[Music] but why would some individuals be able to push further and further and that's going to be 100% neural mental and when I say neural mental I mean you know the mental piece we often hear you know 90% of work or sport is psychological But ultimately it's neural it's the firing of neurons so what would allow one person to push further it's going to come down to their effort their perception of their effort and what that means to them right the meaning piece is a little bit hard for science to really attack mechanistically but let's be real if somebody feels depleted but they can set mental Milestones like I'll just go another 10 m and then reup another 10 m and then another 10 m that's one strategy they could count steps yeah they could also distract themselves right you could distract yourself from the pain of the effort somebody who's very good at endurance is going to have a deep kit at times they'll count steps at times they'll go for milestones at times they'll distract themselves and they'll have a deep kit of meaning running for the purpose of themselves running for maybe higher power maybe running for family then they're going to have to probably shift those as time goes on but if we want to get mechanistic there's a brain structure most neuroscientists until recently didn't even know what this brain structure did most probably didn't even know that it existed this is a brain structure called the anterior mid singulate cortex fancy name name doesn't matter but amcc the amcc is an area in the brain that gets inputs and outputs from lots of different things the dopamine system the serotonin system the memory system the forbrain that's involved in thinking planning and strategy and that's key we'll come back to that a colleague of mine at Stanford School Medicine Joe parvey he's a neurosurgeon did this really interesting study he's in in the brain he's stimulating different brain areas and he discovers this anur mid singulate cortex when he stimulates there people feel as if a challenge is impending on them a storm or some sort of physical challenge or psychological Challenge and and it's kind of abstract in their mind but they response to it when this brain area is stimulated is to feel as if they're going to go forward Center of mass into it and through it it's the grit piece and then he backs off the stimulation of this area and that mental effect relax he stimulates a little bit of a distance away completely different set of subjective effects this brain area has been shown in other studies to enlarge or to be activated more in people that are successful dieters successful exercisers and here's the key it seems to really matter if the effort that you're engaging in is something that you don't want to do it's it's painful it's creating that internal sense of resistance so your keep hammering Mantra yeah is hammering against something right we think of the hammer right rarely do we think about the surface pushing back against that so when Courtney or goggin or you or anyone is pushing through a mental barrier they're they are enduring without this anterior mid singulate cortex is is highly active and what's interesting is that this brain area is not designed for running it's not designed for getting up for the seventh time in the middle of the night when your newborn is crying mhm it's designed for all of that this is something that's essentially in all of us smaller in some larger in others and the act of enduring makes it more accessible and there are a bunch of really interesting studies that also show when people fail at reaching a goal when they tap out yeah especially long-term goals if you think about it for somebody who's struggle with their weight or with other issues or quitting smoking or something like that it's an endurance race really not one it's not a one-off this brain area seems to be less engaged maybe even atrophies a little bit shrinks a little bit I've been talking a lot about this brain area recently because it's super exciting a number of different studies Converge on a common theme which is that it's involved in enduring and pushing through so when Courtney's out running I don't know what's going on in her head but presumably at some point she might have a clamp cramp in the leg or something oh now you have an option of thinking about that cramp making it disappear that way or taking your attention to something else when I've had experts on the podcast who talks about pain uh Dr Shawn Mackey he's a medical doctor and PhD director of the pain Center essentially at Stanford school of medicine he's talked a lot about what's called the biopsychosocial model of pain which means that pain is an emotion it's something that exists in us as a thought and an emotion so that's the psychological piece right Courtney or goggin or you no doubt has a a memory of I've been here before where there was pain it went away or I remember leaning into the feeling of it and it got and that pain got smaller that's what's interesting about how the brain registers pain sometimes by focusing on it we can mentally shrink it sometimes by focusing on it it grows you kind of have to explore that I think the cold plunge is a really nice way to explore some of this you get into really cold water it's uncomfortable and you can either embrace the discomfort and move through it or you can try and distract