(Breather) Isn’t it a relief to know that recent research suggests that increasing all forms of general everyday movement is more beneficial for your health than adhering to a devoted workout regimen?

This means that instead of sweating it out at the gym doing the same old, super repetitive routine, you get to enjoy doing a nice variety of movements throughout your day and week, which is not only way less boring, but also way more effective! That’s why MOFO Mission #5 is Move Frequently: because getting in that general everyday movement will make a huge difference in your health.

What exactly does general everyday movement entail? More frequent walking, (dynamic) stretching, and incorporating micro-workouts into your day, as well as devoting time to movement based practices like Yoga, Pilates, and Tai-Chi, and calisthenics and flexibility/mobility drills. In this show, I’m breaking down why it is that frequent movement has such an effect on our physiology. Some key points:

• The compensation theory of exercise/ total energy expenditure theory: A workout regimen makes minimal to zero contribution towards fat reduction goals, because strenuous workouts stimulate your appetite, making you consume more calories and also (consciously and subconsciously) seek out ways to be lazier/less active for the rest of the day.

• Sitting is the new smoking. Sitting for as little as 20 minutes delivers a measurable reduction in glucose tolerance and an increase in glucose resistance, plus a decrease in cognitive performance. Active couch potato syndrome is very real: just because you’re fit, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re healthy. If you’re not moving frequently, but putting in one hour daily for exercise, you’re not moving enough. This is where the general everyday movement comes in; make time at least for walking, and make strategic choices in your everyday life: park further away from your destination, take the stairs instead of the elevator, etc.

• A dynamic workplace is the goal. Whatever your situation is, try to make it work. If you don’t have room to do some lunges or squats in your office, just go in the stairwell or hallway if you can, because it’s super important that you create a habit of breaking up the workday to practice some form of movement.

TIMESTAMPS:

MOFO assignment no. 5 is to move frequently.  Recent research in health fitness exercise physiology is suggesting that just increasing all forms of general everyday movement may be more important than a devoted exerciser regimen. [01:43]

Total energy expenditure theory is when your body’s metabolic function slows as a reaction to the calories you burn during exercise. [04:15]

Sitting is the new smoking. Prolonged periods of inactivity are risk factors for many different diseases. [07:22]

It’s important to do some critical thinking regarding what is the best movement formula for you. Your body is designed to move. [10:32]

Sitting still for as little as 20 minutes will deliver a measurable reduction in glucose tolerance and an increase in insulin resistance. [12:60]

Fidgeting and foam rolling are good things to do on your movement break. [16:36]

Brad describes many mini workouts to do throughout the day that are very beneficial. [19:49]

A dynamic workplace is a goal whatever your work situation is. [26:00]

The fourth pillar of moving frequently is a structured low-level cardiovascular exercise. [29:18]

Sticking to the MAF heart rate function, will produce all manner of benefits that can last up to 72 hours. [31:31]

A post dinner stroll is high up on the list.  Try flexibility drills, get your workplace fit, and don’t forget the cardio. [34:58]

LINKS:

• Brad’s Shopping Page
• Active Couch Potato Syndrome
• Joel Jamieson
• Dr. Herman Pontzer
• Andre Obradovic
• Katy Bowman
• Brad Kearns Morning Routine
• Brad Kearns Dynamic Stretching
• Brad Kearns Running Technique
• Dr. Peter Wayne
• Stephen Rader
• Eight Steps to a Pain Free Back
• Hadza People
• Gokhale Institute
• Primal Endurance
• Dr. Phil Maffetone

