YouTube podcast episode (Whole Man Academy EP107) featuring David Vaux, a second‑generation London Fire Brigade firefighter and osteopath with a special interest in strength and movement. Conversational transcript covers career anecdotes (responding to a distressed man on Chelsea Bridge), day‑to‑day station life, the physical/mental demands of firefighting, tactical‑athlete framing, and practical advice on strength preservation and training across middle age (importance of resistance training, frequency suggestions). Tone is colloquial and candid.
Second generation firefighter in the London Fire Brigade. Whole Man Academy podcast. David Vogue. What was the most fun thing about being in the fire service?
People's advisors were melting.
Wow.
Whole Man Academy. The hardest six months of my life, man. The hardest six months of my life.
Osteopath with a special interest in strength and movement, which we just went back.
To the fire station, made a cup of tea and nobody talks about it. And I was sitting there, you know, my eyes like that, thinking, performing at a very high level as what's being called now a tactical athlete.
Push yourself, you know, to challenge yourself sometimes to see where your limit is.
A young man who was quite distressed, he was threatening to jump off of Chelsea Bridge. If we'd have come off then we would have both fallen 100 foot into the River Thames and I don't think we would have come up. And if you're in asleep and the bells go, there's a sickening drop in your stomach just through the sheer bolt upright and you want to move and you go down the pole into your kit onto the fire engine. I had been institutionalized. Looking across at people who are fucking around in the lessons and they're 18, they don't know any better. And I'm like thinking, why aren't you doing fucking press ups, you know, why aren't you fucking out there doing, you know, running up and down until I say stop? Strength preservation. This is what you need to be doing for the rest of your life. Dude, you're 45. You 50. Get on it now, but do some strength training as well. Yeah, Twice a week, three times a week, Standalone activity.
Kind of suffer from the dad bod. The testosterone drops off.
All those things coalesce in middle aged traditionally. And that's the very time when you don't want to be dropping off in terms of resistance training. It's kind of the perfect storm. As you get older, I think you've got to train clever. You've got to be your expert on yourself. You pair of trousers I got when I was about 35. If I can get into those trousers, I'm in shape actually, why don't you just fuck off. I'm going to be here.
