The 4 Season Solution with Dallas Hartwig

Allan (03:24):
Dallas, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dallas (03:26):
Thank you so much for having me.

Allan (03:28):
It's just an honor for me to have you on the show. It's a, you're someone I've really wanted to get in touch with for a while. And when I, when I got your book, The Four Seasons Solution and I started reading through it, I was like, this is profound. This because I had sort of already taken the nutrition thing to a kind of a seasonal idea thinking through ancestral eating and you know, my Northern European family would not have been eating papayas in December. And so I would typically do, and I coined the phrase seasonal ketosis cause that's a natural place that I found myself at now. I did it backwards because I like football season and beer and hanging out with my friends. And so I kinda, I kind of switched it up, but I have to admit, I have found myself very much where you talk about in the book and that kind of this perpetual summer, which we're going to talk about. So I really did resonate with the message that you have in the book. And I think the folks, anyone that's going to read your book is going to as well.

Dallas (04:30):
Awesome.

Allan (04:32):
So now part of what you have in the book and you talk about are these rhythms and you know, we, we can talk about circadian rhythms, we can talk about the rhythms that happen over the course of seasons. Cause everybody, particularly in the Northeast and the North is going to experience some form of seasons in the Southeast they'll call it 10 seasons, rain hot, a little bit more rain hot. And then you know, a little bit more rain. But down here in Panama, you know, we really only have rainy and hot and so we don't have the longer, shorter days and things like that. So it's a little harder to kind of go into the whole that, but there are those rhythms and I think most, most people that are listening to this are going to kind of resonate with that idea that there's, Oh yeah, there's these seasons and there's different things that we do and should be doing longer days, shorter days.

Allan (05:22):
And then there's the seasons of life. And so you kind of use that concept as you go through this to build, for lack of a better word, as I went into reading it and thinking through as a helix, our life as we go forward going through these series of rhythms. But we've got to get in sync with those rhythms if we really want to be well. So can you kind of talk through those different rhythms that we should be paying attention to and how they're going to benefit us for wellness.

Dallas (05:50):
For sure. And you know, that's both, a simple question and a really complex question. I, it's one of the things that I'm most interested in is patterns. And what I started to identify over the last 6 to 10 years is a sort of recurring fractal pattern of expansion and contraction that occurs on a daily rhythm. Actually, there are shorter rhythms call trading rhythms and we're familiar with REM cycles when we're sleeping. So there's a very sort of rhythm. There's the very obvious daily rhythm or circadian rhythm. There's also the same expansion-contraction cycle over the course of a year. And then we have this expansion-contraction cycle over the course of a lifetime. And there are so many fascinating comparisons between all those different cycles of what happens for us experientially, motivationally, emotionally, physiologically, metabolically. There are so many comparisons there and that fascinates me.

Dallas (06:44):
And what I started to do was layer in and sort of glean some of the patterns that are already encoded into our DNA. These are biological principles that have always governed the way we live that govern basically all life on earth is governed by these different cycles. And the circadian rhythm is a really obvious one across the course of the day. We have light, we have dark, we have sunrise, we have sunset, we have bright midday light. Like all of these things send physiological signals to our bodies and they affect our neurochemistry, they affect our metabolism, they affect our alertness, they affect our motivation, they affect our pleasure responses to things. And so it changes this. There's this entire, like I sort of envision this almost sort of pulsing, throbbing sort of amoeba shaped thing. Like we are constantly in motion in all of these different ways.

Dallas (07:41):
And what I seek to do in this book, and is giving some simple structure and organization to that. And that is basically just observing the natural patterns that are already there in nature. So I talk about rhythms with what we eat. I talk about rhythms with the light dark cycle, including sleep, but not limited to sleep. I talk about rhythms and oscillations in that same expansion contraction cycle in the way that we move across the course of a day across the course of a year and across the course of a lifetime. And I talk about connection, and I think that's one of the things that is overlooked in a lot of discussions about health and wellness is the sense of connection, not just to other people. That's kind of the obvious one. There's a large and growing conversation about social isolation and loneliness and that the social, emotional unhealth cost of loneliness, but that's not the entire story of connection.

