SHAWN STEVENSON: Welcome to the Model Health Show. This is Fitness nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. On this episode, we're gonna be talking about not just how to stay fit for a lifetime, but how to maintain peak performance at any and every age. And I'm not just saying that today's special guest is exhibiting that in a way that is going to blow your mind. It definitely blew my mind. I saw some things today and I experienced some insights, but I saw some things that I have not seen before here at the Model Health Show Studio. I'm absolutely inspired. I can't wait to put into place some of the things that I've learned, and I think that you're going to feel the same way.

Let's dive into this powerful conversation with the one and only Brad Kearns. Brad Kearns is a New York Times bestselling author, former two time US national champion, and number three, world ranked professional triathlete, and he's currently an elite masters track and field sprinter and high jumper. In 2025, after he turned 60 years old, he reached the world number one ranking in the Master's, 60 plus HighJump and number two ranking in the 400 meters. His current bestselling book, along with his co-author, Mark Sisson, is titled Born to Walk and is exposing the hype and broken promises of the Running Boom and how walking extensively every day is a fundamental genetic expectation for human health. Let's dive in this conversation with the incredible Brad Kearns. The one and only Brad Kearns. How you doing, man? 

BRAD KEARNS: Oh my gosh. What an honor to be here in the Model Health Show studios in my hood. My hometown, San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, California. It's so great to be back. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's right. Born and raised here, man. And you've accomplished so much since then. We're gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about the history, but where you are today, you are literally shattering paradigms. You know, I was just sharing with the guys here, if they actually understand who you are, you know, being number one in the world masters level at high jump, specifically number one. I think you're number two in the 400.

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. I got on the board this year. I just turned 60 in February of 2025, and so like three days later there was a track meet, early season track meet. 

So I put up those numbers in the new division. And what's so cool about masters track and field is every five years you shift into a new age group. So when you get these birthday milestones, you're not sad. You're like, oh, I can't wait to go kick ass on some poor wrinkled up 60 year olds, man, I'm gonna throw it down. So there's always something to shoot for. And we'll be talking about this theme a lot, but this is so far removed from my previous life as a young professional triathlete. That was my career back then.

I competed on the circuit for nine years and I was this extreme endurance athlete. But those days are so long gone, and that's a young person's game too. Hopefully we'll talk about that, that endurance, crazy stuff. And so for the rest of my life, I've been trying to find ways to maintain that passion and that competitive intensity and have really. Important goals that I strive for and focus on. And of course, they're not as important when I was competing for my livelihood on television, for prize checks and magazines and attention, and it seems so serious. But now, like when I go practice high, jump in an empty high school stadium during Covid, I was climbing over the fences and putting my own standards over the fence, setting up the bar. When I clear that bar in the empty stadium, it feels like the Olympic finals to me because I achieve this accomplishment and there's always something to go after and look for. And it's been a huge change from being endurance athlete to being like a sprinter and a high jumper now. But it's, it's really fun. It's a blast. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, you're, you're setting the bar for other individuals who are looking for some aspiration on like what's possible. You know, as we age, we've got these pretty deeply ingrained beliefs about how aging is supposed to look in our society, and we've got plenty of examples of what it can be. And we were talking before the show just about the importance of the environment and having examples and so you're really setting that bar and I've been so excited. I even told my wife, just been so excited to talk to you and I was, you didn't even know this, but I was just spending time, I was watching your interviews and just hanging out in your world for a while. We've been connected, but I didn't tell you that. I was just like studying you and looking at your story, which is incredible and we'll go through all that. But I wanna start with what are some of the biggest misconceptions that the average person has about aging? 

BRAD KEARNS: Wow. I think, you know, when it comes to the, the fitness realm that we're talking about, everyone is socialized to believe that they have their day as young people. And then they sit around and talk about back in the day, the rest of their lives it seems. And I remember like coaching, we were talking about our kids growing up and playing the sports and your son's that high level ball player now and in the mix with AAU basketball and all the great opportunities they have out there for kids. And I remember having a great time coaching my kids in Hughes soccer and I'd get to practice and the parents would bring their beach chairs out and fold the beach chair and sit down and read the paper from five to 7:00 PM. And I'm like, what is this man? This is a community engagement here. And so I'd go around to the sideline, I go, you, I need you on a orange netted shirt.

I need you on the yellow. I need you two guys on the orange. You guys come back here, you're gonna be on defense. When the kids come, I want you to move a little bit and pass across the field. And the parents are like me? I have to get outta my chair and play. And it was great because pretty soon everyone looked forward to gathering and, and playing alongside their kids rather than sitting there and watching their kids and in a lot of cases, barking instruction at their kids. And you know that that's all they did. One time the team didn't show up. The other team was scheduling mishap or whatever. So we're at the park at 10:00 AM and the kids were like, when are we gonna play? When are we gonna play? So I took all the parents off the sidelines, got 'em in their orange netted shirt, and we played parents against kids.

And I'll tell you, after that game, the rest of the season, there was so much less yelling from the sideline because a parent would go up, have a nice shot on goal, and they'd completely whiff the ball and fall on their butt and fall back. And it was like soccer's tough man, and they get winded after 12 seconds of running after the ball. So they had a much more fresher perspective on how tough it is out there for the kids to play. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's, I love that so much. 

BRAD KEARNS: Is that a direct answer to your question of what are the misconceptions about aging? But I, I think that. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I mean, yeah, absolutely. That's, that's an entry point into it. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I love this and I've got a similar connection because, same thing with my son's AAU team. One of the teams didn't show up. Hey, the coach was insightful enough to grab some of the dads and to play against the boys. 

BRAD KEARNS: Oh, nice. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And also what that creates that synergy, the connection with the kids as well. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And being able to play together. And I, I, there's this statement that I've been saying for years is that families that play together stay together.

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, and just being able to reframe what it looks like, because again, our culture today, as many of the parents are sitting back and watching, and I've, and it's not just because we are who we are. This, these are choices. And so I'm the parent when they're, you know, there's four and they're missing a, a fifth player. Like, I'll jump in, you know, just to like help everybody to, you know, and they can work on different things, different skills when they're working with their parent. You know, versus one of the coolest things that you just said is how the parents stopped barking at their kids as much once they, because it's so easy to sit there and to judge.

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But then to remember what it's like to challenge yourself and to do all these things, it's a completely different thing. You become much more compassionate as well. 

BRAD KEARNS: Oh yeah. Speaking of that and another no-show story. So now we have a a u basketball scrimmage. Now my kid's like in 10th grade, and these guys are playing at a pretty high level, as you know. So we go to this important scrimmage with another team, another good team who doesn't show, the refs. So we're waiting around for the refs. I'm like, you know what? We gotta play. The coach says, Brad, can you ref? I'm like, I've never done it in my life, except for I did a little reffing in eighth grade at the Recita Park down the street.

I said, we gotta do it. Let's do it. So I get the whistle and I was the worst freaking ref. And the reffing is so difficult to make the decision on the spot. And what would happen, I'd be jogging up and down the sideline and the guys would be barking from me in the front row. The other parents, they'd be like dude that was traveling, and I'd be like, you are right. It was, I'm sorry, I, I didn't notice, I forgot. And so there's no more talking for me at the refs ever again, because if they can do a better job than me, I can't say anything. Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah. We just see 'em as, you know, the, the, the white and black stripes and, you know, they're, but people to. 

BRAD KEARNS: Oh, that such a tough job, you know? Oh my gosh. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So one of the big misconceptions again is just like we are supposed to, as we age, we're supposed to back off on all these different things. And it, I think it happens incrementally for, for most people. And one of the things that you've been talking about is, you know, folks that see themselves, you know, in their glory days, right? In high school when they were this athlete, when their life revolved around being this certain personality type. And then later on in life, like how do you associate with exercise and getting in shape? Because for so many people, they feel like. I used to be like this, I just, ah, I'm embarrassed. Or like, how can they bridge that gap and start to get more involved with their health and fitness again?

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. I think there's another problem that, that comes up when, when you mention this, is that our cultural programming of what it means to maintain your fitness, and a lot of times it's really misinformed and ineffective. And you know, Mark Sisson was here on your show talking about our book Born to Walk, and what a ridiculous mistake the running boom has been in many ways because we're been told that if you throw on these elevated cushion shoes and shuffle down the road or the trail and make it five miles or 10 miles, or maybe do a marathon someday, would be an incredible accomplishment.

And hey, it's great. It's a nice bucket list achievement to go set a goal and push yourself and run further than you ever have before. But the act of steady state cardiovascular training as your main fitness outlet is not going to help you in the categories of antiaging and full body functional fitness. And now many of the great leaders like yourself and the other fitness and health experts are saying the main way to delay aging is to maintain functional muscle mass and functional muscle strength throughout life, right? And what's funny is it's not that difficult. It takes very little time commitment to put your muscles under resistance load on a regular basis in your life.

