The SECRET To BURNING FAT And Getting In Shape | Mark Sisson & Lewis Howes

welcome back everyone at the school of greatness podcast we've got a huge guest in mark sisson in the house thanks for being here thanks for having me appreciate it i'm pumped uh i heard about you i think probably like seven or eight years ago when i started kind of getting in the blogging world the social media blogging world just kind of like dipping my toes and you were a huge success already in the fitness space and you had a book out called primal blueprint right or the primal blueprint is that right correct and um i think you had like a couple hundred thousand subscribers at the time maybe this was 2009 2010 but you were already kind of just crushing it in the fitness space and as and doing very well as a blogger and that's how i first heard about you right and since then you've got like tons of products in terms of you had supplements before then but you've got about 20 something books right you've got food products training restaurants you've got everything right fitness programs you've just kind of expanded the brand which is really cool to see and you've got a new book out today called primal endurance uh as one of the new books and i want to dive into what you just mentioned beforehand before we started this interview is talking about your lifestyle and the whole philosophy and the approach to your lifestyle whether you want to be an endurance athlete or have endurance in your life or you want to put on mass or you want to get lean or whatever it may be right you have a specific lifestyle that i've always been excited about when you came in here uh you were talking about how i have the same stand-up desk as you and i was like yes if i'm doing something that mark is doing i feel like i'm doing it right right so i just want to dive into what this philosophy is and and how you actually live right so uh my main goal is to live awesome that's the tagline that's the motto of our company primal blueprint live awesome and what does that mean it means extracting the greatest amount of pleasure enjoyment contentment fulfillment uh that's possible out of every possible moment now they're going to be bad times of course but to to to live in the moment to appreciate the now to uh appreciate the relationships uh to have fun when you're when you're working out uh to enjoy every single bite of food you ever eat and not choke something down be just because it's healthy so so it really revolves around orchestrating a life way of of pleasure of hedonistic experiences in the context of this you know modern world that we have here understanding that we sit here with hunter-gatherer genes that have certain sort of proclivities and expectations of us that we can meet either through natural means or through artificial means and sometimes there's not a right answer but it's about choices so how do i make choices that serve me in the short term that give me pleasure that don't harm me in the long term so it's sort of a an overview of what we're up against here but you know as you drill down as you boil it boil it down and distill it down to what does it look like it looks like you know what are the types of foods that we choose to eat that turn on genes that build muscle or burn fat what are the types of you know how much sun exposure do we get that allows us to make vitamin d and get tan but not too much so we get burned how much sleep do we get that and by the way sleep is a very pleasurable thing if you if you're willing to acknowledge that yes how much sleep do we get in in a way that that uh reinvigorates us and allows us to to be creative on a daily basis and not brag about how well we do on so little sleep you know so all these you know how do we use our brain uh on a regular basis beyond just the road stuff of you know checking the the pdas but how do we do puzzles do we play games do we you know do we do are we creative do we play musical instruments do we learn a language how do we use our brain um all these things make the totality of the human experience and i love to look at all the ways in which we can choose these behaviors that manifest themselves as pleasurable enjoyable providing contentment and fulfillment and and and build us toward a better human being when did you start to you know take this on you know because you were a was a tri triathlete yeah i was a marathoner in the in the 70s wow and actually the late 60s and early 70s wow and and from there went to triathlon um i was always trying to you know improve optimize performance optimize performance yes um using the tools of the day which were pretty rudimentary it's like all right run a lot of miles and eat lots of carbohydrates and you'll be you'll be where you need to be well you know that's what that's what we knew that's all we knew and it wasn't exactly appropriate so over the years i got injured i got sick from the over training from the diet which was very highly inflammatory it caused pastas and breads or what all that stuff that they said you had to eat i mean i had so many pasta meals and pizza meals lasagna meals the night before every game and i remember just being so exhausted in every game high school college pro it was just like exhaustion right yawning i would you know oh that's that's that's a classic symbol why am i yawning right i'm supposed to be excited about the game i wanted to take a map take a nap yeah exactly uh yeah so so we have these sort of old conventional wisdom technologies that we were using to to improve performance theoretically yes and they weren't so uh i basically ended my career early prematurely i was i was too injured to continue running i was my my health had suffered i had you know arthritis and tendonitis and irritable bowel syndrome and i got sick a lot and i had uh heartburn and uh hemorrhoids and i was like a real wreck i mean here's theoretically the picture of health because of the training i was doing but i was falling apart on the inside so i sort of rededicated my life to figuring out how i could be fit and strong and lean and happy and healthy at the same time without being overly you know without too much struggle and sacrifice and suffering you know is there an easy way an easier way to be all those things i wanted to be that that allowed me to have more pleasure in the moment right and didn't sacrifice my long-term health uh so that's that was the big shift in me and it's and it's been going on for 35 years and it continues to go on so i and as soon as i made that shift i started doing the research i started i mean i wrote my first book in 82 on how to how to train for triathlons and even then i was calling upon evolution as the main basis for how we train and i was looking at um the previous few years of of triathletes because in 82 there hadn't even been a decade of triathlon training wow but i i already recognized that we were doing it wrong we're training too hard we're we were um 20 miles too many too many miles too much too you know um too much redlining the heart and the body and and and there was a better way an easier way to do it so i started to recognize it recognizing that back in 82 and then it's even even up until three years ago uh when i started researching the primal endurance book i started thinking well you know all of the science continues to show us that the old choice was probably a wrong choice that reliance on carbohydrates and that that intent of of managing our glycogen stores in our muscles was kind of the wrong approach and maybe we ought to come at it from the exact opposite end of the