Dallas (08:31):
So we also have this opportunity to connect deeply with ourselves, connect deeply with a sense of place and belonging and home and sort of mother earth. And then we have this sense of connection to a larger purpose, sense of contribution to something larger than ourselves, which is also correlated with some of the happiest and most long lived people on earth. So it's complex in that there are multiple moving pieces in this expansion contraction cycle. But it's also incredibly simple because what it does is allows us to get back in touch with our intuitive rhythms that are present in our bodies already. And we've just learned to ignore them or we've never learned to listen to them in the first place. So that the closer we get to aligning with these natural rhythms, the easier decisions get, the easier we make healthy decisions because it's just what we want to do intuitively.

Dallas (09:25):
So one of the major problems with the modern world is that we have largely eliminated those rhythms. We've flattened everything. So it's made, we've made everything like a light switch. It's off or it's on, it's go or it's stop and all of these things, we're at work or we're not, we are exercising or we're sedentary and this, it's very binary and polarized. And one of the things that argue for in this book is that across all of these different domains of living, we should be much more like a sign wave than a right angle or a straight line because there are no straight lines and right angles in nature. They're all curvaceous and beautiful and cyclical. So that's the, that's the sort of, that's the sort of conceptual background. And then the book gets much more, specific into each of those areas and, and kind of how, in my recommendations of how to actually implement those different things.

Allan (10:20):
Yeah. I think, you know, intuitively, we kind of know these things. If we do shift work, someone who does shift work, you know, there's plenty of science out there to say that they, they struggle with their health and wellness because the shift work interferes with their normal circadian sleep rhythm. They don't know when to be awake and when to be asleep. And yeah it really impacts their health overall. And so it's that when we break one of these, I'm not going to say a rule, but just a natural rhythm of, of how we should probably be living our lives, how we've lived our lives for millennia. It's, it really does take a toll on our bodies. Now I want to kind of start because I think that the easiest way to think about this beyond the, of course the circadian rhythm is kind of an easy one to do, but most people think that relates to sleep and you believe it's relates to all of it, but I want to talk about particularly the four seasons of the year because like I said, it was fascinating to me.

Allan (11:17):
I thought of it from a nutrition perspective of okay, my ancestors would not have had access to this food, therefore it probably shouldn't be eating that food during this time of the year. I need to have a winter, I need to have a time of famine where I'm predominantly eating meat and fat and that's my food products because that's all that's available. And there's going to be a period of time when I'm eating leafy greens and then there's going to be blueberry season where I'm just going to go crazy eating the blueberries. So it was easy for me to conceptualize this from a, from a food perspective, but you take it across all four of those dynamics, the food, the movements, the sleep and then of course the relationships both with ourselves and with others. Can you kind of walk through the four seasons and kind of give us an idea of how over the course of four seasons that would impact each of those four pillars of health and then why we find ourselves today kind of stuck in this summer. Because we've had this linear, like you said, we've smoothed everything out and we just happen to smooth it out at a time when we love, which is that dopamine summer.

Dallas (12:20):
Totally. Totally. So I mentioned expansion, contraction cycle. So there is kind of the two sides of the coin there and I grouped the four seasons into two and two. So spring and summer tend to be all about expansion. They tend to be about stimulation and fun and novelty and excitement and exploration and hard work and stress and all of that is totally okay. Like that's a natural rhythm. So it's akin to kind of morning and mid-day and the experience of a, like the sort of the titillation of early spring when we're like, let's go do some work in the garden or clean the garage. Like that sort of spontaneous motivation to do things or to start a new exercise program or to go on a trip or like the draw towards new exciting things is driven by dopamine and then the stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol, which help us adapt to that stress and maximize our sort of performance under stress.

