Though physical fitness is obvious, emotional fitness is less obvious. They do coexist in an odd relationship, wherein, on average, people who prioritize physical activity have a much lower incidence of mental health issues. Over and over, the most diehard clinicians who previously relied solely on drug therapies are recognizing the pivotal role of exercise:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470658/… However, this creates a bit of a paradox in peoples’ minds as they await the emotional boost (inspiration or motivation) in order to begin greater investment in physical fitness. It probably only ever works the opposite direction, starting with taking care of the temple, and consequently gleaning the mental health benefits. Thus, how do we “crack the code” on emotional or psychological fitness? There’s no easy answer. I have had many periods of overwhelm in life. I get it. Up to a point, anyway. With real challenges, not imaginary phobic episodes, I am deeply sympathetic. Imaginary challenges which don’t exist and may never come to fruition, however, I view as a severe mental defect. When you allow nonsense thoughts to take up free rent in your brain, that unfitness won’t go away through thought. You have to lift some weights, go for a run, get in a cold shower, etc. You have to DO something physical to change your emotional state. Attempting to “think your way” out of a mental defect isn’t going to work. The bad software which got you here isn’t going to get you out of here. Time for a new program. Download a new app in your brain. There are many related skills for emotional management, most of which have to do with what make-believe ideas you are willing to repeatedly expose yourself to. But again, think about this. Being stuck inside your thoughts IS more non-physical time where you are caught up inside your head. If you keep entertaining the same echo-chamber of negativity, yeah, you’re probably going to continually be an angry or depressed person. Maybe instead of getting worked up about something by which you aren’t impacted and which you don’t affect, go DO something. Move. Be physical. Change your state. DO something you can DO something about. I had this really odd experience the other day where someone in my network showed me a quote about not letting external circumstance which don’t involve you affect your internal emotional state. Sound. Valid. I concur. This is, in fact, one of the skills on which I coach people. But the oddity was that this guy then angrily proceeded to try to convince me that I should be upset about a political topic which has ZERO interest to me. I place myself on NEITHER side of this particular debate, because, frankly, all of the typical arguments about it don’t rise above the level of 5th grade civics when I encountered and debated it vigorously. I have a third perspective on it. And I’m not arguing against the other two. I’m not arguing at all. I’m at peace. If something rises to the intellectual level worthy of my consideration, maybe I’ll take it on. But I’m too happy and fulfilled of a person to waste time on parochial talking points. The greater oddity was that I never debated and this guy still stormed off in a huff. He ambushed ME, I didn’t disagree or agree, and he stormed off. Weird? I merely reminded him of the first quote he’d just shown me, about how we shouldn’t let things we can’t affect at this moment ruin our internal state. I want to have a great day. If you don’t, that’s up to you. But you lack the capacity to ruin mine. Apparently, it didn’t click. Once he stormed off, I wondered why I was so emotionally fit in that circumstance and he was so emotionally unfit. I proceeded to have an awesome day with my wife and kids. But in hindsight, today, I worry about him. Why was something which isn’t actually happening in reality so important in his imagination that he would ruin his own internal state over it? But it’s not just him. This is part of the human experience for us all. We let make-believe scenarios take up free rent in our heads. Those thoughts aren’t paying rent. We let them be squatters there, requiring us to pick up after them, sullying our mental living space. Perhaps the answer isn’t to be rationalized though. Like I said, maybe we just need to pick up some resistance, do sprint intervals, DO something. The nervous and anxious and angry energy which people deploy on their supposed opponents doesn’t ever yield the outcome desired anyway. Why not just go do something physical instead? Reconnect with WHO we humans are by DOING something. You could continue to enrage yourself by inventing sick fantasies of what you think enemies might do to you. OR, you could go LIVE. There’s clearly a desire at a deep level for all humans to DO something about their feelings. But instead of managing the feelings by changing their state, most of the time they amplify the feelings by doing absolutely nothing about their state. Lashing out at others, ambushing people who aren’t even debating you, throwing out simpleminded memes, might satisfy one little drop of dopamine balance. But ultimately it changed nothing in the physical world. So your emotional unfitness persists, and usually grows, since your “efforts” don’t have results. I’ve been there. Up until age 23 or so. Then I outgrew indignation and offense. I don’t have the answer. But what I found was that when I manage myself through various tactics, including regularly doing physical training, people exert zero unwanted influence on my emotional state. Control what you can control. Accept what you can’t. Pray to know the difference. In so doing, you might become more fit.
