Part two of this show focuses on the importance of emphasizing a kinder, gentler approach when it comes to working out (especially in regards to high-intensity exercise), the price of “diminishing returns” and how cumulative fatigue affects both your brain and your body, and the benefits of weaving in micro workouts throughout your day.

Following the workout protocol outlined in this episode will give you a serious boost in testosterone and anti-aging benefits, and it will also help you avoid the disastrous and unfortunately all too common mistakes we see in the fitness industry. You’ll learn quick and easy solutions to avoid engaging in prolonged periods of stillness, and practical tips that help you make the most out of your environment to get as much movement in as possible. You’ll also find out just how long you have to be sitting down for a decrease in glucose tolerance to take place, and why prioritizing regular resistance training and sweeping, full body functional movements (like squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, and push ups) provides a much better hormone boost compared to other workouts. 

I also share how starting to go more slowly, adding sprinting, and incorporating variation during my daily jog with my dog, resulted in all kinds of new growth pathways opening up. There are so many benefits to gain from simply keeping things fun and interesting, and also from remembering that you don’t need to get out there and burn calories to stay lean. Further, you certainly don’t need to be putting in all those hours towards steady state cardio in order to stay fit or healthy. Once you realize how easy it is to receive cardio benefits (because these occur in everything we do), you’ll also realize that this makes it quite easy to overdo it.

Thanks for listening to part two!

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad continues describing his protocol for boosting testosterone and anti-aging benefits. [01:26]

It is time to question all the previous ideas you had about the proper way to exercise. Avoid the bad stuff. [02:12]

Move throughout the day. Have some variety. Walk to work, school, or store. Park away. [03:02]

Slow down your steady state cardio efforts, making an effort to monitor heart rate. [07:28]

Engage in regular resistance training. Maintain muscle mass as you age. [08:55]

Running sprints helps with fat reduction and increasing bone density. [17:07]

Allow your body to recover gradually. You don’t want to stop abruptly. [21:42]

When you overdo it, you suffer the next day. [23:08]

It’s a mistake if you train to the extent of being exhausted and depleted. [27:35]

Is it better to have a set routine or to mix it up trying new things when exercising? [29:00]

You don’t need to focus on burning calories in order to stay fit. [35:06]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns.com
• Brad’s Shopping Page   
• Brad’s Workout Protocol Part 1
• Brad’s Morning Routine (original)
• Brad’s Morning Routine (advanced)
• Jogging 2.0 video
• The Primal Blueprint
• Dr. Jaquish podcast
• Dr. Jaquish website
• 10 Ways to Skip video
• HIIT vs. HIRT article
• Joel Jamieson podcast
• Brian MacKenzie podcast
• Brian MacKenzie
• A Day in My Life YouTube video
• Dr. Pontzer podcast

QUOTES:

• “Trying to outrun a bad diet just simply doesn’t work.”

LISTEN: 

