Let's Say Hello

[00:04:08.520] – Allan
Hey, Raz, how are things going?

[00:04:10.600] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:04:12.960] – Allan
I'm doing well. I had kind of run out of gas and so I was in a little bit of a panic mode. So I threw out, you know, reached out to four different guests just to see if I could get them on the show. And they all four said yes. I mean, the three of them scheduled for this week. I was like sitting there Thursday night and I get the last one to book and I'm like, they all booked in the same week.

[00:04:38.130] – Allan
So I have a Monday, I have a Tuesday and have a Thursday interview and I have some books to read.

[00:04:43.560] – Rachel
I was going to say, you got a lot to read.

[00:04:46.740] – Allan
They were good books. I'm looking forward to talking to all of them. And as you're listening to this, this is episode 497. And so I've now booked up the plan all the way through the end of August. And so I did that interview and will be doing the other interviews. So we're going be booked up through there. We're going to have our 500th episode coming up. So that's coming up. That'll be a solo show to discuss what we're doing here on the show and celebrate and talk about some of the things we learned this year that are different, maybe things I've learned in the past.

[00:05:20.820] – Allan
But, you know, five hundred is a big accomplishment. But we've got some really cool guests coming, talking about some topics. Obviously, a couple of weeks ago, we had someone talking about stroke and that was requested by a listener. I have another episode coming up that was requested. Someone was talking about binge eating. So we have a binge eating episode coming up soon. And so, you know, and then there's others that just they want something easier.

[00:05:48.100] – Allan
And so I've got a guy that, you know, kind of talks about how to manage moderation and do it, you know, do it the right way for yourself, customize yourself. So it's got some really good episodes coming up. So I'm pretty excited about that. And I've kind of launched this new thing on the Facebook group that you may have noticed if you're in the Facebook group. But every Tuesday night now I'm coming on and doing a Facebook live to answer any questions that anyone has, particularly about the episode that we did that week.

[00:06:18.870] – Allan
So if you're listening to this on Monday or Tuesday during the day, if you can go the Facebook group at 40PlusFitnesspodcast.com/group, get into the Facebook group and I do a live there. I'll answer any questions you have about this episode with Dr. Bubbs. So you know, anything that comes up and you want to know about, about the interview, something he said, something you thought about, a question that came up.

[00:06:44.940] – Allan
I'll do my best to answer on that live. So go to 40PlusFitnesspodcost.com/group and join the 40+ Fitness Podcast Group. And I'll be there live every Tuesday. We do a lot of cool things, challenges. You know, I post a lot of what I think are important things for us to consider in our health and fitness journey. So a lot of value I think there. Come join the group. It's not overwhelming there. You'll be with over sixteen hundred other people that love the show and want to get healthy and fit and we're all over forty, so it's a really cool place to hang out.

[00:07:20.130] – Rachel
Absolutely. And that sounds fun.

[00:07:22.590] – Allan
So what's been going on up there?

[00:07:24.420] – Rachel
Oh, we're doing good through the magic of podcasting. This will be a little bit later. But Mike and I celebrate our birthdays this week and we both turned fifty. So we're getting ready for that big celebration.

[00:07:37.470] – Allan
Congratulations.

[00:07:38.430] – Rachel
Yeah, I'm pretty excited.

[00:07:40.290] – Allan
Well, we need to share this. I think we've said this before, but from a birthday perspective and if I recall, Mike's older by one day.

[00:07:49.050] – Rachel
He is. Yeah.

[00:07:50.160] – Allan
And then your birthday's the very next day.

[00:07:52.350] – Rachel
It is.

[00:07:53.160] – Allan
And you're both the same age. Both turning 50. And so my wife would probably be able to answer this question for me. But when you're both the same astrological sign and the same Chinese sign, how does that work?

[00:08:11.070] – Rachel
We seem to make it work. I think we're a lot the same in many respects and a lot different in many other respects. We have enough yin yang, I think, to make it work. We've actually been married twenty-six years now, so we somehow made that work. Yeah, yeah.

[00:08:27.840] – Allan
But it's over half your life.

[00:08:29.760] – Rachel
It is. It is. Yeah. We both, cancer is known for being stubborn and that's my astrological sign is cancer and, and we're known for being stubborn and we both can be in very different ways.

[00:08:42.960] – Allan
he's in health and safety. So that's kind of a good feel to be in if you're saying

[00:08:46.980] – Rachel
it is. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:08:50.580] – Allan
All right. So you ready to get into our conversation with Doctor Bubbs?

[00:08:53.720] – Rachel
Yep. This will be great.

Interview

[00:09:26.920] – Allan
Dr. Bubbs. Welcome back to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:30.020] – Dr. Bubbs
Allan, I appreciate you having me on. Always good to be back.

[00:09:32.970] – Allan
Yeah. Now, the last time I had you on, we were talking about your book Peak, and it's really where you had done a deep dive into just performance in general. What are the best athletes in the world doing? What does science tell us about why they're so good and why they're getting better? And then you wrote the book that I wanted you to write. I didn't tell you I wanted you to write it, but you wrote it.

[00:09:55.840] – Allan
And it's called Peak 40: The New Science of Midlife Health for a Leaner, Stronger Body and a Sharper Mind. That's a big promise.

[00:10:05.560] – Dr. Bubbs
That is a big promise in there.

[00:10:07.750] – Allan
But you delivered.

[00:10:09.130] – Dr. Bubbs
Well, I appreciate that. It's a funny thing when you're trying to write books. I mean, this one actually came out of the impetus was the book was really working in performance. The coaches and the performance staff were all, you know, like myself in their early 40s or beyond and leading busy lives. It was like, look, I need just the Coles Notes or the that's what we use and saying, you know, the abbreviated version of what I need to do.

[00:10:33.310] – Dr. Bubbs
Right. What are the big rocks? And so and that resonated with me as well with working in the general population. You know, people are so busy in their day to day lives that it's tough to have a big, long list of things to do. And so the goal here was to provide, you know, some of these big rocks, like we say, of how we get to the major things that we can really, you know, try to keep the ball in the fairway, so to speak.

[00:10:56.530] – Dr. Bubbs
You know, we use a golfing metaphor here. Let's keep it somewhere where we can play the next shot. And then all of a sudden people realize, like I'm sure you see in your practice, like all of a sudden we can make some pretty darn good progress if we just start layering in some of these real fundamentals.

[00:11:10.870] – Allan
Yeah. And we call him Cliff Notes in the United States. It's just not just the story. You call them Coles Notes. We call them Cliff Notes. But before I get in, I didn't really talked about this, but I was going back and preparing for this. And I just like this. I can't leave this moment without actually saying this is you talked about kind and wicked as learning environments. And I and it just resonated with me.

[00:11:35.380] – Allan
So I just want to share this and we can go into it a little bit if you want to. But a kind learning environment is basically where things just fall in line. You have immediate feedback, you do something, you see the result. Your golf metaphor is perfect because that's what you talked about. You hit a golf ball. If you hit it well, it went far. It went. We're supposed to go and you're happy with that golf shot.

[00:12:01.080] – Dr. Bubbs
It doesn't feel fine, does it, Allan? like it doesn't feel easier, but it does actually. The result immediately tells you if you know a golf swing, you know exactly what you did wrong in terms of swing playing and everything else. But it is obviously a difficult sport.

[00:12:13.930] – Allan
and so kind doesn't necessarily mean the answer you're getting, the feedback you're getting. It just means you do get that feedback. Whereas we're learning environments are where you have to just stick with it and it takes so much more planning and patience. And when we're over 40 and we're looking at trying to improve our health, you know, we go into the gym and we do a workout, we eat well for a week and we don't really get immediate feedback.

[00:12:45.550] – Allan
It's sometimes we don't get feedback or sometimes we even get negative feedback is not the feedback we wanted. Well, crap, I eat salad all week and I gained weight. I guess salads make me fat.

[00:12:56.800] – Dr. Bubbs
Exactly.

[00:12:58.870] – Allan
You know, so I just I wanted to tell you that because I think as we go into this, that was just really something I took out of the book that was not unexpected because it is the message. The message is if you don't have planning, which this book gives you the tools, which that's why it's so great of a book and the patience to execute on the things that you'll learn that Dr. Bubbs has written about. This is a great book to give you some huge fundamentals, those big rocks that you were talking about to really move the needle.

[00:13:31.330] – Dr. Bubbs
Well, it's interesting that you hit on a couple of things that I mean, one of them is the human aspect of this whole story, which is the fact that regardless if you're the most rational scientist, doctor, lawyer or whomever, the human part of us, even knowing your business in your work life or your finances, you'd never think you're going to, you know, you return on investment it's going to be 100 to one in a month. When we talk about weight loss, all of a sudden, you know, rationality goes out the window and we're wondering why in 30 days we haven't lost 30 pounds.

[00:13:59.290] – Dr. Bubbs
And of course, that's the message, you know, rapid transformation so much the message that we get. But compounding things is this idea of like a wicked learning environment. And it's interesting because years ago I actually lived in the south of France teaching English and the method they used, you'd have to speak to the French people only in English. You never translated anything. Of course, they couldn't speak English, and so they found it incredibly difficult to start with.

[00:14:26.450] – Dr. Bubbs
And it's interesting because research in this area compared this is what this program was built on compared to the classic, you know, you learn Spanish, you learn French and you memorize a bunch of words. And when the researchers then asked those students how they felt that they were doing, they all felt like they were learning really well. Now, the other group in the study was doing like I had done in France, which is they were in a full immersion.

[00:14:48.740] – Dr. Bubbs
So they no one could speak to them in their mother tongue. They had to just grind through it. And when you when the researchers asked them how they were doing, they said they were doing horribly. You know, I'm not learning anything. And of course, six months later, they do this sort of immersion test. And, of course, the people who scored 90 percent on their test because they memorized all the words, once you actually put them in an environment where they had to speak French or Spanish, they were awful.

[00:15:12.650] – Dr. Bubbs
Right, because they hadn't actually practiced it, whereas the ones who thought they were awful the whole time by being in this complete immersion could actually do it well. And so that idea of linear progression is what we're talking about here. We're so used to making progress in steps that to go to muddle through weeks and months and feel like you're not making progress, even though you are, because you're laying down the right foundations for how you eat the right habits, the right training.

[00:15:37.130] – Dr. Bubbs
And it does take some time. That's one of the hardest things. I mean, it's and ironically, it circles back to Pete because this is one of the reasons why elite athletes and Olympians are so great, because they find a way to get through. You know, it's not because they're doing some fancy new workout or they've got a special supplement. It's because they can get through all these day after day, week after week of this training. And they accept the fact that this trajectory is going to be, you know, slow.

[00:16:03.290] – Dr. Bubbs
Right. If you get one percent stronger, if you're an Olympic athlete, that's tremendous work in a year. Right. So it's up. But I think when people when we present that more to clients and we let them know that we've traveled down this road and this is the expectation and we're going to get you to where you want to go. And the best part, of course, is if you use that method to get there once you arrive, it's not a free fall back to where you started from.

[00:16:26.090] – Dr. Bubbs
Once you know, you make a mistake or you go off the rails a little bit.

[00:16:31.190] – Allan
Yeah. And so I just thought that was a really important concept because so many people expect that immediate I did this, therefore that like this, if that, you know, it's so but it doesn't happen that way. And so that was really cool. Now another thing you got into the book, which again is you got into it. I was like, whoa, that's a little deep because and I knew this empirically because, you know, when we look at the standard, so something says, OK, you should, your BMI should be this and your blood pressure should be this and your height should be this.

[00:17:08.060] – Allan
And, you know, we go through all those things and what we what you come to find out when you actually get down below it is that all of these things are really sort of averages for a general person, you know? And so, you know, I don't think any of us are average across the board. We're exceptional in some places and we're not so good in others. So as you look at fasting blood glucose level, I was like, this is interesting because what you which use some of the studies you touched on, one of them was in diabetes care and another was in scientific reports, and one of them was nineteen ninety nine, the others in twenty seventeen.

[00:17:44.520] – Allan
So this is research that's been ongoing is that even though you're in the reference range, as they call it, you might not be optimized, you might not have really a good chance that might actually be better from a longevity perspective, from a health perspective to be a little bit more optimized. And you talked about how the current range for blood glucose level might not be good enough. And we might actually want to start not just being high normal, but really pushing ourselves down.

[00:18:15.890] – Dr. Bubbs
Yeah. Again, it's that idea, like in our work life, if we're getting feedback, if the project isn't to that a standard that we want, we don't accept that it's a B and just say, oh, it's good enough. We investigate. We say, how can we make this a top class or A level? And so the challenge in medicine is that so many people are unwell. So for a GP who's sitting there all day long saying twenty or twenty four patients, two thirds of the population are overweight or obese.

[00:18:42.620] – Dr. Bubbs
And so they're seeing blood sugar levels in the nines, tens and elevens. And so when somebody walks in and they're fasting, glucose is five point eight or five point nine, for the day that's you know, that's actually pretty good. And so oftentimes they won't get a recommendation or the doctor won't tell them anything. And that's you know, I don't necessarily blame the doc for that. But it is this idea that we've got to start. You know, if you're the individual listening to this and obviously listen to yourself, they've probably got none of this already of just being able to compare yourself to yourself every year, because the first you know, the first post to the goal to meet is that you're in the normal range, that's the first place you want to get to.

[00:19:21.470] – Dr. Bubbs
But after you're in there, this idea that just because you're within the normal range, you're still doing well is a problem because I've had, as I'm sure you've had, you know, the client comes in, they're 20 pounds overweight, their waist is 40 inches around the belly or more. And they say to you that their doctor told them they're in perfect health and you can see their lives and say, wait a minute, you know, I got this is a bit of a stretch here because perfect is a little.

[00:19:46.720] – Dr. Bubbs
And so what we see in the evidence is the idea that if you're at this high, normal range, you're still at a much greater risk for cardiovascular events. And so the idea around midlife health is that, you know, in midlife works, really busy in the home life, really busy, and you might be caring for young kids or older parents or even both. And so, you know, we are more at risk for various conditions and low mood and other things are part of that, which actually ties in quite tightly to the story around blood sugars.

[00:20:14.950] – Dr. Bubbs
And so really, it's more conversation to have an opportunity really for. I do talk to tell clients, say, hey, look, you're doing well, but at five point eight, we can still see a significant difference if we could get that fasting glucose down towards five, you know, definitely less than five point four. And so it's a conversation to say, what are you doing on the nutrition front? What are you doing in the exercise front?

[00:20:35.380] – Dr. Bubbs
What does that sleep or stress look like? What lever can we move there to be able to get some more wins, you know, to be able to nudge things in the right direction? Because, again, the nice part is you don't have to make a dramatic change. You just need to make a few small changes. And, again, you know, repeat them over time. But to circle back, I think the biggest problem, as we see some of you are so sick that those others kind of fly under the radar.

[00:21:00.010] – Dr. Bubbs
And, you know, I'm sure you hear they get frustrated, too, because they're still not losing that 20 pounds and they still feel like their energy is low or they're not sleeping as well or the libido is not where it wants to be. And that's a part of this whole story.

[00:21:12.550] – Allan
Yeah. And then again, in the end, when we're talking about performance, it's performing for your life. So if you can make that better then this is an approach. And again, the connection to the longevity was really something that kind of floored me. It's like, oh, so I can actually be in the normal range. My doctors happy. He's got a big smile. He spent his seven minutes with me and said, oh, your labs turned out great.

[00:21:36.250] – Allan
I'll talk to you next time. Oh, by the way, you need to lose some weight. And then he walks out the door and

[00:21:42.700] – Dr. Bubbs
wait a minute, what am I? Am I great? I'm going to lose some weight? And this is where like an American unit to be less than ninety four is kind of what we aim for or in international units, 5.0 millimoles per liter. But that's a good fasting glucose is a really good marker or your HA1C is another one, you know, that's your HP1C that's your three month average for blood glucose and again less than five point four, five to five point four is what we're after.

[00:22:08.530] – Dr. Bubbs
And so those just act as a way to tell us, like, do you have the right diet for you, regardless if it's low carb or low fat or everything else in between? That starts to tell us, like, wait a minute, if you're still at five point seven or five point eight or your fasting glucose is at one hundred and five or 110, you know, you're not all the way home yet. We've got to continue this.

[00:22:29.320] – Dr. Bubbs
We've got to, you know, like detective work, start to unpack things a little bit more and figure out where those those gaps are.

[00:22:36.160] – Allan
Yeah. Now, I was very fortunate in my kind of fitness journey and health journey was that I fell into a lot of things. I got a little lucky is the best way I can say it. The things when I found the things that worked and one of the things that really worked well for me was fasted exercise.

[00:22:55.060] – Dr. Bubbs
Cool.

[00:22:55.480] – Allan
And it was just one of those things to me saying, you know, if I get up in the morning and what was it was twofold.

[00:23:00.130] – Allan
One, if I got up in the morning and did my exercise, it was going to get done that day. You know, it's kind of like. The general says that makes you make your bed because you have a small win. For me, it was like if I just get some exercise in in the morning. And so a lot of my programs that I would put together would just say, let's let's even if it's just going for a walk, a 30 minute walk, when you first get up in the morning, you know, hydrate, go the bathroom and then just take your dog for a walk or go for a nice little walk.

[00:23:29.440] – Allan
And I said it's literally going to help you lose weight faster. And the funny thing is, is there's still a lot of people that will argue and say, no, it's calories, a calorie. You're not going to lose fat or anything. But I just don't empirically. And it's anecdotal from my perspective, until you actually, again, pointed to a study because your book is extremely science based. And it basically was it was in the Journal of Nutrition in 2019.

[00:23:55.930] – Allan
That is basically if you're exercising before breakfast, you're giving yourself a competitive advantage for weight loss.

[00:24:03.880] – Dr. Bubbs
I mean, it's a fascinating topic, everything around breakfast and timing of exercise. And there's a group out at the University of Bath and it's called the Bath Breakfast Project. So the group of researchers that are investigating everything around breakfast in terms of the types of breakfast we eat and whether we exercise before or after. And the really cool thing here is that if for someone who is overweight or trying to lose weight. When you do exercise in the fasted state, it's amazing that our body, it needs fuel, right?

[00:24:31.510] – Dr. Bubbs
And of course, we have fuel on our bodies. So even if you're 10 percent body fat, so you're lean, you've got almost a six pack, you still have thirty thousand calories of energy on your body, which means you could run like seven or eight marathons with nothing. So you imagine someone who's 20 percent or 30 percent. We've got all this energy, right. So it's your point, you wake up in the morning, you might not feel like you have the energy, but the cool thing, if you do resistance training on the one hand.

[00:24:59.450] – Dr. Bubbs
The fat within your muscles, which is called intramuscular fat, you actually start improving your ability, your body does the ability to use that fat as a fuel source for your muscle. Now, it gets really interesting here because insulin is the blood sugar hormone. And if you're more prediabetic or diabetic or overweight with a lot of central adiposity, so belly fat, then you have really high insulin levels. And that's not a good thing for longevity. Some of the original research, Dr.

[00:25:26.300] – Dr. Bubbs
Gerald Evan Stanford Medical School back in two thousand show that that's a you know, that's a big risk factor for cardiovascular disease, cancers, dementia. And so, when you train in the morning, you do resistance training, you use more intramuscular fat, and that's really correlated with really lowering this insulin in, you know, your chronic levels of insulin. And so it's a great way to, you know, you're basically moving your body in a state where there's not a lot in the fuel tank coming from the food you're eating.

[00:25:58.370] – Dr. Bubbs
So your body has to use what's in the reserves. So your body fat starts to really kick things up. And it's amazing how that is a powerful signal. And it happens also on the aerobics side. So, you know, it's a little bit different in terms of the pathway. But when you haven't eaten anything and you go off and I love your point there, but like even walking, because what people struggle with is especially if they've exercised in the past.

[00:26:22.520] – Dr. Bubbs
And then I tell them, hey, look, just get up and go for a walk. And if there a type A personality, they think you're giving them like the lower version of things and they're all I don't want to do that. That's not you know, that's not intense enough. And they don't realize that the goal is actually just to train yourself to get up and do something. It's almost like, I don't care what you do.

[00:26:40.020] – Dr. Bubbs
I just want you to get used to waking up at six or six thirty or whatever it is and do something, because that's actually the hardest part right? The getting out of bed part. And I'm sure you've seen this. You get somebody walking and then by the end of the week, without even telling them they might start jogging a little bit or by the end of two weeks, they're running in the morning. But had you suggested that right off the bat, they would have gone, oh man, the first morning they wake up and it sort of feels too intense, then we've got some cool studies to show that right.

[00:27:08.370] – Dr. Bubbs
You ask someone to go down and give you 30 pushups and, you know, something like 30 percent of the group wants to do it. You ask someone to go down and give you one push up. Almost one hundred percent of the group wants to do it. And at the end of the day, both groups are actually quite similar to the amount of pushups they can do. So it's this idea like if you can just get the person down on the floor ready to do one, once they're down there, they're going to show you what they got.

[00:27:34.830] – Dr. Bubbs
And it's the same with that morning movement piece. And so, just what you said, I think the fact that life is busy in midlife is like if we can carve this out in the morning, is great. I know people's schedules are different. So for some people, could even be after dinner, you know, rather than, you know, we all fall prey to like the Netflix and Red Wine or whatever might be a bottle of beer.

[00:27:55.410] – Dr. Bubbs
But like, if we can do some movement after dinner, if that's the only time you can get it in. And that's a pretty good time, too. And that way you get into that natural rhythm and you can start making some progress.

[00:28:06.690] – Allan
Yeah. And I've actually seen a study that said if you do some movement after you eat, it actually helps with blood sugar regulation. So, again, there's no bad time to exercise. It's just when you can get it in and which you enjoy doing and just the consistency of doing it.

[00:28:23.160] – Dr. Bubbs
100 percent. I mean, that's one of the things where, you know, we're in an Olympic year this year. And back to that morning analogy like, olympic athletes don't wake up in the morning doing cartwheels like it's five thirty in the morning and they're jumping out of bed with a big smile on their face right there. They don't know. They don't want to get out of bed and trained a lot of mornings. But the big difference, and this is part of the notion that we talk about in the Book of Building Habits is that the rest of us wake up in the morning.

[00:28:47.900] – Dr. Bubbs
When the alarm goes off. We still ask that question, like, should I get up? Should I not get up? And do I really want to go for a run? Whereas the people in this example, the you know, the athletes, the Olympic athletes, there's not a question anymore. The alarm goes off that that alarm triggers the action. They roll themselves out of bed and they just get on with it. And you'll often hear people say, well, I could never do that.

[00:29:10.640] – Dr. Bubbs
And then I say to them, what? What's the first thing you do when you sit in your car? We put your seatbelt on, right? Well, you're not thinking about that anymore. You're not motivated or inspired or you start even disciplined. You just literally the environment of sitting in that chair triggers this automatic reaction. And it's interesting how we can you know, everybody does that and so we can start to use that to implement. You know, that's ultimately what we want to do in nutrition and exercise.

[00:29:35.030] – Dr. Bubbs
We don't want you to make decisions all day long. We want to start as best we can integrating some of these things that are just what you do rather than having to think so much about it.

[00:29:42.800] – Allan
Yeah, and with an athlete, the way you're talking to competitive athletes and Olympians is, you know, first they start off with a commitment. They're going to do this and then it becomes a habit. And, you know, it's the whole point of in a way I like to say it is if your spouse needed you to pick them up at the airport at five o'clock in the morning. Guess where you are at five o'clock in the morning? You don't roll out and say, I really don't want to do this and hit your snooze alarm and ignore their text and then the letter from your divorce attorney.

[00:30:13.670] – Dr. Bubbs
exactly.

[00:30:14.870] – Allan
You know, so no, you show up where you're supposed to be. And so it's just kind of getting that thing, that ball rolling. And to know that doing this physical activity first thing in the morning before your breakfast is actually doing you more good than just doing it really kind of needs to be a huge incentive to say, yeah, get up, do something, start something. That work, even if it doesn't feel intense, is really kind of changing you and getting you better and helping you with your performance as just being a good human and a healthy parent, a healthy grandparent and all of that.

[00:30:48.230] – Dr. Bubbs
100 percent.

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[00:33:02.560] – Allan
One of the things you got into in the book is you got into protein, and this is a topic I think I read about or talk about nearly every single day, you know, because, you know, if I'm talking to a vegan or vegetarian, then the topic will always come up is where do you get your protein?

[00:33:22.120] – Allan
And I tell people it's like it's in all of that. You just have to mix and match. And then someone who is like animal protein and like, that's great protein. If you want to eat animals, that's great, too. I loved your approach coming in, basically just saying to both, you know.

[00:33:39.430] – Dr. Bubbs
Yeah. I mean, it's I mean, in the book we basically set like a minimum level and people say, well, more it. Sure. But again, the idea with the book is that if we use a golf analogy, like if you play a par three with Tiger Woods and even if you're a 10 handicap, if Tiger hits a really good shot and you hit a really good shot, you're probably not too different in terms of where the ball is.

[00:34:01.550] – Dr. Bubbs
But the difference is if Tiger hits his worst shot he's got, he's still on the green, whereas if an amateur hits the worst shot, the 20 hours in the bush and they're, you know, they've lost their ball.

[00:34:11.730] – Allan
And so we heard a splash. We just heard a splash.

[00:34:14.080] – Dr. Bubbs
That's so it was like. And so this idea that we've got to start like, you know, the worst day that we have is just going to be better, right. Rather than always focusing on trying to be people want to be great, but then it's hard to maintain it. And then all of a sudden they fall off the wagon. And so, you know, the minimum the idea for this minimum of one point two grams of protein per kilogram body weight per day, which if you divide, you know, for Canadian or American, you take your body weight in pounds and divide that by two point two.

[00:34:42.820] – Dr. Bubbs
You know, this is a number that some of the best protein researchers like Stu Phillips of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and The US leads back in the U.K., in their research, have found that as we age, if we can maintain this amount of protein, minimum amount in the 50s, 60s, 70s, it really helps to fight off sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle associated with aging. And that's actually a huge problem when we talk about longevity and wellness.

[00:35:08.320] – Dr. Bubbs
Like once you start losing muscle mass, you know, a lot of bad things start to happen after that. And so, again, it's about setting up this rhythm that if you can just start to hit this as part of your daily rhythm every day and you just know that you're getting this one point two grams per kilo, you can actually stop thinking about protein a little bit. I mean, there's scenarios where you might want more, etc., but you can then, you know, focus on other areas like carbs or fats or whatever else.

[00:35:32.890] – Dr. Bubbs
But that's a really big one, because as much as people think they're eating a lot of protein and, you know, you mentioned, you know, plant based or vegan, they'll often say, well, I've heard that before, I'm fine. But I'm sure you've seen once you actually go through and calculate things, even for meat eaters, you're saying, well, wait a minute, you know, we're barely at the RDA, which is zero point eight.

[00:35:54.730] – Dr. Bubbs
And and we're wondering why, you know, we're leaving a lot of gains out here if we're not at least getting to one point two. And even there we see in the research, if you climb up to the one point six, you're still going to get some significant benefits. So, you know, it's a great place to start to build out your diet is like, where is the protein on my plate? And then from there figuring out, you know, the rest.

[00:36:15.200] – Allan
Yeah, you do center on protein as kind of the starting point of deciding which you're going to eat. And, you know, yes, I have a client. I meet a client, I start talking and we start looking at their nutrition. And it's like they're eating 60 grams, maybe 65 grams of protein in a day. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, you're about to start lifting weights with me. I need you to bump that up considerably.

[00:36:40.630] – Allan
And then there's this fear. They're like, well, won't that harm my kidneys? Can I eat too much protein? And you kind of dove into that, you know, that people might not be able to eat too much protein, can you talk a little bit about is there a protein limit?

[00:36:56.190] – Dr. Bubbs
I mean, that's one of the biggest hangovers that still lingers in medical schools, is this idea that if we eat too much, protein is bad for our kidneys. And this really stems from if someone has type two diabetic and is having renal failure typically is the issue where we do need to be mindful of the amount of protein because the kidneys struggle to cope with it. And of course, it's almost like lost in translation. That's then got the notion of, well, if anybody consumes X amount of protein or too much protein, they're going to have issues with their kidneys.

[00:37:23.130] – Dr. Bubbs
I mean, we have studies now that for the course of one entire year, individuals consumed three point zero grams per kilogram, which is almost triple what we suggest here. And there's still no adverse effects on kidney function. And so I think one of the things, you know, this obviously is safe for the kidneys, and that's what all the protein experts will tell you. And we see more and more doctors now realizing this. And the evidence is really clear.

[00:37:45.480] – Dr. Bubbs
I mean, it's not even you know, it's very, very clear. But in addition to this, the thing that I talk about in the book, as well as this idea that vegetables are great for you, eat lots of those, but when you increase your protein intake, you also dramatically increase your micronutrients data. So you bring on board more vitamins and minerals, which we often just associate with plants and the vegetables that we're eating, but animal proteins and plant proteins as well.

[00:38:12.360] – Dr. Bubbs
But I think animal proteins often get left out on this is they're tremendously nutrient dense. And so, you know, making sure you get those in is, in effect, acting like a multivitamin. You know, you're getting you know, you're one a day or all the key vitamins and minerals that you're after.

[00:38:28.710] – Allan
Now, one of the other concepts before we get off of protein that I thought was really important that I say this all the time. It's about the quality. So when we talk about the quality of protein, what does that actually mean and how do we how do we achieve that?

[00:38:47.570] – Dr. Bubbs
Yeah, I mean, I think this is interesting when we start to look at populations around the world and we could probably even expand this to just the overall diet quality like the quality of the entire diet, because the conversation, one of the reasons why we tend to fear animal protein is because if we increase saturated fat in the diet, we can increase LDL cholesterol, which is quote unquote, the bad cholesterol. And that plays an important role in the progression of atherosclerosis, which is the narrowing of the arteries, which predisposes you more to heart attacks and strokes.

[00:39:19.160] – Dr. Bubbs
And so, heck, that's not good. We don't want that right? Now, there's a lot of nuance in this whole story because, you know, first off, we often hear steak, eggs, dairy, watch out they're high saturated fat foods. They certainly do contain some. But, you know, almonds contain double two and a half times as many saturated fats as 100 grams serving of steak. And you don't hear people saying, well, listen, almonds are going to cause you problems or dark chocolate or whatnot.

[00:39:48.710] – Dr. Bubbs
And so, you know, the foods that are richest in saturated fat are things like pizza, grain based desserts, sausages, hamburgers, all these processed meats and processed foods. And so, you know, that's the first place that we look at. But it gets even more interesting when you look at the countries around the world, because there are certain countries that have removed this upper limit, which in America we still have this upper limit that says, you should only consume 10 percent of your total caloric intake from saturated fats.

[00:40:17.660] – Dr. Bubbs
If you go above that, it can be a problem. Now, it gets interesting because you go to Spain and by 20, 40, the Spanish will be the longest living people on the planet and they eat more than 10 percent saturated fat and think, OK, maybe that's a one off, we go to France. Same thing, one of the longest living countries in the world. They also consume more than 10 percent. And this is the notion where diet quality matters, like if your saturated fats coming from real food, from steak and eggs and these types of things, and you're eating a lot of vegetables and whole foods, it looks as though that's not as big an adverse impact.

[00:40:54.230] – Dr. Bubbs
Right. You're not going to have this adverse cardiovascular effect because we see, you know, in places like Spain and France, thirty two or thirty eight deaths per 100000 from heart attack, whereas in the United States we see almost 80. Right. So more than double. And this is the idea where if you're saturated fats are coming from all those ultra processed foods. Right. Like the take out pizza, the quick hamburger or the sausage, and you're overweight.

[00:41:20.690] – Dr. Bubbs
This creates the perfect storm for all these bad issues to happen. And so, you know, if you're someone listening in and you don't like to eat meat or you don't want to eat meat, we don't tell you this to force it upon you. But I think too often I see people who are overweight who are avoiding these foods because they think it's, quote unquote, bad for them. But an effect of that is we don't achieve the protein intake and the foods that they choose to eat actually have a lot more calories in them.

[00:41:45.920] – Dr. Bubbs
And now if we're not losing weight, then we're not going to be improving blood sugars. We're not going to be lowering inflammation. And this is where we get into a real problem, because now we're you know, we're really stuck in that risk is not going to go down.

[00:41:58.150] – Allan
Now, I see that too as someone to sit there and say, well, you know, I don't want to eat that much meat and I want to get my protein. So I buy this vegan protein shake at this certain place. And I go to that place and look up the nutrition information and say, OK, well, it's got, you know, thirty nine grams of carbs, I mean, sugar. And I'm like, so that's like drinking a so-called soft drink.

[00:42:20.650] – Allan
I mean, quite literally drinking a soft drink. And you might be getting 20 grams of protein out of that. But, you know, it's not just protein and it's processed stuff and it's a lot of sugar. And so, yeah, I think it's too easy to get roped into this. The simple is the way and it's just, you know, go ahead and avoid these, you know, set these simple rules, avoid saturated fat, avoid animal products, avoid that.

[00:42:46.930] – Allan
And you can get yourself roped into a just kind of making mistakes only because you're listening and trying to fit it in and and also because you like that particular flavor of shake.

[00:42:59.320] – Dr. Bubbs
Well, and the other thing, too. Yeah. I mean, if you're a plant based or vegan and oftentimes I see people have problems, I'm like, I don't see them eating any lentils. I don't see them eating any tempe and eating all these processed, you know, meat substitutes and say, wait a minute, you can't if you're plant based and you're still eating a processed food diet, that's still not good. And it might even be worse than an animal based processed food diet.

[00:43:22.900] – Dr. Bubbs
And it's like we've got to get back to your point here, like eating real food. You want 20 grams or 30 grams of plant based protein. Well, let's have some lentils. Let's have some tempe or whatnot or a shake that has less sugar than the one you mentioned, because otherwise, yeah, you're still causing a lot of the same problems just with a different type of strategy.

[00:43:43.630] – Allan
Yeah. Now, one area you got into the book that I think is far overlooked in the health and wellness space is because we're like, OK, well, here's your nutrition, here's your fitness. Go lose some weight, get stronger and you're good. And many people will sit there and kind of put this concept of when I get to a particular weight, I'm going to be happy. Yeah. Now,

[00:44:09.070] – Dr. Bubbs
when I win an Olympic medal, I'll be happy.

