Three reasons we fail to reach our health and fitness goals (part 1)

Episode Notes

Music by Dave Gerhart

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– Anne Lynch	– Ken McQuade	– Leigh Tanner
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Another episode you may enjoy

9 things to drop from your life today

I'm usually a fan of adding good things into your life to crowd out the bad. But I thought I'd go through my top 9 things you should remove as you work on improving your health and fitness. 

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

[00:01:19.270] – Allan

Hey, Ras. How are things?

[00:01:21.390] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:01:23.420] – Allan

Well, just moving.

[00:01:26.170] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:01:26.960] – Rachel

Yeah, well, moving. We're going to take a month off.

[00:01:29.420] – Allan

So trying to get a lot done. In fact, we're actually going to do our portion of three different episodes this week, and then we're going to do. Four episodes next week. And so I only have one of those four recorded right now, so it kind of gives you an idea of what it's like to try to get ahead. So we'll have what they call in the can, like seven or eight episodes.

[00:01:51.530] – Allan

Once I leave, I guess seven, and then I'm out. And so the whole month of September, this one is going live on the 29th, so, yeah, I guess it's going live next week. Okay. Yeah, that's how confusing it gets when. You try to get way ahead.

[00:02:08.320] – Allan

But we're still doing the bingo on Facebook. So if you go to the Facebook group, 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group, or you can just go directly to the bingo sign up page at 40plusfitness.com/bingo, then. You can go and sign up for the bingo. But you are going to need to be in the Facebook group to play bingo because that's where you're going to post your card. And so on your card each day you can do one square, and you want to do a line, an X and a blackout. So get as many of those done in a month as you can at the end of September. Then there's the cut-off, and you have until October 1 to post your card completed card.

[00:02:47.140] – Allan

What you did during September, it is on an honor system, but at the same time, this is an opportunity for you to maybe do some things for your health and fitness that you hadn't considered doing before. So there's some fun tasks and some.

[00:02:59.620] – Allan

That are going to be a little. Bit more challenging around nutrition and fitness but there's 24 squares you got to fill out there's one free in the middle, and so that's 30 days to get 24 squares filled out to get us a blackout. And there are prizes, so if you get a line, there's an opportunity for prizes. If you get an X, there's an opportunity for more prizes. You get a blackout, then you get the best prize pack of all. So there's a reason for you to keep with it and stay consistent. And hopefully this will help you stay a little bit more motivated during the month of September while I'm on vacation.

[00:03:31.890] – Rachel

That sounds awesome. Sounds like a lot of fun.

[00:03:34.240] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:03:35.780] – Rachel

Good. A while back, I mentioned I was tapering for an upcoming race, which was the other weekend, and we had such a fun time. We did a marathon relay. So I had a team of five. I was one of the five. I did my five mile leg, and it was just a super fun weekend. There was a ton of kids out there for cross country teams were doing the relay as well, so it was just a riot, and it was a super fun experience. So I totally recommend if nobody wants to run a full marathon, see if they have a relay, grab a couple of friends, and maybe do some miles together. But it was just a riot.

[00:04:13.810] – Allan

Well, 5 miles for you. That's like a sprint, right?

[00:04:16.160] – Rachel

It is, yeah. It's a good day for me.

[00:04:19.810] – Allan

You get through, and you're like, I should still be running.

[00:04:22.080] – Rachel

Yeah. And it was really for fun. We were not super competitive. Not super competitive about it. But I'm going to just say that my face hurt so much worse than my legs. I was laughing so hard the entire weekend. And although I did race well, I did hit a pretty good time for myself, and my legs were a little sore from racing. My face hurt far worse from laughing so hard. It was just a riot. Fully recommend it.

[00:04:47.310] – Allan

Glad you had a good time.

[00:04:48.410] – Rachel

Yeah. Gosh yeah. Good people. Good times.

[00:04:51.250] – Allan

All right, are you ready to get into today's episode?

[00:04:54.180] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

Today we're going to discuss nine things that you should drop from your life today. Now, I've never been a huge proponent of trying to eliminate certain things that you do. I'm always a bigger fan of adding things in. I found if you eat real good food and you feel good, you don't want the sugar, you don't want the processed stuff. And so it's kind of one of those things where I'm telling you that these are the things that you want to exclude from your life, but if you can replace them with something healthy.

It's a double win.

So the first one on my list.

And I don't think this should be.

Any surprise to anybody, is smoking and tobacco products. One of the reasons I listed this one first is it is probably the hardest thing for you to stop doing. But beyond that, I've seen firsthand what the cancers associated with smoking and tobacco products do to the human body. I watched my grandfather have bits of his throat and tongue cut out. And I watched my father in law basically drowned in his own blood because he had lung cancer. So this is no joke. Smoking has so many bad things that it does to you. It's something you need to get off of as soon as you possibly can. Try some of the stuff that's out there. The gums, the patches, the I don't know, hypnosis products, anything. Just do what you got to do to get off of that stuff.

The second one on my list is sugar.

And when I'm talking about sugar, I'm not necessarily talking about the sugars that come from natural foods like carrots have.

Some sugar in them. Fruit obviously has sugar in it.

That's typically not the problem. It's the added sugars and they get snuck into just about everything on the shelf. It's really kind of crazy if you start looking at the foods that we eat and you start logging this stuff.

To realize how much sugar is in.

Things just to make them more palatable. So the more you can cut sugar, you're probably going to lose some weight. And if you'll go to fortyplusfitness.com, scroll down a bit, you'll see where I have some challenges. One of those is a sugar challenge. It doesn't cost much, but it's a.

Really good 28 day challenge to help.

You cut down your sugar.

And that's going to have all kinds.

Of health benefits for you.

The next one is related.

It's processed foods.

Most processed foods are engineered to taste.

Good, to make you want more of them, to make you eat more. They're not processed in a way to make them more healthy.

Quite literally, it's the opposite. They want you eating more.

They don't really care about your health.

They may use terms like healthy or whole. All kinds of things, green labels, things like that to make you think that.

A food is healthy for you.

But if it's processed, it's not. And that's just a marketing gimmick. So cut out the processed foods and your health is going to improve considerably.

Sitting for long periods of time is another one.

And most of us are in jobs where we do have to sit for.

Most of the day, but we're still.

Sitting a lot more than we need to. So I'd strongly encourage you to have walk breaks. There's a process of work called the Pomodoro method where you work steady and focused for 25 minutes and then you take a five minute break. My recommendation would be for that five.

Minutes to actually be movement of some sort, get your body moving.

It's going to re energize your brain. It's going to make you more effective. It's going to make things a lot better. You're going to be more productive. But just sitting there for hours and hours and hours is not doing your body any favors. So if you can get up, if you can take a phone call while you're standing, get an adjustable desk. If you can just find ways to be moving a little bit more each day and sitting a little bit less.

The fifth one on my list is negative self taught. Now, I've talked about this topic a.

Good bit over the past five or six months for sure.

And what's happening here is our bodies.

Basically receive food, they receive water and.

Liquids, they receive movement.

What that does for the body and negative thoughts and our environment. And so if you've got negative self.

Talk, you're telling your body you're in.

Trouble, you're telling your body to be unhealthy. It may not seem that way, but negative self talk beats you down and keeps your body from recovering. It keeps your body from doing the things, raises your cortisol, which causes you.

To cut out muscle and to store fat.

And so the negative self talk is something that's very, very damaging to you.

So I'd strongly encourage you to get a journal.

I've said this so many times on the show. Get a journal.

And when you catch yourself doing negative self talk, write about it.

Write about what's going on in your life, why you wrote that statement.

And then as soon as you write.

That statement out, as soon as you think that statement, you write that statement out.

It's your job to refute that.

You're not a bad person. You don't always mess up. You find yourself using those words. You're probably using negative self talk and.

It'S not helping you on your health and fitness journey.

The 6th one is toxic relationships. And I get this is a little.

Touchy, but if you've got people in.

Your life that are making it harder for you to be healthy, they're making.

Your life harder, you don't need that.

That's not helping you. And so if you can end a toxic relationship, it's going to free up space for you to invite somebody else that's much more valuable to you, that's going to be better for you into your life. So try to cut out toxic relationships.

Which leads me to number seven, which is social media.

Social media is the current birthplace of almost all toxic relationships.

Now you get on one of these.

Social media platforms and you write something, someone's going to say something negative, they just are. And then that can escalate into a.

Whole myriad of other things.

So the less time you spend on social media, the better off you're going to be. And the social media that you do consume should be valuable to you. It shouldn't just be out there looking for problems, listening to what other people are having to say about you in your life. Yes, it's cool to share how you're doing, but share it with people that care, you can come to 40 Plusfitnesspodcast.com.

Group and join the 40 plus fitness group. And that's a group of people that.

Are going to treat you right. That's a group of people that care about health and fitness. We're all over 40, so this is not kids running around yelling at each other and causing all kinds of grief. There are no anonymous accounts in the group. I approve each and every one that comes in and I will kick them out if they are abusing what we do there.

So avoid social media where you can.

And if you are going to do it, find good places where you can consume things that are valuable to you.

Okay?

Number eight is alcohol. And I know we've all read it, oh, well, two drinks is actually probably healthy for you. No, that's a doctor doing a study that already has a predefined idea of what they want the outcome to be because they actually just want to go.

