Life After Olympia: Fatherhood, TRT & Finding Purpose - Chris Bumstead - #1006

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You've stopped competing, and you're more tired than ever. How's retirement going?

**Chris Bumstead** (0:05)
It's a great question.
It's a very broad question to start. I don't even know where to dive into that. It's both good and bad in different ways, I would say. It's interesting because when people ask me if I miss competing, especially right now with the Olympic coming up, it's like there's parts that I miss, but I don't wish I was doing it. I trained with Ryan Terry and seeing the mindset he's in, remembering the pressure I felt and everything that came with it. I was like, I don't wish I was there right now, but there's aspects I miss. I'm happy with my decision, but there's also a lot of feeling of lost in direction, and what am I doing? Where am I going right now? I feel like I filled that up with a lot of busy work, I feel like in the last year. It had been business, it had been being a dad, there's been just moving on to one thing to another, and I haven't slowed down to really process. Life is very different now. You had 10 years of chasing a single goal of being the best in the world at one thing, that was eat, sleep, train, and now it's gone. So it's definitely been interesting, but I feel like the fact that I'm feeling a lot now in terms of a bit of stress, this tired in my body, this somatic experience that I might not have had before, it shows that things are coming up that might have been masked by the overwhelming pressure of competing. So there was this side of me discovering the new side of myself, like this ego death of like, bodybuilding is gone now, who are you? And then there's this other part of my life that's like the most incredible aspect, which is being a father now. My daughter's getting old enough to say my name. Me and my wife are getting the hang of things, we're really starting to find our groove in that. So it's like the most beautiful thing in my life and I feel like they're kind of balancing each other out. But it's still not like neutral peace.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
I've heard you say physically and emotionally, you don't feel much until you slow down.

**Chris Bumstead** (1:54)
Yeah. That was a big awakening for this year for me. I feel like year after year after year, it's like Olympia, hero's journey. Kind of compete, come down, go through it, some type of adverse event, come through it again, win, high, back down, repeat, repeat, repeat. I was never able to really experience things and I feel like what I really found out about myself recently is that I constantly feel like I need to improve something in myself, like I constantly need more, I need to progress at something, I need to make my health better, I need to do X more. I was channeling that heavily into bodybuilding, which made me an incredible bodybuilder. But what once drove me started to drain me over time, so it was kind of started to alter and now slowing down and not having that singular goal I was working towards, I realized now I'm trying to find all these other external things to progress in, as if I need to be proving myself that I'm getting better and better, and I can't just rest and be good enough as things are. I don't think I would have experienced that if I hadn't actually properly retired and stepped away from it. So it's one of the journeys currently experiencing.

**Chris Williamson** (2:56)
Lots of things get hidden under momentum and bravado and attention and chaos. You hide all of the quiet fleeting thoughts. No, shut up. I don't need to listen to you. Quiet down, subconscious. I've got a competition to win or a podcast record or whatever.

**Chris Bumstead** (3:15)
I can go to the gym. I can focus on eating. I do this. Don't think about it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:18)
You get pulled through those little fleeting thoughts with the momentum. And then, yeah. Oh, fuck. All of those fleeting thoughts are kind of, they're not drowned out as easily anymore.

**Chris Bumstead** (3:33)
No, I definitely had this like selective emotional efficiency where I could like understand what was important to me and how to actively work towards the things and like practical capabilities of applying specific things. You know, like bodybuilding is important. Prioritize life for that. It makes me feel better to do these physical things, X, Y, and Z, but I wasn't really feeling the things I needed to feel in the same way. So like the practical capabilities of understanding emotion and lining up life so I was in a good place with good, but the ability to express the good and the bad through it, the kind of messier side of things, wasn't really my expertise. And it put me in the state of like constant hypervigilance that could be easily hidden from by momentum and competing. And I could fuel energy and more success and more and more and more. And I was falling forward and going good. But eventually I was just tired. You know, it was like this lack of deep rest. And like it's the joke that I have the worst HRV ever. My average is 29 and now we're chilling. That's going on the way up. And I don't know if that's even connected to it, but I don't need to have an HRV on my wrist to tell me that like, they're like, do you feel calm? I'm like, yeah, do you feel stressed? Not really. But like, have you had deep rest recently? Have you felt deeply calm and at peace? And it's like, not really, you know, cause it's constantly moving through that thing and that state of hypervigilance of am I safe to express this emotion or am I trying to control progress forward and the practical capabilities to be perfect and progressing in my life so I feel like I'm doing enough rather than just sitting in the moment of what I need to feel. To me, I feel like I've been rewarded heavily for that side of practical capability, but still the expression of emotion, the going through things rather than learning, felt very like high risk, low reward for me. So my body just as a way to protect hid from it. But being constantly hypervigilant means you're constantly on, constantly kind of stressed, aware, even if I'm not aware of it, it's like subconsciously happening.