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We all have been or still are or know someone else who is the type of person who will burn up days, weeks, months, years, decades, a whole life on a decision in order to find the best deal or best price or best value. Ultra-effective people don’t do this. People who’ve grown businesses from essentially nothing don’t do this. People who build incredible wealth don’t do this. Because time is more valuable than anything. Once spent, it’s gone forever.
I know people who will lose 50 hours of their personal time in order to save a few bucks. They clearly never studied business or econ. Depending on what your time is worth, that 50 hours could represent a 500-50,000 dollar loss. You “saved” 30 dollars. Lol. Good for you. You lost thousands. AND, no matter how much money you spend, as long as you’re alive or have investments setup for next-of-kin after your death, you can make it back. Time spent is never recovered. A day passes. That day is GONE. Forever. You NEVER get that day back. Some people figure this out and pay for time savings, expertise, etc. Why do you think companies hire employees? The founders and higher-ups in many cases are plenty capable to do any of those jobs; but they are trying to scale their impact without losing any more time. Paying someone 40k, 80k, 200k per year is worthwhile, if it saves them more time. Remember this when you negotiate salary or variable/bonus. This becomes painfully clear in the business-owner sphere. If ten hours of effort can yield two grand, all chore-level work is literally a massive loss if you don’t pay someone else to do it. You think you’re saving 20 bucks by not paying someone to mow your lawn; but you’re actually losing hundreds of dollars. Plus, that time is GONE. Likewise with schooling, any subject can be learned with self-study. All universities have test-out procedures for a fraction of the price of a full course. But you pay for expertise (the instructor and the structure of the lessons) in order to save time. I tested out of year one collegiate Greek, year one and two collegiate Latin, and intro German. I was a good enough self-study to save money and time doing this. Usually, the opposite is true and you could burn up invaluable time trying to figure things out on your own. I had this realization with my kids several years ago. Many decisions I made as a consequence were massive money losses. But, the money spent or lost enabled me to be with my family more. I had this clarity: I will never get this moment with my 2 year old again. I will never get age 3 again. I will never get the opportunity to play with my 4 year old again. Poof. Time vanished. Spent. It’s over. I was able to be there with them. I can still make the money which could’ve been made in those time periods, because I’m still alive and kicking. If I’d thrown the days away trying to build an empire, those ages would be gone with the clear memory of me as an absentee father. No amount of money could buy back that loss. That’s what I see in fitness. For the most part, you don’t get another body. You don’t get another set of organs. You definitely don’t get another life timeline. A minute spent is GONE! It’s over. You can never ever get it back. Dollars come and go. But the time to invest in your health, once spent, is completely unrecoverable. People lose this focus. I lose this focus. It’s human. I hear people futilely emphasize the price of things, not realizing the “lower cost” option is the most expensive one. You saved five bucks only to lose an entire day. You really lost infinity dollars on your sweet deal. In business and microeconomics, the term is opportunity cost. But it’s so much bigger than that. Because different choices, different use of that time, changes everything, not just a few things. Health and fitness, therefore, create the single nuance to this time matrix problem. A client of mine and I were discussing this with regard to fasting. There is one perspective which might see that you are sacrificing eating enjoyment by fasting for three days. But another perspective is that it may be the first time in 30 years you allowed your intestinal tract and microvilli to repair themselves. If that results in a modicum of regeneration, you might have a 10% improvement in absorption of nutrients and synthesis of serotonin. One person looks at it like the loss of three days. But in actuality it may mean achieving a whole new lease on life, physically, emotionally, and so forth. Perhaps for every day you fast you gain two more days of life for each individual. We don’t know exactly. But it wouldn’t be surprising if it worked this way precisely. What I find is that I save the time, money, and energy on food while fasting. To me, it’s an obvious net profit. I like entertaining ideas about time as an illusion or as a physical property which came into existence with the creation of our universe. And contemplating time in a different manner may help us solve intractable scientific problems, like why there are stars which are older than the universe: https://www.forbes.com/…/the-greatest-cosmic-puzzle-astro…/…. But insomuch as we can know for now, and pertaining to our lives, time is very real and very fleeting. Every moment passes, never to return. Listen. I get it. I don’t want to spend money on costly fitness