#282: Brad Kearns - Why Walking is the Key to Longevity, Health, and Weight Loss
Walking is not only a fundamental human activity, but a cornerstone for improving health and longevity as discussed in this conversation with Brad Kearns, co-author of Born to Walk: The Broken Promises of the Running Boom and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy One Step at a Time.
This new book challenges the long-held belief that we were all born to run, arguing instead that walking is a far less stressful and more beneficial form of exercise.
In this episode, Rip is also joined by his co-producer, Carrie Barrett - an avid endurance runner and triathlete.
They discuss:
How walking is often overlooked but is a powerful catalyst for health and longevity.
Why many people mistakenly believe running is essential for fitness, but walking can be more beneficial.
How the running boom has led to increased injuries, especially among recreational runners.
Why so-called 'supershoes' are really a marketing gimmick
A significant number of runners get injured each year, even more than NFL players.
How improving aerobic conditioning through walking can help avoid the risks associated with running.
How to determine your "Fat Max" heart rate level of training
Slowing down your workouts to maximize health benefits and promote sustainable fitness
Laying out a fitness plan that centers primarily on walking, but also includes a sprint intervals
This episode and book challenges the long-held belief that we were all 'born to run,' arguing instead that walking better health and longevity for most people. And, as you lay out your fitness goals for 2025, we hope you're inspired to take that first step toward a healthier lifestyle—one step and one walk at a time.
Episode Highlights
00:20 The Case for Walking Over Running
10:50 Challenging the Running Phenomenon: An Introduction to 'Born to Walk'
16:40 The Myth of Pheidippides and the Marathon
25:25 The Obligate Runner and the Pursuit of Balance
45:20 The Impact of Running vs. Walking
57:05 Transitioning to a Barefoot Inspired Lifestyle
01:08:00 Understanding Fat Max Heart Rate for Optimal Training
01:13:35 The Importance of Aerobic Base Training
01:32:40 Understanding the Physiology of Sprinting and Fat Loss
01:35:05 Reprogramming Our Fitness Mindset
01:47:50 Embracing Longevity and Fitness in Aging
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Full Episode Transcription via Transcription Service
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Born to Walk Revolution
[0:05] Many of you have heard the notion that we were born to run. In fact, there was a book by Christopher McDougall called Born to Run and a whole movement around this premise. Now, what if I told you that the whole born to run movement is just a big fat marketing gimmick and that we were actually born to walk instead. Are you intrigued? I was too. And today you're going to hear from the co-author of the new book, Born to Walk, The Broken Promises of the Running Boom and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy One Step at a Time. Brad Kearns and his co-author Mark Sisson challenge everything that I've ever learned about running And instead, they make the case for how walking is far less stressful, improves health, longevity,
Rip's Triathlon Journey
[1:07] cognitive function, and even weight loss far more than running can. So let's start the year off on the right foot right after this word from PLANTSTRONG.
[1:24] I imagine that most of you know about my background as a professional triathlete. This career that was before my firefighting days took me all over the world to train and race in some of the most exotic and also brutal places on the planet. Thank goodness that I was fueled by plants because that crazy level of training can also take a huge toll on your body. Now, My conversation today just happens to be with one of my old training and racing partners from those triathlon days, Brad Kearns. Now together, we must have logged countless hours of training. And at the time, we subscribed to the no pain, no gain theory of training. It was the philosophy at the time, swim, bike, and run as hard as you can, as long as you can. But the problem with that is it's unsustainable for career longevity and inevitably leads to injury, burnout, and breakdown.
[2:34] In their new book, Born to Walk, authors Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns exposed the ruse that the running industry has also sold to us, which is we were all born to run. In fact, the last 50 years has seen a huge rise in the number of marathons and participants. The Chicago marathon had over 50,000 people and most major marathons have, actually have a lottery system in place in order for you to nab a spot. Shoe companies are churning out heavily cushioned shoes and even super shoes with carbon plates. But you know what this has led to? More injuries, especially in the recreational runners who may not have the muscular foundation to plod along for 26.2 miles. And it isn't always the weight loss machine that we dream of either. Running hard all the time, it stimulates our appetite and can actually encourage poor food choices and muscular breakdown.
[3:40] Instead, Brad and Mark suggest that the simple act of walking can improve aerobic conditioning the right way, avoid the risks of injury and burnout associated with running, and promote a healthy, happy, energetic, long life one step at a time. It's a super provocative notion that really intrigued me and my co-producer, Carrie Barrett, who is an avid marathoner. So I asked her to join me in this conversation about the new book, which comes out on January 7th. Now, Brad, Mark, and I may not agree on everything, especially including how to eat and what constitutes a healthy diet, but I certainly found myself nodding along in agreement on most of the points in this book. We dive deep on this one, But my biggest takeaway is this. So many of us think that we have to become a runner in order to get fit and healthy. And I know that this can be a huge barrier for many of us. And as Brad suggests, we were born to walk. And that is the greatest catalyst for physical and metabolic health. So join Carrie and me as we welcome Brad Kearns, co-author of Born to Walk.
[5:07] All right. I'm here with my long-time triathlon buddy, Brad Kearns. Brad, welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Oh, I'm so glad to be here in the studio. Speaking of long time, I was here about 30-plus years ago, and it is so fantastic to come and reminisce with my old boy, Ripper, andCarrie hanging out here. Thank you very much. But we got stuff to talk about, and we're going to hit it hard. We are. And you mentioned Carrie. So Carrie's the podcast producer. And I've invited Carrie because of her love of all things kind of ultra endurance. And I thought she would appreciate this conversation and be a nice side host today. So thanks for joining, Carrie. Thank you. What an honor it is for me to be such a, I am a tri-nerd at heart. I love the sport of triathlon. I love the sport of running. So to be sitting at the table with two legends of the sport, I'll take it. Well, and so Brad and I, we competed for the most part between, like, I did 1987 and 1997, which is when I became a firefighter. When did you compete hardcore? You outlasted me, man. It was 86 through 94, and that was nine seasons.
[6:22] And by the time I finished that, I felt like I was 80 years old. I was completely wiped out. I'd been getting my butt kicked for the last year. So, it was a beautiful, graceful transition into real life. But it sure was fun, especially traveling around with you. And we knew how to make the most of our experience on the circuit and have some fun and also compete hard. So, it was a great stint there. Yeah. Well, and you were no slouch. I mean, at one point, you were ranked, I think, number three in the world in triathlons. So you reached the height of the sport in a big way.
[7:02] Yeah, it was pretty fun because it's so much work and so much training.
[7:06] And then you realize, as we were talking about just before we hit record, like I had given my heart and soul to this sport and tried as hard as I could to train as hard as I could every single day and go after these guys that were up ahead of me on the road. And at a certain point, you realize, okay, I'm exhausted. I'm devoting my entire life to this and I'm not getting faster. And that's when I had these great awakenings thanks to mentors like Mark Allen, Mike Pig, Phil Maffetone, Andrew McNaughton, Mark Sisson. And we had to evolve our training approach to not just be flooring the gas pedal like a race car driver, but to actually understand the balance of stress and rest and the nuances of using your intuition to make good training decisions rather than just being the most competitive dude around. And I trained for half my career in Los Angeles and it coincided moving to a small rural northern california town coincided with me improving a lot on the circuit because in la every single workout was hardcore you'd show up on the saturday bike ride with 60 guys wanting to kick your ass and so you just get into this excessive competitive scene and an unregulated competitive intensity and guess what happens you go to these races and you get disappointed And so, it was really great to learn about regulating energy and doing things correctly and not having to suffer and struggle to get better.
[8:34] The body likes a graceful training concept where you're under the radar and you're not constantly fatiguing yourself every day. And we're going to get into this more because we're going to talk about the book. But for everyone out there who's a fitness enthusiast, we've been socialized and programmed and marketed to in a way that in many cases has created... An adverse impact on people's mentality and their habits, because we've been told that you have to pound that bicycle and then be soaked in a pool of sweat after in order for it to be qualified as a legitimate workout. And it's completely off base, especially for people who are novice or recreational. Well, okay, we're going to dive more into that for sure. I want people to know that you also, you're a true kindred spirit when it comes to, it's amazing how you and I have taken very similar paths as far as kind of being health advocates, being authors, having podcasts.
[9:35] Loving to like continue in our, you know, I'm 61. How old are you? 59, almost 60, man. Watch out, 60 plus to finish the next year. But we still love to compete. We love adventures. So you and your buddy, Mark Sisson, have written a new, I think, very disruptive book. It is going to turn a lot of heads. It's going to make people question what they've been doing for a long time. And it's called what? Born to Walk. So I don't know about you, Carrie, Brad. I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Yeah, great book. 2010, 11. 2009, it came out. Yeah. And I loved it. I soaked it up. You know, my buddy Scott Jurek, you know, plant-based wonder boy. I know him, yeah. Running with these Tarahumara Indians. I think, was it a 100-mile race that they did or 50? Yeah, they did these super long races. The primitive living Tarahumara and Copper Canyons of Mexico are running as their lifestyle. And the book was some Westerners, elite ultra runners coming down to join them and learn about their culture and do their races. Yeah. But so you've kind of so you've directly challenged kind of that book born to run with born to walk and so I, Why don't we start with the whole running phenomenon that you guys say is a ruse.
The Running Boom's Origins
[11:02] It's a big ruse, and it's unhealthy, and there's a better way for people to stay healthy. So why don't you start with maybe what is the background of how did running become so popular in this country and why? Yeah, good setup, good questions. And the book is definitely disruptive and the title's kind of tongue-in-cheek to the other book, but I think by the time we converse a little bit, we'll come to a beautiful, you know, recalibration of some of the notions that we've taken for granted or that have been pushed down our throats. And it's beautiful that America is getting fitter and fitter and the participation in the events is bigger than ever. When we were doing triathlons, people would be like, so what are the three events again? It was like completely off of the mainstream awareness and now it's an Olympic sport and everybody knows about marathon races in their town and they watch the things on TV. So the growth of fitness is wonderful, but I think there's a better way than the struggling and suffering that I mentioned a little bit. And so, you asked me, how is the running boom built on misinformation.
[12:18] Misinterpretation, fabrication, and all that? And so, what we're looking at in modern times is the explosion of endurance running as a popular mass participation sport dates back around 50 years, and people credit Frank Shorter winning the gold in munich in 1972 if you remember that far along um the first american to win the marathon it was amazing and then jim fix wrote the book about uh running the complete book of running and you know races like the boston marathon started to explode in popularity um and it you know.
[12:53] Goes on year after year, more things come up. And one of the main ones was Nike inventing the elevated cushioned waffle sold shoe. So, prior to that, if you want to be a long distance runner, you had to wear a really crappy shoe that didn't have padding or cushion and be so well adapted as, you know, quite an athletic specimen in order to run down the road for six miles without your feet falling apart and your calves seizing up. And so, before the 70s, runners, quote-unquote, were very fast, they were super lean, super athletic, and they were generally coming from the high school, college ranks, and that was it. There wasn't joggers in your neighborhood huffing and puffing along, carrying extra weight and trying to get in shape. It did not exist at all. And you can look at like participation numbers of the Boston Marathon. There was, you know, hundreds entered since 1896 when it started.
