Mark Sisson | Eating And Exercising For Longevity, Going With The Flow, And Picking Your Battles

[Music] marxism back on the hot seat usually we have a very tight agenda for our podcast we did a great one covering the book two meals a day go watch that video listen to that show and this time there's some uh loose ends lying around usually we get to talking when we're sitting at lunch or doing a workout or something so i wanted to bring some of these uh hot topics of the health and fitness scene especially the breaking insights and ways that we're progressing our thinking and see what you think okay let's do it i mean all i got is opinions and uh the first one that comes to mind is this idea that the uh the story of insulin resistance metabolic syndrome is not quite as simple as what we've been talking about for so long that you eat too many carbs you produce too much insulin and you store fat yeah well i mean that's uh easy for a lot of people understand and it was kind of the driving force behind our initial recommendation to cut carbs and in cutting carbs you get control of insulin and you're getting control of insulin sort of all the other hormones fall into place leptin ghrelin glucagon all these other contributory hormones fall into place if you can if you can get insulin under control and recently new information new new research shows that the inclusion of these uh potentially harmful industrial seed oils in our diet may be more insidious and causing more harm than we ever suspected especially in light of or in in the realm of uh insulin resistance so soybean oil canola oil corn oil uh these these uh highly processed oils that are high in uh omega-6 fats that contain um damaged polyunsaturated fatty acids that can be incorporated into they're they're really not combusted as fuel the way other fats might be combusted uh they're often incorporated into cells and may you know impact the way mitochondria function so they may impede mitochondrial function which in turn has an impact on insulin resistance so the insulin resistance thing is still a critical concern and it's something that we want to address uh and we want to include uh the elimination of industrial seed oils in addition to the cutting back on sugars and processed grains and things like that so you're consuming these seed oils and it interferes with healthy fat burning burning of healthy uh fat cells right and if you can't burn fat and you try to go cut carbs and go keto and you'll be miserable you you um you'll you'll default over to simple requirements on the dietary carbs yeah yeah since you're not good at burning stored body fat no exactly it's just uh you know catch 22 in the worst way it's a it's a perfect storm of the insulin resistance locking the the fat in inside the fat cells and uh the bloodstream lacking in its uh access to an energy substrate and then causing the brain to go seek out this simple carbohydrate that it's become so reliant on and there therefore we wind up consuming these you know super palatable highly um you know uh infused with sugar and and and processed carbs uh and then you know where we start down this roller coaster of carb dependency that many of us never get off of uh so the super palatable foods the happier palatable foods um kate shanahan's been doing a great job talking about this in association with the seed oils rob wolf and wired to eat making these points that the over consumption of this is inevitable because these are foods that are never found in nature where you're putting fat right and simple sugars together and it kind of hijacks the the appetite the reward center in the brain yeah so the brain typically never really gets a sensation that it's time to stop eating it just continuously stays hungry because the types of food that people are consuming because they're hyper palatable because they're they're they're overly processed uh they don't have the same impact on the satiety systems that would otherwise say all right you know that's enough i i'm full i feel great i don't need to eat anymore um which is what happens with um you know uh natural real foods that we promote so much in primal blueprint and keto reset and all the other the books that we've done so yeah they um you know this this hijacking of the uh of the satiety systems is a big thing for a lot of people uh let's see can we think of any examples of pairing fat and sugar together ice cream yeah pizza um uh you know chips just about anything in a box wrapped frozen processed all the things we love the hot fudge sundae yeah and and you know the uh early on in the days of uh paleo and primal when the message got out that there are the fat is not the enemy and fat is you know not the proximate cause of heart disease by itself and that and that we should we would be uh um well served by eating more fat i think people really liked hearing that and so they ate more fat but they didn't cut back on the sugar and and so it doesn't even have to be in the form of of uh ice cream um you know it can be it's something is simple it doesn't in others it doesn't even have to be the two things in the same food it could just be the two things in the same meal right so you can have a high-fat meal and then follow it up with uh you know a lot of bread or processed carbohydrates that turns the glucose and you've you pretty much accomplished the same thing that you would have right with a bowl of ice cream which is you've offset this wonderful trend and tendency toward becoming a fat burning beast and now you you've you've just all you've done is increased your insulin and the tendency to store excess calories is fat uh you're talking about an omelette with some orange juice or a bowl of oatmeal exactly seemingly good choices because they are nutritious or whatever we've been told but boy that's a challenge because you're kind of going uh with a heavy rejection of carbs and then still going into this keto scene and this thing that have people have a lot of difficulty with but interestingly