Dallas (13:20):
And that's all good stuff. And I think that sometimes we make the mistake of sort of idealizing some other metobolic processes or neuro transmitters or motivational experiences and then demonizing others. And what I'm saying here is that actually all of these things have important functions because if we didn't have some of those motivational experiences to go try new things, go places, meet new people, we would stay at home and probably starve to death because we didn't have that spontaneous motivation to kind of go out and explore. So those are all really important things. So spring and summer are the expansion phase. Fall and winter are the contraction phase. It's the balancing point. And fall and winter are about slowing down, restoring and recovering from the stressful spring and summer. It is about coming home and reconnection and being grateful and being generous and knowing our place.

Dallas (14:16):
And it's all of the ideas that are really kind of epitomizes by American Thanksgiving. This sense of like gratitude and connection and generosity that are such hallmarks of fall. And then winter then is this experience of deep healing and restoration and contraction and what's wrong into like the most intimate parts of yourself and most intimate connections with people. It's not, it's kind of the opposite of the summer barbecues and block parties. It is sitting around the fireplace with your closest circle and all of those things are important. There's not, there's no good or bad here. What there is is this expansion and contraction cycle that works beautifully when it's in balance and works really poorly when it's out of balance. So fall and winter then are symbolized by the neurotransmitters of serotonin and melatonin. Serotonin as well known for its role in mood, in pleasure, in feeling a sense of contentment and connection and belonging.

Dallas (15:16):
And it's a very, it's a very peaceful, Placid, satisfied experience. And of course melatonin being the sort of darkness hormone, so to speak, is all about getting us into that very deep contracted, restorative phase of sleep or in the case of deep winter, a very kind of therapeutic experience. The problem is that back at the Dawn of agriculture, roughly 10 or 12,000 years ago, and as we started to kind of get civilization going and ownership societies and economics and urbanization, the whole thing sort of started to shift from being hunter gatherers in sort of integrated into their local environment to start to take control of the environment at first through agriculture and stabilizing the food supply. But then through, you know, later through the industrial revolution with artificial light, we started to kind of really craft the environment around us and that's where we went off course. Really kind of starting back at the agricultural revolution and then later through the industrial and technological revolutions.

Dallas (16:17):
Because what we did is we got stuck in this summer mode, this mode of success, of hard work, of accumulating resources of like go, go always on excitement and fun and expansion. And we got stuck there because it's good for civilization, it's good for the human species as a whole in that expansive mode. And of course you look at the population of humans on earth. We have done plenty of expansion, but it is out of balance. And what the challenge there, and I explained this in the book, but part of the challenge is that it's so fun and exciting to experience the dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol components of life. The excitement and the pleasure and the reward aspects of it. It's very difficult to tear ourselves away from that to have the corresponding contraction experiences. So I write in the book that we are stuck in a chronic summer and if you think about having the feeling you have at the end of summertime and let's say at the, in the Northern hemisphere sort of at the end of August and early September, you're like, Oh, I'm so tired.

Dallas (17:25):
I can't wait for the days to start to get shorter and they start to cool down and maybe the kids go back to school and like things start to kind of settle in and get a little bit saner because we're so tired. And that same sensation is the one that a lot of us have like deep in our bones over the course of years. And decades because we're living in a chronic summer. And the reason that's a major problem is because the behaviors in the summertime, if they are out over again years or decades, those chronic summer behaviors produce chronic disease outcomes. So all of this gets tied together as we can not only prevent and reverse chronic disease by stepping out of that chronic summer situation, but we can actually make all of the rich, beautiful human experiences better by reintroduced saying a balanced oscillating system.

Allan (18:15):
Yeah, and I think that's kind of the key of it is it's exciting. We're out there, we're doing stuff in particular as we start talking about sleep. I think food people get, it's like we have access to some foods all year round. And so we're, we're eating that all the time. We're getting all that sugar, all that, you know, the blueberries are there every day, every season I get and I'm everyday and if I keep doing that, my body's not getting that retraction, that contraction, that should be getting later. But with sleep kind of thing is an annual visits, the badge of honor that I only sleep five hours a night and do this stuff. You know what, I've got all these things, these, these responsibilities that, you know, put the kids to bed and then I've got to catch up with this and then I got to do that.