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Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad (1m 43s): Welcome to the MOFO mission assignment number five: move frequently. Oh, pretty easy. Pretty obvious, pretty important, extremely important. Recent research in health fitness exercise physiology is suggesting that just increasing all forms of general everyday movement could be more important to all aspects of health than adhering to a devoted exercise regimen. Brad (2m 18s): Incredible! Why is that? Well, there’s an assortment of reasons. One of them is the compensation theory of exercise slash the total energy expenditure theory, relatedly. And what these insights reveal is that your devoted exercise regimen, your devoted workout regimen makes a minimal or no contribution to your fat reduction goals. The idea is that a strenuous workout stimulates a corresponding increase in appetite, such that you consume more calories and find ways to become lazier for the rest of the day because you completed your workout. Brad (3m 2s): This happens both consciously and subconsciously. Consciously. I guess you hit your 6:00 AM spin class. You’re so proud of yourself. And so you feel free to relax the rest of the day, take the elevator up three floors instead of taking the stairs, come home and find your way to extra consumption of Ben and Jerry’s and whatever other indulgences you feel like because you’re celebrating the great caloric ,output that you delivered early in the morning, giving yourself a hall pass, the hot fudge sundae hall pass, because you put in that hard work. Brad (3m 39s): This was me literally in high school with my main man, Dr. Stevie Kobrine. He would get me up on Tuesday mornings, particularly, and we’d run at 5:30 in the morning with his dad and his dad’s friends, eight miles tough in the hills before it even got light for many months of the year. And then at afternoon cross country team track team practice. When everyone else was suiting up, getting ready to go suffer and put in another workout in the smoggy afternoons of Los Angeles, we would show up with a triple ice cream cone from the ice cream shop across the street from the school and report in that we’d already put in our eight miles earlier that day. Brad (4m 15s): Hey, that’s an aside, but this is an important concept to understand. That we have this compensation, many compensation mechanisms to balance out that caloric expenditure with diminished caloric output and general sense of greater laziness throughout the day. So the conscious the reward aspect, the hall pass aspect, but also subconsciously your body’s metabolic function slows as a reaction or a compensatory mechanism to the calories you burn during exercise. Brad (4m 47s): This is called the total energy expenditure theory. It was popping arise by a scientist named Dr. Herman Pontzer, who went out and studied the Hadza in Tanzania. That’s a modern day hunter gatherer tribe, primitive, living, modern people, some of the last groups on the entire planet, great people to study. And Poncer found that they put heart rate monitors and accelerometers on these people to estimate their caloric intake and their activity level. Brad (5m 18s): And he found that these extremely active people that walked anywhere from five to seven miles a day, gathering food, hunting, tending to the basic needs of the hunter gatherer existence. Even with that tremendously active lifestyle, they burned a similar amount of calories each day to the average modern couch, potato office worker, minimally active, modern human. So we have these compensatory metabolic mechanisms that just bump us up against an upper limit for caloric expenditure each day. Brad (5m 55s): And we just can’t exceed that in big picture sense. I think athletes can be relating here. For example, when I was training for hours every day for triathlon, I burned very few calories at the other times of the day and my metabolism was more efficient. So I burned fewer calories at rest rather than more calories, which is our flawed common laypersons notion that if you go and work out at the gym and you increase your metabolism, quote unquote, you’re going to be burning more calories while you’re sitting at your desk. Brad (6m 28s): In fact, the opposite can be true, especially if you’re immersed into chronic exercise patterns where you’re overdoing it and the body is struggling to recover. It’s going to slow down and make you feel more sluggish. Maybe your thermal output is a little lower, right? Your body temperature is a little lower. So the big takeaway here, of course, workouts are fantastic. Building your fitness, countering all the sedentary periods that we have in life, but in general, the obligation to just move more throughout the day is more aligned with our genetic expectations for health, as opposed to blasting ourselves with an incredible CrossFit workout for 47 minutes in the morning, and then getting on the subway and commuting to your office job, commuting home and sitting on the couch and eating a lot of food as a compensatory response also, and engaging in more sedentary, leisure time. Brad (7m 22s): So the obligation to get up and move around more each day is what being human is all about. And we have so many health consequences of sitting. They call it sitting is the new smoking. You’ve probably heard of that Maxim and all the disease risk factors that are noted from a lifestyle featuring prolonged periods of inactivity. There’s something called the active couch potato syndrome, where they actually have studied