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The first time I couldn't get up the ladder, I told my apprentice my back went out. It hadn't. I've torn off probably 800 roofs in my life and I know what a back going out feels like. It feels like someone shoved a knife between your spine and your kidney and twisted. This wasn't that. This was something else. This was my legs forgetting how to hold me up. My name is Greg. I'm 53. I'm a roofer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I've been on roofs since I was 17 years old. My dad was a roofer. His dad framed houses but did roofs in the summer to make extra money. I started Helton Roofing with my brother Dale in 1998 and we've been the guys you call in Allen County when a tree comes down on your garage or the shingles you put on in the 90s finally give up. I'm telling you this because I want you to understand something before I tell you the rest of the story. Roofing is not a job. It's a body. You don't roof for 36 years and have a body left over for other things. You spend your whole life giving pieces of yourself to other people's houses. Your knees go to the pitch. Your back goes to the bundles. Your shoulders go to the nail gun. Your hands go to the heat and the cold and the splinters and the cuts. You know going in that you're trading. You just don't know what the bill's going to look like when it comes due. Mine came due on a Tuesday morning in May of last year, on a tear off in Aboite Township, on a ranch house with a 6/12 pitch and three layers of shingles that had to come off before lunch. My apprentice that day was a kid named Tyler. 22 years old. Been with us about a year. Good kid, dumb in the way 22 year olds are dumb, hard worker, the kind of guy who'd jump off the truck and start tearing into something before I'd even finished telling him what we were doing. We pulled up at 7:15. Tyler dropped the trailer. I went to set the ladder. I want you to picture the ladder. 24 footer. Aluminum. The kind I've climbed maybe 40,000 times in my life. I could climb that ladder in my sleep. I have climbed it half asleep, hungover, with a fever, with a cut on my hand bleeding into my work glove, with my back so locked up I couldn't sit down. I started up. Rung one. Rung two. Rung three. Rung four, my right leg just quit. It wasn't pain. It was worse than that. The strength went out of it all at once, like the wires between my brain and my leg got cut. I told my leg to push me up to the next rung. It didn't push. I told it again. Nothing. There was just no power in it. I was four rungs up a ladder with my left foot on rung four and my right foot trying to get to rung five and not getting there, because the leg that was supposed to lift me had nothing left to lift with. I looked down. Tyler was at the bottom holding the ladder, staring up at me with a confused look on his face. I said, "Come up here a second." He climbed up behind me. I told him my back went out. I said I needed help getting down. He believed me because why wouldn't he. We got me down. I sat on the tailgate of the truck for 20 minutes. Tyler ran to the gas station and got me a Gatorade. I told him to call Dale and have him send another guy. I drove home that afternoon with the worst feeling I have ever had in my life sitting in the seat next to me. It wasn't pain. It was a question. The question was: Am I done? I'm going to back up and tell you about the year before, because the ladder wasn't really the moment things broke. The ladder was the moment I had to admit they'd already broken. Things had been going wrong for about 18 months. It started in my hands. I'd be holding a nail gun and my grip would just give out around the trigger. Not painfully. The strength just wasn't there. I'd have to put the gun down and shake my hand out for a minute and then go back to it. I figured it was the cold. We were in the middle of a January and I was pulling 10 hour days in 22 degree weather. Then it was my shoulders. I'd be carrying a bundle of shingles up a ladder, 80 pounds on my shoulder, and halfway up the arm holding it would start to fail, like the strength was draining straight out of it. I'd get to the top and have to set the bundle down and roll my shoulder for a minute before I could move it right. Then it was my hips and legs. I'd be sitting on the ridge of a roof drinking coffee on a break and when I went to stand up, I couldn't push myself up. The legs that had carried me up and down ladders for 36 years didn't have the push in them anymore. I'd have to grab the ridge with both hands and pull myself up like an old man getting out of a recliner. I was 52 years old. 52 is not old. My dad was working roofs at 67. My uncle Bert was on a ladder at 71. The guy who taught me how to swing a hammer, a man named Ralph who passed in 2011, was nailing down shingles at 74 and only stopped because his wife made him. 52 is not old in the roofing world. But my body was acting like 70. I went to my doctor. Dr. Reisman. He's been my doctor since the kids were in elementary school. Good guy. Late 50s. Plays golf. The kind of doctor who listens for about four minutes and then writes something down and tells you to lose weight. I told him about my hands. My shoulders. My hips. My legs, which had started doing the thing where they felt dead and heavy for the first 20 minutes of every morning and then loosened up a little after I got moving. He nodded. He moved my arms around. He pressed on my knees. He