[00:44:12.820] – Allan
I'll be happy.

[00:44:13.960] – Allan
Right. And that day may or may not ever come, but you get to that weight and it's not there. And so you talk about awe and happiness and they're related in my opinion. Awe gives you happiness. Awe is the moments that you're happiest because you're just looking at the world in a way that's just it's opening you up to just what, what's possible. Why should we commit to all Awe.

[00:44:42.080] – Dr. Bubbs
I mean this is sort of the underpinning of the whole book with this idea that. Well, first off, Mindset's. You know, the six inches between our ears is the reason why we succeed or don't succeed. And so with that as the backdrop and again, this is regardless if it's you or I or someone working a nine to five is trying to achieve their goals or even an Olympian, it's still you know, that mindset that we bring is really what's going to make us or break us.

[00:45:07.420] – Dr. Bubbs
And the really, you know, at first kind of depressing thing in midlife is how I open the book with this U shaped happiness curve, which Professor David Blanchflower, Dartmouth University goes around the world than the one hundred and thirty five countries. They measure all these indices of happiness and realize that it doesn't matter if you're in America, South America, Europe, Asia by midlife and are between 41 to 48. Effectively, we have this dip, our lowest point of the happiness index, which on the surface sounds a little bit like, oh geez, really?

[00:45:38.440] – Dr. Bubbs
That sounds like a long time, seven years, but really more than likely reflects the fact that we're just at our busiest. We got all these demands on our time, we're sleeping less, etc.. Now, why is that important to this whole conversation? Well, if we don't if we know that, let's say if you don't sleep sufficiently, if you don't get that at least seven hours a night, it's more difficult to disengage from negative thoughts. Tonight,

[00:46:02.170] – Dr. Bubbs
You wake up in the morning. I think we'll forget that. I'm not getting up to run because, you know, we can make up an excuse, right. It gets harder now to build the habits that we need. And so this is one of the major roadblocks we see with clients in midlife is that, you know, the mindset is such that we're sort of stuck in this bit of a rut, if you will, or we've tried to achieve those weight loss goals, health goals so many times that as soon as something goes wrong or as soon as we get to a roadblock, you know, it's like a loop that plays back in our minds and we start self sabotaging and thinking it's not going to work out.

[00:46:37.810] – Dr. Bubbs
And so, you know, this connection to awe, really, how do we rather than this progression of if I achieve the promotion, if I achieve the weight loss goal, if I achieve my dream of the Olympics, then I get to happiness. The cool thing, again, from a performance standpoint, is in elite sport, they're flipping that whole model to say how do we create happiness in this person to allow them to express their potential? Because even if you achieve your weight loss goal, guess what happens tomorrow morning?

[00:47:08.800] – Dr. Bubbs
You still need to wake up and do something, you still need to eat something, you still need to train a certain way, like there's you know, the world keeps moving. And so how do we build that mindset? How do we start to reshape, you know, how we think and how we feel, you know, whether it's optimism, self talk, all these types of things? And this is where we circle back to this conversation are awe because I think with the backdrop of the latest pandemic, we've seen how people's moods have been impacted.

[00:47:37.060] – Dr. Bubbs
And so what's the easiest way to impact, you know, mood and happiness? And when we look, you know, there's two components to happiness. One of them is life satisfaction, which is effectively, you know, how satisfied are you with your life? And that actually does trend really closely with your income. So you tend to be more satisfied with your life if you have higher earning power. But the other part of happiness is the subjective part.

[00:48:02.750] – Dr. Bubbs
Which means, are you happy in your life? And that actually has no correlation with income. It might. In fact, when you get to a high enough bracket, it actually impacts negatively. And so the crazy part about awe, which is awe is basically just walking out into nature, you know, forests, seeing mountains and ocean, even pictures of it. Awe is even listening to, like a song that really resonates for you or a speech that makes you feel a certain way and that actually triggers both aspects.

[00:48:32.340] – Dr. Bubbs
It's a positive emotion. It triggers both aspects of happiness. And so, you know, some really cool research by Dr. Amy Gordon at Cal Berkeley and even our day to day lives, if you can actually in a week, find a couple of things that are, that allow you to experience that, so if you can scroll through your Instagram rather than comparing yourself to somebody, look through some landscapes or listen to some music, it actually has this really beneficial effect for, you know, emotions and positive emotions, which, you know, by itself isn't going to move the needle.

[00:49:07.740] – Dr. Bubbs
But it allows you then to take that step towards saying, I'm going to do a little bit more, you know, positive self talk exercise or I'm going to train myself a bit more to be optimistic. Because the funny part is these are actually like these are trainable skills. We often think of them as just traits like that's a positive person. I'm a skeptical person. But one of the analogies I like metaphors that's really great is this idea. Like, you don't show up to the championship game and expect to score 40 points if you've never practiced.

[00:49:38.370] – Dr. Bubbs
And how many of us really practice our mindset skills. Right. And until recently, it's really flown under the radar. And so I think for some of us in midlife, it feels kind of weird to sort of circle back to that. But, you know, one of the ways in which I outline is and which I've seen it, the experts that I work with and in sport right now is this notion of going back to your values. So if I need you to develop a new habit.

[00:50:04.090] – Dr. Bubbs
It helps a little bit if you want to hit a certain number on the scale, but it really helps if your values or the fact that you want to take care of your you know, you want to spend quality time with your kids and have enough energy for them, but you're 30 pounds overweight. And if you don't do it, it's going to adversely impact that relationship and your ability. Now, all of a sudden, we've got this you know, you can really see that the North Star there is that value.

[00:50:26.000] – Dr. Bubbs
And if you're staying up late watching, you know, crappy TV and snacking on things, it just becomes more obvious. And so that's been one thing over time that's really struck out for me in my practices, you know, limiting the amount of things that get people to do, being more just like here's the one or two things you want to do and allowing them the space to see that, you know, hey, this is your goal.

[00:50:48.530] – Dr. Bubbs
You want to be more energetic, to thrive in your business or at home. Well, these are the things that you're doing. Do you think those are in alignment? And when you can let people start and they make those connections quite quickly and all of a sudden it's amazing how almost like snapping your fingers, people who struggled to do a behavior for weeks or months can all of a sudden really jump on board.

[00:51:10.100] – Allan
Dr. Bubbs. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:51:20.420] – Dr. Bubbs
that's a great question. I mean. The way again, this whole idea of being busy in the madness and hectics of midlife is coming back to simple rules that we can remember. When we're busy and when we fall off the wagon and we fall out, you know, we go off path, it's easy to remember these heuristics, right? These simple rules to come back to us. What I would like to tell people is, if you can start your morning well, in the book we call Master your morning.

[00:51:45.610] – Dr. Bubbs
If you can end your day well or not, let things go off the rails with all the late night eating because we know that's where, you know, more than 40 percent of all the calories we consume now come after six o'clock. So if you can start your day well, end your day well and eat enough protein through the day. Three simple things. You'd be amazed at how much progress you can make as the middle of the day actually doesn't matter nearly as much as those other points.

[00:52:07.360] – Dr. Bubbs
And so that would be kind of the quick tips I would give someone that they can go off with and say, hey, eat the right breakfast, try not to snacks in the mid-morning, don't succumb to the late night snacking and get that protein in. And you'd be pretty, pretty amazed at the progress you can make.

[00:52:24.050] – Allan
Awesome. So, Dr. Bubbs, if someone wanted to learn more about you about the book, and I believe you have a seminar, a peak 40 think coming up this fall, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:52:39.380] – Dr. Bubbs
100 percent. Yeah, I appreciate it. You can go to drbubbs.com/peak40 and you'll you know, you'll see some info there. We have a nutrition coaching we do every three times a year. The next one's in the fall, 2021. And so you can check out some information there. We got a peak 40 podcast as well, or a short form podcast, again, sort of 20 minutes an episode to give people some clips on this and how they can start to implement some of these things.

[00:53:04.430] – Dr. Bubbs
And again, you know, after 20 years of doing this and working on both ends of the spectrum with kind of elite Olympic athletes and the general population, it's really been, you know, a fun journey. But trying to figure out how we can help people, you know, make the most progress by doing that minimum effective dose is really the, you know, the impetus for the book.

[00:53:24.230] – Allan
Dr. Bubbs, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:53:28.160] – Dr. Bubbs
Allan, I appreciate it, man. It's been great to be on. And thanks for having me.

Post Show/Recap

[00:53:36.360] – Allan
Hey Raz, welcome back.

[00:53:38.160] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, wow, that was really neat of Dr. Bubbs to come back with a new book and they both of his books sound really interesting. I like the idea of peaking, but especially after 40.

[00:53:50.240] – Allan
Well, yeah. And I think that was kind of one of the things the first book was just it was intense because it was written for pretty much for professional athletes. And it was, you know, in their field, they need to peak at a certain time. So I'm not sure the show we're coming up on the Olympics soon. I think, you know, people won't be attending again because of the problems with covid.

[00:54:13.980] – Allan
But all these athletes over the course, the last several months have been doing what they needed to do to qualify for the Olympics, which is typically done every four years for most of these athletes. So they are doing world championships and other things. But for most of them, they don't care about that. They just want to make this one race. They want to do this one thing. And to do that, they spend all their time trying to peak to try to be at the best performance they possibly can at a given point in time.

[00:54:46.230] – Allan
So one, they make it into the Olympics and then two when they're competing in the Olympics against the best people in the world, that they're doing their best. So even if they don't win, you're seeing the best that that athlete can bring to the field. And the science that Dr. Bubbs talked about in his first book, Peak was everything we know about how that happens and how you can train for peak performance. I thought it was important to have him on here because we are training to be peak grandparents and peak this, you know.

[00:55:22.500] – Allan
So if you're planning a hike and you're going to do the Grand Canyon with your nieces and nephews or your children or whatever grandchildren you want to be, peak health, you want to be peak performance, you know, you want to be able to lift your own kayak. You want to be able to do your own, you know, your own marching and you don't want to have to sit stuff out. So peaking and being in the performance state I thought was really important.

[00:55:44.790] – Allan
And then he comes back with peak forty and I'm like, well, this is perfect. I didn't have anything to do with that. But like, this is perfect. And so. Yeah. And so basically this book is taking a lot of the basic science and things that were in peak and is applying it to the rest of us. So he was talking to that, that one percent of people out there with the first book and I, I tried to take that information and apply it for us and then he's gone and actually done it and even better.

[00:56:15.720] – Allan
So it's a really cool book, particularly if you consider yourself generally athletic, but doesn't have to be because there's still a lot in there for everybody. But if you're if you're an athlete, you see yourself as an athlete, there's a lot in there to help you just be as good as you can be. So if you're trying to get a PR on a five K or a half marathon boom, you're going to have some a lot of information in there to help you do that.

[00:56:42.660] – Allan
Or if you just want to be an awesome grandma when it comes to family vacation or the grandkids are hanging out with you. It's also that kind of book too.

[00:56:51.960] – Rachel
When you started the interview off with the big rocks, the major things, the big things that we can do to make a change in our lives. And that also resonated with me, too, because we're bombarded by data all around us. There's articles and podcasts and news clippings and and news headlines that we see on the news.

[00:57:11.100] – Rachel
And all this stuff is around us and we can easily get lost in the weeds. But I like bringing the focus back to the big rocks. What are the major things that we can do to move the needle on our own personal health and fitness?

[00:57:22.720] – Allan
Yeah, well, I brought this up in my book as well, the Wellness Roadmap was that we do have to focus on the big rocks. And I actually talked about kind of where that concept came from, its big rocks, little rocks and sand. And you're trying to get them all in the bucket and they all fit in the bucket. If you put the big rocks in there first, if you put the sand in there first, you won't get all the big rocks and little rocks in there.

[00:57:46.020] – Allan
And if you put the little rocks in there, you're still not going to get everything in there. So you've got to put the big rocks in first and then you put the little rocks and then you shake the hell out of the jar. And then you put the sand in and shake the jar and you eventually can get all of that into that jar. It doesn't look like it when you first start, but you can. And the concept is, if you focus on the big rocks first, you're going to make up a lot of ground faster.

[00:58:11.340] – Allan
And it and it works and it works in almost every aspect of your life. We get buried when we start focusing on the sand. So the question is, what supplement should I take? You know, I hear about this protein window after my weight training, do I have to have protein within an hour or is my training wasted? We hear all these things and it keeps coming out every day, you know, eat pomegranate, it's a superfood.

[00:58:41.440] – Allan
Those are all those things are good. But they're the sand. They're just sand in your progress of how far you want to go. So focusing on the big rocks means that you're putting your priority. You're putting your time, which is at a premium for us today. You're putting that on the most important thing. So, you know, you'll hear the statement, you can't outwork a diet.

[00:59:07.470] – Allan
people still try.

[00:59:08.870] – Allan
Yeah, well, you know, I'm doing an hour a day on the treadmill and I'm like, well, if you spent that hour food prepping. You know, cutting up some vegetables, pre cooking the meat and fish that you want to eat for the week and putting those meals together and putting them in the freezer that hour would do so much more for you than the hour you spent on the treadmill. Now, the hour on the treadmill might be important from a mental health perspective because many of us get a lot of mental benefit from the exercise.

[00:59:41.280] – Allan
So my big rock might not entirely be your big rock, but I will say I'm certain for 90, 95 percent of us nutrition, eating whole food is our big rock. If you're not eating mostly whole food, meaning it's not coming from a can, box, jar or bag, and I see those different every time I see them. But if it's not coming from one of those four things, then you're eating Whole Foods. It's plant.

[01:00:13.200] – Allan
Yeah, animal. And the less processed the better. If you're eating mostly whole food and as high quality as you can eat. That's most of our big rocks.

[01:00:24.780] – Rachel
That is a good one. That's a great one.

[01:00:27.300] – Allan
And then the next big rock. The next big rock is moving. Exactly. You need to be moving. Your body was designed to move. In fact, it needs to move to stay alive. You know, the toxins that are in your body, they're cleared from your cells and they go into your lymph system. Now, your lymph system doesn't have any pumps. Your heart is a pump for blood. Your lungs and the diaphragm work as a pump system to basically move oxygen in and take carbon dioxide out.

[01:01:00.480] – Allan
And that's working like a pumping action. But we don't have a way to remove our toxins with any pumping action, the way that works is through skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is the muscle that moves our body around. So if we're not moving, we're not clearing toxins. And they're sitting there and you might have heard some terms like, OK, well, I hope the cancer doesn't get into the lymph nodes because then it spreads.

[01:01:26.970] – Allan
And that's true. So movement is a way for your body to stay detoxify. It's a way for your body to stay cleaner. So we need to move as a function of our day to day life that makes us healthier and helps us avoid a lot of problems. And so those are the two big rocks that I would say if you're not doing those two things and it doesn't matter how much protein you eat, it doesn't matter how many hours you sleep, it doesn't matter anything else.

[01:01:58.110] – Allan
Doesn't matter if you're not doing those two things.

[01:02:01.080] – Rachel
Yeah, I have to agree with you on that. One food and movement are so critical. And he also mentioned the happiness and awe and mindset at the end. That's my other favorite word, mindset.

[01:02:16.080] – Allan
I was so happy to see the word, Awe. Because no one in the health and fitness field, to my knowledge, and I've read hundreds, thousands of books and articles, no one really talks much about that. You know, I talk about happiness, but awe takes it to a whole nother level. Awe is about the experience of life. And I think a lot of us missed that because we're too busy being busy.

[01:02:45.610] – Rachel
Oh, gosh. Yeah.

[01:02:48.380] – Allan
So I was really glad he brought that up, because I do think that happiness and awe are kind of a missed piece of a life well lived. So you can be super fit. And you can eat the best foods. But if you're not enjoying yourself and you're not having those moments of bliss of awe, then why live a year longer? You know, why? I mean, so the why that we go through the commitment is typically about

[01:03:22.930] – Allan
Those moments, you know, when I talk to clients and I say, OK, why do you want to do this? Why why do you want to lose 30 pounds? why? And it's the well, you know, I'll feel better. I'll be happier. And that's not the way it works. You will probably feel better. That's true. But it's so you can do what? And those moments should be, awe, you know, time with a granddaughter, time of the grandson.

[01:03:55.760] – Allan
Hiking Grand Canyon, going and seeing the Great Wall of China, the Galapagos, you know, having the health and wellness to do that stuff, because I can tell you, when you're standing on the sea cliffs of the Galapagos and you're watching the albatross fly and the sea wall is just like the sea just hitting these cliffs and spring up in the air. Those are moments that no one can take from me.

[01:04:24.230] – Rachel
I love it.

[01:04:25.280] – Allan
And so when someone tells me, you know, I'm too busy. I'm too busy to eat well. I'm too busy to work out those big rocks and then the fact that smaller, big rocks of sleep and stress reduction, I'm too busy to meditate, I'm too busy to do yoga. I'm too busy. When someone tells me they're too busy, that's one of the saddest things that I can hear, and it bothers me that that excuse bothers me more than any other excuse out there.

[01:04:58.400] – Rachel
Yeah, it's so important to make your own health a priority and then to work your life around that. And I'm a morning runner and a lot of the people in some local run clubs are morning runners. Some of us are evening runners. And I see the most beautiful sunrise and sunset pictures from other people's runs that are just breathtaking. And to have that moment of that beautiful splendor of the first light or the last light, it's beautiful.

[01:05:29.620] – Rachel
Who doesn't love a sunrise or sunset? And to just appreciate that moment or to see the wildlife we've got dear right now are dropping fawn. So we see a lot of fawns on our runs as well. And to see a deer and a fawn is such a special thing. And it's why I get out and run so often. And I just it just makes me so happy in that moment and it's such a special time. And I wish other people could appreciate that as well by getting up early and doing their thing.

[01:05:59.740] – Allan
And it's not that you have to go for a run to do those things. Sometimes it's as simple as getting in your car, driving down to a local park and going for a walk. And it's funny because I have a guest that's coming up and I don't want to blow the whole thing, but he just you talked about just petting and playing with a dog and some things like that. And I'm like, there's so many moments that you can take.

[01:06:26.710] – Allan
To put more happiness into your life, and so I'd kind of like to leave this with a challenge and the challenge would be write down three things that you really, really, really enjoy doing that just really make you happy. Write down three things and then commit to within the next month to do all three of those things. And it can be to sit with your loved one and watch a sunset. It can be to go back and watch a movie that I really, really enjoyed.

[01:07:06.010] – Allan
it can be to take up something that I did before that was athletic and just do it slower pace. If you need to pick up a tennis racket and a golf hit the ball against the wall.

[01:07:20.890] – Allan
You know, you don't have to be all of that. But if you enjoyed playing tennis, it's not that you have to give it up. You go do it. And so within the next month. Take those three things and just make a point to do them, and if you can do them easily like Sunset's. Other than when it's cloudy, those happen almost every day, lots of opportunity, whereas, you know, if it's I want to go to the beach again, maybe that's a little bit out of touch, out of reach for this month.

[01:07:54.100] – Allan
But think about the things that really kind of bring you joy, that make you happy and just spend a little bit more time doing that. And then, of course, if you're focusing on the big rocks, you have more energy, you have more fitness, and you'll be able to do more. And so, like I said, it just it bugs me when people say they're too busy. And I'm like, you know, really, if you care about your wellness, then they're listening to this point in the podcast.

[01:08:25.360] – Allan
So I think you care. You got to make the investment. You got to make the investment of time because big rocks take time. Big rocks take time because one, you're not going to get that immediate satisfaction of, oh, I had a salad for dinner, I should weight 10 pounds less tomorrow. Not how it works or I got on the treadmill today and I ran a mile. It's like, OK, you wake up the next morning and you hurt like heck because you haven't been running at all.

[01:08:56.200] – Allan
That's not how big rocks work. You've got to move them slowly. You've got to do the gentle nudges and then you've got to be patient and wait for those things, those good things to happen. And so the peak performance that you see in an elite athlete, the Olympics, are four years away for some of these kids. They started training when they were in diapers, learning a skill and then honing it and working it, working it, and hours and hours and hours and hours, thousands and thousands of hours of training.

[01:09:23.050] – Allan
Yeah. Just for the chance to be one of those athletes. And then they perform, and so the investment that they're making is huge over time. And it's that slow, they get there, they get there, and then if everything peaks, everything's right. They have that awesome moment. And what but I think that Dr. Bubbs is saying in this book is awesome moments are all around you. You don't have to wait for the Olympics to come.

[01:09:58.120] – Allan
You can have an awesome moment today. You just have to go out and do it. You have to know you want it and you have to do it. You have to make the investment of time, effort, money, put the time and you put the money and you put the effort in and you make special things happen in your life. And that makes your life better. It makes it more full. And so, you know, most of us are opportunity to go to the Olympics is over.

[01:10:24.520] – Allan
Our boat has sailed. And we're not going to be there. I'm not going to be in the NFL. You're not going to be NBA or WNBA. That stuff's not going to happen for us. But that doesn't mean we don't have things that we can aspire to, things that we can win, things that make us happy.

[01:10:41.770] – Rachel
Yeah, we can do great things. Allan, I mentioned earlier, I'm about to turn 50 and a couple of weeks ago I ran fifty miles.

[01:10:50.200] – Rachel
That's got to be one of the biggest accomplishments in my life. And I'm about 50. So there's still plenty of time to do great things, whatever they are. Well, just if you could start,

[01:11:01.060] – Allan
it might be the biggest so far.

[01:11:02.890] – Rachel
So far. That is true.

[01:11:05.410] – Allan
because you haven't been a grandma yet, you know. So there's. Yeah. And pushed that off a few years. OK, but since your kids are just not quite there yet. Yeah butthe whole point being is, Yes, that there's so much in front of us. And that's again why I love that word, awe. Is because if you start seeking out those things that do that for you, your life is going to be so much fuller.

[01:11:35.410] – Allan
And most of the time we get on here and we're talking about nutrition and we're talking about fitness and we're into the stuff that sometimes it's easy to forget. It's not always about putting more in. So I'm working that full time job, I'm doing this, and then I'm trying to exercise and I'm trying to cook and I'm trying to take care of my kids and and do all those things together. The reality is sometimes it's just taking a break and doing less and just doing something that you enjoy that just brings you that feeling.

[01:12:09.670] – Rachel
That's just it is finding that happiness and that joy and awe. Like Dr. Bubbs had said, it's important.

[01:12:17.950] – Allan
Yes, it is. All right. So, Rachel, I guess we'll talk next week then.

[01:12:22.930] – Rachel
Sounds great. Take care.

[01:12:24.850] – Allan
You, too.

[01:12:25.730] – Rachel
Thanks.

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Reach your peak with Dr Marc Bubbs

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:04:02.900] – Allan
Hey, Raz. How are you?

[00:04:04.790] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:04:07.540] – Allan
I'm doing good. We have finished construction.

[00:04:11.820] – Rachel
Yey. That's so wonderful. Congratulations.

[00:04:16.340] – Allan
Yeah. Yeah. Lula's is now the construction is over and now we're just trying to get it used to living in and figuring it out because all of our crates and everything were stored in our part of our living space or pulling those out and getting them organized the right way. And then because we now have a fence set up, it was funny because apparently the police were looking for somebody last night and they came up just as my dog was waking up.

[00:04:43.820] – Allan
And I told Tammy, I said, since we have the fence set up, I'm just going to open up the gate door and let him out. It just happened just as I let him out. The police drove up on their motorcycle, shined the flashlight because they were looking for somebody that had darted off the road right by our house. And so the dogs barking. And I'm like, and so anyway, we bring them back in.

[00:05:04.340] – Allan
And long story short, I was up at three o'clock in the morning. And he was in the back. He was in the yard and everything was fine. And then he found a way out and we just some waited. We didn't know he could manage to get out, but he managed to get out. So I'm chasing him down the road. He just thinks it's the funniest thing, he just stays just arm's length away from me and he just wags his tail.

[00:05:27.510] – Allan
He's running around in the dark and it's so much fun to him at three o'clock in the morning to be chased by daddy.

[00:05:34.770] – Rachel
Not fun.

[00:05:36.300] – Allan
So it took me a few hours before I could actually get back to sleep, but I did get another sleep cycle in, so I'm OK. But it was not the night I thought it was going to be.

[00:05:47.010] – Rachel
Wow. Yeah. What a night. My goodness.

[00:05:50.070] – Allan
How are things up there?

[00:05:51.390] – Rachel
Oh, good. We're doing good. July is a busy month for us. We have a ton of birthdays. We just celebrated our daughter's birthday. Mike and I have birthdays at the end of the month and my dad and his twin and cousin of ours. And it's just a busy month full of fun. So, yeah. Having a good time.

[00:06:10.340] – Allan
Awesome. All right. Are you ready to talk about weight training?

[00:06:14.130] – Rachel
Yes. Yes. This is exciting.

Episode

Really appreciate the questions that you guys set out there. I'm definitely going to do this type of thing again. And if you're interested in helping me make this podcast better, I'd really like to have you in the group. So come to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and join the 40 plus fitness group today.

Introduction

Do you feel like you're getting weaker as you age? Here's a hint. The jars aren't any tighter than they were in the 1990s.

If you're not doing weight lifting or resistance training, you are getting weaker. And there's a study I'm going to have a link in the show notes that cites that the number one reason we lose our independence as we age is because we get weaker, we lose our strength. Our enemies are sarcopenia and osteopenia. And if you're not progressing with your weight lifting, you're likely regressing. And we'll go into that in a lot more detail as we get into what progression really is and how you can do it and how you can keep it going to the point that you need it.

So get out your pens, because we're about to get really, really deep into weightlifting progression over 40.

Vision

In my wellness roadmap book, I talk about having a wellness GPS and in the Wellness GPS, the G stands for grounding and that's your reason why you're training, why you're dieting, why you're doing any of this. And the vision is also a really important part of this overall commitment to what you're doing. You have to have an idea of who you want to be.

And in reality, almost every single person I talk to about vision, one of the core elements is they want to be stronger. And they want to be more athletically looking, more athletic looking, and so they might use words like toned or fit, but they want that that's a part of this vision of who most of us want to be as we age. We don't want to be frail. We want to be strong. We want to be athletic.

We want to look good. And most of us need all of that. So we lift weights to get there. So with resistance training, I say the term resistance training, sometimes that's a little confusing. So I want to take a step back. Sometimes you're going to hear this as weight training, which is what I used for the title. I tend to use the term resistance training because it's a little less threatening than saying strength training, weight training or body building.

And the reality is they're all very similar. They're all using some form of resistance to affect the muscles in your body. And so for most of the time, you're going to hear me use the term resistance training. And I use it interchangeably with weight training, with strength training, with bodybuilding. You're going to have your own specific goals of what you're trying to accomplish, but you're going to probably do it with some form of weight training, resistance training or strength training, OK. For a muscle to grow, it needs three things.

It needs a stimulus. Now, that stimulus is typically us getting under some form of resistance, under some weight, doing a weight training episode of some sort. Now, it doesn't have to be that we went to the gym to do a workout or we did a workout round. It could be doing yard work. And you might notice after a day of doing some hard yard work and carrying, you know, bags of mulch around, you've got some aches and pains. You feel it. That's the stimulus. You give in your muscle a reason to change.

The second thing that you need is protein and carbs. And yes, we do need carbs for muscle building. We don't have to have them. But if we want to optimize our weight training gains, we definitely want to make sure that carbs are a mix of what we're eating. But protein is really kind of the core and protein kind of gets this really weird discussion when we get into weight training and bodybuilding and all of that.

And so all these little things have come about, these rules of thumb. This broscience. And there's one broscience myth that's out there that you can only consume or absorb 30 grams of protein per meal. Absolutely not true. There's other myths that say you need to spread your protein out throughout the day so that you're, you know, giving your body all the amino acids while it's repairing. And there's also even some myths that say you need to eat right before right after a train like you have some anabolic window.

And the reality is that some people saw great success. So with anecdotal evidence, they ran off and did this. But I actually have linked to a study that shows we don't really know what the upper limit for our protein absorption is. And there's a lot of variables. How much fat did you eat with that meal? How empty was your stomach? And just basically variations between people. I also have a link to a study in the show notes to talk a little bit about that.

They deep dove into it really good. And they linked to a lot of other studies. So what we do know is that the human body can absorb more than 30 grams of protein per meal. But the question comes down then is how much protein should I really be getting? As a general rule of thumb with my clients that are training, actually lifting, doing weight training, I recommend that they get one gram per pound or about half a little less than half a gram per kg the way that works out.

So whichever way you like to handle weight, that's there. Now, one other question that comes up is, well, what if I'm overweight? What if I'm carrying and, you know, instead of being the normal 220, I should be I'm 290. Do I need to be eating 290 grams of protein? And the short answer is probably not. So, you know, as a general rule there, if you feel like 290 grams of protein is too much, you can tap that down a little bit.

So, for example, if someone is overweight, they weigh about 290 kind of estimating what they would weigh without their body fat. We're probably saying, you know, that's a good, what, 70, 80 pounds, 90 pounds maybe of fat so they could try 200 grams. Again, this is if you're training hard, try 200 grams and then just see how you recover, see how your body reacts. Are you getting enough protein to stimulate the anabolic effect of muscle growth?

So if you don't feel like you want to try to eat the 290 and again, you don't have to distribute it across six meals or whatever across the day, you quite literally can have more than 30 grams of protein in any given meal. So it's not that hard to get up to a 180 to 200 grams, which is probably as much as many of us would need, we're not professional bodybuilders, but you can take that protein down a little bit and see. But again, just as a general rule, if you're trying to put on strength, trying to put on some muscle mass, I recommend one gram per pound.

the third thing that you need for muscle growth is rest. For many of this, this is actually the hardest part. The lifting is not already. Eating is not hard. It's when it comes to the rest. Now, there's going to be rest between each set in most cases, depending on how your workouts put together.

But in general, there's going to be rest between sets. Now, that rest time is when your body is taking its energy stores. Basically, the mitochondria that fire the muscle need ATP. So ATP is effectively the fuel for our muscles and our body can regenerate ATP. It just needs a little time to do that. So if we lift, we do a set and then we rest. The longer we rest, the more we allow the ATP to develop.

Now we don't want to wait too long or the muscle cools down and it's not really even the same workout anymore. But you do a good lift. You rest for anywhere from 60 seconds to three minutes and I would never recommend more than three minutes. But for most of us, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, maybe two minutes is going to be enough time between sets. And I'd say as a beginner, try 60 seconds and then see how your second set goes.

If you're almost fully recovered, you might not be fully recovered. Then you're hitting into the sweet spot. So the way I kind of look at is so if I can do 90 percent of what I did for the first set during the second set and then I'm less, you know, just 90 percent less than on a third set. And if I do a forty fourth set, then again, 90 percent less, it's just a little bit harder each set.

I might have to lower the weight a little bit, but in a general sense, I know I'm giving my muscle the stimulus it needs and then the rest it needs between sets rest between workouts. You know, a lot of people that are lifting and training all the time, they have really high recovery rates. They're in their 20s. They're doing great. If you're over 40, though, that's less likely that you're going to recover that fast.

And if you're not doing something like anabolic steroids or some other enhancement, you might find that it's you're going to need some time. I typically like to take at least two days before I work a body part again. So if I did a really good leg session on Monday, I'm probably not going to lift legs again until at least Thursday. And then you can play that by ear and just see how fast you recover. But you're going to need a couple days.

So the folks that go to the gym every single day and do the same workout every single day, they're not giving their body the rest between sets and therefore they're not doing things as intensely and will get into intensity and volume in a minute. But if you're doing an intense good workout that's giving you the proper stimulus for muscle growth and muscle and strength gains, then you're going to need a couple of days for that to happen. And then the final bit of rest is sleep.

Sleep is a very important component because sleep is when all of our hormones are kind of resetting and reorganizing. It's when we're healing internally. And so sleep is a very important component for strength gains, for muscle mass. If you're not getting good sleep, you're probably not going to recover as fast. So making sure that you're getting your rest is it's really important. So, again, the three things that you need for muscle growth is the stimulus that's lifting the weights.

It has to be appropriate. We'll talk about that a minute. You need the protein and carbs, but mostly the protein and make sure you're getting enough of it and then you need the rest. And again, making sure you're getting good quality sleep. You're taking time and breaks between each set and you're taking time in breaks between each workout for a given muscle group.

Sponsor
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Progression

So what is progression? Progression is basically where we're getting stronger or we're gaining more muscle and we're doing that generally consistently over time. Now for someone who's over 40, that looks a little different than someone who's a teenager or in their 20s.

Those individuals that are teenagers and 20s, they have a ton of testosterone and they have the opportunity to put on a great bit of muscle mass and a great bit of strength if they go through the proper training and do the rest and the other feeling and do all that stuff. When we get a little older, though, muscles aren't going to grow as fast, predominantly because we don't have the testosterone and also because we don't generally recover as fast.

So not recovering as fast means we can't lift as often. And not having the testosterone generally means we're not going to be able to lift as much and we're not going to be able to, again, recover as fast. So both of those are kind of against us when we're over 40 for, you know, getting tons of strength gains and muscle mass and all of that. So progression generally just means that we're continuing to build muscle and maintain muscle mass, maintain bone density and be strong up to the point.

We need to be strong. OK, I tore a rotator cuff a few years ago and so what I recognized was, OK, what I was doing was, I was trying to push to 80 pound dumbbells over my head from a seated position. And the struggle was not the pushing it over my head. The struggle was getting the dumbbells into the position. I needed them to start the lift. And that's where I hurt myself, where I tore my rotator cuff.

After that event, it really got me to thinking, do I ever have a situation where I would be putting one hundred and sixty pounds over my head for any reason whatsoever? And the short answer is no. I would ask for help so I don't need to be able to lift one hundred and sixty pounds over my head. I don't need to be able to deadlift 500 pounds. So the things that I was doing back then aren't really my priority.

Again, we talked about vision and I do want to be strong. I want to be strong enough to help my wife around if she needs it. I want to be strong enough to carry things that I need to carry for her. So, you know, we just moved into a bed and breakfast and I've got all my stuff in there and it's all in these bins. And some of them are quite heavy. And so my wife wants to go through those bins and she's like, get that bin for me and bring it in here.