this and taken a group of devoted fitness enthusiasts. Brad (7m 54s): People who get to the gym or get out on the road on a daily basis and put in many hours of devoted exercise every week and otherwise have a sedentary lifestyle pattern. So they might be knowledge workers working in an office, living modern life with all the conveniences and luxuries, besides the calories they’re burning during workouts. They compared those to people who live a sedentary lifestyles and show that they have similar risk factors in the blood, blood tests, whatever, as I said, interi population because of the many, many hours that they accumulate with inactivity. Brad (8m 28s): So I, my goodness, you have a week that has 168 hours. Even if you’re working at an hour every single day, that’s only seven hours. What are you doing with the other 161? Of course you should be sleeping for a good chunk of that, but the rest of the time, that’s what we’re going to attack with this MOFO Mission number five. So the way to accomplish this objective, there are many avenues to do so frequent stretching, exercise breaks during the workday sprinkling and formal movement practices like yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, doing calisthenics, flexibility, mobility drillsF Humans are meant to move throughout the day. Brad (9m 8s): Number one on the list, we’ll cover a bunch of different ones, but I think JFW has to take that top spot. It’s the ultimate quintessential human activity. Yes, JFW stands for just F…ng Walk! And today we have to orchestrate ways to walk in an, obligatory fashion, right? So instead of parking up close, when you go to the big box store, why don’t you turn the other direction park in the furthest spot available? And as a rule, every time you go shopping or go to a parking area park far away and make that one of your ways that you walk more every day, take the elevator instead of the stairs. Brad (9m 49s): Oh, what? You’re on the 27th floor? That’s too many stairs? Get off on the 20th. You might make some new friends, who knows. And walk up seven floors or five floors, or walk down three floors and then get on the elevator, keep the dream alive every day in every way. My favorite example, if you own a dog, you have an obligation as a pet owner to give that animal the life that it deserves. And at the very, very least that means two generous outings every single day, whether you feel like it or not, whether you’re tired or stressed or already did an ambitious, impressive workout earlier that morning. Brad (10m 25s): You got to get the dog out into nature twice a day for a nice evening stroll morning stroll, whatever it is. So there’s a few right there. I’m talking, especially to athletes, my man, Andre Obradovic, frequent podcast guest. He says, don’t be a Muppet. A Muppet is a follower blindly following the pack, not really critical thinking or not taking the initiative in life in general. And he says, don’t be a parking lot Muppet. Brad (10m 57s): Don’t be an elevator Muppet. Don’t be an athlete Muppet. And the athlete mentality, Katy Bowman calls it the lazy athlete mentality whereby the athletic population can tend to be some of the least active in society because we give ourselves these wonderful hall passes. I’m calling out myself back in the day when I was training hard on the triathlon circuit. And I had a routine of getting in the car and driving to get my mail at the mailbox every day. And it was six tenths of a mile away. Brad (11m 28s): It was rural delivery. Young lived in Cool? California. And so it wasn’t coming straight to the house, but can you imagine getting in the car and driving to pick up the mail on a day when I’d written my bicycle 82 miles in the mountains, or what have you, but I couldn’t get on my mountain bike and ride that quick trip over to the mailbox with a backpack and put the mail in, or walk there as a relaxing evening routine with the dog or something? Nope. Cause I’d already put in so much work that it just didn’t even cross my mind. I was too lazy to take that short walk. Brad (11m 59s): So the athletes especially, and I’ve found this to be a huge improvement in recovery from my high intensity sprint workouts. When I make a point to be more active, rather than less active in the 24 to 36 hours, after a high intensity workout, the body wants to move circulate the blood circulate the oxygen, not have a pooling of blood and the lymphatic system and the extremities whereby you get more stiff, more sore, take longer to recover. Brad (12m 29s): So that kind of flips the, the previous notion of recovery on its end, where I thought the best way to recovery was to sit on the couch and eat as much food and watch as many movies as possible. It’s now being disproven by the great leaders in the fitness scene, Joel Jamieson at eightweeksout.com, MMA trainer. He talks about these rebound workouts, where he gets his athletes into the gym and doing a specially designed workout has actually been proven to speed recovery in a superior manner, comparison to total rest. Brad (12m 60s): Okay. So finding ways to walk around every single day, especially to break up prolonged periods of stillness during the work day. Studies have revealed that being still sitting for as little as 20 minutes will deliver a measurable reduction in glucose tolerance and an increase in insulin resistance. In other words, if you sit, you stop burning fat and you switch over into a sugar burning mode where your appetite might spike and your concentration in the blood circulation and oxygen delivery to your brain starts to lessen your cognitive performance goes down even for as short as 20 minutes. Brad (13m 43s): So if you can just get up and move for a minute or 30 seconds, if you will. Doing a set of deep squats in your cubicle, the micro workouts that we’re going to talk about on the MOFO Mission, number six, to hit it hard. These can go a long way throughout the day to guard against all these problems with sedentary, existence and periods of stillness. Brad (14m 14s): Dude Spellingsw my podcast guest, set a goal for himself where he set an alarm on his computer to go off on the hour. He has a office knowledge job looking at the screen all day and on the hour he told himself that he would get up and do 30 pushups. Yeah, that’s right. Guess what happens in an eight hour workday? 