had me bend forward and touch my toes. I got down to my shins. He sat back on his stool and said, "Greg, I'm going to be straight with you. You're 52 years old, you've been roofing since high school, and you're paying the bill. There's nothing structurally wrong here. This is wear and tear. This is what 36 years of roofs looks like." I said, "What do I do about it?" He said, "You can take ibuprofen for the aches. You can do some stretching. You can eat more protein. You can think about getting off the roof and into the office side of the business." He said it like it was nothing. Like he was telling me to switch from a hardback to a softer chair. Get off the roof. I drove home that day in a kind of fog I'd never been in before. Get off the roof. The roof was where I lived. The roof was the only thing I'd ever been good at. My brother handles the books, the bidding, the customer calls. I do the work. I climb. I tear off. I lay down felt. I shingle. I'm the guy on the ladder. Get off the roof was the same as saying get out of your own life. I didn't tell my wife Patty. I didn't tell Dale. I just started taking the ibuprofen for the aches that came riding along with all of it. Three in the morning. Three at lunch. Three before bed. Sometimes a fourth set when I got home if my knees were really yelling. For about a month it helped. Took the edge off enough that I could keep moving. Then it stopped helping. The aches came back through the medicine like water through a screen door, and the weakness underneath them never stopped getting worse. So I doubled the dose. Six in the morning. Six at lunch. Six at night. About six weeks into that, my stomach started bleeding. I didn't know that's what it was at first. I thought I had a stomach bug. Then the toilet bowl was black one morning and Patty saw it before I could flush. We went to the ER. They told me I had two ulcers in my stomach. They told me to stop the ibuprofen immediately or I'd be on the operating table inside a year. I stopped the ibuprofen. The aches came roaring back inside 48 hours, and the weakness kept right on going, worse than before, like it had been waiting in the closet the whole time and now it was loose in the house. That's when the ladder thing happened. I'm sitting on the tailgate of my truck in Aboite Township that Tuesday morning, leg not working, Gatorade in my hand, and I'm doing math in my head. The mortgage. The truck payment. Dale's kid is going to Purdue in the fall. Patty's been talking about retiring in five years. We've got a granddaughter, our daughter Megan's little girl Hailey, she's 4 years old and she calls me Pop and I am her favorite person on this earth. How am I supposed to be Pop if I can't pick her up? How am I supposed to take her fishing at Cedarville Reservoir like I told her I would, when I can't push myself up off the ground after I kneel down to bait the hook? How am I supposed to walk her down the aisle if she ever gets that far, when I can barely get up off the porch step? I sat on that tailgate for 20 minutes and I felt every year of every roof come down on top of me at once. Then I drove home. I told Patty that night. The whole thing. The hands, the shoulders, the hips, the ladder, Reisman telling me to get off the roof. The ulcers. The math. She didn't say anything for a long time. She got up and made me a sandwich and put it in front of me. Then she sat down across from me at the kitchen table and she said something that's stuck with me. She said, "Greg, you need to stop trying to bandage this. You need to figure out what's actually going on inside you." I didn't know what she meant. I don't think she knew what she meant either. But the sentence stuck. Two weeks later, our neighbor Kenny came by to borrow the pressure washer. Kenny is 56. Lives three houses down. He used to work at the GM plant in Roanoke before they shut it down. After the plant closed he started a small landscaping operation, mowing yards and doing fall cleanups for the neighborhood. He has hands like leather and a permanent farmer's tan and a Chevy with 230,000 miles on it. I was on the porch when he came up the driveway. I was sitting because standing too long made my legs give out under me. He came up the steps and stopped on the second one and looked at me. He said, "You look terrible." I said, "Thanks, Kenny." He sat down on the step. He said, "What's going on with you?" So I told him. Most of it. Not the part about Hailey. The rest of it. Kenny listened. He pulled a piece of dried grass out of his pant cuff and rolled it between his fingers while he listened. When I was done he said, "Greg. You remember the year I couldn't get out of my truck?" I did remember. About four years ago Kenny had a stretch of about eight months where he was in real bad shape. No strength in his legs. His arms going. He'd be sitting in his truck at the end of a job and his wife would have to come out to the driveway to help him get the door open and his legs out. I'd forgotten about it because Kenny had been fine for years now. Mowing his yards. Climbing in and out of the truck like a 30 year old. I said, "Yeah. What happened? You ever figure that out?" He looked at me and said, "My wife's sister put me onto something. Couple of compounds out of the research. The kind of thing your doctor never mentions." I almost laughed. A supplement. I'm sitting there with two ulcers and legs that won't hold me and Kenny is telling me about some powder. He saw the look