yourself so having those options in mind is key because of this mental part of pain and struggle it gives us options of ways to push through it it's kind of like like like finding your way through a jungle right sometimes you want to hack low on the plant sometimes you want to hack high so one of the key things here is the fact that this antr mid singulate cortex gets input from the dopamine system you know and people make a lot of dopamine and it's involved in a lot of different things not just reward and effort so one of the cool things about the anterior mid singulate cortex is that it gets input from the dopamine system and you know people hear about dopamine a lot these days dopamine hits and dopamine's involved with reward and motivation and that's all true it's involved in a lot of things it's even involved in stuff within the eye believe it or not man but the interesting thing about the dopamine system as it relates to endurance is that when we set milestones and we reach those Milestones dopamine is deployed and that changes our physiology and allows us to go further so for instance let's say Courtney's running and she got a leg cramp and it's painful and she's wondering if she's hydrated enough she's starting to flag I mean I have to imagine I'm not her obviously but I have to imagine at some point she thinks like this really sucks but she decides okay 15 15 more steps now if she reaches that 15th step no doubt there's a reward released in the brain in the form of a chemical made it yeah made it dopamine is released other things too okay I don't want to give the impression dopamine is the only currency of reward in the brain but at that point her physiology is different than it was 15 Steps prior why because dopamine is deployed along with two other chemicals epinephrine and norepinephrine which together those three we call the catamin and those three change the way that our brain networks work they give us a new sense of what's possible now she can set a new Milestone okay I'm going to go another 8 minutes or I'm going to go the duration of some some song in my head or I'm just going to focus on the trees around me so the incredible thing about human endurance is that we can use our cognition our thoughts our emotions meaning to set milestones and push to what would otherwise cause us to tap out if we were just focused on the perception of the pain right so it's almost like a vehicle that you know an it's almost like an automatic vehicle where you program in the destination but then it's a thinking vehicle that can change the destination reup the destination and actually change the amount of fuel it uses to go a given speed across a given distance what do I mean by that you know if we look at the body and endurance and the Brain if we look at the body and endurance just as a what we call like a linear system like calories in calories burn V2 Max you know firing of slow twitch muscle fibers Etc a lot of sense can be made of that but ultimately the the the mental piece is the one that can change the you know how much effort is put in is largely dictated by how much we perceive that effort and how much we perceive okay the effort I just went through the last 100 miles well I'm here now if I could do 100 miles I have can do another 100 you know this is also true for psychological stress you know and this is taught a lot in uh addiction treatment communities if you can be uncomfortable for 1 second well then you can be uncomfortable for 2 seconds you just made it through that second you can be uncomfortable for 2 seconds you can be uncomfortable for 5 minutes you know the whole notion of one day at a time is that that segment seems to work you know you try and segment your whole life that's a that's a big that's a big elephant heat all at once so the point here is that these reward systems that we can set up through just our own spontaneous creation of what the subjective Milestones are in theory can allow us to run until we are on Nubs in theory right right and at that point of course you know you could bleed out you could need sleep so much that you collapse but in speaking with people in communities you know that go through like military screening where they have to stay up many many days a lot of those guys will tell you you know you're better off not taking the nap right you're better off not dropping it just keep moving and the hardest thing to do is sit still but as long as you keep moving you're good and that without question is because you have a task and as long as you're completing task you're reuping these reward systems which then changes your physiology which then allows you to move forward in in those conditions they're being given a task run this distance dig this sand get back in the cold water or what have you yeah but in a foot race or race against oneself which is ultimately what it becomes you just keep changing the goal changing the goal changing the goal so it's a constant reuping of Finish Lines and it's essentially like taking a trophy each time except that trophy think about that trophy that you get when you reach that next mental Milestone imagine that trophy is filled with a fuel and that fuel is endurance [Music] I mean I think that people rely um often too heavily on psychological motivators and we overlook this entrainment phenomenon and the ability for our body to entrain