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B.Rad Podcast

Brad (1m 26s): Welcome to part two workout protocol to boost testosterone and anti-aging benefits and avoid the disastrous and very common mistakes that we see in the mainstream approach to fitness and in most fitness programming. So I hope you go back and listen to part one where we talk about the mistakes and then we get into the solutions, but here’s a summary of the part one mistakes. So number one was too many sedentary patterns in your life. Number two was too much medium to difficult intensity cardio, which is depleting and exhausting that overproduction of stress hormones, and also rethinking the need for steady state cardio overall because of the risk factors and the lack of fitness diversity. Brad (2m 12s): And then the big one is doing the wrong kinds of HIT workouts. That call for too many work efforts lasting too long with insufficient rest between them and workouts that are done too frequently with insufficient rest between them. And now the solutions. Number one is to avoid all the aforementioned. So too much sitting around too difficult HIT workouts and chronic cardio. And what are we left with when the smoke clears? Pretty much all the major popular fitness programming is going into the garbage can or it’s up to you to modify your approach to these things. So if you’re a CrossFit enthusiast and you love the social aspect of the gym and the expert technique instruction, maybe there’s going to be times frequently where you’re going to bow out halfway through or two thirds of the way through. Brad (3m 2s): Same with your Spin class or with your personal trainer and having a discussion saying, you know what, I’m going to do one set really, really good. And I’m going to skip the second and third ones, cause there’s no justification for doing it. Okay. And then that’s that’s number one is to avoid the bad stuff. Number two is move around throughout the day with an assortment of ways to move your body. Starting with JFW as Mark Sisson says, just effing walk. And you now today have to orchestrate ways to walk more frequently because it’s so easy for us to just sit instead of stand or move to drive instead of go on foot to the post office or to the, the corner market. Brad (3m 49s): So we’re going to try to find ways to walk. I love Kelly Starrett’s suggestion. He’s super involved with his children’s school and he got a stand-up desk going for these elementary school kids in the San Francisco Bay area. And he talks about walking to school. Guess what? Not everybody can walk to school. There’s a busy freeway involved. We have to take two exits, whatever, whatever he says, park a mile away and walk your kids in the final mile and then walk back to your car. So there’s always a solution, right? I don’t want to hear the excuse that like, well, I have to drive to work because of this or that. You can always find ways to orchestrate walking. One of them is when you turn into the giant parking lot for the big box store, turn left, instead of right. Brad (4m 29s): And go park way out in the corner and walk it in. Yes. Push your cart the way back to your car. You’re going to get less door dings, less hassles, less looking around for a spot. Same with the stairs. If you’re in an office building or whatever environment, use the stairs instead of the elevator. Make it a rule. Oh, Oh, Oh, what’d you say? You’re on the 67th floor. Okay. Get off the elevator every day at the 57th floor and walk it up. The final 10, ah, moving around. Also in this category are things like dynamic, stretching, flexibility, mobility routine, which I’m so excited about and I’ve done entire shows on. And I think this is the most life-changing thing I’ve done for my fitness ever, especially in the last four plus years, my streak is still alive. Brad (5m 17s): It’s going into the fifth year now where I’ve done it every single day without fail. So please look at the YouTube video, Brad Kearns morning routine. You’ll actually find two videos if you search for that. One of them was my original, super easy one that I started out where I was in bed doing core exercises before I realized that when you do core exercise, sinking into a mattress, it’s a lot easier than hitting the deck. And so you’ll see the modern one that I filmed last fall. And I go through all a description of all the movements, but you can see the whole thing in fast motion in the first 52 seconds of the video. So the morning routine is a great way to increase your daily movement quota as the very first thing that you do in the morning. Brad (6m 0s): And it sets you up to be a focused, disciplined individual. It’s a lot better than going into the reactive mode. That happens when we reached for our mobile device. First thing in the morning. So we have walking, we have dynamic stretching. We have these micro workouts where you can take a brief break from your busy day at the work desk to let’s say a sprint up a couple of flights of stairs or drop right there at your cubicle for a set of 20 deep squats. Or if you have a pull-up bar