You can do a 12 minute workout. They have all kinds of programming and people selling stuff on the internet. Get the machine, set it up in your garage, go for 12 minutes, you're, it's gonna rock your world and it's gonna make a fantastic contribution to your longevity. But generally, when we go down the street and go to the first biggest health club that we can find on Ventura Boulevard, we're gonna go in there.

We're gonna see 17 treadmills. 37 exercise bikes. 11 TV screens mounted. So the treadmills and the exercise bikers can, can look at the thing. It's like, wait, y'all are in Los Angeles? Go outside. It's 72 degrees and sunny. What are you doing on a treadmill anyway? And then the weight area and the strength training area is a lot of times populated by bros and, and young dudes listening to their iPods and resting on the bench while they check their text messages. And I'm wondering, how long is it appropriate for them until I ask them, could you get your butt off there so I can do my exercise and go on with my busy day? So that is a huge neglect I think I still see in the fitness scene now. High intensity interval training. It's a big deal. Everyone loves it. It's super popular.

A lot of the programming is calibrated toward that, and that's fine. It's a great workout to go do a hard spin class or a bootcamp or whatever the programming is. But again, that's very easily abused and misapplied to many people because a pattern of those workouts lasting for 50 minutes or whatever it is, is a little bit too difficult for most people. And so what I wanna see is bringing back the popularity of brief, explosive, all out sprints for everyone, where you're only giving a burst of energy for 10 seconds. It could be on a stationary bike 'cause most people aren't adapted to go out to the track with me and do my workouts that I film and, and put on my Instagram.

So you can sprint doing anything. You can sprint on a rowing machine, you can sprint on the elliptical, but rather than going in and watching TV for 45 minutes, again, credit to you, that's better than sitting on your butt. But now to really push and challenge the body and generate those adaptive hormones into the bloodstream, testosterone, growth hormone, the things that keep you youthful and vital and stimulate the production of lean muscle and the preservation of lean muscle and also the reduction of excess body fat. That all comes from strength training, sprinting and power, not from steady state endurance. It's now not my opinion, but it's been validated by science. There's this scientific realm of research called the excess endurance exercise hypothesis, and also another realm called the Compensation Theory of Exercise.

And what that states is when you do these slightly to significantly two strenuous workouts, such as the typical five mile run for most people, you stimulate an increase in appetite and a dysregulation of appetite hormones, such that you're gonna have a pint of Ben and Jerry's because you ran that five miles in the morning and it's not gonna help you get lean and mean and strong. Now, go Google Olympic Sprinter physique. I just did it this morning 'cause we're working on a slideshow for the, for the the health retreat. And these guys are universally. Incredibly ripped and toned and lean, and they look like the statues because that's the nature of what the training stimulus is to the body.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So powerful. And also we were talking a little bit about when you were looking at those, putting the slides together about feet of these athletes. 

BRAD KEARNS: Oof. Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And, you know, some stuff which I do not encourage people to go look this up unless you wanna have nightmares. All right. LeBron James feet, Usain Bolt and the dysfunction that happens by wearing these conventional shoes over time and, and training hard. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. You know, that brings up another point back to your first question of how do we, how do we keep the dream alive and keep things going? We need to respect that some of the stuff we do, especially when we're young and in our heyday, is gonna have negative long-term consequences that we really need to work hard to unwind. And so if you take a hit in high school on the football field, luckily I was watching from the stands man, 'cause again, I was at the big public high school down the street, TAF tie. There was no way I was playing football but those guys took some hits and those shoulders are not good. 10, 20 and 40 years later.

I'm sure you got 17 dings you can report right now where the outside of your left knee when you climb up the stairs a certain way 'cause some guy took you down on the 20 yard line that day many years ago. And so, it's really important when you. Look at this perspective of fitness, rather than just shuffling down the street and getting that five miles done. Maybe you have a 12 minute foot mobility exercise that you could Google right now and look up on YouTube and start mixing that into the game or getting that professional support from personal trainer like your son, or a good physical therapist that's a sports performance minded physical therapist, and they will, again, rock your world and bring you back better than before.

I've been goofing around with this master's track and field, got a lot of aches and pains and minor dings, and one of them got so bad my Achilles got a bone spur. I had to have a minor surgery. This was now three years ago, and I got outta that surgery and I'm limping out. I had to hop on my foot for a day. I refuse the crutches, but you know, I go into physical therapy a week later and I thought the guy was gonna rub the magic wand. Donna, does this feel good? Does that feel better? You want some more warm, icy thing to put on? I go in there, still shuffling and limping and worried, you know about what's going on.

And he goes, grab the 45 pound kettlebell. Sit down, put it on your knee, and I want 12 of these straight raises. Hold the top, go down. And I do my 12. And I'm like, yeah, I kind of got like a burning sensation a little bit on the inside and a little bit around the outside. And he goes, two more sets, then come over here and I'm going give you the, the pin press exercise as your next rehab. So he didn't give a crap about my little aches and pains. He was getting me rehab from surgery, Dr. Jonathan Sandberg, shout out in Sacramento. And it was like a mind opener for me 'cause like if I experience pain or tightness or burning sensation, I need to back off and I need to go get my massage gun and put it in there and all that stuff.

He calls that spa day. Massage, massage, gun, whatever it is, red light, all the modalities. Of course, they help a little bit, but his motto is, if you're getting strong, you can't go wrong. And he got me to strengthen that Achilles to where it's never been a problem after the eight or nine months that it took to finally come out of pain and into complete strength. Then I developed the same problem on the other side. So I'm working on that right now, but now my mentality is, okay, if I got a little nick and an ache and pain here, I just need to get it stronger and more functional. And I see this as a great shift in the culture of sports healing and therapy.

Because in the old days, we would have rest, take some ibuprofen and sit around for three months until your hamstring feels better, and then it's never gonna be the same. Because when we age, we age. And so if that hamstring gets tweaked because you pulled it one day joining the soccer field because there wasn't enough kids to play, or the basketball game, you have an acute injury. Sometimes that's your beginning of your demise. And we know from the research Americans over age 65, the number one cause of morbidity and death is falling and adverse related health consequences. They're not falling and dying, but they fall, they break their hip, they get bedridden, they never quite come back strong.

They get bedridden again. They get pneumonia and they die. And it all started from that broken hip. How did that broken hip happen? One slight misstep, which could have been averted if you had enough anaerobic, explosive muscle power preserved. But instead we're rocking, we're doing our cardio. The elderly people are doing a great job at that, but they're missing that huge element of sprinting strength training and maintaining that explosive power as they age to protect against falling.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. Thankfully there's a shift happening right now. Yeah. Where this education is getting out there. But one of the things I wanna circle back to was, you know, for folks who are wanting to, you know, they've, they've gotten caught up in this new culture that we have today, which is the largest sedentary population that, you know, humanity's ever seen. Our food culture, the list goes on and on, but, you know, they have their glory days or they're just, you know, they tried stuff on and off. What I heard from you was what we tend to do, which might be resistance to even doing in the first place, or if we do it, we might be doing something that is gonna deter us later.

We have the mindset of Rocky, so we're gonna just start getting out here and jogging. Right. Because again, we, that's what we think. That's what we were programmed to believe is what we should be doing. If you wanna lose weight, lose fat. So get out there and jog. You'll get on that cardio machine and jog or, you know, we were doing a certain thing and that's where we were acclimated to like, you know, in our younger days. So we just go out and start playing basketball again because we wanna get in shape. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Weekend warrior. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And we end up having an ACL or a, or Achilles or whatever the case might be. But some or a minor thing happens and that takes you off the path as well. And one thing is, number one, we've gotta qualify ourselves and our bodies to be able to do certain things. And it's never too late to qualify yourself to do a thing at some level. And I think we, as you mentioned a minor setback happens or something major and then we just back completely away. And we don't move into that and train and recover and most importantly, do what we can to prevent the thing in the first place. And so what you shared is, number one, instead of going and doing what's in the middle, the messy middle of, let's do this medium thing, this, this steady state cardio, jogging. Let's do, let's do some walking. Number one that is like such a, a low bar for us to, a low on ramp. For everybody to get started. There's so much. We, I wanna talk more about that. And at the other side, let's do some high intensity interval training. And we're gonna get so much more bang for our buck doing, is this the bread of the sandwich basically. We're doing the two things on the other end versus the stuff in the middle. We'll say the bologna. It's bologna, right? 

BRAD KEARNS: It's all bologna in the middle. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And doing what, you know, the, the steady state cardio versus what we can do on the periphery. So the high intensity interval training, which we could do that. So many different mediums. So we can do sprinting, but we gotta qualify ourselves for that. Stationary bike. Much lower bar of entry, a barrier of entry. You mentioned a row machine. There's a salt bike. There's battle ropes, there's, you know, jump ropes. There's even jump ropes where you don't have to jump. You just, there's just like the two ends. They have a little bit of weight to them. 