there's research that these extremely low fat diets where you're just consuming carbs and don't have any fat to store yeah because you're not eating your food they actually work they work yeah temporarily i would argue sure but i mean the concept is the same even though it's it's a mostly carbohydrate diet and the calories are are sort of uh controlled for in some regard the fact that you're not including a lot of fat or any fat in this case um you know you you've approached the issue of insulin sensitivity from a from the completely opposite spectrum one is like a very high fat diet with low carbohydrate the other is a high carbohydrate diet with low fat but it's all natural food it's real food in both cases and they can both work but it's when you combine the two and try to get away with both that you really get into trouble and i think a lot of people in the paleo community a lot of people have primal you know ancestral health world even in the keto community um you know they'll spend a day or or maybe a meal doing really well and then and then have dessert or have something that would that would um you know not just kick them out of keto but have that that impact of raising insulin and and kind of derailing the the entire effort of of improving metabolic flexibility through the manipulation of either removing the carbs in the case of a high-fat diet or or sticking to a fairly strict high-carb diet without the fat like the uh the uh the cyclic ketogenic folks who go hardcore during the week and then go binge on the weekend i think um jacob wilson the florida guy did some research and the people uh were in keto strict keto eating for five days allowed to go off on the weekend and have their pizza and ice cream and then they went back and it took them five days to get back into ketosis to the point where they had their next pizza served up so it was a total disaster yeah they lost muscle mass and they gained fat yep yeah so again you know we have all this information we have all this research and we can draw upon it and we can craft uh a dietary you know uh way of eating that suits us individually but you have to really pay attention to the science and make sure that when you do eliminate certain things from your diet or do agree to include other things that you do it in a way that's that's following the research and generating the sort of results that you're seeking and as we said not not somehow you know grabbing the best of of two different ways of eating two different books on your shelf combining them in one and then and then wondering why you don't get results yeah i mean it does help me reconcile some of this confusion and controversy from the other side where our buddy rick esselstyn one of the leaders of the plant-based movement he's doing fantastic work he motivates people to eat healthy colorful foods of the earth and you know a devoted restriction of all kinds of fat including that nasty olive oil and just you know a different approach but they have people who have lost weight feel great reverse heart disease with his father's work at cleveland clinic and i'm wondering you know if that works for you long term and you're just happy to eat your leaves and your beans and your rice um some people are some people are and you don't come up with nutritional deficiencies or things that you're not getting from the animal kingdom if you're really diligent about it it's not guaranteed that you will have problems right you know but you have to be diligent in these covered full b12 and whatever else yeah yeah okay so i think uh relatedly when we're trying to think deeper about this uh theory of metabolic dysfunction the research from dr hermann ponzer's new book called burn when he went out and studied the hadza and came up with this uh pretty uh breakthrough insight that humans have a ceiling on their daily caloric expenditure and we find a way to down regulate caloric expenditure if we're a fitness freak burning so many calories in the gym well we find a way when we're not working out to down regulate the rest so in other words you're burning calories in the gym and as a result if we have this allowance this daily allowance of calories uh then what the body does is it says oh my god you know you work two hours in the gym and you burn you know 1575 calories so we're going to kind of down regulate how we burn calories throughout the rest of the day so you'll notice uh when we were you know when we were training we were trained hard and we'd have to take a nap right and just do nothing for the rest of the day because that was the body's you know it wasn't as if training hard you know gave you three or four or five thousand calories worth of output for the day and then you kept your same metabolic rate and you know you were because how could you how could you even you know maintain a body weight that way so the body has this amazing reserve that just says okay if i spend all these calories here i got to conserve all these calories there and it's it's really interesting science because then it gets into you know what is it about people that then has them unable to lose weight when they seemingly are on diets right how come they're not able to lose weight if the body is still burning the same number of calories throughout the day per my online calculation of my caloric burn right right and you know it may be that um any amount of exercise you're trying to do and any amount of uh sacrifice you're trying to make in the name of of of adhering to a restricted eating program works for a short period of time but then the brain just gets kind of sidetracked and and looks for those hyperpalatable foods those quick sources of of cheap calories that get stored as um either glycogen or body fat pretty quickly and um you know so there's a it again it speaks to to the idea that we should always be eating real food as opposed to these packaged crunchy salty fatty sweet hyper palatable foods and besides the adjusting of the the calorie burning with a