to certain times you know I for instance I it's a terrible thing but I like to get up hydrate caffeinate slowly do some mental work and then my ideal training time you know if I ever retire I don't know that I ever will but would be to train midm morning like 10:30 amazing I love it my workouts are always best Etc but my life isn't organized that way so I like to try and exercise within an hour of waking up um but I have to drink caffeine first I don't do my 90-minute delay thing I drink my caffeine first if I'm going to exercise right away and I should say that for people that feel amotivated what do we do generally we consume things like caffeine which as we know disrupts the adenosine system so adenosine being a molecule of sleepiness or fatigue um also upregulates dopamine receptors incidentally it's actually shown in human dopamine receptors pretty interesting there Cafe regular caffeine consumption very likely increases the the sensitivity Andor number of dopamine receptors available so whatever dopamine is released can have quote unquote more of an effect in terms of motivation and reward people will take nowadays um and I'm not passing judgment here but there's a lot of use of things like adol modafanil viant stimulants what do all those stimulants do they release the catacol meines mainly dopamine and epinephrine um they they are amphetamines okay people go we going to you know speed yep that's what they are um again not passing judgment they can have certain positive effects for certain clinical um issues in some cases again not um promoting or discouraging just stating the the reality but what do people do they take stimulants what did I do right before this podcast I'll come clean I don't hide these things I've been experimenting lately with with 2 mg of Nicorette nicotine in the form of gum I don't smoke Vape dip or snuff those are all bad carcinogenic Etc I know people say vaping is not as bad smoking vaping is bad okay it's as bad smoking probably not but it's not good for you don't Vape I just got some enemies but that's my read of the data more coming but nicotine Taps into the acetycholine system increases focus it also will tap into the epinephrine and dopamine system it's highly reinforcing so I limit myself to 2 milligrams maybe four times a week total and I'm thinking about stopping all together because I'm just running this as an experiment on myself and it really really works for me what does it do it makes me more alert more motivated that also scares me it's not um and many people I know that take their these pouches that come in caners I've never tried them I don't want to those are generally 4 to 8 milligrams of nicotine per pouch I hear over and over again that people take one they love it take one pouch they then will do two a day three a day and pretty quickly they're consuming a canister or so if not every day every couple of days so it's a very quick route to let's just call it habit is it addictive maybe is it habit forming clearly um and this is becoming All the Rage now um I don't recommend it um nicotine is a vasoconstrictor um which isn't good raises blood pressure Etc there's some evidence that nicotine can be a cognitive enhancer and maybe later in life it might something that I'll return to um for that reason um but it does have certain health hazards um Clips always get cut of me saying the cognitive part cognitive enhancing part but the point here is that when people feel amotivated they tend to look for something that they can ingest remember no effort get the get the molecules going and there's nothing wrong with that a cup of coffee or espresso or yeram mate you I'll do all three sometimes and you're more alert you're more arousal you need to do something with that energy and then try and lean into work the problem is with pharmacology it's hard to get the dose just right so that you have the ideal level of focus ideal level of alertness but not so much that you have agitation and your mind is kind of darting all over the place my typical thing is I I will use coffee or yerbamate or both prior to a hard Weight Workout but when it comes to cardio I try and do my cardio without any any caffeine or even certainly no excessive caffeine maybe half a cup of coffee maybe a yamate or two and then just get out and go run in my case or or do the hit workout and let the workout itself be its own source of neurochemicals but um that's just me I know some people are doing the energy drinks combined with nicotine combined with I mean all sorts of stuff and it's wild because then what they find is in the absence of those things they're amotivated well why it was minimal to zero effort followed by high amplitude dopamine release and probably less directly from the the exercise that you're doing how does caffeine um from coffee affect so you mentioned the dopamine receptors is that so is there like longterm cuz then you start to like you never feel as good as like if you take a break from caffeine then you have the first cup of coffee right I know I can't I can't say I relate cuz I I can't remember the last time I I took a break from caffeine I've done it when I had flu or I was cold you know had colds or flu cuz I just don't want to drink caffeine under those conditions usually like chamomile tea and I'm just huddling in bed or something um I love caffeine I don't drink that