BRAD KEARNS: That's right. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, there's so many different things that you can do at a higher intensity. Yeah. And then recover and then do a few repetitions of that. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so this is what I'm hearing for, for all of us, no matter where we are, if we're wanting to get started or to have something more sustainable. Our superpower is getting out there and doing some walking and fitting in some resistance training and some high intensity interval training. Let's talk more about walking. All right. Specifically, because your latest book, New York Times bestselling author, it's no big deal, you know, but your latest book, your latest project is Born to Walk. You were a world class top. We're talking about top in the world, triathlete. So this is so far from walking, it's, it's on another planet, you know? Right. So how did you get from that, right, that background. I wanna talk about your, your career and experience as a triathlete to being such a huge advocate of the power of walking for all of us.

BRAD KEARNS: Well, you know what, it's actually pretty similar because it's the baseline aerobic conditioning for life and for all athletic and fitness and active lifestyle pursuits is we need to have that foundation and the aerobic foundation is built at low heart rates, period. Ain't none of you can argue that. I don't care if you like to go faster and like to get a better workout and get more endorphin rush. The aerobic system is built at the fat burning heart rates where you have enough oxygen to stimulate mitochondrial production and improve your fat burning capabilities. So without that foundation, you really can't do anything of note without getting winded and exhausted. So that's the weekend warrior going and playing on the basketball team and they're good for like two minutes and 12 seconds and then they raise their hand to get subbed out.

Good for them, they're trying. But if they walked more and built up that just easy foundation where the, the effort feels easy, not strenuous, that's when you kind of elevate the platform from which you launch all other fitness endeavors, including my sprinting and jumping and things that would be very difficult to just come out of the office at five o'clock and head over and start slamming it. It doesn't work unless you have that foundation of active lifestyle. That's why people are getting injured so frequently when they're playing pickleball, which is not terribly strenuous, but it's the hot sport of the, of the age right now. But they're walking right out of the office onto the court taking one false step and there goes the meniscus or what have you. So I think that's the first fitness objective for everybody, is to raise that platform of general daily activity. And by the way, when you do that, you negate all the health consequences that are related to sitting, sitting as the new smoking, that whole body of research. And it doesn't take this huge commitment or this huge lifestyle change because a two minute walk, if we want to take a break now with our crew too, we could take a two minute walk, come back, everyone would be fine.

Hey, we're back at the Model Health Show. We just walked up a few fights of stairs. In fact, I sprinted from 4 7 2 11. It was pretty fun. You know that stuff is within reach of everyone, but we for some reason don't do it 'cause we're too slammed, we're too busy, we can't get away from our screen. We have brain research from Stanford University showing that. After 20 minutes, we can't maintain peak cognitive focus anyway, so our brains will take a break for us unless we take one and a physical break would be the best, right? If I don't take my physical breaks, I tend over to YouTube watching high jump videos instead of working on my important presentation. So there's no excuse not to get up and walk for a minute or two here, two to five minutes here. Maybe a nice centerpiece like you get home from work and you walk for 20, 30 minutes with the dog around the block. And these things have a major contribution to fitness. It's just we're not respecting it or appreciated enough.

And then as you talked about in the middle ground, that running down the street man, where you're huffing and puffing, has a lot of adverse consequences, including the metabolic and the appetite hormones and things like that. So just moving more without the strain and then putting in the icing on the cake. It's that high intensity stuff, and even that is not going to exhaust and deplete you and wear you out because I only want you going for brief bursts. That's when you really are powerful and explosive. It's not about going, you know, some of the spinning classes are organized in a manner that's a little disturbing for me because it's like, all right, class, we're gonna pretend we're in the tour to France and we're gonna sprint for a minute, 10 times and a minute break.

And that's an interval session. It has wonderful fitness stimulation benefits, but not if you're not super fit to begin with and you're just getting on that bike after eight hours of sitting on your butt, sitting on your butt in another chair, now you're on the bike seat and you're asked to slam it really hard. That can easily lead to overdoing it. So we want to have this notion of moving more in a comfortable pace and then hitting it hard. Once in a while, the strength training can happen. You know, a couple days a week is fine for workouts lasting 10 to 30 minutes. So if you're taking notes at home, look to transform your fitness and delay the aging process with incredible accuracy.

Get out there and, and put your body under resistance load for 10 to 30 minutes a couple times a week. The sprinting can happen. Even just once a week. You go and hit that bicycle hard for ten second bursts with a lot of rest. Do four or five or six of those, you're out of there. The whole workout took 15 minutes and the return on investment for doing something like that where you're really cranking those pedals is vastly superior to pedaling for hours and hours workouts that last 10 times as long has have less impact on your physiology than a proper sprint session.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back. 

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SHAWN STEVENSON: So if there's anybody in this room that knows a thing or 20 about suffering, it's you. I would say, you know, a tri the, I just even thinking about a triathlon.

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah, man, you're right. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, it's, it's bonkers, but, and no disrespect to those listening who are, you know, they love their endurance events and you know, there are a lot of highly competitive people who listen to this show. But you know, I think, again, so many of us, and I've seen it time and time again, even now, they're wanting to get in shape. So they sign up to do a marathon. 

BRAD KEARNS: Mm-hmm. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, and that's big. That's their big thing, and that's okay. 

BRAD KEARNS: Mm-hmm. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But there are far more effective and also sustainable ways to go about it. And so I'm setting all this up to ask you what it was like training for these triathlons. Which can you also, first of all, what is a triathlon for those that don't know? And can you share, because a lot of the people, unless they can fully devote their life to training and, and, and being competitive, they're not gonna be competitive in a triathlon. So, unless this is like you're getting sponsored and let, can you talk a little bit about that? Because again, I think it's very aspirational for the average person as well. Let's talk about that. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Your career. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. So the, the triathlon is this sport of swimming, bicycle riding and running, and they're all strung together. So the gun goes off, everyone's waiting in the ocean or the lake, and they swim the swim course, then they bicycle and then they run. Many people are familiar with the Ironman, which originated in Hawaii, and it's the pinnacle, the sport. And so these Ironman distances are just crazy extreme where you're swimming 2.4 miles in the ocean, you're bicycling 112 miles, you're racking your bike and immediately heading out onto the lava fields of Kona to run a 26.2 mile marathon. And so you can't get any more extreme and ultra endurance than something like that. I mean, you can, but this is kind of the centerpiece of the, the, the, the achievement in, in, in triathlon. However, the sport is now in the Olympics. So if you watch in the Olympics, maybe you caught some triathlon action and the Olympic distance is a more reasonable.

In kilometers, it's 1.5 40 and 10. So it's a mile swim, a 24 mile bike ride, and a six mile run. And these guys are going fast and they're running, completing the entire race in less than two hours. So it's a fast swim. You get on your bike and you crank that bike for an hour, you get off the bike and you run that 10 K in a half hour. And boy, it's a, it's a, it's a fast, high speed, high energy event. And so I preferred racing at the Olympic distance than the all day stuff, although I did do, I, everyone does all the distances. But, the training is similar where even a two hour race where you're swimming a mile, biking 25, running six, that's a lot of endurance.

It's an extreme endurance event, even though you're going faster than an Ironman person. And so basically you, like you said, dedicating your life to getting competent in all three of those sports. And I found this sport in college 'cause I was a broken down, beat up, distance runner. I had great aspirations of going to UC Santa Barbara, a D-1 program. I was a great runner in high school. I made it to the National Junior Olympics finals. I was ranked 12th in the nation when I was 16. A little mile runner. Very competitive, tough guy. Was willing to hurt and suffer and do whatever it took to one. And then I go to the program and they repeatedly just broke me down and beat me up and I'd have injury or illness. And it was a big disaster. And it was a tough time in my life 'cause like my identity was athlete and I was trying as hard as I could and I kept getting, you know, stuffed and, and, and sent to the sidelines. So that was kind of a good awakening for a lot of things I've talked about throughout my career of balancing stress and rest and being sensible with the application of your competitive intensity rather than just a, you know, a, a open, open throttle kind of guy.

So luckily the sport of triathlon was there and I was immediately able to transition from injured runner to novice swimmer, novice bicycle rider, and then the running was gonna come around. My injuries were gonna heal and I could throw down on the run course. So that, that fascination led to a nine year career on the pro circuit where I traveled all over the world and we had these great races of various distances. And it was, it was a tough life though, man. Just like any athlete, all my energy went to, to training and eating and sleeping. And because we're talking to the sleep expert here, I will assert now, I was on the circuit from age 20 to 30. I was asleep for half of that time. I slept for half my life during that decade.

So every single night was 10 hours and then I had a two hour nap reliably every afternoon. And if I missed even part of that nap, it affected my evening swim workout. And I, everything was, you know, off. So I just had to sleep and train. And you consume a lot of calories, of course, 'cause you're out there for the whole day doing the different events and it was a great time. I think it's a great thing for a young person to do. I dreamed of being an athlete. I wanted to carry the ball on the football field like you, but there were bigger, tougher guys. I wanted to play point guard on the basketball court, but we were a Los Angeles city champion, so I wasn't playing basketball either.