more relaxed day we have that great graphic in two meals a day where and we did the calculations to verify this yeah uh the saturday was 100 mile bike ride uh watching nfl all afternoon when you get back and eating uh an extra pint of ice cream and two extra servings of pasta and then sunday was gardening walking the dog around the block and having your regular meals and it was a complete it was a complete wash like the 100-mile bike ride did nothing nothing to offset contribute to that yeah yeah chris kelly nourish balance thrive made a great point on this matter when he said um locomotion reproduction repair and growth are a zero-sum game so if you borrow a lot from one yeah you're gonna come at the expense so locomotion let's say you and i training for five hours a day yeah um we were we were uh that's so funny there you are uh on the screen coming up right there running that's pretty funny i mean uh but thinking back you know my testosterone yeah blood levels when i was an athlete in my 20s and my supposedly endocrine primes were those of an old man right and now i'm 55 and they're four to five times higher because i'm not borrowing so much on the locomotion side yeah and then repair and all that your immune function all that stuff gets compromised i mean i'll give you one better so you and i uh the last couple of days i went for a hard paddle out in the ocean two days ago and took a lot out of me and i was kind of dragging ass the rest of the day and then you and i did a hard ride on the sand uh yesterday and uh and it was like literally like we we did nothing today and it was because we were you know the body was just like i wasn't gonna try and force myself to work out today because that's my body saying look i gotta i gotta compensate for the hard work that we did the other day yeah you know yeah does that make sense oh my gosh it's it's not into the brains of the human yet and i think we're all in the back of our minds thinking we have to get out there and burn some energy to maintain fitness yeah and there's the assumption that um that you have to do it all the time and that and there's the assumption that you can plow through it so there so in the old days you know we would have gotten up today and said geez i'm beat up from the workout yesterday in the workout the day before but let's go run 15 because that's on the plan yeah right and and now i'm like no that's not i don't feel compelled to do that i'm listening to my human body my you know my my genetic recipe that wants me to be healthy and it's telling me today is a day to take it easy yeah and in i guess in a separate category is that obligation to just engage in general movement yeah and you've always said it's not about the calories it's about the movement which means well which means uh you know we we still moved around a lot today but you know walking and means um some easy stretching sometimes it means uh changing positions when you're sitting uh getting up every once in a while walking around the room uh it's it's it's not a complex equation and it's easy to do um to find ways to just move about and again as long as people understand that it that it isn't uh contemplated to have you burn calories this is not about burning calories it's just about moving through time and space yeah and and doing you know articulated movements that your body is designed to do uh for an assortment of benefits that are well i mean it's sort of related to uh your body composition goals because you burn fat better right when you get up and move not because of the the the numbers involved but just the efficiency versus wanting to snack all day because you've been sitting around uh stuck in an office and i think um katie bowman makes a good distinction between cardiovascular fitness which we developed peddling those bikes through the deep sand and cranking that heart so we can become a fitter bicycle writer but then there's cardiovascular health which is the relative you know functioning of the cells throughout your body and mechanotransduction i think is her term where you know are are your cells healthy at exchanging oxygen and burning energy and those are things that are separate from the one hour that you put in or if you're training two hours a day that's still a small fraction of the time the time of how you're using your body yeah i mean we're you know we're off off camera we're talking about the sort of the the balance between six packs and having a six pack low body fat body and longevity and are they you know are they um in parallel as you go through life or are they it's sometimes in conflict and i think quite often they're in conflict uh that the work you do to develop that extra um loss of body fat um it has a cost as we as you know as you said the locomotion the reproduction the you know the the the different functions that the body has to sort of allocate resources to and if it gets too much in one area it takes from another that's one of the things that's happening with people who are going overboard trying to get the you know the the cover of shape magazine body or these or the eight pack abs or whatever uh some people just aren't genetically pre-wired or predisposed to achieving that without a ton of work and a ton of potential cost to to the rest to their health so not everybody uh is going to be well served by by going through life with a miss eight percent body fat for instance well with the bigger picture of where fitness comes in with your longevity goals we now know on the cardiovascular side oh my gosh the the bar is so freaking low that it's a joke i mean all the all the race businesses would be out of out of business if we knew uh dr james o'keefe one of the leaders here saying that you know a couple hours a week of cardio exercise at the right heart rate is sufficient to get you guess an a plus score score an a plus score and by the way extra extra credit drops your score down right the more that you do um after a certain point of you know supporting diminishing