[13:49] Oh, it's a tradition like no other. It's the 100th anniversary. Now it's the 100 and something. But this was just a smattering of really freaky people out on the edge doing this crazy thing. But then in the 70s, when the shoes came along, now people could put on these shoes, respond to the amazing Nike advertising, like just do it. And before that, the slogan was there is no finish line. And people could feel inspired watching the usa guy on tv and they themselves think about participating in a 10k and i started running in high school to join the high school team and we'd go to the weekend events and there was you know hundreds if not thousands of people doing these endurance runs for the first time um the the the ruse is that it's it's something that supports general overall health longevity, because it's such a difficult sport that in many cases, if not most cases right now, it's too stressful to really be promoting of health. So, what it does is it sets you up for a pattern of breakdown, burnout, illness, and injury because it's too strenuous for the average person who's sitting at a desk all day or leading a largely sedentary lifestyle to take off and actually do the human gait pattern of running. We're going to talk about why walking's better, but that's one of us. Running is a very, very difficult sport. We can gauge this by what heart rate is reading on your watch when you're going, even at a slow jog.
[15:16] You are probably exceeding what would be considered an aerobic heart rate or a comfortably paced heart rate and drifting into a workout that can be categorized as stressful and lightly anaerobic and more glucose burning than fat burning and all those things that we have to be really careful about because it's going to make us tired, exhausted, and injured. Now, you in the book talk about how.
[15:41] And you just mentioned it, but like up until 1964, there were no more than 300 participants in the Boston Marathon. Now you have to qualify. There's thousands and thousands. New York City just had a record of 54,000 or something. Incredible. Yeah.
The Myth of the Marathon
[15:55] It's like a whole city running a marathon. And so another thing that you and Mark talk about in the book is how the whole 26.2 is basically a fabrication. I'm glad you brought that up. Because I didn't know the extent of this until we did all this research. So, the modern-day Olympic Games 1896, they brought one of these events in called the Marathon. They say, hey, let's honor the amazing Greek soldier Pheidippides, who, as legend has it, ran from the city of Athens to the city of Marathon to Athens to report news of victory. He said, Nike, Nike, Nenikayam, which means rejoice, we conquer, and then he dropped dead. That's the legend of Pheidippides, the amazing runner, and that was the inspiration for the modern 26-mile marathon was the distance from Marathon to Athens. The problem is, it never happened. It was a complete fabrication, and it came from an 1879 poem by Robert Browning, where he took his liberties with Greek history and made up the story of the runner-messenger collapsing and dying.
[16:58] So, Pheidippides was a true historical figure in Greece. He was a hemorrhoedromi. Hemorrhoedromus is a messenger soldier. So, the most elite, it's like the Navy Seals or the Green Berets, the most elite performers in the army, they selected some of these guys to be foot messengers because they could beat a horse over hilly terrain with a message and get an advantage in battle. So, this guy, Pheidippides, his job was to run for the army. And in truth, what he did was when the Athenians needed help from the Spartans for a major battle, he ran 153 miles in 36 hours to Sparta. Asked them for help in the battle, and they said, oh, we're on holiday, sorry, we can't help. So, he rested a little bit and turned around and ran back another 153 miles in 36 hours, so a total of 72 hours. Like Harvey Lewis. Yeah, he ran 306 miles in four days. All right, we're changing the distance of the marathon. It's now like 300 miles. If you want to honor Pheidippides, the marathon should be, we could say it should be 153, you know?
[18:09] So, Dean Karnasas wrote a whole book about this, and he recreated Fidipides' journey. There's an actual competition or an organized event where they run 153 miles, and he tried to use the same food as Fidipides, so he had dried figs and salami and this whole thing. But he unwound the legend from what was really true. And I bring up the story. It's kind of fascinating that it never happened because everything's calibrated on this amazing accomplishment of 26.2 miles. And you finish and you get a tattoo on your body that says 26.2 or you get a sticker on your car. But it has nothing to do with like a true athletic accomplishment honoring some ancestor. And it's kind of like the Iron Man, Rip.
Ironman and Arbitrary Distances
[18:53] I was going to bring that up to talk about arbitrary distance. Ironman was, it started with a bunch of drunk sailors at an awards banquet for the Waikiki rough water swim. And they were arguing, what's the toughest event in the Hawaiian Islands? Is it the 2.4 mile Waikiki swim? Is it the 112 mile bicycle ride around Oahu? Or is it the Honolulu Marathon? And someone said, well, someone who could do all three in the same day would really be an Ironman. And the next year, 13 people did it. But it's like, so what? But, and I argue today, especially in triathlon world, the pace that most people compete at and the lifestyle that most people lead.
[19:35] If Ironman were half Ironman, we'd all be better off. And if the marathon were 13.1 miles, that is a long-ass way to run. It takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of devotion. And you just finish 13 miles of running, that would be fantastic. We don't need 26 for any reason except for watching these amazing Olympic runners like Frank Shorter and the rest of them excel. But we list the heights and weights of the great legends of running. And it's like, they're all these featherweight, extreme genetic freaks that we are trying to be inspired by and model with competing in the same race. Now, it's cool to get on the same starting line. And in triathlon, it's fun. Like, everyone lines up on the same starting line and does the same race. But, like, we shouldn't be trying to emulate the athletic performance of someone who's 5'10", 134. That was Frank Shorter, Sifan Asan, if you watch the Olympics in Paris, the most versatile and one of the greatest female athletes of all time. She's 5'7", 108, and we go on and on. The Olympic gold medalist from Atlanta in 96, Thugwane from South Africa. He's 5'2", and weighs 99 pounds. The guy who won the gold in the marathon.
[20:50] So, for comparison or for inspiration, maybe everyone should be striving for 13.1, or perhaps even completing a 10K is an amazing accomplishment. And it doesn't have that extreme, overly stressful element of needing to train
Shifting Perspectives on Goals
[21:05] that much. I think that that's just it. It doesn't have that extreme. Because I do think that, like, I know in the world of Ironman, 70.3 races are incredibly popular. Like, they keep increasing the amount of races. And by 70.3 races, I mean half Ironmans. Half marathons are also incredibly popular so they are popular but you just it's like you you don't you don't earn the tattoo so to speak that you do when you do it's in the background like so are you planning a full one so you know you finish and get congratulated are you planning a full one someday yeah like this isn't enough are you gonna go to Kona have you done Kona you know everyone just like have you done that one in Hawaii yeah well I will say just as I started to read the book and you do open with a lot of the stuff that you've just talked about and the big ruse and how we're gunning for so much and why are we doing this? And I was like, I was a little bristled, which is what you were going for, like the hair on my sister.
[22:09] She came in here before you were here and she's like, I'm angry, traumatized. I was like, I've got to figure out a way to be. Because it was, so my entry point into running was-
[22:22] I was overweight. I was unhealthy. I was brand new to Austin. Oh, well, don't even say anymore. I mean, you're in Austin. You have to go around the trail. So you have to do something. You can't drive somewhere. Yeah. So it became, so running a marathon was not, you know, it did become a goal. But it was, for me, it was so much more about meeting people, having self-esteem, building self-pride, changing some really difficult habits that I needed to get rid of, and really adopting new habits. And so, when I'm reading, like, yeah, you've been duped, I'm like, no, I haven't, have I? But as the book goes on, I understand where you're going with all of this. Oh, sure, yeah. You know, we all fall prey to marketing tactics. Well, you know what's funny is that so you and I did the triathlons hardcore. You know, we did half Ironmans. We did Ironmans. And I look back on it, and I agree with so much of what you write about in the book. I find it ultimately to be very destructive as opposed to constructive, right, in the grand scheme of things. and I think we need to like.
[23:48] Get a different mentality around what it means to just kind of set goals for yourself and what are those goals? What do they look like? And not have them be based upon these myths about 26.2 or what is an Ironman? And I mean, who in this, who with a husband or a wife and a family and a job, can literally train for an Ironman triathlon without something breaking.
[24:18] Again, this endurance stuff, like you're reporting a success story and you did things for the right reasons and it changed your life and all that, you're going for a very narrow pie slice of what broad-based functional fitness for longevity is, which is what most people would agree with, oh, that's my goal. That sounds great. And so, you got your endurance handled now. If you cut your mileage in half, I'm speaking to everybody, not just you, you still have an A plus in endurance with that narrow pie slice. But if we really want to expand what it means to be like fit and active and live an adventurous life like Ripper described, we're going to look at strength, we're going to look at mobility, we're going to look at unstructured play for the brain and more things that most endurance enthusiasts don't have the time or energy for because so much of their energy is going toward making a bigger pie slice and improving their time in the 13.1 from two hours to an hour 47 or whatever the obsession becomes. You know what, I love this conversation.
Understanding the Obligate Runner
[25:21] I want to kind of transition it to, you have a chapter in here called the Obligate Runner. And I think that you self-identify now and as a kind of a triathlete endurance runner. And so will you explain what the Obligate Runner is? Cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that are listening.
[25:41] That after they hear your description of it, will go, wow, that's me. If you're listening, please pull over to the side of the road. Slow down to a walk if you're listening on your workout. But the Obligate Runner was actually a term coined by a psychologist with a study way back in the 70s in Arizona.
[26:03] And they drew a corollary to the anorexic. and they threw in a lot of symptoms of addiction as applied to one's athletic obsession of endurance running. And so, I think a lot of exercisers and fitness people can relate. Like, if you miss your workout, do you feel shitty that day and agitated and you're no fun to be around at work or at the home because you didn't have time to get your workout in? And so, one of the hallmarks of addiction is you need your fix to get to level, not to get that wonderful high with your friends and the camaraderie and afterward we went to breakfast tacos and I had a great Sunday morning, much better than sleeping in. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a point where you've crossed that line and you need it just to feel normal and then perhaps become obsessed about performance to the extent that you're disappointed if you don't perform up to standard and i mean i think we all wrestled with this when we were training and racing at the extreme level in triathlon like i was pissed when i got ninth instead of top three and you go home you know on the airplane wondering about the future of your life and what are you doing spending all this time and energy it wasn't a fun enjoyable trip to the caribbean where we went for a beautiful swim in the clear water it's nor like god dang it you know what's going on but your Paychecks also depended on it, too. Yeah, there was so much tied into that. Yeah, it's tough. When you get tightly wound to the extent that it's not all about...