So I'm like, well, I, I want to be an athlete. I want to compete. So I just learned to run around in circles and then pedal my bicycle in a straight line, swim in a straight line, run in a straight line. But it's such an extreme, you know, binge of career ambition as well as physical fitness pursuit that you can't do it forever. And then, so I, I spun out of that at age 30. Now I needed to go get a job because I didn't make 57 million like a washed up baseball pitcher, right? And so now it's like everything started over again, including, now what am I gonna do for fitness? I'm not gonna race these crazy races anymore. I've been there and done that.

I did 130 races around the globe. So now I had to recalibrate everything and you know, where I, you know, where I took it. I made it my mission to dominate these poor little kids in basketball, soccer, and track that I coached from my son ages five to around 15 when I finally stepped aside. And I brought the heat every practice, and I just played full bore on these guys. I learned this from another dad who was older than me, Dennis Curley, and I saw him and went over to his house one time he had a basketball court in the back and his boys were like seven and eight. Good little players, really intense, competitive. And he's just blowing him off the cord and banging under the boards and going for a layup.

And I'm like, Dennis, man, are you, are you playing too hard? Your kid's about to cry over there? And he goes, oh no, you gotta show 'em how to play. You can't hold back. You gotta show them to bring the heat every time, otherwise how are they gonna learn? And I'm like, right on. So this old time triathlete who was good at going in a straight line, all of a sudden I noticed I'm getting winded playing against 8-year-old soccer kids. I don't like this. I wanna, I wanna smoke them every time. And so I learned to become a more broad base competent athlete. Same for the track and field, same for the basketball. I do my dribbling drills now, instead of going for a 30 minute run and putting more miles in, now you do those 360 dribbling with both hands. You're breathing hard, you're getting a workout, your quads are burning. So that opened up, you know the, the journey that's now obsessed with masters track and field. But there was always something that was taking me to a different perspective than this extremely small slice of pie that represents endurance competency as seen by an elite triathlete, for example.

SHAWN STEVENSON: This is such a great story. This is so cool. So cool. 

BRAD KEARNS: The parents didn't get it for a while. They had to like kind of adjust to coach Brad coming in and being the leading scorer at practice. And then finally they have like open gym on Sunday nights at the high school. So now my son's a high school player and they do these three on three where you rotate the court, the winners go this way and the losers go this way. And it was so fun for me 'cause now we're playing against varsity guys, JV guys, frosh soft guys. They're all mixed together. I'm trying to hold my own and then one day I'm driving home with my son and he goes, Hey dad, you don't have to drive me to Sunday night hoops anymore. I can go with Josh's dad.

He'll gimme a ride. I go, oh no. I love it man. I love playing with you guys. See you guys. You don't have to play on, on three on three anymore either. So I went from MVP all through elementary school and middle school to now. I wasn't really holding my own account on the court, especially against the varsity and JV guys who are scoring and put me on the wrong court. So that was like another awakening where it's like, all right, my basketball career is gracefully over now, but I do have those MVP awards against the 12, 13, 14 year olds until they turn 15. Now they're six feet tall, and, and that's it. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. And but what I'm hearing also, this is first of all, this is amazing. You, you kept finding a way to attach yourself to something mentally that kept challenging you to, to, to, to train, to challenge yourself, and even every step along the way, there was the next thing. How did you find that? Like how did you know to do that mentally? Because I think a lot of us, we get to the end of a line, you know, with something, with the career. A lot of this happens with a lot of athletes after their playing days are over. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Oh yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And there's this steady, sometimes shocking decline. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: How did you mentally know to find that next thing? 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, same to you, man. You, you finished your sporting career and you played at a high level, and now you applied your energy toward doing your, doing your business pursuits and your, your, your family. Trying to be the best you can be in every way, I guess. I mean, I think that's what's great about athletics. You learn these lessons of life and success and failure in the most intense and dramatic manner imaginable. You know, I'm out there one week kicking butt and taping the VHS so I can see myself on ESPN winning a triathlon, and then I fly off to the next race.

And get smoked by everybody. And it's incredibly naked and exposed. Almost naked, 'cause we wore the little speedos back then. Now they wear a full body suit. But like we were just, you know, these, these skinny freaks riding around with almost no clothes on. But to me it helped me with kind of not attaching my self-esteem to the outcome, but instead learning that my, my greatest center of power as a competitive person was to be fully engaged in the process and take it very seriously and appreciate it all the way, whether I win or lose, but use this as a personal growth experience no matter what.

And not get too high on myself just because I excelled and not get too down on myself just because I got my butt kicked. And so if you can take that mentality into career aspirations or even, you know, as a father, when my 2-year-old daughter is saying, I hate you, dad. You're the worst father ever. And I'm smiling and about to crack up. I'm not taking it personally. Like, how dare you say that you don't know how much I've done for you. You know, that kind of thing. And so that's part of it is taking this mentality with whatever you're doing. And now, you know, we talked about bragging about my track and field exploits. Look, these are meets for old people and there's not that many of 'em there.

But I still celebrate myself. I'm proud. I can brag about it on the Model Health Show, no problem. But you know, the perspective, you could kind of think like, all right, whatever, go have your fun. And it's not that big a deal. But to me it is a huge deal. And I think that could be some magic right there where we have so much abundance and things to be grateful for. Like every time I call you, you gimme your seven things you're grateful for before we get down to the matters at hand. You know, we have all this stuff to be grateful for. Why not putting our bodies first and foremost and our physical health, because that can be taken away in a snap.

And, that's a big one for me. I'm not sure everyone has bought into that as fully as I have from being this lifelong immersion into competitive sports, but it could look like something a little more mellow and quiet for the next person. Not having to dominate little kids, but maybe just getting out of that chair and feeling like you participate. So, so something. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be a marathon. That's why I think people go like all in or they're on the sideline again watching NFL Red Zone for four hours straight. And it doesn't have to be that way. It could be like, Hey, there's those, those stairs in Santa Monica that take a couple minutes to get up.

Why don't you try to beat your time and report it to yourself and have a personal celebration. All these things are, make life rich and meaningful. Roger Banister, you remember him? He was the first person to run sub four minute mile. Very quotable guy. He's, he's passed now, but he wrote great books with all these wonderful one-liners and one of 'em was struggle, gives meaning and richness to life. And he was talking about struggling to try to break the four minute mile barrier and there's so much pain and suffering involved, but in that way it's an appropriate application of pain and suffering into your life where you're striving to compete and exhibit crisp, precise form and, and complete your interval workout or whatever you're doing. And then realizing that you didn't overdo it, you applied that to a sensible level of where your fitness is now, and you feel better for doing it rather than feeling like you need to beat yourself up or whatever. Those flawed mentalities, some people that are in the over exercising category are carrying along.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Thank you for that. We've never talked about this before, so everybody listening or watching, what can you attach yourself to that makes it bigger than just fitness? And think about that. So this might be you wanna start competing with Brad at some of these track meets. 

BRAD KEARNS: See out there. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And give him a run for his money or this could be, I wanna be able to make sure that I can dance my, my ass off at my daughter's wedding. This could be being able to start playing basketball in a league of people that are in your age bracket. This could be the list goes on and on being amazing at, you know, roller skating or maybe there's some new thing that you've always wanted to try that you can attach yourself to. Like, this is my goal for some people. Again, I mentioned this being, signing up for a marathon, right? Which we're not advocating against, but you know, what is that thing that you can attach yourself to psychologically? That drives the fitness behavior along with it versus like, I am supposed to do this. I need to be fit. I'm supposed to build muscle because longevity scientists say so. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: What can you, everybody listening, ask yourself the question, what can you attach yourself to mentally? What, what is the intention that you're going to set for yourself that can drive that fitness behavior? 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah, that's great. I, I'm thinking of a, a wonderful one liner on this topic from my friend Simon Whitfield, Olympic gold medalist in triathlon in 2000, Olympic silver in 2008. So he had a fantastic career on the pro circuit racing at the highest level. He was the first gold medalist ever in triathlon 'cause triathlon got put in the Olympics in 2000. And here's this Canadian guy. He was kind of an underdog and he just came from behind. You can still see him on YouTube. It was the most amazing drive for the Olympic gold and changed his whole life. 

He became a national celebrity 'cause Canada had two gold medals in that Olympics. USA had 37. Those guys were all trying to make the rounds and get on the Wheaties box, but this was a big thing for him.

Great career. He's retired. I'm interviewing him for YouTube and I say, Simon, you know, what are you doing these days now that you're, you know, a few years retired from the pro circuit? Tell me about your training schedule now. And he says, you know, Brad, today I'm coached by my 80-year-old self. So you wanna attach something, attach your 80-year-old self right now. He's looking down, watching you right now, and he's gonna be shaking his head going, what are you doing man? You're on the couch again for another evening where you turn down the chance to go to the gym and work out with your kid, or whatever it is, because. We're all gonna live a long time, you know, more or less, right?

We have all the medical interventions where we can go up, you know, to the, to the senior citizen's home and see 'em walking around in pain and suffering and wheelchair and walkers because their 80-year-old self didn't look after them when they were 30, 40, 50, and 60. And they made decisions that sent them to life, you know, long decline of pain and suffering. So, Marxist and has this motto, live long, drop dead. We made t-shirts that said that, and that's kind of the ultimate goal for everyone. I think would be to live a nice long life and then have your demise come really quickly. And painlessly and you drop off the cliff. My dad was the greatest example for this.