returns and then it falls off and they become negative returns so uh and i felt that for a long a long way a long time um which is why i don't i haven't run very much in the last uh you know 20 years um you know riding the bike i do it for my legs i happen to get cardio in the process of riding the bike but i'm doing it for my quads and my butt and my you know lower body um primarily especially when we're going in the sand and doing that hard stuff well uh everything's a bit of a cardio workout is a new insight that's come up yeah and kind of uh negating the importance of going to the gym for the express purpose of working out your heart and lungs while doing something uh you know rudimentary like and boring the stairs pouring yeah yeah and possibly uh risking overuse patterns with the case of jogging and chronic chronic repetitive motion stuff right yeah i mean you're it's absolutely true everything we do uh that that takes effort it takes uh increased amounts of energy uh calls the cardiovascular system into play calls upon it to supply oxygen for the heart to beat faster and do all these things so we really i think don't have to think that much about doing uh actual cardio stuff which is once again why the other day i just decided um uh you know my two sort of hard days in a row was like it's too much for my heart like i don't need to work my heart out yeah you know i got to figure out a way to work the rest of my body out and give my heart almost give my heart a rest especially if i'm thinking in terms of longevity um and it does call into question the prevailing goals of the endurance community here and i like to uh make the wise crack that we'd all be better off if the distances were halved so that the marathon was 13.1 miles instead of 26. who said 26. that was some greek messenger spirit or whatever yeah yeah and um the iron man was three random events put together right you know right just borrow them bet right right um but we're we're still seeing these over training patterns that are incredibly common and even in the in the casual enthusiast putting all that time into climbing the stairs when if you look at what's going on let's say when they're going and trying to build muscle mass and going through the stations right with these long breaks in between the heart still probably double resting heart rate when you're in between a set and talking to somebody and then you're going back and putting out more work to build muscle mass yeah so it could it could transition the goals into something that's more broad than needing to pound this heart every single day yeah no i mean you know i just read uh a little piece about the tarahumara indians in the copper canyon who are featured in born to run uh and and it turns out they don't really train for these 50-mile races that they do um in fact they're supposed to not train and then do these races based on their lifestyle and just based on how they live and based on like it's almost like i guess cheating to train because it's more of a spiritual experience as part of this race um so you know i i as i like to tell people i train for life now so i don't need to train for 10k i'm not going to enter 10k but i train to be competent in as many sports as i as i can be without getting injured and along the way i achieve some level of cardiovascular fitness as a result of the work that i do even though i'm not dedicating the you know any of these specific workouts to just doing cardio so the next component would be let's say muscle mass and how that correlates to longevity extremely well and incredibly important so i suppose there's a point where you're beyond your maximum functional muscle mass if you're a big gym rat that's obviously carrying around way more than is necessary for anything but hoisting the heavy weights but where's that balance point at all age groups well you know yeah i mean the balance point i don't know some of it has to do with um your uh family familial genetics right like what did i inherit a body type uh mesomorph ectomorph metamorph from my parents um but but really the the issue as we get older is uh one of what we call sarcopenia loss of muscle mass so people suffer as they age and and the biggest indicator of of um of senility and and uh and aging is the loss of muscle mass so it behooves everyone to do whatever they can to build and maintain muscle mass for as long as they can to your point you know up to up to a point you know it becomes ridiculous if you're doing massive amounts of steroids and lifting heavy weights and you've got this huge bulky figure but if you are someone who is interested in in living uh a quality long life we absolutely have to talk about mobility like what what defines a quality of life two things in my mind cognition memory access to memories and being able to carry on a conversation appreciate the world and so you know dementia and alzheimer's are a big issue there and mobility the ability to move throughout the world and enjoy interacting with nature and moving from place to place and being able to get out of bed in the morning and go do things perform tasks and meet with people and play games if that's if that's your thing so uh mobility becomes crucial to the quality of life and what happens to people as they get older is they tend to focus less on mobility so they're sitting more um maybe they have more aches and pains this kind of is a is a um a positive feedback cycle that says the more aches and pains i have the less i'm going to work out the less i'm going to work out the more aches and pains i'm going to have so you got to get people out of the chair out of bed and working out in the gym why is that well the the the entire body works on this sort of um synchronistic system whereby uh we make a decision to move and in making a decision to move and to use our muscles and to stress those muscles a little bit and perform an activity the muscle which now needs access to blood flow and oxygen and nutrients the muscle sort of there's a there's