Have a drink and feel good about it.

Alcohol does not serve you. It dehydrates you. It does no value when they show you the studies about resveratrol and all.

That stuff, the amount you would have.

To drink to get the dose necessary to get those improvements, if they even happen for humans, because it's really rat studies, it's enormous. You would never be able to drink that much alcohol. And even taking the supplements probably isn't.

Getting you where you want to be. So again, if you're going to drink.

Obviously in moderation, but it's not helping you. And if you're interested in improving your.

Health and fitness, that is one of the things that you should drop. And then number nine is unnecessary medications. Now, if you listened to the show.

Last week, episode 60 Four with Dr. Levy, she wrote the book on that. She's a doctor of pharmacy, and basically she does audits of people who are on various different medications. And as we get older, how we react to different medications changes. So having an audit done or just a review done of what you're taking and trying to figure out if any of those might be unnecessary would be.

A good way for you to cut those back. Every medication has drawbacks. It has side effects. It just does. There's no safe, 100% safe drug out there. So if you're taking them, you're probably.

Then going to have to take other.

Drugs to deal with the side effects of the drugs that you're taking. So if that's the case, try to find another plan. Try to get off of some of them. If you're improving your health, a lot of the medications you're taking might become unnecessary. So if there are unnecessary medications, talk to your doctor, get a professional, get a doctor or a pharmacist to go through the list and see if there's any redundancies things that could probably cut out. There are some reasons for there to be redundancies at time. But for the most part, if you're taking one drug and it's not working for you, you should stop taking it and consider something else if that's what you need. But you got to talk to your doctor and you got to know what you're taking, and you got to have that conversation.

To recap, my list of nine things to drop from your life today,

1. smoking or tobacco products.
2. sugar.
3. processed foods.
4. sitting for long periods of time.
5. negative self-talk.
6. toxic relationships.
7. social media.
8. alcohol.
9. unnecessary medications.

The more of these things you get out of your life, the better you're going to feel, the healthier you're going to be, and you're going to be much more likely to thrive without these things in your life. So if any of these are in your life today, it's worth putting in the work necessary to get them out so you can live a healthy and long.

Post Show/Recap

[00:14:18.850] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:14:19.900] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, you know, like you, I prefer to add things versus drop things. But as I'm listening to you talk about all these things that we should really eliminate from our life, I'm like, yeah, it's a good thing to cut out things like smoking, sugar, sitting. These are all pretty big things that we could maybe stand to reevaluate in our lives. See where we stand.

[00:14:41.040] – Allan

Yeah. And sometimes it is easier to add something, and that makes it that you're going to do less of these other things. Just something to think about. If these things are in your life, they're holding your health back. They just are.

[00:14:53.550] – Rachel

Well, I want to start with sugar right off the bat, and I just mentioned this because a couple years ago, when I was reevaluating my diet, I went towards the keto style of eating, and I was eliminating sugar, and my mind was blown, Alan. I was just shocked at where sugar is in all the foods. It's just hidden. When you think of sugar, at least when I was thinking of sugar, I'm thinking candy bars, pop. That's the easy ones. But there's a lot of sugar in the yogurt we might eat or the creamer I might put in my coffee, or it's even in ketchup. And some other weird things that you wouldn't think about. So taking the minute to look at the labels was super eye-opening.

[00:15:36.590] – Allan

Yeah, I'm preparing. We're going to do it when we get back in October. There's a chili cook-off. And so I'm preparing the chili for 0ur team this year. And so I've been experimenting with the different spices and how to put it together. And one of our teammates, being helpful, wanted to send me a recipe, sort of like, this is the one that'll win. So, yeah, I'm going to do someone else's recipe for my chili cook-off. No, but they all use the canned stuff. This recipe, it called for brown sugar.

[00:16:07.880] – Rachel

Of course.

[00:16:08.650] – Allan

Just throw half a cup of brown sugar in there and everybody's going to love it. And others are throwing in chocolate bars. It was a couple others that threw in sugar. And everything's coming out of a can. Everything that they're putting in there is coming out of a can. I'm like, soak your beans. Yeah, this is not Texas chili, by the way, but soak your beans and then just do mean it.

Yes, it takes a little bit longer to make your own tomato know, it just does. But when you do it, you know what's in it. I'll be able to tell you there's nothing in this. When I get done and I make this thing, there won't be anything out of a can in my chili.

Everything is going to be the raw spices. Everything's going to be the raw vegetables and the meat. And so there's not going to be a bunch of processed stuff or chemicals or sugar in my chili. It'll be something that even if you're keto, you can get past the beans. You can eat it. But it has to be made with hamburger or should be made with hamburger.

What their intent is to make it all fair, and they need beans to kind of bulk that up a little bit. Because just hamburger meat, chili is just okay, but just a little bit of beans to get some fiber and a little bit of bulk in there. But no, it's like you're right if it's in a box bag, jar or can, you need to read the label.

[00:17:29.570] – Rachel

Oh, gosh, yeah.

[00:17:39.970] – Allan

Probably avoid it anyway, but read the. Label first while you're still standing in the store. And then ask yourself, is this something that if I really cared about myself. That I would feed to someone that I care about?

[00:17:39.970] – Rachel

Or is there a better option?

[00:17:41.590] – Allan

Yeah, or is there a better option? There are a lot more of them now. You walk down the aisle and no sugar added peanut butter. Peanut butter should just be peanuts. It really should grind up some peanuts. That's all peanut butter is, is just ground up peanuts. When they start putting sugar and they start pulling out the actual oil from the peanut and putting vegetable oil in. There, you've got to ask the question why.

[00:18:05.240] – Allan

And that's to make it cheaper and to make it more palatable so you'll eat more of it and buy more of it. And again, there's no reason for there to be sugar in peanut butter. But they put it in there.

[00:18:16.270] – Rachel

Yeah,

[00:18:18.600] – Allan

There shouldn't be a no sugar peanut butter. There just shouldn't be sugar in your peanut butter. But we got to read the label. Sugar comes in a lot of different names. If it has an -ose ending, it's probably sugar. And so they'll put different ways to put it in there so they can put it further down the label.

[00:18:36.990] – Allan

High fructose corn syrup is one of the big ones that you'll see, but tt's glucose, it's cane sugar, it's agave nectar. It's all these different things. They're all sugar. And what you want to do then you see all these on the label. They're way down in there. But if there's more than one or two of them now you got to go up there and look at the numbers. Sorry if you don't like numbers, but look up at the numbers and see how many grams of sugar is in this thing. And if it's not fiber, it's mostly sugar.

[00:19:09.230] – Allan

Even if it doesn't say the sugar directly, that's added sugar, it could still be a simple carb that's going to act just like sugar in your body. So you take the total carbs and then you look at the fiber, and that different number is net carbs. And so if you're trying to manage your carbs and manage your sugar, that's where you're going to see it. And then you start looking through the ingredients list. Hint, if there's more than five, put it back. But if they're going to have two or three different types of sugar in it. That's exactly what they're trying to do, is to hide the sugar in this product.

[00:19:42.860] – Allan

So you just don't know how much is in there because they're obligated to put it in order of volume. So ketchup? Yeah, the top ingredient might be water. And then tomatoes and then sugar. And you're like, okay, so the third ingredient in this is sugar.

[00:20:06.000] – Allan

Again, some of the things I see online, I just have to turn it off. I literally just have to say, okay, I'm out. And so that's why I put social media on there, because

[00:20:14.930] – Rachel

That's a good point.

[00:20:14.530] – Allan

There was a woman adding sugar to her Pepsi.

[00:20:15.230] – Rachel

What?

[00:20:15.840] – Allan

Yeah. Her question was, how many spoons or tablespoons of sugar do you put in your Pepsi? There's an individual adding sugar to sugar,water, to make, I guess, more sugary. And I was like, I can't. I just can't. But that's out there. And so people are doing these things. They're filming themselves do it and stop. Just please don't. I went past that post.

[00:20:52.450] – Rachel

Good.

[00:20:53.170] – Allan

And I shut my laptop. I was done because I couldn't. But I held my tongue, I held my snap back of how completely unsmart that was.

[00:21:05.960] – Rachel

Crazy.

[00:21:07.030] – Allan

Yeah, but it's out there. It's out there. People are so addicted to sugar. They will put sugar on sugar and it's just stop, please.

[00:21:18.300] – Rachel

That's got to be the worst I think that's probably the worst thing. That's why I wanted to chat about it for a second. I think all the different varieties of sugar and all the myriad of products that we eat every day, it's insidious and it adds up so fast and we just don't realize it until we begin to look. So, yeah, it's important to start paying attention to that.

[00:21:40.510] – Allan

I agree. Sure.

[00:21:41.790] – Rachel

And then the other thing you had mentioned was sitting can't sit for too long. I've heard people say sitting is the new smoking. We've heard that for a few years now, too. And in the running community, I don't think sometimes runners may not realize we go out for our three, four, five mile run in the morning, and then we spend the day at work. We come home and we're tired because we got up early to run, and we spend the evening on the couch watching TV. And like, well, you kind of are undoing all the great work that you just did that morning. And so if you pay attention to your lifestyle, if you spend too much time sitting, it might be time to, again, reevaluate what you're doing in the evenings.