He made it 97 years. He passed in 2019. He was on fire for 95 years. He was the world's number one golfer over age 90 from age 90 to 95. And he shot his age for those familiar with golf, like it's a huge accomplishment to shoot under your age in strokes 'cause Par is 72, right? And if you shoot par, you're like a pro player. And so there's not many old guys shooting in the seventies and there's not many guys in their eighties shooting in their eighties. Not to mention their nineties. He shot his age like 1200 times. So it was every time he went out at 84, he'd shoot 78. At 91, he'd shoot whatever his record was 16 strokes under his age.

So he shot a 76 at age 92. He's five over par hitting long shots and making putts and all this. And then at 95 he started to get tired. He only retired from being a, a doctor at age 95, so he kind of stopped playing golf and stopped working and then he got old and slowed down and gracefully just went from playing 18 holes of golf to now he's only playing nine and now he's making chip shots in the backyard. And pretty soon it was time to go. And it's like, who wants to hang around longer than 97 when you're getting tired And there's, you know, there's no more joy and abundance. But like the reason he made it so well for 95 years is 'cause he did all the right things and he worked on his fitness and he practiced his golf game and he had so much enjoyment for playing.

He basically golfed at a high level for over 80 years. And that's I hope, appealing to people to think about. Boy, wouldn't that be fun to keep playing well and not having a smaller and smaller swing. Like you see most golfers that are 80, they go, eh, ugh. And I got video on YouTube. You can probably find my dad on YouTube, Walter Kearns, he is bombing drives when he's 90 years old. I mean the ball is smoking out there. He actually was complaining to his playing partner one time at Remark Country Club down the street 'cause he had macular degeneration was one of his conditions. So his eyesight was losing. And he goes, gosh darn this. You know this eye thing. I can't see my shots anymore. Where did that one go? And the playing partner said, Walter, the reason you can't see your shots is because they go too damn far. I see every single one of my shots 'cause they're only 10 feet off the ground and a hundred yards ahead. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's amazing. Amazing. Now even with that, this sounds like just to hear about your father, this is an environment exposure as well. Like you have your dad doing this. What do you expect you're gonna do? There's a higher probability. And so this is why I'm so grateful truly to have you here is like, to give us a model, to give us an example of what's possible. Because you saw that with your dad, you know, it's not an accident that you are doing what you're doing today. And so, but we've got the larger culturescape that is giving us every example, but that. You know? 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so my mission is to change that narrative is to like, make it more accessible and common for these exceptional levels of fitness as we age. Because it's not, again, that you just have, which your genes are pretty good. You, you do have some good genes, but we know that our genes do not control our destiny. You know, there are all these epigenetic factors because your life can be very different just with some, a couple different choices here or there. And so most of us, the vast majority of people listening have that potential to play to be competitive at some degree, even if it's with himself. Like your dad was being competitive with himself as well. And we have this potential, but we just don't realize it because of our cultural programming.

And so what I want to ask you about is programming specifically because there's a lot of longevity experts who are touting certain fitness programming to be the end all be all for people. And you are advocating instead for us to pay attention to the behavior patterns of some of the world's top Olympic and professional athletes that might be doing something completely counter. Let's talk about that. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. That's a good setup. Thank you. And I'm not gonna say that any of this deluge of information is a bad thing. I think it's a wonderful thing. We were talking, were we on camera when I was talking about trying to get the lyrics to, to my first hip hop songs that I learned in the eighties, and you couldn't get the lyrics anywhere. You heard this awesome song, you didn't know what it was called. It took like months of research to go and find the song and who, who did it? Invisible Man's band all night thing. My favorite song. Anyway, so we now have incredible resources to learn all about anything. You buy the little ab roller on the, in the fitness store.

And now I realize from Jeff Cavalier that I'm not supposed to go all the way up 'cause it's totally easy when you put all the way up. You just go like this way out there. I'm like, holy crap, that's 12 times harder than what I was doing. I'm not gonna do 50 anymore. I'm gonna do 14 and be completely bombed out. So we have all this information, but I do object to some of the characterizations where science is the end all, and science says that VO two max and zone two training are the things that are gonna correlate with longevity. Okay? Okay. Again, it's not wrong, but with us and our busy lives and trying to navigate all this information overload, I'm in really in favor of simplifying things and making it doable and appealing and sustainable to people. So I've done a lot of research on this. Do you know what the number one best exercise for longevity is? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Lay it on me. 

BRAD KEARNS: It's the one that you enjoy the most and really want to do for the rest of your life. Yeah. So, like Simon says, being coached by your 80-year-old self, John Asraf, the brain training expert, he says, right now I'm training to teach my grandchildren how to ski. And I go, oh, that's so cute. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, teach your grand. You know, so you want to be around for, keep skiing for a while. I go, how old are your grandchildren? He goes, so I don't have any yet. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Wow. 

BRAD KEARNS: Okay, so now we're coming allow along with a, you know, a vision and a plan that can become very specific, even if you don't have any grandchildren yet. Wouldn't that be cool to teach your grandkid how to ski? What does that mean right now? That means I wanna see you doing some wall sits at your busy office when you're slammed all day and you can't get out and get down the street to the gym. Go sit on the wall for, you know, at 90 degrees for 20 seconds. Work up to 40 seconds, then go back to work. It doesn't have to disrupt your life, this whole thing, but we wanna, we wanna slide in there. So that's why I like the information and the research and the touting of VO two max as this cool longevity metric. Same with the zone two exercise, but really zone one is not getting enough love these days.

And that's when we're talking about walking. You can develop fantastic aerobic conditioning base from very, very comfortably paced exercise. For example, when you go to the gym, as soon as you get outta your car and walk across the parking lot and check in, you're in zone one. Your heart rate is more than double resting heart rate. You don't need to go on the treadmill and do 45 minutes to check off that box and say that you did your cardio. Your cardio game is on when you go over and lift weights and rest in between. Your heart rate is going in patterns where you recover and go back into high intensity movement, but the whole thing is cardio.

So everything is cardio. And don't get confused thinking about you need to put this much time in this zone and this much time in that zone. It's like you just need to get moving mainly as your number one objective and then do things that you enjoy and appreciate and that are fun and sustainable. So if you feel like your workout patterns are getting too exhausting, fatiguing, depleting, and you're eating too many Ben and Jerry's Pines we're gonna recalibrate and slow down and get tremendous benefits from that. I was hit with that halfway through my career as a professional triathlete. I was training as hard as I could. I was sleeping as hard as I could, and I was still getting fifth or seventh or third, and guys were ahead of me on the course.

And so I asked the greatest triathlete of all time, Mark Allen. I go, mark, what's going on? I'm a young, healthy, fit, talented guy. I'm pushing my body as hard as I can, and how did you beat me by four minutes, man, what's your secret? Come on, cough it up. And he goes, you know. I learned that I needed to take care of my body better. I learned that I needed to back off on a lot of workouts and harness my health and my balance of stress and rest and my hormones and everything so that I could go unleash the dragon when it comes time on race day. So it's not about just getting to the gym 37 days in a row. On the 37 day challenge are all these things that are getting filled in people's heads and they realize, well, I could never do, what is it, the 90 Day Challenge, or what do they call it, the 70, or there's some number out there, like the Extreme 80 or whatever.

All that stuff's fine, but bring this in and own it personally and make it something you can work with. And if it's like right now, leashing up the dog and taking that dog out every day, that's the least you can do. Because when you agree to take that animal home from the shelter, you need to give it the life it deserves. So I don't care if you're not motivated or too busy, I know you can get your walking done every day. Answering to something higher than yourself, which is the animal and the eyes looking at you like, what do you mean we're not going today? What do you mean we're too busy? I don't understand. We have to go walk. It's five o'clock. The greatest motivator ever. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. That's so interesting you said that because just today I saw a fellow neighborhood walker that I see this guy lives a block away from me named Stan. And I see Stan all the time, but the last maybe month, I haven't been seeing him. And he's probably, I'm gonna guess around 70. And my youngest son noted, like we were outside shooting around. He was like, I haven't seen Stan for a while. Have you, have you seen Stan? And I was like, no, I haven't. It's interesting. And so I saw him today and he had a little health issue that popped up and now he's getting back in it. So he's walking, he's out, working things out. And he said that what's getting him up and going, he just got a puppy. As they got a little puppy, him and his wife. 

BRAD KEARNS: Awesome. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And they got the puppy at eight weeks old and he's just like, you know, so he's like, had to get back. It's, it's one of those things that became an external accountability for him. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And something he's attached himself to that is driving his movement. 

BRAD KEARNS: Awesome. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, just to get him back going. And you just even, you know, that whole sharing is like going back to that whole point for everybody again. What can you attach yourself to. That gentleman saying, I'm training to train my grandkids at skiing and he doesn't even have grandkids yet. You know, what is that thing for you? I just want you to keep asking yourself that question and thinking about that. And I wanna ask you about this because we're talking about longevity is a big undercurrent for us. How can we set some age appropriate fitness goals for ourselves? Can you give us some tips on doing that?

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah, I like that one because, and I was telling you before we hit record, I had a 60th birthday party recently. And we made a big poster with old pictures and my friends were all on the poster and the title was 60 is the new 60. So that, that became my motto. And what I mean by that is we have so much lip service for this concept of chronological aging, and we think, Hey, 60 is a new 30. 

I feel great. I look good. And it's like, okay, well the more you're spouting sort of these lines. Without the significance and the impact behind them, I think we can kind of lose track. Like you better respect the hell out of your chronological number. Otherwise, we're gonna end up in accelerated decline and demise that we see all around us because people just kind of move further and further away from the, the, the field of play and onto the sideline.

So now I can't get away with some of the stuff that I did in my past. I don't wanna have any part of that stuff, and I don't think it's healthy for me to go out there and participate in a triathlon and go as fast as I can like I did before. So now my pie slices of my fitness pie are allocated to things like morning mobility, flexibility, strengthening, working the mini bands doing the yoga poses and all that stuff before I get up and do anything, let alone high jump. I mean, high jump is a violent sport where you're basically. Olympic high jumper, Amy Ako called it a car wreck because you're running in a circle, you're building up speed, you're angling into the curve, and then you slam your foot on the ground just like taking a slam dunk. You have to slam the ground and explode up into the air.

So it's very jarring to the body. So I spend several minutes every morning just doing my foot mobility exercise exercises. You can see me doing these on Peluva YouTube channel, and they're great for everyone 'cause once you get little nicks and knacks and things that are not working right with your feet or your knees or your shoulders or the problem areas, now you really are limited. And it's gonna be big trouble to get back to whatever baseline you were at before you took that blow in adult pickup league basketball. So, as we age, some of those goals may not be as sexy as the guy who could throw off the sweatsuit and jump into the pickup game. But it's kind of fun and I, I, I appreciate my body way more now.

Because it's more fragile and it's not just kind of easy pickings and, you know, unrolling my talent for all the world to appreciate by pedaling the bicycle faster than anybody on the beach bike path in Santa Monica, which I might do for fun if some guy tried to catch up to me with his sneakers and then I go, all right, here's what 300 watts feels like and I'm gone. All that kind of stuff is. Gone forever, sensibly. So, and hopefully my ego's on the sideline too, to where now I have like great respect and appreciation for my limitations and I'm working with some of the great masters, sprinting athletes and coaches. Cynthia Monte Leon, world champion Sue McDonald up in Santa Barbara has set 15 world records in the last year and a half.

You might have to get her down to the Model Health show. She is amazing at 62 years old, shattering the paradigms of what adult masters athletes are doing. And I had her interviewed her on my podcast and she said, well, I said, tell me about your training. What's your week like? What kind of workout? She goes, yeah, it's, it's, it's really boring. I, I mean, it's a boring life and, and I, I guess I'll talk about it, you know, like it wasn't anything exciting. Like what I do is I dunk my face in the, in the cucumber water at 4:00 AM. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's like she's up, she's at it. She's in her side yard doing this many sequences of that, and she's building that foundation and then she goes to world championships and win gold medals.

And so that is, has a big impact on me, where if you even want to get in the game now at a certain age, you gotta do a lot of prep time. It's sort of like, Hey, want to give a talk at this important conference? There's 5,000 people in the audience. Sure. Shawn will come on down tomorrow and do it. No, you're gonna prepare, you're gonna think about it, you're gonna rehearse, you're gonna research, and then you're gonna bring your A game. And that's kind of what fitness is like the older we get. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Mm. I love that. So the one of the big keys here is research, right? And looking at some of the pieces that can qualify you to do the thing, right? So if somebody is wanting to keep playing basketball or to start playing basketball, for example, or pickleball. What are some, what are some training modalities that they can implement? And again, we live at the greatest time in human history with access of information. Right. Most of the time, free. And so researching, like what are some of the things that, you know, can help to injury, proof your body to play that sport, right.

Yeah. That you, that you probably gotta do now because you're chronologically older that you know, again your 12-year-old kid doesn't have to do, right. They could just go and play pickleball, but maybe it's some ankle mobility stuff. Maybe it's, you know, training with some bands and doing some band drills with dorsiflexion and doing some maybe single leg hopping or whatever the case might be. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But maybe getting a trainer, maybe just doing some research. And finding out what are some things that you can do to qualify yourself to do the thing that you wanna do. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. And even if you're not that serious, I mean, if you're serious, then you're gonna get a trainer or a coach, you're gonna sign up for online programming, whatever, but like get a trainer once people. Tell the trainer like, Hey man, I'm not sure how committed I am. I'll pay you for your 80 bucks for your session. Gimme a bunch of stuff to do. You got your assignments, you go back and you can kick some butt. You don't need a trainer three times a week for the 12 week package and all that.

Although I highly, highly recommend that it could be life changing because now you're accountable to somebody. The personal training industry is growing wonderfully. I know your son's involved in that mix, and it's like, how can you do better than someone showing up on time to guide you through a workout? And what is that worth to you in your life? When we're bitching and moaning about, you know, you're on the highest cell phone plan, but you can't afford a trainer, come on. So get, get things set up. But even if you're not serious, you can go on YouTube right now and 10 good pickleball mobility exercises. So the information is there, it's just a matter of doing 'em and committing to them.

And we don't even have to get super detailed about which better counterclockwise foot rotations or clockwise, because I notice that the arches engage further when you're going counter. I don't know, man. I'm not an expert on all that, but I am moving my body every single day. And my morning session that I described, I figured I made up some of the stuff. Okay. 'cause it feels good to me, especially when my left hip feels a little strange the day after high jumping. So I figured out this modified pigeon yoga move that I do every morning. Yeah, maybe some yoga instructor would be like, well that's not optimal because your spinal angle feels good to me and it feels good.

So, low tech approach, intuitive approach. And then you can sprinkle in good information that feels sensible to you, that you test it out, put it to the test and it works. But again, I also want to put that barrier down of the time consuming aspect of this 'cause I mix with a lot of peers that are my age. Some of 'em are really dedicated to fitness. Some of 'em are medium and some of 'em are needs to improve. And so for the needs to improve listener, I say, look, can you dedicate 12 minutes a day? Yeah. With your 80-year-old self watching to avoid that pain and suffering, what is it gonna take to, to motivate you?

And I think some of it is just clearing the, the noise and the confusion, thinking that, oh, I need to sign up with my trainer again, who kicked my butt last time and made me sore and stiff for three days after every workout. That's not what I like to see in the training community. I wanna see someone bring you along gracefully and making sure that you're, you know, bought in the whole way and not pushed too hard. So we have two main problems in the fitness scene. People pushing themselves too hard, getting the wrong information, setting goals that are not aligned with longevity. We're not gonna, we're not gonna discourage you from the marathon, but please understand from the bottom of my heart, this is antithetical to health full stop.

And you can't argue that either. It's just brutal on the body. So it's a bucket list achievement. And then dial that thing back to where maybe you really love running. Get good at five Ks. Why don't you go faster at 5K and make that be your challenge instead of like, I'm gonna do another marathon and another, and another. You're destroying your health. I'm sorry to convey that information, but that's, that's the truth. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. So one of the things we're talking about, again, qualifying ourselves to do things. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Love that word, man. This could be the title of the thing, you know. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Or it could be, there's lots of kinds of pigeons out here. All right. The pigeon pose. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: There's Mike Tyson type pigeons. There's, you know, hoing pigeons, there's homing pigeons. 

BRAD KEARNS: Love those guys, man. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know? Yeah. And, there's, it's really about listening to your own body. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But there is one form of exercise that the vast majority of people are already qualified to do, and that's walking. It is the thing that our genes expect us to do. We are, if all the forms of exercise, humans are super creative, we've got high jumping, we've got. Powerlifting. We've got, you know, sprints, we've got basketball. These things that we've come up with to challenge ourselves in different ways. But we are designed to walk, we're bipedal.

And one of the things that I'm gonna do today that I always do when I leave the studio is when I get home, I throw on my Peluvas and I walk for at least 15, 20 minutes, sometimes longer, but just to decompress. Also to get that nourishment from my feet and just that input, the ground contact. And I spend a lot of time just even at home just wearing my Peluvas or the Peluva socks. And it's been one of those things that translates over into so many other parts of my fitness. Right. So. My sons, my son's, and my wife as well. This past weekend we were doing some hill sprints. 

BRAD KEARNS: Nice. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And my youngest son, he had some, you know, now that he's this great athlete now and we're all kind of, we're not competing per se, but we're all just doing this thing together. He's like, dad, you're running for him, is phenomenal. And of course this is years of, of training in sprinting, but also like, I just feel so good. My, I'm, I'm very explosive. Yeah. Right. 