[27:33] Camaraderie and self-esteem and all those beautiful checkpoints that you mentioned, that's when one has crossed over to something that's the same with like, hey, I like going out drinking on the weekends in Austin. I go to that second street, is that what it's called? Where all the houses are. Oh, it's so fun. It's fantastic. I do it every weekend and I stay out till two or three and my Sunday's pretty much ruined. And so is my Monday. That's when you've crossed the line with something that's, you know, too much instant gratification and pursuit of that runner's high. And when we talk about what is the runner's high, the endorphins that flood the bloodstream, yeah, it's feel-good chemicals that are released in response to a really grueling and extreme effort. And everyone, you can look it up on, Google it and read a bunch of articles about the endorphin high, but we have to remember that the reason the chemicals are released, that the pain-killing chemicals, it's really to.
[28:27] It's to it's literally to give you a peaceful death and so when you're in real trouble this is in a primal context where we're running for our lives and we're not going to make it or the zebra's not going to make it and the lion's coming after him the zebra lies down and releases a bunch of endorphins so that they die without the anguish of getting eaten and same with the human like the endorphins are coming because we've pushed ourselves so hard that we're flooding the bloodstream with chemicals in order to keep going if we need to run for our lives or to, you know, just kind of help us cross over because it is so painful and grueling and strenuous. So, it's something that once in a while, a rush of pain-killing chemicals and feel-good chemicals can be a wonderful thing. So, let's say you do a bucket list event and you train and train and train and then you complete that 13.1 mile and you feel great and you're awash in these chemicals.
[29:26] And then the next week you recover and you go back to work and you go to preschool and volunteer in your kid's class and you have a balanced, wonderful, and rich life without going for that drug high again and again and again. Otherwise, it becomes obligate runner addiction. And the corollary between anorexics is that's all about control and also a kind of a way to assert one's superiority over the community or the society around them. So, anorexics have so much control over food, most people want to lose weight and quit eating so much. There's the opposite extreme and the runners are existing in a society where we don't do enough activity and we eat too much. So it's kind of like, okay, I've broken free from the clutches of unhealthy society. And now I'm a runner and I'm taking that all the way to the bank to the potential detriment of my health. Right.
[30:19] Wow. I had- Any of that ring true or- Yes, I have a prime example of my own experience where several years ago now, probably 10, 12 years ago,
Unpacking Addiction in Running
[30:31] I was training for an Ironman. And my husband and I were going to go to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend and just a romantic getaway. That's really what it was. However, I also had a century ride on my plan. And so we booked bike rentals. We had a 100-mile route planned out and everything. Like it was good to go except it rained all weekend in Asheville. And I melted down like a three-year-old child all weekend long. And I couldn't get out of my own head about.
[31:10] My training is ruined. My race is ruined. I should just be back in Austin where it's sunny and I could do my bike ride. And I took what could have been a perfectly romantic, relaxing getaway to just recharge, and I ruined it. And I am forever regretful of how I behaved that weekend. And I think that that is an example of what you're talking about, of just taking this to these extreme addictions. Yeah. I mean, look, you're not going to succeed in life unless you become a badass. It's very competitive out there in career world, fitness world, getting your life together and doing good decisions. And so, you have all these attributes like driven, focused, motivated, goal-directed, all that stuff, and you applied it when you described your story of turning away those bad habits and picking up good habits. So, all these success factors are very, very important. And if we just sit back and say, hey, we should go to the beach every day and relax and not worry about contributing to the economy or really getting too involved in parenting, just let your kids grow up and do whatever they want, you know, that's not going to work either. So, it's about harnessing things like competitive drive, like I described my own competitive drive that was out of control. It's about harnessing that stuff and using it to make for a better life and learning from experience. Thanks for sharing that story because it's, you know, it's pretty heavy. You're welcome.
[32:35] I think it's a positive takeaway is like, that's probably not going to happen on your next romantic getaway. Right. Okay. I'm too old. We don't have those anymore. This is kind of, you know,
Consequences of the Running Boom
[32:45] it's what the book's about. Like, look, there's a right way to do it. We just need to chill out a little bit, start absorbing things like the appropriate heart rate to train at if you have endurance goals. And, you know, not getting, you know, down that path of obligate runner and all the fallout that comes from an extreme approach. I want to – so the first half of the book is about the unintended consequences of the running boom.
The Case for Minimalist Footwear
[33:10] So I want to finish talking about a couple points that you make in the book on that. And then I'd love to transition to the running shoe and the minimalist footwear because I think that is absolutely fascinating. And it's something that I personally want to explore with my footwear. But so you talk about the broken promise of weight loss and that running in fact is not the best thing for weight loss and it's walking that seems so counterintuitive to me so help me understand yeah it's crazy huh I think we're now learning the message is coming strongly about the scientists call it the compensation theory of exercise.
[33:57] Where we're, you know, we're unwinding this calories in, calories out notion that's really deeply flawed and not applicable to real life, even though it's scientifically, of course, it's the, it's actually calories burned versus calories stored is how you're going to establish your body composition. That's different than calories consumed because the body does different things with a PLANTSTRONG soup versus a Twinkie, right? Even though there says 248 calories, Rip, it's the same as a Twinkie, what's the big deal? It's calories burned versus calories stored. But beyond that, there's so many variables that affect your metabolic function and your daily rate of calorie burning. And the body is really, really good at conserving energy and surviving. It's all genetically programmed survival mechanisms. And so, most listeners are aware, like if you go on a crash diet, guess what? Your metabolism slows down, you lose muscle mass, causing your metabolism to slow down further and all those bad things. When it comes to running and burning exercise calories to the extent that your pattern is overly stressful, and Mark Sisson calls it chronic cardio.
[35:02] What happens is you become lazier throughout the rest of the day and you eat more food than you normally would because your appetite center has been dysregulated due to the exhausting and depleting nature of the workouts. So, if you're depleting your glycogen, That's your storage of carbs versus the fat stores you have, which you have plenty. You can run three or four or five or six marathons in a row. I've heard of the moon in back with your fat storage stuff, right? 66,000 calories. That would get me to Oklahoma. My goodness.
[35:32] Gosh darn, that's a long way from Austin, son. So if you're continually depleting your glycogen stores, like an elite athlete that you talked about earlier, you're going to be hitting that fridge, not for PLANTSTRONG, but for Ben and Jerry's. And it puts you into this cycle of, when I say lazier, I'm talking about consciously and subconsciously. So, lazier, I'm not raking the leaves today because I ran a quick 10 around the lake. I'll do it some other day or hire someone. And then subconsciously, hey, can you get me can you get me another stack of post-it notes? I'm too lazy to walk 12 feet down the hall. I'm going to call up my neighbor in the next cubicle. And so the running kind of turns into a net zero in terms of the calories that you think you're burning for weight loss.
[36:26] So fat metabolism, fat reduction is about hormone optimization. I'm sure you guys have talked about this a lot of times on the show. It's not just about... Eating less and exercising more. You're going to get yourself into real trouble. The female's story is really coming out now because like the extreme CrossFitters that go ketogenic diet and are slamming these high glycolytic workouts four days a week, they throw off their thyroid, they throw off their adrenals, they start, you know, getting their gums get all receding and their hair falls out and all kinds of terrible things happen when you push the body too hard and don't nourish it properly. Yeah, no, that rings true. And so if I'm understanding you correctly.
[37:08] Running can be corrosive because of the metabolic effect that it has. So it does raise cortisol, which is our stress hormone. And if we have stress in all areas of our life, stress is stress is stress, right? So like, yes, I can go out and just hammer a 10-mile run or not even hammer it, even if I'm just moderately too fast, as you're saying, like that is corrosive on my body. That releases cortisol. And then when I get home and I've got Ripper calling me and I've got this happening and I've got that. So like the stress just continues to compile. But wait, you said Ripper calling you. So that's like a calming, relaxing. Yeah, yeah, no, you're right. Hey, wanna do our meditation in our five minute thing after your run? Hey, what podcast we got scheduled this week? Who am I interviewing in an hour? No.
[38:01] But your body physiologically just cannot recover from that. And then if you go out and do the same workout the next day, now you're really in a deficit. So that's one form of what you're talking about now, of why running actually isn't as healthy as we think it is. Because we're not regulating it or periodizing it, so to speak, if I could use that coachy coach term, to where it's beneficial for our metabolic health. Yeah. And how do we get really good at fat burning? By moving around a lot throughout the day. And this is evolutionary biology. The homo sapien species is designed for frequent everyday movement. I mean, one quote is near nonstop everyday movement. And that's the study with the Hadza in Tanzania, the modern day hunter gatherers, which give us a lot of window into our past and our genetic optimization. They move all day long.
[39:00] The lion is another species, Leopantera is called. The lion genetics warrant sleeping for around 20 hours a day and launching brief all-out 30-second attacks at sunset. They don't move around during the day because they don't regulate heat well. So, the lion living its best life is sleeping around for 20 hours a day.
[39:22] Launching an attack, and then after an attack and they feast, they will be known to sleep for up to 24 hours. That's the optimal genetic experience for the lion. The human needs to avoid prolonged periods of stillness. There's research showing that when you're still for as little as 20 minutes, you have a noticeable decrease in glucose regulation and insulin sensitivity. You become insulin resistant sitting for 20 minutes and your brain function goes down. The research from Stanford and elsewhere showing that you can only focus on a peak cognitive task for 20 minutes at a time and then you fade a little. So, if you don't give yourself a break, you'll find yourself going on YouTube and watching high jump videos. So, we warrant frequent breaks for movement and that is the best for fat burning and good fat metabolism along with getting rid of crappy stuff from your diet that interrupt fat metabolism. That has nothing to do with how many calories you're burning running around the lake. And then the other point, if I can keep rambling about the cortisol, is like if your workout patterns are overly stressful and you have this chronic overproduction of stress hormones, hormones.
[40:34] One of the things that drives is the accumulation of the health-destructive visceral fat. I just heard you talking about this on a- Around the organs. Right. And so, there's subcutaneous fat, which is unpleasant. We don't like how our butt looks now, where we're too fat, but the visceral fat around the organs is extremely problematic, where the subcutaneous fat is not known to be a huge, gigantic health risk by itself. Deepak Chopra talks about that a lot, because he's a little chubby himself. But the visceral fat, when you start getting that, that spare tire that is messing up your hormones. It's messing up your fat burning. It's releasing these inflammatory chemicals into the bloodstream. It's a disaster. Yeah.
[41:15] It's interesting. The seventh pillar of kind of the whole PLANTSTRONG program is movement. And I'm a huge fan of walking. I wrote about it in the Engine 2 7-Day Rescue
The Benefits of Walking
[41:26] Diet, even just 10 minutes. It's amazing what just 10 minutes can do. You know this. but where i'm going with this is i just saw a study it's called the global burden of death and it talked about how the the fourth leading cause of death now worldwide is lack of physical activity behind behind high blood pressure behind smoking and number three was uh heart disease or high uh blood sugar levels so number four yeah so this is why i love what you and mark are doing with this book, Born to Walk.