hanging around, or I have the deadlift bar that I talk about so frequently, that’s a placed outside on route to the garbage can. So when it’s time to throw away the garbage from the kitchen to the, the, the barrel, I perform a single set of deadlifts as a routine, as a habit, it’s not difficult, right? Brad (6m 46s): It’s not gonna mess up my preparation for the big workout that’s coming tomorrow, nor my recovery from whatever I did the previous day. It’s just part of living a more active life. And when you start to become more active and you avoid prolonged periods of stillness, you experience all these incredible health, cognitive, immune fat metabolism benefits. And you avoid those problems associated with prolonged sitting, which are systemic inflammation and a noticeable decrease in glucose tolerance after only 20 minutes of stillness. So our bodies stop burning fat well, we start to lose concentration and cognitive ability. Brad (7m 28s): And over time, if we continue to sit there, we’re going to increase our appetite, especially for quick energy carbohydrates. So number one is move more. Number two, if you insist on doing steady state cardio, please be sure to do the vast majority of it at your maximum aerobic function heart rate or below. And of course, you know, from listening to the show, that’s 180 minus your age in beats per minute. And guess what? For most people, if they’re not exposed to this proper type of training, it’s going to seem very, very comfortable, very slow pace. So we’re talking about slowing down our steady state cardio efforts, making an effort to monitor heart rate so we know what we’re doing and where we’re at. Brad (8m 10s): And then I strongly recommend mixing it up a little bit. Watch the jogging 2.0 video, throw some stuff into the mix. If you’re in the gym and you’re sitting on a bike watching CNN for 45 minutes as your workout, get off the bloody bike every 10 minutes and do a set of pushups or do something over on the mat or pull some, some stretch bands and get some upper body stimulation. And then you can get back on the bike if you insist. But realize that the cardiovascular training effect can be had from everything from a comfortable walk around the block. Again, your heart rate is going to be double resting heart rate. So the walk is an excellent cardiovascular training session as is a very explosive high intensity session. Brad (8m 56s): So number three, there, number one was avoid the bad stuff. Number two is move around every day. Number three is do your structured cardio at the proper heart rates and consider mixing it up a little bit. And number four is to engage in regular resistance training. And this is one of the ultimate anti aging tips you’ll ever get is to try as hard as you can, to maintain that muscle mass as you age. This comes from putting your body under resistance load, ideally with sweeping full body functional movements. Everyone’s talking about how squats dead lifts pull-ups pushups are the, are the bomb. And those are things that recruit major muscle groups and doing these movements that we call functional. Brad (9m 38s): In other words, you’re going to be tapping into these skills as you go through daily life. So being able to squat is strongly associated with your longevity potential. Imagine that. So were things like grip strength with other large scale studies. I believe it’s the Honolulu heart study that measured a squat capability and showed this tremendous correlation with ability to squat, with good competency and good volume with predictive of living a long and healthy life, as opposed to people who couldn’t bust out a couple of squats, they did not fare well by a huge margin. There’s also a study with firefighters pushups study, where if as all as 40 year old firefighters, if they could do 40 pushups, they were looking good. Brad (10m 24s): They were setting themselves up for longevity. And if they couldn’t do four, they were in big trouble and had huge increase in mortality. So there’s also a recommendation to focus on the lower body compound movements like squats and deadlifts because there’s greater androgen receptor density in your legs. So you’re going to get a better hormone boost from doing a heavy-duty legwork, also the size of the muscles and the amount of explosive muscle fibers that are being trained when you’re working on your glutes, your hamstrings, your quads, you’re gonna get a nice return on your investment. And I read some other interesting research recently about holding the bar, the weight at the point of maximum force production. Brad (11m 11s): And I’ve been doing this recently and seems like a fun thing to do. And this is also believed to stimulate androgen receptor site activation. So that means you’re going to be producing more testosterone, improving your testosterone status. And it’s also a way to get really strong with minimal injury risk. Because what you’re doing is just holding, let’s say the classic example of a bench press, where you’re doing your reps, and then you’re holding the bar at almost top. You don’t want to