Allan (18:57):
And then I'm so wound up, well I guess I'll just go ahead and watch Netflix for an hour or so or four or six. And then I got to catch up on Facebook because totally all my friends that have been up until two o'clock in the morning, they're also posting now. So that's coming through and, we're one, we're giving ourselves all this artificial light, which wouldn't exist. We're not going with the natural cycle. And I think that's one of the, to me, that's where the, like the aha moment with what you were going into when you went through and said, when your book, you had your other book, which is, it starts with food. But in this book you said, you know, maybe sleep is easier, a better place to really think about this. And I'm agreeing with you here, if you sleep more when it's darker longer, that's probably how our ancestors did it for millennia, and it's probably a good life lesson for us. So can you kind of just talk about why sleep is so important to us and how we can use the seasons as a kind of a flag for us of better sleep and better health?

Dallas (19:55):
Certainly. There's this principle of evolutionary mismatch, which might not be a familiar term, but the concept is familiar and you've already spoken to it in that in our ancient past and the way that our bodies have evolved, we, our bodies expect oscillation. We expect certain types of kind of environmental conditions. And the modern world, the way we've constructed is extremely new to our physiology. We haven't had time evolutionarily speaking, to adapt to that. So we have a mismatch between what our physiology expects and what our environment provides us or what we provide ourselves through the modern environment. And that same principle. So you've spoken to food and said, okay, we can actually solve a ton of the problems with food by eating what is locally and seasonally available. And that's a beautiful elegant solution to food is literally just doing that one simple thing is eating what's available to you locally and seasonally.

Dallas (20:49):
And of course that takes into account what your local geography is. And in Panama you've got a different and certainly much smaller amplitude or smaller oscillations season to season, but there's a small change. It's of course much larger at higher and lower latitudes respectively, higher latitudes, North and South, North and South of the equator. And there's another principle that's akin to that with sleep, which is basically you should track or your sleeping patterns should be reasonably close to the sunrise and sunset times wherever you live. And that doesn't mean that in, you know, the Northern United States that you'd go to bed at 5:00 PM, you know, in the winter time because the sun goes down that early. But the closer you can track that this is like a beautiful, simple kind of heuristic or or sort of shortcut.

Dallas (21:38):
The closer you are to that, the better your health and wellness is going to be across the board. And that's true for a number of reasons. The single largest one is that our physiology is incredibly dependent on the light dark cycle. And that's something that has been, that I and many other researchers, have really underappreciated in years and decades past. And as we start to understand how significantly our metabolism is affected by that light dark cycle, we can start to identify the downstream consequences of mismatching, what's going on outside and the natural rhythms that are there with what we are with the environments we are providing with artificial light. And especially to your point, the sort of staying up late, which is basically a summertime behavior, right? Where the kind of long days, short nights, and what we basically have is a chronic shortage of sleep, but it's not just shortage of sleep, it's actually a deficiency of time spent in darkness.

Dallas (22:36):
So I kind of reframe that in the book where it's not just that people need to get more sleep and needs to go to bed earlier and whatever. They also need to spend more time in relative darkness. So there's this principle of mismatch that shows up in the realm of sleep because we, not only do we not have enough time spent in darkness and including sleeping, we also don't have enough exposure to bright, natural light. So, so much of our physiology is dictated by exposure to bright light because that is one of the triggers for our metabolism to say, Oh, I should be awake. Our nervous system gets regulated by that. And we have these, what we call clocks, these, these genetically encoded mechanisms within almost all of the cells and all of our bodies that have a roughly 24 hour rhythm, but they are made more accurate and more consistent by exposure to bright light.

Dallas (23:28):
So bright light early in the morning really helps to kind of reset and coordinate all of those clocks so that as we advance through the day, we have a more coordinated system. And as we get into the hours after sunset or approaching sunset, we are, we have coordinated clocks within our bodies such that we can start to wind down more naturally. And that requires that we avoid the artificial light after sunset. And that means dimming the lights at home. That means avoiding the computer and tablet and smartphone screens that have a lot of that blue light. Because if you think about blue light, especially when it's quite bright, blue light is effectively the signal that it is mid day. And this is sort of blue sky environment. Blue light tells your brain you should be alert, you should be active and you should have this sort of stress hormones on board so that you can perform maximally.