Catabolic vs. Anabolic Exercise
[42:02] Explain this to me. You say that running is catabolic and walking is anabolic. What does that mean exactly? So we talked about the, you talked about the catabolic. You said the term corrosive. I've never heard that. I love that. I'm going to borrow that. Like, you know, the engine oil gets, you know, and that's kind of what happens with overly stressful lifestyle, overproduction of stress hormones. People are familiar with calcification of the arteries. You've talked about that for about 30 years, and that comes from a lot of things, including too much stress from the exercise realm, as well as the smoking and the crappy diet. And so, the catabolic effects of running are when it's so stressful that your body becomes chronically inflamed and broken down, doesn't recover well.
[42:51] And so, there's some nitty-gritty about these terms when you say anabolic and catabolic. Most people know what you're talking about, but it's about the genetic signaling for the activity. So, walking is not literally anabolic, but what happens when you walk a lot is you have the proper signaling for muscular repair and restoration in the body. It's sending the signal to be healthy. I think of anabolic steroids.
[43:19] Right, right. Right. Anabolic is building and catabolic is breaking down. Yeah. And then the third one is metabolic where you're just existing. You're not catabolic or anabolic. I think that's the great way. One's building and one is breaking it down. Right. So, you know, the impact trauma of running is another reason why you would call it catabolic because you're running at three to four times. To five times impact body weight every stride. So, a jogger doing an easy five miler that weighs 150 pounds at a slow pace is imparting like 2.3 million pounds of impact trauma on a five-mile jog. Walking, what's the impact trauma? Any of you physics majors out there? It's never more than one X body weight because the definition of walking is that one foot is always on the ground. You know, in the Olympics, they're going to get disqualified from race walking. Hey, I see two feet in the air. So, because one foot is always on the ground, your body weight is always supported by at least one foot. So, there's no impact trauma beyond the one-time body weight. But when you land, running has what's called a flight phase. That's the difference between walking and running is in running, there's two feet off the ground at a time. And then you land, and then there's two feet off the ground, and then you land. And that's where you get the two to three.
[44:33] Usain Bolt has five times impact trauma in the 100 meters. when he's running 27 miles an hour, so he weighs 200 pounds. He's imparting 1,000 pounds of vertical force into the ground on every stride. That's why his strides are eight feet long, but a jogger is still going two to three times body weight impact trauma. Now, if you're not super fit and perhaps super lean like Frank Shorter and Thagwane and Safana San, that's going to be a tremendous load to absorb if you've been sitting on your butt for the last 5, 10, or 20 years and haven't really built tremendously strong bone density and been in the gym doing resistance exercise and things that help you absorb impact trauma. Oh, and the shoes, by the way, we'll get into that, but they cause a big problem here with impact trauma. Well, yeah. And so, you have a whole chapter on the broken promise of cushioned shoes. And in the book, you have a stat that that I think says that over 50% of runners get injured every year,
The Truth About Cushioned Shoes
[45:34] which is more than an NFL football player, which is 33 and a third. That's from the Cale University School of Medicine. Excuse me, Yale University. There's tons of research about this. 25% of regular runners are injured at any given time.
[45:50] One out of four is sidelined by shin splints or Achilles tendonitis or plantar fasciitis and then stressing about it because we learned about the obligate runner feeling like they're missing their workouts. Forget about a weekend raining in North Carolina. Now you're out for six weeks. I had a stress fracture in college. I can share my vulnerable sob story, but like running on the team was everything to me in high school and college. I was going to be a D1 athlete and this was my identity and my way to fit in with my peers and distinguish myself. And I went off to UCSB and I was sick or injured five seasons in a row until I finally said, F this, I'm going to become a triathlete. But when I got that last, you know, diagnosis of the stress fracture, I was devastated, you know. I just like, what am I going to do now? You know, it's not working out and it's everything to me. So, injuries are no joke. Now, why is everyone getting injured at such a ridiculous rate? But if we're wearing these cushioned shoes, shouldn't that be protecting us somewhat? Right, exactly. Yeah. So, here's the thing about cushioned shoes. There has never been a single shred of evidence showing that they prevent injuries. They do not lessen impact trauma. They actually increase impact trauma up to seven times. That's Daniel Lieberman at Harvard University Research, very highly respected lab where he's a barefoot running expert. He wrote the book Exercised and some other books. And they also, amazingly, don't even control pronation.
[47:19] So, you know, runners are familiar with the term pronation where your foot caves inward when you land and then pushes off the ground. And when you overpronate, it's believed to be driving injury because your foot works at a weird angle and can overstress the foot. It's actually a normal part of the running stride. And you can see like the greatest runners in the world have extreme overpronation when they're landing close up when you're watching them run around the track in the Olympics. So, running shoes don't even do what has been advertised for the last 50 years in the magazines and the print ads. The British Journal of Sports Medicine says this is an extreme public health hazard, the false advertising about running shoes. So, what running shoes do is they enable poorly adapted people to run who wouldn't otherwise be able to run because they mask the tremendous impact trauma of two to three times body weight on every stride for someone who's not adapted because of that nice, soft cushioned shoe. So, when you're running down the road in pavement in these elevated cushioned shoes, and you're not really strong or adapted enough to run with correct form to minimize the impact trauma with a beautiful midfoot landing and a correct pronation and a balanced body weight, balanced pelvis.
[48:38] That's when you did finish your 10-mile jog around the lake, but you did it with horribly poor form that exacerbated the impact trauma that might be minimized from someone like the Tarahumara, who run 50 miles in a piece of tire tied around their foot. So for every listener right now.
[48:58] That is wearing their hokas have they been hoodwinked well um this is where i want to be kinder and gentler because we've had some uh we've had some tough tough talk so far um yeah the whole movement uh toward endurance running is way better than sitting on the couch and smoking which was the past time in the 50s and 60s and whatever so anything that's getting people out of the house and onto the road has got to be considered a good thing, a great thing. And these elevated cushion shoes, and now the super cushion shoes that you mentioned, enable poorly adapted people to do something that they would not otherwise try. The argument here is like, let's think about running with proper form, which is a midfoot landing over a balanced center of gravity, rather than the most common, Lieberman says 80 to 95% of recreational runners exhibit what's called a heel striking.
[49:53] Breaking, overstriding pattern. And there are many reasons for this. The running shoe allows you to heel strike and overstride and give a breaking effect on each stride. But the reasons for it are, and there's a list in the book, like weak hamstrings, tight hip flexors, dysfunctional glutes, and all these things that come from sitting in a chair, honestly, and not doing the proper mobility work. Like when the old days humans worked on the farm and in the factory and they put big boxes up on the top shelf. Now we're pretty much, you know, DoorDash and computer.
Learning Proper Running Form
[50:26] And so, running, again, very, very difficult activity to do correctly with the proper technique. And that's where you can envision this gateway to a better future where you learn how to run correctly. And guess what? Maybe you're only going to make it three minutes before you need to stop and walk and kind of change your workout pattern from shuffling along for a four and a half hour marathon or a five and a half hour marathon with bad form and a lot of impact trauma to being an actual runner that's doing it correctly.
[51:00] I like what you said in the book, too, when you were talking about how the advent of the super shoe and these super max cushion shoes still allow us to go out and run because it's absorbing a lot of it's compensating for us on a lot of this poor form that we might exhibit. It otherwise uh you compared that in the book which really hit home to me as getting novocaine for having a tooth yanked out so it's fine yeah so they'll they'll numb you up and they'll go in and they'll rip that tooth out and you won't feel anything until later until it wears off yeah that's what an overuse injury is and and that's you know that there and again is what we're talking about here of like learning proper form which i would love to get into the how too of of you know how do we learn proper form i gotta i gotta of walking or running right now yeah we could take a five minute break and i will show you how to exhibit perfect form here it is people go outside.
[52:08] Or inside, find a nice stretch of hard surface. So, it could be a gym or it could be a paved road that's smooth and without the debris. Take off your shoes and start running. And immediately, no matter who you are and how crappy your form is now, you will immediately exhibit perfect, beautiful running form like a deer gracefully running through the forest. Because the penalty for even the slightest imperfection in form when you're running down, let's say, a gym, go to the gym or the fitness center where there's a nice stretch or down a clean sidewalk, the penalty for bad form is immediately tremendously noticeable.
[52:52] I talked about heel striking and the shoes enabling heel striking. You can jump off a two-inch platform somewhere in your house, like take a book, stand on the book, and try to jump on the ground and land on your heels. Your brain won't even let you do it and if you even do it for a demo like jump up in the air and land one inch on your heels ow that hurts like like heck but you're doing that every stride on on the run because the the cushion shoe is only absorbing 10 of the impact by the way so the beautiful hoka with the giant cushion 10 is being absorbed into the foam which is you know an attribute right where's the other 90 the other 90 is inappropriately dis inappropriately They disperse throughout your lower extremities without you noticing because the cushioning of the shoe destroys your proprioception. That's your awareness of your body moving through space. Isn't that remarkable? So, they feel great, especially when you try on the shoe in the store and you run down the sidewalk for two minutes and two minutes back. These are awesome. I feel like I'm, you know, on springs. It's because your brain has been disconnected from what's actually happening to your foot when it hits the ground. But when I say take your shoes off and run down the gym or down the sidewalk, you can feel right away.
[54:06] What it feels like to land on the ground. And guess what? When you take off your shoes, you will land on the midfoot. Your toes will, what they call toe splay, they splay sideways. So, the entire foot flattens, goes sideways, then it pronates, which is all the way to not only absorb impact, but also now harness kinetic energy for a beautiful propulsive takeoff. And all this is the magnificent human foot doing what it's designed to do. And we can see what's possible when we see the great barefoot runners. Mary Decker. I mean, Zola Budd was barefoot, right? And the Tarahumara and whoever you want to pick. Like humans can run 100 miles barefoot, basically, with no pain or overuse injury
Transitioning to a Healthier Approach
[54:53] because they're extremely well adapted. Yeah. So, if Carrie and I, who have been running with normal shoes, want to get started with something that's a little bit smarter, how do we begin? I wouldn't do it, man. Just keep doing what you're doing. It's too much of a challenge. It's too hard. You're too old now. Well, no.
[55:16] What you want to do is start walking and living a barefoot-inspired lifestyle as much as possible. So, again, walking with one X impact, you can immediately walk comfortably. With any shoe? Well, a barefoot-inspired shoe would be the best. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Especially getting rid of that heel, because the elevated heel is the single worst attribute, according to Katie Bowman, barefoot expert, it's the single worst attribute of modern shoes. It throws off, everyone can realize, it throws off your freaking posture.
[55:45] You're supposed to stand on your heels as a human. The calcaneus bone is so dense and rigid because it's supposed to support body weight. And the body weight stacks over the spine, stacks over the pelvis and the neck and everything. And the shoulders are in line with the spine. And everything's loaded over the heels. But as soon as you put on a shoe, especially a big puffy cushion running shoe, you are now onto your midfoot with your loaded weight. Therefore, what's going to happen to your shoulders and your neck? Everything's going to hunch over, driven by, and blaming the shoes, partly. Otherwise, it's also habits of texting, typing, driving, swimming. Everything's hunched over. But it would be really helpful to get what's called a zero-drop shoe. And then, as you know, we're involved, Mark Sisson and I, with his new company, Paluva, which is a five-toe shoe. And we use that attribute as the distinguishing feature of the best barefoot style experience is the toes need to be independent. Of each other to truly work properly and articulate and splay and do all those things that I described through the running stride and the walking stride. But you ask the question like, oh, we run in regular shoes, what should we do now?
