that.
Dr. Biggs: Again, looking back in the day, people really didn't like the ibuprofen because they felt like it delayed healing. That hasn't panned out quite as much as maybe we first thought about it.
But the important part is if you're doing stuff throughout the day that's causing you to have to take ibuprofen at the end of the day, occasionally that's fine, but you need to look and say, "Well, what else do I need to do to try to prevent this from occurring?" Not just the ibuprofen. You can't just come home every day, take ibuprofen, and expect your body to get through to retirement and then enjoy your retirement after that.
Mitch: Let's talk about when maybe things do get bad. What are some of the warning signs that . . . Because especially with this group of people, the people that I know that have worked in construction, etc., they push through the pain, right? No pain, no gain, or it's something they have to do, etc., a sore knee, a tight back, or something like that.
What are some warning signs that we should maybe be on the lookout for, for people in this kind of work, for when it's maybe a little more than just being sore or just being a little overworked?
Dr. Biggs: So let's talk about a back, since that happens to even people who are sitting all day. You can have some back issues. It's a pretty common ailment to have.
So an occasional sore back here or there, especially if you tried something new or different at work, you started a new job, you got new equipment, something like that, and it's just relatively sore, it's relatively localized, and it's short-lived, and by that I mean a few days at most, that isn't as alarming as something that's almost every day or every week, seems to be getting a little bit worse, noticing it a little bit more often, whether it's at work or, like you said, after work.
Another thing to really, really focus on and try to make sure is not happening is if it starts to spread, right? It has always been the right side, now it's the left side as well. It's always just been in the back, now it goes down my leg. Those are going to be signs that it's not just, "I'm working a little bit harder this day. Some ice, some stretching is fine."
So those are going to be some of the warning signs, is increased pain, spreading of the pain, especially if talking about, again, low back where the pain starts to go down your legs and such. And then, again, if you get any numbness and tingling associated with the pain, that's more problematic because we don't want to damage nerves. Nerves take a long time to get better, if they ever do sometimes. And so we've really got to be careful that we don't do that.
Scot: So some of those are your red flags. If you start noticing those, what steps should you take at that point?
I think I'd also like you to address kind of the cost of waiting too long to address a problem, which you did briefly by saying if it develops into nerve damage, that's a big problem.
But yeah, what are we looking at if we start noticing some of those warning signs and the other countermeasures we're doing just aren't enough?
Dr. Biggs: So a little bit is going to depend on what resources you have. There are some situations where employers have on-site whether it be athletic trainers or therapists or ergonomists that you can go to and say, "Hey, I'm noticing this is getting worse," and they can help evaluate your job, give you some stuff to maybe change, different equipment, that kind of stuff. So that's one thing that I would do for sure if you're having recurring pain, worsening pain.
It is also possible that it's time to make a doctor's appointment. And I know most guys don't like to go to the doctor.
Scot: No thanks.
Dr. Biggs: Right? But it may be, "Hey, I need to go to the doctor and get some imaging, possibly," whether that be an X-ray or imaging that looks at soft tissue to see what you're dealing with. Sometimes once you know that, you can kind of better tailor a treatment program, whether that be showing the exercise or activity or if there's more that you have to do. And then, again, it would give you an idea. There are some other tests you can do if you're worried about nerve damage.
Dr. Smith: So what are some good things that people can do? What's your go-to thing to tell people to do, like, "Hey, before things get bad, these are the resources that I would push you to so you don't have to come to my office"?
Dr. Biggs: As occupational medicine physicians, we do a lot of what we call preventive medicine, where we go, we work with companies on a regular basis to design and implement fitness programs and make sure that people are safe for work and they're not going to, hopefully, do any damage.
So kind of going back to what we started, it's going to be just general overall healthy living. Cardiovascular health is important, not just because you may you lose weight, or you have a lower heart rate or low blood pressure. All those are important. But like we talked about before, blood flow to tissues is pivotal for getting better.
Some of these guys may know people who have really bad diabetes, right? What do you see when someone has really bad diabetes? Sometimes they'll get sores somewhere, let's say, on their feet, and they just never get better. Why is that? Because they don't have enough blood flow. Diabetes destroys small blood vessels. That's one of the things it does. And so you have to have good blood flow in order for your body to be able to heal.
We break down our bodies all day, every day. I mean, that's the purpose of going to the gym and lifting weights, right? You're breaking down your muscle tissue, you're tearing it so that it can then rebuild in a stronger fashion. But you have to have that blood flow.
So we talk a lot about that. We also talk a lot about sleep, like we talked about before, because that's when your body does that healing, most of it. So we talk about the different stages of sleep and how it's important. We make sure there's not any sleep disorder, like sleep apnea, that would interfere with those. Those are some of the main things we focus on.
Scot: Dr. Biggs, is there a time where you get a patient in and the prescription really is, "You just have to take a couple of weeks off. You need to rest, you need to recover, you need to give whatever the condition is a chance"? I would imagine that probably wouldn't go over well with guys that use their body for a living. I mean, if they're not working, they're not making money. Or even their employers.