I want to be strong enough to do that for her. So I don't have to hire somebody to be that person. So you're going to find strength the way you needed to find strength. You're going to define muscle mass and the look that you want and then you're going to want to work to progress to that point. And then after that point, the progression is really about just making sure we're building a cross or building a good platform. So we're not just strong in one direction, we're strong across all of it.

So we have that support. So there's less injury, less everything else. So progression, as I stated, is not necessarily that you just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger or you just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It's kind of a combination of just making sure that you're resilient and you're strong enough. So one question that comes up a lot is, well, should women do what men do? You know, we go and we start looking at exercises.

And, you know, women typically will approach the gym very differently than men until they actually get in there and figure a few things out. And then those women realize that the lifts the men are doing work just as well for them. In fact, what I have found is most women can get stronger than men pound for pound if they train hard. Women have a capacity to put up with stuff. They have a capacity to train hard. And while they don't have the testosterone to get as strong as a man or to get as big as a man, they do have some.

And so they are able to get very strong. They are able to get very fit. And so from a training perspective, there's not a real reason for a woman to train differently. With one caveat, women's knees tend to be a weak spot. Women have knee problems a lot more than men. They have hip problems a lot more than men. And so if you have a structural dysfunction, you want to make sure the way you're training is not causing you problems where you're going to injure yourself.

And I'm going to get into that in a minute because I think this is really, really important. So there's not a real reason for a woman to train different than a man other than playing your game. Don't don't necessarily feel like you have to do a certain lift just because the men can do it or are doing it. Recognize if you have a weakness, you have a movement dysfunction, don't play that game. But otherwise there's no reason a woman can't train just like a man.

Circuit training is another topic that comes up quite often, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm not a huge fan. Circuit training is great for really one good reason that it gets people moving and it gets a workout done quickly. And if it's supervised and managed properly, it can be effective at building muscular endurance. It's typically not very good at building strength. And I'll get into that in a minute. There's a basic structure for most of the circuit training.

So you're going to go in and in some gyms, there's actually a set of equipment that set you just go through the loop and as soon as you finished with one, you move to the other and then the other and then the other. There's two basic approaches to this. One is the big muscle, little muscle. So you might start with leg press and some leg workout. Then you're going to move to maybe your back and then you can move to your chest and are going to move to your shoulders and then you can move to your arms.

And so there's kind of a circuit. You go around, you do when you move to the next machine, you can also do that would have that set up with dumbbells or barbells or whatever. But that's one way that a circuit would work. And there's another one and it's called peripheral hard action. And that's basically where you work a lower body and then you work in upper body. And the premise of circuit training is because you're working a different body part.

You don't have to take that break between sets because you're already automatically taking it, because you're not working that body part again until you come back around for another round. So a circuit can save a lot of time. You can get an hour, hour and a half workout done in less than 30 minutes in a circuit training setup. But there are some problems to it. OK, three reasons that I really don't like circuit training as we're talking about strength and building muscle is that one.

It splits your focus. And so you're going to end up lowering your weight and you're going to end up lowering your time and attention. OK, and I'll get into those topics in just a minute. But just that I call it kind of the Barbie workout and you'll see it where they're not really carrying any real weight. And you can tell they're not really resisting, they're not really struggling. They're just flop in their arms. And now they might do it in really good form and it might, you know, look like they're doing something.

But because there's not enough resistance and there's not enough time and attention, they're not getting the stimulus that we talked about. So, you know, if you go in and you do that, you're typically not optimizing the weightlifting elements of that circuit. If you do put the weight on there and you're doing it fast with the weight. Again, so we're we're doing it pretty quickly. That's more about power and so powers which are after at a given weight.

That's great. You can do that. And so most people are trying to work through the circuit quickly because that's they're thinking about the cardio component of this circuit and they're going through it. So they're not really developing really any core strength. And for a lot of people, when they're going through it, they tend to use the same weight every time. So they know I'm on peg eight, I'm on peg two, I'm on peg three. I'm on peg eight.

And they go around the circuit that way and every workouts the same. And in many cases, like I said, they come back every day and do that same workout. The final thing reason I'm not a big fan of circuit training is when you take speed and you add a load, you increase your risk of injury. So you might be on a machine. And that's great for avoiding injury a lot of times. But when you're moving fast, you're not necessarily paying attention to your form and the risk of injury goes up.

And so there's just a few reasons why I'm not a huge fan of circuit training as a way of getting stronger or building muscle mass. It's just not that effective and the risk is just too high.

So let's talk about resistance. When we're doing resistance, there's two types of resistance, there's fixed resistance and there's variable resistance now fixed resistance is using something like a dumbbell or your body weight or a kettlebell. It weighs the same through the entire length of the movement.

Now, one thing about our muscles is pur muscles are designed with different output capabilities at different points in a movement. So an example I can give you would be this. If you completely straighten your arm out and you grab a weight, you try to pull that weight up from the bottom of that movement. It's very difficult as you get closer to your shoulder to basically curl that weight, your bicep gets shorter in that angle for the lever gets better and you're able you're a lot stronger.

So you're stronger in one part of the movement. And that's where things like resistance bands providing a variable resistance can be actually sometimes as effective or not more effective than the free weights. So there is, for the most part, fixed and variable resistance most of the workout. So we're going to do unless you work with resistance bands and some of the things like chains and some of the other ways that you can create that variable resistance, some machines do it.

But most of the work week we tend to do in the gym or at home and with body weight particularly is fixed. OK, so what kind of resistance work can we do when we're talking about this? There's bodyweight, as I mentioned, resistance bands. There's machines, there's free weights and free weights can include barbells, dumbbells, kettle bells and the like. So which one is the best? And I kind of have a few answers for this.

First is, what do you have? I mean, obviously, I could tell you that, you know, if I could tell you that Dumbell and a barbell would be one of the best pieces of equipment for you to own to make your legs stronger. If you don't have it, you don't have it. So you're not going to be able to do that work. So, yeah, having it is kind of important. Next is what can you get?

So, you know, if I could go to a gym, I don't have to have it. I can go to a gym. So I effectively now have access to it or I can buy it and put it in my home gym and I have it. So, you know, if you can get it, then that's great. Have a plan for that. And then but the real answer I want to get to is that the best is the best tool for the job.

So I'll give you an example. If you wanted to open up a drain and it had a common head screw or three common head screws, you know, you'll be in a movie and you'll see someone take a paper clip and they're able to open that. Well, it's not hard. It's not easy using a paper clip to open a screw, but it can be done. If you had an electric screwdriver, you'd be done with that job in a matter of seconds.

So it's really, really important for you to have the tools you want, which builds all the way back to the vision. You can get yourself very, very strong with body weight, but with some of the implements that you might have access to in a in a gym membership or in a home gym, that you really work well to outfit, you might be able to get results faster. So just thinking about the investment that you want to make relative to the vision you have, you can you can build something.

And so I'm not going to say that body weight is less attractive or worse than dumbbells, but the flexibility you get with having both is better. So the better equipment you have, it's going to make the job easier. So it's just about having the right tool. So let's get into some of the meat of what we're talking about when we're getting into weight training, you'll hear the term reps and sets and I'll define those for you. The reps are repetitions that are the number of times that you move the weight through a certain movement pattern that you're doing for that workout.

So for a body weight squat, you're lowering your butt you're bending your legs down and then you're squatting down and you're getting to parallel below, and then you're coming back up to the starting position standing. That's a repetition. A set is the number of times you're going to do that repetition. So I could give you a workout. And the first exercise is body weight squats. And I'm going to say, I want you to do three sets of ten repetitions, so you're going to do ten repetitions, you're going to take a rest, say 60 seconds, and then you'll do your second set and then a rest and then your third and final set.

And that would be your sets across that exercise. So your reps and sets are that. The other way that we add to a workout and make it a better stimulus as we change the time under tension. So if you're looking to add muscle mass time under tension is your friend. Time and attention is simply the amount of time the muscle is working during each repetition. So the way that looks is I set a tempo for the lift of I'm going to bring the weight down slow.

So I says I'm doing my squat, I'm going to squat down slow for a count of three and then I'm going to squat up slow for a count of three. And I think you'll find if you try that right now, I don't know if you can do if you're driving, don't. But if you can try that, try just doing a quick little squat and feel what that feels like and then trying to do it when you go down for a count of three and then back up for a count of three.

And I think you can see how much more difficult adding time under tension makes that exercise. So sometimes it's not about adding more weight to an exercise, it's merely about slowing down and increasing the time and attention. Now, when we take the reps and the sets and the time and attention and the weight and we add those all up, we come up with what we call workout volume. OK, so for any given body part, your body is going to be capable of doing a given volume at a point in time.

And progression is merely being able to increase that volume. OK, we can do it by increasing the reps, we can do it by increasing the sets, we can do it by increasing the time under tension, and we can do it by increasing the weight. We never want to do all four at the same time. In fact, we only want to do one at a time. So typically, as you're putting a workout together or you're working with a trainer, you'll probably notice that you'll have a fixed workout with a set weight and you'll do that.

And then the next time you come in, if you got stronger, could handle the volume. They added more weight. That's the typical way we do this. But they might also add another setnce you get stronger, they might add a little bit more a few more reps are in or they might change the time and attention. All of those are ways that we can change the workout and increase the volume. And that's that's how we're getting the progression.

Now, one word of caution. When you're doing this weight training and you're over 40, you have to do gentle nudges, OK? And so the number one rule of weight lifting and if you take nothing else away from this episode, take this away. The most important part of weightlifting is to not injure yourself, because if you enjoy yourself, you're not weight training anymore, at least not with that body part. So the number one rule of weight training is do not hurt yourself.

And we do that with the gentle nudges. So a couple of things that are a little confusing as we get into this. So I'm asking you to add volume. I'm asking you to add a stimulus and do this. And typically you're going to recognize that that stimulus happened through pain. It's unfortunate, but it's normal. While you're doing the lift, you might feel a little bit of discomfort and afterwards you might. So when you feel pain after a workout and it's immediate, you need to be paying attention to two things.

Was it a muscle pain or was it a joint pain? If it's a muscle pain, that's probably something you just want to take off a little bit. If it's a joint pain, that's something you probably want get to some help for straight away. Joints don't have the ability to recover the way muscle does, but a terrible muscle is a bad thing, too. So if it's super intense, acute, go, go seek some medical attention.

It's a couple of days later you start feeling really, really sore or maybe even just the day later. That's called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). And that's not a bad thing or a good thing either. So you may experience DOMS when you're lifting and that's that doesn't mean you had a great workout. It just means yes, you did have the stimulus we're talking about, but you may not always have DOMS as you go through your workout.

So that should never be your focus, never be your intent. OK, as you're lifting and we talked about your vision, you really need to be thinking about what your intent for that lifting section is. OK, do you want to get stronger? Do you want to put on some more mass? This is called hypertrophy or do you just want to build some more power? So the ability to do something quickly with load is power. So in thinking about that vision that you had, what does that look and feel like?

So for most of us, over 40, it's about building strength. And maybe some muscular development. So as we're putting together your workouts, that's knowing that intent will help you do the workout the right way. OK, and know that you're getting the right result. If you don't have a target, you won't know when you're there. So when you get started, you might experience something called Newbie gains. And so that's usually for the first two to four months as someone comes in and starts lifting.

They notice that they get stronger a lot faster. So you may go in and say, OK, the first time I did this lift, I could really only do 10 pounds. And by two weeks later I've doubled that. And then four weeks later, I've tripled that. And it's like, you know, I went from 10 pounds to 30 pounds over the course of a month. And you're like, wow, I might be a power lifter for Olympics.

I don't know. The reality is no, that's just newbie gains. It will level off. There's a couple of reasons why newbie gains happen. The first is every time you try to use a muscle, your brain has to fire off for that muscle to fire and use certain muscle fibers. It almost never uses all of the muscle fibers at one time. It uses some of them and it uses just enough for what it thinks it needs to do to do that lift.

So if you are trying to pick up 10 pounds, it struggles with that at first. How many do I fire off? And then once it knows how many to fire off, it gets better at that and then get a little stronger and you can start increasing the weight as you increase the weight. Your brain again is learning how to fire new muscle fibers to do that. So you're basically teaching your muscle and your brain how to talk to each other.

That's basically the neuromuscular communication and that's a big part of what Newbie gains are. And then after that, it's the muscular development. And in many cases, that muscular development comes from a little bit of what I would like to call muscle memory. If your body was more muscular at one time, it knows how to get more muscular a little bit faster. It will turn the muscle fibers thicker. It will actually start adding muscle fibers less so when we're over 40.

But it will activate more muscle fibers and you will grow stronger and a little bit more muscular faster during those first two to four months. And then it's going to kind of level off. And when it does that level off, we call that a plateau. Now, you're probably much more familiar with plateau's from a weight loss perspective. That's a normal part of your body balancing and trying to save you from starving to death. With muscular growth, It's a very similar thing in that it's just not a linear process.

You're not just going to continue to get stronger until you can lift a car. This is not how it works. So at some point you will plateau that exercise that you're doing. You're going to find your peak PR, personal record. And for the most part, you're going to play around there for a long time. And if that's strong enough for that lift for what you're trying to do for your vision, then full stop. You did it. You're good.

OK, but if we want to break a plateau. The biggest and best way to do that is through a process called periodization.

Periodization

With periodization is kind of where we put all this stuff together. So we talk about the different exercises that we're going to do. We talk about the weights and the reps and the sets and the time and attention or tempo. And you've been doing a particular workout and maybe you do that workout for a number of months and then you get to your plateau.

Periodization is a way that we can avoid ever getting to a plateau. And the way a periodization works is we'll do a particular workout for six to eight weeks and then we'll switch it up, will change the exercises, will change the way you do it. So instead of doing say you were doing 100 pounds for 10 reps, we might change it and say you're going to do one hundred and twenty pounds for six reps. So, you know, the volume is very similar.

It's just a different lift. It's a much heavier weight and the reacts to your body tends to be a little different. OK, so a good periodization does a few things for you. One, it does help you prevent the plateaus that are inevitable. It won't prevent all of them, but it's a really good start. The other thing is it also works very well to improve the variety of your workouts. OK, so if you want some more variety to your workouts, you can do a standard six week deal.

You can even do it more often if you want to. But one of the things I find is if someone is changing out their workout all the time, they're not really getting the sense that they're any stronger. What you're experiencing is, OK, I can bench press 100 pounds and then I move over and I'm doing another exercise. So I still don't know if I'm getting stronger on the bench press. In all likelihood, you are.

But until you cycle back around and start doing bench presses, you really won't have that bad experience. You won't see it. So if something's working, my advice is typically leave it in, stick with it. But if you want to avoid plateaus and you want some more variety, you can mix that in and just recognize you might not see the gains, if you will, that other people will. So that's one of the things like a crosthwaite style workout where they're constantly varied in their workouts.

It's sometimes hard for them to measure where they are relative to how they were before. And unless they do the same workout again later. So they might do a workout like Murf and, you know, for Labor Day. And then a year later, after being in Crossfit for an additional year, they do murf again and they may find that they did a better they had better performance at it. Now, Murf is not necessarily a strength or a muscle mass thing, but it's just when you have that constant variety, you don't necessarily get that feedback that you've done something better.

So doing the same workout, doing those gentle nudges, feeling and seeing yourself get stronger, there's a lot of value to that as far as motivation and keeping you going.

Action. OK, none of this happens, I just taught you a ton of stuff, and if you had the pencil out, like I told you, you've probably been writing down feverishly. If you don't do it, it doesn't it doesn't help. It doesn't happen. You've got to be in the gym.

You've got to be consistent. OK, and I want to leave you with a tool that helps you do that, OK? And it's a tool that I learned from business coach, but I see it works just as well for what we're trying to do here. And it's called the Be do have model. OK, so Be OK. So the people that are like the vision you want to be, when you think about their vision, your vision, I mean, what are people that already have that look like?

what are they doing? What are strong and fit people doing? Well, they train, they actually it's not that they become gym rats per se, but it becomes ingrained in their lifestyle, they're training. They're working. They're in the gym and they're doing it. They're in their home gym and they're doing it. They're in their hotel room doing it, OK? And they grow to love it. That's the one thing that I've found for most people that are healthy and fit and exceptional fit.

They just love it and they're doing it every day. So the Be part is you just have to have that mindset of I'm going to love the process as much as I love the result. The Do part is training and that's just being consistent. So the Be is in your head. You've got to love it, you've got to want it, you've got to mean it. The Do is your training and then the Have is you'll get the strength, you'll get that look and you'll be your vision.

And so start with your vision. Develop your training around that. I gave you a lot of information about how that works. I'm going to be doing a call next week, I mean, this week on the group. And so if you're part of the group 40PlusFitnessPodcast.Com/Group, I do a Facebook live and I announce the Facebook live. So if you can't make the live, then at least go on to the invitation for the live for the event and leave some comments, leave some questions.

I'll be glad to during the live answer your questions. If you're on the live, I'm going to try to answer your questions. I want to make sure that this is more of an interactive podcast when we're doing these types of things, whether it's a solo show and I'm trying to teach and encourage and get you going, because if you want to be stronger and you want to have more mass and you want to be, you know, once your bone density to be where it is and you just want to be fit and tone.

those are not really words, but I'll use them anyway. You want to be that person, you've got to do the work and you've got to know the right way to do it. And you've got to follow rule number one, which is anybody? Right, don't injure yourself and you've got to know what you're doing to not injure yourself, and you've got to use gentle nudges and it's all of that. So there was a lot in this podcast episode.

If you have any questions whatsoever, please reach out to me. I'm on the Facebook group. I'm on Facebook. You can email me. You can even comment on the post for the show notes. As I mentioned, there were a couple studies that we got into. So if you have questions, I'm here for you. I thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Post Show/Recap

[00:48:20.330] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:48:21.740] – Rachel
Hey, Allan. That was really a great discussion and weightlifting over 40 or the progression of weightlifting over 40, that was really helpful.

[00:48:30.290] – Allan
Yeah, I was really thankful for the folks that were on Facebook, you know, in our group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group, because they asked some really great questions that, you know, if I had not asked them that question, there were bits that I would have probably left out that I shouldn't, now I can talk about weightlifting for months, like our books about it, obviously, you know. And so, you know, it's more than you can cover in any one podcast.

[00:48:58.520] – Allan
And so I've covered strength training before and we've had other, you know, people on authors and whatnot to talk about weight training, resistance training and like. And so it was just good to kind of go in and say, OK, you know, everybody is telling you to lift weights and then lift more weights and lift more weights. And, you know, like Rich, you know, he asked, when is progression too much? What have you done too much?

[00:49:21.560] – Allan
And or, you know, how do you stop or do you stop and, you know, what do you do? And and the reality is, you know, once you become a lifter. You think of yourself as a lifter, you know, you know, the gym becomes or your home gym becomes kind of a part of your training, a part of your daily life. It's you brush your teeth, you lift weights, you know.

[00:49:43.300] – Rachel
That's right. Yeah.

[00:49:45.500] – Allan
And so, you know, I was it was good to be able to go through that and get into it. But I would always preface this with, you know, I said the number one rule of weightlifting is to not injure yourself. And that happens if you follow rule number two, typically, and that is use good form. Whatever training you're going to do, I think it is really important for you to be strategic and really take your time to learn the movements.

[00:50:17.450] – Allan
Machines can seem really, really easy because it's really only one direction. You can push the way and only one direction. It can come back, but you can still injure yourself on the machine. And if that machine isn't aligned to you properly, you're pushing against a resistance in a way that your body's not designed to do it. So, you know, the seat height, for example, on a press machine can mean the difference between using your chest muscles and overly using your shoulder muscles, which can lead to an injury.

[00:50:50.220] – Allan
So even with machines, it's important for you to be strategic and know what you're doing and if necessary, find someone at the gym that knows what they're doing. You know, someone that works there, coach or hire a personal trainer.

[00:51:04.130] – Rachel
Oh, those are great tips. Years ago when I lived in Florida, I did have a gym membership and I would go in and I would just use the machines, just lighter weights. But just like you mentioned, I never always took the time to adjust the seats or maybe play around with different weights. I just kind of wanted to do my thing, get in and get out. But along that same line, though, I never had any personal trainers, anybody at the gym or any of the staff anyway, come up and teach me anything or show me.

[00:51:33.830] – Rachel
And there's some machines out there that I don't even know how to sit in, let alone me. It was probably there's some crazy devices out there.

[00:51:40.850] – Allan
There are. And you see and you see the videos on YouTube all the time how not to do it. And so, yeah, I've seen some pretty crazy things at the gym. The reality is a good gym that has trainers. The trainers should be walking the floor and offering suggestions. If you're in a gym that doesn't have active trainers and again, they're not getting a lot of times they're not getting paid for those hours that they're walking around the gym.

[00:52:07.160] – Allan
It's just expected as a part of their their contract to train people there is that they're walking the floor. It serves to help the people that are working out. It also serves as a sales opportunity because they can see that you need some guidance. And so at least they're there to step up and say, you know, come on in for free consult or something so we can make sure you don't hurt yourself again, rule number one.

[00:52:33.890] – Rachel
Well, that would be great. And there's no shortage of YouTube videos and articles and things out there that teach us how to do certain things. But there's no guarantee that the person showing you how to make that move or do that, that movement knows what they're doing. And even with the NSAM training that I've had, I feel more educated. I feel more aware of what I should and should not be doing. And as far as weightlifting goes, but there's still a few moves that I wouldn't touch.

[00:53:02.060] – Rachel
And the deadlift is one of them. I'm so concerned about doing it with perform, I'd be a lot more comfortable having somebody show me how to do it and teach me how to do it properly, just just to make sure I don't hurt myself at that particular one.

[00:53:14.540] – Allan
Yeah, the key to a deadlift that most people mess up is they think it's just like a squat with the bars in a different place. And it was nothing like the squat, but the deadlift is a hip hinge movement. You're literally all you're trying to do is hinge your hip and you do that by leaning forward more than you would on any kind of squat. And you literally drag the bar up your leg so your shins should be vertical, your shins should be vertical in this lift, whereas squat they won't be they're going to be at an angle out.

[00:53:56.390] – Allan
And so if your shins are straight and you're bent down, your whole center of mass is now well behind the bar. So you're talking a foot or more away from the bar and then you want to drag that bar up. You're up a good session for me that i've got bloody shins. Oh, it just is. The bevils on the bar that they rub up against that I don't wear high socks, you know, I'm not that girly girl yet, but I'm just.

[00:54:30.050] – Allan
Just drag it all the way up your legs, if it gets away from your legs, you're losing it and you need to lower the weight. And so if I'm going to work with someone and teach them the deadlift, it's let's start with a PVC pipe. Quite literally, it weighs next to nothing. Then I'll pick up one of those spin lock bars that weighs about 15 pounds. And that's a good time for them to at least feel a little bit of weight to it, drag it up along their leg, have a little bit more of that bevil I was talking about.

[00:54:59.450] – Allan
So they kind of feel that roughness as it's going up. And I understand what people are afraid of the deadlift because they keep being told that deadlifts are going to hurt your back. But I'm of the principle that you hurt your back because you're not doing deadlifts. The history of the deadlift as this is, is actually it was a technique taught to people to move human bodies, dead bodies. When people were having to remove dead bodies, they were they were hurting themselves doing it because the human body is heavy, especially when it's solid and it's awkward.

[00:55:34.580] – Allan
So they were teaching them how to lift a dead body without hurting themselves. And that's where the deadlift technique as lift came to be in the dead lift. So but they don't want you to hurt your back. And if you and reach over to lift up something heavy, like you want to, you know, lift up one end or pick up one end of a dresser, if you and someone else remove dresser or it's a hip hands movement because you can't get your knees underneath it, you're behind it, you're beside it.

[00:56:03.800] – Allan
So you have to use a hip hinge properly or you're using your lower back and that leads to injury. So learning good technique, even if you're not going to go super heavy on the deadlift, learning good technique for a given comfortable way isis valuable to not injuring your back. And so you should easily be able to do sets of of deadlift at half your body weight.

[00:56:27.620] – Rachel
Oh wow.

[00:56:28.160] – Allan
Think about the other things that you might want to lift.

[00:56:31.270] – Allan
OK, and that fits in like a bag of dog food. We have a fifty five pound bag of dog food because we have two hungry dogs. To pick that up, I have to use the Hip hinge deadlift and to pick up the dog food at least to get it up to waist high. But so it's a movement that we do and it's good for us to generally know how to do it safely and up to a specific level of strength.

[00:56:59.330] – Rachel
Yeah, that's a good one. And we were talking about squats to squats are another one. A lot of misconceptions apparently with that one.

[00:57:07.160] – Allan
There are. Because, you know, you'll hear your toes should be pointing directly forward and about shoulder width apart and then you'll hear your knees should never go beyond your toes and all of these other things. But the reality is all of us have different length legs. So depending on how long your shin bones are relative to the upper part of your leg, you're going to have a different lever system.

[00:57:31.880] – Allan
It's going to work and it's going to look different. So you can watch a guy do squats and you'll see it. Someone who's got a leaner frame can have their legs practically right beside each other. And just you'll see, it's more common in Asian countries. But one of the resting positions is literally to just squat down and the butt is right up against your heels sitting on the ground. And they're comfortable sitting in that position because they have the mobility.

[00:58:03.410] – Allan
They've small frames so their legs can be very close together and they can get down in that position. My hips are wider, so I have to spread my legs wider or I can't get my hips down without shifting motion, my synonomous forward. So if I'm going to shift it now, I'm more in a hip hinge, but the weights on my back, my shoulders. So that puts me at a bad place for my back.

[00:58:29.270] – Allan
So for me to keep my back in a neutral position, I have to spread my feet and I do point my toes out slightly and then the knees should always just track over the toes. And when I say over, they may go to the toes, they may go slightly past it again. The core of it is just to make sure that it's a smooth motion and that your knees are lined up properly with your toes. And then when you go down, you always want to go to parallel or below.

[00:58:58.430] – Allan
And there's a very important reason for that. When you go down to parallel or below, you have to fire your glutes. OK, prior to that, everything is being basically slowed down or controlled with your quadriceps. So if you can imagine having let's just say you put half your body weight on your shoulders and you start to squat down and you want to stop that movement, suddenly you're only using your quadriceps to do it. And that puts pressure on the knees.

[00:59:32.460] – Allan
OK, that's why there's knee pain for a lot of people doing squats is they do half squats. They don't know three quarter squats. If you get down to parallel or below, the quadriceps are out. They can't do anything. So the only way you stop that weight is to fire your glutes. And you use the glutes, one of the strongest muscle in your body. That used not much when we're sitting around, fire that off and that stops the momentum going down and can restart the momentum going up, therefore not putting pressure on your knees because the glutes are able the quadriceps on the front of your legs are able to relax and let the glutes take the weight.

[01:00:15.690] – Allan
So it's a handoff that happens right about parallel. So it's important to get to parallel so the glutes can fire. And one way I tell my clients that they want to really make sure that they feel that is to imagine that you have one hundred dollar bills squeezed between your butt cheeks. And if you hold on to it through the whole lift, you get to keep it.

[01:00:37.870] – Rachel
Oh, nice. That's a good trick. Good tip on that one. And that's an important movement. And I like to lift weights and do body resistance training and squats are always in my wheelhouse. I'm moving the glutes. Strengthening the glute is the most important thing for runners since more runners should spend time in the gym, that's for sure.

[01:01:00.550] – Allan
Well, yeah, because it balances you out. You know, if you're running, it's great. That's great. Cardiovascular stamina work. You do build leg musculature, but it's a muscular endurance. It's not a muscular strength. And then with weight training, you know, you can now start working in laterals. You know, you can do side lunges and you can do other work that's going to complement your legs and keep your knees healthier.

[01:01:27.580] – Allan
And you can find those movement issues that if running, you know, if running is going to hurt you over time, it's going to be either because you have an overuse injury or it's because you let other muscle groups get weaker. And, you know, remember, I had, was it John Vanquish. We talked about how weight lifting would be superior to cardio overall over time for weight loss. And that was predominantly because, again, yes, you don't have any muscular musculature in your if you're doing endurance running.

[01:02:04.690] – Allan
They have almost no musculature in their upper body because there's no usage of it. They're swinging their arms. But then that's not doing anything for them. So building a little bit of muscular strength makes you functional outside of running and building core strength and muscular strength in your legs, outside of just the running muscles of the quadriceps and the hamstrings, quite literally, will help you run faster. So, you know, particularly in the sprint. So if you get to the final hundred yards and you're like, you know, you're seeing that clock ticked down and there's a PR on that clock.

[01:02:37.720] – Allan
Yeah, I'm going.

[01:02:40.690] – Allan
And that's that extra strength and extra power that you're building by doing resistance training is going to help you do that.

[01:02:47.030] – Rachel
Oh, absolutely. I also want to point out one more thing you mentioned in your podcast about what did you say that the cans aren't getting any harder to open? The pickle jar? You know, and it's funny because, you know, it's not any harder, but I was that strong enough to begin with. But, you know, it's those types of functional movements. You know, it's one thing to be a well rounded, rounded runner. That's fine.

[01:03:11.830] – Rachel
But it's the functional movements of day to day life that could be enhanced by doing a little bit of resistance training, whether it's the dumbbells or the bands like you mentioned, or body weight like I do on occasion, you know, just that type of activity could make just daily tasks just that little bit easier.

[01:03:29.950] – Allan
it does. I mean, when you think about like we talked about the deadlift, OK, so what do you have to do with the deadlift when you're grabbing the bar? You have to have the grip strength. And for most people who work the deadlift up to a point, they realized that the limiting factor for them becomes their grip, not how much they can deadlift. And so then and now it's grip strength. And you'll see people if you go into a gym, you may see people using wraps where they strap on or hooks or something.

[01:03:59.410] – Allan
So it's taking away the requirement that they hold the bar for their lift. OK, which means then for the deadlift they can deadlift more because they've removed the single point of failure. But rather than get their grip strength stronger, they do that. So then so then you come up with terms like raw and ated and things like that. So there's deadlifts that people have done with straps that could deadlift more typically than someone deadlift without. And the prime factor of that is that they're using the straps to end a grip is not failing in that lift.

[01:04:34.840] – Allan
So but you do make your grip stronger. When you're doing it, I mean, just because you're walking around, you're holding something heavy, a dumbbell, a barbell or something, or you're doing a pulling movement every time you grab a bar, every time you grab something and you're having to hold that, that's grip strength. And so that's going to help you open that pickle jar.

[01:04:57.520] – Rachel
I sure hope so. That's my plan.

[01:05:00.520] – Allan
All right. Well, Rachel, I'll talk to you next week, OK?

[01:05:03.430] – Rachel
All right. Take care. Thanks, Allan.

Patreons

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

How to Get Strong After 40

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:26.270] – Allan
Hey Raz, how are you?

[00:02:27.920] – Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:30.320] – Allan
Doing all right. It's been kind of busy here. My wife is getting Lula's kind of ready, you know, finishing up some of the final touches and we had a professional photographer come in to take some pictures. And it was kind of a scary moment because I walk in and I go into the living room and it's warm and all I see is a tripod sitting outside. So I'm like, OK, she's doing something somewhere else in the house.

[00:02:53.720] – Allan
So cool. I start opening things back up and she comes downstairs and says, Do you have somewhere to be?

[00:02:59.640] – Rachel
Oh no.

[00:03:01.820] – Allan
Oh. And then she says, you know, we need to close those windows and turn off those lights. And I'm like, OK, so I just went back into our little, we have an owner suite. I just went back there, shut the door, just stayed in there. So I knew she was gone. So I've dealt with some scary people, scary things before, but just her just, OK, I'm out of here, you know.

[00:03:25.980] – Allan
Do you. And I'm out. But they were some really nice pictures. And if you're on the Facebook group, I went to post a few of those out there so you can kind of get an idea of what this Lula's place I've been talking, complaining about. It is beautiful. It is beautiful, but it's been a handful to go through this major renovation of it. And but we're almost there.

[00:03:49.520] – Rachel
Yeah, it does look beautiful. The pictures came out just lovely. It looks like a wonderful place to relax for a nice vacation.

[00:03:57.560] – Allan
And live

[00:03:58.220] – Rachel
and live. You're lucky you can live on vacation.

[00:04:01.730] – Allan
Well, not exactly when I'm there. I'm not on vacation. I have to leave there and come to the gym to feel like I'm on vacation.

[00:04:09.560] – Rachel
It's beautiful, though. That's very exciting.

[00:04:11.990] – Allan
So how are things up there?

[00:04:13.610] – Rachel
Good, good. We have a mulberry tree on our property that produced a bumper crop this year. So we have jars of mulberry sitting in vodka, which we will turn into a liqueur after they set for a while and then we've got a couple of pounds in the freezer that will turn into jelly. And just after that was done, our black raspberries are coming to fruit right now. And so we've been picking blackberries. My fingers will be permanently purple, but we'll be doing the same thing.

[00:04:48.230] – Rachel
I think we'll make something to liqueur because we have so many and then we'll put some into some jelly. So it's been fun.

[00:04:55.370] – Allan
OK, good. Yeah, we don't have much space in the growing space on the property, so there's none of that for us. You know, my wife had an avocado that she had grown up and it was about three feet tall and then Buster decided to tear it out of the ground and so it died. But it looks like it's trying to reroot. It's just I don't think it's getting enough sun where so I think I'm going to have to move it.

[00:05:18.650] – Allan
But, yeah, we're not in a place where we can really grow our own food or liqueur or, you know.

[00:05:26.390] – Rachel
It's tough. Yeah. We've got a lot of space here, so but maybe some potted tomatoes or something, or at least herbs would be nice.

[00:05:33.950] – Allan
Yeah. Something, you know, we do have it's funny, we have this, it's called a Katuk plant. It's called katuk plant. Hold on, let me check it out. Yeah, it's called a katuk plant, and so friends of ours brought them over, they were staying with us while they were in town and they went over to their property and it was all over the place. And so they picked some and brought us some sprigs. And so we've been growing this katuk.

[00:05:57.800] – Allan
And it's basically kind of a nutty spinach flavor.

[00:06:01.580] – Rachel
Oh, neat.

[00:06:02.870] – Allan
And so we like we'll mix it in with eggs or something like that. Similar to spinach. You just don't wanna eat a whole lot of it because there's actually there have been some studies that, you know, if you get like a too much of it, you can get sick, and so this is kind of one of those things where it's a, you know, really good it tastes really good. It mixes well with eggs and, you know, works similar to spinach, which just don't want to overdo it, you know.