[56:55] Please don't run in a barefoot shoe that you order up and get, you know, next day in the mail because your body's poorly adapted from wearing elevated cushion shoes your whole life. And so, the transition to improved foot health, just putting running aside for a moment, is to try to get trend toward a more barefoot-inspired lifestyle. So you walk around barefoot as much as you can in the house and in safe areas, on the beach, wherever you can, and then you wear a shoe for the necessary protection. But it has those minimal features, which are so popular now. It's a whole footwear category that didn't exist a long time ago. Yeah, well, and what about, though, for people that have – all of our feet structures are different. So some people have super high arches, some people have no arches –, My husband contends that he cannot walk around barefoot because it hurts his feet. He gets plantar.
[57:49] I don't know. Maybe he's just trained his brain to believe that after all these years. So are there considerations to be made for people that have vastly different structures? For sure. Yeah. You don't want to push it or overdo it. It's just like saying, hey, you're out of shape and you don't have as much muscle mass. Go to the gym and work out.
Transitioning to Barefoot Living
[58:07] We're not telling you to go and get sore every day and rip your muscles apart. And so, if you have foot issues, oh, which 78% of modern citizens do complain of chronic foot pain, which is, you know, another stat up there with like the running injuries, this requires a graceful transition and a lifelong commitment, really. But most people can walk around barefoot in the house without too much trouble.
[58:34] But if you put on some minimalist shoes and go for a two-mile walk and then your arches are sore the next day, that's a sign of inflammation and trying to adapt to a new protocol. So, you just got to back it off and tweak it a little bit. And the different high arches, flat feet, this foot, that foot, all feet are going to work pretty well through the gait pattern. So, it's not this huge deal where you're in this corner and you can't do much because you have really flat feet. It's not the biggest deal that people think it is. You just got to train that foot to strengthen things that have been extremely atrophied, like the Achilles tendon and the longitudinal arch and the calf muscles and everything that goes with it. So, even someone who's interested in a more minimalist approach, you can do sets of 12 calf raises while you're in your working cubicle all day. That's a little break as it counts as movement, but we got some issues here. If you don't want to end up on that predictive road where you know that medicare gives medicare.
[59:39] Covers two pairs of orthopedic shoes a year it's it's built into the system that our feet are going to fall apart so bad that we need special shoes and special orthotics are also covered as part of like routine you know it's it's crazy to think that that many people have destroyed their feet from uh you know basically you're putting them in a cast your whole life.
[1:00:02] I can look at, I'm sure that you can look at somebody's foot and tell immediately how, if it's a healthy foot or not, right? Well, you can Google like ancestral, you know, what's his name? Weston A. Price going and taking pictures around the world of native living people and their toes are like, it looks like an open hand. Right. You know? Right. And then most people's feet are just munched together because they've been inside a shoe. And my mom's a good example. She has a hammer toe. So one of the toes is like pushed up. and out of line with the other toes because there's no room for it. And so, she's trying these five-toe shoes and the toe will have to be forced into its individual pocket, but then it sits there and it's realigned and re-educated all day long. So, it's really cool to have a path toward, you know, adaptation and improvement because the body is very resilient. If you take your shoes off and start going around barefoot, But your husband's archers are going to get stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. Just, you know, let's make sure we don't introduce new pain and have setbacks accordingly. And so, I'm saying this because, like, when Vibram, the original five-finger shoe, came out in 2005, 2006.
[1:01:15] And then Born to Run came out, and they showed the Tarahumara running with rubber straps tied around their feet, and they got very popular and the runners started becoming inspired by these great natural adaptive runners and they started training in these minimalist shoes that offered no padding and they got injured and then there was a class action lawsuit filed and it kind of tanked the company for a while it was a ridiculous lawsuit where someone sued him because they got injured when it said these shoes were good for your feet like really you're holding up it's basically a rubber sock and they got injured blaming the shoe
The Rise of Minimalist Shoes
[1:01:50] and they'd settled the lawsuit and that really took a PR hit for them. And so, what we're saying with this new movement toward barefoot minimalist shoes is walk around in these and get stronger and then if you like specialized activity like running.
[1:02:07] Use your running shoe. If you like to play basketball, here's a tip. Use a basketball shoe rather than a barefoot five-toe shoe. I like to high jump, so I have shoes with heel spikes in them, and those are the best shoes for high jumping because I ain't high jumping barefoot or I'll tweak my feet, right? That's the most common sense thing I've heard, too, and I think that that's a huge takeaway for people is like, yes, just use a sport-specific shoe for those particular activities and use this barefoot shoe or go barefoot as you said create like a barefoot lifestyle and in other facets of your life when you can um because i i love a minimal shoe but i i can't run in them oh same with your romantic weekend you want to pack your high heels and get all decked out and then the you know the rest of your life when you come out of those high heels you want to give your feet a break and strengthen and relax realign i didn't want to bring my heels i wanted to use my bike shoes that we get. That's, that was, now what are you gonna do? Like, I've really gotten into pickleball. I think it's the fastest growing sport in North America. Oh yeah. Everybody I know is, is, is either addicted or they're getting into it. Is there a pickleball?
[1:03:21] Minimalist yeah i mean paluva is actually making a pickleball shoe and how long do i have to wait i'm going to send you a prototype just because you express interest um but that's a side-to-side activity yeah so you require some adaptation and some compromise between the ultimate minimalist shoe and one that gives you protection especially lateral stability but there's definitely an advantage to be had when you're on the ground and trying to move around if you can you know get get comfortable in a shoe that has less height and less padding you're going to move better on the pickleball court for sure i don't want to get more injuries because the pickleball's the number one most popular sport and it's also like the orthopedist i know i love that it's like yeah pickleball's like the huge injury um rate because it's you know unfit people are going out and trying to have fun and reach for a shot, which they haven't done the proper mobility, flexibility.
[1:04:22] Daily drilling, and things that allow you to have a more playful, active, energetic life. And I'm going to say the same about runners, where when you get into that obligate runner mode and you're just focused on your mileage, you potentially sacrifice the time and energy and discipline to do those 12 minutes of exercise bands at home to get those hip flexors engaged and going before you head out onto the road. Kelly Starrett, you know, the great movement expert, author of Becoming a Supple Leopard. We had him on the podcast. He says, runners should spend 25% of training time on mobility, flexibility, preparatory, strengthening drills. So if you're out there running for an hour, the 15 minutes should be dedicated to this and so on down the line for, you know, your entire weekly mileage dedication. I saw he wrote a really nice review for Born to Walk.
Embracing the Foot Health Journey
[1:05:14] For you guys. Yep, it's right along. You know, we've been a big fan of his. He presented our retreats for many years. One of the best presenters I've ever seen. Hilarious. Just getting people cracking up all the way and then learning all these new, you know, pillars of wisdom in order to live your life. And speaking of that, and I mentioned Katie Bowman too, like experts like them are contending strongly that just moving more in daily life is more important for disease risk prevention and longevity than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen. So, of course, fitness has all these benefits and getting in the gym and getting your cardio and your endurance and all that is super important. It's going to help you. But number one objective is just to move more and that's within reach of everybody. And when I say move more, I talk about calf raises and whatever, but, you know, walking is kind of the foundational human movement and the quintessential human gait pattern. And so, everyone can think of walking as a centerpiece, but yoga class counts for moving more, and so does Pilates, and so does helping out at the preschool playground, and so forth. Yeah, I think with the advent of work from home, and I know a lot of the audience here for PLANTSTRONG, many of them are retired now, and so they're maybe not building in that passive movement and into their day.
[1:06:38] And so you do have to make a concerted effort to set your watch at the top of every hour to give you a buzz and say, get up and do five squats or get up and walk around your house. I remember when I used to work at a traditional office.
[1:06:54] I would probably spend 45 minutes a day just walking around, chatting with people, going to lunch, getting, you know, just all the things that made you move. And now that I work from home generally, I will do my morning workout and that's it. I sit all day. And so I am guilty as charged. And so I think that building in these little micro, what do you call it, micro sessions, micro workouts, micro movement patterns into your day is wildly important. A question that I wanted to ask, because I am very stuck in my running ways. I love to run. As we mentioned before, it's very social for me now. I love to set a goal and try to go for it. There's a lot of pride that comes with that. Call it ego. I don't care. I mean, it's fun to work hard for a goal. So when you're advocating walking, you're not saying, stop running altogether to the general audience. I mean, you're not saying... Or are you? Well, here it is. It's up to you, listener. And here's how we're going to address this issue. There's something called fat max heart rate or MAF heart rate or aerobic maximum. And this can be identified in a laboratory or using the simple Dr. Phil Maffetone's formula of 180 minus your age in beats per minute. But fat max heart rate is where you are burning the most fat calories per minute.
[1:08:22] And if you were to go faster than that, you would burn fewer fat calories per minute. You'd burn fat at a lower rate in favor of a distinct spike in glucose burning in order to fuel you going faster and faster. People probably know basic physiology where fat burning is a comfortable pace, and then glucose burning is you get faster and faster and work all the way up to a sprint. So, FatMax is a really important number to identify and respect when you're doing endurance aerobic activity.
[1:08:54] So, when you train at or below FatMax, you are training your fat-burning systems and you're getting an energizing, rejuvenating, refreshing exercise session. In contrast, if you exceed FatMax and do what might be termed tempo or threshold or Whatever term you want to use for a more strenuous workout, it has a desired fitness adaptation, right? You're trying to train for your pace to run 10K or whatever, but it's a much more stressful workout, and you're actually stimulating different energy systems, namely the glucose burning system, which, as I said before, when we deplete those energy stores, the glycogen stores in the body to fuel these type of workouts, the brain will want to replenish with one extra Ben and Jerry's than you might ordinarily consume. So, training in the fat-burning zones and emphasizing that for the vast majority of your exercise time, especially the more and more devoted and perhaps competitive you are, where you're putting in a lot of time out there running or whatever you're doing, could be a cyclist or anybody, that's super important because that's going to keep you in an area where the workout is not too stressful.