[00:22:22.690] – Allan

And it's really about movement, because this is not you should stand up all day long either, because that has health ramifications. Too I remember because there were a lot of women standing in the pharmacy business. I was in the pharmacy business when I was in college, and they would gave problems with their varicose veins and other issues because they were standing in one place for a long period of time.

[00:22:44.930] – Allan

It's really about movement. So the opposite of sitting is not standing. The opposite of sitting is moving. Okay? Your glutes need to be engaged, which. They are not when you're sitting. And so the opposite is moving. So getting up and walking around, getting up and maybe doing a couple of jumping jacks or some body squats or just something, the opposite is not standing. So if you get one of those adjustable desks, adjust it.

[00:23:10.210] – Allan

I would basically set the timer on. My phone for 30 minutes, and every. 30 minutes, I would adjust my desk. Up or adjust my desk down. Sometimes I would sit on one of the balance balls if what I was working on didn't require me to be worried about this. And I had a wobble board and. All these other things, and people walk in my office, it's like, what in the heck are you doing in here? Looks more like a gym than it does an office. And that was by design.

[00:23:36.100] – Allan

I wanted to be able to move. I had a yoga mat. I have a yoga mat in my office.

[00:23:40.790] – Rachel

So if I feel like I need to move around, I've been sitting for a little while. I can get down on the floor on the yoga mat and do some bird dogs, do some crunches, do some hollow holds, just different things to basically get my body moving and engaged and not just sitting still.

[00:24:00.090] – Rachel

Oh, I think that's important, to find different ways to move throughout the day, and then especially in the evening when we're sitting there watching TV. We always talk about this, too, Allan. When the commercial comes on, get up and go do something for me. I'm doing laundry in the evenings, so when the show ends or something. I can go downstairs, maybe walk up, go back downstairs. I kind of do some chores in the evening just to get stuff done and kill two birds with 1 st, basically.

[00:24:27.750] – Allan

Or try like the Starrettes do: just sit on the floor.

[00:24:32.910] – Rachel

Oh, yeah.

[00:24:42.910] – Allan

You're going to squirm you're going to move around. If you try to sit on the floor and watch TV, you're going to squirm around a little bit. You're going to be moving the whole time because it's kind of uncomfortable to sit on the floor for a long period of time without moving around. When we sit in a chair, we're just in this comfortable, supported place that, there's not a lot of reason, especially on a couch, not a lot of reason for us to do much moving except to reach out and grab your beer, I guess.

[00:25:02.190] – Allan

But it's just getting down on the floor that's going to open up your hips. It's going to make you move around a bit, and then yeah.

Then pop up onto the couch for a little while and then get up. Yeah, walk into the bathroom or walk over to grab your laundry. And you can stand there and fold it while you're watching the television program. And then sit back down if you're still watching. But there's lots of things you can.

[00:25:24.790] – Allan

Do to watch your show wind down. And still get some general movement in it. We're not talking about getting on a treadmill and running for a half hour while you're watching TV. This is just casual, gentle movement, and your body's going to appreciate that.

[00:25:39.920] – Rachel

Oh, absolutely. These are all great things to consider or try and figure out how to eliminate them out of your day to day.

[00:25:47.150] – Allan

All right, well, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:25:49.680] – Rachel

Sounds great, Allan. Take care.

[00:25:51.280] – Allan

You too. Bye.

[00:25:52.350] – Rachel

Thanks. Bye bye.

Music by Dave Gerhart

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– Ken McQuade	– Leigh Tanner
– Debbie Ralston	– John Dachauer	– Tim Alexander
– Eliza Lamb

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Are you capable of changing your health and fitness?

Less...

Finding your health and fitness pace

Many people believe that any health and fitness endeavor must be a full-on sprint. They start a new diet and don't take into account how they're going to sustain it over the long haul. On this episode, we talk about how to find your pace.

Transcript

Let's Say Hello

Due to Allan's travel we recorded our hello and wrap up sessions beforehand and did not do our standard hello section for this episode.

Episode

Today we're going to talk about pace and how life isn't all sprints. I want to start this with basically two contrasting stories from my life. The first one was my tough mudder training. Now I've told the story in the book, and basically the concept here was that I decided I wanted to do a tough mudder with my daughter. And this was March when we made this decision.

And the race that I wanted to do was in November. My daughter was going to be 21 years old, close to 21 years old. She was a level one CrossFit coach and quite fit. And so in my planning for this tough Mudder, my training for this tough Mudder, I knew I was going to have to push myself pretty hard and pretty fast if I was going to be in shape for that tough Mudder. So going from March, where I was already generally training to November, I still had a lot of ground to make up, and so I did what I call a sprint.

I trained really hard. I worked on my nutrition really hard, and I sprinted, and I got it all done. I got the work done. The results were great. You can see the before and after picture on my Facebook and on my website, 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com.

And when I did it, I felt really good. I got that sprint done. I accomplished everything I wanted to do, so good for me. Right? Well, let's flash forward about five years, maybe a little bit further when I did the Spartan training.

Now I plan to do the Spartan race as a function. We were going to be traveling to Chicago, and there was a spartan in there, and I thought, hey, I could do a Spartan. And so I asked my younger brother if he wanted to do it with me, and he did. So I'm like, okay, let's do this Spartan. Let's go to Chicago and do a Spartan together.

The difference was I was in okay shape, but I needed to be in Spartan shape within about two and a half months. And so I started my sprint, and I pushed hard, and I worked on my nutrition, and I did everything I could do to be ready for this Spartan race until I broke my rotator cuff snapped in the middle of a workout. I was trying to do overhead presses with dumbbells, and the reality was I didn't hurt myself doing the presses. I hurt myself trying to get the weights up into the starting position.

I felt it snapped, and I knew immediately what I had done.

And in fact, it was a very bad tear. But it wasn't a tear that had happened just during that sprint. It was a tear that had been happening over a long period of time. And the only reason I tell you these two contrasting stories, I still did this part. It hurt like heck, I still did this part.

But the stories I'm telling here are really just to emphasize the fact that if we go too hard, too long, we will break. And that's not the purpose of what we're trying to accomplish here. The goal in health and fitness is not a destination. You might approach it and say, oh, I need to lose 40 lbs, and that's my goal. That's my thing.

That's my finish line. But after you've lost that 40 lbs, it's not like honey and roses for the rest of your life. You're still going to want to train and need to train. You're still going to have to focus on nutrition and do the things you're doing for your health. That doesn't change.

So don't feel like there's a finish line. Just like if you're saying you're going to do the couch to 5K and you complete that 5K, hopefully you're not hanging up your running shoes and saying, I'm done nothing more. No more training. I'm out. I accomplished the great thing, the 5K.

That's not how this works. We train to live and be the people we want to be, to be better tomorrow. And yes, while we might have goals in mind of certain things that we want to accomplish, be it a weight loss goal or completing a race or doing something else, those are just motivating goals. Those are just things that drive us the measurement criteria. So we know that we're successful at getting better.

The true goal here is to come up with a sustainable lifestyle and a sustainable lifestyle basically means you can eat the foods you like and not feel deprived. Now, are you eating as much of it as you want? Maybe not. Maybe you used to have pizza every night, and now you're only having pizza maybe once a month. But you're still having pizza.

So you're eating the foods that you enjoy and you're enjoying your foods. You're just not eating as much. And maybe you've changed your palette to a point that some of the foods that you used to enjoy, you don't enjoy as much now. So you've found a sustainable way of eating that you can eat most of the time, if not all the time. And you've also in sustainable lifestyle,

You've built a movement pattern that improves and helps you maintain your fitness without breaking you. So sustainable is something you can do for the long term. And that should be the overall objective of everything we do with our health and fitness is to find the sustainable path that we can stay on the vast majority of the time. It's not that you wouldn't depart from that, that you wouldn't take a detour. But once you take the detour, you know, to get right back on your sustainable path and keep pushing forward.

SPONSOR

This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is brought to you by Timeline Nutrition, the makers of MitoPure. We've talked about the importance of mitochondria the power generators at the heart of nearly every cell in our body. So, you know, keeping your mitochondria healthy is an important step in feeling good and slowing the aging process.

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So let's talk a little bit about pace. The faster you go, the longer you go, the more likely you break. That's true in everything that we do, particularly when you're over 40. Now, my story at the beginning of this episode, we're about pushing too hard training for an event, and I broke, but the same can hold true for nutrition. If you deprive yourself of a type of food or you eat a certain way, that's really restrictive, the likelihood you're gonna fall off the wagon goes up substantially.

If you tell yourself I'm never going to have another drink, that might work for you. But the reality is for most people, they're going to find themselves at a party, they're going to find themselves at a bar and they're gonna have a drink, and that's okay. There's nothing substantially wrong with that. But the harder you push yourself, the more restrictive you are, the more likely you're going to fail at some point, it's just the way it works. So when I talk about pace, I like to think of them in three terms.

Okay. The first is the sprint or the Ferrari, the second is a moderate pace. I call the pickup truck, and the third is slow, which I call the minivan. And there's reasons for each and every one of these paces that goes beyond what you want to accomplish. So let's talk about sprints first.

Sprints

When you are ready to do a sprint, there should be nothing between you and the finish line. You want to be able to do straight forward without having to stop. You want to do it as quickly as you can responsibly. And that means there's nothing there to stop you. There's no one there to bother you.