a system whereby the heart starts to pump more because it has to supply the nutrients to this muscle to to um you know to perform the task uh the lungs have to inspire more they have to you have to breathe in more to provide the oxygen also to allow the muscle to work the liver has to be more uh functioning to be able to clear toxins and clear waste uh the kidneys same thing have to clear waste uh and it goes on and on so that every organ in our body is attached to um some amount of muscle activity right and in the case of um sarcopenia when you lose muscle uh the body is going well let's see uh you know there's we're not doing that much we're not getting out of the sofa so we don't need to spend precious resourcing precious resources building bone density right because there's no i'm not i'm not stressing the structure at all so bone density suffers there's no reason for the heart to pump vigorously because we're not doing any activity so the heart the function of the heart diminishes and you lose capacity in the heart same with the lungs the lungs don't have to breathe in because you're just you know you're taking in small breaths all day you're not doing much activity the muscles are are atrophying and in so doing that they're not requiring the input of all these other systems all these other organs and so over time uh the it isn't just that we lose muscle mass but we lose what we call organ reserve we lose the ability of the rest of our organs to keep up with us and in the event that there's some catastrophe like an infection now we have we we're not able to combat the infection so when we're looking at covet this year for instance there are a lot of people who have you know heart issues who have lung issues copd and lung issues have been a big thing with covet and this is a disease it sort of attaches itself to it likes lung tissue and and tries to mess with it right and if you don't have the the capacity to withstand it you will succumb you will die um as people get older you know this is sort of the the thing i've talked about many times in the past but as you lose muscle mass as you lose organ reserve and as these things start to fall apart the classic scenario is and my my aunt my 90 year old aunt just this just happened to her you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom you know you trip over something you because you you haven't worked on balance you can't catch yourself because you're not strong enough to catch yourself you can't even you know you put your arms out but it doesn't work and you fall and you break a hip because your bone density is so bad your bones are so brittle because you haven't worked on the bone density you haven't given the bones a reason to maintain the tensile structure so you wind up in the hospital with a fractured hip now you're in the hospital lying in bed and you know we know that a lot of infections happen in the hospital now you get maybe you get pneumonia and maybe because your lungs are not strong because you haven't used them for decades you haven't you haven't done any of this muscle building activity to create this lean mass their lungs have had no reason to really work more than 10 or 15 percent but now all of a sudden you're in the hospital you've got pneumonia you can't cough out the sputum now your heart which has to kind of keep up and pump oxygen to the rest of your body so your blood oxygen your pulse ox as they call it diminishes because you can't you can not only can you not breathe in full amounts of air but you can't your heart's not pumping forcefully enough to get it to the other tissue and so some people die of pneumonia some people die of congestive heart failure ultimately because they didn't work out in the gym ultimately because they lost muscle mass and ultimately because because the muscle mass is tied to this organ reserve as your muscle mass diminishes and as you as you get to this condition known as sarcopenia all the organ reserve kind of goes down down the tubes with it so nobody really dies of old age we die of organ failure as a result of the weakest link in our in our bodies finally giving up the ghost yeah i mean the the actual uh functional capacity of the organs is known to be around 120 years yeah and so if we you know if we fought this battle better and i'm scared straight right now i'm listening to you man i don't want to go through that pain and suffering and my your buddy walter my dad was such a great example and he kept it going so strong into his mid-90s and then had a really quick and painless two-year demise and i feel like his motivation and his physical capacity declined at the same rate so we'd get him out and walk around the park every day for a half a mile when he was 90 91 92 93 94. and then he started to kind of balk at it i'm not going to go the whole way i'll wait here on this bench well come on let's just let's just go to the next bench and it was really a beautiful thing to see because at a certain point we all deserve to kick back and if you don't feel like walking a half mile around the park when you're 95 it's going to contribute to your demise but you're 95 so it's okay and you're complicit you're you're you're you know you're in control you're in control of it yeah yeah uh falling and coming to you know this misfortune that's it's just it's just so tragic to see yeah um that part it seems like we can do a much better job and maybe it maybe people feel like it's too daunting because of the fitness programming and the the maybe but i'll give it you know here's my other example so i got covet this year right i got it two months ago he looks okay to me and it was it was a non-event for me you know it was like it was like a summer cold lasted three days two and a half days um never a fever um and and i tell people i've been training my whole life for covet so i was trained for covet and i hear stories about you know they're look they're people have um horrible experiences with it and and i empathize with people who've lost