[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan I'm excited today because we're going to get into a habit that you've established after many years of focusing on your health which you call the thousand calories before breakfast which is kind of fascinating to me especially because at age 74 you're in spectac th exercise calories before breakfast that's a really good point th exercise you burn a th000 calories before breakfast which is kind of spectacular especially age 74 you're in the best shape I think you said you've ever been you look fantastic and I know our clients come in and go go whoa what have you been doing especially people who are 20 30 40 years younger than you are and I just think you're a phenomenal example of that so I'd love to talk about how you hit on this particular strategy because you and Babs have worked for decades on your health so talk about exactly what this habit is and how you came to come up with this one one strategy for success with regard to your health well Shannon actually it's interesting because my thousand calorie Burns before breakfast is actually a byproduct of the lifetime extender which I did for the first time 30 years ago actually a little bit more than 30 years ago and I established 156 as my lifetime extender goal what I've learned and the second concept that contributes to this is that you're Eyes Only See and your ears only hear what your brain is looking for so for 31 years my brain has been looking for anything that gets me to 156 and there's some real medical breakthroughs that have to happen for this to happen and I would say that the third one is the 25y year transformation concept and when I was 70 I established what I was going to look like and how I was going to be performing when when I was 95 years old so those three have really really conditioned my mind to be very serious about exercise especially something that you can do every day and it just becomes a firm habit and for me the earlier in the day the better you like out of bed early in the day so that's really where this came from oh I love it and I think that's really important as you were talking I was thinking about our forse's growth formula and it starts with commit and so your commitment to living to 156 even though don't exactly know how that's going to happen yet your vision of what your 25 years looks like in terms of what you're going to operate with and I love that you shared that with the company it's like yes Dan's going to be around and this is what's going to be true it's like oh good to know yeah I told the team when I was 70 just right around my 70th birthday I said look a lot of you I don't even know if you know any 70y olds but you have one in front of you and maybe some of you without talking about it too much I've been wondering you know how long is the old guy going to stick around and I said I just want to let you know today that when I'm 95 I'm going to be coaching strategic coach workshops and I said I don't know if this is going to be where we are and I don't know what the fee structure is on the program but I am going to be coaching when I'm 95 and then I went on to say that these were some big projects for me over the next 25 years so just over the next 25 years these are some of the projects that I'm going to be working on including producing a book every quarter and really getting heavily involved in podcasts and you know pumping out a lot of brand new Concepts so this is it but you really have to be physically energetic if you want to be creatively energetic and I just began looking at all sorts of ways I could do that Babs and I do a vast array of different kinds of testing and we've taken advantage of all sorts of Technologies but I wanted an exercise that I could do anywhere regardless of where I was that didn't require too much in the way of extra equipment so in early 2017 I was at one of our checkup places which is Canyon Ranch in Tucson which is a health spot I have some tests and one of the tests indicated that my resting metabolism so resting metabolism is based that you wake up but you don't get out of bed how many calories would you burn if you just woke up and you were awake all day but you didn't get up you didn't exercise or anything else and what I had noticed from 25 years previously that I had dropped 400 calories per day it's a function of age and it's a function of loss of muscle but it's also not doing as much exercise so I said well I'll just worry about the last one I'm just going to vastly increase the amount of exercise that I do so what I thought I would do I said you know so just to get my 400 calories that I've lost in my metabolism over the last 25 years I'm going to start off and I'm just going to do 700 calories immediately so I'm going to go down exercise and there's a calculator that you can actually do this on you can actually get this right on Google for free it's calories calculator.net yeah so I'm going to say that again it's calories calculator.net cuz you showed me right before we came in the studio and I love it because it doesn't require that much information no it's just four pieces of information gives you what your Gallerie burn is and so I use a heart rate monitor Polar you know which is one of the big brands on the planet and it's a heart rate monitor so it's a strap that wraps around your chest and then you have a watch a polar watch and the moment you start exercising you click it on and it starts measuring your heart rate and then over the entire exercise period it measures the number of minutes that you put in and when you're finished you click it again and it shows you what your average heart rate was for the period of time so this morning I did 107 minutes so it was basically about an hour and a half a little bit more than an hour and a half from start to finish and that includes warm-ups stretching what I always include in every session is really intense interval training I can use a treadmill I can use but my favorite is an elliptical machine and you know if I'm in a hotel that doesn't have a great gym I just walk Flo and there's a piece of equipment that I have that you can get for $80 which is called the elevation training mask which fits across your mouth and it restricts the amount of air you take in so your lungs have to work harder all your muscles and your trunk have to work harder to actually get the amount of air that you need when you're exercising and just adding that to your exercise routine will actually bump up your