[1:10:10] It's promoting of longevity and cognitive function and an active, energetic, happy day rather than getting you into that exhaustion mode. So if we were to take like, hey, let's take next summer, the three of us, and walk the Appalachian Trail. It's 2,200 miles. Scott Jurek did it in 40-something days. Let's do it in 127 days. So if we spent all day walking at a comfortable pace, that would be a super, super, super healthy summer. You can't get better than being outdoors, and then it's going to be catered by PLANTSTRONG. We're going to meet at the trailhead, and they're going to have a full meal for us every day. You can't beat that for health and all that. Now, if you're a runner, and you're going to spend the summer running 35 to 52 miles a week at a pace that exceeds fat max, you are just piling on more stress and chronic overproduction of cortisol into your already stressful life. If you're not trained for that, or if you haven't adapted to that. Right. So how do we know we're overdoing it? What pace should we go at? Take your fat max, which is 180 minus your age. Okay. So let's just start there. Let's look like what was, so what would yours be?
Understanding Fat Max Heart Rate
[1:11:19] So I did it actually when I was reading the book, I did it and I want to say it's 128 right now. So 180 minus my age is it's 128.
[1:11:28] So that is my heart rate. Right now I use a, so for people that aren't familiar with a heart rate monitor, the most common heart rate monitors are chest straps that you that you wear around your your chest um i find them wildly uncomfortable these watches now they do they're not great but they are a baseline yeah um they are a baseline um yeah so a lot of smart watches apple watches etc do have wrist optics um but if if it's the all you have and it's the only metric you have at least it's consistent you know you're not changing out technological devices they also have arm arm band ones that go around your your sort of upper bicep like a blood pressure cuff that i'm more intrigued to learn more about yeah so you like so 128 for me is my based on this formula my fat max number so if i go over that number. Now I'm dipping into glucose storage at this point. And I'll need to replenish that glucose because it's in short supply. So if I have, let's say a two hour run, I cannot get through a two hour run.
[1:12:42] Above that fat max number without taking in gels or carbohydrates and suffering basically yeah to hold your pace yeah yeah yeah it takes it requires work but below that 128 i mean that's if i look i look at that and i'm like well that feels pretty slow that brad that feels frustrating that feels pretty frustrating to me now rip and i learned this as triathletes when you're the training load is so high that you really have to protect your energy and your stress rest cycles. And if you go too hard in training, trying to be Mr. Strong Guy in Austin, or I want to be the baddest guy in California, you get stressed out, you get broken down, you get injured, you get burnt out. And it was all because you pushed yourself too hard instead of respecting the importance of building that aerobic base. The aerobic conditioning base is a foundation for all performance in all sports, even explosive, high performance, you know, power lifting and all the basketball players, all the soccer players, baseball player, everyone needs an aerobic base in order to, you know.
[1:13:51] Excel in whatever workouts they're doing in whatever team sports. And we destroy this objective when we push ourselves too hard and we teach ourselves to be oversimplified, of course. We teach ourselves to be sugar burners rather than fat burners.
[1:14:06] So, the frustrating part is when you get your watch on and you start honoring the correct way to train, which has been proven by the performances of all endurance athletes in every sport, all the elite athletes in every sport for the past 60 years dating back to Arthur Lyddiard, New Zealand, training the runners. This is the way to train, but the average recreational enthusiast pushes themselves too hard repeatedly to the extent that their aerobic base is compromised and they're a sugar-burning, high-stress athlete with extra belly fat and bad eating habits and laziness habits throughout the day. So the takeaway message of slowing down to get fitter to get faster to get more energetic in general and to promote longevity rather than compromise longevity is one that hopefully will be embraced but it is a little frustrating that's why i remember the triathlon days of like wait mark allen told me to slow down in training so i could get closer to him because he's kicking my ass over and over and it was a great gift that he gave me to say that and you know it works but It takes a lot of trust and patience and letting go of if those ego influences are there where you need to meet your certain time on the Lady Bird Trail, otherwise you're not going to feel fulfilled that day.
[1:15:24] That's going to be stuff that we have to shatter through with a sledgehammer because this is the way to train. And in the book, we spent a lot of time talking about Elwood Kipchoge, the greatest marathon runner of all time, one of the greatest endurance athletes of all time. Maybe he and Lance Armstrong are the two greatest endurance machines ever on the planet, in my opinion. but this is the guy that ran the 159 marathon. He published his training log.
[1:15:47] On the internet years ago five years ago what it looked like for all the exercise physiologists and coaches to dig into and guys have flown over to kenya and watched him train and recorded everything and he performs 82 to 84 percent of his weekly mileage at what he calls easy.
[1:16:07] Or 50 capacity so he's in zone one if you've heard about the zones and zone two is great zone two this and zone two that that's good that they're promoting zone two because that's also a comfortable zone and that the top of zone two is represents fat max heart rate but he's a zone one guy for something like uh 80 something percent of his his total weekly mileage he does nine percent in zone two and seven percent at the upper zones where he's slamming out these amazing track workouts that you can look on youtube and he's doing eight times 1000 meters at 240 pace or Whatever. No, he's a 159 marathon runner, so he's pretty darn fast. So, an easy run for him is six and a half to eight minutes per mile. Huh, that's pretty fast, isn't it? Well, his marathon pace is 434 per mile. So, most of his running is two minutes to three and a half minutes slower than his marathon pace. Okay, listener, get out your pen. What's your marathon time. Oh, I'm an average 430. The average marathon time is 431 across the world, 2 million marathon runners. 431 is 1018 per mile. So, now let's go 28 to 43% slower than that. Guess what magic number we're going to be tipping toward?
[1:17:25] 1357. What's 1357 per mile, Brad? What's a 14-minute mile? The 14-minute mile represents the human gait pattern switching from jogging to walking. So, if you're going slower than 14-minute mile, you're now walking. You've now reduced your impact trauma from three to four to one. And by the way, a lot of people jog at slower than 14 minute mile for some reason. So, they just pound down the road rather than freaking walk at a brisk walk without getting the injuries and the whole thing. So, if your fat max heart rate, 121, 128, you go out there and I'm not asking you to go for 50 yards. I want to see if you're going for a six mile run, you want to keep it under 128 for the entire six mile run. What's your pace going to be? If it's slower than 14 minute mile, then the vast majority of your training, 82 to 84%, and the example of the greatest of all time, the goat, is walking. That might not be well received by the person who loves to jog and burn calories and sweat, but this is how the elite athletes train. Swimming, Michael Phelps, 27 gold medals. He trained, what, four to five hours a day for 20 years to get those gold medals?
[1:18:41] At least yeah yeah well i think swimmers are the most over-trained athletes in the world yeah i mean it's illustrating like the the aerobic base and the aerobic training, is such a huge component of races lasting from 47 seconds to four minutes or whatever his his longest race he needed that aerobic base in order to thrive when he was going full speed yeah well Yeah, I'd say his longest event was the 400 IM. So he had the world record in that. He went 402. Okay, so 403, which was broken by Leon Mershaw this year. Yeah. This guy's incredible. Yeah.
[1:19:19] Yeah, slowing down. That is an interesting concept. And it's not, you know, not because some guy on a podcast said to slow down. It's like, look, take your heart rate, train properly, see what pace you're at, and go run your butt off if you want. because I have a lot of friends that are, you know, long-time runners, my buddies from my high school running team, and my friend, Dr. Stevie, who I just climbed Cactus to Clouds, Palm Springs, the toughest hiking trail in America last week. He loves running 12 miles a couple days a week, eight miles the other day, five miles this day. He's going at a slower pace every year as he reports back, like, it used to be a nine-minute mile, now it's a 10, now it's an 11, but it's extremely healthy for him. It's the centerpiece of his day. He absolutely loves it out there. He minds his heart rate, so it's a comfortable pace, and it's slowing down as he gets older, appropriately so. And so, whatever age you're at and whatever fitness level you're at, when we were triathletes, we were pretty fit. We could go run and talk and be doing 630s on the Town Lake Trail. Excuse me, on your left. Oh, thank you. Have a nice day. How are you doing. I'm the baddest boy in Austin running at this pace, but it's comfortable, relatively speaking, to my fitness level. So, Kipchoge running 630s is for almost everyone listening and almost everyone on the starting line. It's a freaking walk.
[1:20:44] Right, right. Yeah. Does that also apply for somebody who is time starved, let's say? Because it sounds like, obviously if i'm going to have to slow my hour-long run to a walk perhaps but i just don't have like i can't build in more hours into my day to train so does this 80 ish 20 percent rule uh now now i'm using endurance training terms 80 20 but like does that apply if i am time starved Because sometimes it just feels more efficient to go out there and run, get it done, get my sweat on, get that energy, and then start my day. Yeah, you've just won a free prize on the show for the most popular comeback question in response to the edict to slow down. And so what if I don't have enough time? Of course, I got to go faster than that, right? Yeah.
[1:21:38] Again, it's now we have to step back and say, okay, what's the big picture? You have limited time to train. You have limited energy and resources. How should you best allocate them? Well, if you're taking notes, Kelly Starrett said 25% goes to mobility, flexibility, preparation, strengthening, and all that. So there's a quarter of your training time, and that's not negotiable because you don't have time. And again, I'm giving examples of elite athletes. maybe we should be on the conservative side where if kipchoge is doing nine percent zone two and seven percent zone three four and five maybe we should do five and five or something and for the most part you just want to get fit enough to one day aspire to actually be a runner and run with correct form at a correct heart rate and if it's not happening right now don't worry about it um you know put in a lot of time walking or consider a different workout and we have a whole appendix in the book of like cardio 2.0, so the evolution of the cardio scene. Who said you have to go steady state for a workout? Who wrote that down? What's the point? It's worse on the heart. We know that from, we were talking off camera about some of our peers that have suffered extreme heart disturbances in later years due to abusing their heart with too much high, you know, medium to difficult steady state cardio. So now you have an hour to train. How about walking.
[1:23:01] Doing some 12 to 20 second running technique drills where you do high knees or a skips or butt kicks or straight legs or things that adapt your muscles and make them stronger and then walk recovery and then do another set. And then when you hit a hill, run up at a good speed for 12 seconds and then walk for the next three minutes and then jog as you usually jog the whole time, jog for a couple few minutes.
[1:23:27] Slow down to a walk because you see that heart rate creeping up to your fat max and get through jogging and walking with sprinting or stop at the bench or stop at the parkour and do 10 push-ups. That's arguably a vastly superior and safer and less stressful workout than someone just huffing and puffing and running at some predetermined pace that maybe there hoping to compete at. But like you said earlier too, like you can go and do your run once a week like you always do with the Saturday morning group. We love meeting at 6.30. We go to breakfast tacos after. We run whatever pace. Maybe it's pretty strenuous and you feel pretty stressed. Take the next few days.
[1:24:07] Walking, strength training, mobility, flexibility, yoga class. This will build a more competent athlete and a more all-around functional fitness person than a mileage machine. I love that. I'm on board. In fact, you had a section in the book that was like talking about how to get rid of belly fat, which let's be honest, like that's what a lot of people want the, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. And you say part of your formula is slow down, but also go hard. And I think that's what you're talking about here in that formula, which is slow down, fat max, but then do your sprint. huge fan of sprinting. Yeah. I mean, I'm obsessed with sprinting now and I've transitioned from an endurance athlete and now I'm a sprinter. So I compete in masters track and field, just like you in the swimming. They have divisions and I can't wait to turn 60 because I'm going to be in the 60 plus with a bunch of old wrinkly guys. I'm going to kick some ass in my favorite events of high jump and 400 meters. So it's been interesting because I've had to transition my mindset too. And a sprinter is someone who does explosive work with an extensive amount of rest and recovery afterward and an endurance machine. The aerobic system responds to a lot of volume, low intensity.