equipment or access either. But the fact is that we all spend piles of money on totally useless things which don’t benefit us in any real way. Look up statistics on vices. It’s jarring. And we throw away time, this most valuable resource and asset, like it’s worthless. Years go by, and people opt to be same or worse. What are we doing? My good buddies and I have been having this broad conversation about regrets and opportunities. We settled on an evaluation, which was essentially that the past is unrecoverable and therefore to be appreciated, seldom regretted. Going forward, however, I would advise any reader to acutely recognize the sacredness and sanctity of time. You won’t ever get it back. If you must spend a fortune to save a minute, do it. When you can lose a dollar to gain a day, do it. Do it, when you can lose money to aggregate an improved future. You can regain almost any resource, any dollar. But you cannot and will not get a spent second back. Smarter? Yes. Harder? Doubtful. If you seek elevated heart rate as a confirmation that you are doing the right thing, it’s probably the exact opposite for you.
I think it’s beneficial to continually remind ourselves about the Blue Zones: various micro-cultures the world over which are comprised of on-average leaner people with low-to-no risks or incidence of heart disease and cancer. Do you really think 80-year-old men sipping alcohol in the town square on a Greek island are tracking steps or jogging? Do you really think 90-year-old Okinawan karate instructors are fit because they sweat non-stop in a workout? There is this propensity to get stuck in a trap with toothpick limbs and ever-growing paunch by emphasizing continuous elevated heart rate efforts. Try rest. Try peace. Try mindset. Get strong. Be intense momentarily. Don’t burn yourself out. 1.) Don’t lift heavy weights or resistance
2.) Don’t eat sufficient protein 3.) Deplete the body through steps, cardio, and/or calorie restriction It boggles my mind when a 95-145lb female with over 30% bodyfat seeks coaching without confronting herself with the obvious program flaws listed above. Don’t get me wrong: there are other demographics which are skinny fat too. But it’s predominantly avid or would-be female runners, cardio-enthusiasts, and step-trackers with a protein and weight training aversion, claiming that they’ve been incapable of changing body composition. Well, yes, you are actively training to be obese, but have lucked out to keep your body mass as low as it still is. In every single comparative analysis regarding body composition, heavy weight training versus not is statistically superior at improving body comp. Likewise, high protein versus low protein is a net win on body comp, especially in females: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29405780/ I don’t even want it to be true, because personally I would love to eat less protein. But biology and science don’t give a rip about what I want to be true. They exist as objective realities. Additionally, I would love if cardio were effective at improving body comp. You know how much easier it is psychologically for me to mindlessly do classes or repetitive motion instead of getting under an iron bar with hundreds of pound on it? But again, physiological mechanisms exist independently of our personal desires. The way I’m wired, it was really easy for me to run 60 miles per week, eating predominantly vegetarian when I was 17 and 18 years old. And I was skinny fat at 165lbs. I couldn’t get a six pack. Contrast that against recent years where I’ve had visible abs between 230 and 250lbs, sometimes doing no cardio at all. People chase their tails on this one, refusing to embrace the fact that their incredibly faulty methodology is the culprit. Doubling down, they just run more, starve more, avoid intense resistance more, reject protein sufficiency more. Fat or skinny fat persists. I know. I’ve been there. And professionally I’ve seen tens of thousands of people futilely want the same to be true, slave for it to be true. But it just ain’t. Does playing basketball make you 7 feet tall? Does playing a lot of basketball intensely make you at least 6 feet tall? If you just really, really buckle down and practice as hard as you can, can basketball make you 6 foot 5 inches tall or taller? How is this line of questioning any different than thinking lots of running will give you a runner's body? The build and the body lend themselves to the sport. The sport doesn't create that body. Your frame and a lot of the muscle fiber distribution is more or less set. We can change body composition through intelligent training and nutrition. We cannot change your frame or completely revise your fiber makeup. No strengthening, low protein, plus lots of wanton physical activity works for the occasional rebellious male (and total freak statistical outlier female) with high enough muscle mass and hormones still. He may get away with this foolish tactic because he’s playing by a different set of rules. One day it will cease to work though as he ages and suppresses hormone balance. And for everyone else, best case scenario is being skinny fat. Progress. It doesn’t happen in egoism. When people hit rock bottom, or are confronted with the palpable consequences of their faulty philosophy, only then do we see the hockey stick growth pattern.