[00:06:27.270] – Allan
So obviously, whenever there's something that's good, more of something good is not always really good.

[00:06:33.770] – Rachel
No, not usually.

[00:06:36.410] – Allan
So we are growing katuk. So I guess I take that back. We do have a plant that we pick a few sprigs from and put into our eggs.

[00:06:44.940] – Rachel
Fun. That's awesome.

[00:06:46.790] – Allan
All right. So you ready to have a conversation with Vivian?

[00:06:49.400] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:07:32.030] – Allan
Vivian, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:34.520] – Vivian
Thank you so much, Allan. It's so great to be here.

[00:07:37.730] – Allan
Now, I have a connection with you that I didn't share with you before we got on this call. But I was a part, I joined the author academy. I didn't do the elite, but I did do that. I've been to a couple of their conferences and whatnot over, of course, covid came and there weren't the live things. So I don't know that I'm gonna get back to their next one when they do the next live one.

[00:08:01.790] – Allan
But it was just, you know, I saw that your book was from them. And interestingly enough, and I'll tell you, you tell anybody that's publishing their own book because you are self published with them is that if you don't make it easy for me to find you, I can't ask you to be a guest on the podcast. So when someone has a book and, you know, I'm going to say independently, you work with a group that helps you, but you get the book published and so many people will be published that way.

[00:08:25.850] – Allan
And then I start searching for them all over the Internet and I can't find anything. But you made it easy for me to find you. And I'm really happy and glad because this topic we're going to talk about today, your book is called When the Words Suddenly Stopped: Finding My Voice Again After a Massive Stroke. I've actually had feedback from listeners asking me to have this topic, and so I've been looking for a book on stroke and recovering from stroke.

[00:08:54.360] – Allan
And that's your story, which is awesome. Now, can you tell us, just real quickly, you know, just an encapsulation of what happened to you. And this is eight years ago or so. Right?

[00:09:10.660] – Vivian
Yes, eight years ago, it was in 2013, it was a Friday morning I woke up, I felt fine. The only thing I had a rough week. Right. It was really busy. And I thought, oh, I have to get up and go to this Girl Scouts breakfast. And then I said, maybe I'll cancel. But at that time, I was just becoming the vice president of community relations at the health care system here in Milwaukee.

[00:09:38.410] – Vivian
And I would fill tables and I would hate when people canceled at the last minute. And of course, in my heart, I knew this was really not a good reason. So I said, I've got to get up and go. So I got up, got dressed. I didn't put on my makeup, which is not totally unusual if I'm resting, I'll do it on the way at stoplights, not driving, but at stoplights and but I will even

[00:10:03.640] – Vivian
If I don't finish, I'll finish when I get to my destination. Well, I completely forgot to do that. I think in hindsight, I think the episode was starting. But I got to the breakfast, basically got in and sat down at my table. Someone asked me if I was OK and I said yes, but they said, you need something to eat probably. They gave me something to eat. And that's the last thing I remember for 10 days, nearly because I collapsed from a seizure.

[00:10:33.730] – Vivian
I was rushed to the hospital. Then they decided that I needed to go to our hospital that specializes in stroke care. I was in neurological ICU for 10 days and in the hospital for a total of 32 days. And I basically had a stroke. I had a blood clot on the left side of my brain over the part that manages your speech. It bled out, killed all those brain cells, which is why I had aphasia and couldn't talk literally for about three and a half weeks.

[00:11:02.200] – Vivian
And I wrote this book because nobody looking at me would think that I had a stroke or was in danger of having a stroke. And then I found out the cause was birth control pills over the age of 40 that caused the blood clot in my brain. And I just did not realize that that was a risk. Half the women don't realize that either, because they say, oh, I'm still over 40 and on birth control pills, the other half say, yes,

[00:11:32.020] – Vivian
My doctor told me when I was in my thirties and plus it's in the fine print. But how many of us read the fine print? I didn't. And so shame on me. But we need to obviously have this talk because doctors don't readily necessarily say that, especially if you haven't had issues with birth control pills.

[00:11:51.430] – Allan
Yeah. And we're going to get into some of the risk factors that would include this. We'll do that in a minute. But I want to start with one thing that I think was really important in your case. And you've acknowledged this a dozen or more times in the book is you had your sisters with you. You had people there at the event that you were really, really close to that immediately stepped in and did big sister stuff for you and got things moving and kept you on track and kept things working for you.

[00:12:19.510] – Allan
You had these really dear friends that then identified themselves as sisters at the hospital so they could come see you and do the things they wanted to do. And you also referred to as your posse. I think it's really important for us to have that in our lives, but a lot of people don't have that kind of support. And when you have an event like this, you've got to kind of be ready for it. And in your case, you had developed these wonderful relationships, but had a nurse said, no, I need to see that you're actually her sister.

[00:12:49.390] – Allan
Some of those things might not have happened. So can you talk a little bit about the sisters stepping in and then, you know. What that looked like from you, from a support perspective? And then so we can kind of think in terms of, OK, well, something like that were to happen to me today, how would it play out and do I have the right things in place to manage that?

[00:13:13.810] – Vivian
Absolutely, I am originally from St. Louis, Missouri. I lived in Milwaukee now more than twenty five years and I don't have fam, I'm not married, I don't have kids. And so my sorority sisters are really close to me. My sorority is Delta Sigma Theta and we have chapters all over the world. And so I'm in the Milwaukee alumni chapter. I also have other close friends as well. But because I was at this breakfast and people, I was pretty well known.

[00:13:46.600] – Vivian
I used to be on television here in Milwaukee. And so I have friends here that in television I had friends who were members of Delta Sigma Theta. And so people in this Girl Scouts breakfast knew that. And so they started calling my friends who were my sorority sisters. And so when they got to the hospital, the nurse said only immediate family are allowed in there with her. And so one of my quote unquote sisters said I'm her sister.

[00:14:19.030] – Vivian
And they told everybody else who was in my close circle to tell them that you're her sister. And you're right. They if they had said, give us an I.D., or some kind of proof, they probably would not have been able, of course, to do that. But I'm glad that they were able to be there with me because what they wanted to do was to make sure that they got down all of the information that we needed to give to my mother when she arrived to town that night.

[00:14:55.780] – Vivian
And so they wanted to make sure that I was getting my care. They wanted to make sure they got down any of the information that my mother would need. And so it was just very important for them to be there. And from this book, my friends who are single like me, they are designating people to call in there, not only in their living wills, if you want, but also in their advanced directives that health care systems give you.

[00:15:28.930] – Vivian
And so here with Aurora health care at the time, they have five well wishes. And so you list all of your wishes so that they know call this person if something happens. And of course, my mother is listed, but then also one of my sisters is now listed as well. And it's just important because, you know, we're living by ourselves and we're home most of the time by ourselves. And if somebody needs to know what's happening also since that book, one of my friends who was listed as my sister, Tracy, she's not in my sorority, but we're really good friends and went to the same church.

[00:16:16.060] – Vivian
And so now what we do is we make sure we touch base with each other in the morning and then in the evening. So we'll say good morning. We'll say good night, because in a stroke, time is brain. And so the faster they can get to you, the more positive your prognosis will be. And they have a chance to reverse things. And so it's just so important that you are just letting people in. And I know sometimes we get into our own lives and we don't let people in.

[00:16:53.530] – Vivian
We need to let somebody in so that they know what's going on with us.

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[00:19:11.290] – Allan
Yeah, and, you know, when you went into this that you were 49 years old, you were healthy, vibrant, doing some great things, having all kinds of fun and moving forward in your career. Things were humming and they were just going well.

[00:19:27.730] – Allan
And then boom and had this happen 15 minutes earlier, you would have been in a car. Had it happened earlier in the morning, you would have been at home. And so having that preparation just to know, OK, if something happens, this is what we do and this is who we contact. And, you know, making sure that's lined up I think is really, really important, even if you feel like you're in the best of health because you just never know.

[00:19:54.420] – Allan
Now, you had some you had a couple of stroke risk factors, but they weren't stroke risk factors that you would have just readily known. One of them was your race, and then one of them was taking birth control when you're over 40 years old. Could you go through some of the risk factors that are out there? And just so people know, OK, if if this then at least something to keep top of mind and if there's something that's reversible, which a lot of these are, I mean, you obviously can't reverse your age, but there are other things in your health you can.

[00:20:31.290] – Allan
Could you go through a few of the risk factors? And I mean, just briefly talk about them a little bit.

[00:20:36.420] – Vivian
Right. Yeah. You know, high blood pressure, which is very prevalent in African-Americans, high blood pressure is one of the risk factors. So you really want to keep your blood pressure regulated. I don't have high blood pressure, and I didn't then and still don't. And so everybody would ask me, oh, you have high blood pressure. And I said, no, I don't. So high blood pressure is huge. And, you know, a lot of people have to take medication, but you can lower your blood pressure with exercise, etc.

[00:21:14.340] – Vivian
If you have a history of high blood pressure in your family, you probably do have to go to medication. But a lot of these things can be mitigated with exercise and eating healthy and that sort of thing.

[00:21:26.500] – Vivian
The history of a stroke in your family is something that you need to watch. And if you do have a history of stroke, a lot of times we don't talk about what is happening in our families. A lot of people are so closed mouthed when it comes to their health. They don't either want to know or they don't want to go to the doctor. So they may not know. Bottom line is, we're not talking about our health and we need to talk about our health.

[00:21:52.950] – Vivian
You need to find out what your history is with your health. You know, if you're smoking is a problem. It exacerbates your ability or your incidence of having a stroke. And with the birth control pills, that would be an issue as well. But I've never smoked. But this birth control pills is kind of lower on the list. And really, it was like on the third list. And but I found out that the estrogen levels in birth control pills can cause these blood clots, clots after a certain age.

[00:22:32.310] – Vivian
And so you really do have to pay attention to that because birth control pills are used for various things and they are a lower risk. A lot of times doctors don't readily talk about it. And so I think that's where I got I got caught in this conundrum, if you will. I had never had an issue with my birth control pills. I moved a lot. And so probably from one state to the next that didn't transfer.

[00:23:07.110] – Vivian
But maybe doctors weren't really thinking that I was have I haven't had any issues. And so maybe they felt that it wasn't I didn't need to know about this or maybe they didn't know. So, you know, I'm not quite sure. I don't want to indict anyone. But I just know that this is an issue that we need to talk about. And even if you don't know what's in the fine print, always ask, what are the risk factors?

[00:23:39.750] – Vivian
Are there any risk factors to whatever kind of medication you're taking into your body?

[00:23:45.360] – Allan
And I think one thing you put together there is, there's things you don't know. But then you find out if you ask the question, what's the risk of this? And then knowing the other risk factors, you can kind of look at them in tandem and say, OK, what does this mean for me? So if you're looking at a medication that you might be taking, you say, OK, am I overweight, am I inactive?

[00:24:08.700] – Allan
You know, do I smoke or do I have high blood pressure? How old am I? What is my race? And you start putting those together and you say and then put something low risk on top of all of that, it could be bad. For you, it was really you know, you were in decent shape and you said a little maybe a little overweight, but not anything exceptional. You were very active. You're moving around doing a lot of things.

[00:24:32.130] – Allan
You didn't smoke. You weren't a binge drinker, just an occasional social drink. You didn't do drugs, but you added this small thing on top of race and those risk factors that came around. And at forty nine, that's relatively early. I could see why someone in their 40s would be on birth control because you still haven't necessarily transitioned into menopause. So you're still, as far as your body's concerned, capable and a lot of people also take the like you said, they'll take the birth control pills to manage their periods, to manage, you know, just their cycles, to have a little bit more control over their lives and not thinking about or not knowing about these additional side effects.

[00:25:14.110] – Allan
So if you are going to go on any medication, get the pamphlet out. It's long. It's boring. It'll probably take a few nights to read it. You'll fall asleep a few times, but ask your doctor and then, you know, just do a little bit of basic research. It's not that you're going to be Dr. Google or anything, but just get out there and say my doctor's prescribing something that I'm going to put in my body.

[00:25:37.050] – Allan
I need to know what this does, not just what it's going to do for me, but what it could do to me.

[00:25:43.090] – Vivian
Absolutely, absolutely, and one of my friends also said to maybe even talk to a pharmacist or pharmacologist, because a lot of times doctors know their specialty, but they don't always necessarily know how medications interact with other medications. And so a pharmacist and a pharmacologist is really more in tune with those things. And so don't be afraid to talk to the pharmacist or the pharmacologist.

[00:26:15.430] – Allan
They actually have a little booth in most pharmacies. If you go in there, there's a little consultation little booth. You can go over there and they'll stop what they're doing and come over and have that conversation with you. So good tip there. Now, there are different kinds of stroke. And I guess as an individual that hasn't had a stroke or had a family member with a stroke, I guess my grandmother had one.

[00:26:38.140] – Allan
She's relatively young and she had hers. I wasn't even around yet. But there are different types of stroke. Could you talk a little bit about the different strokes and then kind of how yours was a unique?

[00:26:50.900] – Vivian
Right. So there are three kinds, there's in a ischematic stroke, there's the hemorrhagic stroke, and then there's the transient ischemic attack, which is called a TIA. And so a lot of people have had those types of strokes. And they are you know, I don't want to say the symptoms are mild, but they're milder compared to two mine. So they may have something and they may be able to walk around for a few days and sometimes they may have two or three.

[00:27:28.400] – Vivian
But those are all kind of warning signs that a major stroke is coming along. The hemorrhagic stroke, that's just excessive bleeding that happens. And then the ischemic stroke is when you have a clot that really blocks the artery. And that's what I had. And it was a major block. But this is what was really interesting. My doctor, Dr. Akram Shhadeh he said that it's called a C V T cervical or cerebral I'm sorry, cerebral venous thrombosis.

[00:28:07.460] – Vivian
And it's when the blood stays or stagnation causes pressure and then it starts to bleed in the vein. And so it's kind of inward instead of outward. And I know this kind of technical, but it was just a rare kind of stroke. And that's why it happened so quickly. And I had the see, it's characterized by a seizure. And so I had that seizure. I had never had a seizure before in my life.

[00:28:42.680] – Vivian
I had two on that day. One at this breakfast. And then they had to stabilize me because I had another one once they put me into the ambulance. So I had to in one day. And when you have a seizure, you can't drive for 90 days legally. And so I had to after 90 days, I had to take work with my occupational therapist. And we know we're going to talk about them in a few minutes. But I had to work with my occupational therapist.

[00:29:16.260] – Vivian
So they do a driving test that really looks at your peripheral vision. If you could see certain things, your reaction and they have to sign off on whether or not you are able to do that before you send it to the state and the state signs off for you to rescind your or to give you your license back, basically.

[00:29:42.110] – Allan
Yeah. Anyone that's listen to the show for any time at all knows that physical therapists are like my favorite people on Earth. I just thought if you enjoy yourself, find a good physical therapist, it's going to mean the world to you as far as how much that can improve your life. But you also then had to go to occupational therapy and speech therapy. Can you kind of talk about how they're different and why each of them was important specifically for you coming back from your stroke?

[00:30:13.520] – Vivian
So physical therapy is very important because when you have a stroke, sometimes you're one side gets weak and so this, my right side got weak and so they would wheel me around in a wheelchair because I had to strengthen that right side. So I had to go to physical therapy every day and do exercises to basically strengthen those muscles. And, you know, it's you know, when something is weak, you just have to exercise the muscle to get it back strong.

[00:30:54.020] – Vivian
And so physical therapy is so key. And we take I think we take our therapists and we take what we do every day for granted. And I just learned through my experience in the hospital that therapists are angels. My nurses and my therapists in particular were angels, because every day we would work on something. And if I wasn't doing well, they would say, well, work on that tomorrow. Let's work on something else. They're just extremely positive, just so positive.

[00:31:31.280] – Vivian
And so physical therapy just strengthens your muscles back so you can use what you've always used in the future. And then occupational therapy is really the therapy that helps you do your everyday activities, that allows you to cook, that allows you to, you know, get dressed in the morning. And so because I was out of it for nearly 10 days, I needed to shower. I needed to brush my teeth, I needed to cook. I needed to get organized.

[00:32:09.320] – Vivian
And so all of those things come in to the help that of an occupational therapist gives you. I remember being in the hospital and she take the occupational therapist, took me to this stall, shower stall to help me get dressed and showered. And then when we came back, she says, OK, go in and brush your teeth. I tried to brush my teeth. I was doing what I normally do. And then when it was time for me to spit the contents out.

[00:32:44.860] – Vivian
I didn't know what to do. I open my mouth, but I didn't know the function of actually spitting it out and she said, Vivian, you have to spit it out. You have to spit it out. And I thought to myself at that time that, oh, I probably should have known this, but I went ahead and spit it out. But just the damage that the stroke had done had taken away my ability to remember all of the actions and functions that my body had done up until that point my whole life.

[00:33:18.370] – Vivian
And so occupational therapists help you get back into your normal routine of life, whatever that may be. And then, of course, there was the speech. That was the most impacted of my abilities. And so I had to do that twice a day. And so I had to learn how to write again. I had to learn how to speak. I had to learn organization. The speech therapist also kind of gives you exercises to do. To say, what would you do first?

[00:33:51.700] – Vivian
What would you do second? What do you remember from this from this sheet with these pictures on it? And so all of that kind of works together to get your mind back into the organizational habit that it's been in for your entire life. So I too love them, just like you look at therapists.

[00:34:15.070] – Allan
And you did your work. And I think that's the core of this. You did it. You kept doing it. And even when you were out, you went back to your appointments, you got your work done, and as the result, you were able to go back to work.

[00:34:28.900] – Allan
And after going back to work and work your way in, now, I guess as of 2015, you are I don't think you'd call it stroke free, but fully recovered.

[00:34:40.920] – Vivian
Absolutely. Yes. My doctor told me that my chances of having another stroke point one percent. So I think that's pretty good.

[00:34:51.520] – Allan
I would, I would put some money on that one. Yeah.

[00:34:56.140] – Vivian
And I'm not on any prescribed medications but I do still take a baby aspirin each day. But it's not prescribed. But that's what they want me to do just to regulate my blood and the thickness of my blood.

[00:35:12.460] – Allan
Vivian, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:35:21.220] – Vivian
exercise, movement. And I know sometimes I have a lot of friends who joke about, oh, you won't find me on the treadmill. It doesn't have to be the treadmill. You know, walk outside. I'm in Wisconsin. And so, you know, it's kind of cold in the winter, but it's a little spring and summer. Get out there. You know, I'm right on Lake Michigan. I like to walk along Lake Michigan, you know, instead of saying, hey, let's go out for drinks.

[00:35:49.960] – Vivian
Hey, let's go for a walk. We get one with nature and we're getting some exercise in and chit chatting with our friends. And so it could be dancing. I was in this dance competition and I actually we danced like every day for hours when I was getting ready for the competition and I lost like fifteen pounds leading up to that competition. Now I've gotten a few pounds back, but it's still, you know, you can do dancing, you can do walking, you can do just whatever. Biking.

[00:36:24.310] – Vivian
A lot of people like biking, swimming, anything that gets you moving and that's fun. You want it to be fun. Just do that. Just have taken a walk. We all can take a walk and if we keep taking a walk and walk a little farther, we could walk farther the next time it's building up those muscles. So that's one thing. I think one thing that I do, I chat with my creator every morning and so I wake up and I just want to make sure that I'm grateful for the things that are in my life.

[00:37:03.490] – Vivian
And so just to me, thanking God for all of the blessings that I have, number one sparing me on October 25th, 2013 so that I can be here and tell this story and share this information, because he gave me the gift of communication. You know, I just thank him for that. I thank him for my friends. I thank him just for all of the blessings that all of the positive things that are in my life.

[00:37:31.930] – Vivian
You know, you need to be connected to your core. And I would say also having friends, you know, some people may not be as social as I am. I'm not a socialist. Some other people that I know, but if you have someone that you can call, whether it's a family member or a friend, connect with people because you'll find things to be grateful for just with that relationship. So those are just three things that I think you just need to have in your life so that you can live a happy, healthy existence.

[00:38:15.260] – Allan
Thank you, Vivian. If someone wanted to learn more about you and your book, When the Words Suddenly Stopped, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:38:23.390] – Vivian
Send them to VivianLking.com. If you go there, you can connect with me on my social media. You'll be able to just click and follow me either on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also learn about the book there. I also have a link where if you would like to get the book, you can link to Amazon, you can link to Audible, and so you can just find anything at vivianlking.com. You can also email me and we can have personal conversations and you'll be able to find whatever I'm doing on vivianlking.com.

[00:39:07.280] – Allan
OK, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/495 and I'll be sure to have those links there. Vivian, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:39:17.690] – Vivian
Thank you so much for having me. It's just been a pleasure and I'm glad I made it easy for you to find me. Carry over with you. Really excited about that. And you know what? You talked about the conference. The next conference is coming up this October, so I would love for you to see it. I'm going. So I hope you'll be able to go too Allan.

[00:39:34.910] – Allan
I'll see what I can do.

Post Show/Recap

[00:39:41.000] – Allan
Hey Raz, welcome back.

[00:39:42.290] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, you know, it was really wonderful to listen to Vivian share her story and, you know, stroke is a scary illness. It's something definitely everybody should watch. And just like health, disease and cancer, you know, almost everybody has some sort of a tie. I've got a family member who suffered a stroke. I've got a friend who's a young lady, suffered a stroke. And her story was very close to Vivian's with having lost her speech and learning how to walk.

[00:40:10.400] – Rachel
And it's been a long road to recovery. It's a scary situation.

[00:40:14.990] – Allan
Yeah. My grandmother on my mother's side had one when she was relatively young. And so it was just things I remember is that her left side was just really not really strong. And so she had to be careful with her balance. And then she had this thing on the steering wheel handle grip thing so she could turn the car more effectively because she just didn't have the dexterity of her left side to do that thing. But she lived well into her 60s.

[00:40:42.500] – Allan
So the care that she got must have been top notch. And she did recover, you know, again. To me, the big thing is, A avoid this, you know, avoid it. In the first you know, we had Dr. Raza on last week and he was talking about cardiovascular disease being on the increase because so many people were more sedentary and gaining weight. And so we know that that's a risk factor. You know, having excess body fat, having, you know, our blood lipid numbers not look well.

[00:41:14.630] – Allan
Those are big cardiovascular risks. But, you know, if you're in a high stress environment or you're hitting some of those other risk factors, like smoking or drinking too much or those types of things, you're setting yourself up.

[00:41:29.060] – Rachel
That's right. That's a good way to look at it. Instead of setting yourself up for success, you're essentially setting yourself up for failure or some sort of an illness. And stroke is one of the many diseases that we do know so many things about. I mean, it's been researched like crazy. And so if we know these risk factors, then why not discuss them with your doctor and see what we could do to reverse that?

[00:41:52.190] – Allan
Well, you know, in a lot of the books that I've read on longevity, you know, today and then it was the Blue Zones and all that type of stuff. They always talk about, you know, being active, having good social connections, all these different things that can help you live longer. And she was checking off the boxes. You know, she she was living the life that she wanted to live and then, boom, it could have been gone in an instant.

[00:42:20.570] – Allan
And she was just very fortunate to have been around friends and people that can take care of her, get her the help she needed quickly. So that's a big part of this. Is one A avoid it if you can. B have some have some plans, have some contingencies. So something happens, you know, you have people that know to look out for you. And then the final bit is. The stronger you are before it happens, the better your opportunity of coming out of this, and I truly believe that that's a big part of why Vivian was able to write this book, was because she was pretty active, pretty healthy, you know, checking off the boxes beforehand.

[00:43:00.780] – Allan
And that just made it easier for her to recover. But then on the back side, she did the work. But, yeah, she went to the physical therapist and she got all the therapy. She went to the occupational therapist and did all the therapy. She went to the speech. Even when she couldn't talk, she was still going to speech therapy. So she didn't wait and she didn't put it off and she didn't quit midstream. And a lot of times people will do that.

[00:43:26.760] – Allan
They'll say, OK, I've got the homework and they're not doing the homework. And they go to a few physical therapy sessions and are like, OK, this is kind of silly. You know, I got this little Pully thing and they're making me pull my arm up and back and do that thing like, OK, that's great, I can do this at home. Why would I pay this guy this kind of money to do the pully thing in front of him when I can do it at home?

[00:43:48.810] – Allan
But the reality is that that is the necessary action to get your body back where it's supposed to be. And whether it's the physical therapy, the occupational therapy or the speech therapy, it's just you want to recover. If you want to get back what you lost, you've got to go. You've got to do well.

[00:44:05.760] – Rachel
It's so important. And these people are all experts in their different fields, and especially with the occupational therapy, like Vivian had mentioned, was that you need to learn how to do things, how to get in and out of a car again. How does put your seatbelt on and off again. And it's not that you're learning it like a child who learns to walk from the first time. It's that your muscles are learning how those actions work. Again, it's a little different and it's kind of hard to explain.

[00:44:31.320] – Rachel
But but the faster you get into these programs, the faster your brain synapses come back together and can process this information. And like she had also mentioned, time is of the essence. If you wait too long, then you might lose some of this and make the process even harder to regain and how to heal from. And yeah, timing is so important.

[00:44:53.400] – Allan
Yeah. And I know a lot of people would be shocked at this, but she had to learn how to shop. I mean, quite literally, they took her to a store, a grocery store and I think maybe a Wal-Mart as a part of her occupational therapy so she could mock shop. So she could relearn how to shop. And you just think that's just those automatic things like spinning when you brush your teeth. And she talked about, well, you know, it's like she just forgot what she was supposed to do next, because even though it had been become so automatic in our lives suddenly now.

[00:45:26.070] – Allan
There was a missing gap, something was not there, and she had to be told to do something that she knew she needed, she knew afterwards. They said it's like, of course, that's what I would do. She had actually physically, not just mentally or remember how to what to do, when to do it, but actually physically go through the action because she had forgotten how.

[00:45:44.250] – Rachel
That's such a mystery. The brain is so mysterious that way.

[00:45:48.180] – Rachel
And it just depends on what part of the brain suffers that damage. And, who knows, it is like literally you forget things and then you forget how to do things. And it's just those random things like learning how to shop. And thank goodness for occupational therapists who could ask you the right questions and see if you know how to do these things during your recovery. It's really amazing.

[00:46:10.140] – Allan
And the last thing I want to leave this with is, OK, maybe you're not concerned about yourself having a stroke, but there are people around you that I know you love and care about. So learning what are the symptoms of a heart attack? What are the symptoms of a stroke? What are the symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke by just by knowing those symptoms and you see something out of place, you know, a drooping of the face slurring of the words when they've obviously not been drinking those just different little things that are happening that if you catch it early and they get the medical care that they need, it can mean a world of difference over how much damage actually gets done.

[00:46:50.850] – Allan
And so it's just really important for you to know some of those things so that when you see it, you can react to it. And if nothing else, it's going to say to you she couldn't have done that for herself because she was too far gone before she even realized what was going on with the people around her. Saw it. You saw it happening to her. Everything was normal. But they could see it and say, no, this is not normal.

Note: The power went out in Bocastown while we were recording.

[00:47:16.170] – Allan
All right, looks like our power went out. So I think I'm still recording, but I think Rachel has fallen off because my power went out. But so thank you guys for being part of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Will talk to you next week.

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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Thank you!

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Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:04:29.950] – Allan
Hey Raz, how are you?

[00:04:31.440] – Rachel
Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:04:33.120] – Allan
I'm doing all right. Still flipped out by that woman.

[00:04:36.670] – Rachel
It is a funny sound on that recording.

[00:04:38.910] – Allan
Yeah. So, yeah, when we go to do a recording on Zoom, they've now got this voice lady that comes in and says, you know, we're recording and then she'll say again, we're not recording. And it's just it's kind of just startling because it's louder than we are. But it's just so you can probably hear us laugh about this for at least the next year. Maybe they can give us different voices, maybe something a little bit calmer and soother to transition into these shows because it's like, don't you know?

[00:05:08.090] – Allan
But now everybody on the call, both of us, Rachel and myself, know that I'm recording. And the little red flashing dot was the indicator for that as well. But it is accessible. This is about accessibility. So I get it. I get it. I get it. But give me a calmer, gentler voice. Everybody will be fine with it, you know, just something nice. Maybe something like Mr. Rogers voice, you know, versus the lady we have.

[00:05:32.010] – Allan
It sounds a lot more like Mr. T.

[00:05:34.230] – Rachel
Yeah. Stern warning.

[00:05:38.400] – Allan
How you doing?

[00:05:39.330] – Rachel
Good. Good. You know, we've been having some rainy weather up here in the spring, which is wonderful for my garden. But I've got a new client for who's running her first full marathon. And I told her to practice running in the rain. And Mike and I just went out. We did a 10k in the rain the other weekend and it really was a hoot. It's just fun. It's fun running and jumping in puddles. And I feel just like a kid again.

[00:06:04.350] – Rachel
And plus I'm testing all my gear because you just never know what the weather will bring on race day. So that's what I want my new client to experience just in case for race day is rainy as well.

[00:06:14.010] – Allan
Just in case it rains. Absolutely. So are you going to chafe? Is it going to hurt? You know, how much is your clothes going to weigh when they're wet. All those things can be big, big deal. You weren't planning on carrying an extra pound or two of water.

[00:06:28.410] – Rachel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's important to make all those decisions and be prepared. Plus you've got the mental preparedness as well. If it's going to rain, it will be a big deal because you've been through it already. So that's an advantage.

[00:06:42.240] – Allan
And if it happens to be a warm day, you've got a natural cooling effort that's there. So it's actually not the direct sunlight dehydration thing. It's rain.

[00:06:52.740] – Rachel
It could be a good day. Yeah.

[00:06:54.990] – Allan
It rained during my first marathon when I ran. It did. It was so funny. We came up to this hill. It wasn't raining when we started and then we came up to the hill is only one really hill in the whole marathon. Turned this corner and it's raining. It starts raining. As soon as we get to this hill and we're running up this hill and the wind is blowing in our face. As we're running up the hill in the rain.

[00:07:19.920] – Rachel
You have to laugh at that.

[00:07:21.540] – Allan
That's the whole point. I thought I was running with. It's like, I knew I was running with the right group of guys. I ran into these guys. It just start and we're running. And, you know, I knew I was with the right guys because we were just. Does it get any worse than this?

[00:07:35.130] – Allan
Like shut up…

[00:07:36.840] – Rachel
Don't say that. Don't say that out loud. Yeah. Because in Florida, you could have a thunderstorm pretty quickly.

[00:07:44.220] – Allan
Anything could happen. So it's like, yeah, let's just not tempt fate. Let's just race. But they were fun. They were fun for the first ten to twelve miles. And then we dropped down below seven minute miles and I was like, nope, that was not the race I trained for. I was not where I wanted to be. And so I dropped down to closer to my pace, which was closer to seven and a half to forty five.

[00:08:09.690] – Allan
And so anyway yeah they left their buddy. That was kind of the first thing that got me was, we're all military guys and they just, they ran on. Their buddy fell out first. I was also just going to leave him. I'm like, oh yes they are. I realized, OK, I don't, you know, I don't have any skin in this game, I'm not trying to win a race. I'm trying to finish one.

[00:08:27.540] – Allan
So. I dropped out. But, yeah, it's good to know there's different conditions when you're doing things.

[00:08:32.790] – Rachel
Absolutely.

[00:08:34.050] – Rachel
So how are things with you down there in Panama?

[00:08:36.300] – Allan
They're getting busy. They're getting really busy. You know, Tammy's trying to do some soft openings on Lula's bed and breakfast. So she's had people come in and stay.

[00:08:46.680] – Allan
Most of them are staying for a month or longer. Then she had a photographer come in. She was going to stay for two days and she was scary. She's just a scary person. Oh, I came in and I started opening up because it was hot and living room. So I started opening up windows and I'll turn on lights. And she said, no, no, no, no, you need to have those lights off and close those windows, like, OK, close everything up.

[00:09:07.230] – Allan
And I went my bedroom and I left her. But no, it was interesting because while she was doing all this, I was trying to do a deep clean at the gym. We do that about once every six months. We pull everything out. The mats and everything, and we scrub the mat, scrub the floor. So we were about, I'd say, maybe three quarters of the way through when the water ran out then, you know, Panama.

[00:09:34.260] – Allan
And I'm like, OK, I know there's tanks, but they city water and they were hostile. We should have so much water. It shouldn't be a problem. But no, they weren't pumping water into their tank. And so we didn't have water on our whole block and we didn't know just went out there. Like we're like, what's wrong? The pumps not working. Like, OK, cool. So I guess guys, we're done early goes go on home and I'll see you tomorrow at nine o'clock.

[00:09:55.590] – Allan
We'll do what we can do. I show up at nine o'clock. I put the bucket, I turn the spigot. It works. cool. They come in, the girl goes there was helping one of the girls that was helping me goes over with a bucket but it turns it on. Nothing comes out. Oh. And I'm like I got water out there. Look there's water in that blue bucket. I got water so I know it's working.

[00:10:13.920] – Allan
When it was not working they hadn't got the pump fixed and they didn't know when it was going to be fixed. So I sent my staff off to go find water in buckets and bring it in because we had to have it to scrub the mats and they found it down at the fire department and they were able to get enough water for us to finish. But just enough. I mean, literally, she went down with the bucket and came back and said, that's the last bucket, because they've now turned off the water to the whole area so they can fix the pump.

[00:10:42.090] – Allan
And so there's no more water. And I'm like, OK. And I went home. I told my wife, I'm like, yeah, we had to go the fire department to get water and we got the last of their water, just like a fire department doesn't have any water.

[00:10:54.180] – Rachel
That's concerning. That's not good.

[00:10:55.620] – Allan
I thought, dammit, I'm going to be that guy. I used all the water.

[00:10:59.970] – Rachel
Oh my goodness.

[00:11:01.770] – Allan
Now we literally probably took I would say. Forty gallons from them, so that was not put out a house fire amount of water that we were using to clean the gym, let's be real. But, yeah, we were able to scrub all the mats, get all of them back and get all the equipment out and stuff, you know, dusted off, cleaned off and put back in. So it was a tough, tough weekend, but we were able to get it done.

[00:11:26.120] – Allan
And, you know, kind of one of those things and I say this over and over, everybody on the podcast is know your strengths, know your weaknesses. You know, don't let your ego get in the way. The first the first two times when I own this gym, I did the deep cleaning by myself, hauled all those mats out, scrubbed them all out, put them all back and did it all by myself.