spectrum which is how do we become really good at burning fat and in so doing spare glycogen and in so doing uh unburdened ourselves of having to take in so much carbohydrate in the form of pasta and breads and cereals and rice and crackers and cookies and all the other stuff sure sure and you're you're 62 right yeah right and you're like leaner than anyone i know so how what's the most effective way to burn fat and still be strong yeah of course you know uh as we said initially in the primal blueprint and i've said it decades before the i wrote the primal blueprint 80 of your body composition is determined by how you eat so if you if there's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat really yes so as opposed to um waking up being hungry having breakfast um being hungry at the 10 30 break being hungry for lunch having a snack in the afternoon having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed which is the sort of standard american approach like uh even the old bodybuilders would say don't go more than three hours without eating or you will cannibalize your muscle tissue right that was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate had had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to continue to work it never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners we are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat and the and the reason that we don't as we go through life is we present our you know you're two years old you're eating cookies and crackers and mushed all that stuff and so your body learns to depend on on glucose on carbohydrates as a source of energy and never really gets to the point where you force it to burn fat so what we do is we we shift the diet around it's not painful you get rid of the breads the pastas the cereals the crackers the cookies the candies the sweet and soft drinks well it does sound kind of nervous doesn't it but what you're left with is meat fish foul eggs nuts seeds vegetables a little bit of fruit some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes things like that those are great tasting foods if you eat them right and they're real food and they're real food and you can use butter and lard and and you can eat bacon on this on this program and what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in and just sort of forces gently forces your body to to up regulate all the enzyme systems that access stored body fat and burn it and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often so the first thing that happens is your appetite self regulates so now you you you get into this space where you become a good bat fat burner you start to melt away you're as hungry because you're not and you're not as hungry because you're always carrying around a meal it's on your thighs it's on your ass it's on your belly wherever it is it's you know that's your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories it says i don't need to eat i'm really not that hungry yeah and that's so empowering for so many people but when you you know i was a i still love sugar but i used to be really bad at sugar i feel like i have much more under control but i feel like when you're eating a lot of candy sweets and sugar you're never satisfied you just want to eat more and more and more but that's until you're sick no exactly i'm full because i'm sick now yeah i mean stories of lamar odom eating four pounds of candy before games or whatever yeah but i mean we are look we're all hired what is that now you know it's like we're all by the way sugar is a very addictive substance it's so addictive so um you know we're all hardwired to seek out sweet things that's part of that hunter-gatherer dna that we all carry really hasn't changed in in thousands of years so how do we shift our mind so you but the first way you do it is is you go from from the craving which is what you're talking about like you crave sugar so you eat sugar and then that just promotes more craving and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle you're actually producing sort of opiate-like substances that are that are occupying receptor sites that are giving you sort of a feel-good experience so you got to kind of be willing to to get rid of that so you get rid of the candies you get rid of sweetened beverages soft drinks and teas and you get rid of the carbohydrates that not all carbs but the the breads that convert to glucose in the bloodstream so rapidly so now you've lowered your blood your glucose experience on a daily basis so now the brain is starting to get you know i don't need to really get that much glucose you know i can i can the body is burning more fat as a result of your being able to burn fat you you create these byproducts called ketones which the brain loves to burn ketones and burns them preferentially so you you need less and less sugar to you know maintain clarity throughout the day if you're if you haven't become fat adapted and you're a sugar burner which is what we it's not a derogatory term but we usually use the term to describe people who haven't become fat burners they're sugar burners if you don't eat it's true if you don't eat for a couple of hours your blood sugar dips because you haven't learned how to burn fat yet you don't know how to access it you can't take it out of storage and burn it so now the blood sugar is low the brain goes i gotta go get some more glucose i gotta get energy somewhere sugar or something sugar so you have to bagel it you know at 10 30 in the morning gosh or you have this tastes amazing well for for an hour and then it's no exactly but then you're hungry again and that's and that's this vicious cycle so if we can um you know take the steps we say it takes 21 days that's why i have a book called the 21 day total body transformation 21 days of this uh cutting these these sugars and and starchy not starchy but uh simple carbohydrates uh out of your diet and just focusing on healthy fats and lean proteins and and uh uh you know and vegetables right uh you get your body just gets the message and says i'm not going to be getting that much glucose i'm going to learn how to burn fat and i'm going to do it well damn it and and then it takes the fat out of your body fat stores so over time you lose a pound two pounds a week uh and you trend toward your ideal body composition wow so all of this is a 10 minute long-winded uh answer to your uh question of how you know what does it take to you know to burn fat it doesn't take a lot of exercise it mostly takes the dietary shift right yeah you got to do some exercise you don't have to do anything but you can choose to do some exercises it'll help accelerate and it'll help accelerate it a little bit but most of it happens as a result the real shifts you make in your diet absolutely it's all in the kitchen yep so you can get abs in the kitchen and not do anything different working absolutely wow yeah okay so what's the difference between because it sounds like a little paleo-ish what's the difference between primal paleo and like a bulletproof which has kind of been picking up as well you know they're all sort of versions of a similar theme which is to cut the sugars way down cut the processed carbohydrates way down get rid of the industrial seed oil so that would be the soybean oil the corn oil the canola which are causing uh inflammatory responses in a lot of people and just kind of go to real food with the primal blueprint we said uh at some point um you know dairy if you like it why not include it in your diet if you don't have an issue with it right i love it so