Listen to my latest podcast episode:

847: 3 ESSENTIAL Keys to Heal Your Body & Transform Your Fitness

TMHS 354: Game-Changing Fitness Advice from 10 of the World’s Top Experts

Fitness is often wrongly attributed as the single solitary driver of your overall health and body composition. Movement and exercise are important, but your overall wellness isn’t so one-dimensional; it encompasses sleep, nutrition, stress management, and more. 

Your fitness routine shouldn’t be your entire life—it’s just one piece of being a passionate, multi-faceted human being. You don’t need to spend countless hours in the gym in order to create a fit, healthy body. What’s more important is that your exercise routine is effective, functional, and rooted in science.

On this episode, we’re highlighting how to build an effective and comprehensive fitness routine. You’re going to hear ten powerful moments from past episodes on building strength, working smarter not harder, building a strong physical foundation, and more. So listen attentively, take notes, and apply the strategies that resonate with you! 

In this episode you’ll discover:

  • The definition of eccentric training, and how to take advantage of its benefits. 
  • What movement hygiene is.
  • The difference between flexibility and mobility. 
  • What you can learn from videoing your workouts. 
  • Why you have to earn the right to do certain exercises. 
  • The brain benefits of working out. 
  • Simple exercises you can incorporate into your routine for improved brain function. 
  • How many days per week you should incorporate HIIT. 
  • What muscular compensations are, and how they occur. 
  • The importance of moving your body functionally. 
  • Why simple habits like rest and stretching can improve your body composition. 
  • The power of basic bodyweight movements. 
  • How to get an effective core workout at your desk. 
  • What progressive overload is, and how it can help you get stronger. 
  • How the concept of mechanotransduction works. 
  • The importance of finding your tribe.  

4d2a70c2-organifigreenjuice-facebook-top2_0qa09v0qa09v000000

Thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Model Health Show. If you haven’t done so already, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review of the show on Apple Podcast by clicking on the link below. It will help us to keep delivering life-changing information for you every week!

Transcript:

You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.

Shawn Stevenson: Welcome to The Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. 

Summer is upon us. All right, this is the time when a lot of us are focusing on getting that beach body. Alright, that summer drip going on. And so today I thought I'd do a compilation episode of some of the greatest fitness advice. 

We know, obviously, that our body composition is a big result of our nutrition, our sleep, stress management, all those factors do play in, but of course, fitness matters.

And we've had some incredibly fit people on this show and really some thought leaders in the space of health and wellness and fitness. And so those are the people that I wanted to bring for you today. 

And it's a compilation of some of my favorite moments and some of my favorite guests with their advice on fitness and exercise structure and recovery, and things of that nature.

So I think you're really, really going to enjoy this and this is just going to be something to add to your superhero utility belt and your plans moving forward, whether it's summertime for you or if you're in another part of the world and you're moving into a different season, but just to have these things ready and on command. 

All right, so again, I think you're really, really going to love this. But this wouldn't be possible without one of the biggest fitness brands out there really helping us support the show for many, many years and it's my friends over at Onnit. 

Now, Onnit is all about human optimization, and they're one of the leading brands not just for the nutrition side with their nutrition, their foods, their supplements, but also the fitness side. 

And this is rare that you see these two things together. Alright, so these folks at Onnit are some of the pioneers that have really pushed into public use things like battle ropes, steel clubs and steel maces, primal bells, not just kettlebells, they have cool design primal bells and they are one of the few companies that actually have partnerships with Marvel entertainment. I'm a huge fan of Marvel Studios and Star Wars. 

All right, so they have yoga mats that have like Han Solo, like trapped inside of this, I don't know whatever he's trapped in, Star Wars people know what I'm talking about, right? So they have like an Iron Man designed kettlebell, super cool and Captain America shield, iconic, #iconic. 

They have Captain America shield weight plates, alright. So these are weight plates that you put onto your barbells to do your cleans, to do your deadlifts, whatever. You do this and you represent that Avenger life. 

All right, so really cool stuff, pop over there, check them out, like yesterday. All right, it's on onnit.com/model, you get 10% off everything they carry. It used to just be for nutrition. I love their foods, by the way.

The Warrior Bars, if you're in a need or looking for a good, plant-based protein, I love hemp for this, it is a soft globular protein, it's a complete protein and it's very minimally processed versus something like these random soys and P proteins and things like that that with soy specifically, we see that a lot of times it's hexane extracted, that's literally explosive stuff. So just throwing that out there. 

But the way that this is processed is, it's non denaturing the protein, so you actually get those high-quality essential min oils you're looking for. 

So pop over there, check them out, onnit.com/model for 10% off, not just the nutrition but now the fitness equipment as well. I love them, onnit.com/model. 

And now let's get to the Apple podcast review of the week. 

Another five-star review titled "You are amazing" by Andnickmom. "I first saw you on Broken Brain 2 and have been following you ever since. You are so articulate, intelligent and real. 

I am a nutritional therapy practitioner, and I'm always researching, reading and listening to new material. Your podcasts are so informational and relevant as well as entertaining. Plus they're beneficial for me and my practice. 

I just listened to episode number 338. Wow, it was freaking awesome! Jolene Brighton is a superwoman and I love the chemistry between the two of you. 

I shared this podcast with three friends whose daughters are on the pill for period issues. Thank you so, so much for what you do. You are an inspiration."

Alright, thank you so much for leaving me that review over on Apple podcast. I truly, truly, truly appreciate that. 

And listen, if you've yet to leave a review, please pop over to Apple podcasts, leave a review for this show and just whatever platform you're listening on, leave a review or leave a comment if you're watching this on YouTube. All right, I appreciate it so very much. 

And now let's get to our topic of the day. 

So today we're doing a fitness advice compilation episode with some of these real superstars and thought leaders in the fitness space. 

And you're going to get a lot of different insights, real tactical things to employ, but also some mindset shifts that we need to make around fitness in and of itself. 

And again, these are like world-class, high-performing people and we're going to go ahead and kick things off with the Super Bowl champion. 

All right, when you say Super Bowl champion, you probably think about like just a Powerhouse running back or a dynamic, long and lean quarterback or maybe a beast of a linebacker. 

But it's not this guy, he's a punter. All right, no disrespect! He's a punter, but he was also voted the fittest man in the NFL. Twice. All of those different positions that I just described and many more, a punter. 

All right, and he really just kind of revolutionized the space in which you think about when you're thinking about somebody who's kicking the ball. It is called football, by the way, it's kind of important. 

But he's an incredible human being and a great friend and I'm talking about Steve Weatherford. 

And being that he was voted the fittest man in the NFL, two times, he knows a thing or 20 about fitness and really sculpting an incredible physique and body composition. 

But he's not going about it in the way that you might think. He's changed it up, especially as he's put a lot of miles on his muscles. He's doing things a little bit differently. 

So we're going to kick over to this clip and a conversation with Steve Weatherford and he's going to be talking about a form of training that he's fallen in love with, called eccentric training. All right, so let's check it out. 

Steve Weatherford: And so I train with guys like Ben Pakulski, and Phil Heath, the guys that have just reached the pinnacle of physical development.

And there's a totally different training style that those guys use, and I've fallen in love with it because trying to stimulate your central nervous system requires heavier weights, it requires more explosive movements, which there's no way around it.

It's going to wear out your tendons, your ligaments, your joints, it's just going to wear down the tires on your car. But hypertrophy training, eccentric training has allowed me to use literally like half of the weight and get almost twice the results. And I've been able to fall in love with training all over again.

Shawn Stevenson: So how do you do it?

Steve Weatherford: So if you're doing bench press, instead of getting under the bench press and doing five sets of ten, or three sets of ten, I'll go do four sets of five. Which you're like, "How is that going to make your muscles grow?"

But it might take me 30 seconds to do a set of five reps because eccentric training is controlling the amount of time that your body is under tension. So the key to bodybuilding is time under tension.

And so studies have shown that the way that you train your body, or the way that you're weight training, the duration of time that your muscles are actually under tension predicts whether your muscle grows stronger, or your muscle grows larger.

And so I've fallen in love with hypertrophy training, which is maximizing the time under tension, and so in order for you to be in a hypertrophic stage, your sets need to last 45 to 75 seconds, which sounds like a long time.

But really, if you're doing a five-second rep on the way down, and then a one-second pause at the top, and then exploding up, you're getting stronger and your muscles are under tension for 45 seconds, 50 seconds.

And I wake up the next morning, and my muscles are incredibly sore, and the heaviest dumbbell I might have touched on chest day was like 70 pounds.

Where normally, I'd have to pick up 120-pound dumbbells, and I wake up the next day, and my chest is sore, but guess what? My shoulders and my elbows are more sore than my muscle. I want to get away from that.

I want to get more out of the time I'm putting into the gym, and hypertrophy training has been— I've fallen in love with training all over again because it's something I knew nothing about.

Shawn Stevenson: All right, next up. We've got my friend, a really, really good friend of mine Luka Hocevar. Luka is world renowned for his coaching and he has one of the most incredible gyms, it's located in Seattle. Shout out to everybody in Seattle. 

If you don't know this guy, go on a holler at Luka, go and pop by his gym, Vigor is the name of his gym. 

And he's world-renowned really for mobility training. Not only can he get down with the best of them, with lifting, with performance, he was also a pro basketball player at one point. 

But Mobility training is really what has revolutionized the lives of so many people, thanks to Luka really leading this push. 

So in this clip, he's going to be talking about the real value of mobility training and this is something that I've incorporated in my life, just the last year. I was tinkering with it and I kept on having random issues. 

But when I really got serious about just doing a mobility training, drill for myself each day, no matter what else is going on with my life— man, things just got so much better and I just am so grateful and I'm so grateful to know Luka. 

So I think you're really going to enjoy this clip. So let's jump over to this clip from Luka Hocevar. Check it out. 

Luka Hocevar: I think that one of the things that's missing that would be humongously beneficial for everybody is let's call it- for instance, when you brush your teeth, right? You call it dental hygiene, right?

But I would say, let's call it joint hygiene or movement hygiene, right? So it's a daily movement practice.

And what I mean by that— now I do this every morning, and I try to get a lot of our clients whether online or offline to start doing this, and sometimes it takes a little bit, but when they do it it's just like the biggest game changer.

Now, why? There are so many reasons for why to do this but think of it this way. When you wake up, we're sitting a lot of the time, our postures are worse than they've ever been because of the 21st-century computers, TV sitting, things of that nature.

So when you wake up, imagine— and I hate to go back to the car analogy, but like if your axle is bent and you keep driving on it, what's going to happen? The car is going to break down faster.

So if you're out of alignment and if your joints are not functioning well, as soon as you wake up, everything that you do that day is going to be basically on a dysfunctional foundation.

So if you spent five, maybe 10 minutes in the morning just working on movement, and some people call it mobility flow, some people call it mobility.

You can give it whatever name. I think mobility is a great name because mobility essentially means— everybody knows flexibility. Flexibility is how far can I stretch my muscle, essentially.

But mobility is how can I control that movement through its full range of motion? So just because I can kick my leg up as high as possible right now, it doesn't mean that I can bring it up slowly and then hold it there. Right? And that's the passive and active difference between my range of motion.

And so imagine that if a person wakes up and they're tight in the hips and they're doing some mobility for their hips, and their shoulders, and their upper back, their thoracic spine, which is for most people very rounded and tight.

You've started the day with creating a quality foundation for your joints, and that's a game changer.

Now apart from that, what happens? You're starting to move. Dopamine and norepinephrine get nice and aligned, so your brain starts getting more alert. Right?

Even smaller things like that, you're in a better mood, you're more ready to learn. So in the book "Spark" it talks about how you're able to take in more information and I would say cognitively you're thinking better after just five, 10, even 15 minutes.

And so why not start the day with something that makes your joints feel better, your body feel better, makes you more alert, and it creates a better foundation for you to go through the rest of the day. 

Now, the cool thing about it is, if you did that just four or five days a week for instance, right, how soon could you start getting rid of some of the nagging injuries that most people have?

Eight out of ten people that come into our gym have something going on— nagging shoulder pain, low back pain, I mean at any point in time, statistics show that 82% of Americans have had low back pain.

And those things are usually happening because of some things like tight hips, no core activation, no upper back extension, and so on and so forth. I mean, there's a number of different things. All of those things can be addressed in a morning ritual that's five to 10 minutes.

Now obviously, this is something that you can do before warmups when you're training as well, but why not do it early in the morning?

Like, put it this way, the ROI, the return on investment for five to ten minutes of your time in the morning. I'll do it while I'm listening to a podcast, or an audiobook, or something like that, so I'm doubling up.

But the ROI is so massive that if somebody did it for five days, instantly it's like, "I can't believe I haven't done this my whole life."

Shawn Stevenson: Right.

Luka Hocevar: Right? And it just makes sense from a standpoint of where we are right now as humans in the 21st century, and we have to kind of reverse engineer to getting back to a better place with our bodies, and our joint health, and everything else.

Shawn Stevenson: All right, up next in our fitness compilation we have somebody who is the owner of one of the top gyms in New York City and he himself is the personal trainer for some of the most acclaimed celebrities in the world. 

Alright, so his client list includes folks like Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, we're talking about Deadpool and Blake Lively, his incredible wife. 

Sebastian Stan who played the Winter Soldier, Liev Schreiber who played Ray Donovan and also, Wolverine's brother. All right, so he's really known, obviously,
there's an element here as training superheroes, folks who are playing these superhero roles and really needing to just really have that kind of incredible physique, that you think about when you think about somebody who is kind of larger than life. 

But again, the advice that he gives and what he teaches would really kind of bake your noodle because it's not the typical thing that you would think, just going hard in the gym, beating yourself down into a pulp. 

His approach is much more cognitive and very intelligent and he is really, really one of the best out there. 

And there's a lot of people who get a lot of acclaim that just happened to be in the right position, right? 

Because proximity is a big part of success, but Don is one of those people that the proximity yes, but he is actually world-class at what he does. So let's jump over into this clip from Don Saladino.

Don Saladino: Yeah, I call them fluffy workouts. Listen, I love the bench press. I mean, I still bench, and I still think it's a valuable exercise, but I think the problem that I have is so many people will get so pigeonholed into one training approach.

And they don't start paying attention to how their body is moving, or the inefficiency, or thinking back squats are bad for you. They might be bad for you, but there's no reason why you can't squat or do a goblet squat.

So I think it's important, if you can, to get an understanding. And this may sound complex, but at my club here, everyone comes in and they go through a really basic screening, it's like a 10-minute screening, and in their warmup we find out how they're moving, and then we're able to kind of educate them a little bit on what exercises they need to be doing or not, if they're not working with a coach.

If they're with a coach, they have nothing to worry about. But a lot of people out there aren't going to have that luxury.

So my first ounce of advice is start videoing yourself doing exercises. This is something that I always do, is I'll still do this day video myself doing kettlebell swings or squats. Show it to a trainer in your gym, or if it just doesn't feel right, our bodies are smart. Like if you're sitting there squatting, your heels are raising up, and your hips hurting you every day, it's probably the fact that you're either doing squats incorrectly, or your body hasn't earned that right for you to be squatting with the bar on your back, or whatever that might be.

I just think a lot of times people just- they're so intrigued on the program. "Oh that's Ryan's program, give it to me," and they just start jumping into it not realizing that what Ryan's doing is good for Ryan, it might not be good for you.

Shawn Stevenson: Oh I love that, man. That's the first time I ever heard that "Your body hasn't earned the right to do it." That's powerful. Really, really powerful.

Don Saladino: And that's the problem with a lot of these group training components, and I'm not going to sit here and bash CrossFit at people. Someone asked me the other day, "What do you think about CrossFit?"

And was like, "You know what? I've seen some good CrossFit boxes, and I've seen some good coaches, but just the problem that I have is when someone's coming into the gym that has been sitting in a chair for the last 20 years, 10 hours a day, and now you have them doing jerks overhead, and they have no thoracic mobility, or they have no external rotation in their shoulders, and you have them doing an exercise that they have not earned the right to do.

So I think there's still an easy way to give them that training effect that they're looking for, but there's no reason why they have to come into a one size fits all exercise.

I can get the same effect out of a med ball slam for someone that I would be doing with an Olympic barbell. Is it really going to matter? The answer is no, but a lot of fitness professionals out there want to own the process, and like it's their methodology, like they created it, and I think as fitness professionals we have to do a much better job of educating people.

I think there's a lot of low-grade coaches out there, and it's making the jobs for us a little bit more difficult because we have to sit there and tell people, "Relax. Let's take a step back so we can move forward." 

I think there are time and place for everything. Again, these are boring answers right now, and I really apologize, but I think it depends on the individual.

I think if you have someone coming in, let's take some of your listeners who might be sleeping five hours a night, or four hours a night, and they're under a lot of stress from work, or relationships, or not getting the nutrition that they want or that they need. I would say that muscle failure is probably the worst thing for them to do for themselves.

I think it's going to be way too [19:36 Indiscernible] taxing on their central nervous system. I think they might feel great for the first week or so out of the gate, and they might be like, "Wow, I'm sweating and I feel awesome."

But in time, they will, no doubt about it, start seeing a decline in their strength and in their energy. So I think it depends on the individual.

I think for someone like myself who's pretty in tune with their body, do I train to muscle failure 365 days a year? Absolutely not.

I might take a couple of blocks of my training, or a few weeks of my training, and decide to train to muscle failure, but I also understand that I have to scale off of that.

So I think it really comes down to your body is really smart, and if you're coming into the gym on a day and you're not feeling great, who ever said you can't see good progress by going through the motions?

And I think taking a little bit of an easier strength approach, I think this is something that- you know, one of my favorite movies of all time is Rocky. I mean, how do you not love Rocky?

But it was almost the worst movie ever for people when it came down to training because they want to revert back success to the Rocky III training scene with him sprinting on the beach, him and Apollo, or climbing up the mountain in Rocky IV until he's literally falling down.

And it's really set a bad precedent for people because they're under the assumption that unless they're killing themselves, they're not going to see progress.

And I tell people now, "Don, I hate training more than 15 minutes." And I'm like, "Well train for 10." "Well am I going to see progress on that?" I'm like, "Absolutely."

If you don't train one day next year, but you train and break a sweat 10 minutes a day for let's say 300 days, of course, you're going to see progress. You're going to sweat, your body is going to feel better, you're going to be more active.

So this assumption that you need six days a week and 90 minutes a clip, it's insane. You're going to see progress doing- do something. You're going to see progress.

Going to failure and taking the muscle to exhaustion is a very difficult thing to do, and yes, you might see a percentage increase on muscle stimulation, but the reality is it's probably going to be so minute that you're not going to see the difference at the end of the year, but your body is going to feel a lot different.

So I would urge more people to kind of throttle back, get through the workouts with some confidence, feel really good, and then come back the next day with a high energy level.

Shawn Stevenson: Next up in our fitness compilation is Dr. Wendy Suzuki. I love Wendy. She is a neuroscientist working out of NYU and I met her at an event that we were both speaking at and she just grabbed my heart. You know, she's just so amazing, so fun, so intelligent, so dedicated to her work. 

And in this clip, she's going to be talking about not just the physical benefits of exercise, but some of the brain benefits as well and a type of exercise because I want to give you some options, some things to think about. 

But something that she does and she employs is called "Intensaty" is an exercise form that she really helped to popularize. And it's a form of aerobic training but you're incorporating affirmations. 

And so with movement, there's a statement from Jim Kwik that I learned many years ago that, "As the body moves the brain grooves." 

And it's really true, the movement really helps to it, ingrain and make neuro-connections really stronger than anything. 

If you're doing that along with positive affirmations, super powerful stuff and people are doing all the time, it's just not conscious, I believe. 

Folks like, if you're just even telling yourself, "I got this, I got this," if you're in the gym or just trying to hype yourself up or even if you think about somebody like Ronnie Coleman, shout out to people who know about Mr. Universe like 17 times in a row, he's this huge guy. It's unbelievable how huge he is. 

He's got a little bit lighter voice, so it's kind of like, "Lightweight baby, lightweight baby," when he's like lifting weights and that's his thing, it's his affirmation, "Lightweight baby". He's like lifting a 1,000 like he's lifting a car, "Lightweight baby". 

So he's ingraining himself with that, but you can ingrain yourself with powerful muscles and messages as well. 

So check out this clip from Dr. Wendy Suzuki and find out again some of the brain benefits of physical movement. 

But also, she's going to touch on the accessibility of exercise so that we can really get away from, "Everything has to be perfect," and really know that exercise is super accessible and approachable for all of us. Check it out. 

Dr. Wendy Suzuki: So the form of exercise that I really got addicted to, that really helped me get my own exercise regime going regularly, is a unique form of exercise that is called "Intensaty" and it was developed by an amazing fitness instructor in New York City named Patricia Moreno. 

And what she did is she pairs physical movements from kickbox and dance and yoga and martial arts with positive spoken affirmations. 

So an Intensaty, well in kickboxing class, you would just be punching back and forth. But Intensaty you say, "I am strong now." Or, "Yes, yes, yes," and the whole class is a series of affirmations and you can create a theme and it's completely ridiculous the first time you do it, but so empowering to actually do this together with a whole bunch of other sweaty, affirmation yelling people. I cannot tell you how fun it is. 

One of the things that excites me so much about this area of research is that really exercise is free. I'm telling you these things about your brain, you can do it right now by taking the stairs, just take the stairs, just park further out and do a good jog walk. Borrow somebody's dog. 

Every day I go out to Washington Square Park, which is right over there. And I sit in the dog park even though you're not supposed to, and I play with other people's dogs because it's good exercise and it also gives me that rush of endorphins because dogs are just so calming. 

Tips I give in the book, my favorite tips for moving more: Pillow fights— highly, highly recommended. 

Playing with your dog, playing with somebody else's dog, also, really highly recommended. 

Number three, get a hula hoop. It costs five bucks and be really silly and do that. 

Dance in your kitchen all by yourself to your favorite song on YouTube. 

So many ways you can do that and all of these are improving your brain function, improving your mood, improving your memory if you continue to do them for the long term. 

Shawn Stevenson: Alright, next we have Dr. Martin Gibala, and he changed my life, he changed the game for me. 

Martin Gibala is a world-class researcher and he is the guy who's actually in the lab, taking the muscle biopsies and putting the mask on people and all the different wires. 

And he's testing to see really what does it impact of doing high-intensity interval training, right? 

This form of exercise has just really taken off and caught fire within the last few years and it's something I've integrated into my work for— man, it's getting close to 15 years. 

And so when I started off, you know kind of coaching people on this training technique, there wasn't a lot of science on, it was just something that I was taught by like just a really world-class person I got to learn from. 

And come to find out when you hear this data that you're about to hear right now, you'll really start to understand why you absolutely must incorporate high-intensity interval training into your fitness plans moving forward. 

Check out this clip from Dr. Martin Gibala.

Dr. Martin Gibala: We demonstrated in the lab, scientifically, our interval protocol now and where the title of the book comes from, "The 1 Minute Workout". 

It's a bit of a teaser headline, but it really relates to the fact that the hard work is three 20-second all-out efforts. 

So we'd have people do a short warm-up, a 20-second all-out sprint, recover for two minutes, a second 20-second sprint, another 2-minute recovery and then that third and final 20-second sprint and a short cooldown. 

So the sprint group was doing 10 minutes of total time commitment, three times a week and we compared that to a group that was doing basically what you'd see in the public health guidelines, so 150 minutes per week of continuous, traditional steady state cardio. 

So big differences between the two groups, 30 minutes involving only one minute of high-intensity exercise versus a 150 minutes a week of traditional cardio. 

And over 12 weeks, so three months of training the improvement that we saw in fitness, so their measured VO2max, which is a really important measure for health, it links to your risk of dying from all causes, the increase in fitness was the same in the two groups. 

We measured that mitochondrial content that we were talking about earlier, the same increase in mitochondrial content, and we also measured something called insulin sensitivity. 

I know you're not familiar with that term but it's basically a measure of how the body processes and handles blood sugar. It's important for your risk of diabetes. 

And we found that the increase in insulin sensitivity, again, on average was the same in the two groups. So just a dramatic illustration, I think of the potency of this type of training. 

Shawn Stevenson: Alright, that was a clip from Dr. Martin Gibala. 

And again, it's just so incredible to realize how much value and how much impact we can get from incorporating just a little bit of high-intensity interval training. 

So this is something I recommend minimum of just once a week and really a maximum we're moving up towards even three times a week would be the maximum. 

This isn't something you want to do every day because it is so powerful for your, not just your endocrine system, not just your muscles, but also your nervous system and just to give your body a chance to recover from it and come back better. 

But this is something again, I've been incorporating for many, many years and super valuable. So hopefully you really got another A-ha moment from that clip. 

But when we're talking about fitness and really transforming our body composition, again, we cannot lose sight on the fact that food is really a huge bridge for us to get to where we want to go. 

Because in reality, what you look at when you're looking in the mirror, you're seeing the food that you've eaten, right? That's what's making up all of this stuff and making it possible. 

So we don't want to lose track of the nutrition and also there are certain things that your muscles and your fat cells and even your brain cells, your meniscus, you know, all the different various parts of your body, different tissues, different organs cannot do their jobs adequately if they're deficient in key nutrients. 

And so rather than us being pointed at, "Okay, so I'm going to eat a somewhat clean diet or maybe just eat straight garbage—" like, you know, when I was a kid and then, "Have a Flintstone. Let me get this kid a Flintstone vitamin so he doesn't clock out on us while he is at recess," you know what I'm saying? 

That's not the way to go about it. So even if we're eating better and then we're turning to getting a "good" multivitamin— what does that mean? A good multivitamin? It's such a blanket statement! And here's the thing about multivitamins. 

Most conventional multivitamins are from the synthetic forms of the nutrients. They're based on like in chemistry, like Mendeleev's table of elements, right? 

We got Magnesium, but on that table, it's measuring the ash. It's ash. It's not even like how does Magnesium actually operate and how does it work when it's in a living organism, right? 

There are two different things, the synthetic version and the whole food version from real food.  It's going to be totally different in how its interacting with your cells. We really caught on to this idea of Better Living Through Chemistry. 

Now, of course, we've had some incredible advances, but also we've devolved a little bit as well, with our health and wellness and we could just look at any of the records, everything in the last 50 years, heart disease higher, cancer higher, diabetes higher, Crohn's disease higher, obesity higher, Better Living Through Chemistry, how's that working out for us? Let's stop. 

All right, let's make sure that we're focusing on real food first and whole food based supplements, not just a good multivitamin. 

Whole food based supplements and I love super food concentrates for really making sure I'm getting those additional nutritional needs. 

And so for me, I'm a fan of these whole food concentrates that don't just have incredible amounts of these key nutrients like B12 and vitamin A, and vitamin C, and the list goes on, you know, B6, whatever it might be. 

But they also have unique compounds that you just don't get anywhere else. For example, like Spirulina. Spirulina is gram for gram the highest protein food in the world, by weight, a gram for gram.

But of course, you gotta eat a lot of Spirulina to equate to the amount that you get in like, a chicken breast or something like that, but it's still again gram for gram, it's a very, very rich source of amino acids, it's a complete protein. 

So you're getting all the essential amino acids as well. But it also contains phycocyanin which study funded by the National Institutes of Health revealed that Spirulina promotes stem cell genesis. So this is literally the creation of new stem cells in your body. 

Get yourself a good multivitamin doesn't have that capability of getting your body to make new stem cells. Resource of B vitamins, copper, iron. And also there was a study published by the Public Library of Science that showed that Spirulina has strong potential to prevent and even reduce inflammation in the brain. 

All right, and this is just one of the things that is found in the Organifi Green Juice blend. There's also Chlorella in their, highest chlorophyll food and also wheat grass as well, which is incredibly dense in chlorophyll. This is why a lot of folks would do those wheatgrass shots— if you enjoy it go for it, If you don't, you don't have to do it. 

All right, you get a great source of chlorophyll here in the Green Juice formula and listen to this, this is why chlorophyll is so important. 

This is a study published in 2014, it's a peer-reviewed journal, Appetite published this study— they found the chlorophyll can aid in weight loss and reduce the urge to eat hyper-palatable foods. 

Incredibly powerful stuff and they found that it has the potential, and this was in the Journal of Endocrinology to trigger body fat redistribution. 

So this is your body fat taken away the visceral fat, the belly fat, that surrounds your organs and migrating that fat out to your subcutaneous tissue where it's much more safe and advantageous for human health. Need I go on? Incredible stuff, Organifi Green Juice blend, hop over there, check them out, you get 20% off. 20% off everything they carry, including the Green Juice blend. 

So pop over right now, it's Organifi.com/model to get that 20% off hook up. All right, it's organifi.com/model, 20% off their Green Juice formula, their Red Juice formula and even their Gold. I think you're going to absolutely love it. If you're not in the Green Juice yet— what are you doing? Organifi.com/model.

Alright, let's jump back into our fitness compilation and next up, I have somebody that blew my mind this past year with his book "Play On". 

One of my favorite books of the past year and I met him recently on a trip to San Francisco, he's a bureau chief of ink out there based in San Fran and now he's with the LA Times, I believe, and he's just making some big moves, he's super, super smart guy and just somebody who's looking for the facts, looking for the data. 

Of course, we'll put all of the episodes in the show notes for you, so if anything really jumps out you can of course go and get the full meal. All right, snacks are great. All right, if you want to get the full meal, you can pop over to check it out, but really talking about how athletes today, we're seeing this huge wave of folks playing on in two years before that we just didn't see this happening. 

There was the rare goat out there like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I think he played to maybe like 39 maybe, and with all due respect when he was out there at that age he was looking like a newborn giraffe-like, you know, it's just kind of things weren't all the way working together, you know, but then you see somebody today like Tom Brady, right?

You see what LeBron James is able to do, it's just really phenomenal, but what is going on, he really did a masterpiece in describing a lot of the different things going on behind the scenes, the technologies with athletes being able to play on and things that we can incorporate into our own lives.

And so in this clip you'll see me talking about muscle compensation. Muscle compensation and this really brings to light why it's so important for us to address our muscular imbalances because why do we drive so hard to get these results if we're just driving ourselves into a deeper hole? 

Because we have these muscular imbalances. And so I think you're really going to enjoy this and definitely go back and check out this full episode with Jeff Bercovici. 

Jeff Bercovici: Compensations arise in your movement when you have some kind of limitation that forces you to do something in a different way.

Often, it's the result of a past injury. So you know, let's say you have a really classic example— let's say you sprained an ankle and you didn't really get it rehabbed, and now the ankle doesn't really move that well.

But you still have to jump. You're a basketball player, you've still got to get up there for those rebounds, so somehow you've got to be able to get down low, and gather your power, and jump up. Well, if that ankle is not moving like it should be, you're going to find some extra range of motion in your knee, and you're going to do that by moving your knee in a way that it's not designed to move. That's a compensation.

And over time, it doesn't just make you more likely to injure yourself, but it can also rob an athlete of some of their power because what they call movement efficiency, basically how efficiently your body transfers energy between one part of your kinetic chain to another part of your kinetic chain, from your feet to your knees, to your hips, to your back and so forth. Basically, compensations rob you of movement efficiency.

Shawn Stevenson: All right, next up in our fitness compilation is Leta Lewis. And this is one of my favorite episodes, just incredible to hang out with Lita. 

She's such a good person good friend. We went to see Beyonce together at the Rose Bowl. 

All right, it was myself, my wife, Lita, and her little sister, and she's just a ton of fun. She's also somebody who's a social-media influencer with a big platform. 

She's doing this from a real place like if she what didn't have all this acclaim in notoriety, she would still be carrying herself the same way and that's what I really love about her. 

And so she's also about that fitness life. Alright, she's been through the whole gamut of what that looks like as well. 

And so in this clip, this is her response to a question that I asked her to share her top three tips for fitness and functionality. Let's check it out. 

Lita Lewis: For me, it is— three things? If I have to pick three things, it is absolutely strength,
right? I would not have been able to sort of build or maintain a body had I not been around some heavy stuff that I can pick up, right? 
 
Movement. I'm big on movement. 
 
Having come from like track, like it's great to lift weights, but if you don't move your body functionally— like for me, I love to hit the track, I love to do stadium work, change up my movement where there is just body weighted movement. Key. And three, I'm a toss between stretch and sleep. Right?
 
Shawn Stevenson: So you don't even know this. You don't even know this. My international bestselling book, "Sleep Smarter."
 
Lita Lewis: "Sleep Smarter?"
 
Shawn Stevenson: Yes, I'm all about the sleep, too. So yeah, that's good.
 
Lita Lewis: Yes, and I've learned that lesson myself. There was a time where I was training, no joke, six hours a day, while I was working corporate. 
 
So my hours were crazy, and getting maybe four and a half hours of sleep, five if I was lucky. And after months of doing that, completely burned out, like flabbergasted, so why I would not see the results after everything I was putting in. And then I said, "Idiot, you're not allowing your body to rest and recover and replenish and repair."
 
Shawn Stevenson: Congratulations, you played yourself.
 
Lita Lewis: Yeah, oh big time. You look back like, "What a wasted three months of my life."
 
Shawn Stevenson: That's when DJ Khaled pops in.
 
Lita Lewis: He's so right for that. Played myself. So yeah, sleep. But you know, stretching too. Maybe because I'm a little older these days, I'm finding great value in a good stretch.
So strength, got to move the body, sleep, stretch in there too.
Shawn Stevenson: Next up in our fitness compilation is one of my all-time favorite guests and somebody who's been on the show probably more than anybody and this is Katy Bowman.
 
Katy Bowman is a biomechanist and somebody who is really looking at the influence that our environment has on our cells, right? 
 
Because even the body that we have right now. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, John Carter, right John Carter, he was like supposedly, I didn't say this, but one of the biggest busts in Hollywood history. 
 
So much money went into it and it's a movie that people were trying to get made for many, many years. It was pretty entertaining, but it just didn't live up to the expectations as far as the sales and all that kind of stuff. 
 
But John Carter basically to sum it up, he somehow finds himself on Mars. And he can breathe but he was like in the Civil War right before that, like he was in Civil War, I don't remember how he got to Mars but maybe took a nap or something, you know how it is, when you take a nap and sometimes wake up somewhere else. 
 
But he ended up in Mars, and he ended up having this incredible strength and this ability to move and jump all these distances, gravity was affecting him differently there. 
 
His body had been placed under this pressure, which we don't even think about of gravity, all the time is putting pressure on us. 
 
And if you think about going deep, deep, deep down into the ocean, that pressure can literally just destroy, it can crush you, right. 
 
So we're dealing with these different environmental pressures that are shaping our bodies, and so even a chair, like if you're sitting in a chair that is shaping these mechanoreceptors and as much as we sit in chairs today, it's training our bodies to become great at sitting in chairs. 
 
All right, but maybe not so great at getting out and playing golf, right? So somebody goes from the chair to the golf and then they wonder why they pull a random muscle or something like that. 
 
You know, it's just understanding our environment. She's one of those people has really helped to impress upon us to be more aware of these things, and let's make these efficient little changes, because one of the things she's going to be talking about, and this is a little bit of a longer clip because she's just so smart and she's just dropping gym after gym after gym.
 
But basic bodyweight movements and being in mechanically sound positions, so touching on that because in the real world, like let's talk about this— why would we be squatting with a barbell on our back with weight if we can't even get out of our chair efficiently or we can't do a basic bodyweight squat, where is that medium ground. 
 
Like how do we go from point A to point Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah so quickly? We've got to make progress here so that we're not putting ourselves in compromising positions because as you train like that without these basic inputs and you jump right to that, we can really set ourselves up for a lot of problems we don't need to have.
 
Because not only do we want to be fit but we want to be fit and functional for a very, very long time. So we're going to jump on into the clip, and this is my conversation, one of my conversations with one of my favorite people, Katy Bowman.
 
Katy Bowman: I think that, again, because we think exercise and not movement, if I'm going to fix my core, I want the 20 pounds carryng 30, I'm looking for like the squat that takes me all the way down and up. You just assume that the exercises will be large. 
 
But what happens is we are going to these larger movements. And we're doing them with a body that doesn't even have working smaller parts. 
 
So when you do the larger movements, they're not moving all of you, they're not moving the parts of you that those larger movements are intended to move. 
 
I think of it like writing, like I have little kids and it's really interesting to watch them write because first they just kind of emulate, they're trying to figure out how to hold their hands to draw and you start with alphabet. 
 
Then you do small words and then you go on to grammar and sentence structure and then you go onto creative writing, right, writing a story, something very practical. 
 
Most people when they are learning how to move, they jump right to creative writing and mechanically the way it looks when I watch them move, it's like you've written an entire story, but you have left out all of the commas, the letter "E" the "M" are all missing. 
 
And so what happens is your communication isn't what you think it is because you didn't have the entire alphabet to work with. 
 
And so the small moves are me going and saying, "For these larger moves, you need to know this alphabet, because this larger move can actually make your condition worse if you don't know how to write the letter M." And the letter M is going to be when my ribcage is here, my elbows are here.
 
So when you pick something up and push it over your head, your elbow better not be over here or else you lifting it over your head is actually creating a set of forces that is making your problem worse.
 
And so an exercise as a solution often is contraindicated because no one is taking the time to fill in the small moves. They're just going to the large moves.
 
If it's in a magazine there are the large moves, if it's in an exercise book with 30 exercises, it's the large move. 
 
So the small moves are like the alphabet, things that you can just put into your daily life. 
 
They're changing how you sit and stand and then the medium moves are things that are a little bit bigger, now, you know, you're definitely going to be calling on some of those letters, but they going to be more challenging and then you get to the larger strength moves at the end as well as a lot of habits, everything is with this. 
 
You know what, you can't solve something that you created moving a certain way and a whole day, whole month, whole life with 15 minutes or 20 minutes of exercise. 
 
You're going to have to change how you move throughout the day, throughout the month, throughout life and here are some strategies on how to do that.
 
Shawn Stevenson: Hmm. With the medium moves, I just want to touch on a couple of them real quick. 
 
You've got sitting near the front of your chair, which I want to definitely talk about that but then I saw some things like you know what, I really enjoy when I do these things, I don't do them enough like swinging, hanging and swinging and I actually try to get my hang on at least once a day. 
 
So let's talk really quickly about sit near the front of your chair. When is that appropriate?
 
Katy Bowman: Sitting near the front of your chair is like the easiest core strength program ever. 
 
We talked about I think and don't just sit there too, so everyone's like, "Okay, but I have to work eight hours a day. 
 
I don't have time for core exercises," and it's like, "Dude, just scoot forward to the front of your chair as soon as you"— is he doing it, did you look over there and see if he is doing it?
 
Shawn Stevenson: He was already doing it. He was doing this and beforehand, good job. 
 
Katy Bowman: Exactly. If you just scoot forward to the front of your chair, what you're going to do is use your torso muscles more to hold up the weight of the torso versus outsource them to the chair. 
 
Like, if you cut the weight the back of your chair that you're sitting in and you fall backwards you were letting the chair hold you up. 
 
So you can just scoot forward and boom, you've got eight hours of core exercises that you can fit in without having to stop work, get a gym membership or anything else like that. 
 
And then you can start making, you can start bringing in some of the smaller moves to the medium moves. Like okay now that you're sitting on the front of the chair, where's your pelvis, is it tucked way under or tipping way forward, you're going to go ahead and find that neutral position. Where's your rib cage? Are they lifting weight out in front of you? So you going to go ahead and drop that down. 
 
Now, you not sitting on the front of the chair is not only more movement you've created a set of forces that are therapeutic specific to the issue that you're working on right now, which is less chronically high intra-abdominal pressure, better spinal stabilization, better recruitment of those muscles. 
 
So yeah, so small. I mean technically that shouldn't even be a small one, but we've got something before just sitting in a chair. I mean just sitting in a chair as an exercise now, which is great, right? Like it's then very practical I think.
 
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. So let's talk about why it's a good idea to get our hang on just so you know, maybe grab a pull-up bar or a branch or something and hang. 
 
Katy Bowman: So many reasons. There's a relationship to grip strength, and all-cause mortality, why that is it's not really clear. 
 
I would assume that it probably has something to do with the people who have better grip strengths are moving a lot through their regular life, they're actually picking up things and moving heavy things around doing like repetitive motions with their arms. 
 
So when they tested that population they found essentially that there was better grip strength in people who move more and that's why. 
 
And then, alongside that, there is this decline in grip strength where the Millennials now have less grip strength than their counterpart in the 1980's. 
 
Okay, so it's related to all time mortality— is it „all time mortality?“ [50:31] and it's going down within our culture. 
 
So hanging is one of those things where your grip strength has to match your mass, which is a simple, easy way to start training everything from your skin on your hands to every finger segment to all the— I mean, we're so used to picking up a kettlebell and saying, 
 
"Okay, my shoulder is carrying 30 pounds or whatever is on the end of it and swinging it around," and so you're testing the kettlebell is pulling on your fingers, your finger is pulling on your wrist, the wrist is pulling on the lower arm which is pulling on the elbow, which is pulling on the upper arm, which is pulling on the shoulder which is pulling on the rib cage, right? So you've got that. 
 
When you're hanging, you become the kettlebell. So your anatomy has evolved to you hanging from your own arms, so that means that as far as the mass and the geometry of your musculature, of the capacity for movement in this part, is to not hold something 30 pounds in your hands, but to anchor your hand and carry, 100 to 250 pounds from that hand. 
 
Which means your fingertips have the capacity to carry your full body weight, not just the weight of a kettlebell. So we're just training very small. Now, that's all one general fitness. For the lot of the work that I do you'll see it's like on pelvic floor, diastasis, recti, core strength, hip strength, SI joint. 
 
When you hang the ultimate mass that's participating is I guess what's the easiest way to explain that— your latissimus, your lats those muscles are connecting pelvis to shoulder. 
 
So when you hang, it is one of the best ways to put a nice strong load on the SI joint to pull it, where it moves freely and it's really the only thing that you've got to move your SI joint. 
 
You've got your butt and you've got your latissimus, your glutes and your latissimus and we don't walk that much and we don't hang that much.
 
So basically, your sacrum and which is also your pelvic floor because the tip of your sacrum, your tail bones and they go across and be the other attachment point for the pelvic floor, your pelvic floor tension, which is very much related to the strengths capabilities of your pelvic floor are dependent on two movements that have been almost extinct in our culture— walking and hanging.
 
The hanging is such an easy way to put a gentle load. It takes a long time though to get your shoulders strong enough to be able to do it etc, but it's worth it because it might be one of the sole movers of the pelvic floor; balancers, stabilizers. 
 
And so we've got all these people suffering from the pelvic floor and they're like sitting there trying to work just the pelvic floor and it's like your lats and your shoulders are part of the ecology of how your pelvic floor works. 
 
Get a hanging bar go out to a branch, you will not be sorry. It's such a great way to create traction forces, decompression forces. You don't need to go to a fancy center and lay in a chamber, just find the nearest branch and go for it.
 
Shawn Stevenson: Alright, this next clip is featuring one of my really, really good friend, somebody I love, just love hanging out with him. He is such a great person. And his name is Jay Ferruggia, Jay is OG triple OG in the fitness world. 
 
He's been in the game a long time, decades, but not just himself, but impacting and teaching and training other people online. He's one of the first people to do it. Alright. 
 
And if you see him now, because then you might think like, "He must be pretty old if he's one of the first people to do it." He kind of is. 
 
Shout out to Jay but he's really just he's killing, if you see, his body composition, his functionality, his level of health and vitality, he just knows how to really manage a lot of these pieces. 
 
And he's talking about different forms of training and again, he's done so many and I reserve when I say this statement like somebody's done it all or seen it all because there's so much but he's definitely gotten close. 
 
And in this clip he is going to be talking about a training technique, something very simple that we tend to get away from when we're looking to get better, which is progressive overload.
 
All right, so let's jump into this clip with Jay Ferruggia.
 
Jay Ferruggia:  I think it's the most important concept in getting bigger and stronger is progressive overload.
 
Now, it changes as you go through the stages of training. As a beginner it's important, and you can add a lot of weight.
 
So basically progressive overload means do more weight or do more reps with the same. You have to continue to challenge your body to grow and adapt.
 
So let's say you do six reps with 100 pounds today.
 
You want to do seven reps with 100 pounds next week, or six reps with 105. And you can do that as a beginner, you know Shawn, you can go up five pounds every workout.
 
But obviously that stops or you'd be bench-pressing 1,000 in a few years. So what you have to do, is as you get smarter and as you evolve in your training, is I believe in variety a lot.
 
So Louie Simmons was a huge influence of mine, and they would change workouts all the time. Same thing, Larry Scott was the first Mr. Olympia, and I remember he said, he gave this analogy, he said, "What are the two most common overuse injuries? Tennis elbow and golf elbow. And you get those from swinging and implement that weighs less than a pound. So what happens if you do the same movements all the time with 200, 300, 400 pounds, even 50 pounds? You're going to get that kind of inflammation, those overuse injuries."
 
Now as a beginner, you need to stick with the same movements as you learn them. But as you get more evolved, and it's not randomness for the sake of randomness, it might just be a slight change.
 
So let's say you bench-press with a 16 inch grip this week. Next week it might be an 18 inch grip. You might use fat gripz. Like slight changes, so it's kind of the same but different.
 
Those small changes are enough to help you avoid those overuse injuries, and then you can't set PR so you can't do a 45 degree incline dumbbell press for six weeks in a row and go up anymore as you get older, but you can slightly change it.
 
Again, you could add fat gripz to it, you can lower the incline slightly, you can pause for two seconds at the bottom, and that's how we track PRs more.
 
Not trying to always go in and break the record that you set last week, because that becomes impossible. But you track things and over time you eventually get stronger.
 
You have to go in with that mindset at the beginning, like set PRs, set PRs for the first few years, but as you get smarter and older you can't do that anymore, you get beat up. And the other thing too, is a lot of people only think of progressive overload is doing one to five reps.
 
But you can do fifteens. If you can do dumbbell presses, let's say a flat dumbbell press, you can do 15 reps right now with 60's.
 
If you get to the point where you do 15 with 70's, you're going to be bigger and stronger, so it doesn't just have to be low reps.
 
That's what I do as I get older, I might track a 20 rep PR on let's say a dumbbell split squat, something like that. You're still going to be able to get stronger.
 
Shawn Stevenson:  All right. We're at our final clip and this one I saved as a morsel, a tasty morsel to close this out because this guy has just had a big impact on my life and on my thinking. 
 
And listen, if you were to actually twist my arm and to get me to say like who is like the smartest, most on it person that you have conversated with, that you learned from— Kelly Starrett will be right there. 
 
The way that he thinks, the way that he thinks about the body. He speaks the language of movement and he's so good at what he does. 
 
And in this clip he is going to be talking about diversifying your physical inputs. And also thinking beyond function, and he's just, again, he's a thought leader in this space, and he's somebody who's worked with everybody, from everyday folks who were just doing the nine to five thing to Olympic athletes and everywhere in between. 
 
And he's such a great guy with a great heart, great family. And again, just a superstar in this space. And so check out this clip from New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Kelly Starrett. 
 
Dr. Kelly Starrett: What's really interesting right now is we're having this conversation where we can begin to see the 30,000 foot view and something I've been talking about a lot lately, it's an analogy at one of our friends comes up with, her name's Katy Bowman, she's a movement t, she's brilliant. 
 
And in her book she talks about and it's a concept that we're seeing a lot and physio right now, which is called mechanotransduction. We might have talked about this last time with the Orca fin, do you remember this.?
 
Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, we talked about it before. 
 
Dr. Kelly Starrett: Okay, so the Orca right, so you put an Orca in captivity, that fin becomes, it starts to fold over because you've changed the environment of the Orca and the Orca isn't loading the fin through hunting and swimming and forces and so subsequently, you see breakdowns in the tissues. 
 
So what's happening now, I think and feeling is that the environment has 180 underneath us. 
 
The access to easy calories, the stresses from work, the amount of time we're having to commute and the kind of work we're doing, just these computers have changed our lives but you tend to do them in these stationary environments, right? 
 
I'm not saying we should go back to working in factories. But what I am saying is that hey, we're not doing the things that fundamentally unite us and express our physiology. 
 
So what you're talking about is you have to load, you have to sleep, you have to do these things. 
 
So then when you come into a movement practice, the real question is, are you beginning to regularly expose yourself to these full ranges of motion. 
 
Are you exposing yourself to these pieces so that you're sort of inoculated and you get your RDA, you know for lack of a better word. 
 
That 10,000 steps, that's the minimum so you don't get rickets, you know, I mean, that's the minimum so you don't get scurvy. That's how low the bar is. 
 
What we're finding is that most people just aren't even coming close. I think it's not their fault. I think that we have, you know, we were talking before just going to the Instagram it's very confusing right now. 
 
And it looks like super high intensity, it looks like tons of, if I don't have six or seven hours to exercise, I'm a failure, right? If I don't do food prep, I'm a failure. 
 
Shawn Stevenson: If you don't have the nine pack. That man has a nine pack. 
 
Dr. Kelly Starrett: That's right. That's right. So, you know, what I think is we can get really back to these unsexy, simple pieces and there are a lot of roads that lead to Rome but as long as we, and I've been picking on Zumba lately, but I was having a conversation with a head of an organization that teaches a lot of Zumba as part of their fitness. 
 
I was like, "Hey Zumba is not good fitness," and she was like, "Whoa, let's fight!" And I was like, "Hang on." Zumba does a lot of things right, you get some unconditional positive regard, maybe the only time in the day where someone said, "Great job. You look amazing. That was fun."
 
You're grinning your face off, you sweated, you mirrored, you danced, there's rhythm you loaded through the long bones. 
 
Because it turns out as we were talking about, all the things that happen during sprinting, if you don't load your long bones of your femurs, you actually can't control food impulse. 
 
Part of the whole fat utilization is driven by some of the hormone release by loading your femurs. 
 
And how do you load your femurs— well you squat and you jump and you walk and you run, you have to load. So if you're not loading your femurs, guess what the whole system just doesn't work. 
 
It's interesting that our brains are tied into the physicality and likewise, our physicality is tied into our brain.
 
This woman, you know was saying, you know, she's like, "Why do you think it's not legit?" I was like, "I don't know, did your heart rate go up to 190? Can you go to the Olympics and do Zumba?" You know, I'm like, "Are you carrying loads" 
 
And what ends up happening is you realize that zumba does 15 things better than almost any other class, right or any other group, right. 
 
But, full range of motion, no. High heart rates, no. Loading no, sprinting, no. But, it doesn't mean that can't be part of the practice. 
 
And so I think what's happened is we've drawn basically gang affiliations around our tribes, these lazy tribes because we don't have a drive anymore. 
 
So my tribe is crossfit, my tribe is Olympic lifting. My tribe is Zumba, and it's easy to be there instead of saying, "Hey, look, what are the inputs that we need to be a 100 years old?" 
 
But for us, also, if I believe we're going to be a hundred years old, I need to think differently about my sleep and stress and currently in physical therapy, there's this idea that you don't have to be, like posture doesn't matter. 
 
They're like, "Oh, it's just an expression. Don't be a posture police." Right? And if you take the word posture and substitute spinal mechanics, then what you're saying is spinal mechanics don't matter and I'm like, "Okay, so there's no research truly to show that poor posture causes pain, but we're not talking about pain, we're talking about function, right? So if I'm in a crappy position, my shoulders don't work well, I can't take a big breath. 
 
My pelvic floor isn't working, so I can function. But the real question for us is, "Hey what shapes translate better to reclaiming normal function of the human being?" 
 
And then secondarily, we can start to say, "Well, how am I training that function for the next 50 or 60 or 70 years?" 
 
Because the problem is we haven't run these experiments of our current generation. We don't know what the outcomes are going to be like, because we haven't seen it yet. 
 
And I think when you come back to first principles, this is why your book is so important, because sleeping is a first principle. Interpersonal relationships and meeting relationships are first principles. 
 
You cannot get away from it. You need a tribe. So if you don't have the church, if you don't have a workout group, you need to go find a tribe. You need to go have those meaningful interactions. 
 
And so suddenly, when we start dropping those things back in then it's an issue of, "Well, how much running do I need to do?" Some, right. "How much lifting I need to do?" I don't know, some. And then it's okay to have like specialists. 
 
My friends really like to lift. Great, you can lift, but you better be able to run a little bit and you better be able to touch your toes and you know, do these other things and still eat like a human.
 
And I don't think we've done a good job of just laying it out for people of saying, "Keep it simple, be consistent. See you in a decade". 
 
Shawn Stevenson: All right that is it for our fitness compilation. I hope that you enjoyed and got a lot of value from it. If you did make, sure to share this out with your friends and family on social media. You can tag me. I love to see that it's @Shawnmodel on Instagram and on Twitter, I peek in there in Twitter every now and then.
 
All right, and also it's at The Model Health Show on Facebook, right. So sharing is caring, make sure to share it out with the people that you love. 
 
And listen, we've got some epic, absolutely epic stuff coming your way soon. So make sure to be ready. Have a great one. 
 
Take care, have an amazing day. I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com, that's where you can find all of the show notes, you can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. 
 
And if you 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.
 

Maximize Your Energy

Get the Free Checklist: “5 Keys That Could Radically Improve Your Energy Levels and Quality of Life”

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

0 comments. Be the first to leave a comment.

HEALTHY MEALS EVERYONE WILL LOVE

The Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Family is Health

When you gather your family around the table to share nutritious food, you’re not only spending quality time with them - you’re setting them up for success in all areas of their lives.

The Eat Smarter Family Cookbook is filled with 100 delicious recipes, plus the latest science to support the mental, physical and social health of your loved ones.

Eat Smarter Family Cookbook

DELICIOUS MEALS FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

The Eat Smarter Family Cookbook is filled with 100 delicious recipes + the latest science to support your family’s mental, physical, and social health all in one place.

A family that eats together, thrives together.

Order the cookbook and get an amazing bonus today!