Dr. Biggs: Yes, that is a difficult thing to deal with at times, both on the guys themselves or their employers or supervisors or managers. They'll come in to us, and we'll say, "Yep, you've got this injury. We need to back off for at least a period of time. Focus on some easier things."
And so we'll give them what we call work limitations, saying, "Look, instead of 50 pounds, they can only lift 10 for the next couple of weeks while we're dealing with this."
And like you said, sometimes that's hard. The supervisor is like, "Well, I'm not getting what I need out of this individual," or the person themselves is like, "Hey, I'm self-employed. I need to finish this job, and this job requires it." So there is often a little bit of a conflict there that we have to kind of balance.
And so sometimes we'll even compromise. We'll say, "Okay, let's try 30. Can we change your job to do 30 pounds instead of 50 for at least a week or two while we're healing?" It's something that we have to do pretty much every day.
Scot: Yeah. I mean, I could also imagine the other guys . . . I wouldn't want to go back in and tell the other guys, "I can't do that for the next two weeks." Or maybe people are more accepting than I think. I don't know.
Dr. Biggs: I think you get it both ways. I think there are going to be times where the other guys are like, "Now I have to pull twice the weight because you can't do what we all need to do." So yeah, there's definitely that as well.
Scot: But it sounds like, in your opinion as a doctor, that sometimes that's just what you have to do. I mean, taking the ribbon probably is worth being able to continue to work.
Dr. Biggs: Right. Like we were talking about before, we want individuals to be safe while they're working now, but we also want these guys who are working hard jobs to be able to enjoy their retirement. And that's an important aspect to consider also.
Scot: Right. Dr. Biggs, this has been great. Let's bring it home. What's one thing from today's conversation that you'd want your dad or younger self or your buddy on the job to take away? Let's go ahead and start with you, Mitch.
Mitch: For me, the big part, because I've seen it in the people in my own life, etc., is the importance of the mental health aspect of all of this. Yeah, you need to recover not just your physical body, but to be able to deal with these long days, hard jobs, stressful situations, etc., you've got to take a break at some point. You've got to get your mind recovered before you get back to it.
Scot: Or even how Dr. Biggs said that mental health can impact your physical health, your ability to heal, or your ability to go on or whatever. Good.
Dr. Smith, what'd you think?
Dr. Smith: I think this is awesome. I mean, I learned a lot. I didn't have a lot to say today because I was sitting back trying to take it in. I have terrible posture at work, and so I have some back pain stuff. So I was trying to glean a little bit of help from my blue-collar folks to help with my current situation. But I think it's awesome.
And also, I think one of the things that hit me was just whatever works to help it feel better. Again, I grew up in that age where it was rest, ice, all those things, or, "Don't use heat for three days after an injury," or whatever that you heard from the trainers in the gym when you were in high school or college.
Some of that stuff has been debunked, and I think that's a nice thing to hear, that, "Hey, when you get home and you're recovering, you do the things that are very helpful to help you recover because it's your body and you know your body. And so listen to it and do the things that are going to help you recover." I think that's my big takeaway.
Scot: My takeaway is just like any other aspect of health we talk about on this show, you have to be intentional about it. If you're not intentional about any aspect of your health, regardless of who you are, what kind of work you do, where you live, that's not necessarily going to get you where you want to go or is not sustainable.
So I just hope that this information was helpful for somebody and kind of gets you thinking, "Well, I've got to be intentional if I want to continue to do this type of work for a period of time. How do I sustain it?" And Dr. Biggs, what you said, even afterwards you don't want to retire all beat up and not be able to enjoy life afterwards.
So, yeah, that intentionality, man. I'll tell you what, it's so hard, right? It's so hard.
Dr. Biggs, final word to you.
Dr. Biggs: I think what all of you are saying is important, but I do want to, again, emphasize sleep. Sometimes it's hard for the guys who work really long, hard hours to prioritize getting some rest because, again, there are other things that are important in their lives outside of work, whether that's their own hobbies, it's their family, it's other things. Sometimes they do more than one job. But you have to prioritize good sleep.
Scot: You have to be intentional about it, just like anything else.
Well, we want these conversations to reach the guys who really need them. So if there's somebody you know, like a coworker, a brother, or a buddy, that would find this useful, pass it along. These are the stories and the voices that don't always get talked about, but they do matter.
And if you have a story or something you'd like to share from today's episode or a topic you'd like us to explore in the future, whether it's white collar, blue collar, or something else, you can reach us via email at hello@thescoperadio.com.
Thanks for listening, and thanks for caring about men's health.
Host: Scot Singpiel, Mitch Sears
Guest: John Smith, MD, Jeremy Biggs, MD
Producer: Scot Singpiel, Mitch Sears
Connect with 'Who Cares About Men's Health'
Email: hello@thescoperadio.com