lock out and put the stress on your joints. So you always want to have the muscles under load. So you don’t want to lock out when you’re doing something like a bench press. So you can kind of waste that bar and then hold it there for a count of 10, your arms almost fully extended. Brad (11m 56s): What I do is I do my sets of dead lifts. And then on the final rep, I will bend my knees a tiny bit and have my elbows bent a tiny bit and be holding the hexagon deadlift bar there for a count of 20. And that’s just lighting up virtually every muscle in my body making me stronger, but without putting my body under the additional stress of, let’s say trying to bang out five more reps, if my form is breaking down. So yeah, sweeping full body functional movements. And I love this concept of working until technical failure. That’s a great trainer in LA that I’ve been working with recently. Jeff Page has that term. I don’t think he made it up, but he always emphasizes where you’re done with the workout. Brad (12m 40s): If you experience technical failure. That means your technique is a little bit flawed, cracks a little bit. Then you put the weight down, you’re done. You move on to the next thing. So it’s not all about just working toward increasing your reps or adding weight. You want to be technically precise at everything you do when you talk about strength, training, resistance training. Okay. So regular resistance training we’ve written about in The Primal Blueprint for so long where I believe the, the template, the thing you see on the fitness pyramid is strength training sessions lasting between 10 and 30 minutes. A couple of times a week is plenty, but really we should revise that because the micro workouts concept is so compelling. Brad (13m 23s): And I think it’s one of the great breakthroughs in philosophy in the world of fitness in many, many years, to realize that a one minute session of putting your body under resistance load has fantastic fitness and health benefits. And if you add these up over time, Oh my gosh, the cumulative fitness benefit of engaging in micro workouts when you don’t really have the time or the inclination to go and do a formal hour long session in the gym, just go in and put your body under resistance load here and there whenever you can. I’m also really a big fan lately of the resistance band training, such as the X three bar. And I think the philosophy is really compelling. Brad (14m 4s): I’ve had John Jaquish on the show, Dr. Jaquish is the inventor of the X three bar. You can look at his website. There’s some really great scientifically validated claims that Lifting Weights is a Waste of Time. That’s the title of his book. So he’s a controversial guy, but inside that book is a lot of really compelling information that this variable resistance training, where you’re stretching the band. So it’s easier at the start and the maximum difficulty when you’re stretching a band is at its maximum, right? You’re stretching the rubber band all the way to the maximum. That is also aligned with your point of maximum force production in the muscles. So if you imagine that again, the example of doing a chest press with the X three bar, as you stretch that thing out, as you extend your arms further away from your body, you’re more and more powerful, stronger. Brad (14m 54s): And that’s also the point where you’re getting the most resistance. Weights are actually the opposite. So if you’re trying to bench press, you have to get that bar off your chest. That is the most difficult degree range of motion of the move, right? Because your elbows are bent. You don’t have as much force as you do when your arms are extended therefore your workout is constrained by your ability to lift a certain amount of weight off your chest. It can probably bench press, I would say 140 pounds somewhere around there, which is not impressive. But anyway, for argument’s sake, if someone were to load on 200 pounds, I couldn’t get it off my chest. Brad (15m 34s): But when I was working with Dr. Jaquish, when he was giving the demo for the X three bar, he goes, you know, right now you’re pressing a two 60. I’m like, no, I’m not. I can only bench press about 130. He says, well, at this point, that’s the amount of resistance provided by the strap as I get to the end of the move. So I’m able to put my by bench pressing muscles under a load of effectively 260 pounds, because I’m using a strap rather than a weight of consistent amount of resistance. And by the way, that’s why you see those guys using chains where you see them bench pressing or squatting with a chain dangling on the side of the barbell, because as they raise higher, they’re getting an increased amount of resistance as more and more chain is being elevated off the ground. Brad (16m 23s): That’s to get this variable resistance training concept going. Okay. So regular resistance training workouts lasting between one minute and 30 minutes is plenty, right? You want to get in and out, do some hard work and get out of the gym before you have this risk factor of over-producing the stress hormones and having them flowing through the bloodstream for too long of a duration. And also having that form breakdown that increased injury risk. And that’s my big problem with conventional fitness programming is that it lasts too long. And there’s no reason for it outside of training for the Olympics in the 400 meter example. So just shorten everything up. And that gets us to the last objective, which is to perform these all out maximum effort sprints. Brad (17m 7s): Running sprints would be the very best because they do profound genetic signaling for fat reduction, which is of great interest to many people as is increasing bone density. But you have to put your body under that weight bearing load that that impact trauma from sprinting on the ground to achieve the maximum genetic signaling for fat loss. What’s happening there is that when you try to sprint, but with weight bearing on flat ground, remember that the penalty for carrying excess nonfunctional weight i.e. body fat is huge. Th the body doesn’t like to go full speed, carrying around spare tires. Brad (17m 47s): You, you lose a tremendous amount of performance in contrast, if you’re going for a 50 mile ultra marathon run and you’re carrying an extra spare tire, the penalty is not as significant when you’re doing this high impact explosive sprint. And that’s why the genetic signaling of a 10 minute sprint workout is this is scientifically validated, is going to very likely have a bigger impact on fat reduction than running for fricking 50 miles, trying to outrun a bad diet, just simply doesn’t work. Okay. So if you can do running sprints or work up to some day doing high-impact running sprints, that’s the ideal. I know there’s a lot of people that are in that category that it’s going to take a long time. Brad (18m 31s): They can’t imagine it they’re overweight. They don’t have enough experience. It’s been a long time since they busted it out. So we want to work toward that goal of doing high-impact running sprinting, but of course, any explosive effort counts as a sprint workout. I mentioned kettlebell swings. So if we’re going to do the proper protocol, we’re going to kettlebell swing for, let’s say 10 seconds of maximum effort kettlebell swing, and then take the long recovery period. And then another quote, unquote, sprint in ensues, or you swing for 10 seconds. You can also do the low or no impact sprinting like a stationary bike. You can do box jumps for 10 seconds or 20 seconds, and that will be considered, considered a, a sprint effort. Brad (19m 13s): Any of the jumping drills that I show you on YouTube are great counting as a sprint session. So for example, I do one legged hops. It’s one of my, my drills for high jumping, where I just hop off my left foot about 12 to 15 times, and then I’m done. And then I take a minute rest period, because that was as if I was doing a full speed running sprint. And if you’re worried about the impact trauma, then you work up to it by getting good with bike sprints, and then some day you can progress to running stairs, uphill up a steep hill. And so these are a much lower impact, much less injury risk. And if you can get good at some hill sprints, and that’s your template workout for, let’s say a month or two, or you put in four or five or six of those, then I think you can go down to the flat ground and start out with what we call wind sprints, which is a brief acceleration up to let’s say your maximum speed followed by an immediate deceleration. Brad (20m 13s): So it’s kind of like getting, getting the hang of sprinting before you’re actually trying to sprint for a prolonged duration, like the 80 meters that I talk about. So the wind sprint might be a total of 20 or 30 meters where you’re accelerating, your feeling what it’s like to put out maximum force production with each stride for a couple of few strides, and then you’re cooling, cruising right down to come to a stop quickly. And that’s also a great idea to do before you launch into the main set of sprints that I described that four to 10 reps of 10 to 20 second efforts with 60 second recovery. Prior to doing that, you need a lot of preparatory drills technique drills, which I have those videos also, but you’re spending a lot of time getting ready. Brad (20m 59s): So when I talk about a short workout and not over producing stress hormones, my sprint workout, I might be out there at the track for 45 to 60 minutes because I’m doing a steady state, very low intensity cardio to get respiration, heart rate, and a little bit of sweat going, then I’m doing dynamic stretching. Then I’m doing the drills like the 10 Ways to Skip, the video that I just released. And then I’m doing some pretty challenging sequences of jumping workouts or sprinting technique drills that are actually pretty strenuous. And then the main session of sprinting. So the workout is more involved than just going out there and running down the football field a bunch of times. Brad (21m 43s): And that will help you with injury prevention if you do it properly, especially the cool-down. And so what you want to do is gradually return your body to homeostasis. You don’t want to abruptly stop a workout because that’s, when you’re going to have a fluid buildup accumulation of toxins in the bloodstream, your lymphatic system, your blood circulation, hasn’t had opportune time to kind of take yourself gradually back down to a rested state. And this will minimize the stress impact of the workout as opposed to making the workout more stressful than it should be because you cranked it up to maximum. Brad (22m 25s): And then, Oh, you had to rush over and get in the car and rush back to the next thing in your busy day. So a really gentle and prolonged elaborate warmup, and then a gentle, prolonged elaborate cool-down is the proper way to engage in this life-changing fitness objective of doing a proper and true full maximum intensity sprint workout. Oh, okay. How does that sound? You know how it sounds? It sounds very likely less stressful than what you’re doing now, banging your head against the wall, trying to get fit with all this medium to difficult steady state or these prolonged high intensity interval training sessions that are too fatiguing. Brad (23m 9s): So we want to emphasize that takeaway point of a kinder, gentler approach, especially to a high intensity exercise. We want to feel pleasantly fatigued and feeling alert, enthusiastic, and satisfied after these workouts that you busted out some good work, but you didn’t torch your body. And guess what, people? I am definitely a work in progress on this objective because what happens is I get so excited and so pumped up when I visit the track for that special day, the adrenaline’s flowing. I feel fantastic. I do my sequences. I do my drills. And then I go over and maybe my favorite time is trying to work on my, the technical aspects of, and the explosive aspects of a full high jump approach. Brad (23m 55s): Right. And I might do I film it all and I might realize, Oh my gosh, I did 18 full approaches. Instead of, you know, probably eight or 10 would be ideal. It’s what the elite jumpers talk about is they only have 10 good jumps every practice, right then they’re done. Not me. I can do 18 cause I’m this high enthusiasm old guy who used to be an endurance athlete who doesn’t know any better. Guess what happens? That’s right. The next day. And my calves are torched for several days. I might bomb out for the afternoon nap like I described. And I realize, looking back and reflective, that the workout was too strenuous. Brad (24m 34s): And it kind of sets me back unnecessarily in comparison to doing a workout whereas well within my capabilities and able to return to the track more frequently, let’s say over a year’s time or what have you. And you might’ve heard me talk about my injury that lasted for six months. I couldn’t do my regular sprinting and jumping workouts. Cause I had this knee problem that would not go away. I finally got some awesome physical therapy and it turned out to be a muscle issue rather than anything wrong with my joint. I was back at it in a short time, but that wasted six months, I believe very likely came from overdoing it and putting my muscles under inappropriate load when they were still tired and traumatized and not fully explosive because I was so excited. Brad (25m 22s): I was doing workouts too frequently. So I’m really trying to back off a bit and actually prove to myself that I can go out to the track and do, let’s say an 80% session where everything’s just toned down a little bit. Sometimes I’ll have a fantastic day where I do push myself hard and I’m doing, you know, a hundred percent effort, whatever, but I want to kind of have that capability where I’m toning things down. And this aligns with the great work that the fitness leaders are doing. Dr. Phil Maffetone has been talking about these concepts for decades, how he doesn’t want you to get sore during workouts. You can search YouTube for his clip of Firas Zahabi on the Joe Rogan show, where he talks to Joe about not getting sore during workouts and pretty much blows Joe’s mind, tough guy. Brad (26m 11s): Joe’s like always thinking you should get sore at workouts. He’s like, no, no, no. I don’t want my MMA world-class fighters getting sore ever, because that implies that you are doing your protein synthesis after the workout to recover, right? If your muscles are sore, that is suggestive, that the protein sent this was dedicated to repairing the muscle rather than making the muscle grow or become stronger and more explosive. First, we had to deal with the damage as evidenced by the soreness rather than dedicate the recovery process to getting stronger and more explosive. Okay. Brad (26m 51s): Dr. Marker’s, landmark article HIIT versus HIRT Please read that. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, Joel Jamieson is doing great work with that. He’s a former podcast guest, so you can listen to that show. It was a long time ago, but it holds true today. His website is called eight, the number 8 weeks out.com known for working with top MMA fighters and his whole approach to fitness is centerpiece on recovery. Same with Brian MacKenzie. One of the most popular shows I ever did very early on. So please search for that show his power, speed, endurance programming, and his new thing ShiftAdapt.com and everything is centered on recovery and breathing awareness and cold exposure. Brad (27m 36s): And these are the world’s leading trainers of elite athletes. And instead of talking about their power and the explosiveness and their all these other attributes that we’re so familiar with obsessing about when we pursue fitness, Brian’s talking about breathing and cold exposure. So just getting out of that realm of no pain, no gain, and looking at the nuances and especially paying attention to your workload and the other stress factors in your life that can affect your approach to exercise. All right? So it’s a mistake If you train to the extent of becoming exhausted and depleted, and it’s gonna result in prolonged recovery time decline in hormone status. Brad (28m 17s): The intended benefits of an explosive high intensity workout is to boost testosterone. But in fact, they can also trash your testosterone if it’s too difficult. And I have a blog post, you can read where I describe going from a blood result that was clinically hypogonadism under the normal healthy range for testosterone. And in six months time, I went from hypo, a candidate for hormone replacement (if I went to the doctor) and in six months time, I doubled my free testosterone and launched into the 95th percentile for men of my age, just from toning down overly stressful workout pattern. Brad (29m 1s): So you can make huge inroads and huge health turnarounds just by taking it easy. I really like my main man, Brian “Liver King” Johnson’s strategy is extremely high performing strength and power athlete. You can look at the MOFO page on Brad Kearns.com and see, read about him doing his barbarian workout and his extreme devotion to fitness. But he talks about in terms of soreness, he likes going for a slight soreness after a tough workout. This is a sign of a job well done and pushing your limits to achieve a growth stimulus, but a lot different than being trashed and being thrown off from your continued pursuit of fitness goals because the workout was too hard. Brad (29m 47s): He also has another interesting goal of going for a new PR in something different every single day. So a different sequence or inventing some new exercise or pairing this with this and timing yourself. And what this does is keeps you excited and engaged. And you’re constantly challenging the muscles in a different way. A lot of people talk about the benefits of mixing up the workouts. It was called muscle confusion on a popular home-based fitness program. I’m going to back off from saying that you need to change your workout as an imperative. And boy, I like to lock in to doing the same drills and a very similar workout over and over and trying to get better at it. Brad (30m 33s): Olympic champion, high jumper, Stefan Holm from Sweden, 2004 champion in Athens. He also has the world record for jumping the highest height over his head, which is a pretty cool world record. He’s around 5′ 10″, and his PR in the high jump is 7’10”. One of the greatest jumpers of all time. He says with regard to jumping drills, get really good at your five favorite ones and just lock into those and increase your competency and perfect your technique rather than trying to master 20 different things. So I like that tip and I’m trying to focus in on doing my favorite stuff and getting good at it. So enough of that muscle confusion, nonsense, it’s not based in science. Brad (31m 13s): And if you can get really good at, for example, doing 50 pull-ups every day, guess what? We’re going to talk in 30 years and that’s going to be all good. Your muscles don’t need to be confused. They just need to get consistent with doing awesome feats of strength, like doing 50 pull-ups every day, but setting these new PRs and having new challenges is really what Liver King’s talking about. That can be great benefit for your, your mindset. All this fun stuff is such a long way from being stuck in a rut of steady state cardio. Like I reported when I had this epiphany and started to mix up my jogging sessions with drills and skills and mobility and flexibility in between walking and jogging and then doing something difficult and challenging. Brad (32m 3s): And I would say in reflection, looking back over, let’s say the previous 15 years that I would start to notice I’d finished my routine steady state cardiovascular session, whether it was 30 or 40 minutes, and I felt slightly depleted or slightly blah, I wasn’t feeling like ready to go attack my day. And I just had this wonderful experience that boosted my health and my fitness. It was like my brain wasn’t responding appropriately to the stimulation of being outside, breathing fresh air, enjoying the dog, and I possibly attributed to boredom, but also there’s a point where if your central nervous system is less enthused, thanks to perhaps overdoing it for many years in my past, right? Brad (32m 49s): So