Dallas (24:20):
So this the experience of summer of having lots of sun, lots of light and lots of stress that goes along with all of that gets stretched over into the evening hours when we have artificial light that we get from all of these screens, so it's quite a well known recommendation at this point that we should be avoiding blue light in the evenings, especially in the hour or two before bed. I'll maybe extend that even farther and say the longer you get after or the longer you are awake after sunset and the more blue light you were exposed to after sunset, wherever you are, the more problems you are likely to have with your circadian rhythm. So it just hearkens back to this really simple and elegant solution. You should actually just follow the natural rhythm with a light dark cycle to the extent that you are able, just like you would follow what is present for you in food with local and seasonal foods. These, all of these, these really simple guidelines of like, this is how we go back and this is how we undo some of that evolutionary mismatch to improve our health overall.

Allan (25:23):
Yeah. I did some personal experiments to just kind of see what my sleep cycles were. You know, you wear wearable devices and things like that. About a year or so. And yeah, I'm right on the sleep cycle of 90 minutes. And I was going through that and I would say, okay. What I found was, yeah, in, in the summertime I, I felt okay with just sometimes four, but usually five sleep cycles. And then when it's the longer winters, and this really hit me when I would travel up to Calgary from Arkansas. And Arkansas, I'd go up to Calgary in July and it's, it's daylight at eight o'clock at night. And I'm like, ah, I just want to go to bed, but what am I supposed to do?

Allan (26:14):
You know? And so that would really mess with me. That would mess with me as much as traveling to Europe for sure. It really threw me off that there was that much difference in the length of a day and when the sun was out, when it wasn't. And so I recognize that my, my body had, was adaptive to the seasons and to the sun. And you know, obviously everybody knows about jet lag, but these were this kind of experiences of I sleep longer in the winter just naturally because I never set an alarm. I always go to bed early enough that I never have to set an alarm. I go through my sleep cycles and when I get through a sleep cycle, if it's after, you know, if I know I have to be up at seven, if it's after five o'clock I just get up. Cause I know 90 minute sleep cycles not going to work, I will, I'll sleep through the alarm if I even set one, which I typically don't. So I just kind of had these natural, okay I'm gonna I need to get five, sometimes six. Then in the winter I always found it was almost always going to be that extra sleep cycle, which you know, is just kind of one of those learning opportunities I gave myself by going to bed earlier. So I gave up a lot of Netflix watching for the sake of science and my health and that's where I found myself.

Dallas (27:23):
Yeah, well I love that you've already taken on so many of these experiments and just sort of naturally gravitate towards something that's very much in alignment with the entire model that I put forward in the book. Because what you, what I hear you saying is you have gotten better at trusting your own body's instincts and intuitions and, and not just like, like hearing them and trusting and acting on them in a way that drifts naturally over time to a much more harmonious and effortless place. I mean, the fact that you can go to bed and just sort of wake up without an alarm really speaks to the, the rested state that you're in when you do wake up. And I think that's extraordinary and beautiful. So I applaud you for doing those experiments.

Allan (28:05):
Yeah, but let my wife wake me up when I'm not like, my whole brain is off. I'm like, wait, where am I? What's going on? And it's like, Oh, we gotta we gotta go. And I'm like, Oh, I need one more sleep cycle. But okay, yes, I'm up. But, so yeah, I've done a lot of that myself cause it's, you know, when you're doing a podcast and doing the health and fitness and you know, this is my thing now, I make that a priority to, to experiment. And I think everyone should do these experiments. And what's really cool about your book is that you give us a lot of experiments. There's a lot in here that we can't get into all of it. But I did want to cover one more thing before we really get going. And because I do interview a lot of people and I'm fairly agnostic with what people eat.