There's nothing that is going to be in the way. So if you're training for something and you want to do a sprint, it's got to be there in your eyesight, in line of sight. And so in that case, it's got to be close enough. You're trying to go from A to B, not A to T. And while it might look from my before and after picture A to T, realize not all of that was really a true 100% sprint.

I wasn't sprinting every day, all day, but I was working toward getting better and better each day. And as I got better, I pushed harder and harder. So it was a sprint, in a sense, but it was an A to B, B to C, C to D kind of approach. I wasn't looking to go A to T. And if that's what you're trying to do, you're probably going to break before you get there.

And then the final bit with sprints, that's really a big one for me is you've got to keep the ego in check. Ego is your enemy when you're doing a sprint, because at that point, you're not looking at your red line. You're not looking at what's going on with the heat and your engine. And if you're pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing and you're not paying attention, snap, there you go.

Honest Truth, the weight I was doing when I was doing those overhead presses was far more than I should have been doing. I didn't need to be doing. I did it because I could until I couldn't. So you've got to keep your ego in check and know what you're doing is building you rather than breaking you. So sprints are important.

Moderate

You're in your Ferrari, you're rooming down the road, and as long as there's nothing to hold you back and you're not going to red line and break, go for it. Next is the moderate pace. So I was a big fan of tailgating when I lived in the United States, and so I had a pick up truck with a tonneau cover so I could put all of my tailgating gear in the back of the truck to go to Hattiesburg for the games. Now, here's the thing. I couldn't own a Ferrari and take all my tail gaining gear because it wouldn't fit.

And my pickup truck doesn't travel as fast as a Ferrari. So I couldn't get there as fast. I could get in the Ferrari. And other than law enforcement, pretty much be there from Pensacola to Hattiesburg. And I don't know, 3 hours, maybe.

Okay, but that wasn't going to work in a pickup truck. I had to go a little bit slower. I take a little bit longer, not much longer, but it would take longer. So it was a more moderate pace because I had baggage to carry. So what's the kind of baggage that would hold us up in general?

Well, we have vacations planned. We have family members that are around that maybe we need to do some things with them. Maybe we have a job, all those little things you got to carry around with you that might slow you down a little bit. And that's okay. If you're patient, you find yourself a sustainable pace that fits your lifestyle, again

That's the objective here. And then you move and you're in this for the long haul. So in general, you should probably be spending most of your time over the course of the next several years in the pickup truck going a moderate pace, you can carry the things you need, do the things you need. There's a lot of utility there to get things done. You just have to have the patience and look at this as the long haul.

Slow and Steady

And then the final pace that I like to talk about is slow. And that's where you're in the minivan. And so you got the kids and the wife and this and that and you got to stop and go to the bathroom, every other exit. And so these issues, these people, these things, they're all happening. And it's not necessarily outside, outside your control, but it's generally outside your control that these are things you also have to focus on.

Your health and fitness may not be the ultimate number one priority in your life, but it's got to be important enough that you're still moving forward. And that's the key. If you have even more patience and self compassion, you do keep moving forward. And that's the key of moving slow is that you're not sitting still and you're not sliding backwards. So at worst times, you're holding your ground.

But most of the time, there's this little push forward a little bit forward. And while the minivan can't go as fast as the pickup truck or the Ferrari, you're still doing something positive for yourself, and you have to keep your head up and realize that's the case. And so I titled this episode, you can't sprint all the time or something like that. But basically, it's not all about sprints for sure. So what is the right pace for you?

Well, the reality of it is it's probably at different points in time going to be all three. There are going to be times when a sprint makes sense. So you say, hey, I'm going to sign up for a 30 day challenge to do this thing, and that can be an awesome motivator. You can sit down and say, when we get to next spring, I want to be able to run a 5K, and now you're moving at a moderate pace, taking a very cool or easy couch the 5K program to get yourself to a point where you can complete that race safely.

And then there's going to be times when things are going on in your life that you just have to slow it down and get in the minivan.

So having the self awareness to know which one makes the most sense for you, and using that as a tool where you're moving forward, you're sprinting when you can. You're going a moderate pace most of the time, and occasionally a slower pace, so that self awareness gives you kind of the gist of all of it. So again, find the pace that you don't break yourself. Find the pace that keeps you moving forward and not going backwards and stay at that pace until it makes sense to change and do something different.

You have health and fitness goals. You know what your vision is, of what you want to accomplish. You have to go the right pace or it's not sustainable. So again, the overall objective of your health and fitness should be to find a sustainable lifestyle and understanding pace and being self aware are key components of making that happen.

Post Show/Recap

[00:16:18.293] – Allan
Hey Ras.

[00:16:18.860] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, while you're talking my language now. We're talking about paces and life is not a sprint.

[00:16:25.820] – Allan
Life is not a sprint in and of itself, but it should and probably will include some sprints. And so that's really kind of one of the cores of this. There's kind of three areas. And one is that so many people want to skip to the end. They come back and say, Well, I want to be able to run a marathon or I want to lose 75 pounds. And so they want to go from A to T and they want it now. It's like, I want it now. Just give it to me now.

[00:16:57.290]
And the reality is that's not how things work. If you push, you're going to probably break yourself, particularly in fitness. And then with weight loss, you've got to do sustainable over time. And so we got to go and we got to tick all the boxes, A B C all the way through. And then it eventually. If we keep at it, then we'll get to T.

[00:17:18.490] – Allan
And so it's just that function of we didn't get here in a day. For some of us, it was 40 years ago for some of us, it was 50 years ago. For some of us, it was more years than that that we weren't doing the right things all the time. And as a result, we have something to work on.

[00:17:32.610] – Rachel
Right.

[00:17:34.020] – Allan
And we work and we gradually get there.

[00:17:37.290] – Rachel
Well, we all want the short, quick, easiest way to lose weight or get stronger or whatever it is. We're always looking for the right diet or the right exercise modality. And the fact is that it's different for everybody. And there is no shortcut to success. It just takes time and hard work. And you mentioned if you push too hard for too long, you'll get injured in the running world. We call people like that weekend warriors. Were you think you can go from the couch to a 5K in a weekend?

[00:18:10.690] – Rachel
And in reality, it takes weeks to adapt. I mean, if you haven't run a mile, you need to start with a quarter mile or ten minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes out there and ease your way up. Otherwise, you'll get injured real quick. And how disappointing would that be?

[00:18:25.040] – Allan
So just realize that there needs to be a process. You've got to go through the hoops, you got to get from A to T the right way.

[00:18:34.880] – Allan
And the next piece of this is part of the reason why that happens is people just aren't patient enough. They think the process should be faster, they think that it should be consistent and that you should know if I lifted £100 yesterday, I should be able to lift 105 today. And it's like that's not how it works. It's seldom any of this weight loss, strength, endurance.

[00:18:59.330] – Allan
It's never linear. You're going to have days when you go out and run and you just feel like you've got all the energy in the world and you have this great run. And you're kind of like, wow, I did that run and I probably could have done it again. You know, I felt that good. And then another day you go out there and it's just trash. And then what happened? I was at this mileage and I had to stop and walk. What's going on? And so just recognizing that the human body was not built for linear change.

[00:19:31.450] – Allan
And so we've just got to have the patience to realize that if we have intelligence behind what we're doing, well, nudge ourselves to where we need to be. And we have to care about ourselves enough to say, okay, I'm not going to break myself by being silly. And then I'm also not going to punish myself for not being what I thought I was going to be. You just have that patience for sure.

[00:19:56.820] – Rachel
And we all hit these plateaus. I had mentioned a few episodes ago that I had a lot of weight to lose after my first child was born, and I gained a lot of weight over those nine months. And it took longer than nine months to take it off. But I also hit a few plateaus, which meant that my body was hitting like a homeostasis. My body got used to what I was doing, and it was time to switch it up. And sometimes you need, you know, a trainer or somebody to kind of guide you to try something else or do something different.

[00:20:27.140] – Rachel
It's not always easy to figure that out on our own.

[00:20:29.700] – Allan
That is one of the things having clients and talking to them, and they're setting their expectations and setting it at the right level. And then, yes, when those inevitable plateaus and they're good, you actually want plateaus to exist because that's your body protecting your body. And so we need that. If you're not getting enough food, your body is going to tell you, if you're trying to do too much work, your body's going to tell you. And so we have all these great feedback mechanisms to say, okay, what we were doing was working, but it's not going to work now.

[00:21:02.240] – Allan
And so what does that actually mean? And what can we do about it? And one of the core ones. And that's why I wanted to talk about these different paces of sprint and moderate paste and slow is that those are your tools. And there's going to be times when you say, okay, I've plateaued. I've been at this wait for now for a month and a half, and I'm ready to do something about it. So you say, okay, I'm going to do the sprint, meaning I'm going to try something a little different.

[00:21:31.570] – Allan
And I'm going to do the sprint for a period of time and see if that doesn't jump start things to coax my body to do something different. And so it can be something as simple as saying, okay, no alcohol for six weeks. Okay. And before you were having a couple drinks on Friday and a couple of drinks on Saturday and still losing weight, just say, okay, I'm going to try cutting out the alcohol for six weeks and see what happens. I would call that a sprint going from some to none is a sprint in the nutrition world.