but all these foods exist on a spectrum so dairy you know there's raw raw milk which is which is good for you there's a2 protein which is a form of case casein um we could have a whole discussion about the different types of cows and the different types of protein that they make but on the far end of the spectrum the good end there's butter there's cream there's all these things at the other end at the bad end there's two percent skim homogenized pasteurized non-fat whatever stay away from that stuff yeah you know so um all these foods sort of exist on spectrum so cheeses for instance part of the dairy family i love cheese i love it so you know i we we include it in our eating strategy because we say there's no real reason not to mm-hmm paleo yeah yeah exactly artisanal cheeses and there's good and bad cheeses as well but on the paleo program or the paleo strategy is pretty strict for a lot of people so they would say no dairy at all of any kind so no milk no butter no no cream no cheese uh so that's you know there there are little variations in this here but mostly whole foods mostly whole foods is what is what we're all looking at i mean even if you look at a vegan experience these days or a vegetarian experience it's really these these dietary programs work largely as a result of what you eliminate not what you're eating right right so if you eliminate the crap and you're left even if you're only eating vegetables as long as you're getting enough protein you should be fine yeah yeah gotcha okay um what is a lgn and how does it motivate you yeah so lgn is look good naked and it's a you know it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years i think people have used it before but we we sort of made it a meme for a while uh and it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is we want to we want to look good naked we want to and i think that happens for a lot of people that's uh that's a subset of their greater goal or it's a side effect of the original intent the original intention for a lot of people go to prime to primal blueprint and to mark's daily apple my blog is they're frustrated they they they're sick uh they can't get off the meds they've had health issues and they've not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels so a lot of people come to me having had that experience in the medical community not a good one so the first thing that they they recognize is you know their blood sugar normalizes or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away or they're gerd or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes away and that's that's wonderful and then they go oh by the way i'm losing some weight too that's awesome as well and i'm starting to look good naked right so it becomes nice a nice side effect gotcha so what's a typical eating day look like for you like what are you putting in your system yeah so what time do you put yeah so i wake up in the morning and i have a cup of coffee around 6 30 in the morning i like coffee i'm a big fan of coffee um i don't eat until 12 30 or 1. okay so i use what we call a compressed eating window now i will wake up and i have plenty of energy because i'm so good at burning fat i've trained my body to do that that i have the energy you know i have the energy i'm not i'm not in a in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that i was sleeping uh it doesn't matter i'm so good at accessing the stored body fat i got plenty of energy in fact i'll go to the gym at 9 30 or 10 o'clock and i'll do my workout fasted sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day sometimes it'll be you know intervals of some kind um again i don't i feel fine feel fine right and then when i get home i won't eat if i get home at like 11 i still won't eat for an hour and a half um partly because i'm not hungry and partly because i got stuff to do right now exactly but i'm not compelled to go oh my god i just finished my workout i must eat a post-workout shake or something yeah there's so many people that say that you know have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes waking up to start your metabolism drink a shake right after a workout why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to um i think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat a couple things happen first of all you have the energy to get through the day second of all if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry i say if you're not hungry why are you eating if you're not hungry don't eat because that's that's kind of key um when you become good at burning fat you don't you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue because when you're a sugar burner and you run out of sugar and or you're you know you're depending on carbohydrate by the way i use glycogen glucose carbohydrate and sugar sort of interchangeable but when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while you've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles because your body's expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it but you don't store very much of it so when you run out of it the brain you need to fill it up the brain goes hey something's off here we got to eat and if we don't eat then here's what we're going to do we're going to we're going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol which is going to go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose so i can fuel the brain so it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose all that goes away when you become a fat burner when you become good at burning fat now when you don't eat your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your your energy levels don't dip your blood sugar doesn't doesn't dip uh and so you don't you don't cut into muscle tissue gotcha so you can train really hard to try to build muscle yeah and you're still saying you don't need this like post recovery shake right afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way exactly exactly now if you're again if you're the old paradigm and you are the carbohydrate dependent athlete then yeah you probably do want to eat a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because because you're working on an entirely different operating system interesting man and so that 21 day transformation is how you get off of that cycle and get into the fat burning cycle essentially okay cool we'll have that linked up here as well and also the primal endurance the book has a lot of it this has this has it all in here but this is really uh specific to people who want to race 10ks 5ks marathons triathlon spartan races all that stuff gotcha yes have you done spartan race yourself i haven't i did want a short one like a five-miler it's pretty intense yeah it's fun though it's fun though i wish i wish it had been around when i was in my private one of my prime because you would have been a machine because i was a i was a good marathoner but i got my you know i had my dna fitness thing done a few years ago and i was like uh 57 endurance and 43 strength what that means is it made me a pretty good endurance athlete but i was never going to be the best in the world because to be you'd have to be 80 or 85 right but it also told me that i had the strength which is sort of in retrospect that's why i realized i used to lift weights even when i was a a marathoner i lifted weights in the gym yeah so i maintained my strength wow and i was a gymnast before i was ever in endurance really so you look at the spartan races and you go well that's you know it's got some gymnastics