on my face. He said, "Greg. I'm telling you. I was where you are. I was about to sell the truck and the mower and the trailer. I was looking at signing up for a desk job at the Lowe's in Jefferson Pointe. My wife's sister, Linda, she lives outside of Indianapolis, she'd been on this stuff for about a year for her own strength problems and she sent me a tub. Said try it for two months. If nothing changes, throw it out." I said, "And?" He said, "Eight weeks in, I was getting in and out of the truck on my own again. Twelve weeks in, I was mowing again. I've been on it three and a half years now. I'm 56 years old and I climbed a 12 foot ladder yesterday to clean Mrs. Henderson's gutters and my legs didn't say a word." He told me what it was. Two compounds. One called Leucine, one called Velositol. Said his sister in law had told him they came out of the research on muscle loss, the stuff nobody in America's doctor ever mentions. Said the brand he took was called Muscle Defense, from a company called Apex Labs. Said Linda had picked it because it was sourced and tested in the U.S. and the company had a money back guarantee. He left the pressure washer cleaner than I expected and he walked back down the driveway and I sat on the porch for another hour thinking. That night I got on my laptop after Patty went to bed. I'm going to tell you what I learned because nobody at Reisman's office ever explained any of this to me, and I think for guys like me, guys who've been told it's wear and tear and aging and there's nothing structural wrong, this stuff matters. The thing they don't tell you about losing your strength like this is that the muscle you can see isn't the whole story. The weakness is where you feel it. But what's causing it is happening at a level you can't see, in the cells that are supposed to be rebuilding that muscle every single day. Here's the part nobody explained to me. Your muscle isn't a fixed thing. Your body is tearing it down and building it back, constantly, your whole life. And the building takes energy. A lot of it. There are two things that go wrong as you get older, and they stack on top of each other. The first is the engines. Inside every muscle cell are tiny engines called mitochondria that produce the energy for all that rebuilding. As you age, especially if you've been hard on your body for decades, those engines wear down. They run rough. They make less power. And a cell with no power can't rebuild muscle, no matter how much protein you shovel at it. The second is the fuel line. Even the protein you do eat stops getting into the cell the way it used to. It just passes through. So you're eating more and getting less, and the muscle keeps shrinking right off your bones. What ibuprofen does is mask the ache that comes riding along with all of it. It works in the short term. But it does nothing about the engines or the fuel line. And it tears holes in your stomach lining as the price of admission, which is how I ended up with two ulcers. Those two compounds Kenny told me about are interesting because they work on both sides of the problem. Leucine has been studied for the way it protects those little engines and triggers the body to build new ones. It puts the power back. Velositol has been studied for the way it opens the fuel line, so the muscle actually pulls in and uses the nutrients you give it instead of letting them pass straight through. What that translates to in plain English is that one of them gets the engine running again, and the other one makes sure the fuel reaches it. And when both of those things happen, the cell can finally do its job again. It can rebuild the muscle. The strength comes back. I read about it for three nights straight. Down the rabbit hole. Studies on Leucine. Studies on Velositol. Trials on older adults gaining back the strength and muscle they'd lost. The information was just sitting there. Nobody had ever told me about it. Not Reisman. Not the ER doctor who told me to stop the ibuprofen. Not a single person in 36 years of working a body to the bone. And here's the part that got me. Most of the protein tubs they sell to men our age have a little Leucine sprinkled in for the label and no real Velositol at all, nowhere near the doses the research used. So you buy the tub, you choke down the chalk, nothing happens, and you decide the whole idea is a scam. The one Kenny had, with both of them at the doses that actually do something, is Muscle Defense. I ordered a tub of it on a Friday night. It came the following Wednesday. One scoop in my coffee with breakfast. That's it. The first two weeks I was honestly waiting for nothing to happen. I'd been let down by enough things at that point that I was already planning on returning it. Week three, something changed in my hands. I noticed it on a Monday morning, getting dressed. Buttoning my shirt. The buttons used to be a small daily fight, my fingers too weak to push them through. That morning I just buttoned my shirt and walked out of the bedroom. I didn't realize I'd done it until I was halfway through breakfast. I told Patty. She said, "Don't jinx it." Week five, the dead heavy feeling in my legs in the morning got shorter. Used to be 20 minutes of moving around before I felt like I had any strength in them. Then it was 15. Then it was 10. Week seven, I climbed a ladder. I want to tell you about that ladder because it's the moment my life pivoted. It was a small job. A neighbor down the street, Mrs. Cordova, asked