Allan (28:51):
You're gonna eat the way you're going to eat and it's either going to serve you or it's not. So you need to do those experiments because experiments are good for you. But one of the things, like I said, I really liked about your book was that it just kind of broke through all of that and it said there's gonna be periods of the year that you would just naturally be a vegan because it's the blueberries are there, the vegetables and fruits are there and they're in abundance and you're going to be just doing that. You're still going to get your protein and do your thing. So I do want to get into the protein aspects cause I think that's another huge thing. But then you say, okay, when we get around to the winter time there's not any more blueberries, there's not as many leafy greens though our diet would naturally have changed. So you kind of break through the diet tribalism cause it gets very tribal.

Dallas (29:42):
Absolutely. Well, and I think, you know, one of the points I make in the book and I'll make here as well, is that one of the reasons why we have such sort of fractured tribal perspectives on nutritionist because this science is extremely inconsistent in its conclusions. You can find a you know, a research paper that says people should eat only meat. You can find a research paper that says research paper that says people should be vegan, they should be extremely low fat, they should be high fat, low carb and everywhere in between. We look at Mediterranean diets and paleo diets and ketogenic diets. Like there's all of these different things that are really often in quite sort of conflict with each other, but yet there's research to support all of them. And I view that like you, I mean I have a, a broad evolutionary template that says the things that are most likely going to nourish us well are the things that have been around for the longest.

Dallas (30:37):
So it goes back to the meat, seafood, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds and naturally occurring fat sources, which from a conceptual standpoint, it looks like a quote unquote paleo diet. But I'm less concerned with what is technically paleolithic and more concerned with like, does this make me healthier? And the beautiful thing that is written into, and not because I wrote it in, but because it's in all of us, and this is to your point, the beautiful thing it's written into our physiology is the ability to adapt to many different nutritional inputs. And so what we have in the research is evidence that we can adapt in positive ways to a low fat, high vegetable kind of plant based or vegetarian diet. We can also adapt to a meat and fat-based low carbohydrate or even kenogenic dietary approach. We can adapt to something that is more moderate, like a sort of meat and vegetables, paleo approach.

Dallas (31:36):
We can adapt to something like a Mediterranean diet that is rich in many different types of micronutrients. But there's a lot of commonality in all of these things. And so what I look for is patterns and commonality. And what I see in commonality is that the nutritional research that across the board, the nutritional principles that make people healthier include whole food sources, adequate dietary protein, plenty of nutrient-dense plant matter and some variation across the course of time. And one of the weaknesses of nutritional research is that they're typically difficult to control short term studies. And so we can come to all sorts of different conclusions with these different dietary approaches. I think there's an opportunity to recognize that the human omnivore is so amazingly adaptable to all these different inputs that we have a seasonal opportunity to implement and gain the benefits of many of these approaches.

Dallas (32:35):
So for example, a springtime diet that is rich in tender greens and healthy fat sources like avocado and olive oil and rich in foods like poultry and seafood would look a lot like a Mediterranean diet. A summer diet of a wide variety of vegetables and starts your roots and fruit, especially fruit in the kind of mid and late summer and is lighter on the kind of meat and fat approach. Looks a lot like a sort of plant based diet that still does include some whole, some complete protein sources, but it looks a lot more like that sort of, you know, what is what we now describe as plant-based. A fall diet might look like a paleo type diet that is again still based on whole foods that has both meat and vegetables present in wide amounts. So there's an amazing opportunity there to gain all those benefits to not have to become really zealous and dogmatic about our nutritional approaches and also still to have all of the health producing benefits of these different dietary approaches.

Dallas (33:38):
So I think that's fascinating because it explains all of the nutritional, the conflicting nutritional information and it just sort of takes away the charge from the diet wars and says, actually here's what works, here's what we know and here's what basically everyone in the nutritional realm would agree on. And that's why I like someone like Michael Paulin, such a sane, moderate research and kind of research based and grounded approach. Like eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Like that's such a beautiful synopsis of that. And I really support simple solutions. So, I think that's a fun way to kind of take some of the charge and the confrontation out of discussions around nutrition.