The number one objective for all coaches is to help their students think in a different manner. The thought-pattern which got you here will not get you there. Thus it is with leanness. People come to me, putting in incredible time cost efforts, slaving away, pushing so hard, for... ? I don’t know actually. The first questions I ask are about sleep and stress management. They want to “get down to business” and break a sweat. Ok. And how well has that thinking worked so far? It absolutely hasn’t yielded a single desired outcome. They want to “get down to business” and diet hard. Ok. And how well has that thinking worked so far? It’s not the amount of effort. You don’t need to put in any more effort at your incredibly faulty thinking. You have to think in a different manner. It isn’t the toolkit, the privilege, the luck, the willpower, the steps on your Fitbit, the calories low enough. It’s that you have a thought defect. You have a belief system which is errant. There are massive lines of viral code in your brain, on which you have to run the antivirus software. I have peers who are incredibly fit with less than 3,000 steps per day. I have obtained outrageous leanness before while doing zero minutes of cardio per week. In research, weight training reigns supreme: https://news.wfu.edu/…/lose-fat-preserve-muscle-weight-tra…/ People don’t want to change their thinking. So they spend even more hours walking, jogging, running, cycling, starving, to absolutely no outcome at all. They spend decades slaving away at efforts which will never gift to them the outcome they desire. It isn’t the work. It isn’t the effort. It’s the belief. People yearn to think in the exact same faulty manner which hasn't improved their lives. A perfect example I saw recently was an article making the argument that you shouldn't tell people who struggle with depression about the benefits of exercise. One-hundred and fifty years of talk therapy and pharmaceutical intervention for depression has yielded ZERO reduction in societal incidence rates of depression. The rates are going up. Should we stop telling people who struggle with depression about the benefits of therapy and drug interventions? The fact of the matter is that a light morning walk has as good or better mean outcomes with regard to depression than talk therapy combined with pharmaceutical therapy every single time they're stacked against one another. The popular voices of medical authority have been moving their tunes toward exercise for over a decade now: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/exercise-is-an-all-natural-treatment-to-fight-depression But, in clinging to the faulty thinking, a blatant error stuck out within that article which was trying to make a validation for not even trying to help people with depression. It focused on how people with depression lack the motivation to exercise. So, they argue, we're painting depressed people into a corner. If your definition of starting exercise is 90 minutes of hardcore effort, yes, I would agree. But if your definition of a depression-addressing exercise practice is a 5 minute morning walk, then I disagree strongly. In fact, when we examine the concept of "motivation" we find it totally vacuous anyway. Motivation is circular and non-explanatory. I reject it entirely in philosophical axiom. Either people decide to affect change or they assume a role of dishonest enabler. You’ll never get fit thinking the way you’ve been thinking that’s made you unfit. There is a tendency to throw ones hands up in exasperation at human health and fitness. “Chaos,” people cry. But it’s not random. It’s not chaos. Many processes are complex, and therefore vexing. But they are well-understood, if we take the time to breathe and reflect.