heart rate by about 20 heart beats per minute so if you're doing an exercise and you're going along at 120 heartbeats per minute if you put the elevation training mask on it'll up you to about 140 with the same exercise so you're getting a 20 heartbeat per minute bump just by putting this extra piece of equipment so it's called elevation training mask it's available on Google you can order it from Amazon right now and you'll have it tomorrow it's true it's kind of I just have to tell a funny story Dan because you do this at your cottage you do this in a hotel in the stairs and by the way I've been beside Dan on the elliptical machine so we'll be down in the Chicago house and I'll be on vasper or something there's no way I could keep up with you and you are 19 years my senior years so it's a little intimidating it's like oh my gosh I can't do what Dan does so it's incredibly impressive but it was fun because some friends of ours were out paddle boarding in front of your cottage cuz our Cottages are close by and they saw you going up and down your stone steps with your elevation training mask on and if you haven't seen one everybody it looks a little bit scary Darth Vader you look you look a bit like Darth Vader they're like we just saw this man I'm like oh yeah that's Dan it was quite entertaining so be forewarned if you're out in public it can scare off dogs and scary people it's incredible now let's talk about you talked about the high-intensity interval training that you do you also use the vasper machine which you've talked about in workshops MH which is great and you also do weight training yeah I do weight training and there's four routines that you can do where you do weights but you don't take a break between sets so I'll do jumping jacks to start and then I'll do push-ups and right off the bat with the elevation trading mask on I'm up to 115 or 120 and then I'll do just a really fast minute on the elliptical machine and then I'll do weight ball I have a weight ball and I'll do side to side stretching exercises two or three exercises then I'll do a little bit of Weights I'll do heavy weights I'll do things like rowing which is you're pulling up with an arm and then I'll do curls and then I'll go and walk up two flights of stairs in our house and I come back and I'll repeat it twice and by that time you know I'm into about 10 minutes of exercise but I've averaged about 120 125 then I'll go into my really heavy interval training and what I do for the first minute is I just go all out for one minute and that takes me from the 120s up into the high 140s and then every two minutes I do a 20 second Sprint and you know you're right at 150 156 Sunday I was just feeling unusually energetic and I was over 160 for roughly about 10 15 minutes wow then you drop it down in 150 and you can almost maintain it at 150 without very much work you know you just stay there and then the time's up but the other thing that a lot of people don't know let's say you do a solid hour of interval training and exercise and you've averaged let's say 140 which for me is somewhere between 15 and 16 I'm burning about 15 16 calories a minute now I got a lot of muscle so the amount of muscle you have determines what your calorie burn your weight determines how many calories you burn I mean if they saw me today and followed me around they said I could never do that and I said well I couldn't do this when I started my process so I started this on I remember the date it was February 19th 2017 and I said I'm just going to do this for a year and see what happens and I'm pretty good at exercising habits because exercise encourages exercise the more you exercise the more your body wants to exercise and people say well is there any day you just don't want to do it and I said no there's days when I'm fearful that I might not do it and I would feel really badly if I didn't but in the first year 365 days I miss three days I'm up in the 500s now and I've still only missed three days because I love the exercise so much and it doesn't do me any harm I never burn out you know my endurance keeps going up and I just did a thorough before we're doing this interview about a week ago in Dallas with my quarterback who's my great you know health and fitness quarterback Dr Jeff Caden Apex his program is called Apex and his whole procedure is not to be in good shape it's to optimize your health and fitness as you get older so I am 74 and probably you know if you took average test results for people at various ages probably the results I'm getting is you know probably in the mid to high 40s maybe 50 years old but just in the area of arobic you know he punches in my age of 74 my weight I'm about 185 and then your height I came out at about 140% of what a 74 year old would do but if you translate that backwards that be equal to a pretty fit early 50-year-old in a robic and he was really impressed and he's a knockout aerobic guy himself I mean he's in terrific shape but he's that's really really really impressive I think Jeff's hard to impress actually yeah he did I mean he said nice things to me and that means a lot to me so what I've noticed I'm just going to give you some results so I'm 140% and when I started I had done a complete checkup with Jeff before I started the process I was coming in at about 105 106% so I'm up about 35% very very interesting I've dropped 16 lbs of fat wow and I've gained two lbs of muscles so these are beautiful results gaining muscle after 70 years old takes a lot of work to do it you know because um generally people are losing muscle decade by decade the average 74 year old will be down probably I would say somewhere in the neighborhood they would have probably 40% less muscle at 74 than they had at 30 30 your body keeps producing muscle until you're about 30 years old and then Nature has no more use for you so anything after 30 we're on our own you know it's like in the psychological level you can be a real star as a child as an adolescent in your 20s and you know you're a star student and you're a star athlete but from a motivational psychological standpoint it ends at 30 because society's support for people pretty well ends at 30 and if you wherever you are at 30 Society isn't going to give you any more support teachers the school system your parents there's massive amounts of support for people up to the 30 but if you're a great person and you keep getting greater after 30 it comes from the inside it's not coming from the outside and I would say your physical