[1:25:28] Don't need a lot of rest and recovery. The anaerobic system responds to the opposite. Very low volume, extensive rest, and very high performance explosive output. It so the missing link for a lot of fitness enthusiasts is they don't do any high intensity explosive activity uh and they also don't do a sufficient resistance training you know putting the muscles under load and in in favor of the giant pie slice for endurance which it's pretty easy to get an a plus in that well the thought the thought of sprinting like going all out for maybe 50 meters or 100 meters is frankly scary right i mean it takes a lot of it's a it's a high risk activity yeah i mean i could see that i could see doing it again i just have to kind of get into that mindset and build into it right do lower low impact or no impact for starters for the vast majority of people yeah you're not going out onto the football field and and doing strides with gabby thomas here in austin you're going to go up the stairs at the stadium is great or up the building or on the bicycle or on the rowing machine, it's still a sprint, quote unquote.
[1:26:39] Because you're doing near maximum output for a very short time. And I just want to distinguish that because there's a lot of popularity of high intensity interval training. Most of the programming and fitness falls into this category of HIIT training, like CrossFit, like Peloton classes, like bootcamp, like step class, the classes that you see at the gym.
[1:27:02] It has a lot of fitness benefits, but it's easily abused and overdone because
The Dangers of High-Intensity Workouts
[1:27:08] these workouts are too strenuous and last too long for the vast majority of people. And so, asking for a repeated hard effort where your heart rate's going into anaerobic zone for 30 seconds at a time with only 30 seconds break and another 30 seconds and then a 30 second break, that's not sprinting. That's high intensity interval training which should be done with great care and restraint and not that frequently because the workout itself is too stressful and i would love if all the workouts were cut in half so i'm a big fan of crossfit all their philosophy is really cool you know it's an explosion of a different broader concept of fitness and i've done a few classes in my time and i was ready to be done halfway because you asked me to do 12 pull-ups i'm going to hit that bar and I'm going to do it and then come down and rest. They go, okay, now do eight and now do six and then go over to the box jumps. I'm like, what are you talking about? I just gave it my all with those 12. I might have six or five more in me, but I'm not going to blast myself at one single workout. And so, it brings a high risk of injury and breakdown when you're pushing yourself super hard.
[1:28:15] I'm not talking about swimming because swimming is so much less body trauma that you can sprint and do a workout that's consisting primarily of sprints it's it's it's a friendly medium the water friend actually this morning a buddy of mine he turned 71 today so we did 71 100s on the 130 so oh my gosh took a thousand yards oh my gosh an hour and 45 minutes that's not that long actually but a minute 30 and all i was thinking about when i was swimming was your book and slowing down. So I wasn't trying to hammer, you know, minutes, right? And then I get halfway and I'd be like, you know, what in the world? And so I was fine. I was fine.
[1:28:59] You're right. Just, I was slowing down. So if you want to integrate sprinting, You asked about losing excess body fat, especially visceral fat, which research shows that sprinting particularly targets visceral fat with the genetic signaling that happens after you push yourself really hard. You can go onto the stationary bike and do a sprint lasting perhaps 15 seconds with a lot of recovery afterward. Because when you sprint, you want extremely high quality and consistent quality throughout the workout. It's not a declining scale of effort and performance. That means you're just fatiguing yourself like you do in a HIIT workout. So you would sprint for 15 seconds with great power and great technique, whatever you're doing, and then rest for a couple minutes and just pedal carefully and slowly. Or you go up to the top of the stairs at the stadium, walk down at your leisure.
[1:29:53] Take your time, check your phone at the bottom, wait it out a little bit, get your breathing regulated, and then hit that staircase again. And you don't want to go for longer than 20 seconds because it's not really a true sprint when you keep extending it out for, okay, we're going to sprint for a minute now. No, that's a peak performance effort that's different than sprint. How many just, let's say, again, average person just getting started. So to catch everybody up, like we've integrated more walking into our routine. So we're not burning ourselves out on sort of the junk miles, if you will. So we've integrated, we've slowed down, we've integrated more walking, but now we want to add some of this power and plyometrics. So for somebody who's just getting started, do you recommend like one day a week, maybe five to 10 of these little bursts and then try to build up from there? Well, here's my template workout.
[1:30:50] Four to eight reps. Of sprints lasting between 10 and 20 seconds and the recovery to work interval is six to one so if you're sprinting for 10 seconds you rest a minute if you're sprinting for 20 seconds you rest for two minutes um what's that range for if you're if you're at 10 i'm talking about like a high impact like running sprints or running up a hill and if it's 20 you can sprint on a bicycle for 20 or a rolling machine or something that's low impact so that's the sweet spot when you sprint between 10 and 20 seconds that's not much and so you're asking the body for a very high performance maximum output on the peloton on the bike machines you can see the watts you can crank out a lot of watts for 10 15 20 seconds but not for a minute or not for a three minute or everyone's talking about vo2 max workouts where i go four by four and i do that once a week that's a ridiculously stressful session that requires a lot of aerobic conditioning just to even benefit from it and recover so sprinting i think is appealing and doable for just about everybody when you're talking about low impact and that's all you have to do is four to eight for for 10 to 20 seconds six to one now you said um you said progress over time here's the progression you get faster you don't progress to do more and more and more that's the endurance mentality leaking into what is a different activity, different metabolic.
[1:32:14] Different, you know, energy systems and brain working to promote sprinting. So you're not gonna ever do more than four to eight. You're just gonna do them faster and better quality over time. That's how you get fitter.
[1:32:28] So are sprinting, is that more of an anabolic exercise? Is that why it is good for visceral fat loss is because, You've got that afterburn, so to speak. Good question. Yeah, we've opened up now. We're going to get in a little into physiology. I know, now I'm digging too deep now. A high-intensity effort of any kind is extremely catabolic. You need to break down and promote fuel and fuel the cells with ATP. So you are in breakdown mode to get through that 20-second sprint. But what happens is, because you don't do a zillion trillion of them, And because it doesn't go on for an hour and a half or two hours or two and a half hour, like a long distance run, you're giving a brief catabolic experience to promote the genetic signaling for anabolism afterward.
[1:33:18] Just like when you do a set of bicep curls and you're sending the bicep curl itself is catabolic. You're breaking down the muscle, even creating microtrauma in the muscle in the weight room. And then, because the muscle had that fitness stimulation, it goes into anabolic mode as soon as you consume the smoothie and the recovery fuel. So, it's the signaling that we're thinking about rather than the literal definition of, you know, of anabolic or catabolic.
Rethinking Endurance Training
[1:33:48] It gets super confusing, like sleep. Is sleep anabolic or catabolic? Well, it's both. It's called amphibolic, where you're doing all these restorative activities during sleep, but you're also breaking down nutrients to send to the muscles to refuel them. So not to get too off track there, but it's a good question because the long distance run is going to put you into catabolic state for a long time afterwards because you're breaking down lean muscle mass, converting it into sugar gluconeogenesis to get the fuel when you didn't bring enough gels or you push yourself too far. I think, yeah, again, I think we just have to be retrained as consumers of marketing messages, because we have been conditioned to believe that longer is better, that if I go out for an hour long run, and I burn 100 calories per mile, and so like, oh, I just burned 600 calories.
[1:34:47] Great, like, let's go have our tacos. And so it's hard to switch that brain and go, well, you just want me to do like 20-second sprints with all of this recovery, which won't take me nearly as long as that hour-long run. Yeah, and it's more effective. But it's way more effective. You know, what I'm listening to this, what I'm realizing is we, and I think I said this at the outset, we have to be deprogrammed, right, from everything that we've learned and that's been indoctrinated into our minds for, you know, 20, 30 years. And it's not easy. Well. Right? And I'll say it's very much parallel to what we're trying to do at PLANTSTRONG, which is to get people to stop eating all the crap. No offense here, stop eating dairy, stop eating animal products, you know, meat. And, uh, and it's, uh, it's going, it, it's very disruptive. And so I just want to say that, well, I think what you and Mark have done here is really phenomenal.
[1:35:53] And, and, uh, we've been through it, man. So that's, uh, if you want to talk about author credibility, I've been out there breaking my body down and accelerating the aging process. You and I, those years that you mentioned, you know, around a decade, a little more for you. But I feel like I aged 25 or 30 years in that decade. And I literally felt like, I shouldn't say literally, I figuratively felt like I was 70 or 80 years old when I was 30 years old due to what I'd put my body through. And now I'm just trying to make up for it for the rest of the decades. But you mentioned something that made me think back to the obligate manner when we talk about needing to be reprogrammed. So, I think a lot of people have to look in the mirror and decide really what they want to do with their.
[1:36:41] Passion and their pursuit of these fitness experiences because a lot of times it's an escape hatch, it's a vent from all the other forms of stress in life and running away from things that they don't want to face. And it's a common attribute of especially when you get to the extreme endurance performers like David Goggins, the best-selling author, and everybody marvels at these amazing achievements that he does, but it's like, okay, he didn't give up, and he's a tough guy, and he went Navy SEALs three times, but he's destroying his body in front of our eyes, and we celebrate that somehow. He's also had heart surgeries. All kinds of stuff. So, let's figure out a balance where you don't need to change anything, But if there's a possibility of greater appreciation and satisfaction and contentment and all the things that you're looking for, I would definitely be recommending a better approach that's looking at your long term. You know, Simon Whitfield, Olympic gold medal triathlete, our buddy. I asked him, I interviewed him after he retired. He won the Olympic gold in 2000, the Olympic silver in 2008, a great career on the pro circuit.
Honoring Your Future Self
[1:37:53] And now he's retired. I say, so what are you doing? Like, what's your fitness, you know, regimen like now? And he goes, well, today I'm coached by my 80-year-old self.
[1:38:04] Hmm. He's reverse engineering. I thought that was the best one line. He wants to honor his 80-year-old self looking down saying, Simon, quit doing that triathlon shit around the world circuit. You're beating yourself up. Now I want you to go do stand-up paddling and some time at the gym and a lot of walking. So, he wants to honor his 80-year-old self as watching. And that's what we all might, you know, look toward is honoring the years ahead and setting ourselves up for success rather than pain suffering and and demise accelerated demise yeah what is uh what's next for you.