Fundamentally, where there are insufficient nutrients and over-abundant stressors, there will be a break down in health or fitness. This is the law. No exceptions. As random as it may seem, it’s in fact quite predictable. Many people will hold up singular statistical outlier anecdotes (ie - so-and-so ate and exercised “perfectly,” and then died of a massive heart attack) as evidence of chaos. It's not chaos. There is no perfect. Always, nutrients were insufficient and stressors were overwhelming. Various modern health issues and risks are the focus of quackery and pseudoscience because a lot has changed in the last 100-200 years, and the simple mind wants to make a historical correlation into a causal connection. That said, recently, researchers at Brown discovered that Vitamin A has anti-skin cancer correlation: https://www.brown.edu/news/2019-07-31/skincancer This wasn’t big new, by the way. Errant senescence of cells is really acutely understood. And this fat-soluble vitamin which was begun to be examined in the 1800s, has a well-defined role in immune function (therefore cancer management) and DNA transcription (therefore suppression of cancer cell proliferation). Our depleted soil leaves us with very little Vitamin A in foods which were once chock full of it. It isn’t random or chaos that getting insufficient nutrients raises risks and sufficiency lowers risks.It was entirely predictable that as we removed nutrients from our diets that there would be a higher incidence of certain cancers and diseases. Human health and fitness follows physical laws. People: I have to work harder to burn fat.
Biology: Fat burn only occurs during low-to-mid intensity. People slave to get leaner, working out HARD because an informercial said so, because a local nouveau fitness business built its whole model on this, because a coked out instructor said to “push it.” But, alas, science reigns supreme over all this nonsense. The optimal fat burn occurs at 47% to 64% of ability: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15212756 That is, long before you get winded, long before you can’t hold a conversation, long before the effort accumulates fatigue/exhaustion, you will stop effectively burning fat. If you have to stop or slow because you’re getting out-of-breath, you already passed the fat burn window a while ago. If you’re having a hard time imagining keeping your current pace for 10 hours or more, you are precisely training the body to be unskilled at fat burn. I value sprints. I value resistance training. Yes. During those brief efforts of 5-55 seconds, go all out. But the moment that over 20% of your workout time is performed at a perceived level above 50% of your capacity, you are DEtraining the body from utilizing stored fat. Recently, a client of mine discovered he had gained 10lbs over the course of two months WHILE he was compliant with nutrition and performing more endurance training. To be clear, he ate less and worked out more. It turned out that the heart rate at which he performed his endurance training was too high. You read that right. TOO HIGH. What that does is make you increasingly better at pain tolerance, not fat burn. Body composition follows suit (fat gain, not loss). When you just experience a lot of discomfort, the body will try to get bigger. With him, we’ve now instituted a do-not-raise-heart-rate-above-this limit. While he trains running or cycling, I don’t want him higher than a heart rate which feels too low to him. This strikes most people as paradoxical or counterintuitive. But it’s actually a defined scientific reality in all of exercise physiology. I encounter this more often than not. Among the sedentary populace, sure, they need to work a little harder. Among the regular exercisers, no, probably they don’t need to push it. Too high of exertion for too long a period of time tends to be the problem I identify among regular exercisers. I marvel at the massive amount of time people throw away at the gym and on the trails. It’s remarkable. They spend hours and hours every week only to have identical athletic ability or worse. Last summer I spent 27 minutes per week working out. Intelligent progression models don’t require piles of time. Regular exercisers should be getting definitively better in their 30s than 20s, 40s than 30s, 50s than 40s, 60s than 50s, 70s than 60s, and perhaps hitting a tipping point of maintenance in their 80s or 90s. At a level, I believe that people do actually know this. But they chase their tails, always believing that if they don’t suffer incredibly then the effort was futile. It’s exactly the opposite. Think back to elementary school, middle school, high school, college. The slowest kids were forced to train at a pace that impeded improvement. To this day, a lot of unknowledgeable coaches still make this mistake. They essentially punish slower kids by requiring them to run harder and more. Outcomes are obvious. Slow kids need to train slowER in order to become more efficient and therefore consequently faster. We know this to be true. We let the fastest kids train below their thresholds. And voila. They improve. We force slow kids to suffer. And voila. They are destined to struggle. It’s a physiological law. You cannot will it to be untrue. It remains true for adults. You must train BELOW hard effort in order to improve speed, body comp, and athleticism. You know what else is below hard effort? Rest. And that’s why nutrition is critical. You