[00:11:46.010] – Allan
The first two times. The last time I did it, I hired three people to help me. And I was still exhausted at the end of the day, and this time I hired four, so there was a little bit more standing around than I would have liked, you know, spending money by the hour. You don't want a lot of standing around, but it was good to have the extra hand. So, like, we had to go a block away and get water in buckets.

[00:12:08.850] – Allan
I had the people to do it and it wasn't me doing it.

[00:12:12.270] – Rachel
Yeah, no kidding. I can't imagine the weight of all your machines and all your cardio equipment and.

[00:12:18.540] – Allan
Yeah, well, that's the other thing. When I bought the gym I had there were 350 pounds of Olympic plates in this gym. And one barbell. You know, and now I have five barbells and a curl bar and about fourteen hundred pounds of Olympic plates. So, yeah, there's a lot more equipment in here now than when the two times I did it. But those horse mats are still those horse mats are still those first mats and they're heavy and there's no real grip to them.

[00:12:49.270] – Allan
So you use a ton of grip strength, picking those up, holding them, flipping them over and doing all that scrubbing. So it's still a tough day to do the work, even when I'm only doing a fraction of it.

[00:13:00.480] – Allan
But I knew my strengths and weaknesses and what was about to get myself hurt.

[00:13:07.920] – Rachel
it's good to have that extra help for sure.

[00:13:10.380] – Allan
So my workouts this weekend had a lot of grip strength, but a lot of moving around. All right. Well, you ready to have a conversation with Dr. Raza?

[00:13:23.580] – Rachel
Yes.

Interview

[00:13:53.100] – Allan
Dr. Raza, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:13:56.100] – Dr. Raza
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:13:57.940] – Allan
Now, you know, as we went into covid and I have made a point on the podcast of not talking about covid a whole lot. And I only say that because there's so much that's happened around covered so many conversations around covid and it's become so political. But one of the things that really concerned me as we went into Lockdowns was the term I use, the term it's called unintended consequences that, you know, so many things are happening to us around what we're trying we're trying to avoid one thing, but we create additional problems for ourselves.

[00:14:38.130] – Allan
And it's just something that, you know, you had someone reach out to me so that you could be on the show. And I was like, absolutely, we have to talk about these unintended consequences of covid. So thank you so much for taking time to be with us today.

[00:14:53.340] – Dr. Raza
And not at all. Thank you for having me.

[00:14:55.590] – Allan
Now, you know, we went into the lockdowns and

[00:14:59.980] – Allan
Kind of the worst part of this was some of my clients were doctors. And so I was training a doctor and the doctor's like, well, we're closing down the clinic. And I'm thinking, well, kids aren't going to stop getting sick, kids are still going to need, you know, their immunizations and are still going to need their health care visits.

[00:15:21.900] – Allan
so our medical care doesn't stop just because we decide we're going to stay in our apartment or house. It doesn't stop because, you know, our office says, oh, well, you can work from home. The things that get us sick, the things that are happening in our bodies that require medical attention are better addressed if we are a little bit more proactive than if we go in for emergency care. And that's the discussion. But what we've noticed and you brought to my attention actual statistics from the CDC is that while we had this huge problem with heart disease before, it's now actually become something worse.

[00:16:04.230] – Allan
Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:16:06.030] – Dr. Raza
It has. So if you go back to last March and here in Dallas, Texas, the spring break is always like first or second week of March.

[00:16:18.030] – Dr. Raza
And so the Thursday before spring break, I remember getting my wife's cardiologist as well. So both of us got an announcement on email and text that school was going to close early and no school on Friday would go into spring break with the anticipation that school would not return after spring break. And at the same time, locally in Dallas and statewide in Texas, we also went into lockdown. In our clinic, logistically, what that meant was that for our nurses or techs or aids, they now have to consider child care issues in addition to the hospital that we're in where we have our clinic, they indicated sort of protocols for who can now come in, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:17:09.380] – Dr. Raza
And so I still remember on that Monday, March 16th, we started to do telemedicine for the first time. We've never done this as a cardiologist, as a cardiology practice, because cardiology, you have to see the patient in front of you. You have to look, listen, examine, do EKGs, et cetera. But we started off on this in April and into May. And slowly things improved, especially locally here in Texas, whereby they opened up in May.

[00:17:41.240] – Dr. Raza
But clearly what we noticed was a drop in the number of visits to the emergency room, to the hospital and to our clinics and patients who would otherwise come in for cardiovascular issues. That is both acute symptoms and chronic management issues. And this basically persisted throughout certainly the acute hospitalization and emergency room data stand down throughout 2020. And this data was not just this is not just US based data.

[00:18:13.380] – Dr. Raza
This is this was also manifested in Europe and in the U.K. whereby they have large nationwide health care system. And so it's very easy to data. But, you know, the NHS can easily look at hospitalizations for cardiovascular issues. 2019, 2020. And we don't get better cardiovascular disease in one year. It doesn't work like that. We look at data in chunks of decades at a time in the clinic, there was a little bit of a reflection whereby June, July was busier than sort of tapered off again, as we initially had a surge in the fall and then definitely the November, December, January surge.

[00:18:57.710] – Dr. Raza
And sure enough, it wasn't surprising when the CDC came out with their data last week that the deaths from heart disease had gone up for the first time in two decades. And this reflected the fact that what was happening wasn't that we had gotten better at treating cardiovascular disease. And so that's why the hospitalizations are down. That's why the rate of our defects is down. That's why clinic visits were down. It's that patients were not seeking medical attention. And so therefore there are heart disease prosecuting chronic or being we're not being managed, not being looked after.

[00:19:34.430] – Dr. Raza
And of course, the unintended consequences is downstream. You have cardiovascular events and as we know, cardiovascular events, unfortunately, to death.

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[00:21:56.620] – Allan
I think many of us have paid attention, at least enough attention to know that if we are going through certain symptoms, you know, pain in the arm is one, dizziness, tightness in the chest, some of those basic things that were we start paying attention to once we're 40, we pay a lot more attention to it. But at this point in time, you're at home and there's this kind of a sudden, this tepid fear that this is out there.

[00:22:28.600] – Allan
The covid is out there, and we have to be concerned about being exposed. And so it's one of those things where it is kind of a counterbalance to say, do I book an appointment and go in and take a risk or is this just indigestion and maybe I shouldn't have had that second slice of pizza I ordered from Domino's or forth? So, you know, as people are going through this because, you know, I can't say this is the last time this is going to happen in our lifetime.

[00:23:00.580] – Allan
You know, this kind of talk about the different aspects of covid and the different variants and things is it's really hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that this might not just be a Spanish flu, if you will, where we have a three year period of time when everybody goes through this situation and then effectively it's passed and we're on, this might be a little bit more of a protracted thing. So before we move on, because I do think this is important and I really think it's important as far as the four steps that you have for how we can move forward, move beyond this.

[00:23:40.720] – Allan
But can we just take one step back and kind of talk about for an individual and, you know, heart disease is the number one killer for men and women in the United States. So as we're looking at that, and I know men and women actually have slightly different symptoms sometimes. Could you just take us back to that level of, let's talk about the symptoms of what would a man experience? And this is the time to go into the emergency room and this is the time to make an appointment with a cardiologist like yourself.

[00:24:14.680] – Allan
And what would a woman experience that could be slightly different? So someone, at least at this point thinking I haven't yet been vaccinated, but I so I'm putting off going to the doctor, putting off, going to the emergency room. What should they be looking for?

[00:24:28.810] – Dr. Raza
It's a great question that you brought up the pizza analogy because you can rationalize your symptoms in many different ways, depending on what you yourself are going through at that point. So you're absolutely right. March of 2020. I have patients tell me this, that they would have chest discomfort, et cetera, and they would say it was probably this, it's probably stress not sleeping well and so on and so forth. And later you find out that this is not the first cardiovascular issue.

[00:24:59.730] – Dr. Raza
So let's go back to, like you said, to the very beginning. So for me and for most cardiologists and we have to do a better job at public information disseminating this out to the public. If you have chest pain, chest pressure, if you have arm numbness, jaw pain, nausea, typefaces where you're sweating, shortness of breath with exertion, shortness of breath, when you lay flat at night, palpitations, unexplained episodes of passing out or even sort of seizure like activity, you should absolutely seek medical attention and you should do it sooner rather than later before you start rationalizing and then more subtle signs.

[00:25:44.240] – Dr. Raza
So if you feel more sure, more tired or fatigued at the end of the day, if you feel that, you know, I used to be able to walk up and down this corridor at work or I used to be able to climb a flight of stairs, now I have to take a break in the middle. Don't rationalize it as I'm a year older, maybe have gained 15 pounds and I'm a little heavier. It's easier.

[00:26:08.620] – Dr. Raza
It's very easy to rationalize. What you actually should do is go out, seek medical attention and then make sure it's not anything we need to worry about. All the other things. Let's rule it out first and then go with the well, I'm just a condition, I just need to lose a little bit weight, it's stress and anxiety. Those things won't markedly alter your mortality and morbidity to way heart disease potentially can. And remember, early intervention is always better, whether it's cancer, whether it's heart disease, you're going to find something more options

[00:26:45.460] – Dr. Raza
We have a better chance we have at preventing something worse.

[00:26:50.050] – Allan
And I think you hit on something really important. There's the early intervention. You know, don't talk. Yourself out of talking to a doctor. The worst case is he tells you, you're perfectly fine, go home and leave me alone. And that would be a great case.

[00:27:05.260] – Dr. Raza
we get that all the time, you know, we get patients who come in and they have chest discomfort. We do the evaluation.

[00:27:11.830] – Dr. Raza
It's not the heart.

[00:27:12.780] – Dr. Raza
What we tell them is, OK, I understand you had symptoms of X, Y, Z. What I can tell you is it's not the heart.

[00:27:19.570] – Dr. Raza
What it could be?

[00:27:20.710] – Dr. Raza
I don't know for sure. But let's take the next step at going back to your primary care doctor, letting them know that you had a battery of cardiovascular tests. You don't think it's your heart.

[00:27:30.500] – Dr. Raza
Let's go down the next thing down the line, whether it's high, whether it's whatever, X, Y, Z.

[00:27:36.760] – Allan
Well, anyone that tells me they went through the last 18 months without feeling some level of anxiety and maybe even moments where they just sat there and said, OK, I'm just beyond myself. They're not being realistic because I think we all went through those moments where we're like, OK, I'm not right. This is not right. I don't feel good. And it may not be a huge health concern, but in the grand scheme of things, if you're feeling any of those symptoms, feeling any of that, it's worth having the conversation and we've put the conversation off.

[00:28:09.720] – Allan
Because of the lockdowns, because of covid restrictions and just the basic fear that's out there, which, again, the fear leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to not some dissimilar, but then also that's confounder that could actually be causing some of the heart issues. So we kind of look at this full circle. It doesn't surprise me to see the higher numbers post covid, but for a long time the numbers looked great because, well, no one was going to the doctor, even the emergency room.

[00:28:40.320] – Allan
And as a result, it's like, you know, flu deaths are down, cancer deaths, all these things are down. And you're like, no, they're not down. They're just submerged into this environment.

[00:28:51.000] – Dr. Raza
They are. And you have this backlog of access to care. So, for example, telemedicine is wonderful, but you have to understand the limitations. So when primary care doctors or specialists like myself, we did tell you we're still relying on Internet connection folks having to either hold up an iPad or a smartphone. The angles are off, the lighting is bad. You can't really see the patient.

[00:29:18.990] – Dr. Raza
And there's a lot of value in actually looking at someone and talking to someone face to face versus over the phone. And so what would happen is I can easily see where they speak to a primary care doctor or a cardiologist and symptoms, I think that minimized lost in translation. And they say, well, we'll see you back in six months and six months passed down the line. And I miss the appointment or something else happens. And this data is has been tracked and the VA population and also in the UK where the NHS has this backlog now, I think about five million well visits of folks who haven't gone for their annual physical screenings.

[00:30:06.150] – Dr. Raza
And if you just do the numbers and add up all those patients with high blood pressure, diabetes and so on and so forth, we haven't had a checkup, whether it's in person over the phone, it's not surprising that you see these numbers. Going back to the initial question that you had. What are the differences between men and women with heart disease? That's a fascinating discussion that's been discussed and actually researched ad nauseum. The American College of Cardiology actually has a wonderful graphic on signs and symptoms of heart disease and actually tweeted it out the other day.

[00:30:41.500] – Dr. Raza
You can follow me at SadiRazaMD and what it is, is the signs and symptoms are similar, but women may have additional symptoms than men, so they may have the nausea, the diaphoresis which is sweating, the dizziness on top of the chest the pain, and the pressure down the left arm, et cetera.

[00:31:01.000] – Allan
OK, now you developed or at least presented to me kind of a four step process that you feel, and I'll guess I'll put my own title to it. And this should not just be about heart care, but in this premise of our conversation, it definitely is.

[00:31:18.310] – Allan
This is a post covid Wellness plan,

[00:31:23.380] – Allan
particularly for people over 40, because we're the ones most likely to be suffering from cardiovascular disease and dying from cardiovascular disease. So can you talk about your four steps? And why each is important?

[00:31:36.580] – Dr. Raza
Sure. So I think step one, and I'll be careful in what I say here, I think step one is try and get vaccinated. So today, I think the administration is going to announce that they've had more than three hundred million doses that have been given since the vaccines came out.

[00:31:56.320] – Dr. Raza
The US has three vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, which are MRNA based vaccine, and this Johnson & Johnson, which is one shot at no virus vaccine. Since March of 2020 to now, our ability to mask handwash and social distance hasn't improved. We're not better at wearing masks now than we were in March.

[00:32:22.450] – Dr. Raza
We're not better at being socially distant from each other now. We're not washing our hands better. If anything, societies open up and then those lockdowns and they really haven't been a this wealth of medications that have come down the pike.

[00:32:39.060] – Dr. Raza
You know, we had the plasma convalescent plasma that patients got potentially a randomized clinical trial, which showed minimal improvement with that, yes, we have the infusions, but really it's not because of medications or non pharmaceutical interventions that our covid numbers have plummeted in the US, both in the US, nationally and locally at the local level, at the city level and internationally. You look at countries like Israel, you look at the European Union and all of them, the curves start to markedly come down from when a robust vaccination program was enacted.

[00:33:20.890] – Dr. Raza
So clearly the vaccines work and for the most part, they're safe. And I say that for the most part because that's sort of just couching my words, because there'll be folks that say, well, in this case, the microdata is you're forgetting about the Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine, which is stopped briefly because of clots in the brain, et cetera. So I'm not discounting those. But out of 300 million people who have been vaccinated, the vast majority have had really no side effects, apart from the normal immune response that we expect from any vaccine with the flu vaccine in this case, the covid vaccine. We know, they prevent moderate to severe this is to prevent hospitalizations, and therefore they prevent the virus.

[00:34:12.160] – Allan
And in a person, a person that's most likely to suffer from cardiovascular event is what we would call an at risk person for covid.

[00:34:20.380] – Dr. Raza
Correct. Absolutely. And this is, again, borne out in our hospitals. If you look at, pick a hospital, any hospital in the US hospital, any hospital in the world, the folks who are now hospitalized with covid are younger and primarily those who are unvaccinated, which is markedly different from the typical covid admitted patient in the hospital that we had for the first 12 to 15, 15 months of this pandemic.

[00:34:48.940] – Dr. Raza
So step number one, get vaccinated.

[00:34:51.280] – Dr. Raza
It's very easy to do now, there's a phone number that you can text with zip code and you'll get a list of places that you can get vaccinated. It's now one of those things where you don't have to get in line. CBS, Walgreens, Walmart, lots of places have them that you just walk in. A lot of them you can pick which one you want. If that's your choice, you want to go with Pfizer or Moderna or Johnson & Johnson, they'll give you the date for the second one.

[00:35:18.610] – Dr. Raza
Get a nice card to carry. So get vaccine. Step two, got to reengage with your physicians, whether it's your primary care physician or to one physician, some specialist, endocrinologist or cardiologist, or lung doctor, we engage with them. Get back to figuring out how far away from the baseline you are. Have an honest conversation with them about the signs and symptoms that you've had recently and give them an overview of your health over the past 15 months.

[00:35:47.370] – Dr. Raza
What's happened?

[00:35:48.060] – Dr. Raza
Have you gained weight?

[00:35:49.650] – Dr. Raza
Have you lost weight? Other stressors? Were you exposed to covid? Where you admitted with covid? Let them know. Give them a full comprehensive history of the last 12 months since they last saw you.

[00:36:02.310] – Dr. Raza
Step three, get back to exercising. So if you look at data that we have from fitness trackers, the number of steps that the average person normally walks in a day that are tracked in Apple watches, Fitbit, et cetera, those fell dramatically between 2019 and 2020, because we naturally became more sedentary when malls shut down.

[00:36:28.230] – Dr. Raza
When you don't when you work from home. You don't have to park your car and you walk into an office, go up and down off this corridor, up and down stairs, go to the break room. You know, you don't have malls that you can go into, shopping, etc. grocery stores, those steps go away. And they're not replaced by walking at home. They're just not, you know, and so you have to get active again.

[00:36:53.040] – Dr. Raza
I understand the hesitancy as far as going back to gyms, but you don't have to go back to a gym to become active. This great workout videos that you can do at home. But we got to get mobile again. We got to become less sedentary. We have to do that and then set yourself targets. How did you gain weight during covid? So let's start on a plan to start losing that weight. Did your diet get altered? Were you having more comfort foods?

[00:37:20.190] – Dr. Raza
Understandable. Obviously, you know, if you go back to March, I remember our kids were off school and we did a lot of baking, cookies and brownies and cakes. And you can do those things were flying off the shelves because people were eating comfort food. So get back to eating healthier foods, veggies, et cetera.

[00:37:39.990] – Dr. Raza
And then the last thing is, make a plan to get to sort of take ownership of your own health care and set yourself health goals for the next three to five years.

[00:37:52.480] – Dr. Raza
What do I want to achieve? Where do I want to be? Whether it's a weight target, whether it's well, I want to make sure that I have my, you know, get my colonoscopy done and make sure, you know, there's a knee that's bothering me I'll go visit an orthopedic doctor, this hip that's bothering me I'll go get my hip replaced, et cetera, et cetera. And that's sort of what I would go towards as we come out of this pandemic, sort of reassess and realign our interests and taking care of our own body, our bodies our temple.

[00:38:24.880] – Dr. Raza
You know, we got to take care of it. During the pandemic, the average American gained around twenty nine pounds.

[00:38:33.970] – Dr. Raza
A lot of folks gained as much as 50 pounds. We say the covid 15, but it was actually not 15. It's more like 20 or 30 pounds on average that people gained. And there's many reasons for that. Give yourself a pass, but try and assess the fact that you did gain weight. You may have developed unhealthy habits and tried to work to correct those. Again, prevention is cure. Start engaging with your primary care doctors. Get an assessment for what your blood pressure is.

[00:39:03.130] – Dr. Raza
Have you become diabetic? You now pre diabetic? Too cholesterol or other medications that you should have been on that you stop taking because you just didn't go to see a doctor and so you didn't fill the prescriptions and so on, so forth.

[00:39:18.580] – Allan
So I kind of had three takeaways from that. One, one being what happened, happened. If you let yourself go and you put on some weight that's passed, let's let's look forward. That was an event. Let's move forward. The second is you're the CEO of your own health.

[00:39:37.120] – Allan
So you've got to be proactive. You've got to step up and do the right things for yourself. And that means making the doctor's appointments. That means moving more. That means eating better. And so making those lifestyle choices that we should have been making all along. But now going forward is our opportunity to act. We can't act on the past, but be the CEO now. Make the right decisions now and the final one. And you didn't really get into this, but you did a little.

[00:40:01.330] – Allan
But be patient.

[00:40:03.790] – Allan
There's a backlog in service. There's a backlog in what doctors are able to do. But if obviously if you become a priority patient, you're going to move to the front of the line so that you've got to be out there, you've got to get that communication with your doctor so that you're getting the care that you deserve. So get into the mix and then, yes, it there's just going to be an element of patients in that your appointment that you normally would have made next week is now maybe three weeks or four weeks from now.

[00:40:32.170] – Allan
And just realizing, OK, there are people right now that are suffering and need the care now and there's a prioritization of service, have the patients to work through that and don't give up on it. Stick with it.

[00:40:45.040] – Dr. Raza
I agree. And the other thing is, the other thing I like about the patient is you've got to take a long term view to health.

[00:40:51.640] – Dr. Raza
And as far unfortunately, all of us know this, it is far easier to gain weight than it is to lose weight. And you have to have a plan in place that has it's a marathon, not a sprint. Set yourself ambitious targets, but don't be disappointed if you don't get them quickly. Sort of a what I would say, take it not even month to month, but maybe season by season. See where you are.

[00:41:18.580] – Dr. Raza
If you walk on a treadmill every day to go as you walk for a half hour, well, the goal is to walk further and thirty pounds two months from now than you did than you do currently. That means you quickened the pace. That means your cardiovascular conditioning and so on, so forth. And the weighing scale is not the end all be all. It's not, you know, you can not lose weight but reduce fat, build up muscle, which is just as important.

[00:41:55.070] – Dr. Raza
It's about an overall level of health. But you're absolutely right. You have to be invested with yourself. I tell patients all the time I can be the world's greatest cardiologist, but I can't help you if when you go home, the diabetes isn't well controlled. If you don't take the medications for blood pressure or for your thyroid or X, Y, Z that you're supposed to, or if you're going for surgery you need and you don't follow the instructions of the orthopedic surgeon properly.

[00:42:28.060] – Dr. Raza
You know, complications, X, Y and Z. You got to be invested in your own health.

[00:42:33.160] – Dr. Raza
And together it truly takes a village. Together we can help you feeling better. At the end of the day, the goal for everyone is I want you to live life to the fullest. Spend as much time out of the hospital, away from doctors offices, doing the things that you love with the people that you love.

[00:42:51.790] – Allan
Awesome. So, Dr. Raza, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?

[00:43:01.090] – Dr. Raza
Well, I think find something that makes you happy. Find people that you can be happy with and find a way that you can achieve those to the best way that you can. Whatever path it takes. It's about the journey as it's not just the destination.

[00:43:19.090] – Allan
Now, Dr. Raza, say if someone wanted to learn more about you and what you're doing, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:43:25.030] – Dr. Raza
so if you go to my Twitter page, so at SadiRazaMD, you'll find a link to my website or practice.

[00:43:33.850] – Dr. Raza
And I tweet regularly about cardiovascular issues, health and wellness, sports and fitness. And you can follow along and try and make it patient centered.

[00:43:43.930] – Dr. Raza
It's not really geared towards physicians necessarily. It's more towards patients know ways to get prevention, prevention, prevention. Some of it is topical. So for example, in the last week or so, you'll see a lot of posts around a soccer player that had a cardiac arrest last week. But for the most part, it's more general and topical.

[00:44:06.970] – Dr. Raza
And I am fortunate enough to be able to do media from time to time. So look out for articles or radio shows, podcasts, etc.. My wife is a cardiologist. I'm just starting to podcast for the heart doctors for that on Spotify on an Apple podcast. And we'll try and put the word out how to be heart healthy and live life to the fullest.

[00:44:34.780] – Allan
OK, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/494 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Raza, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:44:45.870] – Dr. Raza
Appreciate it. Thank you, Allan.

Post Show/Recap

[00:44:52.350] – Allan
Hey, Raz. Welcome back.

[00:44:54.130] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a wonderful interview with Dr. Raza. You know, it is I was kind of wondering how the covid shut down had other implications than what we commonly talk about on the news. I mean, besides the covid 15 or covid 20, that might be that extra weight we've all gained. You know, there is a real concern about our overall health, but particularly cardiovascular health. That's a pretty scary side effect.

[00:45:21.170] – Allan
Yeah, I kind of knew a little bit of this was happening because a couple of my clients, as we went into covid are medical professionals. And so when they were going to telemedicine, I was thinking, well, how does someone who was about to potentially start chemotherapy and radiation treatment, how do they telemedicine that, you know you know, if a kid needs their standard vaccinations now, granted, they're not running into other kids with mumps because they're not seeing other kids with mumps.

[00:45:53.710] – Allan
But, you know, so maybe some of that stuff isn't necessary. But it just seemed to me it's like there's a lot of well care that just didn't happen. And so you can't go to your gyms. A lot of people didn't feel like training. They was just if I can't go to my gym, if I can't get out and, you know, do the things I was doing, the sports I was playing with, things like that to keep me engaged and doing this, I mean, you give me a stat that a lot of that stuff Strava put out that the people that were doing these virtual runs was kind of going up.

[00:46:28.420] – Allan
but if you were part of a run club and that was kind of the real thing that got you showing up, was that accountability like where you belong to a gym or belong to a cross fit and things like and those things were just gone. And you're like, OK, I need five people around me sweating harder than I am for me to get my bike gear. You know, it's just I could see where that investment wasn't happening. The investment of time.

[00:46:54.190] – Allan
The investment of effort and then the investment of money. A lot of people were trying to buy home equipment, but there was none to be found.

[00:47:01.720] – Rachel
Oh, yeah, I know that probably sold out pretty quick. But, you know, down with you where you are in Panama, you had a pretty strict shutdown. You weren't even allowed to get out and get moving. And I know a lot of countries that were like that as well. And here in the United States, we did have a little bit of freedom to be outside and most of our country. But I think a lot of people were still afraid to go out.

[00:47:25.360] – Rachel
We didn't know a lot about covid. We just knew that we didn't want to get it and end up in the hospital. So, you know, I think a lot of people did stay home. And I think the level of stress went up. And we had talked about in the past about how the parents that had to learn how to work at home that had never worked at home before, plus help to home school their kids because school went virtual I mean, jeez, there's so many things that kept people from being able to go out and work out any more.

[00:47:53.920] – Rachel
So there's it's not really surprising that we have a covid weight gain or any other health implications.

[00:47:59.770] – Allan
Yeah, but the data is there, you know, the cardiovascular events and deaths from that is going up. And it shouldn't. I'm almost certain that we're going to see cancer, diabetes, those types of things, you know, where the care just wasn't there. If you're not going in and getting your dialysis, you know, if you're not, you know, going in the doctor and getting your blood pressure done and checking your meds or maybe not even getting them filled.

[00:48:28.770] – Allan
Because you didn't want to get out and go to the pharmacy because you just didn't want to be exposed.

[00:48:34.810] – Rachel
Well, that and plus, some doctors won't refill a prescription unless they see you in person.

[00:48:40.300] – Allan
Well, they were doing telemedicine. They changed medical care a little bit. But there's just so many things. It's like, OK, they can't get the labs to know. They can't do a blood pressure. And if you don't have the monitor yourself already, it's like you don't know. It's like, you know, because you walk into the doctor, they stand on the scale. They, you know, your blood pressure.

[00:48:59.620] – Allan
And that's the part of the natural conversation with your doctor, which kind of takes me to the next transition. You go to your doctor. Get your care team together. As I mentioned before, this podcast, you know, we've got to start showing our priorities with the way we spend our money, the way we spend our effort and the way we spend our time. And it's easy to audit that. Just go and look at your bank statement.

[00:49:26.200] – Allan
Look at your credit card statement. Where are you spending your your money? Look at it days time and just say, OK, how much time that I spend watching Netflix versus exercising? And maybe we're doing both. And that's awesome. You know, double dip in there. You're on the treadmill or the elliptical and you're watching your Netflix show. That',s cool. That's totally cool. But most of us aren't doing that. You know, they weren't doing that.

[00:49:49.240] – Allan
And so it's look at where you're spending your time. Look at the effort you're putting in and look at where you're spending your money and answer that question, what are your true priorities here? And it's time to shift that, because if you're not taking care of your health, you're soon enough can be taken care of illness.

[00:50:04.990] – Rachel
Yeah. Dr. Raza mentioned that too, suggesting that we, of course, reengage with our specialists and but also get back into exercising and resetting our eating habits. You know, it's it's a multifaceted way of improving our health. But we do need to focus. We do need to focus on it.

[00:50:26.700] – Allan
Now, I ran across a study this week. Thirty five chronic diseases can be traced to inactivity.

[00:50:34.260] – Rachel
Wow.

[00:50:35.220] – Allan
OK, and I'll make sure to put a link to that in the show notes. But this is not and this is not really a new study. I didn't realize this was out there. That's the first time I was seeing it. The study was done in 2012. But, yeah, they've manually, physically traced thirty five different chronic diseases directly to lack of activity.

[00:50:55.380] – Rachel
So the best thing you can do for your health is move.

[00:50:58.290] – Allan
Move

[00:51:00.990] – Rachel
Do something. Anything.

[00:51:02.150] – Allan
Well, the human body was built to move. I mean, our lymphatic system is how we get rid of toxins and waste in our body.

[00:51:09.030] – Allan
And it doesn't have a pump system, the pump system for your lymphatic system as your muscles, your skeletal muscle. So if you're not moving, then you're basically letting gunk sit there and it's poison. Your body needs to get rid of it. And the only way it can do that is if you move and push that stuff through your system to get it out. And so that's yeah, absolutely. We need movement. And then there's just so many other things that movement gets us.

[00:51:35.100] – Allan
You know, if you get the endorphins because you're doing it enough, if you know the movement patterns. And the other thing movement does is it kind of gets the the juices going with blood and flows and everything else to where maybe your knees hurt less because you're actually getting more nutrients and fluids and liquids in the knee so that'll function better. Now, obviously, if you go do some exercise and the knee swells up, you've got to talk to somebody and have that taken care of.

[00:52:02.670] – Allan
But for a lot of us, the aches and pains that we're feeling is vicious.

[00:52:08.970] – Rachel
it is. And I've said to a lot of my friends and in run clubs and elsewhere that if you rest, you rust. And it's essentially true. You just need to keep moving to keep those joints fluid, keep your balance, keep your flexibility. I mean, I'm not saying run marathons or do something crazy. Just take a walk, walk for a mile, walk for two miles and just a little bit of fresh air.

[00:52:33.000] – Rachel
And some activity can do so much good for your health overall.

[00:52:37.650] – Allan
Well, you're the one that admitted marathons are crazy, so.

[00:52:41.610] – Rachel
Yeah, maybe. But, you know. Yeah, no, you don't have to run marathons, but, you know, you can get so much benefit from just walking one, two or three miles. And if that feels good, do a little jogging and maybe maybe register for a local 5K. I've got a 5K coming up this weekend and proceeds go to the local cross-country team. So, you know, you do a little good for others while you're doing good for yourself.

[00:53:09.810] – Allan
Awesome. Rachel, so I guess I'll see you next week.

[00:53:13.120] – Rachel
Yeah. Take care.

[00:53:14.390] – Allan
You too.

[00:53:15.120] – Rachel
Thanks.

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:27.350] – Allan
Hey Raz.

[00:02:27.350] – Rachel
Hey Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:29.360] – Allan
I'm doing good, I'm doing good. We're getting close to getting Lula's wrapped up and open although we won't really open open until probably October. But at least the work part will be done. The place will be cleaned, it'll be ready. And then you know, that just means, yeah not as much dust.

[00:02:48.770] – Rachel
Yey. That's so exciting.

[00:02:51.080] – Allan
Yeah. And then we'll have our little owner suite area down there. So a little more space for us because we've been staying in one of the rooms, so it's just a room and a bathroom. So, you know, probably less than I don't know, less than maybe two hundred square foot, you know, just a standard hotel room with the bathroom. So we'll be moving into a little suite that we'll have downstairs. So that'll be nice.

[00:03:13.040] – Allan
And then a fence and it's basically concrete because we don't really have a yard but fence in the area around the back. So the dogs have kind of area that can roam around and run and not feel so stuck. But yeah. So it'd be cool and then that'll be separate from where the guests would stay. So we'll have our space, they'll have their space and

[00:03:33.170] – Rachel
Wonderful. Can't wait to see it. I have to come down and visit you sometime.

[00:03:37.070] – Allan
Yeah, you need to. You and Mike. You can bring Mike.

[00:03:40.820] – Rachel
Thanks. I don't travel well. I need a travel companion.

[00:03:45.190] – Allan
All right. So you ran a long, long race.

[00:03:51.020] – Rachel
I did.

[00:03:52.310] – Allan
Fifty three miles.

[00:03:53.660] – Rachel
It was. Yeah. Ran a little long. It was the best experience. Definitely a huge challenge, but so very rewarding. It's surreal. I still am kind of on cloud nine actually.

[00:04:09.050] – Allan
Well, good. And I mean, your legs aren't hurting nearly as bad as mine were.

[00:04:14.300] – Rachel
No, no. I felt pretty good.

[00:04:16.630] – Allan
Yeah. And we talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we went into, you know, recovering from injury and illness. And, you know, while in the sense you didn't injure yourself at all and it's not really an injury, I mean, illness as we would go. But this is a situation where you're doing post rehab, post healing. You're taking it easy, if you will, but you're not stopping because I saw you also did a 5K.

[00:04:46.070] – Rachel
Yeah, I can't sit still for very long.

[00:04:49.940] – Allan
Well, I did a recovery run 5K the next day. So I mean it's not unheard of. It's just probably felt you didn't have the spring in your legs that you would normally have. You're working on doing some things to recover that, right?

[00:05:04.040] – Rachel
Absolutely. Yeah. So right after we finished the run, it was about 2:00 in the morning because we started at noon. We finished and just shy of 14 hours. It was about 2:00 in the morning or so. And on the way home, we I drank a lot of water and finished my hydration, that electrolytes that I had in my pouch and finished up a snack I was working on. And when I got back, drank a little bit more and went to bed.

[00:05:33.170] – Rachel
And the next day we went to do some more sightseeing. We took some friends to a special part of Michigan up at Mackinac Island. And so we had a short drive to get there. And we walked a lot around the fort and we did a little bit of sightseeing on the way home. So a little bit of driving, a little bit of walking and just kind of cut loose that way. And that felt really good. So we did that for about two days actually after the run and continued with a lot of hydration and a lot of good protein. Healthy protein.

[00:06:07.200] – Allan
Well, good. So what's next for Rachel Everett?