me to look at a leak around her chimney. I told Patty I was just going to look. I drove over with Tyler. I was honestly going to climb up two rungs, take a picture with my phone, and come back down. I went up two rungs. Then four. Then six. Then I was on the roof. I walked the perimeter. I crouched down at the chimney flashing. I crouched down, and then I stood back up. Under my own power. My legs lifted me the way they were supposed to. They lifted me like I was 35 years old. I sat down on the ridge of Mrs. Cordova's roof and I looked out over the neighborhood and I cried. Tyler was at the bottom of the ladder. He didn't see me. I'm glad. I came down the ladder one rung at a time, slow, the way I'd been coming down ladders for two years, but my legs held me the whole way. My hips weren't locking. My shoulders weren't giving out. I came down a ladder like a man. That was nine months ago. I'm still on the roof. I picked up Hailey at her preschool last Thursday. She runs at me when I come into the lobby and I scoop her up and put her on my hip and walk out to the truck. I haven't done that in three years. Megan watched me do it and she got quiet in the kind of way mothers get quiet when something they didn't think would happen happens. Patty asked me on Sunday if I was thinking about retiring early. I said, "Patty, I just got back to work." I want to say one more thing. There's a particular kind of feeling that comes with being a man who works with his hands and starts losing them. It's not just the weakness. It's the identity. You spend your whole life being the guy who can fix it, lift it, climb it, carry it. And then one day you're standing four rungs up a ladder and your leg won't push and you realize you're becoming somebody you don't recognize. Somebody who needs help. Somebody who watches. That's worse than anything. I lost about 18 months to that feeling. I don't get those months back. I don't get the day Hailey wanted me to lift her up onto the kitchen counter to help bake cookies and I had to tell her Pop couldn't. I don't get the day my brother had to take a job I should have been on because I couldn't climb the ladder. But I get the rest. And if you're a roofer or a plumber or a mechanic or a framer or anybody whose body is the tool you use to feed your family, and your legs are starting to quit on you in the morning, and your grip is starting to go, and your doctor is telling you it's wear and tear and to think about a desk job, I want you to know there's another way to think about this. The weakness in your body isn't the whole story. The story is the little engines in your muscle cells running down, and the fuel that's supposed to rebuild you not getting where it needs to go, quietly, for years, while you were giving everything you had to other people's houses. Muscle Defense supports the system that's supposed to keep that running. One scoop in your coffee a day. 60 day money back guarantee. If your body doesn't tell you something is different inside two months, you send it back and you don't pay a dime. Kenny told me to try it for two months. I'm telling you the same thing. You traded a lot for the work you do. It doesn't have to be the trade you thought it was. 👉 alphanutritionboost.com/special-offer-fr-135/ P.S. Tyler is on the roof beside me again. He never asked me what really happened that day in Aboite Township. I think he knew. He's a good kid. I told him on a roof in Huntington a couple weeks ago, both of us sitting on the ridge eating a sandwich, what had actually been going on. I told him about the two compounds. He laughed. Then he stopped laughing. He told me his dad, who's a millwright in Decatur, has been having the same kind of year I had. Hands. Shoulders. Legs giving out. He asked me to write the name down for him. I wrote it on the back of a Helton Roofing card and he put it in his wallet. He texted me last week. His dad's been on it three weeks. His dad walked the dog Saturday morning for the first time since November. P.P.S. The 60 day money back guarantee is what got me to try it and it's what I want you to think about. When Reisman told me to take ibuprofen and the ibuprofen tore holes in my stomach, nobody offered me a refund on the ulcers. When I lost 18 months of work to a body that quit on me, nobody offered me a refund on the months. The supplement aisle at Walgreens doesn't offer refunds. Doctors don't offer refunds. The only people I've ever found who offer to refund a thing that doesn't work are the people who actually believe in what they're selling. Try it for two months. If it doesn't move the needle, send it back. You're risking nothing. I risked 18 months. Don't do that. P.P.P.S. If you're a tradesman and you've been quietly thinking about getting off the tools, if you've been telling your wife your back is fine when it isn't, if you've been letting the younger guy on the crew do the work you used to do, if you've been sitting in the truck at the end of the day for an extra ten minutes before your legs will hold you, this is what I want to tell you. You traded your body for your work. You don't get to undo the trade. But you might be able to renegotiate it. A scoop in your coffee. 36 years of roofs. A 4 year old granddaughter who calls me Pop. A ladder I climbed last Thursday on a tear off in New Haven, all the way up, no help, no story to tell my apprentice. That's the renegotiation. That's what's available. 👉 alphanutritionboost.com/special-offer-fr-135/