[1:38:42] What you just did the iron man what's next you just did mount everest what's next there's there's so much more to accomplish in master's track and field as a new enthusiast i mean i've really been obsessed with this for the past four years and really said goodbye to um you know the endurance, component of my dedication to fitness. So, it's super fun to learn and mix with these athletes and see what's going on and also to see what's possible through the years. And you can look on YouTube like, you know, these athletes in the higher age groups. I race a guy in the 400 meters in national championships, Lee Bridges of Chicago, and he was so far ahead of me. I came up after the race. I'm like, dude, this is the 55 to 59 category. What are you doing out there? And he's like, well, you know, I ran in the 88 Olympic trials against Butch Reynolds and the top guys in the world. And, you know, now he does a 52 second 400 meter, which is like your best varsity guy at any high school. And he ran 45. And so in 33 years or whatever, he's regressed only seven seconds in an all out performance. It's amazing. What's the record for 60 to 64?
[1:39:53] And this Sue McDonald, I got to give her a plug too. She's broken a dozen world records in the 60 plus division for women in like all these different events, 400, 800, mile, heptathlon. She just goes to the meets and goes where no human has ever gone before. So, it's really interesting to see, like, by definition, this person is setting a standard that we've never seen before in that age group, and whatever she's doing is working. And so, the sprinting community, Cynthia, like I talked about, who was a world champion herself, they're figuring out ways to be healthy and strong, because there's no margin for error when you're in the 60-plus division. And so, it's not like today's Olympic gold medalist who flames out with shoulder surgery and a broken knee and, you know, sent to the sideline. Same with NFL player or whatever. Now, we're seeing, I think, to credit the great coaches and the great innovators in physical therapy and sports performance. Like, if I had some great guys guiding me when I had my Achilles surgery, I went in there right after.
[1:40:57] And my trainer, one's Jason, one's Jonathan. They're putting me to work. I'm like but it's kind of sore and it still hurts and when I woke up it was really stiff this morning He's like get the 45 pound kettlebell do three sets of those raises and then go over to the pogo and and like they're pushing you through rather than sitting around and waiting for your injuries to get better and it was a real eye-opener for me like We have to fight this battle on every front and those runners that are getting injured. And I mentioned the list of different things. Get those hip flexors mobile. Do some banded mountain climbers in the gym and learn how to use the mini bands. Mini bands are like four bucks, right, for the band you put around your ankle. It's probably the most versatile and challenging and amazing fitness experience that you can travel with on the road and rock your world in like one minute of doing monster walks or the things that we do. Did you tear your Achilles? What happened? I got a bone spur. So a bone spur is when you repeatedly stress the tendon and pull it away from the bone to the point where the bone fills in the gap. And so this is... How did you get... That almost sounds as bad as a stress fracture.
[1:42:08] It's interesting. I do have an L on my forehead. It's wearing off now for that. But here's the funny thing. And this is a great, great thing to mention is I'm not stupid, right? I don't want to push through the pain of an injury. So, what would happen is every morning I'd wake up and I'd feel like crap and super stiff with my foot and then I'd put it through some rotational exercises and calf raises and then I'd stretch my lower back and then things would feel good and I'd go out and I'd warm up carefully and I'd get sweaty and warm and I'd do the workout and feel great. And then i end up in the i went to physical therapy so much they're like dude guess where i'm sending you today we're not going to do our session drive down the street you need to get imaging and see dr galato because you're in deep crap you've you've been dealing with this they asked me how long has this been bothering you i go like a year and the guy's eyes bugged out like a year what like sure all kinds of things bug me for a year my left shoulder hurts since i wiped out on the e-foil for two years, you know? So, the doctor says her epic one-liner, because I'm telling you what I just described, like, I felt fine during the workout. Yeah, it hurt in the morning. She goes, oh.
[1:43:17] The tendons fool you when they become inflamed. Please take that back with you, listeners. The tendons fool you when you become inflamed. So you want to measure your state of readiness, recovery, and stability first thing in the morning when you walk down the hall to pee. And since the triathlon days of 30-something years ago, that first thing in the morning walk was a shuffle, man. It wasn't ballet dancer floating down the hall. It was like dragging your body through until you get it warmed up. And it's a great takeaway because now it's like, I want to be functional all the time. And as soon as I wake up and get out of bed, I expect to feel good. And if something's a little off, I'm going to work that area and get it stronger and address these functional weaknesses rather than drag myself to. And the same goes for all the, you know, the massage guns and the cream and the stimulator machines. Okay, those are fine. My trainer, my physical therapist, Jonathan, calls it spa day.
[1:44:17] So like yeah i got a i got a warm belt it really feels good on my back that's spa day man get the kettlebell and do your marches and build those muscles and so that's like um if you're getting strong you can't go wrong it's his it's his line and i'm living by that now where i just want to fight this battle respecting and knowing that at my age things are different i remember some at some birthday, I heard, you know, hey, happy birthday. Yeah, age is just a number. And someone said, no, it's not just an effing number. And if you think that, you got some issues that you need to address right now. So, it's not just a number and you can't breezily, you know, write it off by saying, oh, it's just a number. I feel young at heart. No, here's your chronological age. Here's your, you know, your state of your body. And we have to make adjustments and recalibrations on account of aging, and then preserve our youthful spirit and our ambition to keep, you know, doing adventurous, active life. Yeah.
[1:45:15] You've got a podcast that's doing really, really well. What's the name of it, and how can people listen to it? The Be Rad Podcast is where all podcasts are found, including PLANTSTRONG. And I have some wonderful guests, and I do a lot of shows myself where I'm just covering a topic, and I want to give people really direct step-by-step tidbits to implement right away. And it's so fun, Rip. Like you said, how do we end up here when we were goofing around and talking at the dinner table in France? Before the race and getting into the favorite health topics that we've been obsessed with for so long. So it's kind of cool to bring it to everybody. Well, you know what I remember when I was a firefighter and you were an author and you wrote, How Does Lance Do It? How Does Tiger Do It?
[1:46:04] You can make a living doing that. That was, I think, the first book you ever wrote. And you were standing in front of an airplane engine, I think. I don't know how you got permission to my triathlon career yeah yeah we had a five minute cameo on the on the airfield it was great yeah but um yeah it's it's it's been quite quite the journey that we've both been on and um anyway i'm just gonna say that this book is i i highly recommend that people get it and there's so many great takeaways and i think it's just a smarter uh more intelligent way of of moving and um and staying in shape and just feeling feeling your best right right you have more energy to do it right rather than slog yourself yeah i think it's great for people who might just be starting a.
[1:47:03] Movement routine and think that, well, I got to sign up for a 5k or I've got to go do a marathon because for, you know, again, we've set that standard of like, that's the only means of success. And it's just, and it's just not. So for people that have often thought or been told that walking is useless, this book will assure you that it's not useless. In fact, it's probably more healthy than jumping into a running routine, which as you explained is, could be riddled with setbacks and injuries and frustrations and, and, and health issues. So I do think it's great for that for a new, a newbie, so to speak. I think it's also great for some, you know, old crusty woman like me, who's been at this for a long time and, and is, is at the precipice of where you're at to both of you. And that is how can I continue to be active and fit and healthy, you know, into my 80s and into my 90s. And so, yeah, it's time to start tweaking things. It's time to start changing things around and turn it more into play. And I think the thing is that for me, because I don't do any of this right now, right?
[1:48:15] But this has, it's tickled my fancy and my intellect in a way to where I'm like, but it makes so much bloody sense that I need to make some, I think, major, a major overhaul to my current way of thinking around what represents fitness, what represents um kind of longevity um and and i feel like just naturally before we sign off naturally i think that's one of the reasons why i've been gravitating gravitating towards pickleball because my body has naturally said you don't want to continue to pound yourself into the sand.
Finding Joy in Movement
[1:49:02] Whether it's mountain biking whether it's swimming you know i've kind of given up the running just because but still it's like yeah i gotta go go go go go go and so this this couldn't have come uh and hit me at a better time right on ripper yeah well if there's an intervention to do right away i would say people start sprinting and go for 10 seconds and do low or no impact where there's zero injury risk we don't want you running out on the on the track with gabby thomas yet but But if you can hit that bicycle hard and take it from, you see the people in the gym watching TV and they're putting their, you know, they're going for 47 minutes straight, they already have an A plus in cardio. You know, Dr. James O'Keefe, I think you've talked to him or he's the expert on cardio.
[1:49:52] He has research that if you accumulate like a couple hours of very low intensity cardio every week, you get an A plus as far as disease prevention. You max out your benefits and then as you exceed that you the curve starts to go down where you have invite potentially increased heart disease risk from overdoing it so and again all exercises are a form of cardio so they all count so going into the gym and doing the weight circuit and walking and if you love running go do your 10k on the weekend but if you start sprinting you're going to get a huge return on investment vastly more than any other workout for weight loss and for increasing your fitness in a short time.
[1:50:38] And then my other takeaway was just bringing in barefoot mentality to just everyday activities. That was another big takeaway for foot strengthening, for posture.
[1:50:50] For all the reasons that you stated in that are in the book. I can't wait to get into that. I mean, lately, all I've been wearing, and I know you guys kind of bash Birkenstocks a little bit, but, you know, all I've been wearing is the Birkenstocks and my toes. I mean, look at my toes. Look at those phenomenal toes Rip is showing. If you're not on camera, his thread is tremendous. No, it is pretty good. Well, that's why you are an All-American swimmer, is that those are freaking flippers, man. Show people your shoes. Yeah, so I'm wearing Paloovas, And that's the venture that Mark and I are involved in, my co-author. And these are distinct because they have five individual toe slots. And this is a huge innovation in footwear because this is a true barefoot experience. All the minimalist shoes are also a great break from the destruction and damage caused by regular shoes. But if you can get that as close to barefoot as possible as often as possible, again, not interfering with your favorite cushion shoes you're running in, But get those feet strong again, because those are the source of all movement. They initiate all complex kinetic chain activity when we're connected to the ground or want to jump off the ground like me. So that's a great takeaway.
Embracing a Barefoot-Inspired Lifestyle
[1:52:01] Start sprinting. Start thinking about a more barefoot-inspired lifestyle.
[1:52:06] Complex chain activity, baby. And be PLANTSTRONG, as always. As always. As always. Brad, thank you, my brother. Ms. Bubs, Ms. Bubs, thanks for inviting me to play. What fun, everybody. Great having you, Carrie. Thanks for listening and watching.
[1:52:27] Born to Walk, The Broken Promises of the Running Boom and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy One Step at a Time comes out on January 7th and you can pre-order it now for fast delivery and I'll be sure to put the link in the show notes to make it super easy for you. I want to thank you so much for listening and I hope that you found this insightful as you start your 2025 fitness journey and identify goals for the year. Just getting out for a walk each day may be the path that is right for you and this book will help you take that first step let's do it together shall we happy new year and remember my PLANTSTRONG cousins to always always keep it PLANTSTRONG, the PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey. if you like what you hear do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones you can always leave a five-star rating and review on apple podcasts or spotify and while you're there make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode as always this and every episode is dedicated to my parents Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn jr. And Anne Crile Esselstyn thanks so much for listening.
[1:53:52] Music.