240 pushups every single day. So instead of the rest of the pack, the Muppets who complaining that their gym’s closed and that’s why they got fat and out of shape, a dude had a dramatic improvement in his fitness during the quarantine period, just from getting up and doing one set of pushups. Brad (14m 47s): And what’s the big deal? It’s not like it’s going to exhaust you to a workout that lasts for less than a minute. So these brief bursts of intensity or brief burst of movement, even if it’s just getting up, walking down one flight of stairs, going and getting a post-it note on a different floor, coming back up to your office area, or if you’re working in a home environment, there’s so many things you can do go out in the backyard. I have the Slack line put up there. So I’ll take a five minute challenge where I’m working on balance and proprioception completely different from what I’m doing while I’m typing on the screen. Brad (15m 22s): And it’s a wonderful balance. So those work breaks super, super important. So we’ve talked about a number one in so many different ways, getting the dog out there, J F W all day long. Number two will encompass a broad selection of complimentary movement options and modalities. So you have your flexibility, mobility drills like I have on my morning routine, you can watch that on YouTube Brad Kearns Morning Routine, or Brad Kearns Dynamic tretching. I have two different ones set up there. Brad (15m 53s): And this has been an amazing centerpiece of my life with a great street going, doing this every single morning consecutively for almost four years running. Now we can also add dynamic stretching in there. So things that you do before workouts, or perhaps during a break in the action you get up and just do a few sequential movements, like a miniature lunges, kick outs. I also demonstrate a lot of drills and dynamic stretching movements on YouTube videos. Brad (16m 26s): You can type in Brad Kearns Dynamic Stretching, Brad Kearns Running Technique Drills, intermediate, and Brad Kearns Running Technique Drills, advance.. So these can kind of piggyback with a workout often, or you can do them as standalone movement experiences, which is super fun. And this is kind of what you’ll find me doing throughout the day, working in the home environment. Obviously I don’t have the constraints. So some of you might have excuses if you’re in an office setting, but really there’s always a stairwell. There’s always some open space where you can go off by yourself. Brad (16m 57s): And if you want to do something goofy, like pull your knee to your chest and then take an exaggerated stride, right? With a certain drill sequence, you can go do that in the stairwell or down the hall. Maybe people will go, Hey, what are you doing there? And you’re saying, ah, I’m increasing all forms of general everyday movement. By the way, I’m enhancing cognitive function. So when I go back and sit at my desk, I’m going to start cranking out some awesome content and achieving my high profile objectives in the workplace. This can also include calisthenics and drills, Katy Bowman’s wall angels, where you get up from your desk and counterbalance all the hunched over positioning of your torso by standing up straight against a wall and making the familiar snow angel pattern like you do when you’re laying in the snow, like flapping your wings. Brad (17m 44s): As you track your arms along the wall, maybe it takes one minute and you go back down and sit down because you’re so busy and important, but tremendous counterbalance. Another great form of movement fidgeting is also on the list that I put here on my notes. So yes, fidgeting is allowed getting up and walking around in a circle as you’re pondering a problem, rather than sitting there on your butt or boy, when I get a phone call that is my cue to pop up and I’ll go puttering around the house a better than typing in conversing, right? Brad (18m 16s): I mean, multitasking’s kind of rude and inefficient in the first place, but if you’re doing a minor things like folding laundry and putting it away while you’re on a phone call, that’s allowed, but typing emails while you’re half listening on the phone. Oh, that’s no good boy. John Gray is going to have something to say about that for the relationship dynamics. Yeah. So pop up whenever you get a phone call, if that’s the case at work or at home or wherever you are. So that’s on the list fidgeting. And then of course we have a foam rolling. Yes. It counts as a form of movement. Brad (18m 46s): How about that? I mean, you’re getting the blood flowing. You’re getting the muscles, moving the oxygen delivery. And so getting a nice foam rolling session going while you’re watching TV or doing something else that would be otherwise sedentary. Great suggestion