health your physical fitness if it keeps getting better after 30 and if you're 45 years later and you're in great shape you did it Society didn't support you there was nothing that supported you so I'm really great but I've dropped three almost going on four trouser sizes so I'm down three and 1 half almost going on 4 in of belt size and just phenomenal energy level and I'm doing probably more work in my 74th going on 75th year I'm in my 75th year now I am producing more I am engaged from morning till night I don't get tired throughout the day I used to nap I used to notice that I've been away to Chicago doing workshops we'd fly back on Friday night the moment I got on the plane I was sound asleep and now I'm reading and everything I just feel really fresh I get up in the morning I sleep 7 7 and 1/2 hours every night get up fresh every morning and it's something that I can stay with for the rest of my life so I started at 700 but when I averaged the first year it was actually just slightly over a th000 so for the second year I've just made it that I'm going to go for a th000 and so far I'm averaging around 1,200 wow yeah we calculated the numbers before it was 11:42 which is fantastic that was this morning 1142 calories this morning which is incredible so Dan I love that so just to give people the bottom line so you use a Polar heart rate monitor I love it cuz it's all very inexpensive accessible stuff it's I mean I use the simplest model some of them are like computers on your wrist but I just want to know what my heart rate is and I want to know how long I've stayed at it and it gives me those numbers and I just go to the Internet app and I just plug it in and then I keep track of it every day I've got a little scorecard where I keep track and I keep track of my average within a month so I'll take a month and I'll log in every day and I average every day you know what was my average for the month so I just got one number it's the average that I'm doing for the month and my goal is always to surpass last month oh nice so it keeps expanding yeah it keeps expanding yeah so the elevation training mask and again the link if you want to check it out is calories Das calculator.net and make sure that you go and look at the calories burned by heart rate so that's the one that you specific Al do I want to tell you something because I think this particular thing that I'm doing one thing is people really notice the difference even people who knew me two years ago you know and I've got clients who've been with me for more than 30 years and they come in and they look at me and they say whoa what a difference you know I mean even in each quarter when they come back for their workshop they say gee my call you just keep looking better and better well Dan the client this morning who saw you at the top of the stairs said oh you're even Slimmer in person that was his comment by the way positive feedback really is part of the no no I I like the praise you know and I feel really really great and I look great I'm doing videos now so I can see what I look like in the videos and you know it's really great but the big thing about this shn is I can do this into the future and I arranged my life in such a way that that time in the morning is always freed up this is one of the big things that I've responded to most and they say where do you find the hour and a half and I said well I want the hour and a half that's where I find it I said I really couldn't spend an hour and a half and I said well you're not trying to you're not trying to I said I started with just 20 minutes 25 minutes 30 minutes and I said but my body really loves the exercise it's producing nothing but good I talked about my aerobic test and how they came back but one of the big things all my other tests all my blood tests every other test is showing that the impact of this one exercise is spilling over into every area of my life when I go and I have blood taken it's like 25 to 30 vials and I've Got Deep veins so this is a bit of a grueling exercise for me but when I get the test back and I do it three times a year so I have three complete anything you think of including genetic testing biome testing everything it's really terrific and Jeff gladen who's my number one doctor and that's Apex if any of you are interested in getting involved with it I think it's two words but Apex Jeff gladen and you'll you'll get the website and it's gladen like g a d DN and a terrific guy he's in his mid-60s and he looks like a 40-year-old it's one thing a lot of doctors I've met always looked in worse shape than I did and I think that they die younger doctors because they're not really in the health care business so many of them are in the disease prevention business Jeff is really in the healthc care and Fitness business that's why I like him so much and he's in the game changer program I mean he's a client and really terrific you Dan I really appreciate this conversation because you've been talking about how you burn thousand calories before breakfast and I know people have been wanting to know well how do you do it so I'm really happy to capture this and the one line that you said to me has really struck me and I think it Bears repeating is you have to be physically energetic if you want to be creatively energetic and that's what your commitment is which will require some courage so you can develop the capabilities to get a new level of confidence but I love this and you've inspired me to go and start tracking my heart rate more than I already do so I really appreciate that thank you well just as a last party note on this I was a three- sport athlete through grade school and high school and I've always been good at aerobic exercises so I went to the area where I've always been good so I was just picking up on something that I had done extraordinarily well when I was younger in life and I just went back to it and the body returns very quickly to Fitness it doesn't take very long for your body to get into a fitness mode but my feeling is that your confidence about a bigger future as an entrepreneur can only be equal to your physical and health energy level you just won't have the physical confidence to have entrepreneurial confidence and that's really why I've just taken this and it's just one thing so I mean it's got a lot of different exercises I can do but I just consider it one thing and it's the scorecard it's at least 1,000 calories before breakfast this is fabulous thank you so much Dan thank you Shannon