loved ones or still struggling with it but in but in my case i mean i feel like i've been training my whole life i've maintained all of these systems including my immune system including my gut health and i think so much of our immune system is resident in our gut so i pay a lot of attention to that um and i've and i feel like that's really the issue going forward with with whether it's this pandemic or whether it's the next one that's going to be around the block this isn't about um vaccines and masks and social distancing as much as it's about building up a healthy immune system to be able to combat this in a way that we are all designed to do it's just that some of us have lost the ability well heck we used to go to basketball games and and yell and scream with 17 000 other people i remember when the the lakers and showtime were in their peak you'd be hugging strangers after magic came down and you know through a path to win the game and somehow we were able to you know withstand all the all the stuff that's on every door handle all winter long so i don't i don't want to make light of this but i do want to say that that you know my my view of longevity has much more to do with muscle mass so with your with walter with your dad i would have said let's get him uh you know standing next to a lamp post and do 20 uh uh you know deep squats you know air squats as far down as he can get without getting too far down maybe having somebody spot him and build the muscle mass build the glutes build the hamstrings build the quads and do it you know do it that way i mean getting out in fresh air is certainly and that's part of the movement aspect of what we're talking about moving around a lot but it's also it's also maintaining building and maintaining muscle mass is crucial yeah um and again it seems like a shortcoming in general because the you go to the gym and the the machines are all full for cardio and then the especially the free weights are sitting there i think there's an intimidation factor so for me it's kind of exciting to see this this trend uh this pop increasing popularity of micro workouts thanks thanks to you and i and others yeah but i i feel like it's the fitness breakthrough of the century to to have a new mindset to realize that you don't have to be a crazy muscle head and and go in and lift all these heavy things for an hour and get tired and a lot of people have had probably a bad experience with a trainer where they went for their package they did 12 sessions they were sore we now know from the leading experts in fitness that you shouldn't get sore and you don't want to get sore during workout yeah what yeah and now you can kind of reposition this to even a home-based situation since we are obligated in recent times to be stuck at home where you can become not just fit but super fit and extremely good with your muscle mass quotient i mean i i just have to laugh at how little strength training i do now that my my sessions that used to be an hour and ten minutes are like 17 minutes now yeah even in the gym and if i don't go to the gym i'll do these micro workouts these you know sets of a push-ups here or squats there um i do i have resistance bands that i use you know take a break um and i feel like that really it and and the science is now showing um smaller shorter amounts of of more intense bursts of output um are very beneficial so the most recent one was like four seconds of all-out um sprinting on an airdyne uh you know bike on a on an ergometer um has pretty profound uh impact on on uh muscle strength uh on mitochondrial function uh even on cardiovascular output so it's pretty pretty interesting that it's like almost like getting to the point where less is more provided you know you ha you hold the intensity yeah so uh let me check my notes it seems like it's all about moving frequently at a slow pace lifting heavy things and sprinting once in a while to get to that finish line yeah yeah what about the sprinting specifically and that those those bursts of output and we're talking about a hormonal uh response that's drastically superior to the chronic overproduction of stress hormones with the chronic cardio i mean spring is still my favorite activity um you know it's not easy to do and it's and it takes kind of a mindset and i can only do it once a week and usually i do it uh in concert with like playing ultimate frisbee so when when i'm playing ultimate i'm you know i'm forced to sprint to get down the other end of the field but if i have a week off or two weeks off i the other day i went to our park down here and i did uh you know eight uh 60 meter sprints with a two-minute rest in between so under 10 seconds of effort yeah with a huge rest afterwards yeah yeah yeah and um and it was really you know it's it's i felt like i'd done something at the end of that workout and i remember when we we trained for track and field and we trained for these long distance events i remember going doing like i did 16 half mile repeats one time at 224 to 228 with short rest with a walk with a walk jog yeah in between um and that that took you know and that workout took an hour and it was i was hammering the whole time and now i feel like i'm i'm i'm refreshed from this workout i feel like i've benefited from this short this short workout and i'm really looking back and i'm like well all i was doing was was sort of practicing hurting myself you know practicing the discomfort and and grinding it out uh as as to replicating what i was going to feel during a marathon when i was running a marathon but i don't know how much it really impacted my you know my my my ratcheting up of my training and my performance yeah well you said a few years ago i i guess it was a delayed uh epiphany that we don't really need to train the brain to suffer yeah of what we're going to face in a marathon race or whatever the goal is the ultra or whatever we're training for the brain can do it on demand and i i make the analogy of you know if i put a gun to your head right now mutual we could go do a marathon yeah we wouldn't uh come out of it too well no but we could we could make it out the idea that you have to suffer over and over and over to uh excel in something is is ridiculous and then uh dr phil maffetone put through through another piece that i put together here that's um you don't really need to train the anaerobic muscle fibers at a huge extent because they're not using oxygen they they're explosive they fire they need a lot of recovery yeah so you're taking these sprints that last you know six seven eight seconds and resting two minutes in between it's not super uh grueling right it doesn't kill you you're not staggering off the the thing you're feeling kind of light on your feet and i think that's a big breakthrough is just to rest more just arrest more and again it's you know it's uh i'm doing these as a component part of my training to be able to play frisbee better for instance so i'm not doing these for the sake of doing these this is not an event that i'm doing so i can take two minutes i can recover fully between and and i can clear all the lactate in the old days i would have said it's it's like when you go to the pool you know and you're swimming you know hundreds on the on the on the what on the minute 30 or a minute 40 or whatever and five and whatever but i mean whatever you finished in you you went immediately on the 120 so if you did this if you did the the lap slower you got less rest if you did it faster it hurt more but you only got a few few seconds more rest because you always had to go on the click on the 120 or whatever right send off yeah the send off and it's like you know that had an application but that's brutal that was just you know that was a um it's it's for competitive preparation only yeah and there's no health uh benefit to a exhausting depleting workout particularly the glycogen depleting aspects of an interval workout and hit is the the greatest trend and it's been the hot term in fitness for so long i love how dr craig marker repositioned that with a great article called hit versus hurt yeah hurt meaning high intensity repeat training yeah so when you did your eight how many did you do that eight sprints uh the other day yeah so your seventh and eighth one yeah i was watching from the balcony above they were of similar quality to the first one yeah because you were arrested maybe even warmed up and even better didn't uh they were better yeah didn't lose form yeah yeah and your 16th half mile repeat you were walking dead and digging so deep i know you're hitting the right time that's an important distinction to make like you're still hitting your time on the sixteenth one but it's coming at a a cost of months of you know recovery yeah and destroying your your will and your brain to go do it when it really came no i mean i i'll never forget that workout and i think it probably left a good race somewhere in the next two six weeks there would there would have been a much better race that i had sure done except they left it on the track yeah i put it all out there yeah so all right let's move on from these workout things what do we have what about the um the nice way that we broke up our day with that that cold plunge at your at your amazing facility yeah and cold exposure's turned into one of the popular bio hacking uh maneuvers of of the time it's getting some good research behind it and people are extolling the benefits uh what do you think where is that so what here's what i think i think um i like i love hot water so i love saunas and jacuzzis and and steams um i i don't like cold water at all so i do it so so i so i don't even though they're all the anti-inflammatory benefits that are touted for uh cold water uh and cold therapy and cryotherapy um i do it for my mind so i literally like i you know today i did whatever four and a half minutes at 48 degrees and um it's just a mind game right and then i get out and warm up and go back so i i i'm a fan i do it a lot and i but i do it mostly for the for the mental uh meditative aspect of it and not so much because i i i'm feeling any sort of anti-inflammatory benefits that's just my yeah my personal preference um well i mean you you get a wonderful uh wake-up call and an increase in alertness and mood elevating hormones no we the rest of the day was great it was like you know because i usually do this at six at night um between 6 and 6 30 or 6 35 is my routine and then i come back and have you know i play drums for an hour and then i have dinner um and then i sleep like a baby but today we did it before lunch and so the rest of the day was very calm and relaxed and we didn't have anything to do except this so it was kind of a it was nice to have it be in the in the earlier part of the day for me uh i agree the psychological benefits seem to be the most profound and every every time i uh i'm about to jump in my chest freezer i tell a story in my head like uh maybe i'll sweep the kitchen floor first it's looking kind of i better answer those emails first and it's always this battle of you know trying to make an excuse and procrastinate and all those things that we complain about in daily life in our work life or our goals with parenting relationships personal improvement and so if i can be one of those people that can override the chatter and do something tony robbins huge fan he says it's my brain telling my body what to do yeah to not hesitate but to act and so if we can leverage that if i can leverage that into other other tasks email inbox exactly and that's a big thing right and um i invite everybody to dabble in this yeah for the physical benefit well is the you know the increased appreciation of that sauna when we went in there i guarantee you of all the people that use the sauna today in miami florida mind you we appreciate it more than anybody because we just got out of cold water yeah yeah exactly no it's it's um it's a very um uh you know i didn't like cold water for the longest time and so for