some you know some parkour type movements rope climbing some rope yeah some some heavy lifting all that stuff combined with the endurance that would have been your thing my thing wow but right now it's like um i just i'm uh i'm too guarding of my of my current fitness level and health i don't want to get injured you know and yeah of course so like the big thing for me is my ultimate frisbee game once a week you're an ultimate frisbee oh my god i love ultimate frisbee you got to come out to malibu college champion with my team in college get out of here it's been a small small d3 school wasn't it whatever man but uh you know what so i can run and jump we have a game in malibu every sunday at 9 30. it's been years but i'd love to come no no it's the most fun can you wear cleats you can wear clothes i wear my vibrams but yeah guys wear cleats wow no it's it's anyway so you know i love to come you know what a good workout it is then that's one of the hardest workouts an hour of ultimate and i mean we played two we played two hours by the way oh my gosh i would be like sub me in 15 minutes i'd have to get back in the shape for it wow that's cool in malibu yeah 9 30 9 30 a.m yup i'll be there and there's guys from west hollywood that come out there too i'll come out for sure was like 30 guys go out there we get uh last week we had six on six that's the that's the most fun wow this summer we'll have 10 on 10 sometimes a little bit crazy but yeah wow okay awesome um okay so you wait until about you have coffee in the morning then you wait until about noon to one oh yeah we haven't even gotten to my any food yet and then what's that and then what do you what's and what does that mean yeah so that means it might be uh what i call a big-ass salad you know it's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein with lots of salad dressing um if you make sure you have your own salad dressing now i have my own salad dressing because i couldn't find any that i could put a lot on and feel like this is that doesn't fill with sugar or or unhealthy fats or unhealthy oils like the soybean oil that i was talking about or the canola you know it's like no canola this is our our salad dressings are made with avocado oil which is the healthiest of all the oils so i have a big salad with with chicken from leftover from the previous night or some piece of fish or something on it nice okay and then and then uh i go till the middle of the middle of the afternoon maybe late afternoon i might have a handful of macadamia nuts we do make a uh we we make a protein bar now all my products i make for myself by the way you know right i make stuff that i wish existed that uh so so this one the dark chocolate dark chocolate looks amazing it is amazing and it's got um 15 grams of protein but but mostly it's 9 grams of collagen so the it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth so you know i'm i love bone broth but it did you know as a kid when i'm driving my car you know yeah so so the bars are are there because i'm really into the repair so one of the issues i have as a 62 year old guy trying to keep up with 20 something right on a sprint to the end zone or to defend a long pass is my achilles you know uh so so uh the collagen really works well really for absolutely keep seeing i i know that i can tell the difference between when i've been eating a lot of collagen and when i haven't in in yeah what happens just tighter when you're not yeah they feel like they're going to snap and i'll and i'll they'll they'll feel sore enough that i'll choose not a back way off for weeks at a time so uh so anyway so that's i might have a i might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon i'm gonna have to get all this stuff yeah let's try it all out um okay and then and then in the evening um you know i have a piece of steak i've got this great wagyu short rib that i get it's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world uh and i'll have that with a whole ton of steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it and once a while i'll have a glass of wine and that's it that's the whole day yeah so much more than that no so here's the thing you may have um gleaned from that that uh it's not a lot of food right and one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat you don't need a lot of food you need you don't need a lot of food so a few years ago um you know i had this thought experiment i got i thought well you know i used to my whole life see what i could get away with see how much food i could eat and not feel like i was gonna puke or not feel like i was going to gain weight right it's how much food can i eat and not and not gain weight i think i think a lot of people live their lives that way they sort of finish what's on their plate they you know they they basically there are a lot of people run or work out just so they can eat more like why do you run so much louis well i run because i love this game i love to eat yeah i love that dude i love to eat too yeah but i don't i don't want to beat myself up sure just so i can eat more uh so that was the thought experiment and then if you reverse it you go well if that's the case what's the least amount of food i can eat and maintain my body mass maintain my energy not get sick and most importantly not be hungry and it turns out it's about 30 fewer calories than i used to eat wow yeah so i learned within the last uh 10 years i've learned you know to sort of halfway through a meal ask myself just sort of subconsciously am i really hungry for the next bite not am i full not in my you know whatever but am i am i truly hungry for the next bite and if i'm not i'm okay pushing the plate away wrapping it up throwing it away giving away whatever because i know there's food wherever i want whenever i want so it's not like i'm trying to pack on the stuff it yeah yeah what if you just enjoy it well if you enjoy it keep going yeah but um you have a lot of times you get into that space where you go you know am i eating this because because it's still there because it's still there am i truly eating it because i enjoy it or or am i you know like i used to i i had a habit of uh one half gallon of ice cream a night oh for five years that sounds amazing it wasn't and i was it was in my training day so burn it all off never gain any weight i actually weighed probably 20 pounds less than i weigh now wow yeah um and but it was a half gallon of ice cream every night and it was like i couldn't i couldn't only eat a pint it was like a pint of ice cream don't even like why am i gonna get started on that i'm just gonna i'm just gonna you know rip your throat off and want more you know whatever rip your head off so so i would and if i it was 10 o'clock at night i didn't have any ice cream in the house i'd get the car and drive and get some it was it was like a real addiction a real sugar addiction clearly i got rid of that but but it was you know i wonder at times whether i had described this it's a half gallon is my dose of ice cream right and even though i could have satisfied myself with a pint or a half a pint because it was there because i i you know could eat it and i could get away with it that became my dose it's like people have a you know bag of potato chips you know you have a little individual serving size of potato chips you have one this big they're still to some people each one is is an individual serving it is it is it's tough to just have a few chips and big bags um so what are these you know for athletes listening or for people that want to get back in their athletic ways you know i used to be a professional athlete and i'm still i consider myself an athlete you've got uh nine pieces of primal advice for athletes but i think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way yeah too and still like be better entrepreneurs be more productive have better relationships be sharper all these different things and i think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur absolutely absolutely but you talk about adequate sleep and this is something i've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts but why just emphasize is sleep important for you i mean sleep is when the body renews and regenerates repairs itself it's when a lot of the neural networking happens to overlook sleep and to think well you know i can sleep when i'm dead well you know that just is so such faulty logic yeah uh it's so critical and so important i try to get eight hours a night myself if i get less than six for some reason i i feel it i know it i try to make up for it i try not to let that happen um i try i try not to schedule late nights because i wake up at the same time pretty much every morning so if i say i'm wake up or yeah 6 30 6 am 6 30. but if i were to go to bed at one i'd still wake up at my normal time so i i have to really force myself to not force myself because i'm tired at the end of the day i'm and i and i have this whole wind down process so my wife and i will we'll watch some uh we'll do some television uh after dinner um we'll catch up on we'll do some some binge watching catching up of whatever the latest series was uh but around 10 we'll break i i have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi so i go into the pool's unheated so in the winter time it might be in the 50s wow i'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really really cold but not to the point of shivering just it's kind of a process in and of itself then i'll get the jacuzzi so my wife and i'll hang out the jacuzzi we'll just recap what the day's events were it's very uh we turn off all the lights in the house we have a fire pit out there so there's a real sort of a primal cave caveman kind of thing to that um then i'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and we and towel off and go up to bed and i sleep like a baby as a result of that wow so that's cold there yeah the hot coal therapy and that's kind of how i wind my day down and that prepares me to sleep brings my body temperature down um which is uh you know they say that you're that you should have your lower body temperature to sleep better um we keep the room around 67 yes we have blackout curtains so it's a real cool sleeping environment you know yes um i always like to keep it cold yeah yeah okay and so if you do like a cold shower before bed you think that's a good thing i think it's a good thing yeah it'll help you sleep better i think so try it i mean you can't hurt okay you talk about stress and rest balance what does that mean well uh you know you there are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable work stress uh commuting stress sometimes training waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes stress sorry uh well i'm more stressed about the traffic coming from right because you never know what it's going to be it could be you know i plan for two hours i got here in an hour and or i got here in less than an hour right so that's good yeah but so so you have these stresses um and some of them are imagined even though your brain thinks they're real they're they don't exist you know that our stress mechanisms in the body were they evolved to handle true life or death situations you know a tiger bearing down upon you uh an infection that's gonna that's gonna kill you a broken leg that may you know whatever uh have its imp impact on you not uh you know am i gonna miss my kids rehearsal or am i gonna be late for work or whatever that's those those cause stress but they're not life-threatening and yet we the brain sees them as life-threatening so the the the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery now uh we talked about this before the show that meditation is a form of of rest and recovery uh but just taking maybe if you need a nap you can you can do that but certainly that that goes back to the whole sleep thing being being being critical but the other part of rest is recognizing if you're an athlete recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says i have to go do six miles today you know if you if you wake up that day and you feel like crap and you and and the metrics you know the heart rate um variability is wrong or or you're just not feeling good then you're better off taking that day off than plowing through it and and being able to write in your logbook yeah i got through the workout felt like crap but i got through the workout i was just rested just rested yeah gotcha okay the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key so in in primal endurance we go back to that philosophy that the body you know is a very um uh sort of temperamental uh it's in temperamental states back and forth sometimes you're in a state of of energy and health and sometimes you're not and you can't really plan on when those states are going to be so you have to be willing to listen to the cues and for that reason we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing if you're an athlete so it's it's when you feel good you can go hard when you don't feel good back off uh you take time off we use the term periodicity so you can periodize your training so that there's there are uh tranches of training days a week at a time where you're really going deep deep hard hard and then you might take a week off or take it real easy and back off you can break those further up into into quarterly annual segments uh always with the idea that some days are going to be good some days are going to be bad you're gonna trend toward wanting to build to ratchet up over time but you're okay kind of not doing stuff uh as as hard and so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress it becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement gotcha uh the next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis train slow to race fast what does that mean yeah so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really to to grok and that is um a lot of athletes and i was certainly one for 20 years you basically go out and you train to hurt so you run or you ride or you swim at a heart rate that's you know 75 to 90 percent of your max heart rate and you see how long you can hold that right right and and so you're training to hurt and it's and it's and it hurts you don't hurt it it does hurt you but you feel tough as a result of it and the but the problem is you're not really training the body to be become more efficient you're just training yourself to hurt so when we talk about efficiency in racing we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in in muscle tissue when you run out of glycogen you sort of hit the wall so how do you manage glycogen well one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race the other would be to become so good at burning fat that you never really tap into that glycogen interesting so we train you to become so good at burning fat now that's the 80 that we talked about with the diet but the other part of that for the endurance athlete is if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are it it's typically it's 180 minus your age so let's just say you are 40 years old so 180 minus 40 is 140. so that's going to be your maximum heart rate you're never in your training you're not going to go above that you set your watch you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. now you you start out and you at that 140 maybe you could only run 13 minute miles even though you're capable of running seven minute miles at 175 beats a minute or whatever right but now what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat and we know that at that at that number 180 minus your age that's the highest rate that you can put oxygen through your system and and know that you're burning mostly fat and we know that because that's that's the pace at which you could breathe you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath once you start losing your having to catch up or having to get winded we know that you're going into burning you're building up lactic acid you're not burning fat you're not burning fat or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar so we want to we want you to be at the highest end of your of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic uh uh abilities and we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age so now the idea is you go out and you train and the first day you go out you're in 13 minute miles and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate um you know bumping up to over 140 well you're not very good at burning fat you might be good at burning sugar like i say you might be able to run seven minute miles or six minutes right right so but over time if you stay at that high heart at that maximum heart rate of which is low much lower than you're used to you find yourself running 12 minute miles and then 11 minute miles and then 10 30's and 10 and 9 30. and what it means is even though the heart rate hasn't changed you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through now you're burning more fat so you're becoming more efficient at burning fat so that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym now you're you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you so just so i wrap my head around this is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based on how no so so your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting uh through your your system and it's because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat they don't they they can burn glycogen or glucose with oxygen but they also burn without without oxygen okay so you know like you could run a hundred meter sprint with your uh nose plugged and you there's no oxygen involved yeah you'd still want to breathe you'd want to breathe at the end of it but and you'd have to be to recover yeah recycle but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount so so when we when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat and by the way the heart it's interesting the heart we're not training the heart to be stronger the heart's already pretty strong so the heart doesn't get stronger it does the heart doesn't have a pr right you know what i mean it does it does what it does but what happens is you become more efficient at with with the materials that the heart gives you so if the heart is pumping oxygen x amount of oxygen and you're not good at burning fat you can't do anything with that oxygen but the better you are at burning fat the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that um glycogen uh storage situation okay all right so it's it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat not forever but it's certainly through the base building phase and that's that's a just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go wait a minute i can i can already run seven minute miles why am i dropping down to 13s but invariably and across the board we see as if they stick to this for weeks at a time they become more and more efficient so now we know that that now you're running seven thirty seven minute thirty second miles and you're burning you're getting 92 percent of your of your energy from fat wow so that when you do decide to run those six minute miles now you're you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen to get there interesting okay cool um structured intensity what does this mean uh it it means uh partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some some heavy lifting yes but not a lot okay and this is if you want to be an endurance happy if you understand one thing that athletes used to avoid like the plague was the gym right they would or if they went they would do you know 50 repetitions of a light weight because they're thinking well you know i'm doing when i'm running a marathon i'm running you know 3 000 repetitions of of of leg turnover so why don't i simulate that in the but you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well so what happens in any long endurance contest in addition to running out of fuel is you run out your your power uh decreases because you haven't trained the power an example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race the first one you go up with 100 of your power the second one even though you have energy your muscle fibers are they've been exhausted and they they haven't trained to sustain your power so now you go up the second hill at 82 percent of your max power and you might go up the third hill at 65 percent of your max power well if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those for those efforts that require actual power uh we can we can maybe go up that first hill at 100 and go up that hill second hill at 100 and that third hill at 95. right so we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights it's typically 80 of your one rep max and we do sequential um repetitions with with sequential rest in between so it's not like you do uh three sets of of five and you stop it's like you do uh three repetitions rest 10 seconds three repetitions rest 10 seconds two repetitions rest 10 seconds rest 20 seconds and and to until you can't finish one good rep and then the workout's over so it's not you just did one set and it might have might have comprised 200 repetitions right but that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power gotcha um the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices what do you mean by that well so now we talk about everything else but the training so if you're you know it's it's uh spending time with your family it's playing playing games with your you know uh playing frisbee with your dog yes uh playing ultimate with your with your with your friends it's uh uh you know it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete i know i used to go well i can't i can't afford to do that i might get injured or i might you know i can't like i can't go skiing because i might twist and twist the knee well if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were uh you know than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all sure right so um we we want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis you know you want to wake up in the morning and go i got that 10k today i gotta go clean out my gi tract i'm so nervous you know but you want to you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day what we're saying is don't put it on the line every day in your training have fun um you know do the do the right sort of training that builds this this beast that when you get to the race you're you're going to enjoy it you're going to have fun you're going to perform probably better than if you've done the old paradigm of training right but you'll have lived a life in the interim i mean i so many of my you know ex triathlete marathon buddies you know couldn't have a relationship it was just you know imagine they put all their energy in this one thing yeah i mean they you know it's like uh the the wife says can't you stay home and cuddle you know saturday morning and the husband goes no i got a 100 mile ride i got to do yeah you know and uh then i'm going to go you know run after that then i'm going to take a nap because i'm going to feel like crap i did so much so we we try to look at the life in general and say well an awesome life includes participating in these events participating in life and doing well but it also includes participating in life yeah yeah so not to the exclusion of all of everything else what feedback would you give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle you know they want to be a primal athlete in their daily life but they also want to run a business and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing yeah maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else yep what would you suggest you're doing it you've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multi-million dollar business multiple of them you know what would you suggest to them so um you know there are there are ways to have it all and uh but you can't be like the best endurance athlete in the world and uh a really successful entrepreneur so you gotta choose how much of the endurance athlete you to be i would suggest that that for me the best choice was i want to i want to tow the starting line with with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90 of the field's ass right so i for me the goal is almost how little can i get away with to get the maximum to get the maximum result without having to go okay because because if it's going to take you know 20 percent of the effort to get 80 the result i'm not willing to put in the other 80 to win the thing right anymore or or and maybe i won't even win the thing because maybe i'll help over train so now you're back to the to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete get a stand-up desk and a tread desk so i have a tread treadmill uh every one of my employees has a treadmill out there yeah at their at their work now they i don't force them to use it so they can but they can they they request it i give it to them so you can put in eight miles walking easily and no one on the phone or even on the skype will know that you're walking yes you know because you can make it uphill whatever um take lots of take frequent breaks and you know drop and do some push-ups or some air squats uh what i do is um i like to i like to go for a paddle and i'll bring a um a recording device on a stand-up paddleboard and i'll if i get my great ideas when i'm paddling so i'll just record my ideas right or i don't fall in well it's a plastic bag by the way i almost never i typically will paddle for an hour and a half i'll step on get wet up to my calves and step off west but the other thing is um hiking so if you want to do some serious hiking um bring a headset in your phone make make business calls while you're hiking i got a friend who's basically a billionaire and that's where he makes most of his business calls wow he does two hours of hiking a day nobody knows he's hiding that he's hiking yeah wow okay awesome and then so the so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time it's not you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff like i said that that maximum sustained power workout i just described it's basically a short warm-up maybe 10 minutes of doing it and then you're done and and if if you could do it in two days later or three days later you didn't do it hard enough okay right so we want you to take a week to recover from that from that specific work doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day but you just wouldn't want to repeat you know a heavy leg day the next right right exactly so it's how you this is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing where you when you put it all together you you can have it all you can be an effective efficient entrepreneur and you can compete against all of those other uh guys who are you know claiming they're going to kick your ass in the 10k or the spartan race or whatever it is right i love that um and we talked about the diet already but the last thing is proper recovery so how much you know is when do you know you're over training well so there there are all sorts of metrics i mean you just wake up in the morning and if you haven't slept well and you're you know you're sore then you're probably over training if you're should we not feel that soreness at all yeah i mean i don't think it's it's appropriate to feel you can feel it on a day-to-day basis but not on a week-to-week basis so you can feel sore after a workout you know today yesterday or two days ago but i think if you're still feeling sore uh for days on end then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts or you might have uh you might have overreached on one of your workouts so uh that's one indicator um we have a metric that we use called heart rate variability hrv and you can buy these apps uh that measure the time between heart beats and you'd think that they that that you'd want to see a metronomic beat like an exact amount of time space between each heartbeat but it turns out that that's an indication of over training that in fact the heart we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever is being called upon in in real time so there might be a 0.8 second skip and then a 1.1 second skip and then a 1.2 and then a 0.8 and then 0.9 okay and that's heart rate variability and and you can and if you if you've got a good heart rate variability score it's probably a good indicator that you're that you're rested and and well trained and ready to go again okay cool um a couple questions left for you this has been great information and i want people to go check out primalblueprint.com so you can see all the books especially primal endurance the new one but all the books the products everything else if you want to own a restaurant you can learn about that too um a few questions left for you what's a question that you've done tons of interviews over the last decade alone from from everything you've been doing what's a question that no one's ever asked you you've always wanted the answer oh wow you should give me time to think about that is there anything that comes to mind no um because i've been i've done a lot of interviews and i've been asked a lot of questions um yeah i'd have to give that some things okay what's something small you've done that you're really proud of that not a lot of people know about you um it's it's not that small but not a lot of people know that i um i helped get uh triathlon in the olympic games by changing uh drastically changing one of the rules of the sport really yeah you got it in the olympic game well i was no i i didn't personally get it in but i got i was i was on uh a board of the international triathlon union which is which was the international federation for the sport of triathlon wow and for the first uh 15 years of triathlon there was no drafting allowed on the bike and i convinced the board to change that rule to allow drafting on the bike which pissed off every every top triathlete in the world at the time but it was the only way we could get in the olympic games really yeah so that's that that move allowed uh allowed us to have races where 50 people could be close to each other and you didn't have to to disqualify them for being too close for drafting and it made for much uh more telegenic events and things like it was just following one person at a time right yeah exactly interesting yeah wow so and then you qualify for the olympic trials right in the marathon yeah the marathon not in the triathlon right yeah okay cool that's all what was your your fastest marathon i ran 218. it's good it's really fast yeah well it wasn't fast enough but it wasn't you know in those days that's fast yeah 70s and 80s or whatever that was really fast um okay it's one of your uh it's one of your final days yeah many many years from now yeah and uh all your books have been erased everything you've created is gone and you have a piece of paper by your bed and all your friends family are there and they ask you to write down three things that you know to be true about your experience in life the three simple truths that you would pass on to them to right yep essentially all your lessons down to three things what would they be um the first one is uh if it were easy everyone would would be doing it does that resonate with you absolutely absolutely um the second one is um is absolutely find uh as much joy in every moment as you possibly can in other words live in the now mm-hmm and the third is um uh i'm gonna say always be in a relationship always be in a relationship one type of relationship either either with someone else or yourself okay why that well um because i think uh first of all i think we you know we're sort of groomed to be in a relationship of some kind uh and that's i think not just groom we're you know we're hardwired to be in a relationship i believe uh and and it doesn't have to be the same person forever but you know sort of we have relationships come and go and i just find that that most of the time when you're in a relationship you're experiencing uh the better parts of life and if you're not in a relationship then if you're in a good relationship with yourself and you and you you have that self-love you're still able to experience that stuff that's cool but as opposed to saying i'm a loner um i don't you know i'm fine alone and i can cruise through life and do whatever it is right yeah okay that's cool that just came to me by the way so i haven't been working on that for no that's great it's great yeah yeah uh what are you grateful for in your life right now oh my god i'm i am i could not uh the list is so long i'm grateful for um my my uh my path and how it got me to where i am so i'm grateful for every bad thing that happened to me and there were a lot of them i'm grateful for my wife and for my kids i have awesome wife two awesome kids i'm grateful for um the time that we live in that would allow me to to be able to talk to millions of people because 20 years ago that wouldn't be would not have been able to do this right you know the internet and and this this uh this ability to to reach out to millions of people tens of millions of people right so i'm grateful for that i'm certainly grateful for my health um grateful uh that uh i'm grateful for good food i mean just and by the way that's i mean that's i think that's important is to spend a little bit of time each day just i mean i remember i'm grateful for this awesome pen that just writes perfectly when i'm trying to take notes where does pen come from okay there you go i love it um final two questions if you had all the money in the world to spend on one thing and you had to spend it on something um what would you spend it on wow to solve like a problem in the world yeah yeah what would you spend it on that would automatically change it forever that problem and be solved yeah i mean i'd i'd uh i would spend it on a uh on a on a food project that had uh that not only fed people but fed them without causing further downstream problems i'll give an example of what i mean by causing further downstream we can provide grain to most of the world but all that does is just keep them alive long enough to get um type 2 diabetes or scurvy or very very diseased right so i i don't mean to sound you know harsh about that but there's a lot more to it than providing grain so i would like to you know fix the the world's food problem i'd probably um do something like a massive grazing program that would that would reclaim uh desertified lands using alan savory's methods of of grazing bees growing grass and grazing beasts and creating more topsoil that that would be that would be the single project that i'd probably well yeah that's cool um final question before i ask uh where should we go for you personally probably brewplan primalblueprint.com but where where are you personally online that we should connect yeah mark's daily apple is my blog that's the best place to find out about what i do and we blog there every day and every day you got an article right yeah yeah every day for 10 years and you do most of the writing don't you i do a lot of the writing now i have you know mondays is a q a that's easy um but uh fridays we do a a success story so that's always somebody writing in their story it's been that way for eight years it's phenomenal we have a recipe on saturday um link love on sunday so yeah that's cool yeah very cool uh well i want to acknowledge you mark for your for for teaching the young generation how to live young at an older age it's incredible you're 62 right yeah 62 i'm 33 i feel like you're way better shape than i am i don't know about you you've got a ton of energy you're so we'll find out when you come play frisbee yeah you'll be in better shape for sure the first time maybe a few more times um but your consistency in in educating the world and educating yourself and constantly learning and evolving is so inspiring so i want to acknowledge you for your incredible commitment and consistency to teaching and educating and your your reach to 10 million people and beyond is is happening in a powerful way so i appreciate and acknowledge you for that thank you so much uh the final question is what's your definition of greatness uh definition of greatness is um a living a life of uh grace and ease and uh and success by your definition mark sisson thanks so much man appreciate it hey guys thanks so much for watching this video i really appreciate it and if you enjoyed this video then make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel you can do that by clicking right here to subscribe because each week we come out with awesome epic and inspiring interviews and messages and videos just for you so click subscribe right here to get notified of new videos every week also if you enjoyed this specific interview we've got a lot of great interviews like this that are uplifting and inspiring so click right here to watch the previous interviews because the people i've had on are pretty cool and epic as well so click here to watch previous interviews click here to subscribe i love you guys and i'll see you very soon

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 325,683

Keywords: lewis howes, the school of greatness, lewis howes podcast, mark sisson primal endurance, mark sission workout, mark sisson interview 2016, mark sisson primal blueprint, mark sisson diet, mark sisson podcast, lewis howes interview, mark sisson, mark sisson keto, self help, inspiration, motivation, inspirational video, motivational video, how to lose fat, how to get healthy, health theory, health interview, how to burn fat, health, nutrition, success, mark sisson interview, healthy

Id: IUY9hln2zVc

Length: 58min 55sec (3535 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2016