[00:06:13.700] – Rachel
well, what people should be doing after a big race like this is what I call a reverse taper. So since I didn't have too much carnage, my legs were not too shredded after that race. I'm in pretty good shape. So I'm going to do a lot of walking and a little bit of running. And so it's exactly what it is, a reverse taper. So I might aim for maybe ten or twelve miles this week and maybe fifteen the next and maybe twenty the next, and just kind of ease my way back into running.

[00:06:45.920] – Rachel
It'll be an every other day kind of thing. I won't be running every day. I'll be walking a lot in between. So it's just easing back into a basic foundation of running again.

[00:06:57.680] – Allan
OK, and your next long race?

[00:07:01.400] – Rachel
It could be another 50 miler.

[00:07:04.190] – Rachel
You know, I do have a 50K, so I'll be running a little over thirty miles in October and then I might be planning another fifty miler or maybe a 100K which is sixty miler. So, we'll see what I can squeeze in.

[00:07:21.830] – Allan
50K works out to a little more than thirty one miles and a 100K works at a little more than sixty two miles.

[00:07:30.470] – Rachel
and then you never know what the race decides to throw at you. So with this fifty miler we actually started at the forty eight mile mark because it's one hundred mile course so we started at mile forty eight which anybody can math that out, you know we're going to have two extra miles to get to the one hundred mile finish line. So yeah, races like to do tricky little things like that. So you know where.

[00:07:55.760] – Allan
You had fun. Right?

[00:07:56.960] – Rachel
It was, it was a tough day but a wonderful day and a lot of fun too.

[00:08:02.510] – Rachel
It was great to run with my good friend Christa and my other wonderful friend Patrick, who was ahead of us. But he did great, too. And it was just nice to see all these people doing amazing things.

[00:08:12.800] – Allan
Cool. Well, let's get Matt and Robert on the phone.

[00:08:17.420] – Rachel
Sure.

Interview

[00:08:45.170] – Allan
Matt, Robert, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:49.070] – Matt
Thank you. I'm looking forward to talking.

[00:08:50.360] – Robert
Thank you, Allan.

[00:08:51.260] – Allan
You know, I've been in the health and fitness field for over six years, and it's been fairly common to hear on the endurance athlete's side where many of them are going plant-based. It's almost, as I said earlier, Keep hand in glove thing that they feel better, their inflammation is lower and they perform really, really well. A lot of plant-based athletes or some of the best endurance athletes on the planet, bar none.

[00:09:19.490] – Allan
And you profiled so many of them. But I think what was really cool is I got into the book is you didn't just stop there. It's like, OK, yes, this is great nutrition for the endurance athlete, even the extreme endurance athlete. But you went into bodybuilding and you went into Olympic sports and you even threw in a pro wrestler, which if you watch them, they're very athletic. They've got to do some pretty crazy things and hold a lot of muscle mass.

[00:09:47.030] – Allan
So, you know, the plant-based diet has come a long way in that we now understand from a human performance perspective that it is a nutritional strategy that works very, very well for a lot of people. Can you talk a little bit about why plant-based might be the route you want to go if you're looking to improve your athletic performance across the board?

[00:10:09.230] – Robert
Yeah, thanks, Allan. That's a great question. I'm so glad you asked it, because I interviewed 60 world class athletes just for this book, the plant-based athlete. And one of the things that I came across was that there was a common theme here. All of these different people came from almost all of them came from an omnivorous eating pattern before a few of them were actually vegan since birth, which is another topic we'll get into because some are Olympic athletes as a result.

[00:10:34.790] – Robert
But the fact is, dozens and dozens and dozens of athletes all shared the same thing, that they saw their energy go up and they saw their recovery get better. They saw a decrease in inflammation and they sped up the recovery process with which improved their performance. So whether it was a world champion boxer and Olympic skier, a world class power lifter or a marathon, you know, record holder, they experienced the same things. And one of the things that's really, really exciting is that I come from a bodybuilding background. Matt comes from a long distance and ultra running background.

[00:11:11.210] – Robert
We have a different body types, different sports. And what we found was that the same diet, the plant-based diet, high in complex carbohydrates with modest amounts of proteins and fats from good quality Whole Foods sources supply the nutrition required, whether you're a bodybuilder or an endurance athlete or whether you are a NHL hockey player or NFL football player or NBA star like Chris Paul and Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan and Hedgesville McGee and go down the list or you're an Olympic figure skater because a plant-based diet gives you naturally gives you energy, the very high energy diet.

[00:11:49.400] – Robert
It is easy on digestion. It's a low calorie but high nutrition. So high nutrient, a calorie ratio and it is super antiinflammatory. And you're not eating pro inflammatory foods. So you reduce inflammation, you recover faster, you improve, your endurance gets better, your muscle soreness often gets reduced and you just continue on. And one of the great byproducts of that is longevity. You know, some of the athletes in the book are in their 50s, almost 60, and competing at world record pace like Rip Esselstyn set a world record at age fifty-nine, I believe, in the 200 meter backstroke and swimming.

[00:12:27.020] – Robert
John Joseph is competing right now, like maybe literally next weekend or within weeks at another Ironman triathlon, full Ironman distance at age fifty-nine, almost Sixty. Fiona Oakes has multiple Guinness Book of World Records and marathons. And she wasn't even supposed to run in the first place because she was born without a kneecap and a right leg and was not even supposed to run and has set multiple records. And she's in her 50s, Christine Vardalos in her 50s. So many athletes are forty-plus and still performing at a world class level.

[00:13:00.440] – Robert
And have to be honest with you, Allan, to me now in my 40s, that was one of the most exciting things for me to read about, to connect really emotionally with Rich Roll, Scott Djuric, Brendan Brazier, John Joseph, Rip Esselstyn, Christine Vardalos and Fiona Oakes, just to name some of them. It's just so inspiring to me that the benefits of a plant-based diet have contributed to incredible longevity in addition to athletic success, whether it's strength.

[00:13:32.270] – Robert
Endurance, power, whatever your sport is, the benefits are there to be had.

[00:13:36.230] – Allan
Now, and we've always thought of those. It's so funny. We've always thought that there's this three completely separate things. You train very specifically for your sport. And so you're you're not a power lifter out there doing, you know, 30 mile distance runs on the weekend just to, get your miles and you train very specific for your sport. And so we've always just assumed, OK, well, you're going to have to eat very specific to your sport.

[00:14:00.200] – Allan
And the eating now is I'm kind of wrap my mind around the book and everything was on. We're looking to lower inflation in the body and we're looking to give it the nutrition that it needs to heal well, and with it healing well and not having the inflammation, you're therefore able to train harder and longer. You recover better. And you perform better.

[00:14:25.220] – Matt
And not to mention the longevity benefit. You mentioned, information, healing your body, healing yourselves. That's what preserves you as you get older too. So to me, it's amazing that you have these three different sport disciplines and the longevity benefit often the same thing. And in fact, it seems that it's the same exact mechanism. It's recovering faster and it's having lots of nutrients in relatively few calories compared to other diets. And it makes it easier on your body.

[00:14:51.590] – Allan
And one of the things it's funny because if I said the word vegan or vegetarian to somebody, they immediately know what it is. I'm going into the produce section when I walk in the grocery store because they just know they're going to be at the farmer's market, they're going to be the frozen section at the grocery store. And so, in a sense, I think those two diets, more than most of the others, maybe paleo, but those diets, more than anything else, kind of drive you to better food quality.

[00:15:20.120] – Matt
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's all there is. I'm I probably spend 80, 90 percent of my time in the produce section. You know, the number of packaged foods I bought that actually in a box is so few now. It's maybe pasta. Sometimes I buy things in cans, but even that you get in the box so, yeah, that's one of the great kind of things. It's been like a journey. This has been, I've done this for 12 years now and every year I get a little bit better at eating more and more real whole foods and less and less processed foods.

[00:15:48.590] – Matt
You don't need to be playing to do that. Like you said, you could be eating a different diet. Paleo will sort of encourage that move towards very Whole Foods in the book, The Plant-Based Athlete, we write a couple of pages where we talk about how much paleo is in-plant they have in common, we're the weirdos out of a group of people, the ones who insist on eating whole foods, not for packages, don't eat dairy.

[00:16:09.530] – Matt
We disagree on the meat, but they're not. They're more alike than they are different. So, yeah, lots of guys can push you down that road. And that certainly plant-based diet does do that for you.

[00:16:17.390] – Allan
Yeah. And I've interviewed now well over three hundred people for this podcast. And it's kind of that's the thing that when you say why is your diet better? Well, it's Whole Foods. It's OK. And that's it. That's actually why it's better in most cases.

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[00:18:45.620] – Allan
You know, one of the things I think someone's going to be concerned about is they go over OK and see the kale that scores very well as a high nutrition, low calorie density food. Of course, then this cruciferous vegetables, all the leafy greens, all of that, they're always going to wonder, OK, well, am I getting enough protein?

[00:19:04.980] – Allan
Now,I know myself that there's protein and all of that in various ways and you compare it together and get all of the amino acids you need. But can we talk just a few minutes about why a plant-based diet and how a plant-based diet can provide the protein needs not just for a normal person walking down the street, but we're talking professional bodybuilders that are trying to put on, you know, 10, 20 pounds a year as they're bulking up and becoming these super these great athletes that you see on the stage.

[00:19:36.790] – Allan
How can they get the protein and do that? How does that work?

[00:19:39.910] – Robert
Yeah, well, first starts with the fact that plants have all the essential amino acids that we need. The amino acids are the building blocks of protein. You eat a variety of food. You're going to get the amount of amino acids you need and the amount of protein you need if you consume enough calories based on your real calorie needs. That's a big thing, right? So if you're a figure skater, you weigh one hundred and five pounds, you're going to have a different protein needs than a power lifter who is 240 pounds.

[00:20:05.970] – Robert
and so you have to understand and I like that we talked about that a few minutes ago, Allan, it's the same essentially the same diet for all sports. It's just a different calorie intake and maybe a slightly different macronutrient breakdown. A little more protein here with more fat here, a little more carbohydrate here, depending on the type of sport. But it's the same diet. It's still sweet potatoes and blueberries and lentils and oats and potatoes and kale, like you mentioned, and walnuts.

[00:20:33.210] – Robert
And it's all the same foods. It's just getting the right quantities. And so for protein, yeah, you can eat more foods that are considered more protein rich, like nuts and nut butters and tofu and other soy foods and legumes tend to be higher in protein, though still very much a carbohydrate food, beans and lentils and such and leafy green vegetables. But there's also some tricks you can do. I mean, everybody knows in different types of athletics that you can do things like smoothies.

[00:21:02.160] – Robert
Right. You can put nut butters and smoothies. You can put a bunch of greens in there. You can even believe it or not, and we mentioned in the book, you can even put like tofu or white beans in smoothies because you're adding raspberries or blueberries or peanut butter and chocolate and you're making you're giving it a flavor that is enjoyable and palatable. Well, it's packed full of like, you know, imagine if you just put it in a bunch of pumpkin seeds or cashews or whatever.

[00:21:29.940] – Robert
Nuts and seeds are your favorite or use a powder, a powder supplement if you want, but you can do it totally whole Foods. And so a smoothie is a great way to add extra protein, if you like. You can also just make a conscious effort. So let's say you're having oatmeal. Well, why not put some walnuts on it or something else? Protein rich, you know, with your oatmeal. If you're having a salad, why not put garbanzo beans all over it?

[00:21:53.790] – Robert
You know, in addition to the leafy greens and the peppers and the mushrooms and whatever else you have in your salad, why not add some of those things? One thing I like to do, even just with a rice and vegetable dish, is add cashews on top, add peanuts on top, sometimes other nuts. And so you can you can make this conscious effort to get one more protein here and there in very tasty, very accessible. I mean, a peanut butter sandwich is as simple as it gets, right?

[00:22:19.830] – Robert
It's not difficult. And one of the messages I really like to make as clear as possible is that if you know what your calorie needs are and you can use the Harris Benedicts calculator, Harris Benedict equation to figure that out and use chronometer, my fitness pal, to determine what your intake actually is. If you meet your calorie needs, you are almost absolutely sure to reach your protein needs because nobody, not a single person, you know, eats only celery or only grapefruit or only oranges during the day.

[00:22:50.130] – Robert
We all eat a variety of stuff. We all eat to some form of variety, maybe a little bit of legumes here, a little bit of grains, a little bit of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds or omnivores, some meat or dairy, whatever. We all eat a variety. And that's how you get the amino acids and then your body pools all those amino acids and uses them throughout the day. You don't need to have like a complete protein in a single meal.

[00:23:15.300] – Robert
And because we don't do anything in a single meal, you don't reach all your nutrient requirements in a single meal. You don't reach your hydration requirements in a single meal or your fiber intake in a single meal. Very, very rarely. It's accumulation of everything that we consume throughout the day and on an ongoing basis, on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis. And so that is how you reach your protein needs by having adequate calories based on what your calorie needs are, finding foods you enjoy.

[00:23:44.140] – Robert
And then eating them on a regular basis and seeing the results.

[00:23:49.180] – Allan
So if someone was training, let's just say for one reason or another, they do find that they're doing this heavy training. They're trying to accomplish something special and they're not quite getting there with protein. Be one of the things that they should maybe take a look at just to make sure that they are hitting that. Or do you just really feel if they're hitting their calorie needs, it's done?

[00:24:12.640] – Robert
Yeah, you could you could take a little bit of close look at protein, but I really don't think it's as big of a factor as people think. I think it's the total calories. And also, you have to look at the other aspects are baggage that comes with any kind of macronutrients or foods that focus on a singular macronutrient. And so what you can find is the benefits actually of complex carbohydrates are increase of carbohydrate intake as you might find more anti-inflammatory properties there.

[00:24:40.720] – Robert
You might find foods that help with aiding and recovery. There you can focus more on things like turmeric and ginger and Tartary juice and beets and nitric oxide, rich leafy greens. And you can find some increased circulation and increased blood flow, increased nutrition to cells throughout the body. So there's other things besides just that one macro nutrient that I think are worth considering, even when you are that body builder or power lifter who's looking for that, just that little edge.

[00:25:08.090] – Robert
I really don't think a few extra grams of protein is the key. I think you have to look at it holistically in its totality and you look at the utility of all the other aspects, all the other components of nutrition. And you could even say something as simple as this, like, well, if they would have just had a little bit more caffeine, maybe in supplement form, they would have had more energy to get the lift better and got stronger and built more muscle.

[00:25:29.980] – Robert
Or if they would have just, you know, use this for anti-inflammatory properties and had reduced soreness, they could have pushed it further. So there's a lot of different ways to look at it. And I really, you have to do in this for quarter century, I just don't think it's protein alone that needs to be the focal point here. I mean, what if they would have got a little more sleep, you know, rested a little bit better and nutrition can help with that or had better digestion, you know, those kind of things.

[00:25:55.270] – Robert
So and Matt, I'd love to hear your thoughts on expanding on that.

[00:26:00.160] – Matt
Yeah, I mean, I, I the very first thing I would look to is total calories. I encounter a lot of people who try have these diets and they come back a month later and say, well, you know, I did it for a while, but then I didn't have the same energy. And the thing is that it's so easy. I mean, if you're really thinking about this carefully and you're looking at all the nutrition, the macro nutrient numbers like Robert has suggested, then you're not going to run into this problem.

[00:26:19.090] – Matt
But a lot of people who just dive into something new. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I really like gradually starting something new. And that's how I went vegan over the course of four years, actually. But people they just removed the animal products and they don't think about replacing it with fairly calorically dense sources because lots and lots of plants are not calorically dense. And that's a great thing for the most part because they have lots of nutrients and relatives, few calories, like I mentioned earlier.

[00:26:42.880] – Matt
But if you just replace all the meat and dairy and everything with leafy greens, for example, you could drop 30 percent of your calories from your diet. And so I think more often, especially for people who are new, that's usually the bigger problem. They just didn't eat enough calories. I've got two young kids who do this. They're both athletes. My son trains. He puts in twenty training sessions a week, it seems like. I mean, he's crazy and I don't I just don't think about working with him.

[00:27:06.160] – Matt
We eat so many whole foods like you mentioned earlier, like so many vegetables. And I'm confident that protein is in all of these things. And he eats almost entirely Whole Foods. So I'm not worried about the processed foods that have the protein remove like a bunch of added oils or processed sugar. So I just don't think about protein. I think about calories. I always urged him to eat more calories. But protein is really one of the last things on my mind.

[00:27:27.370] – Matt
It's just it's about getting the fresh stuff that I know is going to help. And the antioxidants, the anti inflammatory contents, all these things are going to help him recover for the next workout. And protein is just one of many things.

[00:27:37.870] – Allan
Yeah. And I think, again, that was the kind of the takeaway here was that as we as we look at these things, we can fine tune. I mean, you guys do a great job as you went through the book of looking at, OK, let's look at protein. Let's look at fat. Let's look at carbs. You know, they're in there and just recognizing that we can get all that we need from them and, you know, kind of push this way and that way a little bit to fit our needs.

[00:28:02.110] – Allan
But beyond that, there are some things that as a vegan, we're just not going to get. We're not going to get the B12 because it's just not in any plant-based food. A lot of folks that go vegan also have some issues with their vitamin D, and there's a few other supplements that you talked about in the book. And I think it might be also worth talking about lysine, because that is one of the amino acids that's not as common in plant foods as it is in animal-based foods.

[00:28:31.480] – Allan
Can you kind of talk through some of those supplements and considerations for those?

[00:28:35.470] – Matt
Yeah, I can take a shot of that. So I have a supplement company and I'm only saying this not to advertise, but to make a point that we make a vegan supplement and it's actually has seven nutrients in it. And people think, well, you've got to get, there must be something wrong with your diet if you have to get those seven nutrients. But we made that so that we didn't have to take this full megadose multivitamin that I was taking before I went plant based.

[00:28:56.740] – Matt
Because a lot of people do that sort of mindless. You just pop a multivitamin to cover all the bases. But as I started to think more about food and as we talked about earlier, start gravitating more towards Whole Foods and thinking more about what I was eating, I realized that I was getting tons and tons of these common vitamins because they're in so many different fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, grains, beans, those things are loaded with micronutrients.

[00:29:18.000] – Matt
So I said I don't I don't need to be overdosing on all these and taking megadoses of these vitamins. So we made a more mindful that doesn't have all those. It's called complement. And because that is like it's a complement. It's not a supplement. It's something less than that. But the point is, like, I think vegans who are eating varied diets probably need to supplement just as a whole less than someone who's eating a standard American diet.

[00:29:42.120] – Matt
You're not going to have tons and tons of areas where you might be running into trouble. Now, as you said, there are some things that are actually, you know, like a B12, for example, can become a serious problem if you don't supplement when you're eating a 100 percent plant-based diet. I'm not at all trying to deny that. And that's why we have this. That's why there's this reputation of all a plant-based diet must be incomplete or unnatural if you've got to supplement it. For me,

[00:30:03.570] – Matt
I just look at the empirical evidence. You look at the long term studies on people who live the longest without health problems, the longest health span, the best number of active years. And if that's a plant-based diet plus a B12 supplement or a B12 and a few other things supplement, then it doesn't matter to me at all whether or not that's quote unquote natural according to someone's theory. I'll I'll take the diet that helps you live the longest, even if it means I have to take a suplement with it.

[00:30:27.940] – Matt
So that's where I come out of it. As far as lysine you mentioned, Allan, that's a great point. And that that is a nice bit of nuance that you should think about as you think about protein. People know that as the limiting amino acid on a plant-based diet. And the idea is that you don't have to worry about protein at all as long as you're meeting your lysine needs, because if you're meeting your lysine needs by default, you're going to be getting plenty of other kinds of protein.

[00:30:50.970] – Matt
But lysine is just one that doesn't show up in all that many plant-based foods. And if you want to supplement with it, if you want to go take a protein powder, that's a very, very easy solution to make sure you're meeting your lysine needs. But you don't have to do that. You could also go to more of an in between way where you take eating some say satay, which is like a wheat gluten that people use to make a lot of meat substitutes that if I actually love the taste of Satay and Robert doesn't like it that much, he gets a digestive problems I think and they get a lot of people don't, but a lot of people do.

[00:31:17.550] – Matt
And it's more and more common these days as the meat substitutes are showing up all over the place in grocery stores and fast food restaurants and everything. So that's loaded with lysine. So is tofu. And Teppei, those are two also like kind of halfway processed foods, although I don't really even think of those processed because they're so nutritious. And then if you want to really be pure about it and say, I'm just not going to take anything processed or supplement, you can you can get it by trying really hard with with lentils, with quinoa, with amaranth.

[00:31:44.130] – Matt
I mean, it's in foods. It's just you got to be more mindful the more and more you're kind of insisting on the purity of one hundred percent Whole Foods.

[00:31:51.000] – Allan
And you said something, I think that was really important there, is this is also about being mindful. It's about knowing the food that you're putting in your mouth and and thinking about it, not just eating what's there. Actually saying, OK, I'm going to have a plan and I know what I like. But and I think for a lot of people, we tend to eat simple. I think most people actually do. We probably pick five or six meals and that's it.

[00:32:19.830] – Allan
That's 90 percent of the calories that we're going to get are going to come from just a very small select foods. But I think as a vegan, you really have to be mindful about the selection and the organization just to make sure you're getting the calorie load, because it is very easy to say, OK, I'm going to have this big salad and I may throw some beans and nuts on it or something like that. But you still to get the calories you need, you kind of need to have a plan.

[00:32:45.480] – Allan
And once you have a plan and you know what you like, you guys have broken it down. I think Robert has his three hours, OK, for the shopping. And I think, again, it's just the better you lay these things out. You guys do great job in the book of giving some structure. If someone is considering transitioning to vegetarian or vegan, you give them a very good structure to say, OK, here's how you can structure your meals so you can make sure you're hitting your bases.

[00:33:13.530] – Allan
And again, we're not just talking about everyday vegan, but it works for them and it works for somebody who's also focused on performance because you don't necessarily want to take a couple of seasons off to get your nutrition right. You're doing this on the fly. So do you guys mind talking a little bit about meal planning and then your approach to shopping for food to make sure that you're getting the variety to hit your all your buttons and bases the way you need to?

[00:33:39.150] – Robert
Yeah, I want to. I think it's an interesting thing. You talk about mindset, or being mindful about it, because I think it's a common idea that we've got to have this mindful approach to plant-based eating. And I think it's obviously good to have a plan. But it's also I think if we think about it, most people are not super mindful in general. It's that there's a fast food restaurant on the corner that I'm craving something oily and salty and meaty.

[00:34:09.030] – Robert
And I want to shake with it as well. And then maybe. Have some pizza later on or I want some cheese on this or that, and, you know, and we could probably be more mindful there, you know, with fountain sodas and with standard American diet food. And so I don't want to say across the board we have to have just elevated levels of mindfulness with plant-based eating compared to where we're coming from with.

[00:34:32.540] – Allan
Oh, no, no, I didn't mean that at all.

[00:34:34.240] – Allan
What I what I meant was that I think we're where most people approach this way of eating is that one that a lot of people are doing it for not just selfish reasons of saying I want to feel better and perform better. And they're actually they have some more emotional ties to how we're handling our meat production and eating something with a face concept. And so I think know a lot of people are going at this saying, I want to be a more responsible ethical person.

[00:35:04.990] – Allan
And so I'm going at it for those ethics reasons. And so I think they're already starting from a I need to be mindful of this. And then that kind of balances into a, so now when I go forward, really focusing on the variety and the quality of the food that I'm eating so that I am nourishing my body, and particularly if you're looking at it from a performance perspective.

[00:35:27.880] – Robert
Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I was just about to get to, is that most times we're not super mindful, you know, plant-based or not. We're just until we get into performance related aspects. Because when you're working so hard for something, Allan, like you're working so hard in the gym or running, I mean, you're putting in this effort, this work, and you want to get a good return on investment from that. Right.

[00:35:49.930] – Robert
You want to be rewarded from that. And that's where I was going to say that's where the mindfulness comes in with a plant-based diet where you want to get the most nutritional bang for your buck. And that's why we have this certain approach, like I write in the book, that you've got to list your favorite foods in every category, your five favorite fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds, because you want to have those readily available.

[00:36:11.410] – Robert
You want to have them for pre workout, for post workout, for snacks. And so you make these mindful decisions like I'm working so hard athletically and for some people, training hours a day, I want to get the most mileage out of my diet as well to support that. And so and some people just may not be aware of what their favorite foods are like. Maybe they have a couple they go to. Like you said, we eat the same kind of five or six meals, and I totally agree with that.

[00:36:36.880] – Robert
But if you could just add a few more things in there, add some seasonal berries, add some seasonal stone fruit and some, you know, some other seasonal crops, you know, winter squash or whatever the case is and have your staples as well. You don't have your whether it's brown rice or tempeh or tofu or lentils or black beans or whatever the case is, your oats have your staples. And then from there, that's where the very particular or specific or mindfulness approach comes.

[00:37:03.670] – Robert
You and that's one thing that I like to talk about and write about is that if you have your staples there, whether they're batch cooking and you have them for the whole week or whatever the case is, you can always call upon that. So when you're craving something, when you're hungry, like sometimes I, I often finish workouts that are two or three hours if I'm doing weights plus cardio plus sauna or whatever the case is, I come hom, man, I am hungry, but I've got to make the most intelligent decision and I can't just say, OK, I want, you know, hurry, order something from the local Thai restaurant which is going to be loaded with oil and all this stuff, because I've got something already prepared at home that I know is going to serve my needs post workout.

[00:37:42.250] – Robert
It's going to help replenish carbohydrates that were burned through exercise, gonna help bring in amino acids and repair muscle that was damaged through exercise. It's going to replenish electrolytes, lost through sweat and then hydration, you know, those lost when you sweat. So I actually I we have an entire section on that. I think Matt and I both agree that mindfulness apart is really, really key. And that's how you also get into habit building and developing behaviors that can be something that you can build on.

[00:38:11.680] – Robert
And then and then it takes the willpower away. Like Matt talks about, you know, when you're trying to follow a really sound nutritional approach for your sport, at first it's a lot of willpower. Like I almost like a burden or a requirement. I have to do this to get this return. And that's for pro athletes and amateur athletes alike. But you do it enough times. You develop these habits and it takes the guesswork out. So I just want to make that early point that I think mindfulness in eating is just not exclusive to plant-based.

[00:38:39.220] – Robert
It's for anybody. And then it just gets accentuated when you get into the athletic world.

[00:38:44.140] – Allan
Yeah, because you're really trying to nail it. But you guys, like I said, you put a structure out there and then you had that really cool the hours, you know, so you're going to get three seasonal vegetables and three seasonal fruits and then you're going to get the kind of your standard things, your apple, your pear and your orange, because that's always there. You call them annuals or.

[00:39:04.720] – Robert
Yeah. Like the rule of three of three different foods, packaged goods, beverages, things that. It's designed to add diversity because diversity is diversity of amino acids, diversity of antioxidants, diversity of vitamins, minerals and other nutritional components, and that's what it's designed to do.

[00:39:24.310] – Allan
Yeah, and then Matt you had a whole different approach to shopping. Do you mind going into that a little bit?

[00:39:29.930] – Matt
Yeah. So I'm much more of a recipe maker. I tend to like cooking, so I will look up recipes. I will almost never go to the store and just pick out the staples that I'm missing. It's more like I make a little bit of list of what the recipes I'm going to make this week are and then I'll go get those things. But I do have a framework that I started to apply over the past eight years, begun just eating like when I'm eating at my best, I find myself falling into this pattern, which is that I will eat a smoothie in the morning, which is loaded with nuts and seeds, flaxseed walnuts, especially bananas, berries, frozen berries, some of the best, most antioxidant rich foods you can have add some greens in there as well.

[00:40:08.120] – Matt
So I have a smoothie in the morning. If you don't like that, you can do an Oatmeal version of that and just don't like smoothies. And that's totally fine. You can do almost the same thing with the same things in your oatmeal and now you get an extra serving with whole grains as well. For lunch. I do a big giant salad with beans on it, either oil and vinegar for dressing like a nice extra virgin olive oil or a nut based dressing which will eliminate the oil entirely, which is one less somewhat processed food in your diet.

[00:40:32.390] – Matt
The beans on there, a great danger to such a healthy food that if you can get a big serving of those every day, you absolutely should. And putting them on a salad for lunch is one way to kind of ensure that you do. And then finally, for dinner time, I always do a grain, a green and a bean. And so many of the foods that we're used to eating turn out to be a grain, a green and a bean.

[00:40:52.070] – Matt
You think of tempeh or tofu, tacos or any kind of bean. Refried beans on a taco. If you have some vegetables on top, you have a grain, a green and a bean. The green being the shell of the bean the filling. And then you get your toppings stir-fry, you got the rice, you have either beans or tofu. If you want that, you've got vegetables on top. So it's very, very easy to make a grain, a green and a bean. Stews, soups.

[00:41:15.140] – Matt
These often take that form. It doesn't have to be this big, mushy, big bowl of vegan sadness that people think of when I think grain, green and bean. And to that simple, like when I look at the cupboard and I have a bunch of stuff, but I have not planned a meal, it's like it's very hard to think of even when you so many choices, it's hard to get your mind to focus in on a meal. But if you can apply a little bit of a constraint that says grain, green and bean, which of those do I have here and how can I make those do well?

[00:41:41.150] – Matt
What condiment can I put in there to make a style of food or a certain cuisine? That structure works really well for me. And what it does enables me to get the seven or ten most important foods I mentioned beans, berries, nuts and seeds, greens, the foods that I'm trying to get every single day. They very naturally fit into that framework. So that's the one that I will typically eat when I'm at my healthiest.

[00:42:01.730] – Allan
And you've made a little easier for us in that you've put some recipes in the book. So we've got a head start.

[00:42:08.000] – Matt
Yes, absolutely. And those recipes, in fact, many of those were contributed by the athletes themselves that we interviewed, which I think is so cool, because to me, like ten years ago when Scott Jurek was doing this, he was ultra endurance athlete. I was an aspiring ultra endurance athlete. And I remember like there was a book, Tim Ferris's for Our Body came out, and I had a few of Scott Jurek's recipes in it, or maybe his grocery list.

[00:42:29.030] – Matt
And then Scott's book came out and to me those recipes were like gold back then. I was like, wow, this is one of the this is a legend in his sport, at my sport. And this is exactly what he eats. And he eats a plant-based diet like. I just could not get enough of having that. So to be able to put sixty recipes in here from elite Pro olympian plant-based athletes, I think that's a really special part of the book, not to mention the day in the life section at the end where they all twenty five of them list exactly what they eat like I just did.

[00:42:54.530] – Matt
They list how their day looks. And what's interesting about that is there are really very different approaches. Some of them really do focus on the meal planning and the macronutrients and they make sure they hit those numbers. Some of them like Dotsie Bausch, Olympic medalist, they just listen to their body. They just and I think as you do this longer and longer, you can get back to the mindfulness and you can actually start to just do it naturally without thinking so much about it.

[00:43:15.020] – Matt
So it's really neat to see that there are so many ways to make this work and not just work, but work for extremely high level performance in sports.

[00:43:21.050] – Allan
Yeah. So it's not like flipping a switch, but figuring you're way out, going through it and getting what works for you, finding the food you like, the food combinations, you know, putting those things together in a way that works. And then over time you just you make it better, you make it work better for you. And then particularly with performance athletes, they're always tweaking. You're always tweaking. So because we've got to find that half inch, we're got to find that half a second we've got to you know, we've got to do those things.

[00:43:50.390] – Allan
And that's the same way with the food. And so just taking your time, going through this book, like I said, gives a really good structure for someone that's looking to go this way, figuring out how to put it together, how to make it matter and do it without harming their performance. In fact, probably most likely going to see performance improvement, definitely if they're moving away from a standard American diet. They're moving away from inflammation, and so the recovery and their pain, that's all going to get better with this way of eating.

[00:44:19.270] – Allan
So, Robert, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:44:29.320] – Robert
I think you've got to find what your passion is in movement and exercise, and it doesn't have to be something super hard core or something that everyone else is already doing. It could be hiking. It could be taking your dog for a walk. It could be being out in nature. But I think you've got to find what you love to do. And when you find your passion or something you're enthusiastic about, you're going to find ways to make it happen.

[00:44:50.590] – Robert
It's less of a burden. It's less of a chore. It's something you look forward to. And I and I love that you said that because that's one of my signature lines, too, is to be healthy, happy and fit. And I think it starts with doing the things you're spending the one thousand four hundred and forty minutes we have each day doing what you enjoy. And the more you can smile, the more you can get enjoyment out of your exercise, then I think the better.

[00:45:14.470] – Robert
And that's what I would encourage everyone to do, is to get out there, move, find what you have to do and just keep doing it.

[00:45:20.850] – Allan
OK, Matt, again, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:45:30.040] – Matt
Great question. So my first one is, I guess kind of I'll go from broad in there. Broad one is take really small steps when you're creating changes. Typically diving in overnight change. Flipping a switch is not the best answer. It might seem like it for the first five days while everything's cranking along and your willpower is not been taxed yet, but it is getting that. And then the day is going to come along when your friends are going to the happy hour or whatever it is, and your perfect setup that you've been this fantasy you've been living, that everything has changed and you're now different, that will come crashing down because that's what happens.

[00:46:01.970] – Matt
But that's what happens with willpower. When it when it goes, it goes. And then because you've lost your perfectionist fantasy, you now think, well, I'm done now. Now it's not worth even having this next meal because I already messed up. So I took four years to go from omnivorous to vegan. Nobody has to take that long. But I tend to think that if you take a month to do it, you give yourself maybe a week like where you just having your breakfast

[00:46:23.140] – Matt
It's plant-based another week or it's now breakfast and lunch and so on or go you go try a few weeks where you're plant-based at home and you're still omnivorous out and then after that, make it so you're only omnivorous out on the weekends and so on and so on. These small steps to me, they give you a chance to learn the new habit. They give you a body, a chance to adapt. They let you learn how to handle things socially.

[00:46:44.290] – Matt
Obviously, I'm speaking right now about going plant-based, but it could also apply to running. You don't have to go out and run a mile five times a week to become a runner or to become fit. You can start with two minutes a day and you're not going to get the progress in the first month. It's going to seem like you're really not going anywhere. But if you look a year down the road, I think the person who starts with two minutes a day is much more likely to be someone who has now run consistently throughout the whole year at increasing amounts.

[00:47:07.000] – Matt
Obviously, because progress is an important part of this. You can't just stagnate at two minutes a day, but starting small and having the patience to accept that you're not going to see physical results, but you are building this invisible habit in your head. I think that's probably the most important tip I have for wellness. So that's my general. A very specific small steps approach for me that I really like is to drink a smoothie and eat a big salad every single day.

[00:47:29.740] – Matt
That's a pretty small step. It might be too big of a step for most people or for most for some people. And if you think that seems like a lot, if you find yourself struggling with even a couple of days of that, then just do one of those things. Just have this really just have the salad, do the oatmeal instead of the smoothie if you want. But those two meals to me, they help keep me on track, because if I kind of just mess up, if I go out and have whatever kind of vegan fast food I happen to have, if later I get back to have a salad, like it just kind of gets me back on track.

[00:47:54.880] – Matt
So I like that as my small one and then my very most specific habit. This is just something that has worked for me paying attention to my sleep, like getting a sleep tracker. I'm not really into trackers and data and stuff like that, but I've realized in the past few months that paying attention to my sleep, it's one of those habits that I think of it as like an anchor habit sort of pulls everything else in the right direction, just like the smoothie in the salad.

[00:48:14.560] – Matt
Like I said, once I started paying attention to my sleep, I started paying attention to how I ate and how I drank in the evening hours before I'd go to bed. So suddenly there was this benefit. I started noticing that when I worked out in the day, I would sleep better. So then I have this extra reason to actually work out in the day. And so it just one of those things. It's like a little game.

[00:48:33.580] – Matt
And if I'm trying to maximize how well I sleep, it turns out that I'm also maximizing how well I am living throughout my day. So maybe sleep, isn't it for everybody. But if you can find that anchor habit, that one that just pulls you to make the right choices, then that's that can be life changing. So it's been sleep for me look for years.

[00:48:51.880] – Allan
Excellent. Thank you for that, both of you. Well, this is episode four hundred ninety three.

[00:48:59.950] – Matt
congratulations.

[00:49:00.910] – Allan
So the show notes are going to be at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/493, but if you guys want me to send somebody somewhere and have links in the show, notes for that, where would you like that to be?

[00:49:13.250] – Matt
They can go to my sites at nomeatathlete.com, Robert what's your site's domain? veganbodybuilding.com, and we have a dedicated book page, at book.nomeatathlete.com, if they want to go there and see a bunch of endorsements and all that's in the book.

[00:49:26.900] – Allan
OK, well, the book is called The Plant-Based Athlete and the subtitle and this is a game changing approach to peak performance. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot from the book because, as I said, I've always known that endurance athletes do very, very well with the vegan diet plant-based diets. But this was kind of the first time I've seen how broad and how wide the performance improvements can be across all these different disciplines. And you've got the case studies in there.

[00:49:55.340] – Allan
You've got the athletes themselves speaking to how they've done this and sharing their own recipes and how they eat in a given day. So you can't ask for much more than that. This is great book, guys. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:50:08.300] – Matt
Thank you, Allan. Appreciate it.

[00:50:09.650] – Robert
Yeah. Thanks, Allan. Appreciate the opportunity today.

Post Show/Recap

[00:50:16.570] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:50:18.160] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a fascinating interview, especially when you're talking about endurance athletes, that's kind of my thing, but the plant-based endurance athlete is pretty amazing.

[00:50:30.140] – Allan
Yeah, and I knew, you know, when I started reading it. And Matt is an endurance athlete. And, of course, you know, some of the people that a lot of the people they profiled, you know, the rich rolls and those guys that are you know, they're just diehard vegan athletes and their endurance athletes. And you look at them and say, yeah, they look like vegans physically. But then, you know, it's power lifters and it's bodybuilders and it's all that stuff.

[00:50:59.530] – Allan
And I'm like, OK, you can. And I think that's really kind of the magic of what I came away with. All of this was you can be vegan and be a bodybuilder, you can be vegan and eat keto, you can do those things. Now, is it the easiest way to do it? And the short answer would be no. And is it the optimal way to do it? And that I think the jury's still out because we just don't have enough of them high enough up in a sport. Now,

[00:51:31.560] – Allan
Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the game changer documentary. It was on Netflix is probably still out there. And, you know, it was he basically said this is the way he's eating now. It's more vegetarian or vegan. I'm not sure exactly which one, but he's in that realm of a plant-based diet and he believes that's the way it should be. That's why people should be eating. Now, would Arnold Schwarzenegger be Arnold Schwarzenegger if he had been a vegan when he was eight years old, 18 years old or 17 years old when he was coming over the United States?

[00:52:01.180] – Allan
The very beginning. And I don't know. I you know, I don't know that he could have accomplished what he accomplished. Being vegan or vegetarian, now, you can get your protein, but I mean, they're eating a ton of extra calories and fiber. To get that done, but it's doable, and I think that's what they've proved in their book and what they might find is with what's happening with all of these big and vegetarian athletes, is are they living longer?

[00:52:31.180] – Allan
Because a lot of the, you know, muscular athletes, really muscular athletes to see, you know, offensive lineman in college football or pro football or you see the bodybuilders or the pro wrestlers, a lot of those folks and a lot of it's lifestyle. It's not necessarily that they just put on so much muscle or what they did or what they ate. But these athletes are trying to do this not just for performance, but for longevity. And so that's their eating style is looking at it from a health and a performance perspective.

[00:53:05.890] – Allan
They don't want to sacrifice performance, but they want to make sure they're not harming their health. So it will be interesting to see how these athletes fare because it's not uncommon for bodybuilders to die younger, professional wrestlers, power lifters, they get big hearts. You know, they don't eat well. They pack on a ton of muscle and often fat in the off season. And so it's just, you know, it's not bodybuilding and powerlifting and those, they're not healthy sports or not, you're not getting into that for health.

[00:53:40.870] – Allan
And in a sense, a lot of times ultra marathoners are not getting into it for health. There's a limit. If you just ran, you know, even it was just like three miles a day or five miles a day, your body would be fine. You'd be healthy. A lot of times when you push yourself too hard and, you know, it's the thing is that you can push yourself past the point of health. And so that would be my only concern is if these athletes are still physically pushing themselves there, does this mitigate some of that health risk that they would have had if they were meat eaters?

[00:54:18.100] – Rachel
That's the interesting question to ask. You know, all these plants that we tend to eat salads and vegetables and all these legumes and beans, they all have some nutrients in there in them that are so important for our day to day life. And getting the right combination of them could very well support our endurance activities, whether it's running or biking or swimming or power lifting, I can imagine. But, you know, the one thing about diets that's really fascinating is that I look at it as a fueling strategy.

[00:54:54.880] – Rachel
You know, I eat certain foods because they agree with me and they support what I'm going to do, athletically speaking. But, you know, people with a nut allergy, for example, no matter how great walnuts and pecans are for you, they can't simply eat them. So there must be an alternative for that person or somebody with the lactose issue or a gluten issue. You know, our bodies, just because you want to eat something may not tolerate it well.

[00:55:22.930] – Rachel
And so the point is just to find what eating style works best for you. And I'm amazed by people like Scott Jurek and Rich Roll and some of the other endurance runners that can live on a vegan diet. Clearly, that's working for them in some way or another. So, yeah, I read a lot of it. It's a trend right now, in our running community, a lot of people are turning to more plant-based diets and there's something to it, obviously.

[00:55:49.030] – Allan
Well, and like we mentioned in the show, it's nutritionally dense food. And so, you know, getting your body, the vitamins and the minerals that you need that you might not be able to get from a full carnivore diet. so, you know, making sure you're doing that. But the end all be all. And, you know, I mentioned this a couple of times on there is. The reason I think that vegans and vegetarians tend to do

[00:56:15.930] – Allan
Better health wise, and I say it over and over when they talk about their studies and their interest in their books because they're eating Whole Foods.

[00:56:24.330] – Rachel
Amen to that.

[00:56:28.830] – Allan
so they equate eating Omnivore as a standard American diet. So to them, it's there's no difference. They don't look at red meat and processed meat and say it's any different. It's meat. And it's so they don't look at it different. If they're going to do a study about the health effects of meat, they're going to just say, do you eat these? And they're going to include the two together.

[00:56:51.720] – Allan
You could come back and say, well, I only eat grass-fed grass, finished beef, pastured chicken, pastured pork. And under these circumstances, but they don't nobody breaks the science down to that level of detail. And even if they did, most of this is just what people say they're eating. Right, and not necessarily what they're eating. So, you know, we've got these athletes now. They're going through this process. And if they stick with it for the long haul, because there's a there's a lot of vegans that fall off the wagon, there's you know, there's a lot of people that go hopeful, that whole food that fall off the wagon.

[00:57:26.880] – Allan
There's a lot of keto people that fall off the wagon. So, you know, if they stick with it, then we might come up with some stories. Some of course, it'll be anecdotal stories, but some stories that demonstrate that that way of eating is sustainable for the long term. It works for their performance, it works for their health and longevity, because that's why they're doing it. They're doing it because they believe that's the healthiest way to eat.

[00:57:50.280] – Allan
For many of it's also an ethical concerns. But almost everybody that I've talked to, and particularly with Robert and Matt, it was really about longevity and health.

[00:58:01.590] – Rachel
Yeah. And you mentioned Whole Foods. It's I think that's the essential key to this part of the formula is whether you're eating a whole vegan type of food or a whole keto kind of food. The point is getting real foods. You know, Oreos, I guess, are vegan, but they certainly don't have any of the nutrition that you need on a daily basis. So, you know, just making sure that you're eating a healthy, actual nutritious item and not going to the chips and the pretzels and the cookies, that just because they're vegan. It counts, I guess.

[00:58:33.870] – Rachel
But, you know, you still need to eat the nutrients you need to eat. But the other point about diets that I'd like to bring up, too, is that sustainable is such a slippery slope of a word for me, because I just trained, for example, for a 50 mile race. What if I decide that I'm going to focus on a triathlon? Or what if I decide to do bodybuilding as my next big challenge? You know, then I will probably change the way I eat to address that activity.

[00:59:04.440] – Rachel
So, you know, whether people stick to a vegan or keto or any diet in between, you know, as long as it's supporting your health and your activities, then I would say go with what is working for you in that moment. You know, I don't get hung up on being sustainable, being vegan to the end of the days or being keto for the end of days. You know, we go through these trends in life. You know, things happen.

[00:59:31.140] – Rachel
So eat how it best supports your health in that moment. This is my point.

[00:59:36.240] – Allan
Yeah. Because in the end, food serves three purposes. OK, first purpose is it's nourishment and fuel for your body, OK? Your body needs certain oils and fats. It needs certain amino acids. And in general, we tend to do a little better if there's some fiber involved, you know. So, you know, those are kind of the bare requirements and then getting the vitamins and minerals that we need. That's our nutrition. The second thing about food is if you do it right, it's delicious.

[01:00:11.040] – Allan
Yes. And so, no, if you eat Twinkies all the time, a strawberry isn't going to taste very sweet. All right. But a strawberry is actually very sweet as our carrots and tomatoes and beets, you know, those very sweet, even a sweet potato. I don't you know, I can put cinnamon just flat on a sweet potato and eat it. I don't need to add sugar, which you go into a restaurant and you order a sweet potato, all their cinnamon is going to be mixed with sugar premixed.

[01:00:44.270] – Allan
That's how they get it. And I don't want the sugar. So, you know, I end up eating it plain, which is with butter. But my basic point is, is you should enjoy your food. So you shouldn't be this. Oh, this is horrible. I have to eat this five pound salad every day. No, that's not how it should be. It should be enjoyable foods that you find appealing that are bringing all the different things, the textures and the tastes and all the things that you like and avoiding the textures and taste that you don't like.

[01:01:15.790] – Allan
And then the final bit is we use food for social things, for celebrations, for parties, for going out, for, you know, eating with somebody has special meaning to us. I think some people go a little too far with that. And it's like, you know, OK, I got to have the cake and got to do this for this party and we got to do that. And the food goes a little off the rails for some of these celebrations.

[01:01:42.190] – Allan
But that said, sitting down and having a meal with someone you care about is an important part of life. Having those conversations over a dinner table with your family is an important part of life. And those are not moments to be missed out on because, you know, oh, they're eating pizza. And I can't sit at the table while they're eating pizza because I might want a slice of pizza. So I'm going to eat in the other room.

[01:02:07.630] – Allan
So I'm not tempted by the pizza. And it's like, well, one, get to investigate your relationship with food and then two, what is it intrinsically about the pizza that's the problem? Yeah, you know, and would having a piece of pizza actually ruin your life?

[01:02:27.020] – Rachel
Yeah, you know, as long as it agrees with you, I always go back to allergies because I have them. So, you know, as long as that pizza agrees with you and it's not going to start a cascading way of terrible dieting and eating over the next few days, then enjoy it, enjoy that family time, enjoy that celebration or that birthday cake or whatever it is, as long as it agrees with you. And just get back to it the next day.

[01:02:53.380] – Allan
And if you want to make it keto, just make the cheese and meat over and vegetables over into your bowl and your plate and toss the crust into the dog's bowl. I mean, there you go.

[01:03:05.320] – Rachel
Yeah. Your dog will be happy.

[01:03:07.390] – Allan
Yeah, the dog's happy. You're happy. You're sitting with the family. All good. All right, Rachel. We'll talk next week then.

[01:03:14.650] – Rachel
Sounds great. Take care.

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Say Hello

Hello and welcome to the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Rachel and I weren't able to get together to do our normal talk around with the show this week, she's traveling back from her ultramarathon. She did complete that. So it's going to be really cool to talk to her next week about how that went and how her recovery is going. So I'm really looking forward to that.

And then my wife was traveling back to the States for a friend's wedding and to see some family. So that kind of left me alone to manage the reconstruction work we're doing on her bed and breakfast. And it's a full time job. I'm not kidding, man. There's just so much going on with all the workers coming in, getting everybody everything they need and getting everything done. Dust everywhere. It's a real mess. Anyway, we're close to being done. I think another week or two and we should have all of the construction work done and we'll be one step closer to my wife having her bed and breakfast, Lula's bed and breakfast here in beautiful Bocas del Toro.

I hope sometime in the future you can come check her out there. It's a beautiful place in a wonderful location in the world and so really excited for her. Now, today, I'm going to be sharing the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. And hopefully I'll be shining a light on some of the things that might be holding you back. Mindset, nutrition and exercise, all play roles in weight loss. Unfortunately, most of us will emphasize one of these things and kind of deemphasize the other or not pay attention to the other.

And that usually is our undoing because a lot of times we're actually focused on the one thing that isn't the most effective of those three. So hopefully today I'll get you some information and get you started on doing something great. But I don't want you to stop there. If you're someone who has been stop and start dieting on your weight loss, you lose some weight, you gain some weight. You're on this roller coaster. I want you to ask yourself one question.

Haven't I done this before? It didn't work last time, so why will it work now? So if we keep doing the same things, we're going to get the same results. If you repeat old mistakes, you're not going to get a different result. You're going to get the same result you got last time, ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. I don't want you to do that. It's time to make the changes that will stick. These 10 weight loss myths for people over 40 will give you some guidance, but don't stop there.

If you're serious about weight loss, it's time to do something different, something more. It's time to hire a coach. I'd like to see if the 40+ Fitness 12-week gas program is for you. E-mail me at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com. We can set up a call so I can understand where you are and then we can put together a plan that will work for you. Don't let another day, week, month or year pass with you getting the same

You've always got get off the roller coaster. Email me at allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com and get the guidance, accountability and support you need to lose the weight for good.

Episode

The top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. As I went down and I was preparing for today's talk, I went through and I kind of cataloged the different myths into three basic categories, three focus areas, if you will. Exercise, nutrition and mindset. And as I go through each of these focus areas, I'm going to talk a little bit about their effectiveness in helping you with weight loss and why they're important.

And the reality of it is all three are important. If you're missing out on one of these three, you're going to slow your weight loss efforts. So let's get into it. The first category I'm gonna talk about is exercise. Now, that tends to be the one area where most people will put their effort in with regards to weight loss. You asked them why they gained the weight. And nine times out of ten, the answer is, well, I stopped exercising.

And while that probably played a little role in it, it wasn't the only reason why you're putting on weight. The lack of exercise is not a weight gain model. It's not necessary that you're going to have to put on body weight because you stopped exercising. But yes, exercise can be a helper. One of the side effects of exercising is that it can help you lose weight. It won't make you lose weight, but it can help. So exercise does play a role in weight loss. It's just not necessarily the role that a lot of us think.

1 – X is the best exercise for weight loss

The first myth associated with weight loss for exercise and when the exercise category is X is the best exercise for weight loss. And this usually comes out in the form of a question where someone will ask in a forum or they're asking you directly as a trainer, what's the best exercise I can do to lose weight? I hear that question practically every day. What exercise can I do for weight loss?

And the reality is you shouldn't be doing exercise for weight loss. You should be doing exercise to be fit for the things you like to do. If you like running, by all means, run. But if you've listened to the episode I had was with Sal DeStefano, you know that running and in that type of exercise isn't necessarily going to give you the body that you want. Yes, you probably will lose some weight running, but it's not going to give you the things you need.

And yes, lifting weights can make your body burn more calories at rest because you're carrying more muscle. We're over 40, though, so the ability for us to put on a ton of muscle isn't there. We can't put on some muscle and that will help, but it won't make you lose weight. So the best thing I can advise you is find exercises that you enjoy, find exercise that gives you the look and the feel and the ability to do the things you want to do. And do those exercises do them consistently. And yes, one of the side effects of most exercise is it helps in your weight loss journey.

2 – burning more calories will lead to weight loss

The second myth, burning more calories will lead to weight loss. And so this is sort of a corollary to the other myth we just said. Burning calories is great, but our bodies are very, very smart. They're set to balance. And so if we start trying to burn a bunch of extra calories, one of two things is going to happen.

One, we're going to get really, really hungry. Our body is going to say, hey, we need more calories. So it's going to amp up our hunger hormones. And that's not good if you're trying to lose weight. The other thing that can happen is if you're not eating. So maybe you yeah, you are hungry, but you're not eating more, your body will start shutting down systems that you're not using. So your reproductive system, your immune system, those things are going to function poorly.

You're going to notice it, and so burning more calories is not necessarily the answer for weight loss. If you're active, yes you are burning more calories. And a side effect of that can be that you're going to lose some weight, but you shouldn't be working to burn more calories so you can eat more food. That's not the model we want to go with. We want to go with the exercises that give our body what they need.

And we'll talk in nutrition later about how you should be approaching your metabolism and the amount of food you're eating and those types of things. But do exercises that give you the results you want, not weight loss. That'll just be a happy side effect.

3 – X is the best exercise for toning your butt, stomach, arms, etc.

The third one in this also tends to come in the form of a question, but is X is the best exercise for toning a certain part of your body. And so we'll hear someone will say, what is the best exercise I can do to make my waist smaller or my butt toned or my arms more toned?

First off, a toned or toned toning is a marketing term. It actually had no real meaning in the world. Now, most of us will believe what it means is that we do an exercise that means that our muscles are more fit and our arms are smaller, but is smaller. But the reality of it is to get smaller, you have to lose body fat and exercising is not going to do that. Now, if you get your body fat down below a certain threshold, you will begin to be able to see the muscle underneath.

So if you wanted a six pack abs, you're going to have to get your body fat down below 10 percent, which is not easy when we're over 40. When you do that, then, yes, it might make sense for you to do some abdominal exercises for the sake of building a little extra muscle there so that you can see it. You know, you can appreciate the what you've got there and you can make it look better, more full rounded, whatever you're trying to accomplish.

I mean, you know, with the butt it's a perfect example is people will do exercises to enhance their butt, but they're also already at a very low body fat percentage. And that makes it easier for those muscles to show. So there is no best exercise for toning a part of your body. You can't spot reduce. So it's best to just try to overall do your weight loss and try to lose body fat, do your exercises so you look and feel the way you want to.

Once you've lost the weight, then you can modify your resistance training, your running or other things to build the body. Look that you want the esthetic that you want, but you can't do an exercise to make that happen.

Sponsor

This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Reel Paper.

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4 – Sweat is fat leaving the body

The fourth myth, and this is also in the weight loss category is sweat is fat leaving the body. I used to believe this one. This was one that was real to me. I would do my cardio and I would take pictures of the sweat on the floor underneath the elliptical machine. And while I got really good at doing the elliptical machine and I would sweat, I wasn't really losing weight.

That's not weight. That's water. And yes, there's water weight. But as soon as I drink a glass of water after I was done, I put that weight right back on. So it really wasn't fat leaving the body. It was me burning extra calories. Fine. But that wasn't fat leaving the body. That was me getting my stamina up, which was helpful, but it was not fat loss. And it's funny because, you know, they used to sell these vinyl suits that the sweat suits that you'd run around into sweat off the weight.

And they have these wraps that you wrap around your waist. And I thought those things were relics of the past, that the Smith maybe had disappeared into the into the ether. But here in Panama the other day, I saw a guy running down the street in one of those vinyl suits, now it's 85 degrees and it's 85 percent humidity. He's already sweating. And now he's got this vinyl suit on and he's running. And I'm thinking to myself, there's, you know, this is not good.

But I didn't stop and tell him he wasn't a client. And I'm not that guy. You know, it's going to come in and tell people how to live their lives. But he looked young and fit. And so I wasn't so worried he was going to have a heat stroke or keel over for another reason. But, you know, it was not a safe way. He was dehydrating his body. He was not really helping his fat loss goals.

That comes from other things. So no sweat is not fat leaving the body. It's just a way that your body cools itself by getting rid of water, put it in the water on the surface of the skin as it then evaporates, it gives a cooling effect. But you're also losing a lot of electrolytes during that period of time and you're dehydrating yourself. So it's not beneficial to sweat more. Don't think that's a win for you. It's good to sweat every day.

It's good to get out and do some things and get yourself moving and work up a sweat. But that's not a weight loss thing. It's just you enjoy getting out, moving around, doing those things. And yeah, you happen to sweat, to cool your body off. So that's the four top myths that I have related to weight loss in the exercise category.

5 – You have to cut carbs to lose weight

We'll move into the nutrition category now. So the fifth myth for weight loss for people over 40 is you have to cut out carbs to lose weight. This is a myth. Do not. Now, I know I probably should pause here and let you catch your breath. What, Allan? You believe in Keto, you follow Keto and it works for you. Yes, absolutely. So you must go low carb. You must think carbs make you fat. And the reality is, no, not all carbs. And I think that's where we lose the discussion because we want to simplify the rule.

And the reality is it's not all carbs. Fiber does not get you fat. Vegetables do not get you fat. In fact, I have never seen anyone who was fat because they ate vegetables. We get fat because we eat sugar. And refined carbs, and it's the refined carbs that are the problem. So if you can move to a more wholefood diet. So if it comes in a box, a bag, a jar or a can avoid it as much as possible. Look on the labels, the primary ingredients for anything you are eating should be food.

You know, if you buy a can of sauce, tomato sauce, the number one ingredient should be tomatoes. They don't need to add sugar. They don't need to add anything else. Just can the sugars. I mean, can the tomatoes and let that be it and you're fine. So, you know, some things in bags like you go to the frozen section and there's some vegetables that have been quick, free, frozen. There's fruits that have been quick frozen.

Those are awesome. Those are great. But sometimes you just look and for one reason or another, they had to add something else. And it's those processed, the highly processed we find carbs that are causing the weight gain. And yes, if you cut refined carbs and sugar, you will lose weight. Almost always. Everyone I've ever worked with, they cut the sugar, they cut the refined carbs, they lose weight. So, no, you don't have to cut carbs to lose weight.

You have to cut refined carbs. You have to start eating whole food. OK, so not all carbs are the same.

6 – Fat makes you fat

The second myth in the nutrition category and our sixth myth overall is fat makes you fat. Now, this comes from the camp of people who are calories in, calories out. And the reason they like to say this is a gram of fat has nine calories, a gram of carbs and an anagram of protein each have four calories.

So basically they're looking at fat and saying the easiest way to cut calories is to cut the fat out of food. Now, there's just one fundamental problem when they cut fat out of food, it tastes horrible. So they add sugar. Yeah, they add sugar and when they add you're going to make it taste better. And when they do that, what do they do? They make you fat. So the low fat stuff that you see, the low fat yogurts, walking through yogurt section, all of them are low fat.

That is very hard to find full fat yogurt these days because everybody wants to lose fat, they want to cut fat. And fat is so important for your body. Your brain is 60 percent fat. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, it is constructed of fat. Your cells, every cell in your body is manufactured using some fat. So you need fat in your diet. In fact, there are some fats that are called essential fats, essential oils.

These essential fats are fats your body cannot make and you need to have them. So avoiding fat can actually be a problem because you're not giving your body the nutrition it needs to build itself, which kind of takes me to my next thought. OK, our food is our body. Our food is our energy. Our food is everything. If you're eating low quality food, you're making your body out of low quality stuff. And that's not how you want to go through life, if you're wondering why your joints are hurting, you're wondering why you're putting on weight.

It's the food. It's almost always the food. Go for nutritionally dense food, and that's going to be meat, eggs, fish and plants. And that's why I have no problem bringing on vegans and vegetarians, because one of the things that makes their way of eating good or great is it typically involves a lot of whole foods. And the better the quality of your diet, the better the quality of food you're eating, the more nutritionally dense it is, the better it is.

So that doesn't make you fat, fat in combination with refined carbs, makes you fat. So, yes, the fat in the pizza, combined with the refined carbs, makes you overeat the pizza. You're getting too many calories in a short period of time. And it's not nutritionally dense if it has vegetables on it at all, if it has meat on it at all. Those are processed meats. They're very little vegetables. In fact, you almost have to eat an entire pizza to get a serving of vegetables.

And that's not the way to go through life. Yes, occasionally have a piece of pizza, but recognize that it is should not be the staple, it should not be the go to source for nutrition. It's just not there and so it is fat in combination with refined carbs, that's the problem.

7 – Fat burners can help you lose weight

The third nutrition myth, and this will be our seventh overall weight loss myth for people over 40. Is these fat burners. And these ranged from benign to ridiculous to dangerous.

I was talking to a potential client the other day and she said, you know, she had gone low carb and it worked pretty well, but she plateaued. So now she was going to take this product. And I go look at the product. It's a multilevel marketing scheme where people are showing how much weight they've lost with this thing. But here's the trick. All the people photographed are in the multilevel marketing thing. They're all selling this stuff.

So, of course, they want to testimony the great people that are doing this, these people are trying to sell this stuff to. Now, did that product help them lose the weight? I don't know. But they definitely had a before and after picture that they could show you and they could show you that product. I have a before and after picture to show you, too.

You can also find it on the website. I didn't take any fat burners for that weight loss. I ate wholefood, I got nutritionally dense foods, I had gone paleo, I started lowering the carbs, I started pulling out the refined carbs and I got down to a point where I was eating meats and vegetables. And I lost that weight, I didn't need a fat burner to raise my metabolism, and in fact, many of these things have been found to be dangerous.

They can harm your heart. They can do a lot of those things. They get pulled, you know, the things that were approved by the FDA for weight loss, they later on find out cause problems and they get pulled off the market. There's a bunch of cases of different things over the years that have done that. And so rather than trying to ramp up your metabolism by either exercising yourself like crazy or taking one of these crazy fat burners, focus on getting nutritionally dense food, and by nature, you will eat fewer calories because your body's getting the nutrition it needs at a lower calorie level.

And then that's when exercise is beneficial because it kind of pushes this a little faster. So it really is it really does come down to the nutrition being the primary lever that's going to help you lose weight and all these fat burners and all these other things. I even, you know, at one time took that stuff that pulls the fat out of your food and leaves a nice little orange ring in the toilet. Yeah, I did that for a while, not for when I figured it out.

But during all those years when I was doing things wrong and starting and stopping, I was like, oh, well, I'll take this product here. I can buy it in a Wal-Mart. And I take it. And now, yeah, I'm leaving little orange rings in my toilet every time I go to the bathroom. Whereas all I really needed to do was focus on the quality of my food, eat whole food, stay away from the junk and you'll lose the weight.

8 – I'm genetically destined to be fat

So that kind of wraps up nutrition and now we'll jump into the mindset category. Now, this is the area within weight loss that almost always gets neglected, people will jump in and they will immediately say, OK, I'm going to go on this strict diet and I'm going to start exercising every day. And that usually lasts about three weeks. And then they quit. OK. And sometimes it's only because of the stories that they're telling themselves, their actual mindset.

So I have three more myths and they're all going to fall in this mindset category. So myth number eight of the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40 is I'm genetically destined to be fat. The nice way people will say it is, well, we're a big boned family. You know, what you are is you're used to eating the way the rest of your family eats. And that's why we're all overweight. Family units tend to learn food habits from each other, and those food habits then become a part of our lifestyles.

And we all get fat. And so if your mother and father are fat, yes, you're more likely to be overweight. The reason is not because of genetics. None of us were genetically predisposed to be fat. There are some very rare, very, very rare genetic diseases that do cause people metabolic problems sometimes, yes, your your thyroid isn't functioning the way it needs to or some other things are going on in your body that are causing some of this weight gain.

But overall, the vast majority of people are not genetically flawed to be overweight. What we have, though, is a great system in our body that knows when we have excess of calories, it's good to store that is fat. That's a safety mechanism. So that if we get into a point in time when we don't have access to food, we have this energy store so we can have the energy to keep looking for food, to keep hunting and keep gathering.

So when we were hunters and gatherers, this was a survival mechanism. This was huge. This is really important. In a day where we have abundance of food, we can get it wherever we want. Quite literally, I don't know that I can walk more than 100 feet from where I am right now and not find three or four restaurants that will serve me all the crap I want. I can find three or four grocery stores all within 100 feet of where I'm sitting right now.

And so we have this abundance of food. So we don't ever have to go through those famines unless they're self-induced, so our body doesn't know how to jettison that fat that fast because it's never had to do it. It wants to hold on to it. It genetically wants to hold on to that fat and hormones are going to do what it needs to do to cause our body to stabilize so you can lose some weight and then you're probably going to plateau a bit.

And then it's time to shift and change, to slowly coax your body to understand it's OK to let go of the weight. So you do have to have the mindset that you can do this and that you stick with it, you have the patience to stick with it so that you're giving your body the right signals, the right coaxing to do the right thing. The body is going to fight you because the body needs to hold wants to hold on that fat for safety reasons, just like our blood pressure stays within a given range.

When we're healthy. Our blood stays within a certain range. Our body temperature stays within a certain range. Our body has weight set points that it doesn't want to go below for safety reasons. So we need to coax our body to go ahead and shed some of that fat and we need to stay persistent. And that's all about mindset.

9 – I lack the willpower to keep the weight off

The second one in the mindset cateogry is kind of related to that, so this is the ninth myth, I lacked the willpower to keep the weight off.

And as I mentioned before, you get really excited. You get in there and you do that first three weeks and then something happens to get you off or you plateau or something. And suddenly now it's really, really hard to stick to it. OK, willpower is not the problem. Commitment is the problem. If you didn't really dive deep into your mindset to understand why you're doing this and why it's really important to do it now. Then you're yes, you're never going to have the willpower to say no to the donuts.

I know I didn't. It wasn't till I was sitting there and I said, I have to do this. I don't have another choice. It's now or it's never. And I made the commitment to myself, to my family, to everything that I held dear, that I was going to change. It was a commitment and at that point, willpower didn't matter anymore. Because I had no desire to do anything but what was healthy and good for myself.

And I did. And I got myself where I needed to be. So this is not about willpower. This is about commitment. So I strongly encourage you to just jettison words like willpower, jettison words like resolution or even the word diet, and start looking at more positive ways to view this. I am committed to being different. I'm committed to making a change in my life. And then the other thing is lose some words like can't, I can't do this.

You know, if you can't do it, you won't. But if you're relying on willpower, well, maybe you can't, but if you've got that commitment and you're doing the right things, willpower becomes non-negotiable. It's just there it's not a willpower. My wife even says it to me. She said, I don't believe you have such great willpower. And the reality is, no, I just have a commitment. When I make a commitment, I keep it. And I know you can, too.

10 – I'll be happy when I lose X pounds

The tenth of the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40 and the final one also in the mindset category is I'll be happy when I lose X pounds. So for some people, it's just five more pounds, not last five pounds. For some people, it's 10, 30, 50, maybe even more than 100. But you're telling yourself you'll be happy when that happens. And the reality is, no, you actually won't be any happier than you are right now.

You might be a little bit excited about the fact that you've done it. You'll have more energy because you're carrying around less weight. But that's not what's going to make you happy. I would encourage you to get happy now to do the things that bring you joy, to spend time with the people that bring you joy. So happiness is something you're working on with independent of the weight loss, but you're working on both. So if you're working to make yourself a happier person, you're going to be happy whether you lose that weight or not, because once you lose the weight, you may feel like you've reached some destination.

But the reality is that's not your reward. Weighing 50 pounds less is not a reward. The things you can do are reward. The things that you have in your life that are bringing you joy is the reward. So I would encourage you to focus on happiness, just like you do any other important thing in your life, set some goals, get some rules, go and get some things going. Build some habits that bring more joy into your life and get rid of some things. It can be a social media, you know, reading the news sometimes just get rid of some things that aren't bringing you joy, that aren't serving you, and you'll be happier.

Then when you lose the weight, you'll be a happier person at a lower weight. Not the other way around.

Summary

To recap, the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. In the exercise category, there are four, so number one is X is the best exercise for weight loss. The second myth, burning more calories will lead to weight loss. The third myth, x is the best exercise for toning some part of your body and four sweat is fat leaving the body.

Exercise should not be a part of your weight loss plan. It should just be an add on where you're building fitness, much like we talked about building happiness earlier, build fitness for the things you want to be able to do. Then the exercise will give you more, a lot more. And yes, as a side effect, most people that are active in exercising do see some benefits in the weight loss area, but it's minor and they have to be eating right to make that happen.

Which leads us to the next category, nutrition, and there are three myths in the nutrition category. Number five, you have to cut carbs to lose weight. Number six, fat makes you fat. And then number seven, fat burners will help you lose the weight, the reality of all this is a good nutrition plan, just where you're eating Whole Foods and staying away from the process crap, avoiding things, most things in a box bag, can or jar, knowing what you're putting in your mouth, getting the most nutritionally dense foods you can is going to help you lose weight.