me it was it was i needed to overcome that right and in order to in order to pour main board i don't know like cold water uh in order to overcome that i had to come up with sort of a a device that i would use um and my device was it's not good or bad it's just a sensation right so when i walk in it's not good or bad whatever i'm feeling isn't i don't assign a positive or a negative value to it it's just a sensation and that's kind of how i start the starting process yeah i'm trying to do the same thing like don't don't judge it yeah and um one of my favorite podcast guests my buddy dave rossi he he kind of wants you to apply that to all areas of life for sure like here's a traffic jam uh i'm stuck in it i'm gonna miss my flight whatever don't judge it there may be a silver lining or you know all those kind of things where we have to we stay in the moment and stay mindful and it's so difficult because we're um you know we're trying to nitpick our way to an optimum life but in the process we can we can compromise happiness yeah miss out on some other opportunities yeah uh speaking of that since we're we're drifting now um do you see like a balance point between uh not judging things and being okay and being being in acceptance and then turning on your your kicking ass jeans to say hey you're screwing me over in this business relationship and i'm going to sue your ass unless you make it straight you know what i mean like diverging from hey mark's a spiritual go with the flow kind of guy but he also has climbed a competitive ladder setting yeah and you know i get it i get it i i think that comes under the heading of you know just choose your battles choose your battles wisely and it also comes under the heading of of absolutely have goals and absolutely do what you need to to work toward those goals but but release attachment to the outcome and it's so easy when i've got just try it people and when i when i've done that which you know i've i've pivoted a lot in my in my career um when i've done that some of the magic has really happened so when i've released attachment to the outcome of like i mean look uh primal kitchen started because i was really frustrated with my supplement business and i kept thinking i've got to find the answer to the supplement thing i've got to find the answer to selling more supplements and attracting more people and and letting people know i have this amazing product and and i i was missing the big picture which was that i talk about food all the time and i talk about you know real food and what is it that makes real food palatable it's what we put put on them sauces dressings toppings methods of preparation herbs and spices and things like that so it was when i released attachment to the outcome of my supplement company succeeding that i was able to pivot and go oh my god this is a much this is this bigger better opportunity has been sitting in front of me for at least 10 years and i've ignored it yeah yeah so you know um and you talk about the the restaurant venture which was uh not successful and you hung in there because you you don't like to lose yeah but it was it was um attached attachment to the same thing yeah yeah well you know an attachment the outcome also involves um not abandoning it's like you know when when many of our friends would get into a a marathon or iron man and not be having their best day yeah and probably should have dropped out yeah no attachment to the outcome yeah but they decided to hang in there because they felt it was going to do them better psychologically to get through it yeah and so part of that was my mindset in the restaurant thing was i didn't want to give up too soon i didn't want like maybe there was going to be a chance that i could resurrect this so you know it's um uh it's definitely a fine line between um being you know sort of like uh oh the world is wonderful and i'll just put it out there and the law of attraction will make everything happen or if it doesn't happen oh well it wasn't meant to be versus having a goal going toward that goal being aware of all the opportunities or other things that are that are that are either coming along or interfering obstacles or or possibilities and and you know being attuned to it and then being able to make uh an informed decision as to whether or not to pivot so i can't i can't give people a rule of thumb on that because everybody's different and some some entrepreneurs are you know voracious tenacious you know uh like tijus and they get and they get what they want you know i'm not i try not to be that way yeah but i still try to get what i want yeah um arguably you know the material success that we place so much emphasis on in modern life but it's no guarantee of happiness it's no guarantee that uh the person's not a jerk and i think those things need to account for more you know and i also see from from your journey like you had this intense desire to make things right and to call out conventional wisdom that was killing people and you said i want to do a book i'm going to do this this blog and it was hideously expensive with no sign of any uh economic uh benefit right for quite some time but you were compelled to do it and so that's like the ultimate example of not being attached to the outcome and oh guess what a lot of people buy your mayonnaise now but i think people um if you if you make the mistake of segmenting the mark system path into you know he hustled and put his picture on the mayonnaise and it sold a lot and now now it's great um that's not that's not how this this uh wave was written yeah yeah 40-year overnight success story well that's been uh a lot of fun and games here i think we've we've hit some hot topics cool thank you very much for listening and watching people [Music] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Mark's Daily Apple

Views: 158,315

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Id: MQX3Il2siXI

Length: 50min 26sec (3026 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021