Allan (34:22):
Yeah. Because if you eat that you're, you're not just going to die. But now I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Dallas (34:37):
Ooh, that's such a great question. So I think, I like simple ones. So here's one in the realm of nutrition which is start moving towards eating foods that are, that are available locally and seasonally. And that in the summertime is really easy because there's a wide range of things, you know, going to your local farmer's market is a great way to do that. In the winter time, especially in the higher latitudes, that gets a lot more restrictive. So it might be more challenging there to be limiting some of the more processed foods and especially carbohydrate sources and introducing, and maybe you have to learn how to cook some new things. But the thing, there's also a real adaptive metabolic benefit to restricting carbohydrate to getting a really rich protein source and a lot of healthy dietary fats each meal because we have all of the instance insulin sensitizing and anti-inflammatory effects of that approach as well.

Dallas (35:30):
So there's lots of great stuff there, but it's literally just eat what's available locally. There is the, just tag us in there. Try to do all of your eating during the daylight hours. So not the lights, not the hours when you have the lights on at home, but during the daylight hours because that starts to introduce a natural compressed feeding window or we talk about narrow like early or late feeding window. We talk about intermittent fasting and I think that's a really elegant way to just provide some natural oscillation there. So in the summertime there's very long windows of time when you'd be eating in the winter, they're much, they're much narrower. And then around movement I haven't talked to much about movement so far, but if you are not currently doing a some kind of resistance training, functional fitness training, something that is based that is the anchor for a strong resilient body.

Dallas (36:21):
Introduce that now and lots of times we take, we take people who are somewhat sedentary or who kind of are underactive and we overemphasize the cardio metabolic or the cardiovascular fitness training and we underemphasize getting good joint mobility and having good strength because building strong muscles and bone density and joints that can tolerate very functional ranges of movement is highly correlated with the ability to maintain independence into our later years. So that's one of those things that is an anchor in my program. And I think the last thing I'll say, and again circling back to connection, most of us spend lots of time in easy, shallow, stimulating, fun, light conversations either with coworkers or people on social media or friends. We don't tend to do a much as much of that contractive fall type, deep vulnerable, intimate kind of open, present, grateful grounded communication.

Dallas (37:24):
That would be more like fall. So I would encourage you, whether it's with your partner or spouse or with some of your closest friends your family or children or parents invest in that experience and it's unfamiliar and it's scary and we don't quite know how to do it. And especially for us men, it feels awkward because our fathers didn't probably didn't do very much of that and it might not be viewed as sort of masculine, but really human beings need connection. And I think in general, if this is a safe stereotype, I think men are particularly isolated because society has taught us that we need to be strong and invulnerable and tough and we take care of ourselves. And usually it means it's hard for us to open up about what's going on for us, psycho emotionally, how we are feeling or what we're feeling, what we're experiencing. So this is my support for and suggestion that we do a lot more of that men and women across the board. But I think for us, men, it's a particularly difficult and scary and unfamiliar thing because it wasn't modeled to us in earlier generations. So those are my three.

Allan (38:32):
Great Dallas, thank you. This book, like I said, it really is an awesome book and I, I am going to be going back into it time and time again because there's so many lessons in there. We, we just, we just scratched the surface your, your concepts on anchors and how we're going to do this pivot. How we make it fit into practically fit into getting out of our summers and getting into the lifestyle that's gonna work for us. Again, there's so much there that's not just theoretical, but it's totally practical, really deep, good book. I appreciate the opportunity to read it. I really appreciate the time you've given us to the show. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, where would you like for me to send them?

Dallas (39:16):
They could go to dallashartwig.com. I'm active on Instagram, primarily has social media, which is @DallasHardwig. I've got a mailing list and the book is available on Amazon and Barnes, noble and everywhere else books are sold.

Allan (39:32):
All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/428 and I'll be sure to have links there, but do make sure you get this book. This is one of the best health and fitness books I've read in a long, long time. So Dallas, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dallas (39:47):
Thank you so much for having me

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Melissa Cardinali
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Tim Alexander
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Thank you!

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