And that might mean cutting carbs for most people it will because you're cutting out the refined carbs. For some people that might be eating less fat, you know, particularly if the fat you're getting is from those refined, high, processed foods. So you might actually end up cutting fat and you might actually end up cutting carbs. That's fine. You're going to find your calorie spot. You're going to be in that spot. You're going to be nourished because you're eating whole foods, you're eating nutritionally dense foods and you're going to feel better.

So those are the three that fit in the nutrition category. Now, we're going to move into the mindset category. And as I mentioned before, this is an area where most people don't spend much time and they should because it's a very, very important aspect to weight loss and more so to keeping the weight off. So number eight in the top 10, weight loss myths for people over 40. I'm genetically destined to be fat. Number nine, I lacked the willpower to keep off the weight, and then number 10, I'll be happy when I lose X pounds.

OK, the reality is mindset and the way you feel about yourself and all those things are things that you should be working on independent of your weight loss goals. Yes, you should want to lose weight if you need to lose weight, but if you think you can't because you're genetically predisposition for something or you think you can't because you just don't, you lack the willpower, the capacity to do it. You won't do it. You've given yourself too many obstacles.

If you have to beat your own genetics, you're not going to if you have to rely on willpower all the time, you're not going to. Commit to change. Whole Foods avoid the process crap, nutritionally dense foods exercise for the things that you enjoy doing, make exercise enjoyable when you're able to do the things you enjoy doing. You can exercise and now you can do those things. You're going to have more joy in your life. You're going to be a happier, healthier person.

So those are the top 10 weight loss myths for people over 40. I hope you take something valuable out of this. If you have some other myths that maybe I didn't cover that you'd like to discuss or at least share with us, come to the Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group. It's a wonderful group of people. Share your myths there. I'd love to hear what yours are. If there's some other ones that you'd like to add or you have some questions about these that we talked about today, there'd be a great place for us to dive in a little bit deeper, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and join the 40+ Fitness Group today.

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Why simple can be a bad long-term strategy for weight loss after 40

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Let's Say Hello

[00:02:08.630] – Allan
Hey Raz, how you doing?

[00:02:10.220] – Rachel
Good, how are you today, Allan?

[00:02:12.200] – Allan
I'm doing better. I'm doing better. It's over at least as far as symptoms for me are. I can actually taste things again. I'm not sure about my smell being all the way back. It's really hard to tell because I didn't have a very good sense of smell to begin with, which has its benefits when you're dealing with stuff that you don't like or doesn't smell good, but also has its deterrence, because if you can't smell something smells bad, then you don't know it smells bad and that can put you in a bad place.

[00:02:42.470] – Allan
So I'm not the one. If you smell something bad, you say, do you smell that? My answer is probably going to be no. And especially after covid. Like I said, I don't know that I've fully recovered, but there wasn't that much to recover in the first place.

[00:02:53.930] – Rachel
Well, good. I'm glad you could taste food again. I can't imagine how weird that would be not to taste.

[00:03:00.080] – Allan
It was weird. And you know, the thing that a lot of folks wouldn't recognize or wouldn't know is that a big part of overeating is that people don't have the reward system for taste and therefore they're actually not tasting their food as much. And that's why we have a tendency to overeat. You know, the mindless sitting there eating a bag of chips while you're watching a movie, you don't taste those chips. You tasted the first bite, then you got into the movie and the crunch, crunch, crunch, empty bag.

[00:03:31.340] – Allan
And you didn't even actually taste that food. Your body just got the endorphins that got the dopamine hit. And that just sort of happened. And so when you're not tasting food, you actually it's hard to not overeat because you tend to just end up eating more of it. It doesn't signal your body that you're full. It doesn't tell you that you're eating foods and getting the right mix of foods. So the signaling is just haywire.

[00:03:59.810] – Allan
So it's really easy to overeat when you're not when you can't taste food. I know that sounds counterintuitive.

[00:04:06.740] – Rachel
Does sound weird.

[00:04:08.870] – Rachel
it's strange. If I couldn't taste anything, I don't know that I would waste time sitting at my table eating food.

[00:04:13.970] – Allan
I ate more than I would normally have eaten because I couldn't taste it. And I just kept eating, thinking, OK, I need to eat. And but I realized after I was done, I was like, you know, normally I would take that cut of steak and that would be two steaks. And I ate the whole steak and like, you know, still try to eat good stuff. But, you know, in a general sense, when I'm not feeling well, I kind of let myself do those other things, you know, then that I wouldn't normally do because it's like, OK, just

[00:04:46.270] – Allan
Chill, you know, I can't get people to go by the high quality foods that I want to buy. I need you to go here to that store and buy that for me and go to that store and only buy this if it says this on the label. And, you know, I couldn't get to folks, so I was like, I just buy me some potatoes, some chicken.

[00:05:03.910] – Rachel
And that's probably good enough.

[00:05:05.890] – Allan
Yeah. And well run with it.

[00:05:07.480] – Rachel
Oh my goodness, how crazy.

[00:05:09.820] – Allan
Yeah. The worst part of it was one of our neighbors, dear friends, she brought us some pasta with lobster. And I couldn't taste.

[00:05:19.370] – Rachel
Oh, no. Oh, how disappointing.

[00:05:24.970] – Allan
Like this looks like it would taste delicious.

[00:05:28.610] – Rachel
Oh my gosh. Well now you'll have to try it again once now that you're feeling better and can taste a little more.

[00:05:34.400] – Allan
I'll have to call her and say thank you. Can I have some more?

[00:05:39.500] – Rachel
Right!

[00:05:39.500] – Allan
See how that goes?

[00:05:40.370] – Rachel
Absolutely.

[00:05:41.870] – Allan
How are things up there?

[00:05:43.430] – Rachel
Good. Really good. You know, funny thing happened up here the other day. We lost power for no good reason whatsoever. It was a beautiful morning, but we lost power. And so I just went about my day cleaning. I knew the power would be back on in a few hours. But the funny part was every time I entered a room, I turned on the light switch because it's such a habit. And I knew the power was out.

[00:06:07.310] – Rachel
I knew what I was doing because the power was out. But every time I entered a room, I kept turning on the light switch and it got me thinking about habits. And I do have a lot. I drink coffee every morning. That's my morning habits. And I do like to run and I do prefer running in the morning. But I'm being kind of forced out of that habit right now because my 50 miler that's coming up starts at noon.

[00:06:31.280] – Rachel
So I've had to adjust that habit to run later in the day. And it's been a challenging adjustment for me. And I'm actually looking forward to getting this race over so I can go back to running in the mornings again. I am a creature of habit.

[00:06:47.420] – Allan
Well, we all are. We just like you said, we don't necessarily recognize it until something brings it to our attention, you know, like the light switch thing. A lot of us are that way even during the daytime. We're going to walk into a room. We're going to hit the light switch. It's a trigger thing. When you walk in the room, you're going through the door, you're going to do something.

[00:07:08.830] – Allan
It's, you know, kind of when you start to understand those triggers and then your immediate action, you know, that's when you can actually start making some decisions. You know, can I change this habit? You know, do we need the light on every time I walk in the room? And the answer at least half the time is probably no.

[00:07:27.440] – Rachel
Right.

[00:07:28.520] – Allan
You know, because half the time it's daylight and half the time it's dark. So half the time you don't necessarily need that light on. But that's not a habit that from a health perspective, you know, is damaging. But a lot of us do have those triggers for the bad habits, you know, and so being aware of that, that's self awareness is really, really important. So it's good to mix up your schedule. It's good to kind of have a little bit of that.

[00:07:58.130] – Allan
It's a learning opportunity. When you said a strange thing, the power went on like, what was it, Tuesday that happens every day here?

[00:08:05.970] – Rachel
Oh, gosh.

[00:08:08.150] – Allan
Not every day. No, that's that's a little oversell. But no, the power goes out regularly here. You know, sometimes we know it's going to happen because they'll say, well, you know, they want to clean the the growth around some of the wires, you know, and can't they just turn off that part of the, No, they've got to turn off the whole island. OK, but, you know, like, we can't get water in our house unless our pumps running.

[00:08:31.490] – Allan
Yeah. And so we don't have water. So when the power goes out, we don't have running water. We don't have power. Air conditioning, all that. You know, I've set it up now. My wife, we have uninterruptible power supplies here. You know, you almost have to. Yeah. So I've got the Wi-Fi router in the actual router. All of that set up now on our UPS the power goes out,

[00:09:00.130] – Allan
We'll have power for at least an hour or so to continue to do what we're doing. So if we were, you know, Snapchat being spread like doing the Zoom call, you know, it would all stay on everything around me would go dark. But then, you know, we could still keep going and then finish out what you're doing and then it's OK. I guess I'll go read a book outside. You know, but, you know, it happens.

[00:09:26.290] – Allan
You sleep and the power goes out and it's like, oh, and you know, most I know it because the air conditioning goes off. But if I leave my phone playing the sounds of the fan, I'm not going to wake up, you know, because I mean, I'm going to I'm going to wear my battery down and I'll wake up at three o'clock in the morning with no sound. And I'll realize that the battery on my phone died, too.

[00:09:46.750] – Allan
And so I don't want that to happen. So, you know, when the power goes out, they need to wake up, turn my phone off, try to sleep in the very dark room with no sound, which is odd for me. It's different. And that's what I'm saying. Sometimes just doing something that's a little out of the norm teaches you the habits. You know, for me, the habit is. Turn out the light, go to bed, turn on the fan noise on my phone, go to sleep, I'm almost like that, I mean, and almost that fast.

[00:10:16.470] – Allan
it's just because a habit I have a sleep routine and during that sleep routine just kind of puts me into the next step of the habit. Fall asleep. So someone could be good habits and some of them could be bad habits and some of them are just wasting a little electricity. Not a lot. Just a little. But, you know, this kind of one of those things that we learn, we learn more about ourselves doing something different than we do, doing what we always do.

[00:10:42.210] – Rachel
Yeah, that is right.

[00:10:44.730] – Allan
All right. Well, you ready to get into today's talk?

[00:10:47.160] – Rachel
Yes.

[00:10:48.330] – Allan
Cool.

Episode

On today's episode, I wanted to talk about coming back from injury or illness over 40. As you may have heard, I was diagnosed with covid a little over a month and a week ago and not a cool thing and not a cool thing at all, but they put me in an ambulance, drove me home and said, sit your butt in this house for two weeks.

They did give me some food and we had some friends that could shop for us. So we were OK. But it did kind of mess with my plans. I had the basic symptoms, fatigue, cold and flu stuff, loss of taste and smell, and this really weird phantom smell thing, which I won't go into, but just recognize that it set me back. And it's fairly common for this to be happening on a regular basis for anyone over the age of 40.

It's inevitable, I guess would be the better word for us to have some form of injury or some illness over the course of our adult lives. And so how we deal with this, particularly when we're over 40, is really, really important. OK, so I'm diagnosed with covid. I can't go anywhere. Definitely can't go to the gym. And while I'm on that topic, it's a regular thing people will be asking typically during the cold and flu season.

So maybe less now this time of year, because we're really more kind of into the allergy season. But during the cold flu season, the question be, should I go to the gym if I'm sick? OK, and I'll just go ahead and put this out there. As a general rule, if you can avoid going to the gym sick, please do. The rest of us don't want to get sick. You know, you have covid. Absolutely do not go to the gym, you know, but other than that, if you have symptoms above the neck, you're more than safe to go out and do some work.

I prefer you do it outside, do it away from people, do it at home. If it's in the chest or low, you know, below the neck, you don't really need to be doing anything. And if there's a fever involved, definitely not a time for you to be exercising. This is the time for you to be focused on recovery. And we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But in a general sense, if you're sick, this might be a good time for you to go ahead and take some time off and recover and get yourself better before you worry about doing anything else.

And obviously, again, with covid entirely different matter, with injuries, maybe even a little bit different, and we'll get into each of those a little bit further as we go along. So the first thing is to recognize that injuries and illnesses are inevitable. You're going to have to face them at some point in your adult life. And so it's not something where you need to push back on yourself and be angry, sad, you know, all those negative emotions that you might have about it.

Those aren't going to serve you. They're not going to help you at all, OK? What you need to do is be able to take a step back objectively and do a couple different things. So the first thing you want to do is, is a basic evaluation. Was there something in your basic behavior that caused this injury? So let's say you were out and about and you weren't paying attention and you tripped and you broke your arm. OK, obviously not watching what you're doing, not paying attention.

You fell. OK? And by falling, you broke yourself. OK, an evaluation would be OK. Probably don't need to have that there. And I probably need to be a little bit more aware of my surroundings when I do particular things. You know, my wife and I own this bed and breakfast and there's the stairs coming down from the top to the bottom. Now we're living upstairs. While we do the renovation, we move downstairs this won't be as big of an issue, but in the morning when I get up in it's dark, but the lights are on downstairs, the slats in the wood, kind of shine this really weird cross angles on the steps as you walk down.

And I see that and I say, OK, that's a trip and fall hazard because I might see the step going a certain way when it goes a different way. So I've had my wife put in some pads so it's more skid resistant and we're putting in some motion sensitive lights. So someone's walking down the stairs, the lights will shine and that will negate that cross light thing. So paying attention to your environment so you avoid injuries, not doing certain things that cause injuries.

Like when I was doing deadlifts and wanted for some reason, do 500 pound dead lift, you know, overdoing it, overstressing over, you know, those are opportunities where your body's telling you through that pain, which is the signal something's not right. Use that time and evaluate that pain, evaluate why it happened and see if your behavior needs to change. Many times that's not the case, but there are times it is so being aware of that's very, very important.

The next thing to understand about all this is that injuries and illness, particularly when you're over 40, is not a stop button. It's a pause button too many times I'll be talking to folks almost every day, actually, and someone will say, yeah, I hurt my back, I hurt my knee, hurt my hip. In many cases, like three, five, 10 years ago, And they're not doing any activity now because it hurts. And that's just tragic. That just I mean, that eats at my soul, because when you stop moving, you stop living.

When you stop moving, you start deteriorating and you have to move to live, so if we're not doing anything to improve our fitness, to improve our health because of an injury, basically that injury beat us and we're letting that injury beat us. So this is not a stop button. We just have to figure this out and it's just a pause button. So pause, figure it out and let's move forward. So the first step, recover, OK?

Too many times people will injure themselves and they won't go to physical therapy. They won't do their physical therapy homework. They won't do what's necessary to get past this. The doctor gave them the pain meds. The pain meds solve the problem or at least the symptom, and they move on with their lives. If they try to lift anything or do something, it hurts and they're back on the pain meds. They don't want to do that. So they stop.

OK, so recover first. Do your physical therapy, get your stuff done. Your quarantine is two weeks that I sat in that bed and breakfast recovering, couldn't go to the gym, couldn't do the things I wanted to do, but I did what I could do and I recovered. I got healthy. That's job number one.

Next is to look for opportunities and buy opportunities. I mean, OK, so let's say you broke your arm, OK? I have a client that happens this to. Actually two one one hurt his wrist, another hurt her elbow. But basically a client gets injured not through their lifting, not through their other stuff. They just have an accident and there's an injury. This is a perfect opportunity for them to work on other modalities, they can work on mobility in their legs and hips, they can work on strength in their legs and hips. They can if the jarring doesn't hurt too much, they can start working on stamina work. They can do core work. There's just so many opportunities, so many other modalities that you would normally neglect.

But now that you have an injury so you can't do your prime thing, this is a great opportunity for you to spend that time doing something else that's going to improve you overall. OK, so use this time as an opportunity. If it's an illness, I used that covid time as an opportunity to really work on mindfulness and meditation. I spent a lot of time thinking, a lot of time in my head that I wouldn't normally have given myself the time to do, but because I was so fatigued that I couldn't really exercise the way I wanted to, I couldn't go anywhere and do anything I wanted to do. It was a great opportunity for me to sit and reflect and do the things I needed to do for better mental health, better clarity. So look for opportunities during this recovery time.

And then when you do come back stronger, have the plan, have the thing ready to go. And so we go into this injury and we're at a certain level. And too many times people will say, OK, well, I'm losing so much ground, I'm losing so much ground. The reality is you're probably not losing as much ground as you think. And if you're working on other modalities and other things, if you're taking those opportunities, you're probably a lot better off than you would have been otherwise.

So take a step back. Yes, you do need to take that step back and then start to retrace your route. So how does this look? OK, from a stamina perspective, let's say you did something to your ankle and or your foot and you're no longer able to run. OK, if you're out for a few weeks, maybe you cut down your distance and speed by. I don't know, 10 percent. If you're out for more than two months, you might have to cut back 50 percent.

So what does that look like? Again, let's say you were running and your long runs were around, you know, five miles, your medium short runs or somewhere around the two to three miles. And so you go back to do your first run. After that, you're in the one to two mile range, your long runs or more in the three, three and a half range. And then you build up from there and it'll come back pretty quickly.

Muscle remembers it can get back to its previous state pretty quickly if you don't let too much time pass. And then promote like a weightlifting perspective, let's say you're working and you have a particular lift and you're doing 50 pounds on this particular lift. When you hurt yourself, when you come back, if you're out for a couple of weeks, a few weeks, maybe you drop it down to 45, so you cut about 10 percent off that and feel how that works for you.

If you're out longer than that, maybe you drop it down to 25 and you do some reps, you get your sets in and you see how things are going. You'll improve pretty quickly. And as I mentioned before, you have that muscle memory. So your body's going to come back a lot quicker than you think it would.

Sponsor
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So to wrap all this up, I think that kind of the core concepts of all this is one, recovering from injury and illness over 40 requires you to have a good mindset. You need to wrap your mind around the fact that you have control. You're not out of control. Yes, this happened. It was inevitable that eventually something bad was going to happen. It just does. Get past it.

This was not a stop button. This was a pause. So do your evaluation understand why this happened? See if there's things you need to correct around you, your environment, yourself, the way you approach things. Slow down in some cases if you need to, but understand why the injury occurred or why the illness occurred. And let's do something about it, OK? Next, your why envision probably haven't changed this whole thing. And if you stop, then you're losing it.

You're losing that whole thing that got you going in the first place. So go back to that mindset, get your mind right. Get yourself back thinking about your why envision. And then you're in a good place, then work through your recovery, make you recover your first priority, make recovery your workout, make recovery the most important thing you do for yourself, and then look for those other opportunities that you may have otherwise neglected, like working on mobility, working on balance, working on strength or, you know, working on stamina, things that you may not have paid much attention to when you were focused on other things that you can't do now because of injury or illness.

And then finally take that step back if you need to. Don't go in this full force thinking you're just as strong as you were the day you left. You need to give your body an opportunity to regroup, retrain and get back to where it was. So retrace your route. Don't go back in thinking you're right where you were. You are going to lose a little bit. You're not going to lose that much, but you are going to lose little.

So go into it smart and get yourself back where you deserve to be.

Post Show/Recap

[00:25:39.920] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[00:25:41.420] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, that is a really timely podcast and all of the running forums I follow, there's a lot of questions from runners in particular about coming back from covid, but also all the time runners are always asking how to come back to running after an injury. So these are constantly timely topics, but in particular, they are good for today.

[00:26:04.340] – Allan
Yeah. You know, one of the things, particularly with running and also with weightlifting, is the propensity to injure ourselves. You know, with running, you're doing a repetitive motion sometimes on concrete or other surfaces that are just beaten to death. Maybe you don't have the best shoes. Maybe you don't have the best running stride. And so you just really pounding on your body a little bit more in a repetitive fashion where over time it causes some basic injuries or some basic problems.

[00:26:35.210] – Allan
And a lot of people, because, you know, let's face it, running can be addictive. they won't stop running. You know, it's like, no, I'm going to keep running and it just gets worse and worse and worse until they can't run. And then that's when they're in this kind of stuck position. So, yes, recovery from that. You know, with weight lifting, it tends to be letting the ego get ahead of the body and, you know, deciding, OK, I'm going to try to do this extra weight and I'm going to get, you know, this is going to be cool and, you know, so, yeah, you're throwing it.

[00:27:05.480] – Allan
And throwing, you know, 80 pound dumbbells onto my shoulders to do overhead press. And I feel good about being that strong until I hear a little crack and a snap. And now my rotator cuff is completely torn off m bone. And, you know, that arm no longer functions the way it did seconds earlier and so doing the right things to recover from that, but you're going to go through something kind of interesting, but it's going to use a lot of these concepts that I talked about today is when you do this 100 miles,

[00:27:39.370] – Rachel
50,

[00:27:39.940] – Allan
50, 50 miles. We were talking before we got on the phone.

[00:27:43.600] – Allan
We got to talk about there's also a one hundred mile component in a hundred miles. And so we got to talk about. So sorry. No, Rachel is not doing a hundred. it's a burn. Got twenty four hours. Who knows?

[00:27:54.580] – Rachel
I got the time.

[00:27:56.980] – Allan
If they don't stop, you just keep running. You might catch them. But, you know, we're going to do this long run. And as a result, we don't even really know right now how how your body is going to respond other than, you know, on the reading of the forums and your experience and running some long distance, and, you know, the marathon range is that, you know, that when you come back, the best way I can put it is you're going to have to go through a period of time that I would call post-hab.

[00:28:27.880] – Rachel
Yes.

[00:28:28.930] – Allan
And so can you talk a little bit about what some of your plans are for post hab as we go into this? Because it's not I mean, you're not self inflicting an injury here. We don't want anyone to think that that's what you ordered illness. But in a sense, your body's going to go through some stress. That's going to be very similar to that. So can you talk a little bit about what your plans are after this race?

[00:28:51.940] – Rachel
Sure. So I'll be running 50 miles and I am estimating it'll take give or take 12 hours. I'm not that fast. I plan on a lot of breaks. We have to check in to aid stations. There's going to be some things to get done on this run besides running. But what happens is, is I will probably be sucking out every possible nutrient out of my blood and liver and muscles. I will be just depleting my body dry of all nutrients and probably a lot of hydration.

[00:29:26.020] – Rachel
So right after the run, I will be drinking a lot of water and electrolytes as well, both liquids to rehydrate. And I will start getting some food coming back in my body just to maintain normal body functions. And I recognize that I will probably be walking probably more than the last few miles of the race, but I will plan on walking after the race is over as well. It's important just to keep the body moving and to come down to some sort of basic equilibrium after all of that motion.

[00:30:00.370] – Rachel
So I'll sit a little, I'll elevate my elevate my feet a little and walk a little. And I also have compression garments. I've got compression pants, and I also have compression calf sleeves that I'll wear to help promote blood flow as well. Since I'm not staying at my home, I'm actually camping in a camper. And so I will get back to our campsite, take a shower and do a lot of that type of post hab. So I've got the foam roller, I've got the compression.

[00:30:35.230] – Rachel
I will elevate and stay hydrated and I will keep walking and chances are really good as even though I'm going to finish. I start the race at noon on Saturday and I should finish around midnight or so. Saturday night. Sunday morning. I will probably be tired but I'll also probably be too amp to sleep. So if I am tossing and turning in bed, I will count that as elevation for a little while and then go out and walk a little bit around the campsite as well.

[00:31:03.760] – Rachel
So a lot of moving and a lot of eating and drinking is pretty much my main rehabs or post habs.

[00:31:10.750] – Allan
Yeah. And then recognizing that, you know, we talked about being a creature of habit that you would normally be getting up in the morning and going for a run. Yeah, that's not going to be Rachel's M.O. for a few weeks. At least you're gonna have to come in and kind of refresh, let your body actually recover from the stressors that it's gone through and then start a training program that picks up somewhere well below the mileage that you would normally be running.

[00:31:42.310] – Rachel
Oh, absolutely. I'm anticipating that I will take that first one full week off of all running altogether. That's an easy no brainer. But I will be walking and I will pick dogs and walk. I will walk around my neighborhood by myself and just keep the legs moving and see how the muscles are responding. You know, if I was 20 years younger, I might be rebounding a lot faster, in which case I wouldn't mind going for a light jog, you know, for a mile here, there.

[00:32:13.480] – Rachel
But for myself, as I said, I'm approaching fifty, rehab and posthab takes a little bit longer. Recovery just takes longer. And so I'll have hot baths and cold baths and walking. And I'll probably start a running regimen maybe a week to 10 days after this race, and when I do start, it won't be going back out where I was before. I'll probably do a walk run type interval, maybe run for a minute, walk for a minute or a couple of minutes and just see how my legs feel.

[00:32:46.120] – Allan
Yeah. If you haven't run before, then you might not recognize that there's a natural spring to your leg as you kind of are walking or running. And when you do something like this, like a 50, which I did before and I did it, I did it like an optimal situation. It was a pine forest horse trail through a pine forest was about as soft, a nice place you could actually run on, you know, so the damage to my legs from, you know, hard or, you know, hitting was not the problem.

[00:33:14.800] – Allan
It was just the total number of miles. But it was about a month for me from that 50 where I actually felt like my legs had recovered their spring, you know, had recovered to a point where they were where they were. For that whole month, all I did was walking and in the gym, upper body exercise, you know, resistance training. So, you know, I was bench pressing and pull ups and, you know, rose and things like that.

[00:33:43.630] – Allan
Nothing for the legs. Just let the legs recover and do some walking, keep the blood flow to them. So they're repairing and doing what they need to, making sure you get plenty of protein and the other things that my body needs for that repair, you know. So for me, it was still I was kind of astounded because I was 29 and it literally took me a month to really feel like I was ready to run again. But, you know, and I think I've told this story right after I finished the race, I pulled a Forrest Gump and said, I'm tired, I'm going home.

[00:34:15.070] – Allan
And I haven't run anything longer than a 10K since then. And I even did that one under protest because it was a friend. She calls me and says, my niece was running this 10K tomorrow. And, you know, we told her we would go with her, but she doesn't want to walk. She wants to actually run it. And you're the only person I know that can run that far. And I'm like, OK, so I ran that 10k with this girl.

[00:34:39.440] – Allan
I thought the girl was going to burn out because she just took off sprinting. I'm like, OK, it's like you can't keep sprinting like this and think you're going to do a 10k. And she proved me wrong. I think I broke my PR on that 10k, but it was flying. So that's definitely a young athlete in the making there. But because I think she was like nine and I was like, oh my gosh, she just took off.

[00:35:02.860] – Allan
I'm like, OK, look, you know, I've got a phase now this girl.

[00:35:06.880] – Rachel
All out, so turn on the burner.

[00:35:09.200] – Allan
And she kept doing it. So that was what was surprising to me is like, yeah, I was like, OK, you got something special here. But that was only one I ran. And like I said, I did it under protest and for a really dear friend at the time. So I was like, OK, I'll do this.

[00:35:21.460] – Allan
But I didn't think I was going to have to sprint it myself, but I did. But, you know, it's just as we kind of go through all of this in recognizing that, you know, injuries and illness, they're going to happen.

[00:35:34.960] – Allan
And sometimes you have a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of opportunity. Like when I hurt my shoulder, I knew, OK, I'm stoked. And this is, again, the probably, you know, too much ego, but it is what it is. Ego hurt me. And then ego kept me from deciding when I was going to do my surgery straightaway. I said, well, I've got this Spartan coming up. And I thought my brother was going to be doing it with me.

[00:35:58.180] – Allan
So I was like, I can't cancel on him, you know, I've got to do this thing. So I had it in my mind. I was going to do it and then I would go get my surgery. And so I did that. I also jumped out of an airplane for Tammy and she wanted to do that. So that's part of that whole weekend was I went up there and did a Spartan and then I jumped out of an airplane the next day, all with a torn rotator cuff.

[00:36:20.980] – Allan
And so I knew I was going to get the surgery, but I arranged for three weeks where I was not to be traveling for work. So I knew, OK, every day I can go in when I if I need to, I can go in and get my physical therapy because the doctor was telling me, you know, he didn't know what the physical therapist was going to need to do, but it was going to be a few times a week for about six to eight weeks, maybe up to twelve.

[00:36:45.280] – Allan
Depending on how I how I did, and so I kept training. I kept doing stuff physically, you know, anything that didn't hurt my shoulder, I kept doing, and then I scheduled my surgery and I went in for the surgery and came out and I went into rehab, went to the physical therapist. And he's like, your range of motion is phenomenal. And he said, what? What did you do? Because he said most people would come in, you know, adults, not because I deal with athletes as I see athletes that come in like this.

[00:37:16.170] – Allan
He says, but you're not an athlete like that. You know the college athlete like that. He says, what are you doing? I said, well, I just kept training. They said, if it didn't hurt, I kept doing it. He's like, well, most people. Yeah, said most people would have put their arm in a sling and stayed of sling until they got their surgery. Then they'd have finished their surgery and they'd waited for a few weeks.

[00:37:32.730] – Allan
And I was like, no, I got my I got my surgery on a Thursday and Monday morning. Monday morning I was in therapy. so, you know, if you if you can plan it like you're planning your posthab on your run, you know, the timing of your run, you know, when you're going about when you going to finish even and you've got to plan. And so if it's an injury and you're going to go in for surgery, talk to your doctor, talk to, you know, if you can a physical therapist know what the plan is for your recovery so you can hit it running.

[00:38:00.570] – Allan
There's things you need to be doing before the surgery. Do them, you know. Yeah, and do them. Do it all. Do your homework from the physical therapist. Do this three times a day, do it and just do it. Yes. It's inconvenient to take this and put it in cold water and then pull it out, put it in hot water and pull it out. Cold water. It doesn't feel good, but it helps.

[00:38:23.760] – Allan
It definitely makes things better. And so making sure that you do your homework, set yourself up and, you know, illness and injuries are going to happen to us and we don't necessarily have a plan and we didn't plan for it. It just happens. And then we have to deal with it. But if you can control certain things about it, you'll recover a lot faster and be a lot stronger for it.

[00:38:45.210] – Rachel
That's let me just highlight that right there, Allan, because I want to point out that you'll be a lot stronger for it. I mean, just because you're injured doesn't mean you're out. And you could have the best comeback you've ever seen in whatever sport that you do. I'm sure your shoulder feels great now when you lift.

[00:39:00.900] – Allan
Yeah, it's well, it is. It's funny because, you know, in talking to the orthopedic surgeon, he said, you know, he said they did a study, said every cadaver they cut up in these cadavers who were in their 90s, people who died in their 90s. And so they went through and they were looking at them and they saw every single one of them had a torn, torn rotator cuff. Some of them had surgery for it and others had not.

[00:39:26.730] – Allan
But every single one of them had an impingement and had a problem with their shoulder, the rotator cuff. And so he said it's inevitable for most of us we're going to have that problem. And if you're someone who lifts and does a lot with your upper body, the potential is even higher because there's just more wear and tear. With mine, I had an impingement, which is basically where the bone is pressing down on the muscle and over time it just wears it down.

[00:39:56.820] – Allan
And he said so the muscle when he got in there was like paper thin and it just tore right off the bone. It snapped. It was gone. And so I was talking to him. I said, you know, obviously we're not going to spend the money to do an X-ray and an MRI on the other shoulder. And he said, yeah, probably. You probably do have an impingement over there. It's probably is as bad. This one just broke first.

[00:40:21.180] – Allan
And so what do I don't do right now? I don't lift eighty pound dumbbells up to my shoulders to press over my head because I recognize the heaviest thing I'm ever going to have to press over my head is a carton of Christmas decorations that I'm going have to put on the top shelf in our storage. Other than that, there's nothing heavier. There's definitely nothing a hundred sixty pounds that I need to put over my head for any reason whatsoever.

[00:40:48.990] – Allan
And if I did, I'd call somebody to come help me. So, you know, recognizing that, you know, ego can get you broke.

[00:40:58.290] – Rachel
Sure.

[00:40:59.670] – Allan
And recognizing those limitations that we have, you know, part of that self-awareness is I know that I probably have an impingement on my left shoulder. So I'm not doing things that I know would adversely affect that. But I'm doing what I need to do to be functionally fit,

[00:41:18.030] – Rachel
perfect

[00:41:18.840] – Allan
fit to be the best Allan, I can be. And that doesn't necessarily mean that I have to be able to deadlift a certain amount of weight or press a certain amount of weight over my head.

[00:41:28.110] – Allan
It just means when it's time to get the Christmas lights down, I could do that. When it's time to put them back, I could do that.

[00:41:34.780] – Rachel
Perfect. Well, that's just the point is that, you know what your potential weakness could be and you just need to work around it and you're doing just that. That sounds perfect.

[00:41:44.580] – Allan
Yeah. So good luck with your run.

[00:41:47.070] – Rachel
Thank you.

[00:41:47.970] – Allan
Good luck with your post hab.

[00:41:49.540] – Rachel
Yes, thank you.

[00:41:51.210] – Allan
Maybe the next time we talk to you, I think we're going to be talking to you relatively soon after your post hab maybe about a week after you finish your run. Maybe a little over a week. You know, when you finish your run and so at that point, you should have some pretty interesting stories to show.

[00:42:08.110] – Allan
So I'm looking forward to that.

[00:42:10.120] – Rachel
hope to have some good tales to tell.

[00:42:13.110] – Allan
That's how you get them. You do something you've never done. You do something that the vast majority of people who have never done. And now you've got a story. Now you've got a life. Now you've done something special. And so I always encourage people, if you don't have a big, audacious goal of just something exciting that you wake up in the morning and know, this is why I'm running, this is why I'm lifting. This is why I'm living.

[00:42:36.130] – Allan
I want to do this thing. And it can be a vacation. It can be a run. It can be a combo. Camp out run.

[00:42:43.810] – Rachel
Right! My favorite.

[00:42:45.880] – Allan
so, you know, just recognize that you're going to have a lot of fun. You can have a good bit of pain

[00:42:53.230] – Rachel
a little bit

[00:42:53.800] – Allan
you're gonna have some challenges and you're going to have the pride of knowing that you took 100 percent of you out on those Indiana roads and left it all there.

[00:43:04.790] – Rachel
That'll be great. Yeah. I'll be up in northern Michigan, actually.

[00:43:08.920] – Allan
Oh, I thought it was Indiana. I don't know why, you were going to Indiana now.

[00:43:12.850] – Rachel
Heading north.

[00:43:13.780] – Allan
OK, north.

[00:43:14.980] – Rachel
yeah. Looking forward to a new adventure, that's for sure.

[00:43:18.250] – Allan
All right. Well, we'll talk to you then.

[00:43:20.410] – Rachel
Thanks. Bye.

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