[00:22:06.270] – Allan
And so you do that now. You don't do that with the expectation this is going to be my forever life. But some people do they actually get to that point. They're like, you know, I really didn't need that in my life, and I'm better off for it. And some people don't go back and they don't go back to drink. And so that's there. I think a lot of people get stuck in something comfortable, and particularly when it was working for a period of time and they're like, Well, I can have my cake and eat it, too.

[00:22:31.380] – Allan
And then eventually, maybe you got to forgo the cake a little bit more often because you are carrying that cake with you and you're not able to get rid of the weight you want to get rid of. So finding different paces when it matters. Like kids are going off to stay with grandma's for a few weeks instead of turning that into a holiday for you. Adult staycation stuff. And you guys are having mimosas and martinis and all of that. Maybe you say this is a great opportunity for me to do something a little bit more aggressive.

[00:23:04.470] – Allan
I can get out. And maybe I do two workouts today because I have this extra time that I don't have to worry taking care of children or taking them to practices or whatever I would have to do that would take up my time. Now I can dedicate more time to myself, self care and use that as an opportunity to sprint. So you come out better for it. But don't just do one pace. Don't think you're locked into one pace for the rest of your life. Your life will change, and that will give you opportunities to go faster.

[00:23:33.740] – Allan
And then there's just going to be times when you have to take the opportunity and go slower. My vacation. I took it slow, you know, they got out and did some things that played volleyball. I went for walks on the beach. I did some things, but I just told myself it's like, okay, I'm not going to stress out. This is a vacation. So I slowed down. I got out of the Ferrari. I got out of the truck and I walked over and said, oh, here's my minivan seat belt and I'm ready to go.

[00:24:02.270] – Allan
And then as I'm traveling, I know that I'm doing research. I can figure out where different things are. I know there's a YMCA in Asheboro, North Carolina I can go to. They charge $5 a day. I know where other gyms are along the route. Unfortunately, I don't have my anytime fitness gym membership anymore, so I won't be able to use that as a way because that was a key way that I would always find a a gym where I was going. So I have to pay some more drop in fees.

[00:24:30.220] – Allan
And I know that. And I know my progress won't be as fast because I'm driving and I'm going to be in the car a lot of days. But anyway, I know that I'm going to have to have a different pace at that point in time. And then when I get back, I get back in the fast lane. You know, it might not be a Ferrari. At first it might be the pickup truck until I feel like I've got my legs under me again. And then I'll go a little harder.

[00:24:53.860] – Rachel
That sounds great. Allan. I hope you enjoy your vacation and all the different places I can enjoy. Where all the cities where you get to spend some time. At least you can hike the trails or walk through parks and enjoy the different foods that you'll get to experience in all these different areas as well. It sounds like a wonderful time.

[00:25:14.270] – Allan
Yeah, Pensacola, I'm coming. I'm going to eat all your oysters.

[00:25:21.390] – Rachel
Well, enjoy that when you can.

[00:25:23.980] – Allan
I will. All right, Rachel, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:25:28.040] – Rachel
Great. Take care.

Patreons

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

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

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Are you committed?

Before we get into today's episode, I would like to ask you if you would take just a moment to vote for The Wellness Roadmap in the Author Academy Awards. We've made it as a top 10 finalist in the health category. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/finalist, and that'll take you to their website. You'll find a little arrow down the page a little bit. You can scroll to page 7 of 16 that's the health category. Just click on the book title, you don't have to give them any information about yourself. Just click on the book title and that will secure your vote for The Wellness Roadmap. Again, 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/finalist. Thank you. This award means a lot to me and your vote means the world to me. Thank you.

So today's episode is the third part of a mindset series. On episode 397, we talked about prioritization and time management by utilizing a tool that I created called the identity grid. You probably do better to go back and listen to the last two episodes, but you don't have to. I'm gonna try to make each episode stand-alone, but if you want to get the whole picture, I will probably be flashing back to that grid.

Also on episode 398, I kinda got into the getting the wellness, the things that you'll need to do to make that happen that include pushing outside your comfort zone, uh, applying your energies the right way and not overstressing yourself. Um, and then just looking at it more like a program rather than a project. So I'd encourage you to go back and listen to 397 and 398 if you haven't already, but I will try to make this episode stand-alone.

Setting your pace toward wellness

Hello and thank you for being a part of the 40+ Fitness podcast. I’m really excited to have you here today and I’m really excited to share today’s show with you. It’s going to be a solo episode. I got a lot of great feedback from the last one, so I did promise you and I am going to continue to give you some of these solo shows. And the topic we’re talking about today called “Modes of Transportation” is really, really important. It’s something that you really need to make sure you understand before you get into your wellness journey, until you get into your path. It’s a part of what I call the “Wellness GPS”.

What I find is so many people struggle to know what to do when, where to go, how to get there, and when they run into a problem, they really don’t have the tools to break away and get through what’s going on. So they’re in a plateau, they don’t know how to get around that. They get into a roadblock or they hit a stumble or a pot hole. They don’t know how to get around that. If you’ve set your GPS right, it will help you do those things, and if you’ve set your Wellness GPS well, you’ll know how to react and do the right things for your wellness.

I want to help you do that, so to do that, I’m going to launch a challenge. It’s going to be called the Wellness GPS Challenge. This is going to be a short-term challenge – I’m thinking probably something in the realm of about seven days. We’re going to walk through each and every step of the Wellness GPS path, get you completely set up to almost guarantee success.

My clients that have used this strategy, used this approach – they get results, and I want you to get results too.

Now, because I’m going to be working directly with you, I can’t bring on a whole lot of people to do this. It’s going to be a very small group, like 20 people. I’m only going to allow 20 people in, and if you want to be a part of it, you need to be on the waiting list, because I’m going to contact the waiting list first, allow 24 hours for them to join, and then I’ll start looking to announce it on the podcast and otherwise. But the first 20 slots are going to go to people that are on the waiting list if they want it. So you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/GPS. And when you sign up on that mailing list, you’ll be getting some emails from me to let you know what the timing is and what we’re going to be doing, and then we’re going to go ahead and launch it. If I get to 20 just from this mailing list, then I’m done. So if you don’t want to miss out on this offer of being a part of the Wellness GPS challenge, I encourage you to go join that mailing list today. Again, that’s at 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/GPS.

Let’s get into our topic – modes of transportation. So I want to set the scene for you. I was probably about five years into my wellness journey, as it would be, and basically it was a yo-yo experience, to say the least. At this particular time though I was in generally good shape. I felt really good, I’d been working out, things were going pretty well, but my work schedule was just getting insane. I was traveling about 90%, and this was one of those rare weekends that I was at home and I just decided I didn’t want to do anything. I was jet lagged, I was tired, so I’m sitting on the couch just pretty much working my thumb. It’s a Sunday morning and I’m flipping between Face the Nation and various infomercials. So as I’m flipping the channels and watching stuff, all of a sudden this commercial comes on for a program called Insanity. You might’ve heard of it – it’s from the same people who did P90X and all the Beachbody people. And this was Shaun T, and this dude looked great. The folks behind him were moving, they were exercising. It all looked really good. And what was really cool about it was that they didn’t need any equipment to do the work they were doing. I was like, “Wow, I travel a lot, it’s really hard for me to find a gym at points in time with all the travel I’m doing. This might actually be the answer.” So of course I get my credit card out, I dial the 1-800 number and I order the stuff.

I come back from my next business trip, and there it is in my mailbox. I was really, really excited about it, so I just decided to rip the covers off, see what’s in it. I knew that I couldn’t carry all these DVDs with me. There were about 12 of them or so. I couldn’t carry all of them with me, so I was saying, “What do I need to do? First thing I’ll do, I’ll rip all these to my computer. I’m getting on another trip soon, and instead of having the DVDs with me, it’d be easier if it’s on my computer. I’ll be more likely to do it on the road.” So I did that first, knowing myself, knowing I needed to have it handy if I was going to use it. Then as soon as I got done with that, I put the first DVD in and it was a fitness test. So I do this fitness test and I really push myself because I want to know how well this does, so I’m going to really push myself to do this fitness test. And it was hard. Not just hard; it was really, really hard. The next day I was basically incapacitated. I felt like I’d been strapped to my bed and beat with a baseball bat. I woke up and I felt so bad, and I really didn’t want to get up. I knew I had to get ready for work and I was laying there and I finally decided, “I’m so much pain, I won’t be able to concentrate. This won’t be a good day for me.” So I called in sick. It’s kind of embarrassing now to look back at it. It’s a little funny, but at the time I was really embarrassed that I pushed myself so hard in a workout that I literally can’t go.

I only tell you that story because I think a lot of us actually approach our health and fitness thinking, “I’ve got to get this done now.” The body weight, the things that we’re trying to get rid of, the things we’re trying to do. We didn’t get into the shape we were in just a couple of weeks, in a couple of days, in a couple months. But I think a lot of us have this general mindset that we want it now. And one of the things that’s going to be a limiting factor, and I’ve talked about this a lot on the show, is just physically what we’re capable of doing. I think in a sense we all know that if we push ourselves too hard, we’re going to break.