my body knows what it’s like to overtrain. And I have a stored emotional memories of the pain and suffering of a training to the point where I feel like crap and daily life. It was very psychologically scarring, right? To put yourself into that overtraining state is no fun. And maybe there were some lingering, latent scarring going on to where even a 30 minute run felt like a chore to me rather than a wonderful experience. And I think there’s this point of diminishing returns where there’s some cumulative fatigue loaded into the brain over years and decades, especially if you’ve had bouts of over-training and boy, to mix it up, to do what Brian says and try to set new PRs and take on new challenges. Brad (33m 36s): I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I picked up a new sport cause I was down in Austin, Texas hanging out with my main man Rip Esselstyn, former podcast guest. And he took me out to the disc golf course. I’d never played in my entire life. And I thought I was a Frisbee expert from playing ultimate and throwing the big disc long and strong with a beautiful flat trajectory. And these little guys that you use on the disc golf course, I didn’t know where the heck they were going. It was super frustrating. And I was going into the trees and the bushes, but it’s actually a pretty fun sport. And it’s a nice way to get a jog or walk through the park and learn some new stuff. So something new for me on my fitness agenda that I never dreamed. Brad (34m 18s): I was gonna pick up disc golf, but I went online. I ordered my discs now, I guess, you know, I played with some good players and these guys show up to the disc golf course with a big shoulder bag and you look inside and there’s like 20 different disks. So little did I know some of these are labeled putter. Some of them say driver, they all look the same to me, but yes, indeed you need numerous clubs to play the disc golf course properly. So these are things that can get you out of the ruts. Get you excited, pick a new route, put some new challenges into the mix. Watch some of the videos like Jogging 2.0. Or if you even want to go deeper, where I show you a ton of micro workouts and a bunch of stuff to do when you’re out there during the workout is the day in the life of Brad turns video. Brad (35m 6s): It’s really fun. And yeah, I don’t do all those micro workouts every single day. I was just doing it for the purpose of the video, but I do something from that mix every day. And that’s a great way to break up prolonged periods of time in front of the mic or in front of the computer or whatever you’re doing. I think it also helps when you’re trying to expand your horizons to relax and realize as detailed with my interviews with Dr. Pontzer, that you don’t need to get out there and burn calories in order to stay lean. And as a matter of fact, we burn a similar number of calories during the day, whether or not we do our precious workout that we think is helping us stay lean. Brad (35m 52s): Yeah, that’s a crazy insight, but I think it kind of takes the pressure off that you feel like your, your mileage is dropping and you’re going to get fat. Well, guess what, if you can mix in some different fitness endeavors, you might have more fun, get more excited about it. Kind of unwind from that minor obsession with burning calories in order to preserve body composition, because it’s been strongly refuted by Dr. Pontzer’s work and many other people zeroing in on these concepts that we have this compensation theory at place where the calories burned during exercise are sort of washed away with decreased activity and increased caloric consumption as a balance. Brad (36m 37s): And also in tandem with that realizing how super duper incredibly easy it is to max out your cardiovascular health benefits to the extent that steady state cardio is not a big fitness objective anymore, unless of course you absolutely love it. And you have competitive goals. Steady state cardio can be mixed up and taken to the next level with fun, exciting, broader challenges where you put your body under resistance load. You work on your ability to jump in the air classic human endeavor that we should all be trying to get some more air time, especially when it comes to the signaling for fat loss, and generally broadening your perspective about fitness and staying away from these disturbing trends that are taking a lot of people down well-meaning fitness enthusiasts putting out the energy and doing too much steady state cardio and the improper application of high intensity interval training. Brad (37m 32s): Thank you for listening. Go out there and kick some butt and please send some comments, some questions I love doing the Q and A shows and the emails are really thoughtful and I think really helpful for the broad audience. So I love getting those compiling them and we’ll be putting out more Q and .A shows coming up, and that would be to the address podcast@bradventures.com. Podcast@bradventures.com. Have a great day. Thanks for listening.

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