can burn fat and primarily fat at complete rest. No exercise required. However, if there is always food in your face and stomach, and always blood sugar volatility, then yeah, you’re going to have to workout a lot, both frequently and lengthily in duration. But this is where exercise becomes a trap. People work out so hard that they MUST eat. The high intensity burned up lean tissue. Then the eating grew fat tissue. They feel fatter, so they work out longer and harder, burning up even more lean tissue, consequently eating even more to grow even more fat tissue. The feedback usually ends up in one of two places. Either people quit, because it’s “not working.” Or they continue binging and exercise purging without ever calling it that. There’s a third way. In this third way, the manner in which you think is important. You must think about resistance training as a skill. It does not exist to burn calories. It exists to prevent osteoporosis, sarcopenia, cachexia, and to make you more capable. You develop the skill. Higher skill will eventually lead to more calories burned. Aerobic training, on the other hand, has a primary objective to improve efficiency. This means that low-to-mid intensity is the directive. And THAT may mean FEWER calories burned in a given time period at the beginning. Over time, without “pushing it,” if you are training at a low-enough intensity, you will naturally move faster. If you are struggling to get faster, it’s because you are thinking about it incorrectly and training too fast too long. Slow down. You will naturally get faster. Then, you will burn more calories within the same or less time. With regard to eating, remind yourself that you are a fully grown adult. Stop eating to grow, unless that’s your goal. Fast when you can. Protein and fiber when you can’t. Depending on timing, the athlete’s needs, and how much versus how much of everything else, carbohydrates land anywhere between “counterproductive” and “necessary.” But they aren’t bad. They have a specific set of roles, most of which are easily fed from stored fat.
In a very long study (3 years ish), those who ate fewer carbs ended up burning about 250 more calories per day: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4583 The authors note that were this to continue trending, participants would lose 20lbs while eating as many calories as their higher carb-intake counterparts. REREAD that. This makes sense, given lots of known physiological phenomena. Take note, the difference in calorie burn between low carb participants and higher carb was an average of over 400 calories if the higher carb people had any amount of insulin resistance. That is, if you are prediabetic, you burn 400 MORE calories per day eating the exact same caloric intake but from fewer carbs. You burn more calories with the exact same activity and calorie intake when less of the food is from carbs. Again, this is why the alleged or ostensible caloric content of food and the alleged or ostensible caloric expenditure from activity do not constitute a sufficient explanatory model in human biology. Gasoline has calories. Bleach has calories. What our body does is more nuanced than simpleton calorie thinking. Every time you try to explain a phenomenon in human health and fitness, you are missing a sufficient understanding without regard to hormone signaling and endocrine function (or dysfunction, as it were). The role of plastics on obesity signaling in endocrine cascades is understood:
https://www.endocrine.org/…/exposure-to-common-chemicals-in… I like when people present a necessary cause as if it’s sufficient. I realize that not every educated person on earth had the opportunity to take logic, philosophy, critical thinking, and really deeply study the science of argumentation or even just scientific thinking. However, when you come to my playground, health and fitness, you ought to at least have the intellectual horsepower to differentiate between necessary and sufficient, validity and soundness, correlation and causality, anecdote and dataset. No one ever said that calories are untrue. They’re just unhelpful as a predictive model. Hormones run the show. And a great many factors other than calories end up affecting hormones. Well, more accurately, digestive health and the bacteria within you play a vital role in how easy or difficult health and fitness is. Here’s yet another study showing how microbes influence obesity:
https://healthcare.utah.edu/…/2019/07/microbiome-obesity.php I find it really interesting how much cultural beliefs prevent people from flourishing. Thirty years ago it might’ve been considered quackery to believe that an individual might need to abstain from dairy or grain proteins or certain foods which perpetuate for them a constant signal to grow fatter. But now we know better. Our gut flora play a huge role. And when you are getting the feedback that you can no longer tolerate a whole category of food... well... maybe stop having it. Maybe fast for a bit. And then, maybe try to restore great digestion. It can be done. It has been done. Even in people with Crohn’s or Celiac, they are able to get well, returning their digestive tract to a healthy functioning routine, consistency, etc. The many pathologies which “inexplicably” plague our modern world are not so inexplicable. They are perfectly explainable when you consider the integral role of digestion. |
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