And I feel that even that rehabilitation with my feet and that, that intelligence really also helped with, with basketball and just other stuff I, I've seen where, you know, even if, you know, basketball's one of those sports, you might sprain an ankle step on somebody's foot wrong or whatever, but just the ability to bounce back and have that proprioception and the reaction time and all this stuff. And so it's been very nourishing and healing. And I've been doing this for over a year and this is before we even connected. 

BRAD KEARNS: Nice. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, and so you have Peluvas on right now as we speak. 

BRAD KEARNS: Whew. Quick product plug. Stick it in the camera lens. Oh, is that high enough? Yes. Thank you. I can put it over my head if you guys want.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yo.

BRAD KEARNS: If anyone's ever done that. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: People that are listening, he just lift his leg up super high. It was impressive. 

BRAD KEARNS: This is super high. Hi. Welcome to the Model Health Show Studio. Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Okay. His leg was behind his head. I was not expecting that. But there's a lot of kind of pigeons out here. Peluvas are something that's become a big part of my life and I'm, I'm wondering what, what inspired you to get involved and why is this such a, why do you have them on right now?

BRAD KEARNS: Oh my gosh, I've gotten rid of probably two dozen pairs of shoes. I was a big shoe fan and had all the different shoes for different, different occasions, and now I'm trying to wear these as much as possible throughout everyday life. With the important caveat, like you mentioned, when I'm high jumping, I'm wearing high jump spikes with a steel plated sole and spikes in the heel because when we're doing these specialized sporting activities, we require those functional shoes.

Same with working on the job site, we're wearing the construction boots, and when we're going out on the town, you might wanna choose to wear high heels. So the Peluvas and the general goal of getting more barefoot adapted in daily life is where we can minimize the damage and destruction caused by modern shoes, the worst one being the elevation of the heel. So almost every shoe has a heel where you put your, you put your foot higher than your, your toes off the ground. High heels, of course, extreme example. But any basketball shoe or running shoe has this elevated heel. And when you put on a pair of shoes and lift your heel off the ground, you immediately exhibit.

Poor posture. And this causes a chain reaction of adverse effects throughout the lower extremities all the way into the lower back and the misshapen of the spine. So we get the modern, especially the dude posture, where the shoulders are hunched forward. The cervical spine is compressed like this. If you're listening, I'm hunching over like I'm sending text messages. But it starts because I got pushed off of my heel bone onto my midfoot. My body weight is now loading over my midfoot, which is causing me to hunch over to maintain the, the center of gravity over the wrong spot. You know why the heel bone is so dense and cross reinforced and the body is designed to hold the human skeleton to stack everything over the heel bone, which is impossible if you're in a shoe.

So now these minimalist shoes, zero drop shoes are so wonderful. The zero drop refers to the fact that the heel on the toe are at the same level. So there's no elevation, there's no angle in the sole. So that's great. And then with Peluvas, we are separating the toes, which is another big feature where you can truly call it a barefoot inspired shoe. Because the toes are separate, the toes are designed to operate independently, dynamically through multiple planes of motion. And if they don't, if they're squeezed into a shoe, now again, you cause this adverse chain reaction. One of the big ones is that the glutes don't fire during the walking or running gate.

It's especially a big deal when you're moving quickly if that big toe doesn't launch off the ground and support your entire body weight over one joint when you're moving through the gait pattern of the running or walking stride of the human. When the big toe launches off the ground, it fires through the nervous system and the glute muscle activates the glutes, the largest and most powerful muscle in the body. And most people have dysfunctional glutes from sitting all day and deactivating them. They also have weak and short and hamstrings and weak and tight hip flexors from the chair. Some of us sit on the ground, that's much better because you're still getting that ground force. But, this is a way to counterbalance some of the problems that we experience in modern life from too much sitting and then not enough moving in a barefoot inspired fashion.

So we want to get as minimal shoes as possible, go barefoot as often as possible, and then really strive to kind of whatever shoe choices you have, strive to get more and more minimalist, minimalist, and integrate more and more time in minimalist shoes to allow your feet to get stronger. And it starts with just going barefoot in the home. Or if it's cold, you can wear the five toe separated toe socks 'cause even socks. It's not as bad as a shoe wedging your toes in there. But even a regular sock is compressing your toes together all day long. And I put my foot over my head. I'm not gonna take my shoe off on the studio either, but like you can see what a lifetime of getting squeezed into shoes, especially athletes where they really have that, like you mentioned with LeBron and all that. 

You know, my toes are folded in together even after years and years of wearing five toe shoes and getting that toe spacing effect. It takes a long time to unwind, but eventually your toes will relax and realign and reeducate themselves to be strong and wide and gripping with every stride and keeping your balance and allowing you to produce force in an optimal manner. And you talk to any advanced sports trainer, physical therapists, we know that all, almost all complex kinetic chain activity starts with the feet. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right. 

BRAD KEARNS: I'm watching Ohtani hit another homer out of the park last night, a walk-off Homer. So the baseball player standing at the plate. And swinging that back to hit a home run. Focus down on the feet. Next time people go watch Ohtani Last night, a guy's sensational, his feet are torquing with tremendous power and the ankle is tremendously mobile to start that momentum where it's coming mainly from the hips and the core and all the things we learn about as golfers or baseball players to try to generate power. But everything starts in the feet. Tom Brady throwing the football, the foot is planted or go to quarterback camp for the young high school players. 

Footwork, footwork, footwork, plant the feet, and then the rotation starts from the bottom of the feet. And of course, the shoulder and the thoracic spine and all those wonderful things that are involved. But if you have dysfunctional fee, you're starting from a disadvantage. Maybe those guys can tape it up and get out there on the field, but not when you're 50, 60, 70. Your neighbor stand now you're gonna get 'em pushing the sled. I understand. And getting, when, when those feet are pushing the sled, you can see how the toes must dorsa flex with great power just to be able to move the weight along.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. And you guys actually have some pro athletes, like a guy in the NFL rocking the Peluvas right now? 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Ameer Abdullah of the Las Vegas Raiders. It's also cool to see some of these athletes that are more advanced with the best coaching and the best guidance. They're doing things like heading out onto the field and warming up barefoot. A lot of the Olympic sprinters will do their drills barefoot, and then of course put on the spikes that crunch those feet together and get them ready for peak performance. But it's all about the functionality. We have a term at Peluva called pre recovery, so we use these for pre recovery and recovery.

Yeah, getting your feet out of the, you know, the elevated constrictive high performance shoe. I didn't know if you know this, but we're coming out with a golf shoe because golf shoes are so uncomfortable. They have the elevated heel, which is terrible for your balanced transfer in the swing. So now we're gonna allow golfers to wear a barefoot functionality shoe throughout the round. Tiger Woods, famously, this is now a decade ago, he had a teacher named Shawn Foley, who was working on the nuances of pressure positioning in the feet throughout the golf swing, balance transfer application of force. They call it force production, or force plate technology and golf world, where they measure you on these metal plates and see that your arch is loading up here on the back swing, and then your big toes pushing down with this many pounds and that many pounds.

So it's high tech golf stuff. Tiger Woods would practice hitting golf balls barefoot. Because you can feel so much more the nuance of what happens on that backswing and how that right arch engages and holds that body weight so that the upper body can coil and unleash the 330 yard drive. So that's kind of fun stuff to see. You know, we talk about shoe technology and all the advertising and the blatant false advertising in the shoe industry. The technology's in the feet, man. The technology's in the amazing sponge-like joints and connective tissue that have allowed us to be human for 2 million years. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. That's where all the intelligence is. 

BRAD KEARNS: That's right. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's already built into the feet. 

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And you know, the best shoes and the sciences emerging now are gonna be the ones that compliment that. And don't try to.. 

BRAD KEARNS: Right. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, disassociate, which is like, again, it's kind of like high intensity interval training for your feet if you're putting the football cleats on. But they're trained, they're doing prehab. Right, with the Peluvas and then rehab afterwards to get that nourishment to relax from that intense pressure you're putting your feet under in a crammed shoe. And also, again, there's sports specific lifestyle specific footwear, absolutely. But give your feet this nourishment. And this is something, again, I've been doing for over a year. I've seen it translate over and just, I just, I just feel better. And if you're wondering where to get your Peluvas, go to peluva.com/model and guess what? You get 15% off, 15% off. So that's P-E-L-U-V a.com/model. 15% off. I love the mesh. The new mesh is the ones I rock most of the time.

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah. Support mesh. Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And again, they've got some new innovations coming up. Don't be surprised if you're seeing, again, more and more athletes rocking Peluvas and also the PGA tour coming up here in the next few years. Of course, I think you're gonna see this emerging and just even having that connective tissue with somebody like Tiger, right? Doing certain things barefoot is, is pretty amazing. But it just makes sense because again, that contact with the ground, this is what we were, we literally evolved to have this intelligence with our feet interacting with the ground and informing what our ankles should do, what our knees should do, what our spine should do, what our neck should do, starts with our feet.

