Maybe you've wanted to get into running, but being over 40, it seems so hard. On this episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, Rachel and I discuss how to start running after 40.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:01:48.900] – Allan Rachel, how are you today?
[00:01:51.000] – Rachel Good. I'm good. Allan, how are you?
[00:01:54.090] – Allan Good. Good. So we're, we're putting a little twist on the podcast this week because we wanted to is as we're getting into and I know it's probably really, really cold where most of you listening to this are, but it's we're getting into the running what we normally call the running season, particularly in North America and in Europe. This is the running season. We get into the spring. Now COVID's probably going to affect this running season as much, if not more than last year. Things are getting better and worse, depending on how you're looking at things. But in a general sense, this year is going to be kind of the same thing. But no one can really deny that running is a really good protocol for getting yourself in better shape. It helps you build stamina, helps to a lot of different things. We're going to talk about that today with running coach Rachel Everett.
[00:02:49.410] – Rachel Yea!
[00:02:50.590] – Allan All right.
Interview
[00:02:52.020] – Allan Rachel, you've been a co-host on the podcast now for a few months, but just so folks know who you are, what you're doing and why you're relevant, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[00:03:05.700] – Rachel Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me on today, Allan. I just got my NASA certified personal training certificate earlier this year or earlier in 2020 during the shutdown because I had a lot of time on my hands. But prior to that, I have been running for about 20 years, a little over 20 years and I've run hundreds of 5K and 10k distances. I'm closing in on probably 40 half marathons, couple of fulls, and a couple ultra's. And this year I'll be hopefully lining up at my first 50 miler later in the summer.
[00:03:43.080] – Rachel So I've been running a really long time and you could probably tell I really love it and I really do get excited when people choose running is a great way to get outside, regain their health. I mean, there's so many reasons to start running. And Strava actually recently released some information indicating that they saw a huge increase in activity in 2020, probably directly due to COVID. And a lot of people are out there putting in a ton of walking and running miles. So this is perfect. This is a great time to talk about starting running over 40.
[00:04:21.510] – Allan Good. Besides not getting caught by a bear, what are some of the benefits that someone will get running after 40?
[00:04:32.730] – Rachel Well, it's a really great way to improve your cardiovascular system. It's a great way to burn some calories. And in times like this, it's actually an ideal way to burn off some stress. And if you're having a problem sleeping at night, like a lot of us do as we get older, burning off these calories and that stress can actually improve your sleep habits as well. And and it's really important that we get all the sleep that we can, especially when we're doing new pursuits like running.
[00:05:02.490] – Allan Yeah, the sleep thing is is important. And one of the reasons I think you're seeing a benefit was sleep, is that you're getting blue light, you're getting outdoors. One of the things that we've gotten away from in our modern lifestyles is we're in an office and we're cooped up and it's artificial light. It's not the same. And so getting outside for a run is going to expose your skin to sunlight. It's going to basically turn on your hormone cycles. It's going to tell your body what time of day it is based on the light and the time of day you run. And then, yes, because you've done that thing to set your clock, your circadian rhythm.
[00:05:46.360] – Allan You've said that you've set that clock now. Yes. Your body's going to be a much better position to sleep. And it is a good step for that. And it is a good step. It does burn some calories. Again, most of your weight loss should come from what you do in the kitchen, what put your mouth. But yes, it's a good way to to get some extra calorie burn going, if that's what you're after.
[00:06:08.770] – Allan And then the other thing is just general stamina. You know, people who don't run at all when they find that they need to do something like run or jog or try to catch a bus or something, just something. That's why they're winded, going up the stairs quickly, they're winded. Whereas someone who has been training for a 5K or something like that, they'll notice that they can get up a flight of stairs a lot easier. So really good, really good reasons to consider running after 40.
[00:06:39.460] – Allan So let's just say I'm a person who's come to you, Rachel. And I say, “Okay, look, I want to start running. I was I was I was active when I was a kid and I was all running all over the place back then. But now I've got all these aches and pains. I've been in an office job for 25 years, but I want to start running. I know it's you know, I don't really get back in the gym right now. I just don't feel safe there. But I know if I could get out and do some running, that's going to do a lot of benefits for me (the benefits we just talked about).” So if someone wanted to get into running, what are some things that you would tell them to to do?
[00:07:15.430] – Rachel First, I would say congratulations. I'm glad you're ready to run and I'm ready to run with you. I'd be so happy to, but I would start with finding a way. What is your motivation to run? And a lot of people will set their own a goal. And maybe there's a five K in the town for a really good charity. A lot of charities, a lot of churches, a lot of schools, local parks, systems, a lot of people will host a five K race.
[00:07:43.630] – Rachel And it would be great to put that on your calendar. You've got some big neon sign that you can look forward to and you could get ready and prepare for that particular race. I know that there may not be a lot of in-person races going on in 2021, or at least not for a while. But there are still a ton of virtual races and in many cases these charity teams.
[00:08:09.373] – Allan Like the sloth running team.
[00:08:09.400] – Rachel You bet, like the sloth. But a lot of these churches and schools and park systems, all these other charities still need the same amount of money, whether there's people in person or not. And so if you could find something that you can support in your local community, look to see if they're going to host their five K in person or if it's going to be virtual and go ahead and sign up, that would be a great place to get started.
[00:08:32.450] – Allan OK, now, so I decided I'm going to run a five K, OK, you've convinced me I'm going to run a five K. I look on I look on the calendar and there's a virtual five K that I can do because there's not 5Ks here on my Island. But I say, OK, I want to do a virtual five K and I want to sign up for it. And so I go and I do the sign up online and it's going to happen in about ten weeks, 12 weeks.
[00:08:57.550] – Rachel Perfect.
[00:08:58.280] – Allan OK, what do I do next. What do I do.
[00:09:02.350] – Rachel Well to get started I would say find a plan of some sort that you could follow. The coach to five k plan is really well known and it's very successful and it's a very similar plan to what Jeff Galloway, former Olympian Jeff Galloway has put out with his walk run program. And both of them are walk run programs where there's a ratio.
[00:09:27.790] – Rachel So, for example, you might start with three or four minutes of walking, followed by thirty seconds of running. And then you repeat that ratio for a set amount of time, whichever the plan dictates. And the great part of having a walk run program is that it's going to teach your body slowly how to move faster. And so when you're in the running segment, for example, you might have a 30 second run. I want to make sure that people know this isn't a sprint.
[00:10:00.190] – Rachel This isn't where you just turn on the afterburners and go all out for that thirty seconds. This is actually just go a little faster than what you were just doing during the walk. And the whole point of that is that a lot of people just assume you go out there and you zoom around the block or something and your heart rate goes up. You're breathing. It's not comfortable and then it becomes not fun and then a lot of people will quit right then and there, so you start off walking, you do a little segment of running like maybe at a jogging pace and then you walk again. And it just is a slow introduction to running. It's really perfect.
[00:10:39.110] – Allan We had Jeff on the show to talk about his run, walk, run method. So that's an episode. I'll make sure to have a link in the show, notes to that one. And then again, yes, as Rachel mentioned, the goal is not to red line as in Jeff's book. In fact, you don't want to because that's going to cause a buildup of lactic acid. And that's where you're going to feel that burn. That's where you're going to feel the pain afterwards.
[00:11:03.140] – Allan You're going to be sore. Whereas if you're doing that kind of the way I put it, gentle, nudging a little bit faster than your walk gets your heart rate up to 75 percent, maybe 80. But that's kind of the line. And then, you know, you could still generally have a conversation with someone and then you're 30 seconds is up. You drop back down to your walk, you do a little bit of recovery. And those those intervals of walking in the running really do help you build that endurance and the way these plans are structured, you the couch to five KS or several of them you get on your phone, some of them are pretty cool.
[00:11:38.600] – Allan They've got voices. The guys are they're talking you through it. Some of them are built up like zombies are chasing you and things like that, you know. And so so there's there's some there's some fun things out there that'll get you going and get you moving over time. And that kind of that gentle nudging getting you to a point in the interesting thing I like to tell people that are training for five kids, you don't have to be able to run five K, which is three point one miles to do a five K.
[00:12:05.480] – Allan In fact, a lot of people will train. They won't quite have ever really run a full three miles. But on race day, the adrenaline kicks in and suddenly they find themselves running a five K, so you realize your race will probably be faster and actually probably easier than the training was. There's the people, there's the thing unless it's virtual. So in that case, find some buddies to do it with. But yeah, there's those programs are really, really good.
[00:12:35.210] – Rachel They are very successful. I actually took the Jeff Galloway training program when I was training for my first full marathon, and I was resistant to try it at first because I just couldn't comprehend how if you were to walk, you know, a third of the time that you're running it, how you're going to get to the finish line any faster. But truth be told, it's true and it's easier on your body.
[00:12:58.670] – Rachel And when you're over 40, things are changing. You're not a teenager or a kid running around the baseball diamond anymore. I mean, when you're 40, you just need to ease into it. And a walk run program is so safe and it's designed to reduce your risk for injury. So it's really important that you find a couch to five K or Jeff Galloway type plan to get yourself eased into the repetition of running.
[00:13:25.580] – Allan OK, so now I'm getting ready to go out and run and, you know, what are some things I want to consider as far as you know, obviously, time is great. You know, you say, OK, walk for three minutes, run for 30 seconds. But I kind of also want to know how far I'm going. Right?
[00:13:43.590] – Rachel Right. So when I started running over 20 years ago, I did not have a GPS watch. I had a car and it had an odometer and I would drive around my subdivision. I marked out a half mile and a mile and I use those landmarks to find where I was going. Well, nowadays we have these fancy watches, although you don't need to buy one if you're going to just start running at this point. But you can look for a track or a local park system with trails and find a place where you could do this walk run program safely.
[00:14:18.950] – Allan Yeah, that's a that's a key if you're out on the roads, you know, that's and we're going to talk about safety a little bit later, but find a route that is something that you know very well. So you're not getting lost. I went I went for not so much to run, but as a long hike when we were traveling in Hong Kong. And I went up this hill and it was beautiful up there. And I was like, Really you know, because you're thinking Hong Kong a big city. But we were over on the Kowloon side. And so I go up this hill and it's like wooded and pretty and just really nice park. And then I got to the other side of the hill and I'm like, OK, I'm going to come back. And I came back and I was at an entirely different place than where I started up that hill. And I had no idea where I was, like none.
[00:15:01.310] – Allan And I had not brought my phone with me. And so I had zero idea where I was. And so I was like I literally just got into a taxi. I told them where my hotel was. And I was on the exact opposite side. I mean, it's just amazing how far away I was from where I thought I was because I just made a wrong turn. So, yeah, kind of knowing your route, knowing some of the risk of the route.
[00:15:24.980] – Allan And then, of course, you've always, you know, now these days you've got a GPS on your phone. So that's going to help. You know it. I use an app called RunKeeper that will basically track my runs-walks. So when I go out, I know my timing, my splits and all of those things. So, you know, if you're into data, there's some pretty cool apps out there to help you with that.
[00:15:46.640] – Rachel Yes, that is perfect.
[00:15:49.100] – Allan Now, one of the reasons that I think a lot of people aspire to running versus some other things that they might do is one, you know, it's something you can do on your own so you don't have to have a partner. So it's not like playing tennis where, you know, at some point it's no more fun to just keep hitting the ball against the wall or serving yourself. At some point, you know, you have to have a teammate or someone to go against.
[00:16:11.900] – Allan And so a lot of sports let things go that way. And with running, you can be outside. But the other thing that's really cool about running is that it costs virtually nothing. I mean, let's talk about the equipment because thats one of the…
[00:16:27.860] – Rachel Yeah, it's true. Running has a low barrier of entry, which is great. You really only need a pair of athletic shoes, although it is kind of a joke, because once you get into running, things can add up. But you don't need all of these fancy gadgets, fancy clothing, fancy nothing until you really know what you actually need. So I'm sure everybody has in their closet a pair of tennis shoes or running shoes of some sort. We all have leisure wear shorts of some sort, basketball shorts.
[00:16:59.510] – Rachel There's actually a famous ultra runner who runs in basketball shorts. That's her choice. And so just dust out those dust off those shoes out of your closet. And but if you are lacking shoes, I do totally recommend going to your local running store and talking to the salespeople about shoes. When you're ready to buy running shoes, they will be able to answer all your questions. They will ask you what kind of mileage you're going to run, if you're going to be on the road or the trails.
[00:17:32.720] – Rachel If you're a heavier person, you want to sturdy shoe. If you're pro, if you pronate one way or another, you want a stability shoe. So get advice from the local running people. They actually do know what they're doing. So it's a good place to go first.
[00:17:47.480] – Allan Because you know, when I started getting into the longer runs the marathons, that's exactly what I did. And so you go in and you know, at that point I was considered heavier. You're not one hundred ninety five pounds and running marathons and ultramarathons, at least not a lot of people were back then. So I was I was big for runners, so. Yeah. And and because my foot is generally wider, I had to have a shoe had to have a type of shoe that would have a larger toe box.
[00:18:14.420] – Allan So I couldn't use Nike's, I couldn't use Reebok's because they were cut too thin. They really didn't have a wide shoe box. So at that point it was new balance was the brand that had the the wider toe box, that was the right shoe for me. Now, would I have ever walked over and bought New Balance and the answer is probably not, because Nike was the king of running shoes that came out of Oregon for that very reason.
[00:18:42.080] – Allan And then Reebok was coming behind. And then there was this other brands that you would see in running stores and say, I went into a running store. The guy was running, says, you pronate a little bit. You're going to need some support. Your foot's generally wider than most, so you're going to need a big toe box. And so he pulled out a set of new balance and said, put these on. And, you know, I did great, you know, and it is important at some level, particularly if you have had problems in the past, because when I was in the Army and did a lot of running, I started having knee problems.
[00:19:14.180] – Allan And that was on the concrete that was, you know, not having good shoes, in some cases combat boots. And then so I had knee problems when I was in basic training in the first year or so that I was in the army. And then here I was trying to basically four years later start running marathons. And my knees could have easily gotten shot again with the volume of training I was doing. But I had the right shoes. I went in and bought a good pair of shoes and it went a long way.
[00:19:43.520] – Allan But initially all you need is just a comfortable pair of shoes because you're looking at lower distances. You're just going to be doing some walking and some jogging. I actually also use basketball shorts when I run, but if I'm going to a longer distance, I realize there's a chafing issue. Then I get runners shorts on. So, you know, if you're
[00:20:03.650] – Allan doing the shorter distances just in any pair of comfortable shoes, shorts and some halfway decent shoes and, you know, moisture wicking clothing and you're typically good. And then, of course, if you're running and it's cold, you need to layer. If you're running and it's hot, you need to somewhat layer. So you can also kind of cut down to a lesser profile of clothing, but it's really easy to get started.
[00:20:30.350] – Rachel Yeah, and I totally recommend that you just go through your closet first and get in a couple of training runs and see how all this equipment works for you. When I started running, I did wear cotton t-shirts, just your basic hanes, white cotton t shirt. Well, you know, after I put on some more miles, I realized that the dry, wick clothing would be a lot more comfortable to wear. And you can buy that at any big box store, Amazon, any anywhere running, of course, you're running store.
[00:20:58.550] – Rachel But the point is, is that you don't need it until you recognize that you need it. So don't go out and get all outfitted for running until you know exactly what you need. And the same goes with your shoes. Once you've run in your own shoes from your closet for a while, see how your feet are feeling, see how your knees are feeling. And if you're getting aches and pains, then go to your running store and get some advice on getting a better fitting shoe.
[00:21:23.990] – Rachel And similarly, while you're getting shoes, take a look at the running socks. Now, I personally have always been prone to blisters. I just have bony feet. And so there's a friction element in between your shoe and your sock. So cotton socks, they're not going to last you for very long. If you start getting blisters, then definitely go to your running store and look for some dry wicking socks that will make you a whole lot happier to be comfortable. And they're not terribly expensive either. So socks would be a good thing to buy pretty early.
[00:21:57.140] – Allan OK, so now I go out and I do this good, good run the first day. I feel really good. Do I just do it again tomorrow and then the next day and the next day, or do I need to take some days off?
[00:22:10.520] – Rachel Well, that's the exciting part about having a plan, is that the plan will tell you when to do these routines and usually plans like the couch to five K will have maybe three or four days of running during the week. And and then that'll tell you that you can cross, train or take rest days and the other days. And I have to say that as we are 40 and over, this is really important to do some cross training as well as take the rest days when you need it.
[00:22:40.550] – Rachel You really do have to listen to your body. You know, when you start a new workout routine, you're going to have the delayed onset muscle soreness, the dams. Everybody knows that feeling. But if you're getting something more serious, more aches and pains, you really need to pay attention and and listen and take that rest day if you need it. Even if the plan says to run, take that day off.
[00:23:02.690] – Allan Yeah, you know, one of the things when you when you get which which if you if you get into running and you do some of these things, you start doing a five K or you join a running team and you do these different things, you're going to start running more. And when you start running more, you start recognizing some some aches and pains, you know, running after forty. You know, even though I'll say this. When I started running marathons, I was a baby, you know, from their consideration, I was twenty nine years old and they consider they all consider me a baby.
[00:23:31.700] – Allan There weren't many young guys like me doing Ultra's. Most of the people, you know, you start talking to them. They didn't start running marathons until they were after 40. They're over 40. And in one case, I finished an ultra. The guy was 68 years old. So, you know, this is an old man's an old woman's sport, if you will. I mean, unless you're doing it competitively, then, of course, you know.
[00:23:53.140] – Allan Yeah. Uh, Hussein, Boltz and the you know, all those folks out there, they're younger. But in a general sense, if you're looking at the recreational runner, most of us are a good bit older. But your body talks to you, you have a language in your body. And there's some there's some pains that you definitely want to pay attention to. And there's some that you you don't just need to change something. So, like, you know, one thing that will happen when you're doing some running, you might notice that you have an ache, a really bad ache in some cases called a stitch that occurs right under your ribcage, right under your diaphragm.
[00:24:26.200] – Allan It hurts a lot, but there's a way around it. So you make a change. And that's typically the case with any time you feel pain. So, Rachel, let's talk about some of the common things that runners experience and what they need to do. Just generally a little short clip-clop. This is some things to consider with regards to each one.
[00:24:45.130] – Rachel Well, I know a lot of runners end up with tight caps. It's part of the push pull of the motion of running. And it can have something to do with the shoes. It can have something to do with overtraining, it can have something to do with too much vertical climb in your route. Which is tough. I live in a very hilly area, so I struggle with my calves. And so when you get these aches and pains, you really need to take a minute and assess the situation.
[00:25:15.880] – Rachel Is it your shoes? If you especially if you have new shoes that could upset your gait a little bit. If you're maybe twisting an ankle on a trail on a route or a rock, you just need to take a minute, walk it out, maybe go home and try try it again another day. But for runners over forty, I have a pre-hab in a rehab. And the pre-hab is you need to do the dynamic kind of warm up before you go out and run.
[00:25:48.520] – Rachel If you think of your muscles and tendons as a rubber band, if you've got a rubber band that's cold, it's going to snap under pressure. And your muscles, they need a minute. They need to get warmed up before you go out and start doing anything vigorous. So a little foam rolling, little dynamic stretching, you know, some jumping jacks, get the heart moving, then go into your run. And then equally important is coming home and getting your body back down to normal equilibrium.
[00:26:17.230] – Rachel So I like to walk before I start. So I usually take my dogs out for a walk in the morning before I run. And then when I get home, I usually walk it off. I'll get out the foam roller and I'll hit my tight calves or any other particular muscle group that's tight. So it's important to pay attention to your body and then act to resolve those issues.
[00:26:38.620] – Allan Yeah. So, you know, with the tightness, I think that's really kind of one of the big ones, because that's that's one of the most common things I see with people who are over 40 is we do have tight calves that comes sometimes from wearing heels. So not just the shoes you're wearing when you're running, but what you're wearing at work and things and sitting at a desk and that. And you're not getting the what we call dorsiflexion from a personal training perspective that you would normally be getting.
[00:27:07.660] – Allan And yes, running is definitely going to tighten up your calves. I have extremely tight calves and so I do have to make sure I stretch them and in some cases, you know, go ahead and roll them. But I am not rolling, I'm literally pressing into the muscle to make it release. It's painful. And I have to use a one of those girls softball. So, you know, this is a hard round object that I have to do because my my calves are that tight.
[00:27:33.280] – Allan It takes that much to get them to to release, but it affects every bit of my movement pattern. So if I'm trying to do a squat, if I'm trying to run, if I'm trying to do anything, if my calves are tight, my movement pattern is messed up. And so if I don't do that for my knees, or for my calves, here's what's going to happen. The front of my the front of my shin, the periformis, I think it's what it's called, it's going to cramp because it's going to try to get tight to to compensate and it's going to start to really hurt.
[00:28:06.310] – Allan And then what the other thing is going to happen is I'm going to not be getting a good gait, so I'm going to be putting additional stress on my quadriceps and my knee. And if I run for a long time that way, I risk really missing my legs up my knees and all of it. So, yeah, it's a very important aspect of understanding your running habits and you're running your body and what it's telling you so that you're addressing those types of things. So really important.
[00:28:33.010] – Rachel Shin splints are a nightmare and that happens a lot for new runners. And it's and it's because you're you're moving in a new way. I mean, everybody walks every day, but not very many people actually run. And so when you get into that running gait, definitely shin splints are a real pain. And then on the opposite side of that plantar fasciitis, that's the tendon that goes up through your soleus in the back. And that that is causing some pretty intense heel pain.
[00:28:59.260] – Rachel So the calf muscle is kind of like the epicenter for all of these problems. And it's really important that you address that. The technique you had mentioned to me earlier this year, along with using a softball on my calves instead of a foam roller, when you find that really tender spot and I know that it hurts, that's when you want to sit on that softball, put a little pressure on it to get that muscle to release. And that works so well for me this year with my tight calves.
[00:29:26.320] – Rachel Another garment that might be worth investing in, it's not terribly expensive are the compression socks or compression sleeves. It's basically a calf sleeve without the sock portion on your foot. And that pressure can help loosen up some of those tight muscles as well. It's a sometimes I wear them running, usually I just wear them for recovery. But that could be a very helpful piece of equipment to get.
[00:29:51.250] – Allan Yeah. OK, so Rachel. OK, so now we're dedicated. We're going to run this five k, really excited about it. What are some other secrets that are going to make sure we're successful in completing this five K.
[00:30:07.120] – Rachel Oh well take a look at your nutritional habits would be a good thing for right now. I like to have people think that an athlete doesn't exercise and diet. They fuel and train. So if you think of food as fuel, you'll be able to hone in better on the on the foods that help fuel your run and not weigh you down. So this would be a good time to cut back on the sugar and the junk food and give yourself the nutrition it needs to work harder on a run.
[00:30:40.640] – Allan I think a lot of people, think they will see these products particular. If you go into the run store, you're going to see this these products, particularly at the front counter. And what I'm going to be called goo. And there's a lot of other brands out there now. And, you know, all this different stuff in it. But if you look at the main ingredients of every single one of those, it's sugar or some form of sugar, probably high fructose corn syrup. In the bay still is that they think you've got to refuel while you're doing the run.
[00:31:11.380] – Allan Here's here's the the cold, hard facts. You have enough glucose and glycogen in your body right now that you could go out and complete not just a five K, but easily a ten K and probably even half a marathon without ever needing any fuel at all.
[00:31:32.020] – Rachel Yes, I caution caution people. They look delicious because there's really fun flavors out there, like birthday cake and an espresso coffee flavors. But no, you certainly don't need any of these running nutritional products for a five K or a 10K. I think that I, I would wager to guess people have probably closer to twenty miles of glucose in their bodies before they really hit the wall, which is a common running term. But so I would stay away from these products until you get into the higher distances.
[00:32:04.810] – Rachel They're just not necessary. But what is necessary would be obviously water and possibly electrolytes, especially if you're training in extreme heat and you're a big sweater like I used to be when I was in Florida. I used to sweat buckets in that heat and humidity. And so electrolytes would be could be very helpful. And even in the winter, even though you're not thirsty in the winter, you still need that hydration. So be sure to have water before and after. May not need it during, but maybe a handheld water bottle could be helpful if you find that need.
[00:32:41.920] – Allan Yeah, I think one of the one of the core things to think about and it's it's more important when you get to longer distances than maybe a five K, but you are how you train and you should eat the same way you would eat. So don't change up your routine, your food routine for your five K for your race, find a way of fueling yourself that feels comfortable.
[00:33:05.260] – Allan Some people don't want to have anything in their stomach when they're running. Some people need something to eat before they run. So find out how you are as far as your training, particularly as you get towards the end of your training by focusing on what you eat and then following course to do the exact same thing on race day and you'll you'll you'll feel a lot better and you'll be properly fueled that way.
[00:33:28.800] – Rachel That's a really good rule of thumb, is never try anything new on race day so that and any new equipment, that food or anything at all. Definitely. And it is true. Once you clean up your diet a little bit, you'll find that the heavier foods, the junk foods will weigh you down. They don't give you the energy that you need. You don't need sugar to give you that boost. And when I lived in Florida, I remember one evening I took my kids to Chick fil A for dinner, and then I met my run club at night. That was probably the biggest mistake of my entire life. So, yeah, just be careful what you eat and when you eat before you go out on a run.
[00:34:13.710] – Allan Yeah. And a part of that, you know, one of the cool things about these things like 5Ks, particularly when you start getting into some of the longer distance, like half marathons, marathons, is they're typically a road trip. You're typically traveling to another location in another state, maybe even another country. And so if you're doing that, one of the things I'd caution you is, like she said, having the same stuff. Don't check you're running apparel.
[00:34:40.770] – Rachel Good point.
[00:34:41.880] – Allan Don't check it. Carry it with you. I was going to the Marine Corps Marathon and they lost my luggage. And the only good thing was I arrived on a Friday night for a run that was Sunday. And so I had Saturday to go to the expo, which I wanted to do anyway. But what it meant was I bought a new pair of shoes. I bought new running shorts, I bought new running shirt. And so everything I was wearing was new and I had blisters and chafes.
[00:35:15.960] – Allan And it was it was it was a wonderful run, don't get me wrong. But at the same time, it would have been a much better experience if I was wearing the stuff I had already broken in and that I was comfortable with. So, yeah, just just little things like that you'll pick up on as you as you get into this. OK, so Rachel, I'm ready to go. I've got I've got everything planned. I've got my nutrition set. I'm ready to go. What are those things that are just going to keep me moving. It's going to keep me excited. Keep me seeing progress.
[00:35:48.480] – Rachel Well, the big secrets to success is basically consistency. You just got to keep at it. And a lot of people will follow that couch to five K plan repetitively because it's such a good plan. And then then maybe aim for a bigger distance like the 10K or half marathon. But the plan should keep you on track. And then the specificity, you know, if you're going to do trail runs, get out on the trail and see what it's like to run on a trail versus the road.
[00:36:18.660] – Rachel And enlist your friends. A lot of people do the couch to five K with a friend because it's fun to run with someone and it's encouraging to have that accountability as well as the motivation with their friends, which is why I'm a huge fan of run clubs. I have been in several run clubs. And when you've got 20 or 30 people out there cheering for you at a race, there is just nothing more satisfying and motivating than hearing your name being shouted as you're approaching the finish line. It's just wonderful.
[00:36:53.790] – Allan Yeah, and the cool thing with the way Rachel and I run is everybody else in the run club is at the finish line before we get there.
[00:37:00.210] – Rachel Yes, that's right. Which makes it very special. Yeah. Yeah. We get the most out of our runs. That's for sure.
[00:37:09.410] – Allan Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, joining a run club, having a training partner, you know, and then making it fun because you know, I think that's one of the cores of this is if you if you find yourself being the competitive type, well guess what, they're going to tell you the time of your five K maybe the next year when you run that same five K, you try to get a better time. Or like when I was doing the marathons, it was like, oh, here's, you know, in this Run magazine, because I got into buying the running magazines at the time.
[00:37:45.660] – Allan We didn't really have the Internet to the extent we do today. Was here was this run this, you know, marathon in California, it was deemed the most beautiful marathon. It's called Big Sur Marathon. And you're running through the rainforest and then over the Bixby Bridge right along the coastline in Northern California. And it is beautiful. It's also a very, very hard marathon. But at the same time, it was it was wonderful to fly out to California to spend some time in Carmel by the sea and to to do this marathon with a lot of other people.
[00:38:27.110] – Allan So it was just a lot of fun and, you know, less so with the five KS unless you're running with some people, you know, but the longer the run it seems, the more social they get. So, you know, over the years, as I was doing it met some really cool people. We had some great, great times on the runs and there were some of them that I actually see them at another marathon somewhere else in the country, you know, so this guy who was at the Big Sur was then also at Washington, D.C., you know, so I ran into the same guy. You know, there were thousands of people at one and then over 17000 at the other.
[00:39:01.880] – Allan And I happened to run into a guy I met on another run. So it's a very social opportunity and the run clubs are really cool. If Rachel moves somewhere there isn't a run club, rachel's going to start a run club.
[00:39:15.690] – Rachel You bet!
[00:39:15.690] – Allan But, you know, they talk about run clubs. So that's not one of the rules.
[00:39:20.720] – Rachel That's right. It's the only thing to do is talk about it. Yeah.
[00:39:25.700] – Allan And I think the final thing is and this is also very important, particularly if you're if you're looking at you're running and you either want to make sure you're doing it safely and you're doing it the right way beyond the apps, beyond the programs. And you just want to have that that that tool that's going to make you a better runner it's going to make you safer runner. You really ought to consider getting some input, getting a trainer, because that can go a long way towards helping you improve your gait.
[00:39:57.860] – Allan So your form is there. You understand if your calves are too tight, you understand if your gait is going to cause you some problems in the future. You also understand, like, you know, I'm a pronater, heavy pronater. And so I did a special kind of shoe to prevent some problems with my knees and ankles in the future if I'm putting on any kind of distance. So, you know, having a coach is going to go a long way. And Rachel is our running coach here at 40+ Fitness.
[00:40:24.650] – Allan So if you're looking at getting into running after 40, I definitely consider hiring a coach because it's going to keep you from a lot of aches and pains and injuries that you hear about a lot in this sport. So, Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your run coaching, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:40:49.370] – Rachel Well, I just launched my business and I'm at strong-soles.com, and I'll send you that link. And through my website, you could find my Socials. I'll be on Facebook and Instagram as well. And there's some contacts, some easy contact forms on my website. So if you did have any questions, go ahead and shoot me an email and I'll see what I can do to help you. I've been running for over twenty years, so I have been through it all.
[00:41:16.370] – Rachel I have blistered, I have changed. I have done crazy things and all my many miles out there and I bet I could help you get through running. And I and I love it and I want you to love it too. So let me help you make it enjoyable as well.
[00:41:29.120] – Allan And Rachel, you have a freebie for us, too, don't you?
[00:41:32.780] – Rachel Yes, I've been working on a runner's workout, and while it is important to run, it's also important to cross train and also to do some strength training. And I have a very simple circuit style training, which is just body weight movements. You don't need anything except maybe a towel or a yoga mat for your floor. So these are all movements that runners need to strengthen their glutes, their hands, their quads. And it'll be a great cross training for you on the days that you're not running. It's called the runners workout. And if you go to my website, sign up for it and it'll be automatically emailed to you.
[00:42:10.550] – Allan And I will be sure to have a link in the show. Notes you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/470 and I'll have the link there. So Rachel, as always, it's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast now, but also as a CO. So thank you so much
[00:42:27.020] Thanks so much Allan. I love running and I hope that your listeners will too.
Patreons
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In her new book, Boom, Cathy Richards shows us how to live a longer, healthier life.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:01:40.880] – Allan Raz, how are you doing?
[00:01:43.100] – Rachel Great, Allan. How are you today?
[00:01:46.070] – Allan I'm doing all right. You know, we're recording this a little bit before Christmas, but this episode we're talking about won't go live until January 11th. And that's by design. So you and I can take some time off during the holidays and not have to worry about getting podcasts put together and out the door. So that's where we're at today. I have a very busy week because in that effort to try to get ahead, I requested and accepted a lot of different interview requests and different people, and they all said, yes.
[00:02:19.040] – Rachel Wow, that's great news!
[00:02:20.840] – Allan It's great news, except I have four interviews to do this week. So it's four books I got to read and prepare for. Well, actually, one's not a book, one's an app, but there's a topic behind it that I need to do a little bit of research and understanding so I can speak appropriately and at the right level because it's to researchers out of Alabama that discuss fat loss and performance. And so, yeah, I've got to prepare for that in next three books I have to have read. So soon as I get off this call, I'm back to reading again.
[00:02:52.430] – Rachel That sounds nice. It sounds very relaxing, too.
[00:02:55.070] – Allan Yeah. And they're health and fitness books, which like I said, I'd probably pay to read myself. So I get paid to do something I do enjoy. But when the clocks on and I've got to get to books read in the next twenty-four hours.
[00:03:08.990] – Rachel Oh, I hope you read fast.
[00:03:12.620] – Allan I do. I can typically get through a standard sized book. So most health and fitness books are about 240 pages on average. I can get through one of those in about six hours.
[00:03:23.900] – Rachel Nice.
[00:03:24.680] – Allan The one, one of them I'm reading today I think is 180, so I should get through that a little bit faster. And then the other one, I'm not sure, I haven't checked the link on that one, but so I'm looking at it probably having a good 14 hours of reading to do before tomorrow, so.
[00:03:38.180] – Rachel Oh my God.
[00:03:41.030] – Allan It's like a job!
[00:03:42.550] – Rachel It is. My goodness. I was going to say it'd be a relaxing way to spend this time, but will not all at once.
[00:03:50.960] – Allan Yeah, but it'll be good. They're going to be good talks. I'm really excited to to meet these authors because they're topics that are really, really important to me. So it'll be good. You're going to like these guys.
[00:04:01.670] – Rachel Fantastic.
[00:04:02.660] – Allan All right. Today we're going to talk to Cathy Richards. Yeah, really interesting woman. Really got her stuff together. And her book is called Boom. And it's actually a really cool book because she spells out a lot of the kind of just the basics of what we want to be doing to improve our overall fitness. So I guess I'll go ahead and introduce Cathy.
Interview
[00:05:36.890] – Allan Cathy, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:05:39.470] – Cathy Yeah, hey there, Allan. Great to be here.
[00:05:41.750] – Allan Now, you picked up on a word that I find myself using all the time when I'm talking my clients. They'll tell me something that's gone on really, really well, and I can't help but say, boom, there you go.
[00:05:54.860] That's right, boom.
[00:05:56.120] – Allan So the name of the book is Boom: 6 Steps to a Longer, Healthier Life. And, you know, I really like that title because, again, it just kind of explains breaking away, doing something different. What you hear when a plane goes through the speed of sound, there's the boom, you know, of that breaking the sound barrier. And so I just like that word and I like the way you approach this book.
[00:06:21.350] – Cathy Thank you. Well, boom can have so many meetings. And so when I think of boom, it's like a wake up call, something that rocks your world, something that you can't ignore that we have this urgency to attend to. And then I also love it when you have people say sometimes “Boom, done!” like it's just a foregone conclusion. It's just going to happen. And so there's so many meanings of boom and they're all about taking action.
[00:06:46.010] – Allan Yeah. And I think that's the point. You know, I talked about I was talking about celebrating when it's done, but when you know, what you're going to do is going to happen, you can start that celebration as soon as you take on the challenge provided that you have the right mindset.
[00:07:02.960] – Cathy Mm hmm.
[00:07:03.590] – Allan And I think, unfortunately, many of us and if something I still struggle with from time to time is just find myself falling back on unhealthy mindsets. Could you talk about that a little bit? What they are some of the major ones that we deal with and some of the things we can do to fix it.
[00:07:19.610] – Cathy It's so important. So, if my book is about six steps to a longer, healthier life, step one is mindset. Everything begins with our mindset and we have a lot working against us, with the media and with pop culture. And so we a lot of times fall into these things about all or none. We think that if we're not going to change and exercise clothes and go to a gym for a whole hour, we might as well not bother when the truth is that there are significant benefits from even modest investments of time.
[00:07:53.180] – Cathy It doesn't have to be all or none. And if you never considered yourself someone who loved big workouts, it's not an option. You can definitely do something smaller and less overwhelming to you, and we have the mindset.
[00:08:07.680] – Cathy You mentioned a quick fix. It's so tempting to believe that something can happen overnight. But what works? Is it quick? It's not glamorous. It's not even new. It's just the consistency. So being able to stay positive and being able to focus on what you can do and keeping up with it, the consistency, that's where it's all that.
[00:08:31.550] – Allan I think so many people will go into this. Like you said, there's the all or none. So if I can't put in an hour, I may as well not even go, or the “Well, I've been doing this for three days. Why isn't the scale moving?”
[00:08:47.300] – Allan But then there's also people that, you know, of course you've you've tried and you tried and you tried. But now now you're felt with you filled with this kind of pessimism. Maybe I'm just meant to be this way and it doesn't matter what I do.
[00:09:02.510] – Cathy That's right. We think, well, it's just genes or a lot of times we feel like, oh, it's just because I turned 40 or just because I turned 50, that we think that it's age related. And most of the changes, a lot of the changes that we like to blame on age are really due to not the physiological aging process itself, but the gradual inactivity. They typically comes with aging. So when we tell ourselves we can't do something, when we tell ourselves, oh, it's too late for me, I'm too old, it's too late, or when we are, we get so down on ourselves from all these failed attempts, you know, what are you going to drown your sorrows in when you when you fall off the wagon the eleventh time? It's certainly not going to be a salad.
[00:09:39.710] – Allan Yeah, That's one of the core things. I think a lot of people will approach this and say, this is the way it is. This is who I'm supposed to be or this is how I'm supposed to age. One of my favorite quotes is we don't we don't stop playing because we got older. We got older because we stopped playing. And a lot of that is because to change is hard.
[00:10:02.690] – Allan You know, we like these comfortable little bubbles. We build ourselves. And as we get a little older, that bubble actually gets a little smaller as we're not pushing the boundaries of that bubble. We're trying to push our comfort zone. We're not trying to do a little bit of that. It tightens up on us.
[00:10:20.210] – Cathy Absolutely. And one of the things that I observed and actually when I decided to write my book, it was after I spent eight years as a director of wellness for a senior living community where the average age of 85. So I was around over fourteen hundred 85 year olds day in and day out for eight years and working in corporate wellness first and then going to senior wellness. I wanted to bring messages back to those of us in just our 40s and 50s that if you ask yourself what type of 85 year old do I want to be?
[00:10:50.660] – Cathy Because you're working on it right now, it's these habits right now that are going to determine it's all these decades because whatever age you are now, chances are you are saying to yourself, how did I get this old, you know, and then you're going to say the same thing five years from now and five more years or so years just go on by. Might as well start thinking about that direction now.
[00:11:12.200] – Allan Yeah, I joke a lot and I'll tell people, when I was younger I wanted to be able to do a Tough Mudder and now my program and the things I think about is I want to be able to wipe my own, but when I'm 105.
[00:11:24.740] – Cathy Absolutely. And you don't know that's a potential problem until you start getting into that working with older adults or until your own parents have started to get to that need where you're realizing, oh, my gosh, that is the kind of independence and dignity I want to have.
[00:11:39.620] – Allan Yeah. And so someone will come in and they'll say, hey, you know, I want to lose some weight. I want to lose twenty pounds, thirty pounds, seventy pounds, whatever it is. Typically when they're talking to a personal trainer like myself or like you, they're saying, hey, I want to lose some weight. And I'm like, that's cool.
[00:11:54.380] – Allan But I say, who do you want to be? Who you want to be five, 10, 15 years now? And they look at me like, OK, I said, no, really, how do you want to feel? You know, how what kind of energy do you want to have when you wake up in the morning? When you walk around, you know, do you want to be on a walk or do you want to be the person that's, you know, bounced around the silver sneakers?
[00:12:13.610] – Allan So in your book, you get into some of the key areas of fitness that I think are really around that story of who do you want to be? Could you talk about those key areas of fitness and then just some general things that we need to consider as we look at each of those and why those would be important to us as we get a little older every day?
[00:12:31.220] – Cathy Yeah, well, the core areas of fitness that you want to address, one of the primary ones is strength training. And I talk about that first because most people always assume cardiovascular exercise is going to go first and we need cardiovascular exercise for heart health and for overall energy level and endurance. And so that's really important. But strength training tends to be something that I love to highlight because less people are familiar with it. And it has so many benefits as.
[00:13:00.500] – Cathy Because the average person loses 50 percent of their strength between the ages of 20 and 80, and you know that this is starting to affect you when you notice in yourself or in older adults that you know who has a difficult time getting out of a chair without using their hands to push off. So, if we really want to maintain that independence, if we really want to age as healthily as possible? It's leg strength and overall physical strength that is one of the most important things that that we want to impact.
[00:13:29.180] – Allan Yeah, you know that one of the things that kind of drives me nuts about gyms, but I understand it now from a from a traffic flow perspective is as you walk into almost every gym, the first thing you see are the cardiovascular machines. Yeah. And then 75 percent of the people fall off right there, you know, because that's as far as they're going to go in. And then the next is a set of machines. So then you're going to have about another 20 percent fall off right there.
[00:13:57.800] – Allan And then you get back to the free weights where, you know, you got that last five percent. So you actually owning a gym. Now, I understand that that flow and why it works that way, because it just makes it easier for cleaning, for management, for all of it. But just, you know, it just works better for everybody. But we've got to get people deeper in the gym.
[00:14:17.060] – Cathy We do. Or, you know, even just home routines. And one of the sweet spots that I like to focus on is when people want to do a strength training routine that they can do in their homes with something like dumbbells, exercise bands and a ball. And for a very little investment, you don't have the commute time. And it's it's a modest investment of time. And once again, you can get great benefits because if you don't see yourself as someone who's ever going to go to a gym, if you don't want to go to a gym, that you can do strength training at home and get great benefits from it.
[00:14:51.270] – Allan Another thing that's really easy to do at home is the cardiovascular. And I always approach cardiovascular saying, yeah, it's good to do most people, when they get into it, enjoy it because it can start at their level, whether it's walking, running, biking or skiing or whatever you turn it into.
[00:15:09.860] – Allan But I really approach cardiovascular training from the perspective of you need the stamina to keep up with your granddaughter when you take them to the zoo. You know, they're both monkeys to the lions. And you you want to be able to keep up with them. You don't want to be sitting on a bench waiting for the family to finish their zoo trip. So what are some things that we can do at home for cardiovascular strength?
[00:15:29.960] – Cathy Yeah, and the good news is, is that it can start and end at your own front door with walking. As you mentioned, you don't have to have any pieces of cardiovascular equipment. You can just you can just do walking. But you can also if you do want to invest in a piece of cardiovascular equipment, then again, you have that convenience. It's right there. You can elliptical machine or a stationary bike or you can take an outdoor bike. Well, first of all, you can ride outside or you can get one of those little trainers where you prop it up on something inside and ride it inside. And then, of course, you know, it's really popular now. And I have a lot of clients that I work out with Zoom, who I take them through circuit workouts where you might take four to six exercises that are cardiovascular in nature.
[00:16:13.580] – Cathy You know, whether it's, you know, whatever level the person is at, it could be something high intensity, like a jump squat or it could be something lower intensity, which is just kind of like a march. But if you string a bunch of them together and you go through each move 30 seconds at a time, you can get your own little cardio circuit going indoors.
[00:16:31.790] – Allan Now now one of the one of the areas I think gets skipped a lot and it really depends on the individual, because what I found is individuals who are already flexible, love flexibility training, people who are already strong like strength training. But flexibility and balance training, I think are the most ignored fitness areas that I see. And it's really hard because you get a client in and they're like, you know, they they can't move through a full range of motion or you're asking them to do a movement and their balance isn't there. And I have to admit myself at it, almost 55 years old, my balance needs to be a lot better. I don't want to fall, so that needs to be an area of training. But it's just an area where I think it's very easy for people to say, I'm not going to do that, whereas it's also really, really easy to do in the comfort of your own home.
[00:17:24.200] – Cathy It is. And you're right that the balance and flexibility tend to get short changed. And I sometimes think it's because they don't impact our appearance.
[00:17:34.950] – Allan This is this is true.
[00:17:38.030] – Cathy So when we're at weight loss or Tonegawa, then people are all about that. But as we age, I have seen my clients more and more appreciating the benefits of flexibility and the benefits of balance training as we age. Because you're right, we want to be able to go through a range of motion comfortably. We want to be able to reach the high shelf. We want to be able to squat down and reach the low shelf we want to be able to not get injured and so flexibility training. One of the ways that I've had a lot of my clients get more into flexible training, in fact, I have one client who used see mostly strength training, and now she wants to do a full 30 minutes of yoga based stretching before we even get into her strength training. And then she loves it so much, because when you think about yoga, which a lot of us like, I was never into yoga when I was a younger fitness person, that was like what I thought, you know, people who were different than me did, you know?
[00:18:29.770] – Cathy But they call when you say a yoga pose that puts in your mindset, hey, I'm going to hold this position for a while. And so when we just talk about stretching, a lot of times we rush through it and we get out of position after just a few seconds. So taking that mindset of getting into a position that causes a mild stretch, not pain, and just holding it there. And so going through a short circuit of stretches doesn't have to take a lot of time. And it's going to make us feel so much better. And again, I'm 54 years old. I definitely didn't appreciate the stretching 10 years ago, as I do now. And I didn't incorporate it as much as I do now. So definitely as we age, you're just going to feel better and better if you incorporate more stretching.
[00:19:12.770] – Allan I think where it comes into play for me was when I started looking at my strength training and somewhat plateauing, because I'm I'm a big proponent of form. If I'm not going to do the right, I'm not going to do it at all. I'm never going to put load if we can't go through the full range of motion. And I started noticing in my own squats that I wasn't able to get to depth. And as I started putting it on, I wasn't there and I was like, OK, so what's going on? And so I started paying more attention to my movement and realized, oh, I'm not dorsiflexing my foot well enough. And that's throwing off my whole kinetic chain. And so I know I'm using a lot of big words here, but the basic gist is I can't bring my toes up towards my shins well. So when I try to do the squat, my butt ends up not where it's supposed to be and my knees end up where they're not supposed to be. And as a result of my body trying to balance, I lean way forward.
[00:20:07.300] – Allan That's not comfortable when you have a lot of weight on your back. So and you know, and sometimes it's not even about the amount of weight that you're lifting. It's just the fact that now you've done something, you have something going on. And if you don't deal with that inflexibility, then you risk injury. And so I think, one of the things with flexibility you mentioned that is, is this is this is injury prevention and it feels good.
[00:20:30.700] – Cathy Yeah. And and you mentioned when you mentioned dorsiflexion, I don't think that we're going to pop up in conversation very often. But but what happens as we age if you look at older adults or maybe in their up in their up to their 70s or 80s who are having difficulty walking and might shuffle when they walk, it's sometimes it's because they are unable to have that dorsiflexion to do a heel strike and then roll through the ball of their foot.
[00:20:54.820] – Cathy So they're just flat footing, moving their feet, shuffling because they don't have that ankle flexibility. So it comes little by little. So the more we can do that now, do those ankle circles include more mobility and range of motion exercises and all your major joints is going to help you. It's going to really bode well for your mobility as we age.
[00:21:18.820] – Allan Then the final bit of it is balance, because while you said, you know, we care about how we look. Well, falling down in the grocery store, we lost our balance. We don't not glamorous.
[00:21:29.620] – Cathy Not a good look.
[00:21:33.640] – Allan I want to jump forward a little bit in our plan because we were going to talk about fall prevention. But, you know, there's a there's a one in three chance if you're over the age of 65, there's a one in three chance that you're going to be laying on the ground sometime this year because you fell.
[00:21:48.220] – Allan Now, strength training is is great because it helps with that. And it also makes sure that you you've got the capacity to hit the ground and not collapse, break because you've got some strength there that's going to support you, some muscle mass that's going to help you. And then, of course, some flexibility. So, you know, if you can move through the full range of motion, you're not stretching or hurting anything. But we can actually do specific training for balance. And I think a lot of people just overlook that.
[00:22:15.430] – Cathy We absolutely can. And the starting point for improving your balance, I'm glad you mentioned about strength training, because the number one factor in balance and preventing falls is leg strength. So if you don't have the quad strength to stabilize your walking, that's increases your risk of falling. So even if someone's not going to do balance specific exercises, if they just just double down on strength training for the quads, you're going to do yourself a great service for preventing falls and then for specific balance training, even just picking up a couple of the exercises, like a tandem stand and then building up to changing your position to more and more like you're standing on a tightrope, even just a little test you can do for yourself is can you stand on one foot without holding on to something? And if so, how long? You know, and that's something you can practice while you're cooking. You can you can do that any time.
[00:23:12.000] – Allan It's one of the things I tell people standing on one foot is one good one. Another one I like is when you're in the kitchen working instead of pivoting to to walk to a different direction, walk sideways, do a shuffle from side to side. You know, you want to go down to the counter, you know, you can put your hand out to make sure you're not going to hurt yourself if you were to slip a little bit. But just going up and down the counter side to side, because we just in a normal course of our day to day, aren't prepared for that side to side movement.
[00:23:41.130] – Allan And that's actually where a lot of the falls that become really dangerous are because we fall sideways and we land on the hip. And so anything you can do to just improve your performance and I don't mean that an athletic perspective, but just performance of your your day to day is going to go a long way.
[00:23:59.340] – Cathy Yeah. And just kind of knowing what the other risk factors are most false happen at night when you're getting up to go to the bathroom, etc.. A lot of falls happen because, you know, someone might not have their glasses on. They might you know, it's dark, there's stuff in the way. So whatever we can do to make sure that our home is set up in a way that reduces our risk and thinking about footwear, thinking about if we have medications that could be contributing to dizziness.
[00:24:26.640] – Cathy There's a lot of things to look at. But it's so important because the statistics, as you mentioned, Allan, are that falls are a biggie after the age of 60.
[00:24:37.590] – Allan And even before then to be honest with you. Like I said, I know I need to be working on my balancers. There's this one step outside of our apartment and it's wooden and it's set at like a 30 degree angle. So it's supposed to be a handicap ramp, but no. It's too slippery. My wife has falling there and I've fallen there. You just kind of walk across it because it's part of the sidewalk. And if you just step on it, it's just a little bit wet. Your feet are going. So having that strength, having that capacity to be able to hit the ground because, if you've been doing the strength training, you've also been improving your your bone density.
[00:25:14.130] – Allan And so you you don't break those are really, really important strength training, resistance training or weightlifting. People hate some of those words and are okay with others. But they're all generally the same thing. Require someone to have a little bit more knowledge than just walk in there. There's a machine. Just go at it to your done. Can you talk a little bit about strength training, how we would how we would set it up if someone was going to come in and say, OK, I want to do a strength training program, what are the things that they would want to know to just know what they're doing when they're doing their program?
[00:25:49.740] – Cathy The first thing you want to know about strength training is when you talk about how much weight you're going to lift people walking and they're and also which which exercise you see a sea of machines like. Which exercises, which machines do I do. Which combination of machines. And so the first step is to know you've got a list of major muscle groups. Right. And you want to hit each major muscle groups.
[00:26:12.240] – Cathy So you want to have a balanced routine. So that's that's step number one is knowing that. OK, let's start off with one exercise for the chest, one for the back, one for the shoulders, so that you're not heavy duty hitting one muscle group a ton with all these machines and something else is getting completely ignored. So you want a well-balanced routine as far as hitting each major muscle group. And then the next thing that most people make the mistake with is selecting a weight that is either too heavy or too light for when you learn in proper form is so important.
[00:26:44.910] – Cathy But then you should if you try to do an exercise and you can't do it correctly. And it's just that you automatically know that's a red flag. It's too heavy. If you can't keep your form and then knowing the the the term or the kind of range of twelve repetitions is kind of the hallmark for general conditioning for when you should reach your fatigue point. So let's picture you're picking up a set of dumbbells and you're going to do a set of bicep curls because that's an exercise most people are familiar with. Now, I'm going to speak from a woman's point of view that women and we women are marketed with pastel pink one and two and three pound dumbbells.
[00:27:24.370] – Allan I have to admit that that's what I've got in my gym. I've got a chrome set, too.
[00:27:30.600] – Cathy Well, most women I know even better when we're getting older don't need to be using one pound dumbbells to do bicep curls unless you are really have significant strength issues or are recovering from an injury. So you could do a million of them at one pound. So you need to find the weight that causes fatigue right around twelve. So if you can't get to twelve, the dumbbells too heavy. If you get past twelve, you blow right past your weight past and you forgot how long. 12 was the way it's too late, so you need to kind of experiment and find that so so again, most women, not even threes, are too late for most women for bicep curls. So you need to experiment find with that right weight is for you to get to fatigue right around 12 when you need to do that for every exercise.
[00:28:16.210] – Allan That's what they'll they will they'll sell you the when you buy the dumbbells, sets those smaller dumbbells, sets up pretty much anything under 15 pounds is likely going to be rubber coated and probably have a pastel color to it. After you get there, then they're thinking, OK, these are the weights. And unfortunately I don't mean this is a bad way, but these are the weights the guys are going to use so they can be a little bit more metal or, you know, they might be rubber coated, but they'll be black. So, yeah, just realize that strength comes not from doing the same thing over and over again. It comes from pushing yourself to that fatigue level.
[00:28:53.650] – Cathy Yeah. And a lot of people as we age were worried about getting injured. So you don't want to use a way that's too heavy and then and thereby risking injuring yourself. But if you're doing a weight that's way too light, you're not going to get results because the muscles are responding to overload. And that's how they grow, is by responding to a weight that is is challenging. So finding that happy medium where it's heavy enough to cause the muscles to grow, but not so heavy that your form goes all crazy and you risk hurting yourself.
[00:29:28.930] – Cathy That's why getting advice, having support, you know, with my personal training clients, I have a lot of Zoom personal training clients who just schedule a handful of sessions up front to learn the proper form to to make sure they doing things correctly and make sure they have somebody observing them, observing the form to find the right weights and then just check in with them periodically versus having someone who's going to be with them for their workouts every single time.
[00:29:53.140] – Allan and sometimes, you know, maybe you're limited a little bit with the amount of weights you can afford to have at home. Some dumbbells and things about once you start getting up to 20 and 30 and 40 pounds of dumbbells, those dumbbells are going for about a dollar a pounds. It can start you can start adding up. So, you know, sometimes the way you get to your limit is not necessarily through more weight. It's by adding additional sets.
[00:30:18.400] – Cathy Yes. Yeah. And so a starter program would be perhaps usually like one set per muscle group. Right. But then if you add sets two sets per muscle group or three sets per muscle group is a way to add intensity and build strength more quickly. And you might or you might have two sets for the same muscle group, but there are different exercises. So maybe for your chest you have one set of chest press and one set of dumbbells flies. And so that's two sets for your chest, slightly hitting the chest muscles a slightly different way.
[00:30:49.120] – Cathy So variety is good, but it's not essential. And I guess sometimes I don't hear very many fitness professionals saying that because variety is better. But a lot of the clients who I work with, were not going to do anything at all. And so I always tell them if you do a strength training routine that you never change ever, that's still better than not doing what at all?
[00:31:14.500] – Allan Particularly a lot of folks, as I mentioned, the distance they'll go inside of a gym when they first get there's a lot of people will make it to the circuit training area, which is a series of machines. And the the goal basically is to go through all of these machines are there's usually seven to ten of them depending on how the circuit set up. And that will give you a full body workout. It's actually really well designed for someone who doesn't know a whole lot. And the machines make it easy to do the work without the concern that you're really going to hurt yourself as long as you just don't drop the weight on yourself and you are still not changing your body position while you're in the chair.
[00:31:51.730] – Allan But it's the same thing they get on the machine. They do the same weight, the same number sets, the same number of circuits that it's the same workout every day and I mean every day. Let's talk a little bit about rest. Rest between exercises are sets and in rest between sets.
[00:32:10.150] – Cathy Yeah, well, first, actually, I thought you're going to talk about rest between days because since strength training, the whole purpose of strength training is to microscopically shred your muscles, that you're not going to get stronger if you are strength training the same muscle groups two days in a row. So that's why you hear about taking a day off in between. And a lot of strength training routines are like Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You know that you're skipping a day in between.
[00:32:33.010] – Cathy If someone is doing strength training two days in a row, it's because they're doing different muscle groups on those days. So that's the recovery time in between your actual sessions. And then when you are in your actual workout, you want to have that rest interval between your sets so that the muscles can get your energy back to really have that second set strong. So usually you want to have between one and three minutes between those exercises, depending on how heavy it is, I mean, if you're doing a lighter weight for 12 to 15 reps, you're going to need less rest time, maybe just a minute. But if someone is really trying to build strength and so they're actually doing less than 12 reps or maybe just an eight rep person, they're doing a heavy weight for only eight repetitions. They're going to find themselves needing a little longer rest interval before they hit that next set.
[00:33:23.530] – Allan In the book, you get into what you call the Boom Fitness Framework. And I think this is a really good framework for for anybody because it's it's four levels. And even within the four levels, you scale down and you scale up. So really, there's eight levels. When you when you break this all down, there's eight ways that we can approach this that's going to work for anybody.
[00:33:44.950] – Cathy Yes.
[00:33:45.670] – Allan Do you mind going through the four the four levels and then kind of the scaling up and down and how that looks?
[00:33:51.850] – Cathy Yeah, the reason why I created this framework is because I wanted to offer options that when you read the book and you look at where you stand and what your motivation level is, how much time you have, that you can pick one as your starter level and then you can decide when you have more time and more interest, you can go up a little bit. And when you have less time and less interest, you can go down a little bit.
[00:34:14.350] – Cathy But the goal is to never be completely off the scale. Like that's how we keep fitness going forever is by having our options to do a little more or a little less. So the first way that I have it separated out is with two tracks. And this is actually based on the subtitle of my book, which is never too early, never too late. So we have the Never Too Early Track, which has a little more challenging exercises for people who are maybe already a little bit fit, don't have any health or mobility challenges necessarily or past injuries and there want something a little more challenging and they're able to get on and off the floor.
[00:34:52.030] – Cathy And then I have the track called Never Too Late, which has more gentle exercises that are more seated, chair-based exercises, not some of his not necessarily comfortable with getting on and off the floor, somebody who who has mobility issues, who want something a little more gentle so you can automatically pick one of those two tracks. And then once you're on the track level, one is called Just Move. And this is like someone who really doesn't want something official and just knows they need to doing a little something.
[00:35:21.340] – Cathy And then you go up to level one is just a small time commitment level to a little more and level three a little more. So whether you're doing and each of them has a little bit of cardio, a little bit of stretching and a little bit of strength or a medium amount of cardio and stretching and strength. And so I really want readers to have an honest little discussion with themselves. You know what's realistic for me? How much time I really willing to commit?
[00:35:49.180] – Cathy And when you get more excited and want to have a bigger commitment, you can go up a level on that for that week or that month or that phase of your life. And then when you want to do a little less, you can go down a level. And so, you know, how to adjust that to me is the key to lifelong fitness is knowing that you don't have to always stay with the same amount of exercise you can go up or you can go down based on your needs and your interest level as it changes.
[00:36:13.240] – Allan And as your fitness level changes. You may have thought about starting over here in my never too late category, but then I start feeling good. My energy levels higher, I'm stronger, I've got more mobility and I've got this pep in my step. So I'm going to start walking a little bit further. And now, lo and behold, your your exercise level is now putting you at the never too early stage.
[00:36:36.460] – Cathy Absolutely. I have clients who are in their 70s and 80s who are doing the never too early exercises, OK? And then I do have clients who are in their forties who are doing the never too late because maybe they did have mobility issues or a significant amount of weight to lose where they're not comfortable with some of the higher intensity exercises. So it's not necessarily age related. And you can you can go from one track to the other either way, based on your changing how your fitness level changes over time.
[00:37:06.250] – Allan Cathy, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be one of the three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:37:14.020] – Cathy What we talked about, the first one right up front, which is mindset is king it truly, truly is. So when I like to say what you focus on grows. So if you're focusing on the negative, that's what's going to grow in your life. If you're focusing on the positive, focusing on what you can do versus what you can't do, you're going to be able to find a way. You're going to get creative and you're going to get that consistency because the habit, the consistency is where the magic happens.
[00:37:41.080] So if you're down on yourself and you're telling yourself I just can't do this. I'm too old, it's too late. I've never been athletic. Exercise is just for those those jock type people, then you're really doing yourself a disservice because exercise, I call it in Boom. That exercise is the magic pill, like it has more benefits in more areas of our life than any other single thing we can do, and we really can't afford not to We can't afford not to find what is going to fit in for us. Perfect.
[00:38:12.360] – Allan Thank you. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, Boom: Six Steps to a Longer and Healthier Life. Where would you like for me to send them?
[00:38:22.050] – Cathy They can come visit me at cathyrichards.net and Cathy is with a C. And then cathyrichards.net/boom is were you can find out about the book. But I have got some great new programs coming in 2021. I have some free master classes to really focus on, How am I going to make 2021 my year? How am I going to fit this in and what am I going to do with the top strategies for getting fitness in my life forever.
[00:38:48.900] – Cathy And so I've got those master classes coming up starting tomorrow. I have got one on January 12th, 7:00 p.m. Eastern. There's one on the 13th and there's one the following week on the 19th. I would love your listeners to hop on over to cathyrichards.net/ to find out about those. And then there's cathyrichards/free for lots of other free stuff. So I've got a lot to offer. I'd love to connect with your with your listeners. See how we can help them out.
[00:39:19.530] – Allan Great. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/468 and I'll be sure to have all those links there. Cathy, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:39:30.720] – Cathy You're welcome. It's great to be here.
Post Show/Recap
[00:39:37.150] – Allan Welcome back, Ras.
[00:39:38.770] – Rachel Hey, Allan. Well, boom! That was quite an interview for sure.
[00:39:44.140] – Allan Yeah, if you're a client of mine and you had a good news thing to tell me. Yeah. You're probably going to hear that word come out of my mouth. So I like that word. And the book was really good too one of the key takeaways I got from it is and I think a lot of us forget this is as we're going into this new year, there's an expectation of change, expectation of improvement. And it doesn't happen fast for most of us. You'll see someone who's spectacularly successful doing what they want to do, dropping weight, getting stronger, doing their thing. But for most of us, it's really a practice of patience, persistence and consistency to get things done and just having a general understanding of where we are today. If you are not a runner and you buy some running shoes and decide you're going to go out and start running, don't be surprised if after about four or five minutes your legs are screaming at you, you've got a stitch in your side and you're breathing hard and you're tired and you want to quit, you know, you are where you are.
[00:40:58.870] – Allan The best way to measure that as a as a point is just that waypoint, that starting point of understanding that this is who I am, this is where I am. And then the next time you go to run, which shouldn't be three months from now to give yourself a day or two, but then get back out there and just you'll feel, it'll get a little bit better and a little bit better. And it's as I put it in my book, the gentle nudging that's going to get you there safely. And just recognize where you are and who you want to be.
[00:41:31.210] – Rachel Mm hmm. For sure. And Kathy mentioned that we tend to have this all or nothing attitude that, like you mentioned, if you're going to start running, you should be qualifying for the Boston Marathon. Or if you're going to start cycling, you should be ready to join the Tour de France. But it's not necessary. And it's certainly not at all a good way to get started on any sort of regimen at all.
[00:41:56.620] – Allan And so if you're starting something, you know, whether it's cardiovascular strength, flexibility or balance, just recognize what is is. Okay? We can't we can't reverse the past. We can't. And we shouldn't punish ourselves over the past. It's over. Forgive yourself. It's over you changing. And the only way you can change is to implement new habits and just start doing it. But don't feel discouraged if you don't have the strength to do a body weight squat without assistance. Don't get discouraged. If when you go out there and you walk to your car, you get winded. And that's why you're always trying to find that closest spot to the to the front door of the grocery store park a few steps back, take a few more steps. That slow progression is going to get you there if you stick with it.
[00:42:48.880] – Rachel Oh, for sure. She had mentioned that she mentioned a term gradual inactivity, and I love that word gradual because we should be doing or working our way towards gradual activity, just like you said, just do a little bit extra every day and you'll get to where you want to be eventually.
[00:43:07.540] – Allan I had a I had a client and she told me, you know, I get winded walking to my car in the morning. So it's right outside our house from walking from the front door to the car. She would get winded and I said, okay, here's here's your homework for this week. Each day when you walk to your car, I want you to do one lap around the car before you get in. And so she did that. And we got on the phone about three days later and I said, how did that go? And she said, it was tough. But she said by the third day, I actually did the lap and I was feeling a little bit better about I said, okay, for the next three days you do two laps around the car. And, you know, we went through that and then she emailed me and said how to go. And she said it went pretty well. I can do the two laps. I said, okay, and make it three. And about it, I said, every three days, just add another lap.
[00:43:57.130] – Allan And within a few weeks it wasn't about the walking to the car, walking laps. She was walking the neighborhood, and it's just is this one of those things of saying to yourself, OK, I'm going to do a little just a little bit more, just a little bit more. I know where I am and it's okay. True fitness for any individual is going to come from that slight push outside your comfort zone. You do the same thing every day, you can't expect better results. It just doesn't work like that. You can't hop on an elliptical or a stationary bicycle. And peddle the same peddling or do walking on a treadmill, the same walk every day and expect to see improvements in your health, all you're really doing is slowing the decline because all wellness really is, is just trying to be the best person you can be.
[00:44:52.120] – Allan Cathy talked about, you know, what an 85 year old her would be like. And, you know, I've always said, you know, as a 105 five year old, I want to be able to wipe my own butt. To wipe my own butt I need the leg strength to be able to stand up off the toilet, wipe my own butt I need the the ability to twist my body and reach back where I need to reach back to. I need the flexibility to do that. I need the balance so that I don't have to have a rail in there to keep from falling over when I stand up anddo the things I have to do. So to do all that work. I need to train and, you know, my training right now to be the best butt wiper, no, obviously not. But what I do know is that the training I'm doing are going to make me proficient at being the human being. I want to be five, 10, 20, even here 50 years later.
[00:45:46.980] – Rachel I love that. And the name of one of the tracks she had for her fitness is never too early, but never too late. I love that because it is never too late to try something new or to be better at something that you can do. Just moving that needle can make a big difference.
[00:46:04.350] – Allan Yeah, and she had the four levels. So again, it's it's where you are if you're just getting started, just move, just move a little bit more. It's an extra lap around the car. It's using the stairs, it's parking a little bit further away from the door to the grocery store. It's walking during your your break, you get a 15 minute break at at work instead use five to seven of it to go to the bathroom and then you just walk around for the next seven minutes, you know, you're back at your desk. Fifteen minutes, you feel fresher, you feel more awake and you're probably more productive at work. And that's going to translate into your relationships or performance at work is going to translate into a lot of things. So just taking that time to figure out where you are and start.
[00:46:56.480] – Rachel That's perfect, just perfect.
[00:46:58.850] – Allan All right. Rachel I'll see you next week.
[00:47:01.220] – Rachel All right, take care.
Patreons
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On this episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we discuss how to get strong after 40.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:02:13.530] – Allan Ras, how are you doing?
[00:02:15.000] – Ras Good, how are you, Allan?
[00:02:16.860] – Allan Busy, busy, busy. You know, doing the the traveling as we're recording this, I'm traveling a good bit to visit family and friends. And so it's go, go, go, go, go. And then getting our stuff together and getting it moved out and realizing how hard it is to let go of some things.
[00:02:32.760] – Allan You know, we're taking far too much stuff down. But as this episode's going live I'm probably in North Carolina and I'll be heading home in about a week or so, so provide again, I can get a negative covid test 48 hours before the flight. So there'll be a little bit of push to get everything done and get get back on an airplane and get back down there. But looking forward to a good Thanksgiving week. That's coming up in about a week or so. So we'll get it done.
[00:03:02.130] – Ras That sounds great. Glad you could get up here and make the rounds visiting family and friends and whatnot.
[00:03:08.190] – Allan So what are you up to?
[00:03:09.900] – Ras Well, we just got a new puppy. So,
[00:03:12.600] – Allan Oh boy!
[00:03:13.440] – Ras I am puppy training. Yep. And she's small black lab. And Mike wanted a puppy for duck hunting. But since she seems to be my shadow like my other pup, Stella, I suspect she'll be a good running partner in another year or so. So it's a real treat. She's a real treat.
[00:03:32.460] – Allan So she can chase you or she can chase ducks.
[00:03:34.980] – Ras Yes, exactly. Either way, we'll both be happy.
[00:03:37.800] – Allan Yeah. There you go. All right. So the episode we're going to talk about today is about strength. So let's go ahead and listen.
Show
Hello and welcome to another solo episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast. Today, we're talking about a topic that is actually my favorite topic, How to Get Strong After 40. Now, I wrote a blog post about this a few days ago and I asked some questions on Facebook. So I may use a lot of that material here just as kind of a based as we have this conversation.
I really did want to take the time to dive in a little bit deeper into some of the topics that I just didn't feel like I got deep enough on on the blog post. So go check out that blog post on the website.
But, you know, most people who come to want wanting to get healthy and fit are typically starting with weight loss as a goal. And, you know, the basic number out there is lose the weight, then gain the muscle.
It sounds good. And in fact, it actually works a little bit because when you focus on one thing, it's obviously easier. But if you're over 40, that's not a good strategy at all. You know, people don't want to lift weights because they're afraid that they're going to get big. They're afraid they're going to stop their weight loss. And the reality of it is the exact opposite. The size of muscle relative to fat is is just tremendous.
If you've ever seen a picture, a meme on Facebook, you know, the fat is seven, eight times bigger pound for pound than muscle. So you're not going to get really, really big, you know, and the other side of it is, you know, people look at bodybuilders and think that's what strength training does. And the reality of it is entirely different. Bodybuilders don't train for strength. They train for muscle mass. So they train very differently.
They eat very differently and they're trained a lot more. Strength training doesn't have to be a profession. You can get a lot done in a little bit of time. And the other thing when you're looking at a bodybuilder is to recognize that many of them, even if they're generally natural, are still using some performance enhancing drugs to get to the size that they're at. They're training a lot harder and to be able to do that. Many of them are using steroids, peptides and SARMs to get those gains.
And so you can't look at a bodybuilder and think that's what you're going to get out of strength training. The other side is most of those folks are putting on that muscle in their 20s and through their 30s.
If you're over 40, you're not going to have the capacity to put on that much muscle, but you can get stronger. And another thing, you know, as we're getting into thinking about weight loss, because, you know, if you're coming at this, still wanting to lose weight, but you're believing you need to do some strength training, which is great is yes, your scale might change a little bit when you first get started, because a damaged muscle, which is part of what we're doing when we're doing the work, we're straining and stressing the muscle.
That effort on the muscle causes metabolic waste and that metabolic waste has to be flushed out. So whenever you do injure part of your body or you lift weights, yes, sometimes muscle will go in, water will go into the muscle. But recognize that weight is water weight and not not in any way your actual weight. And then once you're training regularly, you know, you won't even notice that, it's going to be kind of built into the formula.
So don't let weight loss be the reason that you're not doing strength training. It is really hard to get strong after 40. And you're going to have to do some work and you need to do that. The reason strength training is so critical, particularly after 40, is this thing called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is an aspect of muscle that over the course of each year we lose about one percent of our muscle. And after the age of 65, that loss accelerates.
If you're not strength training, you are definitely losing muscle and you're definitely losing strength. And in fact, in many cases, you're probably also losing bone density due to osteopenia. So strength training is going to help you maintain and maybe even gain some muscle.
But this is really about strength training. So to get strong after 40, you're going to do some training. If you don't do the training, you're going to get weak and weak and weak. And what that leads to is the potential loss of independence.
If you've ever tried to open a jar and struggled to open it, that's a loss of independence. You either had to do without what was in that jar or ask somebody else for help. Now, that's going to reverberate through your entire life as you don't have the strength to accomplish things like getting up from a toilet. You're definitely losing your independence on that one. So strength training is important and it's so important as we get older because we want to be able to continue to do the things we're doing and so few people do and they lose their independence and they don't want that to happen to you.
If you want to get strong after 40, you got to follow a few protocols. Your body's not going to be as forgiving as it was when you were in your 20s and 30s. You're going to have to be a little bit more careful and you're going to have to be a little bit smarter. So the very first thing to consider when you're getting ready to do any kind of lifting is to make sure that you warm up first.
I remember having a an instructor when I was in college that was, you know, the physiology and exercise class. And he he just really didn't believe warm ups were important and prove it to us. One day he was you know, he's in his 60s. He just started jumping up and down on his chair from the ground to the chair and back and forth. And then he was breathing heavy after a couple of minutes of that. And he said, see, I'm warm.
I didn't have to warm up before I did that. But I advise you to warm up. A cold muscle has much more likelihood of getting pulled or broken. And then the other problem is that your ligaments and tendons don't necessarily get good blood flow. So a good warm up is going to go a long way towards helping you prevent injury and just have better performance when you're lifting.
You'll want to make sure when you're lifting that your body is in a good position to move and do the right things. And that means that you have to have good mobility for those of us that have had office jobs for much of our lives with a lot of sitting, or if you're driving, you're sitting. If you don't spend a lot of time moving around, you've probably lost some of the mobility. Now, there are a few different ways that you can improve your mobility to include stretching and other things. I want to go briefly through a few things with regard to that.
Dynamic stretching is the most advisable kind of stretching when you're going to be doing strength training. Dynamic stretching is where you basically move through a range of motion. You start very slow and then as the muscle warms up, you're able to move a little bit faster, a little bit faster, and you kind of build up some some opportunity to work the full range of motion and get that muscle warmed up and going. OK, that gets good blood flow to the muscle, to the ligaments, to the tendons, and everything's good to go.
If you have a movement problem, you know, perfect example. Most people have very tight calves. You probably need to do some static stretching for those muscles. Static stretching is basically where you put the muscle into a stretched position. So it's at one range of the full range of motion. And you basically put a little bit of pressure on it such that that muscle is forced to lengthen.
That lengthening is important because if a muscle can't properly lengthen, it's going to affect the kinetic chain. For every muscle that you move contracts to move the weight, you have other muscles that are basically required to lengthen to allow you to move through that range of motion. And if some of those muscles are tight, they're going to keep you from completing the movement in a good form. And we're going to talk about that in a minute too. So make sure that you have a good pattern of movement.
If anything's inhibiting you from doing that, you want to stretch that muscle now, you don't stretch all the muscles because of a muscle is already loose. It doesn't need stretching. Dynamic stretching will be enough because you'll get blood flow to it and it'll be ready to go. You only want to statically stretch the muscles that are inhibiting your movement or keeping you from having a good range of motion because static stretching will reduce your strength.
If you do static stretching on a muscle that you intend to work, you're going to lose performance. And then, of course, if you're not doing as much weight on an exercise, you're not building as much strength, so if you want to get strong after 40. Don't statically stretch the muscles that you want to work.
There are a couple different ways, other ways that you can improve your overall mobility if static stretching and dynamic stretching don't quite get you there. One of those is Self Myofascial Release or SMR. You may have heard this called rolling or smashing.
I don't like the term rolling because I think people do it wrong. You know, the object of self myofascial release is not to roll something over the muscle that stimulates the muscle. What you want to do is find those spots on the muscle that are tight and pressed into them. So smashing is probably a better depiction of what you want to do is press into that for about 30 to 60 seconds and then you'll feel the muscle release. This is a natural protective mechanism of a muscle.
If it were to get too tight, it doesn't want to break. So it has an automatic release and you want to kind of make that happen. And self myofascial release is a way to do that. If you've ever had a joint injury or something that's preventing you from moving, flossing is a way that you might be able to go about releasing that. And so, like, you know, if you sit a lot, you may have some hip issues where you're not getting your your upper leg, where it fits into the socket on your pelvis.
You might not be getting a full range of motion there and I mean a full mobility there. And if that's what's holding you up, flossing could be something. But self myofascial release and flossing are not for everybody. And if you're going to get into it, I would work with a professional coach to make sure that you get good advice and good guidance on how to do that properly because you can enjoy yourself if you're not flossing regularly, not flossing properly.
I've said it before, but I'm reiterate this, and this is very important. One of the most important rules here, and that's always use good form. If you don't know what good form is, find out. Don't just put weight on yourself. If you're not able to do the exercise properly, good form is going to be full range of motion. There's very few exercises when you're training for strength that you're going to do in a partial range.
You want to make sure you're doing a full range of motion and you also want to make sure that you have control of the weight. There's a lot of people like to throw a lot of weight around and they're not actually building strength. They're building something else, building power. So I want to switch this a little bit, when we're talking about lifting, we have three actual movement patterns that a muscle will do while while we're lifting.
The first is isometric. And that's basically where the force that we're applying to the weight is equal to the weight so the weight doesn't move. OK, so you can think of something in terms of like doing a plank where once you're holding a position, you're holding your core in a position and it's the gravity fighting against you, but you're holding it there. So you're applying just as much force as the gravity is in that instance to hold that pose. OK, that's an isometric movement.
A concentric movement is when you're moving a weight against the gravity. So you're moving a resistance against itself. So an example of that would be when I am curling my arm up. So if I'm bringing my fist up towards my shoulder. I'm curling. I'm having a concentric contraction in my bicep muscle. If you were doing a push up, when you're pushing your body away from the floor, your chest and triceps are doing a concentric movement to move you against that gravity.
An eccentric movement is when your body is still generally resisting gravity, but you're letting gravity kind of have its way of lowering. So if you in the top position of a push up and you slowly lowered yourself to the ground, or if you're in a top position of a bicep curl and you slowly let the weight go back down to the ground, that concentric movement is usually a power movement.
That's not exactly where you're building the most strength. It's the eccentric portion of the movement where you're building the most strength. So having control of the weight and not just dropping it after you get it moved up is really, really important. If you want to get strong after 40, that's where you're really building the strength is in that control of the eccentric portion of the movement.
OK, the final bit is that you should be trying to make sure that you maintain core endurance throughout the lift. Many of the lifts that you'll do will require you to have your core braced. And only way you can really properly do that is if you do have good core muscle endurance.
You build muscle endurance by holding positions for a period of time. And you want to think of your core, not just as your rectus dominates the muscles in the front, but the whole part of your body, the core of your body, so that's the back, the sides and the front. You want to think of it like a can.
If you thought a can of soda and you want to add a cinderblock and put it on top of that can, if the cans full, it can pretty much hold that cinder block, even if the cinder block is a little off whack. If you empty the can of fluid and you put it there, now it's a little bit more cumbersome. You could still set that cinder block on top. You have to be a little bit more careful.
And if it's a little bit off, it could crush the can. And if the can has a dividend in it anywhere and you try to put a cinder block on there, it's going to crush the can. So if you think of your core in that way, you want to have a good solid core and that requires some training of your core. So core work should be a regular part. And it's not just doing a function of hyper extensions and sit ups and things like that. You want to focus more on maintaining endurance.
So the endurance comes from those isometric moves we talked about. So, you know, doing bird dogs and doing planks and, you know, some other types of exercises that you hold a position that's helping you build that core endurance. And many of the exercises that you're doing, as I said, require that core endurance. So you're building you're building some of that there, too. So but core training should be a part of your strength training to help you maintain good form.
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Next, I want to shift to talking about nutrition. The first thing that you want to make sure, because everything, every function in our body requires water and electrolytes to function properly. You want to make sure you're properly hydrated. So drinking plenty of water, you know, all day, not just during your workout or not just before your workout, but making sure you stay good and hydrated is going to help your muscles perform better. And when you talk about hydration, again, it's not always just about the water.
If you have issues with electrolytes, if you're sweating a lot and or if you're breathing a lot and even, you know, some dry, cold days can cause you to dehydrate a little bit. So making sure you stay hydrated requires you to make sure you're getting your potassium, magnesium, sodium and zinc. And it also requires you to make sure that you're getting plenty of POW plain old water. Don't overfeed.
If you came at this to lose weight and now you want to get strong, a lot of people have the tendency to think they need to overeat. You know, they'll tell you you need a calorie surplus to build muscle. And that's not actually completely true. Yes, if you have a calorie surplus, you'll put on more muscle faster for sure. But we're not worried if we're trying to get strong about actually putting on a whole lot more muscle.
What we just do is we want to build muscle to make it stronger. So you don't necessarily want to overfeed and you can still be at a slight calorie deficit and gain some muscle strength and gain some muscle mass. Even to do that, though, you've got to make sure that you are feeding the muscle. So you will if you're if you're lifting and particularly lifting heavy and you're lifting often, you're going to make sure that you're getting enough protein.
And as a general guideline, I typically try to target about a half a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So me sitting at about 200 pounds. That means I'm going to want about 100 grams of protein every day to make sure that I'm giving my muscles what they need to to build. On days that I train heavier, I'll probably add a little bit more protein on the days that I'm not training, I may eat a little bit less, but in general, I'm trying to average about 100 grams per day, half a gram per pound.
Next, I want to talk about rest and recovery. In between each lift you need to take a short break. Short break. These rest breaks in between each set is when your body basically is rebuilding the energy store inside the muscle. It's called APT. And the body can regenerate some APT in a very short period of time so that you're able to do a heavier lift the next time. So let's say you're doing three sets.
First starting out. You might find that a minute is a long enough rest period for you to be able to go back and do the same weight almost as many times as you did the first time, and then maybe the third time a little bit less than you did the first and second. But you generally want to make sure that you're still lifting in your desired rep range and staging your rest to allow that to happen is really, really important. So one minute works for most people.
If you're lifting heavier or you're going a little bit more intense with stuff, you might want to go to two and a half minutes, but you seldom need to go more than three. And I say that because you don't want to cool down. And if you're just sitting on your phone for five minutes, you probably want to do a little bit of warm up again before you get back into it. So, you know, a good one to two and a half minute break in between each lift.
Try to be consistent with it so you can at least monitor how the rest is working for you. And then you can, you know, ratchet up, ratchet it down as you go. But you want to give yourself at least a minute to allow your body to rebuild its energy stores. And then we're going to talk about recovery. OK, so recovery is the time between workouts. I don't know how many times I've been in the gym and seen, you know, the same person come into the gym, do the same workout every single day.
The thing is, they're not building any strength. They haven't allowed their body to recover. They haven't allowed the muscles to rebuild. The way muscles, muscle and strength works is you do the stimulus, which is the lifting. After you do the stimulus, you make sure you've got the food. So we're getting plenty of protein and we're staying hydrated.
And then we give our body 48 to 72 hours to rebuild that muscle. The stimulus tells the muscle that it needs to be able to do something. And so its response is going to be to make itself stronger. And that's how this whole thing works. And it works whether you're in your 20s all the way up to your 80s and past. If you want to get strong after 40, you need to lift and you need to rest. And that recovery time is really, really important.
A lot of folks, when they first start out, can do a full body. If you think about it in those terms, that just means if you work out on a Monday, you come back in on Thursday, you come back in on Sunday, you come back in on Wednesday. So you're getting two to two and a half workouts per week, and that's plenty of stimulus, particularly in the beginning, to give your muscles what it needs to know, that it needs to grow.
If you find that you want to do more volume because you're getting conditioned, you can do more volume, but you're probably going to have to break up your workouts in what we call splits. And we'll talk a little bit more about exercise selection and things like that and later on. But just kind of give you an idea of how a structure would work.
You need to make sure you're giving your body at least 48 hours to recover and pay attention to it, because some people do recover a little faster. Some some muscles recover a little slower. My upper body recovers much faster than my lower body so it can take on more volume than my lower than my lower body can. But sometimes I need the whole 72 hours for my lower body.And I take that into account based on how hard I'm training.
OK, the next thing I want to talk about is consistency. You can't lift once a month and get strong after 40. It just, that just doesn't work that way. Consistency takes three things. It takes patience. You know, as you go to the gym each day, you're going to have days that are great and you're going to have days that are actually not so great. This can be because of a myriad of things.
It might be your immune system might be dealing with a virus. You might just be a little bit lower energy that day for one reason or another, because your thyroid, because you didn't sleep well, a lot of different things could be going on. You may not have fully recovered, but and so your workouts aren't quite as good. So you're going to have this this thing happening where it's not necessarily a linear thing.
If you have the persistence, which is the second “P” here, you keep showing up and you keep doing it. And what happens over time is you do see a trend to get stronger. And at first it's actually pretty cool because your brain is learning the exercises. It's learning how to fire more and more muscles to muscle fibers to make that movement happen.
A lot of people early on see really good strength improvement and then that kind of seems to plateau. So you have to have the patience and then the persistence to keep pushing on. And that's where the other one comes in, the other “P”, progression.
Progression is about getting stronger. It's about putting more on. You want to do that in a smart way. I call it gentle nudges. So you shouldn't ever increase the weight from one workout to the other more than, say, 10% or so. And sometimes that's hard. I know if you're dealing with dumbbells and it's a 15 dumbbell and now you're ready to move to the next weight and the next weight is a 20, I get it.
That's, that's a lot more than 10%. And so sometimes you're going to be stuck with what you have, but in a general sense to get a really good progression and a strength workout, you want to just try to move up no more than 10%. So a couple of pounds on an exercise is a progression. And when you can get those the full sets in and the reps in and use good form, that's when you want to progress.
I've talked about people coming into the gym. They do the same workout every time they set the weights on the same thing, every time they're not getting stronger because, one they're not stimulating their muscles, because they're not progressing, they're not adding weight to that workout. And then, of course, they're not recovering. But they didn't do the work to need to recover. So they just they're coming in and they're doing a workout, which is great.
I'm glad you're there. I'm glad you're moving. Movement is important, but you're not getting stronger and you're not building strength. So that's what we want to do. We don't want to just stay where we are. We want to get a little bit stronger. We want to add a little bit more muscle mass, because if Sarcopenia kicks in, it's going to start reducing that muscle mass. And as it does, the more muscle you have and start with, the better you're going to be when you start going against that even heavier. So patience, persistence and progression lead to consistency and consistency leads to results.
Now, the next thing I want to talk about in this lineup is exercise selection, and this is really, really important because so many people love to come in and do work that makes them feel good. And that's awesome, but again, it's not going to help you really get stronger. If you see a lot of people coming to the gym and they just blast their arms with these isolation movements. And that's fine. Isolation exercises where you're really just working one muscle and that's fine. If you want to have bigger biceps, you have bigger triceps. That's great to work those muscles, but it's not really helping you get a lot stronger because they're not muscles that you're going to be doing.
What was the heaviest thing that you lift up to your mouth from a low point. And then reality is you're going to find that you're just not using your biceps that much to lift a lot of weight. Now you are using your back and you are using your chest and you are using your legs. So focusing on compound movements now, compound movements are movements that move multiple muscles.
A push up is requiring you to move your chest and your triceps. So it's working multiple muscles. A squat is requiring you to use your quadriceps and your glutes. And deadlift is causing you to use your your glutes and your back and your hamstrings.
So compound movements are going to be your bread and butter for strength exercises. And so as you're doing this exercise selection, a good starting point for most beginners. If you look at most beginner workouts, they're going to involve a squat. There probably can involve a lunge or a deadlift. They're going to involve a push up or a bench press, and they're going to involve a pulling movement like a row or pull up. And then finally, they're going to involve some form of overhead press.
That's a basic five exercise compound movement workout. Three sets of ten start very low in weight. And, you know, as you get good form and you feel good about it, you can begin to do that progression. But all of those are compound movements. Now, if you find that you know your triceps are what's keeping you from being stronger when you do your base workout, maybe you want to add some tricep work in there just to strengthen them a little bit more, because you don't want anyone body part being the laggard that's keeping you from optimizing the strength in other muscles.
So you may do some of that. You may split this up and start doing more of that. And then the final point I want to talk about as far as exercise selection is a term called periodization. When you do the same thing over time, initially, yes, your brain connects with the muscles. It learns how to use more muscle fibers to affect the movement. And your strength gains are pretty good. After that now we're really into the muscle building.
Now we're into the, you know, really focusing on the muscle becoming stronger, not just the neuromuscular connection being firmer. We're actually now strengthening the muscle at many points in time that can stall. That can feel like it's just not going anywhere, and you might feel like you've plateaued. That's where periodization can help. You can set up periodization in any kind of schedule you want. I'm a big fan of either four weeks or eight weeks.
I found that, you know, after about four weeks strength training, you know, that's where they start to see kind of that flattening out by eight weeks. Most people are flattened out. And so if you change up the exercises, in many cases, you're going to spurring more connections for your brain to your muscle fibers and you're building additional strength in those muscles.
So about once every eight weeks, you're probably going to want to change up your program to incorporate different exercises that basically accomplish some of the same tasks. So an example would be, let's say you started out with a back squat where the bars on your back and you're doing that for eight weeks. You may want to switch up and for the next eight weeks do a front squat.
This changes the dynamic of the movement. You're at a slightly different angle. And what I found is for a lot of people, once they learn the front squat, get really good at the front, squat, their back squat naturally gets stronger because they have better core positioning and they feel better under the bar. But understanding these progressions and understanding periodization is really, really important. If you want to continue to see progress and get stronger after 40. The final thing I want to talk about is about getting help.
Weightlifting is it may feel like a very solo sport because it's just you against the weight, but in reality, it should not be a solo sport. The first thing I want to preach here is safety. You do not want to be under a weight that you can't control or that you can't lift if that way it's going to come down on you. So exercise is like the squat and the bench press and in some cases, maybe even the overhead press are things that you just want to be very, very careful with.
Having someone there, or at the very least having a safety rack is really important. I'm going to put a link in the show notes of this podcast where you can go in and see video that I've done about safety rack and how you can use a safety rack for safety. I used one, I basically did three exercises as part what we talked about the squat, the bench press and the overhead press.
On each of those exercises, I use the safety rack to provide safety so that if I couldn't complete the lift, I could get out from under the bar without it, you know, being on top of me. So having someone there to spot you is is really, really important if you don't have access to a safety rack.
In most gyms, when you're working out, if you need a spot, ask for a spot. And people will love to come over and help you as long as it's not something that's, you know, too long, too much. But just, you know, tap a guy and say, hey, do you mind spotting me?
And most people in gyms are going to be more than happy to come over there and help you get that lift done safely. Or you can hire a personal trainer. Now, I want to take just a moment to step away from, you know, working with a personal trainer to say there are personal trainers and there are coaches. And it's kind of important to understand who you're hiring if you're going to hire one or the other.
A personal trainer is really good about meeting you in the gym at a certain time, giving you a workout, making sure that you're getting good periodization, good exercise selection, again, which was very, very important, that they're timing your rest, they're counting your reps and they're there to spot you on your lifts. And, you know, in some cases, yes, that's even nice that they're there to help you load and unload machines or weights. But personal trainers, really that I mean, they're in the gym giving you, and most personal trainers are not going to be attentive to you or really care too much about what you're doing outside of the hour, two hour, three hours per week that you spend with them.
A coach, on the other hand, is someone who is going to want to spend more time with you. They're going to want to know what you're doing for the rest of the week. They're going to talk to you about nutrition. They're going to talk to you about rests. They're going to talk to you about sleep. They're going to talk to you about a lot of things to make sure that you're doing things outside the gym that will benefit what you're doing in the gym.
And then again, the coach, if they're there with you, is counting reps. They're looking at your form. They're giving you cues. So a coach is more than a personal trainer. It's truly a coach that's there to help you win. And so, you know, if you're looking for a coach, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/programs-guides-challenges. I have a few different ways that you can work with me.
And I'm a coach. I'm not a personal trainer anymore. We focus on a lot more than just here's your workout, here's your thing. Most of what I do is custom for you. So if you come in to work out, there will be some space workouts. But in a general sense, we're going to talk. And if we decide you need to make some changes in your nutrition, your sleep, your rest, your stress or your lifting or the things you're doing outside of lifting, then, you know, we make those changes.
Now, I did get a few questions on Facebook. One of them related to training as a runner and runners are really interesting because a lot of runners don't really want to weight train. And I get it, because if having the best time is what's really important to you, you have to think about your strength versus mass, OK, or power versus mass.
So if you actually are lifting and gaining weight, gaining pounds of muscle, which can happen, what you might find is that that actually slows your time. So you don't necessarily want to get bigger and put on muscle mass if you're a runner. But lifting can be a good adjunct to your running and areas where I see that most runners can benefit from strength training is in the core work and the lateral work.
So exercises that are not just going and then most runners need to do more upper body training. They don't you know, they don't get any work on their arms while they're running. And as a result, they don't see, they basically don't have enough muscle mass up there to have the things we're talking about to build strength. But you can work and build strength and be a runner, too. It just takes training again, a little bit smarter. If you're doing long runs, obviously, you don't want to do a leg day before a long run, so you have to time your rest and recovery better.
Those are some basic aspects there, you know, as far as someone just getting started out. I'd really encourage you to to consider hiring a personal trainer or coach, because if they can show you how to do the exercise properly, you're going to use good form. You're not going to injure yourself. And by all means, if you do ever find yourself that you have an injury, don't don't try to power through it all pain, no gain is actually doesn't work that way.
If you hurt yourself, you're out of the game and you're not going to get stronger. So if you're over 40, I strongly encourage you and you haven't lifted before. I strongly encourage you to get a coach. Someone will teach you how to do the exercises properly. Someone will pay attention to your movement patterns and make sure that you're doing the right things in the gym and away from the gym to get strong after 40 and optimize your results in time.
You know, if you spent hours in a gym each week, you want to make sure you're getting a benefit for that time. If you're eating extra protein and you're, you know, working on your sleep and your health, all those different things, you want to make sure you're getting your results.
And so you don't want to be injured. You want to make sure you're doing it right, and you want to make sure there's someone there to kind of push you and hold you accountable. So hiring a good coach is really, really important if you want to get the optimal results.
Post Show/Recap
Post show with Rachel.
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On this episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast, we sit down with Dr. John Jaquish and discuss his book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time.
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Transcript
[00:02:48.530] – Allan Rachel, how are you doing?
[00:02:50.250] – Rachel Good, how are you, Allan?
[00:02:51.500] – Allan I'm doing really good, doing really good. This is an exciting week for us here in Panama. You know, up until this point, we've been on a curfew and a weekend quarantine. And so what that means is from 7:00 at night till 5:00 in the morning, you're not allowed out. And if you get caught out, they arrest you. And then over the weekend, it's complete quarantine. So you're supposed to stay home and not go out on Saturday and Sunday. So from seven o'clock Friday night until Monday morning at five o'clock, you're not supposed to be out.
[00:03:24.840] – Allan And so, yeah, they will arrest you, but they're giving us back our Saturdays and they're raising the curfew from seven o'clock to 11 o'clock. So now the curfew will be 11 to five, which I'm already, I'm asleep then. Anyway, I do wake up sometimes before 5:00 but I'm not rushing out the door. Then I'm having some coffee,
[00:03:48.210] – Rachel Oh good.
[00:03:48.290] – Allan But I'm happy I got the Saturdays. It's going to make hitting my goal of 100 miles a month a little easier.
[00:03:54.990] – Rachel Oh yeah.
[00:03:56.010] – Allan When you add a whole extra day and it's a 20 percent increase in days and I'm pretty excited about that, I don't have to spend my Saturdays in my apartment.
[00:04:06.300] – Rachel Oh, that's fantastic.
[00:04:07.940] – Allan So what's going on in your world?
[00:04:10.770] – Rachel Same old. I don't have quite the strict curfew as you guys have, but not a whole lot new here, trying out some new planks or with your traditional planks. So I've tried some new variations this week. I've done the the walk down where you get up kind of in a push up position and put your forearms down and get back up and couple of reaching ones and side planks and yeah, it's been entertaining.
[00:04:38.590] – Allan OK, let me give you a couple more.
[00:04:40.630] – Rachel Ok.
[00:04:41.460] – Allan OK, so this one is called a three tap plank.
[00:04:45.320] – Rachel OK.
[00:04:45.540] – Allan OK. And so you get into the regular plank with your arms extended. So it's the push up style position. OK, and what you're going to do is you're going to take your you're going to take your right hand off the floor and you're going to touch your left shoulder.
[00:04:59.610] – Rachel Oh…
[00:04:59.910] – Allan Then you're going to touch your right shoulder
[00:05:02.050] – Rachel Oh…
[00:05:02.140] – Allan And then you're going to put your arm back on the ground.
[00:05:04.220] – Rachel OK
[00:05:04.670] – Allan And you take your left arm, reach up and you touch your right shoulder and then touch your left shoulder and put your hand on the ground. That's one repetition.
[00:05:13.880] – Rachel That's fantastic.
[00:05:15.260] – Allan OK, so that's a good one. And then if you're struggling with the standard plank, you know, some people will do them on their elbows, which is fine. Are you do it with your hands up, whichever works better, your shoulder strength, your upper body strength, both of them are fine.
[00:05:33.900] – Allan But if you struggle with both of those, or you just you just don't feel like you have the abdominal strength to do that. I recommend people do. And it's basically a yoga move. It's called the bird dog. Are you familiar with the bird dog?
[00:05:46.150] – Rachel I don't think so.
[00:05:47.290] – Allan OK, with the bird dog, you get on your hands and knees.
[00:05:50.430] – Rachel OK.
[00:05:51.040] – Allan OK. And then you want to raise your right arm and point it straight forward.
[00:05:55.110] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:05:55.560] – Allan And then you want to raise your left leg. You try to hold that position. Now, once you get really good at it, you should be able to hold that position for a full minute.
[00:06:04.730] – Rachel Oh, boy.
[00:06:05.430] – Allan You'll shake. You'll shake. It happened. I was I was using this in a class and the shake, shake, shake song came on and they were all kind of laughing because it's like this is appropriate. And then after you get on the right side, then, of course, you switch sides. So left arm out and then your right leg up and you hold that. So that's called the bird dog. So those are two planks that you can add to your repertoire.
[00:06:25.740] – Rachel I absolutely will give that a try. Thank you.
[00:06:28.170] – Allan Good deal. All right. So let's introduce our guest.
[00:06:31.770] – Rachel All right.
[00:06:32.750] – Allan Our guest today approaches health and fitness problems as a scientist and inventor, he invented the Osteo Strong to help fight osteoporosis, the X3 bar to help optimize strength training, along with several other products to help you optimize your health and fitness. With no further ado, here's Dr. John Jaquish.
[00:06:52.160] – Allan Dr. Jaquish, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:55.160] – Dr. Jaquish Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:06:56.960] – Allan You know, when you write a book, Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time, so is cardio. But there's a better way to have the body you want. You're going to get some personal trainers, hating at first until they actually take the time to read the book, which I did. And I agree. When I first saw it, I was like, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not, that's not entirely true until you actually start looking at some of the science behind what you're talking about and why you're saying the way we're doing weightlifting today is a mistake, the way we're doing cardio and what we're doing it for is a mistake. There are better ways to get the same results. And that's really what your…
[00:07:34.880] – Dr. Jaquish Better results.
[00:07:36.100] – Allan Yes. Yes, absolutely. You know, it's it's sometimes it's really hard. I'll talk to a woman. I'll say, OK, look, I want you to do some strength training because you want to get stronger. And their initial response is, but I don't want to get big and bulky and, you know, I just want to lose weight. I just want to lose weight. And in the book, you cite some studies which I think are critical, but you also go a little bit deeper to why doing strength training is important for weight loss and waist circumference and things like that, better so maybe than even cardio. Can you get into that?
[00:08:10.940] – Dr. Jaquish So. cardio, like your central nervous system, is going to make changes to your body to a degree based on your environment. Now if the environment you're putting your body in is to go long distances, run long distances or bike long distances. It's going to try and find a homeostasis that's going to give you some advantages and it's going to adapt to that environment. Well, if you adapt to that environment, you have to think about and let's just use the analogy of an economy car versus a Formula One car.
[00:08:51.910] – Dr. Jaquish So let's say you're a weightlifter, so you're more like a Formula One car. You're built for short distance speed explosiveness. So what do you have? You have a powerful chassis, very high bone density. Now, weight training is actually not heavy enough ever for bone density, but that's beside the point. And that has to do with a lot of its drawbacks. But so powerful, Chassy, bigger engine, more muscle, that bigger engine is going to draw more fuel and it's going to disable you from going as far even burning the same energy. When I run up a flight of stairs and like I was in the Munich airport recently out of the Munich airport, but it's up and down, running up. You run down, running up you run down, especially if you're like you have a tight connection because you've got to go through immigration.
[00:09:50.610] – Dr. Jaquish Like, I'm winded. And then my friend a guy I do some work with we're going to Moscow and and he says oh your, cardiovascular is terrible and I'm like, no it's not. It's better than yours. I just one hundred pounds more than you in that weight is muscle. I'm not just like taller and bigger. Like so my quadriceps are probably three times bigger than yours. And when they contract they draw a lot of blood.
[00:10:16.590] – Dr. Jaquish So I am not efficient for distance. It doesn't mean I have bad cardio health. The health of the heart and the distance you're able to run are two totally different subjects. So when when you look at what the body is going to do, when you start running long distances, it thinks that it needs to give you that output with the least amount of fuel used. So you lose bone density. Plenty of research on this. You lose muscle, cortisol gets up regulated, cortisol does two things. It lessens your muscle, it gets rid of muscle, and it protects your body fat so that you don't metabolize body fat, so cardio in essence, keeps you fatter longer.
[00:11:05.050] – Dr. Jaquish And sacrifices muscle tissue. So last I checked, unless you want to be a distance runner, it's giving you the opposite of what you think you're getting. Completely the opposite, and then you can look at marathon runners versus sprinters, the marathon runners are what's called skinny fat. So yeah, they don't weigh a lot, but you can't see much visible musculature. You see kind of slumped shoulders, exaggerated kyphosis, because they don't even have the muscle to keep their bodies upright. They've lost so much of the muscle, but then they're still soft like still kind of mushy, you can see cellulite in various places and then on these athletes. So cardio is just not the answer unless you just want to be a distance runner.
[00:12:00.380] – Dr. Jaquish And that's the thing. And that's fine. But if you're not going to be that, you got to know what that activity will do to you is not what you want at all, it'll do the opposite. So when it comes to strength training, muscle is an engine that's running all the time and influences your metabolic rate. So, you know, as I have gained muscle, I'm burning more calories all the time. And and so that's big. But also, as I lift I up regulate growth hormone. I up regulate testosterone, so to ensure that I have the building blocks for muscle growth and the growth hormone, is anti catabolic.
[00:12:51.760] – Dr. Jaquish So even if I go on a caloric deficit, which I frequently do, I'm not losing the muscle at all. And so when you do weight training and like I do push the point, variable resistance is more powerful in the weight room, but weight training in the most efficient way. Let's call it resistance training because it's not really weight training.
[00:13:14.590] – Allan That's the word I use.
[00:13:16.590] – Dr. Jaquish Right, right. Like I didn't say, resistance training is a waste of time. But weight training is a waste of time. So so when when you apply the resistance in the most scientifically proven way, you will have all kinds of anabolic effects, build muscle. And if you have your nutrition right, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
[00:13:42.220] – Allan Yeah, now you were working on a problem. It's kind of what started you down this whole path your mother was dealing with with bone density issues. And so you started saying, what can I do to help her improve her life? And so you started working on a product to basically work on bone density that's been quite successful. And while you were doing that work, you not stumbled upon, but you started noticing the strength curve and you started noticing some things about the strength curve that I think we're missing in the past.
[00:14:16.930] – Allan So, for example, you know, novelists back in the 70s put these cans on their equipment so that you got a variable style of resistance as you worked. If we work with most of the resistance bands that are out there today or even like a Bowflex in the old days, I assume they're still using some form of band. As the band got longer, the resistance was variable. So I think that the concept of variable training has been out there for quite some time.
[00:14:44.290] – Allan But you've kind of come across something that says, look, we don't understand. We didn't understand the strength curve well enough to design that equipment well enough. Can you talk about the strength curve and why it's so important for resistance training?
[00:14:59.050] – Dr. Jaquish So what I what I documented in in some research that I ended up doing in a London hospital and this was for the bone density was going to be able to hear me a little bit better if I do this. But you have when you're back here, you have X amount of weight you can hold. When you're out here, you have seven X. So why would we ever work out with weight that's the same when we have different capacity?
[00:15:31.460] – Dr. Jaquish So the weights heavy and the weakest range of motion and then it's really not that heavy at all in the other range of motion. So I just. You know, like I said to myself, wow, weightlifting is so inefficient as a muscular stimulus. And then the next question was, well, maybe, maybe I should just train with bands, but then once you look at a band and what a band can do to you, once you get to a band that will deliver load that's relevant to strength.
[00:16:09.200] – Dr. Jaquish This happens, your wrists get twisted. And when the wrists and ankles, most specifically wrists and ankles get twisted. So now you're just causing a different type of injury than you would normally get from weight training. So the band's by themselves are totally useless. There is a couple of hucksters out there who see the success of my product and then they launched a different one. That's just like a bag of bands and it's like, OK, you can't get a workout from that, but you can certainly charge people money for it, but you're just not going stimulating growth.
[00:16:45.350] – Dr. Jaquish So what I did was I developed an Olympic bar that can hold as much or more than a regular bar. Solid steel on the inside connected, I'll show you this. So, you know, there's a solid steel core and you can see both hooks rotating. So the risk is always kept neutral, and then the exterior is anodized aluminum mill to the million like an iPhone, because I want people to grab it and realize that this is not just some other fitness product made out of cheap plastic or whatever like this is this is it. This is like the iPhone of fitness equipment.
[00:17:29.450] – Dr. Jaquish And now I have over 40 professional athletes using X3 as their main main strength development tool and a joint protection tool. Now, of course, professional athletes, they have to do like their drills and stuff like like skill training has become a lot more important with athletes. I was just on a podcast talking about this with a former NFL guy. And so, like they do their skill training but then X3 is their strength.
[00:18:00.380] – Allan And I think some of the things that you went into are really, really important is, one understanding, yes. I think anyone that's done just something as simple as a push up, they notice that as they go down and get to the bottom position, it's a lot harder than it was when they were up at the top because they can't recruit as much muscle. So they're much weaker there. And that's why a lot of people that that struggle with push ups just do half pushups.
[00:18:24.560] – Allan You mentioned that in the book, that that's the strength curve. That's our recognition of the strength curve and thinking if we go down any further, we're probably not going to come back up. That's just our mind turning off because it says you can't do this. So, you know, that's the one thing. The other thing I think that's really important is you've taken the time to think about how band work can be improved by making sure that the bar does what Olympic bars do, which is rotate. If you've ever had one of those screw cap kinds and they don't rotate, you feel it when you're trying to move that bar because the weights are static.
[00:18:57.860] – Dr. Jaquish You can't really lift, you have neural inhibition. It makes the joints very uncomfortable and muscles start to shut off. So your body's protecting yourself. Yeah. So it's you can't you can't exercise in any serious manner.
[00:19:12.590] – Allan Yeah, and then you have the footplate, which I think is also critical because that's going to keep the ankles from feeling that resistance, whereas a normal band set, you know it just like the handles. Someone's going to stand on the band and use their ankles and try to press overhead. Well, as they start getting stronger with that, that's that's basically going to start turning their ankles. So this gives them the capacity to work as hard as they want to and I think I saw the bands go up to 600 pounds. So there's there's not anyone I can think of that's not going to get a good workout with up to 600 pounds of resistance.
[00:19:48.110] – Dr. Jaquish Anything you do is high reps. So it's like six hundred pounds with, you know, thirty repetitions. Like, you're not going to bump into anyone, in fact, the NFL guys of the NFL guys, not a single one, uses the heaviest band. And it's not and it's really funny because there are fans of the product who do like you're supposed to do 15 reps minimum, but then they get the heavy band and they'll do maybe like 10 sloppy kind of reps or they're like twisting their body and stuff like that.
[00:20:22.190] – Dr. Jaquish And then they're like, oh, I'm stronger than guys in the NFL. That's a lot of attitudes online is it's not really about. How you perform, it's about how you look on or how you think you look on the video you post on Facebook.
[00:20:41.200] – Allan Yeah, and that's just that's just ego. And I'd say if you're over 40 and you're doing strength training, you're doing resistance training, you need to leave the ego at the door. You need to do work that's efficient and effective. You need to make sure that you don't enjoy yourself, because once you enjoy yourself, you're out of the game until you recover. And when you're over the age of 40, that's just much more difficult to do. So this checks off a lot of really good boxes. So I'm pretty excited about this product.
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[00:22:39.850] – Allan Now, you also got into the topic, which I think is really important, because I think when a lot of people want to build mass, they're thinking, oh, I've got to, you know, I've got to hit the carbs, I've got to hit the protein. And, you know, I go low fat. So, you know, I'm eating chicken and I'm eating rice and I'm just, you know, tuna and pasta and I'm just going after it. But you actually follow a plan of ketosis and intermittent fasting. Would you talk a little bit about your protocols and how you're able to build the mass that you have. Because I'm looking at your massive build, the mass that you have while still practicing ketosis and intermittent fasting.
[00:23:20.380] – Dr. Jaquish So the conclusion I came to had mostly to do with realizing protein recommendations and understanding protein quality. So like whey protein, it's easy to get your protein if you count whey protein. But the problem is only 18 percent of the whey protein is of the proper amino acid ratios. So, you know. 82% goes through you as waste. So it's really not worth it to just even bother with whey protein.
[00:23:55.000] – Dr. Jaquish People get so upset, probably because they have six months of whey protein in their in their pantry.
[00:24:04.720] – Allan Yeah, it's cheap, it's the most, it's the most cost less product you could have relative to actually eating some whole food. It's actually a little cheaper. Like if I look at and say oh I can get 30 grams of protein with this two dollar scoop of protein powder or I can go buy, you know, a steak and pay, you know, maybe four or five, six dollars for that at the store, you know, so, yeah, it's it appears cost effective.
[00:24:34.630] – Dr. Jaquish Well, whey used to be the byproduct of well, so it is the byproduct of pasteurizing processing milk and then it was thrown away. It was garbage. And so it was Dandi Shane who started buying it. And say, hey, can I have that trash of yours and I get like a buck every chemical drum or whatever, and then that's where that's really where protein whey protein supplements came from. It was garbage.
[00:25:12.170] – Allan There you go. But but you do follow ketosis, but you're just making sure that the quality of your protein is such that you're able to get the protein you need and that helps you maintain your muscle mass and continue to maintain strength.
[00:25:26.720] – Dr. Jaquish Right. I don't use the word I mean, I'm in ketosis all the time. But what's interesting is I don't use the word much because there's a lot of confusion around it. Like people think to get in ketosis, you need to eat fat. That is 100 percent not true. To get into ketosis, you need to not eat carbohydrates. Now your body turns to fat for fuel, but it could get that fat through what you're eating. This is true.
[00:26:07.060] – Dr. Jaquish But it could also get the fat from the Krispy Kreme donut you had when you were eight years old, which is in your gut. So let's get it from there. So that that's that's really where I want people to focus.
[00:26:25.950] – Allan Well, you definitely do a lot of research, and when you want to solve a problem, by God, you solve it.
[00:26:34.700] – Dr. Jaquish And then I document it because I tell people, people, and sometimes they get like a DM or something. And it says, what's your opinion on this or what's your opinion? And then I'm like, I don't have any opinions. I'll tell you, there's research on that. And what and how we could view that research and what the weaknesses and strengths of that research are, but there are no opinions. Like I wont volunteer my opinion on really anything from a biological standpoint.
[00:27:06.150] – Dr. Jaquish Like I can say, there's no research. Hearing things that might be happening. But I won't wait those one way or the other because, you know. So I guess my point is I'm always trying to be is referenced or I'm trying to reference other research as much as possible. So because I'm saying so many controversial things, nobody would believe it if it were just like this is what I think. If I can I can site a bunch of studies and go, well, you know, these researchers that Dr. Jaquish doesn't know. You know, and years before he launched his products came to these conclusions so they can kick and scream about it. Unfortunately, people are dogmatic about it. I actually get trolled for nutrition even more so than my product.
[00:27:58.720] – Allan I mean, I can understand that because and I was actually thinking about this, I'm working on another book, a little e-book that I'm going to put out. And I was actually thinking about, you know, why why does someone get so mad when you you have a food approach or a way of eating approach that is so different than theirs that, you know, they literally almost like politics, want to come to blows about how wrong you are. And it is just dogma.
[00:28:26.470] – Allan It's just they're tied married to their idea. You know, sometimes when you're looking at research even, which is cool because, you know, you made the comment that most of the research you're following, these guys just never figured out how to productize what they were finding. You have so, you know, boo-hoo on them if they feel bad about it. But you did. You're taking the time to think about it and come up with solutions, which is huge because that's what we need.
[00:28:54.520] – Allan We don't you know, science is great, but if it sits in a journal unread for 20 years, it's not really doing us a ton of good.
[00:29:02.570] – Dr. Jaquish Right.
[00:29:03.340] – Allan Occasionally something will come up, you know, like like Louis Simms at West Side, you know, put bands and cable and chains over the bars and his athletes got really freaking strong and everybody's like, what's he doing? And a few people went in there and basically spied on what is what he was doing, this conjugating method. And it got out. It's like, yeah, this is what he's doing. This is how his athletes are getting really, really strong. And all you've really done is take some of that same. You figured out exactly what the optimal strength curve is and said, OK, if we have an appliance that allows them to work out with this kind of strength curve, or at least as close to it as we can approximate with what technology we have today.
[00:29:45.210] – Dr. Jaquish Oh, I'm dead on. I measured.
[00:29:47.920] – Allan Yeah, I saw the curves online. I was like, yeah, he's right there. You know, it's not there's not much, much, little bit to get in there, but it's there. And so, you know, and you took the time to think about what are the other problems we're going to have with a piece of kit like this if we one, don't think about turning ankles and we don't think about the wrists and we don't think about the bio mechanics of how this is all going to work so that we're, you know, in a way optimizing without the injury. So, again, I'm really I'm really pleased with your product. I think it's I think it's really, really cool.
[00:30:20.980] – Dr. Jaquish Thank you.
[00:30:22.150] – Allan Now, if someone I'm sorry I jumped ahead. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:30:33.400] – Dr. Jaquish Well, so the easiest one is you grow when you sleep. You repair cells when you sleep. So don't compromise your sleep, which really means don't drink alcohol. Thats not the answer a lot of people want to hear or, you know, drink it at the minimum, but it really affects your sleep if you sleep monitor like a motion detector next to you in the bed and like you can use your phone to do this. There's a couple different sleep analysis apps and you'll notice you thrash around all night when you have a lot of alcohol in your system. When you don't, you don't. And you sleep much better and you can have a much better repair of damaged cells.
[00:31:25.290] – Dr. Jaquish And then, you know, the growth, just the muscle protein synthesis that comes with proper strategic strength training. Yeah, so like, that's the easiest one getting getting better sleep by cutting, cutting down or out alcohol. So the other two really have to do the two pieces of information we have that lead to long life, so the two greatest drivers of long life, despite what you read on, you know, nutritional facts.com, which should really be called nutritional lies.com, the two greatest drivers are high levels of strength and low levels of body fat.
[00:32:15.050] – Dr. Jaquish So if you want to live a long time, focus on those two things. So that means strength training or cardio. That means focusing on things like ketosis if you want a low body fat. Animal protein, because it's going to make you leaner, like a vegan nutrition plant based nutrition. From a vegan perspective, you know, there's not a lot of data on the pure vegan, but you notice their weak with a lot of body fat, so they have two things going on that are going to cause them to live shorter lives, longer lives.
[00:32:55.130] – Dr. Jaquish And then and then, you know, when you when you look at the Western diet, like right now, people are practically vegan. 70% of the Western diet is plant based because remember, vegans are not necessarily eating vegetables. Bread is vegan, right? So they're having all kinds of pastries and little nut bars that have nuts from every continent in the world that, by the way, if you want to talk about destroying the environment. There we go, sourcing ingredients from every corner of the world to make some little fake health bar. Like that's a stupid decision, so like some of the vegans I know, they brag about how Oreos are vegan and they eat like sleeves of Oreos for dinner or at dinner time, I'm sure they would call it dinner.
[00:33:56.830] – Dr. Jaquish But like, you're just getting fatter, like you're just getting fatter. That's all you're doing. And you're worsening your cellular health, your metabolic health, your hemoglobin A1C score all the things that they're saying on the news to do the opposite of. But then, of course, like the American Diabetes Association gives out cookies at their events. Like, that's like going to an AA meeting in pouring free shots. It doesn't make any sense at all.
[00:34:31.790] – Dr. Jaquish But, you know, like you can tell somebody they smoke too much, you can tell somebody, they drink too much, you tell somebody they eat too much, and it's like you insulted their ancestors. So unfortunately, that's the situation we live in.
[00:34:45.000] – Allan I've been doing I've been doing this for five years. And I can just tell you, it's like I have a guest on and we don't exactly see eye to eye on the nutrition front. It's never a pleasant conversation for either of us. So, you know, I don't push my own out there. You know, I'm like I'm agnostic generally. I say eat what I'm going to eat because it doesn't matter what I tell you to eat, you're going to still eat what you eat. But I'm just saying, you're right. If we're not paying attention to the quality of our food quality of our protein, we're not paying attention what we're putting in our mouths. It really doesn't matter what else we try to do for our health. It's just not going to happen.
[00:35:20.510] – Allan Dr. Jaquiss, thank you for being on the show. If someone wants to learn more about you, the X3 and the protein supplements and things that you have (Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time), where would you like for me to send them?
[00:35:31.660] – Dr. Jaquish Yeah, I made a landing page with all the links to everything, you know, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. So go to doctorj.com.
[00:35:45.780] – Allan Cool, well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/454 and I'll be sure to have a link there. So Dr. Jaquish, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:35:56.120] – Dr. Jaquish Allan, thanks for having me. This was great.
[00:36:03.340] – Allan Well, Rachel, that was that was a really interesting talk. It's kind of interesting to see John on video. I took some videos and I'll be posting those promos for this episode. So I encourage you guys to go check those out on our Facebook group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and that'll take you to a Facebook group. I'll have a couple of videos posted there of John and we're having this conversation.
[00:36:27.650] – Allan Now, the interesting thing is that when you see John, he looks like a bouncer. You quite literally looks like a guy. If you walked up to the club, you got the guy who's got his arms crossed in front of his chest. And you're kind of like, I'm not going to mess with that guy. He also is bald, but he just looks like a bouncer. But he's a really, really smart guy. He's an inventor. He's a scientist. He looks at data and he solves problems. And so his piece of equipment X3, I'm not I'm not joking. You know, right now, I'm not getting any money from John to say this, but I'm going to buy one and I'm going to check it out because I think it is important to optimize what you can get if if you're not lifting weights at all, or you're not doing any resistance training at all. Shame on you.
[00:37:13.510] – Allan Your bones and your muscles are not happy. I can tell you right now. And you're missing a big pillar of our health and fitness by not doing resistance training. But to start with something, you know, the resistance bands that you can buy on Amazon and I'll have a link in the show notes to some. Those are really great little tool for you to get some exercise at home and they fit in your in your suitcase so you can carry them anywhere you are.
[00:37:40.780] – Allan You can get your resistance workout done. And resistance bands are just a great adjunct to body weight movement because it just gives you an opportunity to do things you can't do, with just body weight. So but he has a specialized process, specialized tool. And I like gadgets and I like playing with stuff. So I'm going to I'm going to probably buy his equipment. So understanding that we can we can do better with science. I mean, in a lot of times I pooh-pooh supplements.
[00:38:09.640] – Allan I pooh-pooh. It's Arjuna's ketones last week. Forgive me, Dr. Lori and I pooh-pooh a lot of other stuff, but there's a time and place when those things matter. You know, I talked about the guys that were lifting at West Side and how they were using chains and bands to maximize their effort. They had a specific task to get really freaking strong. And you might not want to get that strong. But if you if you want your deadlift to get heavier or you want your squat, get heavier, training your body the right way will help that happen.
[00:38:45.850] – Allan And so what's going to happen for someone that does both. You're going to you're going to fatigue your muscles to the full range of motion a lot better than you would if you just did the exercise itself. So I see the tool as a great tool. And again, these were a tool and I like to use the same word twice in a sentence, but it is a tool and it's a tool for allowing you to get stronger. He put a lot of thought into how it's designed and how it's built.
[00:39:13.150] – Allan So it's it's a pretty cool thing and it's something that weighs like seventeen pounds. So it's something you can actually carry around with you. And like I said, just the same convenience you kind of have with bands, although these are probably and likely much better, is going to give you a gym in your hotel room and give you a gym at your house in a time when people don't necessarily want to get out and about around a lot of people and like in the gym, because our gym still closed here.
[00:39:41.770] – Allan Yeah, they basically lumped us in with discos and casinos and concerts and movie theaters. So, you know, we're just that important. But no gyms here. So if I want to do something at home, this is a pretty cool piece of kit to have.
[00:39:57.130] – Rachel Yeah, I'm actually really intrigued by his results with bands. Usually when I think of a big bulky guy, a bouncer type guy, I'm thinking big heavy weights, big Olympic bars, big fat plates. Yeah, serious weight lifting. And I'm pretty intrigued that he can get some really good results with this program or this tool.
[00:40:19.140] – Allan Yeah. And the interesting thing is he's got he's even got professional athletes working with it. So, you know, it's it's not a toy and it's not the little bands that you're buying on Amazon.
[00:40:28.130] – Rachel Right.
[00:40:28.300] – Allan Again, if you're not doing anything there is the start, that's where you go. You get those bands, you do body weight movement. And if you have any questions about it, email me. I'm here. You know, I'm here to help you figure that out. But if you're getting into the training and, you know, scary to get under a lot of weight when you're doing a bench press, it's scary to get under a lot of weight when you're doing squats and there's opportunities for you to injure yourself when you're moving a lot of weight.
[00:40:56.710] – Allan So here's a band that's going to work within your strength curve so that you're getting stronger through the full range of motion and he's built it to be generally safe. So again, I think it's really cool toy.
[00:41:09.930] – Rachel That's something I can see having in our gym, too, especially when if I'm working out by myself, I don't want to be crushed by some heavy Olympic bar.
[00:41:19.320] – Rachel But I'm also interested in the strength curve and the kind of the specificity behind using bands to get kind of a different workout than your basic dumbbell, barbell type move?
[00:41:33.450] – Allan Well, the the equivalent, because, you know, I'm kind of been in this lifting mode for a long time in my life. But one of the core things that comes out is when you do push ups, you can watch someone doing push ups or watch someone doing pull ups and you'll notice how they don't go all the way down.
[00:41:50.850] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:41:51.330] – Allan And the reason they don't go all the way down is because it's so hard.
[00:41:54.120] – Rachel It is.
[00:41:54.870] – Allan You know, it's like I go to the bottom. I might not make it back up to the top. You know, I'm not going to take a deep squat like I'm supposed to. I'm going to take those little half squats and risk my knees because it's hard to get back up. Whereas with this piece of equipment, you're working that weak part hard enough for that weak part and you're working your strong parts as hard as your strong parts can work. So you can find that equilibrium where you're getting the best work.
[00:42:23.340] – Allan So, you know, understanding that having that variable resistance is going to help you get a better workout is, like I said, really, really cool. And there are, the way we used to do it as bodybuilders would be this. Is we knew that we could lift a lot more weight within that strong zone. So we would do partial reps there. And we knew we couldn't lift as much in those weak ranges. So when we found our sticking points, we would work lightweights through heavier, heavier but lightweights there.
[00:42:53.060] – Allan You know, lightweights, but not as heavy as our strong. So you would do these partial reps, you know, and that's cool if you're trying to build muscle. And, you know, look, Buff, you know, once when I was doing it was kind of the goal. But, you know, that's not practical for a lot of people to say, OK, I'm going to do, you know, partial reps in this zone and then I'm going to go change the weights and do more reps in this zone, and then I'm going to do more weight in this zone.
[00:43:22.890] – Allan That's not a practical workout for most people. And it's not strength training. It's that's bodybuilding. It's very different kind of lifting approach. But what he's allowing to do is within the strength area for you to use that same concept and just work the whole range of motion. And you don't even have to change bars or change weights. Just just do the work. So I think it's a great adjunct to a normal weight lifting program. I'm not going to go as far as as John went as to say lifting weights is a waste of time, cardio too. I'm sorry John.
[00:43:58.930] – Rachel Bold. It's a bold statement.
[00:44:00.780] – Allan As I told him. I said, you know, of course I'm getting you on this podcast because I've got something to say to you. But he's a big guy, so I probably wouldn't say it. I would just say good job. But anyway, it's you know, I feel good moving weight, you know, and I don't get the exact same satisfaction moving band. So, you know, there is a motivational factor for me to to get under a bar to to pick up a bar from the ground.
[00:44:31.190] – Allan I love deadlifts, love, love, love, love, love, love deadlifts. It is my favorite thing. But besides steak and oysters and a couple of other things. But it's it's up there anyway. So yeah. I love I love moving way. I love about the feeling of being able to functionally do something and so bands can be a great adjunct if I, you know, maybe I, I don't want to move that much weight or want to know, maybe I'm sticking in my tall, you know, sticking at the right and, you know, sticking at the bottom and I'm just not getting a good start on my left.
[00:45:04.940] – Allan I'm like, OK, I know I can get this weight, but I just got to be able to build strength in that zone. Now, there's ways I could do that. You know, I could put it on rack and I could lift partials. I could do boxes and I could elevate my feet and I could do some things to kind of change those angles and change that weight within those angles. But again, not my favorite thing and too much time dedicated to something like that.
[00:45:27.650] – Allan And it means not adding a tremendous amount of value to my life other than just feeling good about what I'm doing. Bands are going to be a great adjunct to what I'm doing.
[00:45:36.550] – Rachel Yeah, I think so. I think it'll keep things interesting in the gym and give you something different to do and you won't be stuck in a rut or doing get bored doing the same thing all the time.
[00:45:46.990] – Allan All right. Well let's go ahead and call it a day and we'll see you next week.
[00:45:53.700] – Rachel All right. Take care.
Patreons
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SPONSOR This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Reel Paper. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/tp and use the discount code 40plus to get 25% off.
Sharkie Zartman is a former volleyball athlete and champion competitor, UCLA, where her jersey was retired. She was a member of the USA Women's National Volleyball Team, USA all-American, and also competed in the Women's Professional Volleyball Association for five years and is a member of the California Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame. As a coach, she led El Camino College to nine conference championships and two state titles. With her husband Pat she helped the South Bay Spoilers Club team win three national youth titles. She holds degrees in kinesiology and instructional technology. She teaches health and fitness at the community college level and hosts Sharkie's pep talk on Healthy Life radio, where she motivates people to take charge of their health and wellness.
Transcript
[00:02:53.190] – Allan Hey Ras how you doing.
[00:02:55.170] – Ras Great. How are you today Allan.
[00:02:56.790] – Allan I'm doing pretty good. Feeling really good. You know life has it, things are really, really good and things are opening up here in Panama so it looks like my wife and I are going to get an opportunity to come back to the states for a little while, visit family. We've been storing all of our crap what crap we have left. You know, you say you sold everything, but we didn't sell everything. We ended up with a whole garage full of stuff that's in our daughter's garage feeling kind of bad that it's been there for as long as it's been there because we moved it all in there over a year ago. And so she's like, you know, she's really cool about it, actually cooler than I would be.
[00:03:38.690] – Allan But it's like I've got to get there and get that. Plus some of the equipment, some of the stuff that's in there. I went for the gym. Now, the gym is not going to open any time soon. Panama looks at gyms and things. We're just like disco tecs and, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, they haven't opened the schools. They're not going to open the discotheques and they're not going to let us open the gym. So we take advantage of the time that the gyms closed to go ahead and take a trip to the United States, get that equipment, get it in there. So when people do come back. It's going to be a pretty cool place.
[00:04:07.750] – Ras Awesome, that sounds great.
[00:04:10.200] – Allan So let's go ahead introduce today's guest.
[00:04:13.250] – Ras All right.
[00:05:03.320] – Allan Sharkie, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:05:06.110] – Sharkie Thank you, Allan. Happy to be here.
[00:05:08.220] – Allan You know, as someone who kind of grew up being an athlete, I just have to say I love the title of your book, When at Aging How to Stay Fit Free and Love Your Retirement. I just like that whole concept of winning this thing is just really, really uplifting.
[00:05:24.000] – Sharkie Well, thank you. We all want to win. Right. So it's an empowered approach to life and aging.
[00:05:31.890] – Allan And I think it's just one of those things where not many people approach this from the perspective of as a manageable thing like you're managing a game or you're managing a sport. And there are strategies and there are rules and there are things you can do and you have to play the game right or you age faster than you should.
[00:05:52.270] – Sharkie Right, exactly. And that's what I'm trying to get out there because I see a lot of people that hit a certain age. I think 50 is probably the age where most people kind of go, oh, my gosh, what's going on? This is crummy. What can I do? And so, yeah, this is meant to help.
[00:06:12.810] – Allan Good, good. And I think it will because some of the things you share in here, I think are just classic. There are things that we all should be doing. Rather we're fifteen or eighty-five, you know, because we want to live a long, healthy life here. And it's not about longevity, it's about having a quality of life, which is part of what winning is about. We've got to do the right things.
[00:06:36.240] – Sharkie Exactly. It takes work.
[00:06:39.870] – Allan Everything worth while does. So in the book, you share what you call some rules of aging, because we're approaching this like a game. And if we want to win, we need to know the rules. Can you go through some of the rules of aging so anyone getting ready to age knows how to play the game?
[00:06:58.910] – Sharkie Sure. Well, I came up with these, so you probably won't find them any place else. But as I was going through studying the process and comparing it to sports, I thought, well, as an athlete, you need to know the rules of the game. So here are the ones I came up with. And the first thing is every living thing ages. And so it's not something that we can avoid, but we can control it. So that's the good news.
[00:07:27.420] – Sharkie But we're all going to go through some kind of process with aging. It's not, and you know, the only alternative is actually leaving the planet. So it's something we're all going to do. And if we're lucky. Right. And also, I want to make sure that people know that you can live a healthy, fulfilling life at any age, but it does take work. We can't just do nothing. Like we were younger, don't remember getting away with stuff like partying all night or and feeling great the next day.
[00:08:00.180] – Sharkie But that's not going to happen as we get older. So we have to realize that it does take work if we want to have a positive, vibrant life as we get older. And here's one that I want people to know. We are responsible for how we handle the aging process. Our doctors can only do so much. And I think a lot of times we just sort of, oh, I don't feel good, my doctor will take care of me.
[00:08:28.770] – Sharkie Well, that's not the way it is and winning at aging. We have to be responsible for our lifestyle and how we feel as we get older. Because the doctor is just going to bring us back from disease. Right. That's what they do. So but another thing that I think is really cool is the rate of aging is actually related to our lifestyle, our attitude, and genetics. And the cool thing is that we can control two out of those three things.
[00:09:00.360] – Sharkie Obviously, we can't control genetics, but we can control our lifestyle and our attitudes. And so that's what we need to focus on. And then the physiological and psychological conditions are really more important than our chronological age. So in other words, don't you know people that are 80, that are vibrant and healthy and other people have all sorts of physical and mental problems. So it's not really the age. So it's again, a lot of these things are controllable.
[00:09:34.440] – Sharkie We don't get older at the same rate and have the same conditions. It's an individualized process. And when it comes to aging, it doesn't matter who you are, it matters what you do. And also we have to respect aging. I call aging in the book a bitch. So respect study and understand the beast or she will take away your quality of life. And again, how we age is up to us. We need to get in the driver's seat. We need to get behind the wheel. We need to stop being a passenger and a back seat driver. So that's the rules of aging and understanding those things. That's how we're going to win.
[00:10:20.100] – Allan Awesome. Awesome. Now, in the book, when you talk about getting healthy, I guess, or dealing with our aging, you used an acronym and I'm like one of these. I go crazy for acronyms. I love them, but your acronym is RAP. Can you tell us about what the pieces are of RAP and why each is important?
[00:10:40.850] – Sharkie Right. I call it the power of rap. And it's really getting your mind on board because most people focus on their bodies. But if your mind isn't on board, you're not going to get the results that you want. So the mind and body have to be working together. And the three characteristics as an athlete that I think all top athletes share are: Resiliency. That's R. Accountability and Purpose. So did you want me to go through those three and explain them to you?
[00:11:13.880] – Allan Yes, please.
[00:11:15.590] – Sharkie OK, so Resiliency, agings a challenge. And so we have to, if we're going to take this path, which most of us are going to do. We have to toughen up. And as an athlete, when, if you played a sport, you didn't probably moan and groan or quit when you lost a game or something happened. You stepped up, you went back to practice and you did it again and you tried again. And so that's what we have to have resiliency. If we get knocked down, we need to brush it off, get back up, and keep going.
[00:11:53.920] – Sharkie So winning and aging is tough. It's not for wimps, that's for sure. So we have to quit complaining and just say, OK, this is the way it is and I can do this and I'm going to control what I can control. So the Rocky movies are a great example of how many times did that guy get knocked down and get back up.
[00:12:18.710] – Sharkie So and the second one is accountability. And I think we have a serious problem with accountability in our society today. It's like nobody wants to take responsibility for their choices.
[00:12:31.030] – Allan Right.
[00:12:31.790] – Sharkie So, but as we get older, we have to start doing that. We have to take a look at what got us where we are today, and we have to accept the responsibility for that. So we really have to say, hey, you know, I made these choices because of that. Maybe that's why I'm dealing with this and I can change those choices. Too often people blame other people or blame the conditions. And as an athlete, you probably know, that that never got you better at your sport. So that's the accountability factor.
[00:13:10.880] – Sharkie And I use a fun story in the book about this guy at this conference I went to with all these trainers and they were trying to say the coolest things that are out there in terms of supplements and gimmicks. And this guy came up when it goes, I don't know everything about it goes, but I have something that works just tell your client to stand in front of the mirror with no clothes on and say, I am responsible for this and I am the only person that can fix it. That was a powerful message.
[00:13:40.490] – Allan There you go.
[00:13:43.040] – Sharkie And the last one is purpose. And I know that that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But basically, it's knowing what you want and start being excited about getting it. I think too often early in our lives, we're trying to make ends meet. We're taking care of our family. We're concerned about our careers. But a lot of times after 50, now's the time for us to kind of go, hey, what do I really want?
[00:14:13.940] – Sharkie We've never really asked ourselves that question before. And once we find out and it's different for everybody and that can be more than one purpose, it gets you excited about life. It gets you excited about getting up in the morning and getting going. And a lot of times when people retire and they lose some self-worth because they're not doing this what they've done for so many years. And but they still have their gifts. They still have their energy. And so they just need to find a way to channel that. And so those are the three things that I think are really, really important. The three characteristics that you need to win at aging.
[00:14:56.120] – Allan Yeah, I completely agree because things are going to happen. You had a knee replacement, I think you said, that was that required rehab, required some really hard work to work through that you easily could have just quit and said, OK, well, now I'm just going to sit here and start doing something like reading because I can't get back in the gym. I can't go do my exercises. I can't do the things I was doing. But you did the rehab, so now you can.
[00:15:26.530] – Sharkie Right, and I got to tell you, anybody that's considering a knee replacement, it's not an easy surgery to recover from. I was six hours on this machine every day that took my leg through different ranges of motion. And I had to do that to get back to one 120 degrees in flexion and extension. And it was hard and it was painful. But I went, there's no way I'm going to have gone through that surgery and not come out better. So, yeah, I got to do it.
[00:16:02.740] – Allan I tore a rotator cuff and, you know, went through and I had the surgery on a Thursday and I was in rehab on Monday. And I was like, I'm not playing around with this. I'm going to get this shoulder back as quickly as I possibly can.
[00:16:17.590] – Sharkie Good for you.
[00:16:18.580] – Allan And then and then the other two, I think we can look at the Blue Zones and some of the other books that are out there, and they kind of make it clear if we don't have a purpose, we don't have a fire. And if we don't have a fire, then that's not really the life we want to live anyway.
[00:16:34.240] – Sharkie Right.
[00:16:34.860] – Allan And then after that, it's like, OK, so here you are and you have this self-awareness. What are you going to do about it? And, you know, we don't have necessarily, unless you hire someone, you don't have a coach out on the field telling you, OK, run this play, do that play, do this thing. You've got to figure some of that out for yourself.
[00:16:52.660] – Allan But the reality is that information's there. It's not rocket science, even though the body's a really complex organism, we know the things we're supposed to be doing, eating whole food, moving, meditating, sleeping. You know, we all know those things. So I think it's really important for folks to really wrap their head around all three of these in your RAP, because it is each and every one of them is important. You can't get there without all three of them.
[00:17:20.980] – Allan Yes. Yes.
[00:17:23.230] – Allan Now, you brought another concept into this thing and again, goes back to your sports and athletic days, the concept of playing offense and defense, because I think most of us are thinking and just thinking in terms of, well, we're going to play this game and play defense. I'm going to try to avoid getting older. I'm going to try to avoid hurting myself. I'm going to, you know, try to avoid some of the things that maybe I did in my 20s and 30s. You know, we're thinking of it from a defensive perspective, but you say we have to do both. If we're going to win this game.
[00:17:54.090] – Sharkie We really do offense, obviously scoring. So if you're in a team sport, you want to score. And defense is preventing the other team from scoring. And actually, when when you're in sports, I think a lot of times people focus more on offense. Right. So like a coach that wants to run and gun and just in basketball and get down and shoot within eight seconds. And, you know, basically, if if you're successful, you're going to win, right. Because you get more opportunities at shooting.
[00:18:28.900] – Sharkie But a lot of times sports, they actually don't work enough on defense. And defense, if two teams are similar defense is preventing the other team from scoring. Right. So you need them both. You need them both. And so you need to be proactive in terms of offense. You need to go after a healthy lifestyle. It's on you. It's your responsibility. You need to do this. The doctor is not going to make you do it.
[00:19:03.910] – Sharkie So but defense, I think, is what I'm looking at defense in terms of what aging is, prevention. And, you know, taking a look at something like COVID, which hopefully will go away soon. You know, we all hear the prevention. Wash your hands, social distancing, masks, don't go to large gatherings, eventually have a vaccine. So COVID doesn't win. And so I think that we need to have both. And there's a lot of overlap between the two. But we can't just focus on one. We can't just focus on defense. We can't just focus on offense.
[00:19:48.170] – Allan Yeah. And I completely agree with you. There is one thing I'd like to say is, you know, with COVID and again, I agree with you, I hope this is something we get rid of and don't have to deal with again, for a long, long time. But I hate the term social distancing because to me, it's a horrible, horrible choice of words.
[00:20:11.310] – Sharkie It is!
[00:20:12.270] – Allan We want physical distancing.
[00:20:14.070] – Sharkie Exactly!
[00:20:15.150] – Allan So we need social you know, that's part of purpose. That's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing, you know, so I don't want to socially distance myself from the people that I care about. I want to be, you know, not necessarily physically around them, because that's you know, that's part of the issue. I have to be smart about it. But I think the core of this is that defense isn't all that sexy. You know, it's just washing your hands, doesn't seem like, you know, a big, sexy thing to do, whereas, you know, get on the bike and go for a ride and you know, and you're enjoying the outdoors and you get at the same time, feeling the wind on your face.
[00:20:51.750] – Allan And, you know, you break a record because you went faster this time than you've gone in a long, long time. So you have a new PR and that's exciting. That's fun. That scoring is fun. Sometimes it's just, you know, brush your teeth, wash your hair. You know.
[00:21:07.200] – Sharkie I know, prevention is not fun.
[00:21:11.430] – Allan Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:14.830] – Sharkie Offense is fun.
[00:21:14.870] – Allan But you still have you still have to do both.
[00:21:17.490] – Sharkie Right.
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[00:22:46.740] – Allan Now, in the book, you went through the components of fitness, and I always like to, if I see someone who's written about this, I really, I like to come back to this, because I think it's, you know, will typically if we start working on fitness, there will be something that we're going to be really, really good at. Like you might be really good at cardio and you can ride your bike forever and you can go, go, go, go, go. But you lack upper body strength or you don't have much mobility or balance. Can you go through the components of fitness and why each one, what we should be doing for each one of those, particularly as we start getting older.
[00:23:22.080] – Sharkie Right. Right. Well, first of all, we need to know that they are all important and so you can't just be healthy and when at aging, just doing one thing. And so the one that gets the most attention usually is cardiorespiratory endurance because it's systematic, which means that affects all the systems of the body. And the definition of that just scientific is the ability of the heart and lungs to transport oxygen and nutrients to the cells and eliminate waste products so the cells can do their jobs.
[00:23:56.490] – Sharkie And so that's basically what it is. And as most of us know, that's prolonged, sustained large muscle movements. Like riding your bike, like walking, jogging. And so usually the timeline on this is to do so at least for 30 minutes a day. And yet it used to be that that was the main guideline. But now we know that we can cut it into chunks. It doesn't have to be non-stop for 30 minutes. And so we can cut it into chunks and still get the benefits from it.
[00:24:33.780] – Sharkie And there are so many things that we can do with cardiorespiratory endurance. And I think especially now people need to get creative, because a lot of the things that they've done in the past, they can't do anymore because of everything shutting down. So, yeah, and getting outside is a great way to get your cardiorespiratory endurance. Writing an exercise bike indoors is very different than riding it outdoors, right?
[00:25:05.160] – Allan Yes.
[00:25:06.670] – Sharkie Yes. And so that's the one that gets the most attention, but one that I think is especially important, especially as we age, is the muscle fitness, which is muscle strength and muscle endurance because as we age, we lose muscle mass if we don't work on keeping it. And as you know, a lot of people, as they get older in their 80s, a lot of times they lose their mobility and nobody wants to lose that. And so we have to keep our muscles strong and active. And there are two components. Again, muscle strength, muscle endurance, we can work on them together or we can work them separately. Most people work them together, and that's just lifting weights or doing resistance training. And the reps would be somewhere between 8 and 12 reps.
[00:26:02.400] – Sharkie And you can do a whole muscle resistance training workout in 20 minutes and so it doesn't take that much time. And you can do it at home with weight machines, you can get strap's I have a TRX machine at home that really works. So there's a lot of different ways to do that. Resistance training. It's not just on the machines that you have at the gym. And so those two are very important. But flexibility is too, that range of motion present at a joint. I mean, we want to be able to move our bodies so we can get up off the floor. Right.
[00:26:44.470] – Sharkie And that involves stretching, making sure that we do work the joints through their full range of motion each and every day. And one of the best ways that I like to do it is through yoga. There are so many different yoga practices out there. Some of them are physical. Some bring in other components like meditation. But combining flexibility with your other workouts for cardiorespiratory endurance and muscle strength is very doable. So there's a lot of hybrid workouts out there that do all three.
[00:27:19.770] – Sharkie And the last one I would like to talk about his body composition because and that's the proportion of body fat to the fat-free mass. And people need to understand body composition is, because otherwise a lot of times people start a resistance training program and then they stand on the scale and they go, oh my God, I've gained weight, especially for women. And a lot of times that's muscle mass. That's. Good. So getting a body composition test is really, really important to know what that mass is.
[00:27:54.990] – Sharkie Obviously muscle. We want muscle and if we have too much body fat, we'd like to get rid of that. But what happens as we get older, especially when we get to be over 40 with losing that muscle mass, ok, and a lot of times we don't notice it happening. We start to put on body fat, ok, and we're doing the same things. It's kind of like we haven't changed our lifestyle, but we start gaining weight. And I think especially this happens to women and so. So we need to be aware of body composition. So those are the components, muscle strength, muscle endurance, cardiorespiratory endurance, flexibility, and body composition. We need them all to win it aging. Yes.
[00:28:39.770] – Allan Yes, I agree. That's why I wanted you to go over them because I do think it's really, really important. And the cool thing about all of them is that you mentioned yoga for flexibility and mobility. You mentioned different ways that we can get cardiovascular fitness. You mentioned different ways that we can do resistance training. And even with body composition, we can try different things. So it should never be stale. It should never get old. It should be something where you're excited to do it. You know, and particularly, I think when people want to continue sports into their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, that's an excellent opportunity because it clearly demonstrates that you're keeping yourself fit and capable.
[00:29:30.690] – Sharkie Yeah, sports are great because they combine all of these components. I mean, you're you have to work on muscle strength, you have to have the endurance in order to go the distance, you have to have the flexibility. So, yeah, you're right. So sports are a great alternative. And people who play sports a lot of times don't realize they're working out because they're having so much fun. Right.
[00:29:56.610] – Allan Until you're sore the next day and you're like, hey, I did something.
[00:30:03.000] – Sharkie I earned that soreness.
[00:30:05.030] – Allan Yeah.
[00:30:05.550] – Sharkie No, we won.
[00:30:08.670] – Allan Or we scored!
[00:30:09.300] – Sharkie We scored
[00:30:10.020] – Allan Yeah, the offense scored. Now we got to play some defense and get ourselves recovered and ready to go again. But, you know, in the book you talked about meditation and meditation used to be one of those things we would say woo-woo. And occasionally you would do it with yoga, you know, with a little less of a spiritual backing to it. But I think now if you didn't know meditation, I mean, they've been in a rock, if they don't know. But meditation has become a little bit more mainstream. But you mentioned three breakdowns. And I just kind of want to go through them because it's three types of meditation. So just like we talked about with fitness, there are different modalities of how you can do and accomplish that task. And it's no different with meditation. Can you talk about the three sections or approaches to meditation and what he does?
[00:31:03.450] – Sharkie Sure, sure. The first one, I think, is the most common. It's called exclusive meditation. The reason that works a lot of times because your brain has something to focus on. Your brain likes to have something to do. Otherwise it's going to just, you're going to have the monkey mind. Right. You've got it all different times. And I think probably the one that I like the most and I've taught my yoga students is a primordial sound, exclusive meditation, where they focus on saying to themselves, SO, s o on the inhale. HUM h u m on the exhale.
[00:31:47.850] – Sharkie And it's real easy. But for some people, it's hard because the mind likes to wander. And I tell my students, just go back when your mind starts to wander, just go back. So on the inhale hum on the exhale. Because what that's doing is it's giving your whole rest of your body a chance to relax, because if the mind is always running amok, it's yourselves are listening to your mind. So if finally, your mind has something to do that's just repetitive with just one thought, one thing, then your whole rest of your body gets to relax.
[00:32:26.340] – Sharkie And it's an easy exercise, meditative exercise to do. And a lot of my students just really enjoy it. So they feel so much better afterward and you don't have to do it for very long. I learned this at the Show Presenter, Depok Chopra. And when I first went into that meditation room, I couldn't sit still for five minutes. After learning this technique, I could be there for 30 minutes and it felt like two minutes.
[00:32:56.180] – Sharkie And so it's it's very powerful and it's very easy. The Inclusive one is a little harder. And so this one, you're kind of letting in the thoughts and but you sit quietly and you just let your brain do the thoughts. But the key here is to not attach any judgment or any emotion to the thoughts. So it's like you're watching them from a distance. It's like you're sitting there watching logs go down a stream one at a time. And I've done this also in my class.
[00:33:29.620] – Sharkie Some of my students really like it because what ends up happening, you're watching yourself think and the thoughts start to slow down and eventually sometimes the thoughts stop. And you're just there totally relaxed in a meditative state. Isn't that cool? So that takes, that's a little harder than the exclusive. The mindfulness we can do every day doing anything. We don't have to sit down or lie down to do mindfulness. It's just being totally aware in the present moment.
[00:34:06.520] – Sharkie And sometimes I'll use a mindfulness technique in terms of just doing a body awareness exercise with my students. I'll have them start at the top of their body and just send their awareness up to their forehead, or to their mouth. They become very aware of the present moment as to what's going on there. But we can do this at like when we're washing the dishes instead of thinking about everything else going on in the past or future. We're just washing the dishes and just be right in that present moment.
[00:34:42.580] – Sharkie So the mindfulness, I think, is really cool because we can do that anywhere, any time. And it's very, very relaxing and soothing. Most of us spend our time either in the past thinking about what we did and obsessing over what we did wrong or we're worried about the future. So mindfulness is a technique on how to stay in the present moment.
[00:35:06.910] – Allan Yeah, and guys washing the dishes counts as washing your hands so use that as some mindfulness time.
[00:35:14.560] – Sharkie That good. That's good.
[00:35:20.620] – Allan And I've done all three of these. And you're right, the inclusive one is kind of the hardest one because invariably I would think of something that I needed to do and I was really afraid to let that thought go. And it took me a while to say, OK, it's going to come back around. I'll remember it. I know I will. But yeah, you get something that is big and you're like, oh, I got to get that done. And yeah, now I'm sitting here not doing it. And so it's a little harder to balance. All of these are easier, particularly.
[00:35:49.990] – Allan I mean, other than the mindfulness, I think all of the other ones are much easier if you have some guidance. So, you know, you might get some apps or go on YouTube and get some videos, you know, to listen to. But when they're guided, it makes it just a little bit easier to get into it. And you start out five minutes and you get comfortable with that. You stretch it out to a little bit longer. And yeah, before you know what you're capable of doing a lot more than you would have thought.
[00:36:15.810] – Sharkie Right. Have you ever done a guided meditation where they actually the audio takes you to a place and describes the place and you're actually using your mind to be there? Have you ever done that?
[00:36:27.890] – Allan Yeah. I've done one of those. I was I subscribed to the Headspace app and it had all kinds of stuff in there. And it was, part of that was the stress relief app so I spent a lot of time with that. But yeah, they had the others. I've gone on YouTube as well and listened to a few where they're like, OK, you're going to leave your body and try to imagine yourself floating above you. You see yourself there?
[00:36:51.680] – Sharkie Yeah.
[00:36:52.450] – Allan You go up to this place where you don't feel any pain, you don't feel any regret, you don't feel anywhere.
[00:36:57.980] – Sharkie Right, that's right. Yeah. Very cool.
[00:37:01.690] – Allan Right. So Sharkie, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:37:11.380] – Sharkie Well, OK, I'm going to take a holistic approach to this, if you don't mind. So, yeah, I'm a health professor and I teach holistic health. So I think we need to and I'm going to talk about three that basically is most of that. But, the fourth one, if we have time, some people will find it harder. The first one people will identify with that, because that is talking about your body, that your body in terms of what you can do to make your body healthier. And that's the wellness.
[00:37:45.550] – Sharkie So one area that I think a lot of us, the nutrition and all of us want to know what's the best way to eat, and there is an idea called bio-individuality, which actually means we're all different. There's not one diet that is for all of us. So we need to spend some time figuring out the kinds of foods that feel good in our bodies and help us live our lives. And because there are some foods out there that are deemed healthy, but they're not healthy for some people. Some people have food allergies. Right.
[00:38:26.030] – Sharkie So it takes time and motivation to really explore foods in terms of what we enjoy, what feels good inside of our bodies. And one thing I would say to everyone is to try to stay away from processed foods. You mentioned that eating whole foods because of all the toxins, the toxins put us at risk for autoimmune disease and everything else. And so if we can just stay away from those kinds of foods and add more whole foods, more fruits, and vegetables, fresh, more whole grains, more protein that is clean, we would notice a difference. And so that's the physical part.
[00:39:14.240] – Sharkie The next one is, I think, even more important, and that's the mental-emotional components of wellness. And like I said, the mind and body are connected. So you can't just work on the body and not have the mind on board. And I think one thing that all of us can do as we age is start having a more positive mindset. You know, the paradigm for aging is it's an eventual period of decline. And that's pretty depressing. I like to say it's a challenge, it's an opportunity and it's a privilege. And so just doing that kind of changes the feeling of what aging is about. And so we need to look for the good instead of always what's wrong. It's hard to do in this day and age, but we can do it if we focus on what's good today.
[00:40:05.830] – Sharkie We can have a journal. We can basically do this. We can look for the good and focus more on what can I do not what can't I do. What can I do that I want to do? And then I just had a person on my show, his name is Ted Larkins. He wrote the Get to Principle. He goes instead of saying, you have to do this, I get to do this. And so this is all mind-shifting towards positivity, which I think we need to do. We need to stop complaining about everything.
[00:40:40.810] – Sharkie And the last one is social, social wellness. We need to put together our own change. We probably have a lot of people out there that draw our energy away that are negative. All they do is complain we need to get people in our lives that are positive and have the same goals as us. When I was doing a lecture once this woman raised her hand and because I told I identified those people as social vampires and she goes, What if you're married to one? And I said, well, you need to crowd him out with other people in your lives that are positive. And so and we get to choose our own team. So it's not like we're back in the days where we had tryouts and stuff to be on teams. We get to choose our own teams now, and that includes our doctors and our health providers. And so, yeah, so we need to get our team together.
[00:41:37.310] – Sharkie And the last component is spirituality. And I tell my students, I give them one phrase, and have them think about it. Imagine that you are spiritual being having a physical experience. And when I tell them that some of them just kind of go, oh, I mean, isn't that a cool thing to think about?
[00:41:59.770] – Allan Yeah.
[00:42:00.730] – Sharkie Yeah. And so so those are the approaches, the three strategies that I use with that last one thrown in for fun.
[00:42:08.980] – Allan Thank you, Sharkie. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, When it Aging, How to Stay Fit, Free, and Love Your Retirement, where would you like for me to send them.
[00:42:20.500] – Sharkie My website. It's my name SharkieZartman.com. And they can also go to Amazon and the book is up and there'll be some reviews up there and some information. And also my other books can, are up on. Amazon and Barnes Noble and but basically my website has pretty much mostly what I do and my background.
[00:42:53.330] – Allan Cool. Well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/452 and I'll be sure to have links there in the show notes. Sharkie, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:43:04.880] – Sharkie Well, thank you for having me, Allan. It was fun.
[00:43:07.370] – Allan Well Ras, that was a pretty cool episode, don't you think?
[00:43:15.170] – Ras Oh, it was. Lots of good information here.
[00:43:18.380] – Allan Yeah, she was just a spitball of fire. I really enjoyed the conversation with her. And, you know, while we were recording her, I think her husband was in the background, Pat. And it was funny because in the book he and I don't even know that I got into this in the interview so much as I did afterward. Sometimes I have better conversations afterward sometimes than I do during the actual episode. But her husband, Pat, you know, one of the things she said about him was that he wants to live until at least 200. And so I wanted her to know that I'm in Pat's corner there. I hope Pat makes it and leads the way for the rest of us to live longer, healthier lives. So it was a really cool conversation.
[00:43:53.150] – Allan And I promise, guys, we're past that point of talking about aging. I've had three or four episodes in a row. So we will move on and will talk about some other things next week and I'll let you know what's going on. But so what were some key things that you took away from this episode Ras?
[00:44:07.760] – Ras Well, she's got the point right on the head here is that we all want to win at aging, don't we? We want to have a really good quality of life as we get older. And sometimes that's hard to get to unless you put in the effort.
[00:44:23.700] – Allan Yeah, I think so many times people look at the aging curve and they just think, OK, that's my path. That's what I'm going to follow. You know, my grandfather lived till he was in his 60s. My father died in his 60s. So, that's my path. They both had diabetes. Therefore, that's my path. My whole family has obesity problems and the issues that come along with that, that's my path.
[00:44:45.870] – Allan But the reality of it is if you approach your life with the mindset that it's not your path, you decide your path, then you can change that trajectory. It doesn't have to follow the standard path where you're living the standard life expectancy of, you know, your family or your history. You can rewrite that second part. You can go on a different path and live longer, live better. And I like that she looks at it as a competition, as winning something, because if you go in with a losing mindset, then that's where you are. You know, it's the Ford quote, if you think you can. You're right. If you think you can't, you're also right. You lead a lot of what goes on with your life, with your mindset.
[00:45:34.140] – Ras Absolutely. I like how she mentions you can't change your genetics, but you can change your attitude and you can change your lifestyle. It's so true.
[00:45:45.480] – Allan Yeah, and so many things that we're facing today, you know, obesity, some cancers, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, a lot of these things we're learning are lifestyle diseases. We, unfortunately, we're doing it to ourselves and we've got to fix that.
[00:46:04.960] – Ras That's so true. She mentions about being proactive with the offense, about taking the lead and leading a healthy lifestyle, making the changes to lose weight, gets healthier, get stronger, and do what you can. I mean, you just don't have to sit there and age. You can do what you can to enjoy it and improve the quality of your living as you age.
[00:46:26.590] – Allan Yeah, I liked that she had that offensive approach along with the defense. You don't win a game without having both. But, you know, most people don't think about the offensive part of this. And one thing that I like when I'm working with clients, and they'll invariably want to use the scale as a measurement of success. And so I'll be working with them and then they'll step on the scale. And they've gained a pound. And it's like a tragedy, you know, they want to they just basically want to quit and if you look at it from the perspective of a football player. And I don't know how much you know about football, but in general, you have four downs to get 10 yards. So you have four plays to get the ten yards that you want to get.
[00:47:10.650] – Allan And if a team goes out there on their first down and maybe they lose three yards, you know, they ran the wrong, they ran to the left and the guys on the left on their side wanted it more than our guys did. And we lost you know, we lost three yards on that play. We don't punt the ball. We don't stop. We don't quit the game and say, well, I'm just going to stop doing this. What we do is we know we have three more downs. We learn from that play. We say, hey, let's not run that play again, you know, maybe later in the game we'll open things up. But let's not run that play right now because it's not going to work. It's not working for us the way we want it to. We've got to get positive yards.
[00:47:49.070] – Allan So now we're looking at throwing the ball or we're looking to run to the right, or we're going to do some kind of misdirection to take care of those aggressive players over there. But we do something different because we know we have more downs in us. We know we have more opportunities. So I agree with that. We can win this. We have to think of it as a total game. You know, aging is not a thing that happens to you today and something that's happening every day. So you're in the game every day whether you want to or not. You just have to choose if you're going to continue to lose those three yards, every single play, or if you're going to make some positive yardage here and there where the game lets you. And that being offensive-minded gives you that opportunity to take advantage of things.
[00:48:31.940] – Ras That's absolutely right. And in the world of running, we, when you're out there running miles, things happen. It always does. You feel a hot spot and a blister comes on. So you stop and tend to it. You're feeling hungry. You stop and have something to eat. The whole point is, is that you're listening to what your body is telling you and you do something about it. Again, you just don't have to wait around and see what happens next. You take control and if you encounter a problem, you learn what it takes to fix it and get after it.
[00:49:03.900] – Allan Absolutely. All right, so anything special going on for you coming up?
[00:49:12.030] – Ras No, just running miles. It's a cut back week for me, so I'm just taking the miles a little light this week. But next week I'll be ramping back up again and I'll have some double-digit days
[00:49:23.100] – Allan Double digits, love it.
[00:49:24.870] – Ras My favorite!
[00:49:26.900] – Allan A lot of me time, a lot of me time.
[00:49:29.100] – Ras You bet ya!
[00:49:29.440] – Allan Getting those miles, good for you.
[00:49:30.420] – Ras For sure. Thanks.
[00:49:32.250] – Allan Now me, the cool thing is things are slightly opening up here in Panama, so it looks like I'm going to get a chance to come back to the States for about a month to see some family take care of a few things that I left undone in Pensacola. So we're looking at taking a trip there in October. So about a month from now, I'll be in Pensacola, where we're flying into Miami, and I'll spend a few days there.
[00:49:58.980] – Allan Then we're going to drive up to Pensacola and we'll spend about a week there. Then we're going to drive up to Indiana, near Chicago and spend about a week there and then to Asheboro, North Carolina, which if you look at North, can I just point your finger right in the very middle of it? That's where Aspro is. I'll go there for about a week and then we'll come back down and we think we think we might have to get one of those little speed tests, you know, just to know that we're not infected before we get on the plane.
[00:50:25.680] – Allan Right now, they're charging about two hundred fifty dollars for those COVID tests. So we have about right now the way the rules are. We have to have that within 40, 48 hours of getting on an airplane. So we'll go down into the Miami area, get that test, wait out the results. I think it's supposed to be immediate now, but we'll see. See, we have to get one that we get an answer for relatively quickly.
[00:50:48.420] – Allan And I think they're like 250 bucks. Maybe the price will come down before then. We'll have yeah, well, we'll have the test. But yeah, we're driving all this other than we are going to fly into Miami. So we've got a couple of flights and then we'll be in Miami and then we're going to drive. So my wife and I will get a lot of car time, a lot podcast's audience.
[00:51:07.480] – Allan That sounds awesome. Well, it is awesome. You start looking well. OK, that's a four and a half-hour drive. That's a six and a half-hour drive, but an eight-hour drive. That's twelve, which.
[00:51:16.920] – Allan So lots of time in the car sitting. But if you're anywhere in between all those things, just reach out to me: allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com, I'd love to hook up. We can get a coffee or have a cocktail, depending on what time of day or night it is and how much further I've got to drive. But you know, so you do reach out and you know, again, I'm around. So I do want to meet you if you're there.
[00:51:40.740] – Allan So so do that. That sounds great. All right. Well, Rachel, you have a great week.
[00:51:47.200] – Ras Thanks. You too.
Patreons
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Tony Horton, creator of the hugely successful P90X series as a part of Beach Body shows us how to stay fit as we age. His fitness lifestyle allowed him to overcome a horrific bout of Shingles.
Transcript
[00:02:19.240] – Allan Tony, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:02:21.860] – Tony Allan, my pleasure to be here, man.
[00:02:24.590] – Allan No, actually, it's my pleasure. You've been a big part of my life early on anyway. I had gotten out of out of college, and in college I was a gym rat. I was the guy who was always in the gym every day from 2-3:00. The guy that owned the gym knew I was going to be there.
[00:02:42.210] – Allan So I actually started spelling him for his lunches each day is like, Allan, just make sure nobody kills anybody while I'm gone. And he would he would go get some lunch. And the only bad day we had was when he got food poisoning for eating bad fish and he didn't come back. I didn't know what to do. But after I got out, I had this supposed to have this great job. You go to college, get a great job.
[00:03:01.120] – Allan But my income was actually less. And so I was like, OK, I can't afford a gym membership, but I need to stay in shape. I like where I am. I like what I'm doing and I want to stay in shape. And so I happened upon an infomercial for P90X and there you are, smiling and active and energetic and a little bit a little bit intimidating, but in a cool way. In a cool way.
[00:03:29.370] – Tony I like the way you put that. I like that.
[00:03:31.830] – Allan Well, you know, you have a certain persona and you bring that out and you talk in one of the videos that I watched about, you know, how when you first started, someone said, just be Tony. And you did. And it clicked. And I think that's the thing about you is that you were just this genuine cool guy that everybody wants to hang out.
[00:03:53.350] – Allan I want to come work out in your backyard with you because your gym in your backyard are just so cool. Now, I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily be able to keep up with you. And you're nine years older than me. But damn, it looks like you have a fun, fun time. We do.
[00:04:08.220] – Tony We do. The whole property is a gym, pretty much. You could work out in the bathroom. Dang it. There's so many other places to do it. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's been an amazing ride for me. It's hard to believe I'm 62. I don't know what the heck that's supposed to feel like. It feels kind of better than twenty two or thirty or forty two, you know what I mean. And that's just because I, because I've learned a lot along the way.
[00:04:30.930] – Tony I mean and I'm always making adjustments along the way. and P90X was sort of one one phase, one stage of my learning process. Prior to that. I was a gym rat too. I was just going to the gym and I was doing cardio and weights and that was it. Sometimes I would do both the same day and sometimes I would alter them. But I had a very sort of limited, myopic view of what fitness was. And I just I was very fortunate.
[00:04:53.190] – Tony I had a lot of kismet in my life. And I ran into some really interesting people and I put myself in situations where I was uncomfortable and I wasn't very good. I mean, right now I'm in the middle of a handstand challenge with my sister, her and her daughter, my niece and some friends, and only because I can't do them. So, I mean, if I can't do something, then it's interesting, then I will I'll spend months trying to get good at handstands, you know what I mean.
[00:05:15.960] – Tony So just being curious, man, that's all I've ever been. I know there wasn't really a question there, but know that your comments kind of leave me in my path at this point.
[00:05:25.860] – Allan So absolutely. And I think we all can actually talk in our lifetimes about how we we have these stages. And so you had your beachbody stage and now you've got these kind of these new cool things happen, your power life supplement brand and your Tony Talks podcast. It's a video podcast that comes out. I saw it on YouTube. At least the first one was out a couple of weeks ago. And, man, it's like I said, you just you just doing so much good for so many people that I'm I'm proud to have you on the show.
[00:05:56.280] – Tony Oh, wow. Well, thank you, man. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
[00:05:59.970] – Allan So what are the things that that you shared in one of the interviews I saw, and, you know, there's a lot of them, but I've kind of pulled together because you you have this really cool keys to success concept in your head and applies to fitness. It applies to your business side. It applies to probably everything you do in your life, including your relationship with your wife, Shawna, can you talk about your keys to success and particularly as it relates to fitness?
[00:06:29.280] – Tony Well, gosh, you know, I mean, I have these paragon events here at my home. We've had four so far. And we invite people from around the world. We had a couple come in from Kuwait City. You know what I mean, most folks are coming in from Canada and other places in the US. And the seminar that I'm doing right now is is really way outside of the box of things that we're in In my book, The Big Picture: 11 Laws That Will Change Your Life. You know variety, consistency, intensity, accountability, different kinds of things.
[00:06:55.350] – Tony But if you really kind of pull back from sixty five thousand feet and you look down, you know, what is the foundation of who you are? And so this is just my story. But whenever I disseminate my story to different people in interviews or or live events or whatever it is or a paragon, I've been here at my home. You know, I always tell people I was a C- student with a speech impediment who was the most lazy procrastinator you ever met your life.
[00:07:19.380] – Tony You know what I mean, I just I didn't really see that I had much of a future, you know what I mean? And then I started getting into some in some personal development. And that really changed my life, you know. And then when I moved out to California in 1980, you know, I had worked out in the gym here and there, I took a weightlifting class in college. It kind of helped build my confidence. And miraculously my GPA went up that semester because I was working out.
[00:07:42.360] – Tony So I didn't understand the exercise, the science behind exercise. In fact you at least norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin and brain derived neurotrophic factor inside the temporal lobe area in the brain, it's teeny it's called the dentate gyrus. So whenever you exercise and breathe heavily, the molecules and the proteins inside of your brain come together. It's like Miracle-Gro for your brain. So everything improves. Sex, drive, memory, cognition, ambition. I mean, it's an amazing process.
[00:08:09.660] – Tony And a lot of people cheat their way there through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But, you know what I mean I mean, there's always payback. You know, short term solutions, temporary solutions can lead to long term problems. You know what I mean, type two diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks, you know what I mean, Parkinson's disease, all these different things. You know what I mean. So so I kept the rock and roll and the sex, but I got rid of the drugs in the alcohol and the poor eating habits and the lack of movement.
[00:08:39.620] – Tony So, you know what I mean, there are there are three things that are really under your control. And a lot of things aren't traffic, whether other people, work, you know what I mean? The stress is one of these kind of amorphous energies that are sort of hard to put your fingers on. So if you do these three things and this is I'm giving you the long term answer here, because we have time.
[00:09:03.920] – Tony Its fitness, food and mindfulness. I used to say it was fitness and food, but the mindfulness thing is really become an important thing for me. And I got really sick back in twenty seventeen. I ended up with Ramsey Hunt syndrome, which was basically shingles in your ear, which means shingles in your brain, which means shingles in your brain or frying nerves in your brain, which really affects everything.
[00:09:25.460] – Tony Smell, taste, balance, creating tons of inflammation, tons of fatigue, constantly vomiting, being noxious all the time. Right. So the mindfulness practice kind of came into play there for me, it was really, really important. I mean, I you know, I meditated once in a while and I would play with my dogs and I would take a nap. I mean, whatever forms of mindfulness you want to call those types of things.
[00:09:46.400] – Tony But for me, it was full-blown meditation. That's the only thing. All the tinctures and doctors and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put me back together again, you know what I mean?
[00:09:55.020] – Tony So all I had was my breath. I can't work out. I can't drive, I can't eat. I got to take some deep breaths because most of us all use the top part of our lungs, especially now with covid, you know what I mean. Like that that virus lives at the bottom. So I may not do a cardio and plyo three times a week just to flush that out, make them strong in case I get this thing I'm ready to rock, you know.
[00:10:16.430] – Tony So when I was a struggling kid, a young kid who was really not doing very well, not very happy financially, in big trouble, in debt, no relationship, really. You know whenever I would exercise, I was just more productive. I mean, I read John Rateys book years later, Spark the effects of physical activity on the brain.
[00:10:36.200] – Tony And and I was oh, this is why when I'm really consistent with my fitness, when I work out five, six, seven days a week because five is the minimum, like, you know what I mean, you go to work five days a week, you go to sleep every night, you eat every day. We do a lot of these things so that we can survive on planet Earth. But I wanted to thrive. I didn't like where I was.
[00:10:57.690] – Tony So when I exercised often, I was releasing all these chemicals in my head and I was just a better man. I was about a human being. I was more productive. I was happier. I was getting stuff done. I was checking boxes, you know what I mean. And then later the food thing came into play, you know what I mean. I was just I love double cheese, chimichangas and bacon cheeseburgers with Dr. Pepper. I mean, come on, it's yummy.
[00:11:17.780] – Tony But it didn't serve me, man, you know what I mean. So and I was Keto and paleo and vegan and blah blah. But now I'm all those things, you know what I mean, I don't I don't limit myself from anything. I just eat really healthy versions of all these different types of food philosophies, which is really what my book is going to be about, probably come out in 2021, you know what I mean and and taking all the pressure off.
[00:11:37.890] – Tony Because so often when we're trying to figure out the food element, there's always some form of restriction. Right. You can do this, but you can't do that. And if you do that, it's going to lead you down that bad path again. Where you are going to be right back where you were. And so I just thought, you know, and this is this is kind of an anomaly, really.
[00:11:56.730] – Tony I mean, I eat keto and vegan and paleo and vegetarian and Mediterranean, Vietnamese and Chinese and French. You know what I mean, like, wow, the world is my oyster. I just eat versions that my great, great great grandparents probably ate. And it wasn't Dr. Pepper or Red Bull and Doritos in a Twinkie.
[00:12:17.120] – Tony I mean, like, you have to get you have to eliminate certain types of foods and you have to figure out how to make all these other foods taste good enough that you want to eat them all the time. Hello. Like, what's so hard about that? Like, people are still scratching their head, trying to figure it out. So I exercise five to seven days a week. I really healthy. I have cheap snacks because snacks are calorically smaller.
[00:12:37.490] – Tony I mean, like there's these little chocolate chip cookies that are kind of gluten free. They're chocolate chip and screw it, I'm going to eat them. But once in a while it satisfies and it quills my my cravings. And then I'm rockin. And then I meditate in the car. I meditate when I first thing I get up in the morning, I meditate before I go to bed and I'm talking five minutes.
[00:12:55.520] – Tony I'm talking sometimes two minutes. I'm not sitting there in Lotus in a dark room with a candle meditating for 90 minutes. I don't have the time or patience for that, but I have to like if I know if I'm in distress (taking a breathe) All I need is about ten of those men, and I'm going to go and yoga and Pilates and other types of mindful fitness. There you go, man. You got the whole cabana.
[00:13:28.570] – Allan That's a lot to wrap. But no, really, there's a lot in there. And one of the things I wanted to I wanted to really dive in with you on is, you know, in your training, because even even when I was doing P90X wasn't the same workout. Every week, every day there were different workouts or different things. And they were all the right thing to do at the right time. And I was looking as you went through, you have a ninja course in your backyard, you have a hatchet throwing. And if you miss, you do push ups.
[00:13:59.740] – Tony Doesn't everybody Allan?
[00:14:01.510] – Allan And you have a balance what they call the balance line. The taut line. And so it's like you you know, you train for life, you train a lot of different variety. Why do you why do you put so much variety into your training?
[00:14:20.800] – Tony Well, you know, I mean, if you look at the original P90X, I had about a year of research for that program and prior to that we did something called power 90. And power 90 was kind of fitness one to one as far as far as I was concerned at that stage of my my career. I mean, I've been training Tom Petty and Billy Idol and Annie Lennox from Eurythmics and Sean Connery.
[00:14:45.320] – Tony Every time I do Sean Connery, I'm going to do that. But I was training The Boss, Bruce Springsteen and different kinds of people. And so, you know, you've got these really. These icons in fitness and acting, Allison Janney and Bryce Dallas Howard and I mean, the list was pretty long for a long, long time.
[00:15:03.500] – Tony And so, you know, there's a lot that was a lot of pressure for me to make sure that they got good results in a relatively short period of time. And so it was up to me to kind of dive into different types of area to prevent boredom, injuries and plateaus or lack of results over time. And so, you know, when my first client was Tom Petty and Tom was not an athletic guy at all. I mean, the first day I met him, he was smoking a cigarette and put that down.
[00:15:31.130] – Tony Hey, Tony, I'm not really a fitness guy. You know, I'm I'm a rocker. So I just I got to increase my stamina. Nobody likes a fat rocker. I mean, so it's like, OK, I got four months, man. I got him on the bench pass. I had him hitting the heavy bag. We were on the stationary bike and we started from scratch. And so I knew even back then that I had to give Tom as many different things to kind of keep him entertained.
[00:15:57.470] – Tony And I noticed where his weaknesses were. And almost all of his stuff was weaknesses early on. And but it was that variety, right? It was that variety. It was the heavy bag. It was it was the it was the core work. It was the cardio work. It was the resistance work. It was all that kind of stuff. And so I was laying the foundation of what eventually would be power 90 and then would be P90X which was, you know, the coup de gras of fitness at that time. And so we had long debates about how much variety there should be. Do you really need? Martial arts? Do you really need yoga? Do you really need classes? Do you really need more specific stuff? Like you're working on balance, too, you know?
[00:16:32.570] – Tony I mean, is it necessary? Let's just get these people looking good. And for me, it wasn't about looking good. It was about health and wellness. It was always about how I mean, when I was younger and when most people are young, you know, I mean, they want to they want a six pack and they want big arms and they want all these different things. I understand that. But that's not a very good objective. I mean, if your purpose is locked into the quality of your life, which affects the quality of other people's lives, that's a bigger picture kind of look at me.
[00:17:00.260] – Tony If it's just so you could walk down the beach so girls could talk about your six pack. Well, you better form a personality while you're at it because you're six pack is only going to to take you so far. Like what's your sense of humor? Like, what kind of job do you have? What kind of person are you in the world? Because your arms and your six pack and your booty, that's an ephemeral thing. That's not it to me. It's not important.
[00:17:19.520] – Allan Well, it gets you into the party but to stay you're going to have to do a lot more.
[00:17:24.880] – Tony Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so still to this day, I mean, why don't I have a ninja course, and a slack line. Because I'm always learning. I'm always growing. I like working on my my weaknesses. And that's what P90X was. I mean if you look at the way I train now, I spend as much or more time on speed, balance and flexibility as I do cardio and resistance. Right. Because the world still is about cardio and resistance, like, oh, fine, that's better than sit on the couch and smoking pot, you know, I'm saying but you might want to try to delve into some other area.
[00:17:55.590] – Tony That's why I go to a track man at 62 and I and I do hundreds and two hundreds and four hundreds. Right. Because I'm teaching my body to move quickly. That's why there's martial arts in all my stuff. Right. Because old folks, old fit folks, people who exercise to go to the gym often. Right. They reached sideways to grab the shampoo on the shelf and they're jacked up for a month because the range of motion sucks.
[00:18:18.650] – Tony Or, you know, you've got to hustle down the down the terminal to catch the catch your airplane and you blowout the hamstring because you haven't run fast since softball in ninth grade. I mean, so these are these are other really important elements. And and so that's that's why I train that way that I mean, it keeps me young. I mean I'm sixty two things that I can think of.
[00:18:39.040] – Tony I mean, I have a routine in the backyard. We go up a pegboard about 12 feet off the ground from top to bottom. Then we grab this being that basically supports my patio up to the top of 17 feet off the ground where if you fall, you're going to break your leg and then we ring a bell up there, which means you have to hold on to the beam with one hand, ring a bell, come down the rope, go back up the rope, ring the bell, go down the beam across the pegboard and then do maximum pull ups in my 20s, 30s, 40s. Couldn't do that. No, no way. I would have been scared to death to climb up this beam.
[00:19:10.750] – Tony And it's about always challenging yourself. Does it mean that I mean, I heli ski. I mean, I've been heli skiing a couple of dozen times, you know what I mean, like pull up land on the top of a mountain with guides in front of me and behind me, just skiing with snow going over my shoulders. I could I would have been scared to death to do that as a kid, you know what I mean? So, I mean, life is short. It's such a short, ridiculous ride. The fact that I just turned 62, I'm going to turn 72 and I'm going to be 82.
[00:19:38.840] – Tony And so this is the part of my life where I can enjoy it. Like I finally have enough bread in the bank that I can go and do things. Like when I was young I was poor. I mean like I had like really work I had to couch surf friends places when I a ski hill, you know what I mean. And you know, and I was getting by eating Cheerios and yogurt three meals you know, those were those are fun days and days of exploration. But you know, it's too bad a lot of people finally get to a point in their life because most people are retiring about now, by sixty five and they're not physically fit and strong enough and flexible enough to to go and do things.
[00:20:18.190] So, you know, so they fish or they or they play shuffleboard, sorry man.
[00:20:23.710] – Allan Or they crochet.
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[00:22:36.140] – Allan So, yeah, I mean, I get it. It's easy to get locked into things you're good at. I'm I'm pretty decent when it comes to strength and for endurance, if I'm slow, I can go. When it comes to just doing sprints and I hate them like that. Hundred yards or two hundred yards or four hundred yards. That would be the worst day of my life. But I see value in it and understand that it needs to be the worst day of my life because that's the weak spot and that's where I'm actually changing.
[00:23:04.790] – Tony There's so many lessons there, though. I think if you warm up properly, you got a good coach. You know me. Understand that you're not going to be. You know, Usain Bolt or anything, or just go out there and you're just learning the technique and driving the knees and leaning forward and doing all the thing and breathing properly, this, you know, I mean, it's know I'm not saying everybody needs to do all the crazy stuff that I'm doing, but you need to do something.
[00:23:30.040] – Tony You need to if you really want to be. Because to me, it's about joy and happiness. It's joy and happiness. Right. And when you know, you're releasing all these chemicals and you're taking care of yourself and you're leaning up and you feel you're just you just lighter on your feet, you know what I mean? You just feel like, oh, wow. And I get thousands and I'm talking thousands of stories from people who say who I was as a human being, above and beyond the physical and who I am now, mentally and emotionally and spiritually is day and night purely because I ate right. And I moved my butt and I got quiet once in a while. I mean, how powerful is that?
[00:24:04.560] – Tony And you control those things like you you can pick what time to do it. I mean, I get at work and I got kids. Fine. I got ten minute workouts, man. You know what? If you can make as many excuses as you want, but the fact of the matter is, you just don't care. You're not prioritizing. And so you can continue to survive, yea surviving, taking care of me, paying my bills, going to work, watching the game, having some beers and then maybe you'll live to seventy five, maybe, maybe you want or you want to thrive and you just you just learn what you need to do to do it and and then it's a whole different ballgame.
[00:24:36.310] – Allan Yeah. Now you went through shingles and that's kind of one of the topics my mother suffered from shingles about two and a half years ago or so. And so I started doing some research on it, thinking, OK, is this something I you know, I need to go ahead and get the vaccine or do something with. And I opted not to do the vaccine at the time. But now reading it, hearing your story with Ramsey Hunt, I guess there is the new light shined on it by me.
[00:25:04.510] – Allan So I'd like to understand your experience and your recovery as you went through that, because you went into it extremely healthy and then lost twenty five pounds. And, you know, but it's still recovery for you was a chore. It was a task. And so what did you do to recover? What are your what are your thoughts on someone that just hasn't had it yet. I'm nine years younger than you are at this point. What would what would your advice be on just getting fit, getting happy, getting healthy, eating right foods? What would what should we do as a protocol to make sure that we're we're staying healthy and not falling prey to things like this?
[00:25:42.400] – Tony Well, yeah, it's a great question. Man it just kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, if you've had chicken pox, it's in there. It's sitting there waiting for you to get too stressed out in the wrong moment, the wrong time to rear its ugly head and make your life a living hell. Now, it really depends on where you get a lot of people get it across their shoulder or on their neck or their mid back or top of their butt.
[00:26:04.120] – Tony There's all kinds of crazy places that'll get it. It just it lives at the end of these nerves. And at that time, I was going through some contractual stuff with Beachbody and it wasn't going very well. And it's one of the reasons why I'm not with the organization anymore. I still have a great relationship with them. And I mean, we're just they were moving in one direction. I was moving in another and it was freaking me out. I mean, I'm not going to lie to you when you're with the same company for 20 years. Yeah. You just assume that, you know, hey, I got twenty more in me, you know what I mean? So, you know, whatever.
[00:26:31.620] – Allan The same guys that bought the P90X are going to buy your P100X.
[00:26:36.610] – Tony Yeah yeah yeah. I mean everyone's like, where's P90X4. I can't make that one sadly because I'm not with them anymore. So that was, that was really weighing on me. That was sort of the main thing, it was really weighing on me because you know, you're riding this amazing wave for so long and then and then you go, OK, well then I would assume that you guys, based on my track record, would continue to want to do X, Y and Z, and they didn't want to do X, Y and Z.
[00:27:01.840] – Tony And I was like, wow, really? OK, well, and then, you know, then, you know, that that was coming to a close. And at that same time there was that shooting in Vegas. And I had friends that were there and a good friend of mine was just sitting there listening to the concert. And the gentleman right next to her, she was just sitting and they were just talking and he catches a bullet right here in front of her and dies, you know? I mean, I had other friends that were there as well.
[00:27:29.530] – Tony I don't know, man. That really was heavy duty for me. I just I just I thought, where do we live? Like, what is going on in this country? And then and then Tom Petty died the next day, and I've been training Tom for 30 years and he was a friend. I mean, he was just a client initially. But I went on tour with Tom and it was I knew his ex-wife. I knew his new wife. I knew his mother in law. I knew his kids, you know what I mean, you know, and my history with him was was just phenomenal.
[00:27:59.290] – Tony I mean, he was just an amazing, talented, super cool. And he was gone and for all the wrong reasons, you know, I'm like, golly. And then I always I kind of blame myself a little bit for that because his manager called me the summer before and said, you've got to work with Tom. He really needs it badly, but I wasn't getting all the intel. I didn't realize that he was struggling with some things that I wasn't aware he was struggling with. And if I had known that, you know, maybe I could have had, you know, because he he trusted me more than almost anybody.
[00:28:28.800] – Tony His wife he trust his management he trust. But he really was like, OK, what am I going to do? What are we got to eat? And I wasn't getting all the intel. So when contract stuff, the shooting, Tom, and then all of a sudden I had a workout crew here, had about 50 people here, and everybody was acting like everything was normal. I mean, like two days before 50 plus people were killed in Vegas.
[00:28:50.910] – Tony And we just chat and they're kind of goofing off. And I invite them to come to my house for free to train, and I snapped. I mean, I went ballistic. I went because if I even reenact that, I'll probably get Ramsey right now. And I was just really upset that everybody was just dogging it. And then life is too important and you have to be strong and durable in life, because if you're not, you could be a victim as well, or you could die before your time.
[00:29:13.840] – Tony And then within a week, I had this rockin headache on the right side of my head. I told Sean, I go when I feel a little bit off, my equilibrium is weird, and then it got so bad that I started throwing up and then I thought, well, maybe maybe I had a stroke or a mini stroke or something. So I went to a couple of doctors and they didn't know and then so the rash was all in my right ear. It didn't appear yet, but it was happening. I mean, yeah. And if I had known and I take any antiviral medication, I could have beat it. Aan, it was tough.
[00:29:47.250] – Tony It was really tough. And it lasted for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months. And it took about a year before I was able to recover. And I remember the first time I attempted to work out, I got on the treadmill, walked on the treadmill for five minutes. I forced myself. I was in such pain and I got off the treadmill and I threw up and I laid down for almost two hours. And it was that very slow.
[00:30:09.000] – Tony Took months and months, man. And so then I hooked up with these folks, created power life because they knew my story. I was posting about it and stuff. And, you know, I lost twenty five pounds and as weak as a chicken. I remember trying to do push ups for the first time.
[00:30:22.680] – Tony I knocked out, like I can usually do like seventy push ups if I had to, if there was a contest and there was money on it and I can do like 30 pull ups pretty pretty much and I could do like eight pull ups and I was dying and I could do maybe 15 push ups. It was huge for me, no cardiovascular strength but but you know, it was it was getting back in the game. And I had the foundation right.
[00:30:43.530] – Tony I had that original foundation. I knew what to do. I knew what to eat once I could. But I needed supplements, man. I needed a decent supplements that I wasn't getting, you know? I mean, the cool thing about what we're doing at Power Life is we're making these really unique formulas. I mean, there's whey proteins and there's plant based proteins, but we're putting in chromium and vitamin D and and HMV and, you know, probiotics, prebiotics and sun fiber and all these really, really interesting combinations of different things based on tons and tons of research.
[00:31:11.100] – Tony And really, they were making it for me, you know, I mean, like, hey, you guys and people our age, we we're all going to suffer from Sarcopenia at some point. I mean, some people sooner than later. But Sarcopenia is age related muscle loss. And I had I had accelerated Age-Related muscle loss as a result of my illness. And so, you know, I mean, that's a sixty two year old arm, that thing's doing OK.
[00:31:32.250] – Tony And, you know, the six pack is back and my quads are strong and and it feels good. I mean it took a year to come back man and it wasn't easy, but thank God I ran into the right people the right time to make these supplements for me, you know, I mean to help because I wasn't getting it from, you know, what I was taking. I just wasn't getting enough. And I could it was just a struggle. And I was still dealing with with pain and fatigue. You know, I talk about this in my latest seminar.
[00:32:01.460] – Tony If there's two things that really slow people down, it's those two. It's pain and fatigue. And if you've got if you're exhausted and you've got joint pain, back pain or neck pain and knee pain or ankle pain or whatever, hip pain, then you just there's no enthusiasm to kind of attack life. But if you can find the right, the right kind of foods, that brings inflammation down, getting regular blood work done. I get blood work done every every six months.
[00:32:25.020] – Tony Yeah, but every six months, twice a year. And I look at my panel and I mean they take 12 vials on my arm. It's like it's like a vampire comes in here. Right. And but I learned about it all. You know what I mean. I mean this. What's my hormone stuff. What's my thyroid stuff. What's my testosterone estrogen. Vitamin D, vitamin C, like all these different things. Chromium like what are all these where are my high or my low.
[00:32:45.730] – Tony And we make those adjustments every time. And then once I started taking my own stuff, you know, my last blood work was she's like, oh my God, your testosterones to the roof, you supplement your testosterone. I go, No, no, I just I don't have the joint pain.
[00:33:02.190] – Tony So when I lift or I do stuff, I'm not fighting pain. It prevents me from doing the amount of repetitions, the amount of weight that I want to do. I can just really go, you know what I mean? Like my right shoulder. I have bursitis, arthritis, tendinitis in two bonesetter's and a three percent torn labrum in his arm. But I can do handstands.
[00:33:19.110] – Tony And I was doing I was doing military before when my shoulder ached, I had to stop here. Right. But it was awesome to come all the way down without that searing pain in my shoulder and full range of motion. That was just awesome, you know. I mean, I'm not Hercules, but I'm, I'm pushing 50's, one hundred pounds and I felt good man.
[00:33:40.320] – Tony So it's just for me it's just. Always researching, always, you know, staying curious, knowing when to take downtime, when I have to and this is thirty, thirty seven years of playing with this stuff, man.
[00:33:53.870] – Tony So, yeah, that was a brutal period. And and I would recommend anybody, because the old vaccine for shingles was kind of the hair of the dog that bites you, right? I mean, so it can actually give you shingles. I mean, it's terrible. But the new one is is a completely different formula. I think it's the GlaxoSmithKline new vaccine. And so when I got this thing, I can't tell you how many thousand people ran out and got the vaccine after they heard my story.
[00:34:20.680] – Allan Yeah, I can imagine. Well, Tony, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?
[00:34:31.100] – Tony Well, without repeating myself, it's finding an exercise program that you can stick with. And then when that program is over, you find another one and another one and another one. And if you want to do the first one five times in a row, fine. But then you want to I mean, that's why I made Power Ninety, P90X, P90X2, X3, 22 minute hard core. I've given people enough variety so they don't get bored, they don't get hurt, they don't plateau. Right. So the foundation of who I am and I would recommend that to anybody is figure out a way to be consistent with your fitness.
[00:35:06.070] – Tony Intensity is important. You want to you want to always up the ante over the course of time because that helps with improvement. You don't want to lift the same ten pound weights and the same exercise for 10 years. It's a waste of time, you know what I mean, so, so intense consistency is everything. Fitness is the first thing. But on top of that is being consistent with your fitness. Right.
[00:35:26.840] – Tony And then accountability is everything. A lot of people can't. I'm talking just the fitness category right now. I'm not talking about all the other aspects of your life, but when it comes to fitness, you've got to be accountable. You've got to be accountable somehow. And some people who live in Minnesota in the middle of winter, who go down into the basement and do yoga for an hour and a half or plyo and fifty seven degrees down there, and then they get up in the dark and go make breakfast for their kids before school superheros like they should get medals every time they go down there and do that.
[00:35:53.910] – Tony Me, I need other people. So they're either in my house, they're online, they're somewhere. Right. I mean the all the days that I work out, I've got somebody here. And even during the quarantine, we're doing it on Zoom call just like this. All right. It's your turn to do pull ups.
[00:36:08.990] – Tony How many are you going to do? Fifteen. All right. You mean the number is really sixteen? OK, well, all right. And there's all this back and forth and on Zoom. It's easy. I mean, there's always solutions when there's a problem, right?
[00:36:17.610] – Tony So and then you need a plan. I mean, without a plan, like what do you figure out what you're going to do, what time you're going to do it and write it down in advance, like predict the future. Get a calendar. Right. So here's an example. Here's my wall calendar. I started a wall calander. I got two calendars on my computer, but I don't do this any more.
[00:36:37.670] – Allan Yeah, they still they still sell those.
[00:36:39.410] – Tony They still sell these man. And you can go to they're called a stationery store and you write down playo yoga, chest and back cardio, but you write them all down and you hang. I don't have a red one here. I did wait here it is just like this. I get to go. I'm so lucky right now.
[00:36:56.600] – Tony You hang this. That's a red Sharpie, you tie a red Sharpie on your calendar, so I got them all written down here and you should have about twenty five workouts written on your calendar. And every time you do that, you take your red magic marker and you make Xs at the bottom of the calendar on the last day you write how many you did you count Xs and you write and if it says 15 you lost or you're tied because 15 workouts in the course of one month means you took 15 days off.
[00:37:25.730] – Tony Try doing that with food. Try doing that with work. Try doing that with sleep. Forget it. Not a shot. You're a dead man. All right. So but if you have 22 Xs more days than not, then you have succeeded, then you're going to see results. Then you're going to feel better. Then you're going to get stronger. Then you're going to be more flexible. Then you're going to be happier. All right.
[00:37:44.630] – Tony Because the more you do, the better you get. The less you do, the more you're going to struggle, period. All right. So purpose why why are you doing this thing? I'm giving you 4. But you've got to decide why and if it's to be sexy. Well, you better be a swimsuit model or a bodybuilder or whatever. But if you're if your goal is to improve the quality of your life physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually for some people, and to start to really make an impact in other people's lives because you've gotten your act together, that's powerful.
[00:38:15.560] – Tony I workout today. I'm going to plyo today at 5:30pm. Do I want to? No, but I know who I'm going to be after I'm done. I mean, I mean, you know, my legs. People look at my legs. I mean, they're super striated. Here you go. I'm going to show you right now Allan. Look at these pythons. Man, can you see that thing? Hold on.
[00:38:32.230] – Allan Awesome.
[00:38:33.380] – Tony Right. That's all. There it is.
[00:38:36.680] – Allan That does not look like that does not look like a 62 year old leg.
[00:38:40.390] – Tony And all I do is jump. Jump up and down, jump up and down and do squats and lunges, you know what I mean? And so my purpose is that I know I'm going to feel afterward and I just repeat day after day after day, purpose, plan, accountability, consistency. That's the foundation of really being the person that you want. And then from there, the world is your oyster man, I'm telling you..
[00:39:01.490] – Allan Very cool. Very cool. Well, Tony, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about Power Life, the supplement line and then again, Tony talks and all the other cool things you're doing, where would you like for me to send them.
[00:39:16.060] – Tony Go to TonyHortonlife.com. It's all right there. We're in the process of actually upgrading the website. There's a lot of really cool new things that we're doing above and beyond. Tony Talks and Power Life. And I've got a brand new fitness equipment line called TH Fitness. You know, a lot of the factories now all across the world are trying to catch up because they were closed. So we're sort of the last in line. But we hope that within about three months we're going to have jump ropes and mats, med balls and stability ball, different things on the website.
[00:39:43.310] – Tony So TonyHortonlife.com, you learn about everything you need to know about your T. Horton right here. So check it out.
[00:39:49.470] – Allan Awesome. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/446 and I'll be sure to have a link there for you if you're driving or can't write that down right now. But Episode four four six. So Tony, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:40:02.490] – Tony Allan. My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me on today. Appreciate it.
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[00:02:49.220] – Allan Alana, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:02:51.930] – Alana Thank you for having me.
[00:02:53.970] – Allan So, you know, I did a little survey asking listeners, what do you want on the show? What do you want me spend more time doing? And I put in a weight loss and, you know, fitness and some other topics in there. And there are a few people wrote a couple of things. And overwhelmingly though, I was pleasantly surprised that they wanted to talk about strength training. They wanted to talk about training a lot more.
[00:03:18.480] – Allan And as a personal trainer, most of the time when we see someone walk in the door and the first thing in their head is that they want to lose weight. So it's kind of surprising. But it's also why I reached out. I want to make sure I had had you on the show. Your book is called, Strength Training Over 40: A 6-Week Program to Build Muscle and Agility. And as I went through it, I was like, you know, this is this is very well done because it's simple.
[00:03:42.570] – Allan You've got complete body workouts whether you want to do at home or in the gym. You explain every exercise very, very well. And I work with some blind clients and so when I'm working with a blind client you have to be very specific about how a movement looks and feels. And you really captured that in the book with your description. So great job.
[00:04:05.070] – Alana Well, great. Thank you so much for that. And you know, it's when I see clients, one of the first things that I, when we first sit down, I talk to them about the fact that we're not going to get bogged down with numbers. I don't want to even know what they weigh. I'm not going to pull out the measuring tape. We focus on getting strong. And that's kind of my mantra. And I say, you know, if we focus on getting strong, everything else kind of falls into place and it does. And so they're thrilled to hear that.
[00:04:37.710] – Allan Yeah. You know, one of the core reasons I think people over the age of 40 feel like there's this uphill battle when they start trying to maintain their muscle mass or get stronger is it just seems a lot harder than it was when they were in their 20s. And it is harder. I won't belittle that at all. A big reason, though, is our hormones. But the good news is that resistance training has a lot of benefits for us, including helping us improve our hormones. Could you talk about that a little bit?
[00:05:09.150] – Alana Oh, absolutely. Yeah, hormones are really complicated and can't be discussed in isolation. They all work together. But basically hormones are chemical messengers in the body that regulate things like metabolism and growth and our mood and our physical response to stress. And interestingly, the body perceives strength training at first as a stressor which can elevate cortisol levels which we don't want to have elevated for long periods of time because they can wreak havoc on the body. It cortisol, the hormone that's responsible for that fight or flight response, and also the accumulation of retention of body fat, belly fat primarily.
[00:05:59.340] – Alana So one might ask why strength train of it stimulates cortisol. And in my research, I've learned that strength training also stimulates human growth hormone, which helps the body to adapt to strength training and human growth hormone helps to reduce cortisol levels as well as helps us with insulin sensitivity. And so we know the other side of insulin sensitivity is insulin resistance, which we don't want because that can lead to Type two diabetes. So we know there's a close relationship between cortisol and insulin that's positively affected by the elevation of human growth hormone, which is stimulated by lifting weights and not just going through the motions of lifting weights either, we want to really challenge ourselves with those weights.
[00:06:59.700] – Alana And so basically, we're training the body to deal with stress in a healthy way by putting that added demand on our muscle. And also, there is strong evidence that strength training not only increases human growth hormone in both men and women, but it also increases testosterone in men, which helps to build muscle and bone mass. And and and it increases estrogen in women, which helps stave off heart disease and osteoporosis. So that's just a very small snapshot into the hormonal response to strength training.
[00:07:40.740] – Allan Yeah, you know when we're getting to this age, I'm in my mid 50s now and our hormones are not our friends and at least they don't feel like they're our friends, but they actually are our friends if we take the time to understand that balancing the resistance work is going to signal and it's the hormones that are going to do that signaling for you. So the release of growth hormone, this temporary increase in cortisol, which is catabolic, is then going to stimulate that muscle to change and insulin is going to play its part by replacing some of the glycogen that's come out of the muscle.
[00:08:18.390] – Allan So whole training aspects of it gets those things working a lot better together, which is really where the key is. And then with regards to insulin and estrogen, if we don't have those right you don't feel energetic. You don't feel strong. You don't feel all the good things we felt when we were younger. So in many ways, your sex hormones are your stay young hormones and the better you do at balancing those out, keeping those where they need to be, the longer you're going to feel young.
[00:08:48.090] – Alana Absolutely. And I think when insulin and cortisol are out of whack, it can create estrogen dominance, which I think for women in menopause is really the guilty party. And so many of the complaints that women have with menopause. And regarding menopause as well, I get a little bit fatigued by hearing women blaming everything that's going on with them on menopause and when the fact is that it's and I believe an accumulation of sort of not so wise choices.
[00:09:38.980] – Allan And thats a really nice way to say it.
[00:09:42.790] – Alana And then we hit sort of because we do we start to lose muscle mass at about the age of 35, called Sarcopenia. It's a fact. And but we don't really notice it until we hit about 50 and we've lost so much muscle by that point that our metabolism has slowed down because our muscle mass is directly tied to our metabolism. We lose enough muscle, our metabolism becomes sluggish. And so I find that many women, and men as well, hitting middle age, they've just lost so much muscle that their metabolism has slowed way down. So yet another another reason to get on strength training and the earlier the better. But it's never too late.
[00:10:35.860] – Allan You know, a lot of times I'll have someone and they'll tell me, look, I know I need to work out. I know I need to, but then they don't. And in the book, you talked about the difference between inspiration and motivation. Could you take just a minute to go over this? Because I think it's I think people have it backwards sometimes when they're thinking, I need somebody, you know, to motivate me. Get me going. And so they kind of want a trainer or they want to work out body or something, someone to walk with them even when they're going to do their walks or something. But I think we're looking at that wrong. If we get those two words mixed up.
[00:11:15.580] – Alana I think so. I did a little video the other day on this very topic and it was really well received. And one of the things that I discuss with my clients, again, when I first sit down with them is about finding their why, what's going to get through them through the door. And it's going to be different for all of us. And I see inspiration as looking outward, such as Instagram and magazines or Facebook groups or whatever. Inspiration and motivation truly comes from finding your why.
[00:11:57.490] – Alana What is important to you? For me, I had a baby a week away from my forty fifth birthday, so my why is wanting to be really active for him and when he he's 17 now, so when he has children I want to be active for them. And so again and I say to people whatever it is that gets you through that door. That's your why and you have to deeply internalize it, but not every day that motivation is going to be there.
[00:12:30.950] – Alana And when that motivation sort of goes on vacation, that's when we need to tap into discipline. But motivation itself will help carry us through for the most part. Yeah. So in some people, I'll ask them what to think about their why. And to them it's just wanting to look good in a bathing suit on the on the beach. I said, that's great. If that's your motivation right now, that means you don't have a lot of aches and pains in your body and you're wanting to look good if your reasons are purely aesthetic, whatever it takes to get you through the door and keep yourself strong.
[00:13:09.320] – Allan You know, I think as we get to this age that we're at that point where we really need to start thinking about what our lives are going to be like for the next 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 years or so. And and if we're losing muscle, we're not doing this and we don't do this. We can't get ourselves motivated and can't get ourselves doing this work. We're going to lose more muscle. Eventually you're not going to be able to open up jars and you're going to lose your independence eventually.
[00:13:36.050] – Allan You're not going be able to get up from the seated position. You're going to lose your independence. And so one of the core ways I like to look at it is I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105.
[00:13:45.470] – Alana Yes, absolutely.
[00:13:46.850] – Allan You know, that gets me up in the morning. You know that that gets me thinking. If I don't do this, then I'm you know, I'm setting myself up for that. When I first got into this, it was it was also my daughter. My daughter was starting to get into CrossFit and she was starting to do this obstacle course races and just that kind of fun stuff. And I was thinking, and I want to go see her do this, but I don't want to just sit there and watch her do it.
[00:14:14.750] – Allan I want to be on the obstacle course with her. I want to be doing across the work out with her. But at the time, I was in no physical shape to make that happen. I needed to be a lot stronger to carry my body through a Tough Mudder or any kind of thing like that. So that's that was my motivation, is wanting to finish those races and spend that time that way with my daughter doing the things she loved. So many times we have our kids around us doing the things we want to do. I wanted her to be doing the things she loves and I wanted to be a part of it. So, you know, finding those ways to have that internal motivation to show up every day to do the work that's necessary to be that person that can open your own jars, that can wipe your butt at 105 or finish a Tough Mudder at 47 years old.
[00:14:57.980] – Alana Yeah, absolutely. And I give a little example in my book. About one day I came home with groceries and it was dark in the middle of the winter and my boys had inadvertently locked me out of the gate and I didn't have my phone with me to call them and I didn't want to start shouting and bothering the neighbors. And so I thought, well, I'll just climb up over this fence and it's a really high fence. And then I was on top of the shed and then I had to lower myself down.
[00:15:27.950] – Alana And that's, as you know, where the real strength comes in. And I got to the top and I thought, OK, it's like, you know, the down portion of a pull up. And I could do it. And I felt like a young girl scrambling up that fence and over the shed and down and opened the gate and grabbed my groceries and I was in the house and I remember thinking I couldn't do this if if I hadn't kept myself strong.
[00:15:56.900] – Alana Not that it's a huge deal. I could have eventually gotten through the gate. But just the fact that I was able to do that, I was so proud of myself. And, yeah, losing muscle you know, for as far as aging goes is the the fastest way to lose our independence. And I'm like you. I want I want to be able to take care of myself for a really long time. I want to be able to do the things that I love to do for a really long time and not have to just look at pictures from other people that walk to the top of the hill and and looked down. I want to be able to do that myself. So those are also my whys, you know, to stay independent. I don't think any of us relishes the fact of, you know, going to a home and sort of deteriorating there.
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[00:19:07.830] – Allan My grandfather lived into his 90s, and that's where he spent the ending of his life, because he couldn't get himself up and down, he couldn't do the things he needed to be able to do. He lost big parts of his life. I remember sitting there at the golf course with him when he was 80 and he said he was going to quit playing golf because he just couldn't do it anymore. His balance wasn't there, his strength just wasn't there. And I just felt that you lived your whole life playing golf. You love the sport, you live on a golf course and now you're not going to play golf.
[00:19:37.210] – Alana Right. And that that brings up a good point, too, because the one thing that people say to me is, well, I walk a lot, so my legs will be strong forever, but it just doesn't work that way. Eventually it'll slide backwards if we're not doing purposeful strength training to strengthen those muscles. And so that's, to train for our sport, whether it be golf or anything, hiking, you know, train the sport of life and we have to do it.
[00:20:13.540] – Alana And just quickly, I was a competitive figure skater growing up and I had these skinny little legs. But soon I wasn't able to compete with the girls that had the genetically strong legs. And in those days back then, we didn't train for our sport. And I remember thinking, oh, if there was only a way, if there was only a way to be strong. And I had to eventually in my late teens give up skating. But I discovered the gym soon after that.
[00:20:43.870] – Alana And I was just so happy because there is a way there is a way to keep ourselves strong. And and I've done that ever since. And I can honestly say at age 62, I'm in better shape, I just I keep getting better and stronger and people that boggles people's mind. They don't understand it. And also they say it must be such hard work. You must have to be doing this constantly and no, I might spend three hours a week in strength training because I've done it for so long. I'm now just maintaining so it's never I like to say it's never too late to start because as the saying goes, muscle knows no age. But the sooner you start, the longer you will have to reap those benefits of a strong body.
[00:21:47.530] – Allan One of the things I was really glad to see in the book was that you spent a good bit of time talking about stretching and showing some stretches that we would do. And you included both the dynamic and the static stretching. Could you take some time to talk about both and then when one is appropriate, when the other isn't?
[00:22:07.810] – Alana Yeah, sure, dynamic stretching is not stretching as we know it, per say, they're sort of more dynamic movements such as leg swings and arm rotations and high knees and marching in place, jumping jacks even, mountain climbers. And so if we're at home and we don't have access or jumping rope is good, but that's also cardio. If we don't have access to cardio equipment, doing these dynamic movements is a great way to not only warm up our joints, but get our heart rate up as well.
[00:22:47.150] – Alana So those are to be done prior to strength training and then static stretching, which is the kind of stretching that most of us are familiar with are the longer holds the well where the hamstring stretches and the quad stretches and those sorts of stretches. But one thing, most of us don't hold those stretches for long enough. You know, people will hold them for three or four seconds. That's it. And go to the other side. But we really should be holding those stretches for 15 to 30 seconds.
[00:23:25.700] – Alana But, and those should be done after strength training, it shouldn't be painful either. And I'm I'm believer in that we really shouldn't be stretching beyond our natural range of motion. And I think it's really, really important to maintain our our natural range of motion. But I think the studies are showing if we have very flexible joints without strength, that creates unstable joints and unstable joints are joints that are prone to injury. So that's been interesting to me because I grew up in through the 80s, 70s and 80s where it was all about stretching, and we really pushed ourselves way beyond our natural range of motion.
[00:24:13.100] – Alana And we don't do that so much anymore. So just maintaining our natural range of motion, I like to say I'm as flexible as I need to be, meaning my joints, every joint in my body can do what it was meant to do.
[00:24:26.630] – Allan Now, sometimes you're talking to a potential client or talking to someone and they hear the word gym. And immediately there's the palms get sweaty and they're thinking about going into a building that they're not going to recognize 90 percent of the stuff in there. And there's people in there. In many cases, they're in the corner over there with the heavy weights, grunting and carrying on, maybe even yelling at each other just to seem to get motivated or sitting around on the phone, sitting on the equipment that you want.
[00:24:55.510] – Allan And so there's you know, there's this this environment that for a lot of people, they're just not quite comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits, why we might want to go to the gym, but also if we really can't or don't want to go to the gym, there's ways we can do this at home so we can go through that.
[00:25:14.700] – Alana For sure. The gym is is a motivating place or because you see other people doing what what you're doing, they're interested in the same thing, which is keeping their body strong. One thing that I will do sometimes if I have a say, a sixty five year old lady who has never been in the gym before, I'll take her over to the buffest guy in the gym and introduce her. And then she sees that these guys are just so sweet and and they say, yeah, if you need any help, just, you know, I'm here.
[00:25:52.160] – Alana And so I think that has has always helped. But being around your your tribe, you know, the people who are interested in doing the same things that that you're doing is very helpful. And I sometimes will start older clients out on the machines, which are great. We can't have those machines at home, most of us. And it's a great way to start some people who have never done strength training before. And so there's that aspect, the machines and the being around other people who are interested in the same things you are no matter the age.
[00:26:37.070] – Alana And I think people will really be surprised at how helpful the fit buff guy, you know, is when asked a question. People are always surprised by that. And and they they say to me, I'm so intimidated. You know, they're not looking at you and they're certainly not judging you. The only thing that they're thinking is good for you, good for you, for walking through that door. So that helps too.
[00:27:05.140] – Allan Well, the core of is this, the more members the gym has than the gyms making money, it's going to stay there. So we want our gym to stay and we want our gym memberships to be reasonably priced. If it's just us in the gym, suddenly it's not that reasonable priced because we want all that equipment in there. And so they're happy to see a new person walk in the gym. That's a net positive for the whole environment.
[00:27:30.870] – Allan And I had a client. His name's Trent. And he told me he said he he doesn't really know the names of anybody, but he goes to the gym at the same time every day and the same people. So not at each other, they'll see each other. He doesn't know their names, doesn't really talk to him, know him that well from that perspective. But he said any day that he's thinking he might not want to go to the gym. He's imagining those guys in there working out, and it's like even if they're not really holding him accountable, accountable, he's holding himself accountable because he knows they're in there and he's not.
[00:28:05.890] – Alana Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great point. And I have a very competitive nature, as many people do. And if, you know, you're sitting at home on the couch there, those other people that you see every day are in the gym, you know, getting ahead of where you are. So you know that that's a good point as well. The gym is a very I don't know. I have been to so many gyms during the course of my life, and I have never, ever, as a small little female, ever had a negative experience in the gym. So I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage for some people to take that first step through the door. But it gets easier and easier. And so I tell them that the first time we sit down together.
[00:28:50.080] – Allan And I know some people say, well, let me lose a little bit more weight, let me get a little bit more comfortable with this, and then I'll consider going to the gym. And so there are ways that we can get this done at home as long as, again, we got that we got that whole motivation, inspiration thing working for us. Many of us can have a home gym and get the same results.Can you talk a little bit? If I'm going to set up a home gym, particularly do your six week program, what are some of the equipment that I would want to have?
[00:29:18.730] – Alana Yeah, well, I think we've proven this during this covid time for sure that we can work out at home. And so I suggest resistant bands of various strengths and you can get the bands with handles or that are continuous loop. Any kind of many bands are also great. Maybe two or three sets of dumbbells to have at home are great. And if you could get a bench, that's great, but you can use your coffee table or even the floor for some exercises if you don't have a bench, a stability ball is awesome to have. You can do all kinds of exercises with a stability ball. Those are some people call them swiss balls or exercise balls and a mat and maybe a pull up bar, which I have.
[00:30:16.720] – Alana And and if you can't do pull ups, you know, you can attach a resistant band to it and put your foot in there. And it's like an assisted pull up and maybe a medicine ball and certainly don't have to do all of that. You can get away with just the resistant bands at first and then just kind of add to it as you go. But you can get a really good workout in with those pieces of equipment.
[00:30:45.670] – Allan And you can often find these used their resale shops in some towns and then can going on something like Craigslist almost always are. Some of the markets, like on Facebook, you'll find used fitness equipment at a cheap, cheap price so you can get these things without breaking the bank if you take your time and shop wisely.
[00:31:07.600] – Alana Oh, absolutely. Although I will say right now people are hard to find because people have snapped a lot of this up right now, but you just keep looking and and you'll find it. In the mean time we shouldn't forget about bodyweight exercises as well. There's a lot we can do with just our body weight, although that's not going to carry us through forever because we do need to continuously you know, we want that progressive resistance. But body weight is a great way to start out.
[00:31:43.510] – Alana Also, I should add, TRX straps, you can buy and hook to the top of your door and those come in really, really handy.
[00:31:54.850] – Allan Alana, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:32:03.940] – Alana OK, well, these might not be your typical responses, but first of all, I would say our state of mind is really important. So be mindful of the words that we say to ourselves, like, for example, I'm sick and tired, or I hate or I'm having a seniors moment or I'm old, or I'm X age therefore I'm supposed to be in pain and lacking energy or be carrying extra fat and growing old sucks. You know, so I never say those words to myself.
[00:32:36.970] – Alana I'm really, really conscious of of how I speak to myself. And so be kind and gentle to yourself and treat yourself how you want others to treat you and also to stay. This is part of of this of the first one is staying connected with others and don't isolate during this this time that we're in right now, be kind to others and be of service, you know, it's all about that state of mind. And second, keeping our brain stimulated by learning new things and getting outside of our comfort zone, which might be going to the gym or taking up something new.
[00:33:18.770] – Alana And outside of our comfort zone is where the best things happen. And stay informed. But don't get bogged down by the negative news today and find solace in knowing that we're all in this together. And third, exercise your body because you love yourself not as punishment for something that you ate. And strength train and maintain your your natural range of motion, as we talked about, challenge your heart in some way, you know, at least three times a week.
[00:33:54.170] – Alana And, you know, just just stay strong and agile so that you can do the things you love for a long, long time. So that's kind of a long answer. But those things, I don't think we can stay well without addressing the state of mind and our brain as well as our physical bodies.
[00:34:16.610] – Allan I completely agree. So Alana if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Strength Training Over 40, what would you like for me to send them?
[00:34:27.470] – Alana Well, Strength Training Over 40 is available now on Amazon.com and I'm in Canada, so it's available here in Canada on Amazon.CA and through my website as well, which is AlanaCollinsfitnesscoach.com. And I have a pretty large following on Instagram. There's my two handles are Aging Fearless and Aging Strong. And so you can check me out there.
[00:34:58.610] – Allan All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com forward/445 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Alana, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:35:08.610] – Alana Thank you so much for having me. It was it was really fun.
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[00:22:36.140] – Allan