added benefit of foam rolling, especially in the evening is that it’s known to stimulate parasympathetic activity. So the discomfort, the goods hurt the pain that comes when you’re rolling out those tight muscles releases some painkilling endorphins into the bloodstream. Brad (19m 17s): And that helps to relax you and trigger that parasympathetic activity, which is so difficult to kick into that mode when we’re constantly stressed and stimulated throughout hectic daily life. And then of course also in this category are the formal movement programs like yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi. This stuff is wonderful. If you want to become an enthusiast and get into a class with a guided instructor today, especially as we’re stuck at home a lot, there’s so many great options on YouTube. Brad (19m 49s): I did some research for our upcoming book, Two Meals a Day where we have a little section on lifestyle and you can learn the yoga sun salute sequences with a wonderful instructor on YouTube. You can sign up like my cousin, Hilary in Portland for a yoga experience where they have teachers and you log in sort of like a zoom meeting where you’re getting the feel of actually being in a class for a certain amount of dollars per month, and then you’re accountable. And you can take the 5:00 PM class every day, a great ideas for that.Tai ChiDis practiced by over billion people every single morning to start their day in countries like China and has so many incredible mind body benefits. Brad (20m 31s): There’s a guy named Dr. Peter Wayne at Harvard medical school, and he’s focused on the incredible health benefits of Tai Chi and bringing it into traditional medical care as an adjunct therapy. “A growing body of carefully conducted research, building a compelling case for Tai Chi as an adjunct to standard medical treatment for the prevention and rehabilitation of many conditions, commonly associated with aging”. Yeah. So get into that stuff. And if you’re not inclined to go down and drive to a formal class and pay the monthly fee, try a mini version at home, using the guidance that you find on YouTube. Brad (21m 12s): Another thing that I love to do throughout the day, especially when I’m in the standup desk position. And I’m not in that all day, I switched back and forth between standing up, sitting down or doing the low desk on the Bosu ball is these assorted of homemade. I call them the ballet dancer drills, where I stick one leg up in the air, kick it out to the side and do a series of mini karate kicks or twisting my, my leg. Let’s say, making my hamstring going from parallel to the ground to perpendicular and back to parallel, right? Brad (21m 46s): So you can imagine a little working through the range of motion of the hip flexor, a wonderful drill, extremely challenging, right? So if I do a 20 count on each side, man, when I’m done with that, I’m catching my breath. And I feel like I did a micro workout right there. So balance, too Achieving that fitness objective is really important. A lot of people throw in balance as one of the pillars of fitness. You hear about strength and power endurance, flexibility, balance, and yes, what is the number one cause of injury and death to Americans over age 65, it’s falling due to the loss of balance due to all kinds of aging factors, including muscle loss, but also that decline in proprioception, the ability of sensing your awareness and space and working your body properly. Brad (22m 37s): So we have to challenge these faculties, especially as we age, but at any age, especially for pre injury prevention and improving fitness competency, working on doing things on one leg is super important. Yeah. I heard an interesting insight the other day. I think it was from Dr. Craig marker maybe. But when you think about all manner of athletic activity and everyday physical work efforts, most of the time we’re doing things that require leveraging force off of one leg, like walking, like running, like jumping climbing stairs, climbing a ladder, climbing a tree, you get the idea. Brad (23m 18s): But with the upper body, a lot of the physical work efforts that we’re doing use both arms. .So when you’re lifting something up or pushing or pulling things like that. And so the rationale is in the weight room, you can emphasize a two armed movements for upper body work such as using a bar bell, of course is the obvious example. But with the lower body, when we’re usually pushing the, the leg press or doing the squats or doing the dead lift with both legs, there’s a huge plug for introducing things where you’re working on balancing off of one leg. Brad (23m 54s): And this has been a wonderful addition to my fitness measurement regimen. And my morning flexibility mobility regimen is to do these elevated leg Bulgarian, split squats. So you put one leg up on an elevated platform and you lower down and do a squat, or you could call it a lunge onto one leg. And I’m used to, you know, throwing a heavy bar on the back to do squats with two legs. But with these, you don’t even need weight. It’s so difficult and challenging. And you’re noticing when my knee is wobbling, as I lowered down onto one leg, the lack of balance and a stable platform, because I haven’t done these challenging exercises before. Brad (24m 35s): And then if you extrapolate that into wanting to jump high, and let’s say taking off on your left foot to try to get over the high jump bar, if I can’t give a stable platform to provide leverage, when I’m taking off in the air, that’s going to dramatically decrease my