But there’s another point to pace that I really want you to take to heart. And it’s the one that’s really the hardest for us to deal with, because we’re gung-ho and we all want to get there – and that is, what vehicle are we going to have to choose to go? The vehicle we choose is going to determine the pace with which we get there. So, in a normal example, if I wanted to drive from here in my home in Pensacola Beach to Hattiesburg, it’s about a 3-hour drive. I’ve done that drive so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. It’s a relatively straight flat road. If I got into a sports car, I could probably get there in two and a half hours easy. I’ll break a couple of speed limits here and there. I know where to not break the speed limits by now, but I’d go really quick. It’s a really easy road, I know the way. Boom, I’m there. It’s just me and the car, and I’m in Hattiesburg. So if I want to be in Hattiesburg for a football game, I’m there. No problem.

So, if you’re single, got nothing else going on in your life, no other troubles, no other problems, no other passengers or baggage – sure, hop in the sports car and get there. As much as your body will allow you to do so, that should be your pace. That can be your pace. But unfortunately many of us do have baggage and passengers. So if I wanted to go to a football game, but I also wanted to set up the tailgate for everybody – I can’t take the sports car now because I can’t carry the tent, the chairs, the grill, the food, the cooler – all the different things that I would want for the tailgate. Now I have to bring my pickup truck. The pickup truck doesn’t handle as quickly as the sports car. It can’t go quite as fast and it’s not going to get there in the same amount of time. So now with the truck, it might take me three hours to get there, which is actually substantially more than two and a half when you sit down and do the math. But because I need to carry the baggage of the stuff in my life, it’s going to take me longer. So, if I have a job that has me working 18-hour days, I won’t be able to work out as often as I may have wanted to work out. If I have some other issues going on with people that are going to want to have food and I want a social life and I want to go tailgate, then I have baggage that’s going to keep me from moving as fast as I might have moved if I didn’t have that baggage. So I have to take the pickup truck – it’s going to take me longer to get there. If I can’t do the things I need to do all the time, without regard to any other timing, any other thing, I might have some difficulty getting there as quickly. And I have to accept that. That acceptance is a very, very important thing.

Before we really get into the acceptance though, I want to talk about the final one, and that is, what if I have passengers? So what if I have six people that want to travel with me to the game? I can’t take the truck because I can’t sit six people in my truck. Now I’m going to have to buy a bus or rent a bus, and the bus is going to be a little harder for me to handle. I might not be as familiar with the transmission, I’m going to have to slow down. And then invariably one of the six or seven of us that are going might have to go to the bathroom while we’re on there. So we’re probably going to be taking a few more pitstops, particularly if those passengers happen to be your children. So, recognizing that you have people in your life that are going to slow you down, you have stuff in your life, events, work, the gym closes, all these different things that can happen that are going to potentially slow you down – you have to set your mind to understand that there is going to be a pace of movement that is going to be most appropriate for you and the lifestyle you want and need and have.

I define wellness as being the happiest, healthiest, most fit person you can be, and I put happiness in there for a reason. Not having baggage can be great, not having passengers can be great. But I’m thinking to be the happiest person you want to be, you’re going to have the baggage, you’re going to have the passengers, you’re going to have those special events. You’re going to have the people – your children, your spouse. You’re going to have those people in your life, so you have to make sure that your fitness journey, the way you set all of this up basically is strategized to deal with that. You may have passengers, or baggage, or you may have both. So you have to choose the appropriate mode of transportation which is going to then reflect into the pace with which you see movement, with which you see the journey happen. Once you satisfy yourself with understanding that that’s how all of this works, it becomes a lot easier for you to accept that you don’t have to feel the acceleration of a sports car to know that you’re moving forward, as long as you stay the path and you keep moving forward. So, getting your mindset on the front end of what is possible and how you’re going to get there, with which vehicle and what that pace is going to be like, is going to go a long way towards helping you reach your goals.

I want to close with one other thing, and I know this is going to be a really short episode. This is a really, really important topic that you need to think about and wrap your mind around, because if you really do want to meet your goals, if you have certain fitness goals that you want to meet – it’s not if you’re going to meet those goals. You must meet those goals. Your health and fitness, your wellness should be the most important thing to you right now, and if it is, then you’re going to want to pick the right vehicle, and then just understand that it’s not if, it’s when you reach certain goals. If right now I wanted to train for a 10K, I have my wife, I have a couple of trips that are coming up. I have to consider the baggage and the passengers to decide, can I do a 10K? Am I capable of doing a 10K in six weeks, or maybe I need to sign up for the next one? I still have it. It’s still there, I still set it up. It’s just a different 10K at a slightly offset time, and I’m doing that because I’m being responsible to understanding what my baggage and my passengers are. And if you’ll do that, that’s going to lend into the whole happiness thing because you’re getting what you want out of your life and you’re meeting your goals. So it’s not if, it’s when. And now you’re on the path and you know you’re going at the pace that’s appropriate for you.

Closing, I do want to leave with one other thing. There are the passengers, there is the baggage, but you are the driver on your wellness journey, period. You have to make some hard decisions, and that might mean at points in time, asking your spouse to eat a little differently or to help you deal a little differently. It might mean telling your children they really can’t have Oreos in the cupboard all the time because you’re trying to accomplish a certain thing. It might mean that you skip a time out with your friends to go do a run because your actual race is coming up really quick. Those are the tradeoffs you’re going to make, but to get the full balance of what we’re trying to get out of wellness, which is happiness, health and fitness, you’re going to have to really tie into understanding the pace that’s the most appropriate to you. That’s not just what your body is capable of doing; it’s what your life is capable of supporting.

So, take some time to think about the pace with which you should be working towards your wellness goals, and then make that your reality. Make those goals happen when they’re supposed to happen for you. You’ll be so much happier, healthier and more fit, and therefore, well.

Another episode you may enjoy

Wellness Roadmap Part 2

Listener question – strength vs flexibility

Kiki asks, “Should I focus on strength, flexibility, or both?  I answer her question and get a bit deeper into the various fitness modalities providing a way for you to decide for yourself.

Allan: Hello, and thank you for being a part of the 40+ Fitness podcast. Today’s show is going to be a little bit different. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately. In fact, I was just looking at this – up to today I‘ve interviewed over 175 authors and experts, so quite a fit bit of interviewing going on on the show. I thought I would mix things up, particularly because I received a call through the SpeakPipe app on the Contact Page. A listener had a question and she asked me to do a podcast on a specific issue. It's actually a very important issue and it is something that I think everyone should know. So I wanted to take a little bit of time to go over her question, and it was a good question. So if you have some questions, I do want you to reach out.

You can go to our Contact Page. There’s a couple different ways to contact me there. If you’d like to potentially have your question answered via audio, on the show, then do use the SpeakPipe. I can also do that in email, so you can email me at allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com, and I’ll be glad to answer any and all questions. I do answer all of my emails, so if there’s something going on and you have a question, please do take the time to reach out. I am here to help you and I want you to know that if you’re needing something and you don’t know the answer to it or know where to look, I’m your guy. Send me an email or contact me on the SpeakPipe, which is through our Contact Page on the website 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com. So, the question today comes from Kiki, and I’m going to go ahead and play her audio section. So here we go.

Kiki : Hi. I have been listening to your podcast and I was wondering if it would be possible maybe to do a podcast about flexibility and muscle strength past the age of 40. My physio said that women over 40 should be concentrating more on muscle building than flexibility, but I always thought it should be a balance of both. So I was wondering if I’ve got it. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening.

Sponsor: Before I answer Kiki’s question, I just wanted to remind you that this podcast is sponsored by Teami Blends. You can support the podcast by going to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Tea. And when you’re there, if you use the promo code 40plus, you can get a 15% discount on a purchase of $30 or more. They have great tea products so I could get to know them. I’ve actually ordered some more. I really do enjoy their teas and I know you will too. Go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Tea.

Allan: Kiki, thank you so much for that question. When my clients come to me, they come to me from many different walks of life, different age ranges, obviously over 40, but I have clients in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. So, it can vary from time to time as far as what fitness modality you should focus on. I agree with your doctor somewhat that strength is important, but I also agree that the answer is probably both in your case. So, let me go through each of the fitness modalities. There are five of them that I think my clients should spend most of their time focusing on when we’re over 40:

1. Strength
2. Flexibility – which I also define as mobility, so I use those words interchangeably
3. Total body composition – which includes weight loss and muscle mass, so I include those together
4. Balance; and
5. Life-specific. With life-specific, that can be things like speed, agility, hand-eye coordination. Let’s say within your life you want to be able to play tennis or you want to be able to see the ball or see the child and be able to move around with the kid. There are different things that you’re going to want to be able to do as you age, so there’ll be different fitness pieces that you’ll want to put together. We’ll get into a lot more detail in a minute on that.

When we talk about strength, the reason that strength is so important is that we tend to lose muscle mass and strength once we’re over the age of 35. It’s a process called sarcopenia. Now, the doctor could have said, “I want you lifting weights so you can retain or gain muscle.” In talking to a woman, a lot of times you see them kind of deflate a little bit because they don’t want to get bulky. Of course, they believe if they’d go lift weights, they’re going to look like a bodybuilder, and that’s just not so. You don’t have the testosterone to do that. You actually don’t have the physical capacity, the energy that it would take for you to put on a significant amount of muscle. You may be able to add a few pounds of muscle, but again, if you’re so onto your weight, obviously you’re going to be, “I don’t want muscle”. We’ll talk about that in a minute.