And Peluvas are really special because this is going a step beyond just having a wide toe box, which I shared this study and you saw it, it was in a previous video where I talked about this phenomenon called Hallux Valgus. Right. The bunion. And this study, and we'll put it up for everybody to see, this was published in prosthetics and orthotics International sought to find out if bunions can be reversed or, you know, decreased by wearing a shoe with a wide toe box, letting the big toe let the toe get into some more splay versus doing that, plus having some toe separation. And they found that unfortunately just wearing the wide toe box, all of a sudden it actually made the bunions worse. But it's having it in conjunction with the toe splay with having toe separators. That helped to dramatically reduce the incidence of bunions. Amazing. So it's like rehabbing and fixing these issues.

BRAD KEARNS: Yeah, it, it's, it's never too late to get started on the path to healing your feet. What's pathetic is like the stats of people complaining of chronic foot pain. American Podiatric Association says 83% of Americans complain of chronic foot pain. So this has now become normal. Here's a funny thing I discovered through extended family member. Medicare covers two pairs of custom rehabilitative shoes per year for everyone. Medicare. That's the, if you're out of country, that's the insurance coverage for elderly United States of America citizens. You get free medical coverage. So you get two free pairs of these funky looking old person shoes, you know, that have the orthotic shoes, that's what they're called, and custom made orthotics.

They'll cover a pair of orthotics and two pairs of shoes every year for your poor, atrophied, weak, dysfunctional feet that are in constant pain to go slide into these things. And now that's kind of the point of big trouble where you need to rely on these shoes or your feet are sore and painful when you walk around barefoot. But everyone can make little dents here. And I'm even talking to runners out there too, where we're not asking you to switch out from your wonderful high foam comfortable hokas or whatever your favorite running shoe is to go and run that five miles or run that marathon. But the rest of the time in daily life, we want to get back to standing posture, walking stride, walking gait pattern that is correct, and allows the foot to go through its full range of motion rather than elevating that achilles tendon off the ground by a quarter inch or whatever it is, and screwing everything up.

And speaking of the Achilles tendon, did you know this is a, a British computational primatologist named Bill Sellers, his life's work studying the, the, the human gait pattern and evolutionary biology. The achilles tendon is the primary evolutionary adaptation that distinguishes humans from our ape cousins, and we screw it up by putting it into a shoe. In other words, our achilles is so important that if we didn't have that functionality, that would still be in the trees chewing leaves all day for 11 hours, like the gorilla to fuel that tiny little brain. But instead, because we became bipedal with that awesome achilles tendon and the awesome big toe, one of the final areas of the body to evolve, the big toe came into line with the others rather than sticking out, which is good for swinging in trees, but not for walking.

So the feet make us human and enabled us to become hunter gatherers. Enabled us to get access to the most nutritious food, to build a more developed brain to rise to the top of the food chain. We run 80% faster than our eight cousins gorilla chimps. Go to the zoo and you could see a chimp running with no Achilles tendon. They just shuffle around the cage when they get pissed and go and take the leaf away from their friend. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Which is good because we want to be able to run away from those bad boys. 

BRAD KEARNS: Those guys are strong, man. Isn't it true like a a, a chimp can rip the arm off an adult human. That's how strong they are.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's the word on the street. I don't wanna see it, don't want to, I don't wanna know it for certain, but that's the word of the street. 

BRAD KEARNS: I have not slipped in the cage. But that insight to me was so profound to think like we're, we're rejecting our humanity in a way when we put on these shoes that inhibit that functionality. And when we have a weak, dysfunctional achilles boy, we're, we're diminishing our potential to do anything relating to active, energetic lifestyle. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Well, this has been absolutely rich with insights. And, if you could, this is gonna be a tough question, right? There's already so many pieces that create this incredible puzzle that you've put together for yourself, and also providing an example for all of us. But what would you say if I had to threaten to rip your arm off like a chimp? Is the number one thing for you personally that's contributed to your longevity with your fitness? 

BRAD KEARNS: I would say pushing hard once in a while. You know, sprinting, this is, you know, the natural, the natural laws of the universe. One of them is use it or lose it. And so most people stop sprinting after middle school soccer or after their high school career's over. And this is like one of the quintessential human activities right up there with walking, right? But we also have walking, then we have the different gait pattern, which is running. So being able to run as fast as you can is such a fantastic skill to hone and try to maintain for the rest of your life. And I think it's a huge void. Where most people even really fit people that can run an entire 26.2 mile marathon. I should pick on my friend Dr. Stevie. Now, he's not gonna like it, but he's a fantastic endurance runner.

He ran the whole entire Colorado trail, 468 miles, all the different segments. So he's an endurance machine and he was running across the street 'cause the car was coming and he pulled his hammy and he was out for like 11 weeks. He couldn't jog because he had that quick burst that was required, but he hasn't been honing his sprint capabilities. So I think everybody starting with low impact. But once you get some capability there, then you can kind of take it out and try to sprint up a staircase or a, a stairwell, maybe up a hill like you're saying with you and Anne, and then maybe someday taking those little short bursts onto flat ground 'cause when you become competent at sprinting on flat ground, something magic happens, which is number one, the bone density.

The genetic signaling for bone density, you need impact load, you need impact trauma to challenge the bones to grow more, but you don't want to get injured. So you wanna build, build, build up to running short splints on fra on flat ground. And then another number two, magic from running sprints on flat ground against gravity. It is sends the most profound signaling for fat reduction because the penalty. For carrying excess body fat, while sprinting is incredibly severe, you're not gonna go fast jiggling around with a lot of body fat. Usain Bolt, Elaine Thompson, the greatest sprinters of all time, they're universally ripped city, every single one of 'em.

We've never seen a fat sprinter ever on television, but if you go to the New York City Marathon, 53,000 people finished last year. Around 30% of them are outside of the healthy BMI index. They can still make it 26 miles, but the signaling for the training that they're doing is actually for fat storage rather than fat reduction. Why? Because when you train and push yourself and you get tired and deplete all your energy. You eat more food and secondly, fat is what you need to get you through the marathon race. And thirdly, there's not a huge penalty for jogging along 10 minute mile with an extra 20 pounds of fat. But if you're trying to sprint one length of the football field, if you got the ball and the guys are coming and you're trying to score touchdown and you're a little saw from your summer of, of fun and partying, you're gonna get run down.

So that's the magic of sprinting and why it should be a centerpiece goal for everybody. And oh yeah, I forgot it takes less time than any other workout 'cause you ain't out there sprinting for an hour. One of my favorite sprint workouts is four by 200 meters. Takes 30 seconds, so I'm sprinting four times 30 seconds. I'm working ultra hard for two minutes. I'm also doing warmup drills, which are strenuous and all that, and a lot of preparation, but the whole workout lasts two minutes. It has transformed my physique and my physiology in recent years to where now I'm a competent sprinter, but I'm putting in work, putting in work like Kobe Bryant 4:00 AM. He shoots for an hour, then he goes, waits. No, no, no, no. It's sprinting for these short bursts will change your life, change your fitness, change your body composition. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Boom. Amazing. The one and only. Brad Kearns, I appreciate you so much. Thank you for coming to hang out with us. 

BRAD KEARNS: Thanks. Model Health people. Thank you so much, Shawn. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Let's go. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value outta this. I absolutely enjoyed this conversation, and again, I experienced some things. I got some insights that I've never received before, and hopefully this is an encouragement to you as well to make sure that we are attaching with intention. Our fitness and our longevity to something bigger than ourselves, just bigger than the superficial. Just wanted, I know I should exercise, wanna be fit. Those things are fine and dandy, but at its core, what's going to really motivate us and drive us to doing those things. Even when things get tough, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

As it said, it's really about having that motivation that is bigger. It's attached to something bigger than just the superficial. So whether that is being fit so that you can play with your grandkids and train us that example that he gave. Train your grandkids in a particular sport or activity or whether this is to be able to compete and play with your friends or people younger than you. Or maybe this is just being proficient in the sport or the activity that you love to do for as long as you possibly can. Be intentional about it. Why are you training? Why does it matter? Why are you doing the things that you're doing? Why are you putting that responsibility on yourself to be better?

That's truly one of the greatest nuggets that I took away from today. And to see Brad over 60 years old up appear, kicking his leg up over his head, mid-interview! You know, and also he did the sit and rise test after sitting for two hours, he got on the floor, just did the sit and rise test with ease. You know, it's just so remarkable. And again, he's demonstrating what's possible. It's not just because, especially it was not because it was probable, all right? Especially in our world today, it's because of the decisions that he made. And we can follow his lead. We can get ourselves surrounded by examples of what vitality and longevity truly can be, and be proactive in doing that.

And I hope that this is a resource that you can utilize, that can help that mindset and support you for a lifetime as well. If you got a lot of value outta this, please share this out with the people that you care about. Share it on social media. Send this via text message to somebody that you love. It is all about community. It's all about empowerment, and it's all about applying what we learn. We got some amazing masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to the model health show.com.

That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions videos for each episode. And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome and I appreciate that so much and take care, I promise, to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.