much of it you know but probably total out about 4 500 milligram a day you know I weigh 215 220 lbs so that's not that much and I'm pretty caffeine acclimated and I tend to drink caffeine in the early part of the day and not so much in the evening or certainly not after 3:00 p.m. so I can sleep well but yeah the stacking is something that you know I don't want to give the impression that if you know you have an energy drink like a pre-workout and you got the music blasting and you're hydrated and you slept grading have a great workout like crush a workout every once in a while but don't be surprised if the next time you're walking into the gym you don't feel quite as motivated and I don't think one should rely on that every single time you know that you need to if you need a stimulant every time you're going to exercise you are um creating a a pattern of behavior and likely some underlying neur neurochemical habits that that are not going to serve you well in the long run you're going to feel less motivation to do the thing that itself can generate feelings of motivation and that's what we've been talking about the use a cold shower would be a great one I'm just fascinated by this that there I've never seen anything else no drug prescription or otherwise no supplement no um workout that I'm aware of but I haven't explored every single one that creates that long Arc of dopamine epinephrine and norepinephrine release that one minute one minute of being uncomfortably cold can create there's Great Value in paying attention to how one encounters stress moves through stress and then when you get out of the cold plunge I I don't tend to spend too much effort thinking about how I feel in that time I just know that it's a complete State shift I also know based on my reading of my sleep on my eight sleeper Whoop That doing coal plune in the morning dramatically increases the amount of Rapid ey movement sleep I get at night and I don't know the exact reason for that not incidentally certain forms of pharmacology not um drugs of abuse but that I've I don't use regularly but that I've used in the past um that increase dopamine and and norepinephrine like pryin will increase my rap and ey movement sleep dramatically I currently don't take it I took it years ago for a short bout of depression I don't take it any longer but I decided to take milligram of proon as a focus Aid at one point at doing an experiment there it didn't work well for me but I noticed that my rap and eye movement at sleep just at night just spiked like crazy the mount the duration increased by you know I think it was about 15% then I stopped taking it and went back to its you know previous uh value so there's something about adrenaline release perhaps even just early in the day that seems to impact sleep at night yeah well cold shower is always great and it's not just zero cost it'll save you on on your heating bill um cold shower sucks because it's almost like the fact that part of you can be out of the cold makes it worse you like like part of you can be slightly warmer whereas with the cold plunge you're you're all in up to the neck hopefully um sometimes people get their hands out and I don't judge I think that's fine um people have different levels of basoc constriction and pain from the from the cold so you want to be fair it does not a problem to keep your hands out as I understand it um cold shower is great I think the high-intensity interval training that I know you're a big fan of that's a remarkable tool not only is it brief but it deploys all these systems these neurochemical systems that create alertness also because it's brief and it does that you're unlikely to fatigue yourself to the point where cognitive work is harder [Music] so how can we overcome procrastination well it turns out that there are findings from within the addiction literature that turn out to be very powerful towards leveraging our way out of procrastination and it has to do with this you already know because I've told you probably a dozen times now that the depth of the trough after a dopamine Peak is proportional to how high that Peak was and how steep it was how quickly that Peak occurred it turns out that not only is the depth of the trough proportional to that but the rate at which you get out of that trough is proportional to how steep that trough is let me explain this for you in as clear terms as I possibly can imagine you're in an amotivated State you're just not feeling motivated you're procrastinating you may think okay the thing to do here is something I'll clean the house I'll take care of some bills I'll do something or I'll just wait those approaches as we talked about before generally don't work or at least don't work quickly or they lead you right up to the deadline and it's the deadline that forces you to get something done or you just don't get it done and you don't succeed in your goal that happens a lot as well however if you were to take that state of being unmotivated or procrastinating and actually do something that's harder than being in that amotivated state in other words doing something that's more effortful even painful you can rebound yourself out of that dopamine trough much more quickly so what do I mean you want to put yourself in a state that's worse than or harder than the state that you're in or do something quote unquote more painful and here I want to be very clear I'll say this three times but I'm going to say it for the first time now when I say more painful I do not mean doing any kind of tissue damaging or psychologically damaging Behavior or anything of that sort that's going to render you injured or not well even in the short term that's not what I'm referring to okay okay let's just get that one out of the way what I'm referring to is the fact that for instance if you're feeling amotivated but you find yourself cleaning the house as a way to procrastinate you can say well cleaning the house is harder than sitting down and doing nothing but actually in that moment or in those moments that's not the case or else you wouldn't be doing it the reality is that the dopamine system works according to what feels hard or easy in the Moment In other words if you're feeling amotivated you need to do something and put yourself into a state that's harder than the state you're in so for instance if you're sitting around feeling amotivated or you find yourself tending to tasks that are irrelevant to the goal that you really should be focused on you need to put your body and mind into a state of discomfort quickly and the way to do that is to either engage in some tangential activity meaning an activity not related to your goal that puts your body into a very different state so here again I'll default to the obvious one which is something like cold shower or cold immersion which not only increases dopamine long term or over several hours rather but for most people is experienced as pain that pain causes a rebound out of that dopamine trough faster than it would occur if you had just stayed in that a motivated State and waited for it to go away or done something like cleaning up that for whatever reason felt like it required less friction when I say friction I mean limbic friction your limic system is always in this dialogue with your forebrain and limic friction goes two ways limic friction can be you're tired and you don't want to do something and so you have to quote unquote motivate to do it energize yourself to do it or limbic friction can be that you're nervous and scared and anxious to do something and you have to calm yourself in order to lean forward into action in order to do that thing despite the anxiety I realize this can be a little bit confusing as a concept so I want to go into a bit more detail let's imagine that you or somebody else does not like to exercise you don't want to exercise and you're trying to get your minimum of 5 days per week exercise and you're just not motivated to do it there are a couple different techniques to doing this assuming you've taking care of all the Baseline stuff all the foundational stuff we talked about earlier and you're just not getting in gear and you find yourself you know checking your phone or maybe you're tending to some tasks obviously those things are quote unquote easier for you meaning they cause less lyic friction than engaging in exercise the typical advice would be just exercise for one minute okay just get one minute of exercise or five minutes and then use the successful completion of that one or 5 minutes as a milestone that allows you to then move to the next Milestone and indeed that approach can work and it's exactly what I'm describing here when I say that you're in a state of lack of motivation or procrastination or both and you need to put yourself into a more painful not less painful state so what do you do you push up against that friction and you exercise for a short while and then that pops you out of that trough that's possible but for a lot of people even that won't be possible because they just can't get motivated or they do that one minute or five minutes and they're just like okay I'm still in the trough I'm not actually feeling that great in those circumstances it makes sense to do something that's tangential to the whole path that you're trying to pursue this goal that you're trying to pursue that is Believe It or Not much worse than just being a motivated and when I say worse I don't mean picking some task that normally you don't like to do but now you're willing to do I mean literally thinking about what would be worse than being in this state again without causing yourself tissue or psychological damage what would be worse well cold water would be worse for many people very cold water so the key is to figure out something that for lack of a better way to put it really sucks really sucks and yet is safe and by doing that you steepen the trough you steepen the slope of the trough which we know brings you back to your Baseline level of dopamine more quickly now for some people that will be deliberate cold exposure through cold shower ice bath and I have to tell you that if you're cringing as I say this well then there you go you now have a tool that you know you cringe even when you just think about and therefore represents a great tool for you so if I'm procrastinating to do something I really need to do should I just simply wait for that procrastination to evaporate no will it eventually evaporate maybe will a deadline eventually surface that will trigger me into an anxious or activated state that will allow me to complete what needs to be done maybe hopefully but better would be to get out of that a motivated state that state of procrastination quickly [Music] [Music] you know I'm big on helping people get their sleep right cuz sleep is the Ultimate Reset for endurance and life right uh but I'm a big proponent of things like non-sleep deep rest which is similar to an ancient practice called yoga NRA where you lie down you deliberately stay awake but you relax your body and you try and get your brain out of thinking and doing and more into just pure sensation sometimes people fall asleep this done for 10 minutes or 20 minutes can partially offset some of the effects of sleep deprivation but we know naps work too now what we're talking about is very very short naps what happens when you're sleep deprived and you take one of those mental Micron naaps or let's just call it a micron naap is no doubt the brain goes into a state of sleep that's much deeper than it normally would had you you know been on a more standard schedule awake for 12 to 16 hours or something that night and go to sleep so what you're getting is a bunch of sleep likee stuff in that very compact time frame Okay now what's happening there okay well we know that fatigue and sleepiness comes from the buildup of a molecule called adenosine incidentally caffeine interrupts the adenosine system so you don't feel that sleepiness and the caffeine wears off and that adenosine hits those receptors and you feel extra sleepy but no doubt in those short micro daps some adenosine is being cleared we also know that there's a bunch of changes in the neurons themselves those what we call ion channels of potassium sodium thing gets altered let's say um in sleep you know it's about altering the amount of pottassium in and outside of the cells and in naps you adjust some of that so when you are really tired and you kind of do that little Micron naap you wake up like I feel better what's going on there well it's a very compact replenishment of some of the cellular and kind of full body things like clearance of adenosine changes those uh the amount of potassium inside and outside the cell these kinds of things now are you clearing all that ensity away in 1 minute no but no doubt there's a more rapid clearance than would normally occur in 1 minute of sleep there's also something very powerful and this is the reason I mentioned non-sleep deep rest there's also something very powerful about just letting your mind go idle for a period of time you know from the time you wake up until you go asleep night you're in what I call dpos you're doing duration path outcome you're trying to figure out what to say next what to do next you're trying to get to that Milestone you're trying to navigate through your day when you go into one of those one minute Micron naaps or you do a non-sleep deep rest you're you're essentially shutting down all that planning what's planning the prefrontal cortex the prefrontal cortex we talked about earlier is this very um d dnamic strategy setting system so like we're here in my yard we have a strategy we have a plan and we're we're carrying out that plan moment you get in your car you have a different strategy plan to get where you need to go and so on and so forth the prefontal cortex is involved in all of that Dynamic planning and when you run as we were talking about before prefrontal cortex is going to be engaged this is important when you actually have to plan mil stones but there's also that beautiful part of endurance running not what I would consider myself an endurance run what I try to rock Along on Sundays and I ran across country a bit to know that there are those times when you just went 20 minutes 30 minutes you weren't planning anything you're just cruising and you're just in the sensation of running and I would argue that when you're doing that when any of us are doing that we're we are allowing our prefrontal cortex to go slightly offline okay it's always online to some extent but slightly off lust rest a little bit so this is rest while moving okay this is rest while in effort so this is another kind of drawer in the in the cupboard of option sorry this is another covered in the options of ways to push through so you can plan Milestones but that's planning that requires that prefrontal cortex okay I'm going to do this I'm going to do that I'm going to do this it's like the list that people cross off during the day but then there's the just running not thinking about anything and we know that that allows the brain to some areas of the brain to get some quote unquote rest during those times so I would argue that provided one doesn't go off track off course provided that one is staying with their Pace the more that one can rest while in effort the more resources you're conserving what resources are we talking about I'm not talking about caloric energy at the level of muscles we're talking about caloric energy and neural energy right okay which sounds kind of woo neural energy no but think about most of our metabolic needs each day are for brain function so the ability to just let the brain idle a little bit in certain areas is energy conservation and so that's got to play in also so we're not just talking about a vehicle that can like Milestone go Milestone go Milestone go push through endure it's also about knowing when to hit like in a vehicle you you know and then you get up in those higher RPMs then what what does a good transmission allow you to do and you can go the same speed right at lower RPM [Music] I try and get to bed by about 10 maybe 11:00 p.m. I don't always succeed um I wake up around you know 6:00 a.m. or so if I don't sleep enough or I don't feel rested I'll do a 10 to 20 minute maybe 30 minute nstr or Yoga Nidra I get up I like to hydrate uh first thing I try and do let drink 16 to 32 ounces of water I like just hydrate in the morning um get outside and get some sunlight if I can't get the sunlight I get in front of that 10,000 Lux light um I prefer to work out early in the day in which case I'll drink caffeine if it's a resistance training workout that for me that's yerbamate or coffee or both sometimes um I'll just tell you my workout schedule is really easy to hit on same thing I've been doing roughly for 30 years although sometimes I've been less you know um less focused on it and let it lapse a bit here and there so first day the a week for me it falls on a Monday but it could be any day I train my legs calves hamstrings quats I'm a big believer in glute ham raises hack squats um leg curls leg extensions calf raises just keep the lower body strong keep the posterior chain strong there are a bunch of different ways to do this one could do it with kettle bell swings or deadlifts but those are the things that work well for me and that I can consistently add load or other ways of increasing intensity without getting hurt okay knock on wood um the whole thing takes about an hour next day um is a rest day typically after leg day and I'll try and do I don't always do but some deliberate heat and deliberate cold exposure in an ideal world it's 20 minutes of sauna 3 to 5 minutes of cold 20 minutes of sauna 3 to 5 minutes of cold 20 minutes of sauna 3 to 5 minutes of cold and yes I finish with a warm shower because I'm a human being um and I like that and I will listen to podcasts or books or something while I do it and helps my recovery it's also just thermal training it has all the benefits of sauna and cold and I like to do it on that day the next day I'll do typically a run um a 25 or 30 minute run at a kind of faster Pace um so where I'm you know breathing hard for most of it but it's not all out maybe 85% of effort and um that's it the next day I train um my torso um I know a lot of people roll their eyes they be like what are you talking about how do you I I do I do some overhead pressing some dips some um pull-ups or chinups and some rowing and then I do some abdominal work and I I train my neck um because I it's an important part of the the you know structure of the upper body to keep the head stable and not get Tex neck and things like that I don't train it heavy but I train my neck and I do make sure I do things like rear delts um I I really am trying to emphasize you know outward you know external rotation of the limb so we're not you know kind of like hunched over like this and heavy in the traps you know just upright posture those kinds of things and then the next day um the only workout is about 10 minutes long it's that 10c hard cycling on the assault bike 20 second rest 10 20 10 20 for eight rounds that's it V2 Max Saturdays um another short resistance training workout so three total for the week and then it's you know biceps triceps calves Little Neck work abdominal work it's kind of just small body part stuff and then on Sunday which for me falls on a Sunday I try and do some long rock or hike often socially put on a backpack with some weight or if I'm by myself I'll do you know a 60 to 90 minute jog or something of that sort maybe hike part of it and listen to music or just let my thoughts go so what it boils down to is 6 days of training per week three resistance training sessions one longer slow run one moderate one and one short one the total amount of time is actually quite low when you when you think about it um and then there's that rest day where I may or may not do the the heat and cold this schedule I could micro disect but what it ends up happening with this schedule is because for in since I'll train my legs on Monday directly but I'm doing the assault bike for hit on Friday so my legs sort of get targeted twice per week once directly once indirectly so I don't have to worry about too little frequency of stimulation for things like strength and hypertrophy although I'm not trying to grow anymore for maintaining muscle similarly I'll train my torso on that one day during the middle of the week but you're using your arms for that and then you train your arms directly another day and on the arm day you know I'm doing some dip like like things and so you're also hitting your torso muscle so I never worry that it's not frequent enough I find that getting into the gym more than 3 days per week or doing resistance training more than three days per week I start to lose my motivation for it but I like to be really focused and targeted when I'm there and I love long runs I love moderate runs and I love the hit workout so I get to do a little bit of everything and I really want to emphasize that because I'm not a professional athlete or even an amateur athlete the whole basis of this thing is to be able to do anything meaning I can go for a long hike or backpack at the during the summer with a heavy pack no problem I can Sprint for the airplane no problem I can lift things without hurting myself no problem provided I'm smart about it I'm not trying to be the strongest the biggest or the fastest or the one with the most endurance just kind of all around life and none of these workouts is longer than an hour and in many cases they're 12 minutes or 30 minutes the daily routine is pretty much consistent and I should say that schedule if I travel things might slide a bit I might move day one next to day two I move things around but I'm careful to never weight train more than two days in a row I personally don't recover I don't like doing that okay nutrition I just try and emphasize nonprocessed or minimally processed foods I'm not really hungry until about 11:00 a.m. and then I like some meat some berries some rice or oat meal sometimes and and some vegetable I'm not low carb in the afternoon I'll generally have a snack maybe a protein drink some nuts you know I do eat you know those Maui Nei jerky sticks or thing of bone broth or something it's not a promotion it's just a fact and then for dinner I like I tend to emphasize less protein for me that works this runs counter to what everyone says but I like more vegetables pasta rice risotto occasionally I'll go out for a big steak or something like that but generally the heavier on the starches not heavy but heavier on the starches relatively and vegetables and then I'll couple hours before sleep ideally but sometimes I'll finish dinner and collapse you know it's just life um I do find I sleep better if I allow a few hours before sleep in terms of um stress modulation and things like that I do deploy the physiological sigh which sounds very technical but two inhales through the nose followed by a long exhale to lungs empty I try and do that anytime I feel that my stress is too high my lab published a clinical trial in cell reports medicine in collaboration with David Spiegel's laboratory at Stanford showing that 5 minutes a day of breath work of cyclic sighing so inhale inhale exhale both through the in both inhales through the nose inhale inhale exhale done as a dedicated practice for 5 minutes a day led to some interesting changes positive changes in reductions in resting heart rate reductions in in um uh blood pressure improvements in sleep mood Etc not all significant but several which work uh statistically significant but I don't tend to do breath work I tend to just use the physiological sigh whenever I'm feeling kind of overly ramped up so what I found for me is that you know the the core set of supplements plus training right plus life um lived in the way I describ some hydration Etc that seems to work best and um what's my measure of that is feelings of vigor whether or not I can recover from my workouts meaning am I getting any progress in terms of loads or other intensity variables or distance or speed over time um with the cardiovascular stuff and the answer is yes small improvements over time are really what I'm after or maintaining what I've got because at 48 I'm just interested in staying healthy and I'm sure would love to be even healthier but I'm also paying attention to how much cognitive Vigor I have you know if I'm training so much or paying so much attention to um to nutrition that I can't like engage in work and and function that's not good if I can't sit for three hours and have a conversation because I'm in pain that's not good unfortunately um you know I've got things in a place where I feel generally um good sometimes great but good most of the time I still get bad nights sleep every once in a while I still um stress you know I don't tend to do cheat days or things like that I love the occasional piece of pizza or croissant or something like that but I've also learned that most of the things about taking great care from nutrition lifestyle mindset and um and the rest creates a kind of a heightened sensory experience of life this is what I think people Miss they think of it as deprivation but when you're doing these things and you do them consistently I find at least that first of all I love the foods I eat I love meat fish chicken eggs vegetables certain starches you know fruit Etc that I enjoy all those things and I also enjoy all of life so much more whereas I find that um things for me anyway alcohol highly processed foods they create a kind of cloak over my senses I don't I don't enjoy life as much but of course a really good cookie like a really good cookie or sure you know that that makes sense um and I enjoy those so I look at things as all of it exercise nutrition supplementation um you know any kind of nsdr things like that as do they allow me to lean into life with more Vigor with more um curiosity with more texture or do they kind of consume a lot of time and don't allow me to do that and in my my experience the things that I described and there are a few others I do allow me to live life better right it's not like I'm sleeping all the time or I'm neurotically saying okay everybody it's 8:30 I got to go to sleep you know and look I respect um people's individual choices I actually um the other day saw for the first time in a long time Brian Johnson who's you know he's whole like wholeheartedly and whole everything devoting his entire energy to being the most measured human and and Longevity stuff and that's what floats his boat me I like to have some flexibility on my schedule in life and if it cost me a few years of life I'm willing to make that trade [Music] [Music]