Strength is a good way to have that open conversation with someone because they can see a need for strength. If you can’t open a jar, if you can’t pull yourself up from your chair, if you can’t reach down and grab something off the ground, like a bag of groceries – then that’s going to be something that’s going to be debilitating later. It’s going to keep you from having liberty, it’s going to keep you from being independent when you get older. If you don’t lift, you’re only going to get weaker. There’s just no other way around it. You can’t live your normal lifestyle and not lose strength. You have to do resistance exercise to retain or gain strength. So, I encourage all of my clients to strength-train. I think it’s very, very important for everybody to strength-train.

Now, mobility is also very important. You can’t reach down and pick up that bag of groceries if you can’t get the full range of motion in your hips, knees, ankles. Having good mobility is important because if you move incorrectly, you have the potential of injury. So, I agree with you that flexibility and mobility are very important modalities for us to maintain. There can be good reasons for you to want to improve beyond what you’re doing now, particularly if there’s an activity that you’re interested in doing. So if maybe you want to go canoeing, there’s a lot of mobility that’s required for you to be in a canoe and operate that canoe. So having the ability to get in and out of that canoe, you’re going to need good working knees, good working ankles. And as you’re rowing, you’re obviously going to need good rotational mobility. So yes, flexibility is also very, very important. So those are the two, what I would call the prime ones that most people should be doing.

I’m also going to talk about total body composition. Rather than just talk about weight loss, because I think every one of us can probably say, “I’d like to lose a couple of pounds of fat or more, but I don’t want this to just be about weight loss because if I lose weight, I might also be losing muscle, and that’s not a good thing.” You might lose two pounds, but if that two pounds is muscle, then you’re actually in worse shape. You’re actually less healthy, because now your body fat percentage has gone up. So instead of thinking about what the scale is telling you, you should think of body composition as a percentage of body fat, or a percentage of muscle mass. Whichever way you want to think about it – cup half full, cup half empty.

Most of us are going to go by body fat percentage – those are things that can be measured. They can be measured with a caliper at a gym. So you can go into a gym and a trained personal trainer can go through a process with the caliper. You can use electrical impedance, although those tend to be off a good bit, and a lot of that will depend on your hydration. If you stay hydrated, they work pretty well. But it could help you give a trend. So you can use them on a consistent basis and see if there’s a trend, but don’t think that’s actually what your body fat percentage is. There’s also the liquid submersion and the BOD PODs that use air. I prefer the DEXA scan. There’s a price to it. I do it probably about once every other year, just to know. But in a general sense, I can tell by looking at myself, measuring my body circumferences around the waist, stomach, hips, neck, arms and legs – I can generally tell how I’m doing on my body composition.

So, total body composition is important because if we allow ourselves to have a little too much body fat, that leads to issues like cardiovascular disease, we can get diabetes. There are other things going on there. You do want to focus on your body composition, but if you’re doing appropriate strength training, then you’re maintaining your muscle. The rest of that is going to be done in the kitchen. So eating good whole foods is actually going to help you lose that body fat. That’s what we want to focus on there – not so much the weight as to make sure that we’re eating good foods and we’re losing body fat.

Balance is important, because particularly as we get into our late 60s, 70s, 80s, there are lot of falls, and most of the falls are sideways when they happen, that someone gets really, really hurt bad. So if you fall sideways and particularly if you haven’t been lifting the weights for strength, you have the potential of breaking a bone. So having good balance is one of those things that can help prevent you from falling in the first place. The strength will help because when you do the resistance exercise, you’re also helping to strengthen your bones, not just your muscles. You’re strengthening your bones. So, a good strength training regimen and then having some balance work, and I prefer to do balance work in a couple different planes. It’ll be one foot or the foot, so you get used to that. You mix that up a little bit. And then you can also work on it from the perspective of moving side to side, being comfortable with your feet side to side and not tripping up as you move from side to side. So shuffles and what I call with karaokes – those types of movements will help you maintain lateral balance, which will prevent falls. So knowing those things, you do want to make sure that you maintain balance, and as you notice that your balance is getting worse, that’s when you want to say, “Okay, I need to focus a little bit more attention to balance.”

Finally, I go into life-specific. So, you have a grandchild, and the grandchild wants to run around, so you’re going to need maybe some additional cardiovascular fitness just so you can keep up with that little bugger. Maybe you want to play some tennis, so hand-eye coordination and agility are something that you want to keep up with. Or maybe in your younger days you were on the track team and you want to try some Masters track, so some speed work might be something that would be important to you. It’s really about your lifestyle and what are those other little bits and pieces that are going to make you better at being that person? That’s where the last piece comes in.

I’ve gone over five different fitness modalities – they’re strength, flexibility, total body composition, balance, and life-specific. Those are the five that I would spend most of my time on. Now, it’s really hard to do all of those at one time and it’s really hard to know which one matters most, which is why I want to take a few minutes to go back over the GPS model that I talked about in episode 296. GPS stands for grounding, personalizing, and self-awareness. If you do those three things, then you’re going to know exactly what your body needs now.

Let’s walk through the GPS model. Grounding is where we’re going to take our “Why”. It’s the grandchild – you want to be there for your grandchildren. The vision – what does it look like? Where do you want to be with the grandchild? Maybe you want to be the grandmother that can get down on the floor and color with them and also run around the park with them and keep up with them, be able to pick them up from the ground and walk with them. If that’s your vision of you with your grandchild, now you have this idea of what you need to look like, what your physicality needs to be. The type of human, athlete effectively, that you need to be to be that grandparent.

If you take your “Why”, which is your grandchildren, and what that vision is, you now have a commitment. You can make a commitment to be that person, and you make that commitment out of self-love, just like you would make any other major commitment in your life, like when you get married or when you profess your faith at your church or your synagogue or your mosque or whatever. When you go into this and say, “This is who I want to be and this is why I want to be it, and I believe it in my heart, and emotionally want this”, and through self-love, you make that commitment – a strong, emotional, deep commitment to make that happen – that’s your grounding. Now you have a center, now you have a reason to do this, and now you know what you need to do because you know what it looks like.

The personalizing is where you start thinking about, if you’re going to take a trip and your GPS says, ”Go up to the next intersection and turn left.” So, just like your GPS would tell you what to do, now you’re saying, “I want to be able to lift up my grandchildren and I want to be able to keep up with my grandchildren.” Those are two fitness modalities – strength and cardiovascular conditioning. At this point, now you’re saying to yourself, “I know I’m going to need my strength and I know I’m going to need to be able to keep up with them.” So putting together a program or a set of goals now that says, “I want to be stronger” – how do you measure that? Maybe you go in and you get your baseline. So you go do some work and say, “I want to be able to deadlift and squat and bench press. Maybe that’s the three lifts that I’m going to measure myself on.” And those are what most weightlifters call “the big 3”. We test with those in high school, we use those as athletes. So the deadlift, the squat and the bench press is a good metric to know that you’re building strength.

Maybe for you it’s pullups and pushups. You get the idea that you can come up with some baseline, and then you can start working on your overall body strength using compound movements. And then as you do that, you should notice improvement in those baseline exercises. So you’ll set smart goals; you’ll say, “I can bench press 100 pounds”, or maybe it’s 50 pounds or 20 pounds. Whatever it is, you have a max strength. You say, “I want to improve that by 10% this next month.” Early on that 10% is possible. So it is one of those stretch goals; it’s attainable though. So part of the smart is attainable. If you try to keep going 10%, 10%, 10%, there’s going to be a point where that’s just not attainable because your strength curve just won’t allow you to get that strong. But you can early on particularly see very large improvements in your strength as you get more comfortable with these exercises. Setting a smart goal that pushes you and making it time-specific – within a month or within a quarter or within a year – those are very good. I prefer the smart goals to be shorter term. Saying you’re going to do something within a year is really hard to keep you focused. Saying you’re going to do something within a month, six weeks, eight weeks – those are probably a little bit more appropriate to ensure that you have consistency and you really work towards them.

So set some smart goals. You know you want to work on strength – you set some smart goals for strength. You know you want to work on cardiovascular – so maybe it is, “Right now I can walk for 30 minutes without getting winded. I want to be able to add maybe another 100 meters to that 30 minutes by the next time I walk.” So I’m walking faster and I’m building speed. Or maybe you’re going to turn that into some interval running. Maybe there’s a little bit of jogging in there, so I’m going to jog to the signpost. Over time your expectation is either you get the distance done faster, or within the 30 minutes, you get more distance. You can choose how you put those goals together, but you can set smart goals for your running or your walking and cardiovascular fitness, in the same realm.