performance capabilities. And so working on the one leg drills is fantastic. And you can do these right in the middle of the day when you’re at your standup environment at the work desk or any time Stephen Rader has got some great content on his website. Brad (25m 7s): You can Google him working hard in the advanced age groups to do all manner of body weight exercises. He’s written a free PDF that you can get to learn about this stuff, but he has this challenge called the hover squat where you just lift one leg off the ground and lower down and try to do a squat over the leg that’s stable on the ground. And man, if you think you’re fit, try to do 10 or 15 of those and it will rock your world. Brad (25m 42s): So go visit formieverything.com and you will see the work of Stephen Rader and download the free ebook called form is everything okay? So plenty of ideas floating around, it’s all up to you to figure something out, to do and keep moving. Dynamic workplace would be the next on the list. And we’ve talked about some of that a little bit with all the ideas with the complimentary movement activities, but especially see if you can find a way to rig up a standup desk environment. Brad (26m 14s): If you spend a lot of time at your desk. So many health benefits to getting up out of the chair where you are messing up an assortment of your musculature, you’re putting your glutes into a prolonged stretch, weakening them accordingly. You’re compressing your hip flexors and your hamstrings shortening them and making them less resilient when it’s time to go out there and exercise. So standing up getting some weight on your skeleton, again, lots of benefits to the muscle groups too, to be weight bearing. Brad (26m 45s): And then I think it gives you a better chance to fidget and move around a little bit. I have one of those balance discs where you can stand on this round wooden device and then there’s a small Island in the middle. And so you can try to stand perfectly straight or you can dip backwards and stretch your calves. So that’s another fun thing that I do when I have these standup desk experience. But as Katy Bowman says, going from sitting to standing in one place all day is no better because you’re still having these prolonged periods of stillness. Brad (27m 22s): The only difference is you’ll be sore because you stood up all day instead of sitting in a chair. So I make a concerted effort to switch back and forth between different work desks experiences. So I have the standup desk, I have a proper chair and table to sit down on. I learned from Esther Gokhale author of the fantastic book, Eight Steps to a Pain Free Back where you learn all about proper human posture, ancestral inspired, and how to counterbalance all the reasons that we suffer from chronic back pain. Brad (27m 55s): Like nothing else, founder of the Gokhale Institute as well, Gokhale. You can find her in all her great work, but I learned from her that I want to sit on the edge of the chair with a straight and elongated spine rather than sinking into a chair and allowing the lower back to kind of a sag and put pressure on your spine in an unnatural manner. So sitting properly in a chair, standing up again, and then also using the Bosu ball, the half spear. Brad (28m 25s): And you can sit on that and then put your laptop on a low desk environment, like a low table. And, Oh my gosh, that’s a nice little trifecta to keep me, keep me honest, keep me moving and changing throughout the day. So variation is the key. According to movement nutrition, expert, Katy Bowman hit her website too, to learn all about the world of nutritious movement. So if you’re making an effort to JFW every single day, obligatory reasons to walk more, including getting up and taking work breaks, if you’re adding in a bunch of complimentary movement objectives and modalities:, the flexibility, mobility drills, the dynamic stretching, and the calisthenics, the micro workout experience foam rolling fidgeting, formal practices like yoga, Pilates, and Tai Chi, and then have a dynamic workplace experience. Brad (29m 18s): You are looking pretty sharp, but we have the fourth and final pillar of moving frequently and honoring that assignment. And that, of course, is a structured low level cardiovascular exercise. So the actual workouts, and even if you’re doing great on all those other levels, we still have plenty of opportunity for sitting around and being less active than our ancestral experience and our genetic expectations for health. Brad (29m 48s): So getting that cardio objective handled with those frequent outings, making sure that you’re exercising at the proper heart rate and keeping it aerobic fat burning zone. I’ve talked about this on many shows and in the book Primal Endurance, the centerpiece of the primal endurance philosophy is to emphasize aerobic exercise and stay out of this no man’s land or black hole exercise, where the, the pace, the effort is slightly too difficult to really be considered an energizing fat burning workout. Brad (30m 22s): And you’re drifting into the glucose burning heart rates where you kind of feel tired and depleted after. So this is in the movement, objective all about doing comfortably paced cardio, and you can pick the exercise of your preference could be brisk walking or jogging. If you happen to be pretty fit, it could be easy pedaling of the bicycle, or, you know, a proper ride. If, again, if you’re really fit, but it’s all about keeping your heart rate at 180 minus your age or below in beats per minute. Brad (30m 55s): And that’s the MAF heart rate from dr. Phil Maffetone. And he has designated this calculation with decades of research and experience to be a very accurate estimate of the point where you are at maximum fat oxidation per minute. So you’re burning the maximum amount of fat calories per minute, your maximum fat burning heart rate. So you’re getting the best aerobic benefits at that heart rate with a minimal amount of glucose burning stress, hormone production, or anaerobic stimulation, which is what happens when you’re doing the high intensity workouts. Brad (31m 31s): So it’s super important to stay comfortable. It actually turns out to be an incredibly comfortable pace. So easy in fact, that you’ll be tempted to exceed it when you first start honoring and adhering to this MAF heart rate training protocol. So it takes some discipline. It takes using a heart rate monitor, or an accurate pulse meter to really see where you’re at. Do that mathematical calculation 180 minus your age. Oh my goodness. I’m 55 now. Brad (32m 1s): So my maximum aerobic heart rate, my MAF heart rate is 125. And if I’m jogging along in the forest with my dog and having fun, and I hear that beeper alarm go off because I’ve gone up going up a slight hill or doing something, that’s kicking me into the, the upper limit of my fat oxidation potential. That’s what I want to slow down. Take it easy, maybe walk for a beat as I’m going up a hill or doing whatever it takes. If you’re biking, you’re going to have to shift into an easier gear and just take your time and build that aerobic system comfortably. Brad (32m 36s): And this will produce all manner of benefits, especially enhancing your fat burning around the clock. So if you train your body to burn fat effectively during workouts, this carries over into your metabolic function for many, many hours afterward. Dr. Maffetone references studies suggesting that the metabolic effects of workout can last up to 72 hours after the workout. So if you’re burning fat, while you’re walking, burning fat, while you’re doing these miniature little activities and then doing the proper workouts at the proper heart rate, you will be a fat burning beast, and you will also optimize your hormone function as opposed to drifting above that MAF heart rate. Brad (33m 22s): So you’re doing workouts that are quote unquote kind of hard as iron man legend. Dave Scott says, when you’re constantly doing that, you are suppressing your testosterone production in favor of a spike in the prominent stress, hormone, cortisol, cortisol, and testosterone antagonize each other. So when you’re in fight or flight mode, you are killing your testosterone production. And that’s kind of the, the hidden theme behind every single assignment of the MOFO Mission is to minimize that chronic overproduction of stress hormones in favor of a balanced life where you’re balancing between parasympathetic and sympathetic function, you’re doing brief adaptive fight or flight experiences like jumping into cold water or doing a sprint workout, and then having plenty of downtime and rest and recovery and relaxation or refreshing low stress nourishing workouts, like a properly conducted aerobic workout, or of course, a, an evening stroll with the dog. Brad (34m 26s): It’s not stressful. It’s not going to spike your fight or flight hormones, and it’s going to help you achieve that wonderful harmonious balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. So that is the MOFO Mission number five. Move frequently. Again, the breaking into four categories. Number one is J F W. Find ways to walk more. Morning strolls, evening strolls with the dog. Taking quick breaks from work to go up or down a few flights of stairs. Brad (34m 58s): Take a walk after dinner, and guess what? Even a short walk at a very slow pace has been shown to reduce the insulin response to the meal by 50%, I believe it was a, a one mile per hour walk for 15 minutes. That’s really, really slow. So just getting up and moving rather than moving the party over to the TV room, huge difference. So a post dinner stroll would be high up on the list of things to do not being a parking lot, elevator or athlete Muppet, be a person who moves a lot, especially in the aftermath of your hard workouts to speed recovery. Brad (35m 35s): So that was the GFW. Number two is the complimentary movement modalities, flexibility, mobility drills, dynamic stretches, calisthenics foam, rolling fidgeting around and formal practices like yoga, Pilates and Tai Chi. Number three would be a dynamic workplace environment, getting a standup option going and then switching and creating a lot of variation standing up, sitting down, perhaps a rigging up and low desk opportunity as well. And then finally, number four is getting in your proper cardio sessions, making sure that your heart rate is 180 minus your age or below in beats per minute for the duration of the cardiovascular workout. Brad (36m 18s): Thanks for listening. Thanks for carrying out this important mission and for spreading the word, maybe you can share this podcast with somebody and say, Hey man, jump in here. I know it’s number five, but it’s time to take on the MOFO Mission. Of course, all the shows are published and archived for eternity so we can start and carry on. We’ve got five more to go. Keep it with me, keep going people. Thank you, MOFOs. Peace out. Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com. Brad (36m 51s): And we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to thanks for doing it.

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