So you get involved. Now here’s the thing – nobody’s perfect. We have physical limitations. But we also have capacities, and many people don’t understand that their capacities often far exceed what their brain believes. Unfortunately, our body is never going to do more than what our brain believes. If you had a child trapped underneath a car, you’ve heard the stories of women and men that had been able to pick up a car to get that child out. How did they do that? Where did that strength come from? They inherently had it in them all the time, and when their brain turned off as to what limitations they had, their capacities kicked in. So taking some time to understand what your mental and physical limitations are, is a very important step because you don’t want to break yourself. Don’t go out there thinking you’re going to be able to double your strength in a few days, therefore you’ve got to work out every day. Be thinking in terms of, “I know when I work out I get really sore, and I’m sore for a day or two, so maybe I’m going to work out every other day, and I’m going to work out different body parts.” Maybe you’re going to do a full body workout one day, next day is going to be your running day or walking day, then you’re going to do another workout, and then another walking day, and maybe then take a day off to rest and recover. And now what you’ve thought of is, “This is what I think my limitations and my capacities are right now from a physical perspective.”

And then you’ve got to think about the mental perspective. I know when I go to work and I work all day and I get off at 6:00 and I go to drive home, and it’s turn right to go to the gym or turn left to go home and have a glass of wine – I have to make that decision. But I’m tired and I know in the evenings I’m so tired that that’s a very hard decision to make. So what do I do? Maybe I should do my workouts in the morning before I get tired, before it’s really that hard. And I fix up my gym bag in the morning, I put it right in front of the door, I put my gym clothes right there on my dresser, so as soon as I get up, I see my gym clothes, I put my them on, I grab my bag and I go out the door. If for whatever reason I don’t get up in the morning – because maybe you’re not a morning person, then I still have my gym clothes there, I still have my gym bag. So I take my gym clothes, I fold them up, I put them in my gym bag and I dedicate myself to say, “My commitment, based on my grounding – I need to do this.” So this gym bag is going to sit in my car on the passenger seat. When I come out of work, I’m going to see that gym bag sitting there, just like I would see a wedding ring on my finger and say, “I committed to myself through self-love to do this thing. So tonight I turn right and I go to the gym.” So I know it was a little while I went onto the GPS model, but I wanted to take a time and talk about it again because I think it’s really important for us to get our minds right first. This GPS process that I’ve laid out here is really about making sure you know why you’re doing this, knowing what you should look like, and from that perspective it really does open up to, “These are the fitness modalities that are going to matter the most to me.”

I’ll give you another quick example for myself. My “Why” is my family. I want to be around for my family, I want to be around for my children and my grandchildren. And as I put together the vision of that, it was not just be there, not just be the cheerleader sitting on the bench, watching them do what they do. I wanted to be engaged with them while they were doing the things they loved. My daughter was into CrossFit so I wanted to be able to do CrossFit. Then she wanted to do mud runs, I wanted to be able to do those obstacle courses with her. That meant I had to work on the fitness modalities to do that.

Also, I want to have a lifestyle that I enjoy. I want to enjoy my life so I’m a better person, I’m a happier person to be around. One of the things that was missing from my life at the point in time where I made that commitment was that I wasn’t playing volleyball anymore, and it was really bumming me out that I wasn’t capable of playing volleyball the way that I had been. I knew that that was a cardiovascular fitness thing, it was a mobility thing. So, to do the mud runs, I needed the cardiovascular fitness and I needed the strength. For me to do the volleyball, I needed the mobility and the cardiovascular. You see how now I have three modalities that were very, very important to me because they tied in directly to my vision, they tied in directly to my “Why”. By tying those all in, I now had a baseline, and it was a commitment, self-love, and now I know which of the fitness modalities matter most to me.

I’m still going to go back and tell you, I think strength, mobility – which includes flexibility, and total body composition are things that we should all always be working on. The others become important to us and we want to focus on those when they matter. So the question then is, if I’ve got all these fitness modalities, I can’t do 18 different workouts a week to maintain or build all of these at the same time. How do I go through a process of methodically building myself where I need to build myself, and then figure out how I can make all that work? There are only so many hours in a day, we’re mostly all working. We’ve got to get things done, and then we have a very short window of time to get this fitness thing done. So how do I do all of them? There’s a couple of different things you can do.

One is called cross-training. Obviously, if you get into a cross-training program, maybe it’s a circuit for strength, therefore you’re working your cardiovascular system and your strength at the same time. Maybe it’s a process where you do something like a bootcamp, where there’s a little bit of all of it going on. And you’ll see improvements. Particularly early on, you will definitely see improvements with anything that you do. So just know that early on – yes, work on all of it. But as you get a little bit stronger and as you mobility improves, as your cardiovascular fitness improves, you’re going to find it very hard to do these cross-training things that are going to be sufficient for you to do all the time. You’re going to want to focus on one thing at a time, at points in time, just so you can improve those more.

That is a process that we call “periodization”. With periodization, what you do is you figure out one or maybe two modalities and you say, “For a period of maybe the next six or eight weeks, that’s my thing. I’m going to focus on that.” Periodization is basically where we’re going to take one or two modalities and we’re going to focus on it for about six to eight weeks. That might mean I want to start really working on my strength and I’m going to take about a six-week period of time and I’m really going to bear down on my strength training. I’m going to get those compound movements that I want to do, I’m going to put in maximum effort for my strength, and I’m going to really bear down on that. Then after I finish that six to eight weeks, I’m going to mix up my program. So maybe body composition is also something that I’m very interested in building, so I do a period of time. Like I said, for strength, I get done with that six to eight week period and I say, “Now I’m going to change up my programming to make it work a little bit more for building muscle mass.”

And there are slight tweaks and variations of those. For the most part, if you’re working strength, you’re going to see some muscle mass improvement. If you’re working muscle mass improvement, you’re going to see some strength, but they’re not in complete overlap. There are ways to maximize and optimize one over the other. As we were talking, for me, I want mobility, strength, and cardiovascular fitness. So what I may say is, “I’m going to do a strength period and with the strength period I’m going to work mobility. And during my cardiovascular period, I’m going to go ahead and work mobility.” So I do a big strength push and I’m doing mobility on the side. And then I do a big cardiovascular push, and I build mobility on the side. And then I can alternate and go back into strength. So you see where you can get these things all improved and then as you do that, you’re going to see optimal improvements in that particular modality. So I would never really say just do one modality, particularly if you notice doing multiple ones together gets you the results. But if you find that you plateau and your strength is not really improving, your mobility is not really improving, your cardiovascular fitness is not really improving – then that might be a time for you to really bear down on that certain modality.

So the answer, as you said, is really both. And I would say it’s even more all-encompassing than both. It’s really all of them. You should be aware of how all of them impact your vision, how they’re going impact your life, and you should dedicate the appropriate amount of time to each of those five modalities that we talked about.

I hope this has been helpful. Again, if you have any questions at all, please go to the Contact Page and leave me a message on SpeakPipe. I get back to those immediately with the short answer. If it makes sense for me to do a podcast on, I will in do one. Otherwise you can email the question to me and if you’re comfortable with it, I’ll read your email and do the same thing with a podcast episode. Please do reach out if you have questions. I love that interaction, I love that opportunity. I want to take your question because you are not the only one with that question; there are others out there. I want to take the questions that you have and I want to teach others with that.

That all said, I am going to somewhat change up the format here. I haven’t really done a lot of solo episodes since the year started. It’s been a lot of interviews. I might not even have done a single solo episode since the year started, so I’m going to actually start mixing in a few more solo shows as we go. It might be something like a three to one ratio, sometimes maybe two to one. We’ll see how that works out, but I do want to have some more solo shows and I do want to continue to bring on experts on topics that matter to you. So just know that I am out there. If you have topics, issues, things you’re concerned about, I’m available. Reach out to me. I do want to make this show important to you. I want to make it as valuable to you as I possibly can, so please do reach out to me so I can do that for you. Thank you.

Another episode you may enjoy

Wellness Roadmap Part 2

Meal timing for weight loss and health

What is the best meal timing for weight loss and health? This question comes up quite a bit online. It is one I find very hard to answer in a simple Facebook post, so I decided to dedicate a full podcast episode to it.

What is the best meal timing for weight loss and health? This question comes up quite a bit online. It is one I find very hard to answer in a simple Facebook post, so I decided to dedicate a full podcast episode to it.

I view eating windows as a continuum much like the political spectrum.  There are different approaches and people are very passionate about defending their place.  Few people are able to objectively look at the full spectrum and see the benefits of each.

The meal timing for weight loss and health spectrum is:

• Six small meals – timing multiple small meals throughout the day to avoid getting hungry.
• Workout meal timing – having carbs before the workout and carbs and protein immediately after the workout.
• Three main meals – having three meals with no snacking permitted.
• Intermittent fasting
  • 16/8 Intermittent fasting – limiting eating to an eight hour window each day.
  • 5×2 Intermittent fasting – eating normally for five days and having two very low calorie days per week.
• Extended fasting – fasting for 24 hours or more.

Most people approach meal timing for weight loss.  Before you can effectively lose weight, you'll have to manage your hormones.  Understanding your hormone profile will help you decide where you should be on the continuum.  Most of the approaches are focused on managing blood sugar and thereby insulin.

Lifestyle also plays a big role in determining which meal timing works best for you.  I am often on a 16/8 intermittent fasting approach.  I opt to skip breakfast and have a good lunch and dinner because it would be odd to not be eating when my wife is taking dinner.

All this said, being a sugar burner or fat burner will have the biggest role in determining which meal timing approach you can stick with.  Frequent meals spaced throughout the day works best for sugar burners.  Fat burners are often more comfortable with intermittent fast and extended fasting.

Another episode you may enjoy

Fasting for weight loss with Dr. Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore