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Strength, Conditioning, & Mobility

We are going to kick off this segment with a little one on one conversation with our beloved and very own editorial manager whitney rickets actually written whitney has been following the course at home and she is really resonating with not only what ari's been sharing but she shares a story line with him as well she like ari had been diagnosed with crones disease and she continues teo learnt about it and learn from you and is continually inspired and we actually have her here on skype so we're going to bring a whitney and just to get ah little perspective hello whitney how are you? I'm great are you were great we're great I'm gonna let ari and you take over and have a little chat but before we get into it I mean we're all curious what has it been like toe watch this course from your perspective it's been really moving toe watch all right talk about how not only is he so I'm in remission with friends but he's been able to cure his phones with really myself tracking and by re evaluating...

the tools that we have available to us and what we consider to be rituals and what and the resources that we can tap into on a daily basis just even just rethinking the way that we systematized our days and the email tips have been incredibly helpful as someone who is addicted to their inbox I'm really glad to hear that I'm surviving your table tio in here and have this conversation with me I do want to point something out because you made a good point that you say you're in remission where as I'm cured but I've had controversy about that and I think that's something worth addressing actually to me well actually everybody technically crozes any terrible disease right way all know that on there are people who've been in remission for twenty years that have gone back into flare ups for me being cured is really about a state of mind and because of all the stuff that I had to do to get to the point where I am I believe that if this were to come back at some point in my life I would never again be a slave to my bodies or have to be on sixteen pills a day because I would have a better way of attacking us this time in the war that was, you know, against myself of my body so in that way I do believe yes I am cured so thank you for giving me the opportunity actually to explain that absolutely and I was really worried about that when I read your block post about it and heard you were coming uncreative live and I have been watching one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is you talk a lot about my vein your days and your life and systems for health so you cut out a little bit but you're asking how I kind of apply optimizing the health, right? Okay, so as I said from the very beginning, everything is attacked with this three part process of optimizing, automating outsourcing and honestly with the diseases that any of us get affected or even if it's an injury or something that's chronic it doesn't really matter unless you're a doctor and even if you are, you probably don't understand it to be in with right so that there is that element of research and learning and not using web md which will always tell you that you have something that's going to kill you tomorrow always so it's really getting that understanding of what is it that's causing the problem right and especially something like crones where it's not really well understood but at the heart of it it's an inflammatory condition and inflammation affects every single one of you whether you have a chronic illness like crones or arthritis from interest brightest or diabetes or obesity inflammation is a part of this if any of you have ever bane journey you have experienced inflammation and inflammation at its heart is very affected by stress. Stress is a huge aspect of inflammation sugar happens to also be a big inflammatory component our bodies but there's all these things that cause information so it took a while for me to really even realize that my problem was basically about information, so that was the optimization part for me honestly and then the automation, everything else comes into it, too, because there was a lot of research that I've done a lot of data that had to be organized in track, that I had no idea how to do it, and I had to learn that along the way, so the most important thing about all of that is that is allowing you to regain that control, that I'm trying to give everybody in all of your lives for everything that you're dealing with, but especially when you're dealing with something where you're trying to fight your body, regaining that control is so important. All right, thank you terms in terms of how you reading that control and how you've talked a little bit about retraining your brain to really understand what stress is like how do you go about doing that right now? So there are plenty of examples in the world of people who handle stress really well and examples people who don't handle really well, the examples of people hand it really well are probably things like navy seals who can co from a state of rest waiting for someone for twenty four, forty eight hours and then go one hundred twenty percent for ten minutes and then after return to it what I learned is that stress is not so much about how you respond to it, but how you recover from it and how quickly you do that, so if you can bounce and bounce back, it's really quite effective and, you know, of course, that we're doing that on the chronic basis, going in and out and in and out that's not as good either, but basically your body can handle enormous amount of stress if it doesn't recognize that as stress. So we're going to get into some specific techniques here in the wellness section about that, but on a basic level, the whole reason for creating less doing was about reducing stress by freeing up time, right? Because if you think about, you know and superpowers and movies like, if you can freeze, frame and walk away from the situation for just a second and give yourself that time, you're going to be able to get something valuable out of it, right? So if you're having illness or you have an injury or so something thatyou recovering from, but you also have to deal with paying your bills and getting a project in on time and answering phone calls and dealing with email addiction, then it's going to be very difficult to address the real root of the problem and that stress is just going to mt. So that really is how it kind of comes full circle. The reason that well this comes into this is that is technologically efficient, as I might be able to help all of you become if you're not sleeping right, and you're not eating away, you should be, and you're not handling stress properly because stress is not one hundred percent bad, by the way, if you're not handling stress right, then you're simply not going to be as effective as you want to be and that's really why we're gonna be talking about wellness now, so we'll win it. Thank you, it's very nice to meet you face to face. Thank you. And I'm so glad you're in remission and thank you for for helping launch the segment. Thank you for sharing your systems and tools. My pleasure. So wellness I'm really glad that when they could get in on this, you know, crones disease is one of those things that, like, people don't hear about it alive, we won't talk about it because it tends to have some embarrassing effects. So once you do start talking about it, everyone finds out that they know someone who has crimes or knew someone who knew someone who had grown, so I'm glad that she could talk to us, okay? I could go on for days and days and years about how you could get better and healthier and do all sorts of things but we don't have days and days and days so I'm gonna try to boil this down to sort of the the level of efficiency that I think that we achieve throughout these seminars about thes sections so there is basically this sort of triad of wellness that sort of at the base of it and that is fitness, nutrition, sleep and then in the middle is supplements that's what it sort of baseline stuff and then we are going to get into some more of the bio hackney aspects of things as well. So for fitness I've done iron man and I was I was a sprinter throughout high school I played very every different sport have done all sorts of different physical stuff, but you can train for things in any number of ways and unfortunately wish I knew a lot more of this stuff when I was training fireman because when I did train prior meant I was doing about twenty five hours a week of it and still having a family and trying to build this business and it was difficult very difficult and retrospect, I've found that I don't need to spend that much time there was a more effective way to do it it's always a more effective way to do everything so what I'm going to tell you as sort of a baseline level of fitness applies even if you are training for certain events and I'm gonna tell you this whole specific thing will apply for iron man but just know that everything that you could want to do fitness wise there is a more effective, shorter and easier way of billion so for a baseline I believe that there are three components to optimal physical health strength conditioning and mobility okay, so the strength component I actually like to say that that's a strength slash skill so the strength khun b olympic weightlifting for instance or lifting weights or playing a sport it's a strength flash skill and I say that specifically because when you're doing something where you're learning a new skill and you're doing it under duress in that case maybe with weight we're doing it in a competitive environment you literally build new neurons, your body gets smarter, your nervous system gets smarter and it grows in ways that it didn't exist before so you can have that skill be rock climbing. You can have that skill be a martial art, which I'm goingto talk about one particularly after but the or it can be olympic weightlifting as I mentioned, which is a veritable skill the conditioning element is where you have to work a little harder so with the conditioning element I'm basically talking about high intensity interval training so interval training is basically where you are cycling between phases of maximal output and rest there's various different protocols to do this but one of the most famous and possibly the most efficient is the four minutes tamada protocol which is named for a japanese doctor and in that four minutes you basically paid twenty seconds of maximal work ten seconds of rest and you do that eight times and that's it and in that maximum effort you could be sprinting you could be swimming you could be rowing you could be doing push ups as fast as possible you can be on a spin bike whatever it is basically you are pushing yourself into the red zone for that twenty seconds at a time and the funniest thing is the first time you have someone do it sabata they will do it and the first two or three they're like that this is easy is twenty seconds and in that fourth one hits and they hit the wall and then they start dying and what lots and lots and lots of research has shown that that four minutes is actually more effective than like an hour a straight up cardio are spinning on a bike or running on the treadmill watching the tv really is that effective now ideally you want to warm up a little before you go right into that four minutes of hard effort and cool down a little bit after but the most important thing about doing ah, high intensity interval training method of any kind is that when you are doing that maximum effort and you're in the red zone, you have to do what ben greenfeld refers to as going into the pain cave you need to really push it. It should burn bad, but it's four minutes and the effects are kind of amazing. You burn calories for a long time after that, your metabolic rate increases you khun take in more oxygen, you can use more oxygen and what's so cool about it is that you can use it with almost any extra well, actually, with any exercise, whether its bodyweight squads or pushups or actually sprinting printings really easy want to do is actually it's a sort of straight forward what's nice about it, too is that when you're training for events, when you're training for a marathon or for a long distance cycling event, or maybe even up to a half iron man, you actually can use interval training in lieu of a lot of the longer distance training because you get that long output from it or you get that lasting efforts for me, which is really cool, and then the mobility component is probably pretty straightforward to everybody, however it's the most overlooked. So mobility is really where you're taking care of your joints and you're taking care of the sockets and everything in the ligaments that make it so that you can move and do the things you want to do and that could be yoga that could be touchy it could be getting a massage it could be foam rolling on and if you don't know what formally is it's really theirs it's a roll of phone where you're sort of doing what's called a myo facial massage where you're basically loosening up the stickiness between the skin the muscle fibers that hold everything together. If you want to take that to the next level you get a lacrosse ball just like this and you can sit on me is you can sort of get you know your thighs in time you could do every need is really work out not it hurt it's a little bit I'll be honest but there's something you said about getting yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit and then recovering from that as I said before stress is not always a bad thing we can use it to get stronger so something like the real cost ball is amazing you know if anyone has cyanotic from sitting too long they can get it right in there but there and sit on it and move around and really grind into that spot disheartening and release it it really does work that way, so those are the three components of optimal fitness. Here's the best part, you don't need more than twenty minutes of each one per week to maintain proper health. Part of this has to do, of course, with being able to eat right and sleep. But we're gonna talk about how all these things related, so you could do all of those in one sixty minute session if you want, you could break that up into twenty minutes action throughout the week. I personally am not adhering to this right now. I'm working out maybe once a month right now, but that's, as I mentioned today yesterday, because of you family stuff and sleep issues, I simply can't get the amount of sleep that I would need to be able to do this once a week, which is not a lot of sleep, but it's a normal amount of sleep that I'm probably not getting. There is one move that can accomplish all of this stuff, and I'm gonna demonstrate it for you. It's called the man maker, but don't worry, ladies it's absolutely affable, so I'll show you, and then I'll explain why this is so great, so with the man maker, you take two weights and these air fifteen pounds, but you can adjust this so whatever you want to do so with the man maker it's it's what's known as a compound move you're dropping down pushing back into a pushup position dropping down and doing push ups and then doing one arm row down another row down jumping forward do a squat clean and then coming up into what's called a push press so that is pretty much every move you need to do to work every part of your body and this is why it's so cool that's what fifteen pound weights if you want to do that with no weight you could do that if you want to do that with really heavy weights you can do that too becomes different exercises doing it slowly like I just did with not two heavyweights actually works is a really good mobility exercise I've opened my hips I'm pushing back into different positions I'm going through a full range of motion up and everything is moving if I do it really fast it is hard core cardio I promise you that and if you do it with really heavy weights it requires you become very skillful in moving those weights properly and using your body the right way and even give me a show that again three more and lower okay I'm gonna change for this but so I do want to point out I'm wasting time now so I should point out that a typical workout for me nowadays is I will do three sets of three with forty five pound weights and I'm done so starting standing going down into a pushup position now if you want to take it really slow you can just step back if anybody knows yoga usually warm up with one foot than the other foot your body should be activating I'm sorry this's a core exercise right? So yes okay this is a plank position I don't know how this looks in these clothes but this is a plank position pushing down into a national push up on what's cool about this is because these airways I can actually go into what's called a deficit so then you're coming up on doing a row this is working try steps and corn stabilising on up again with the other side you can take this even further and turn like this so then you're getting a little bit of side obliques into it jumping forward and now this is another one when you can really adjust the intensity of this so I can do this really slow or I can do it like it's an olympic lift where you're doing like which is a real squat clean and that this was a really heavy way that would have to do this coming up okay keep him over head for a second so she's she's prepared I think that's really optimized the whole body yeah, well, I don't want to do it again. Tell me what I didn't work uh that's working cardio it's working core and stabilization and by the way, if you can work here court you are doing yourself a favor and I want to tell you that crunches do not work your core the way you think they d'oh actually, why that's so cool is that it shows almost a perfect example of less doing fitness when you're in a plank position when you're in a plane position and you're stabilizing, my muscles are working right? Everyone knows that your muscles air contracting and relaxing, but I'm not extending or descending that's what's known as an isometric exercise another one would be if you're sitting against the wall you know and like this position sitting against the wall, these muscles will start to burn very quickly, but you're not moving the very safe exercise you're working very hard. Your muscles are working very hard burning calories and also building muscle fibers and you're basically working every possible system in your body. So from the rial strong muscles to the stabilizers to your core and that neurological aspect so yeah it's called the man maker and the way you would adjust that is the level of the weights and the speed at which you do it everything else you can just play with on your own if you do it real slow, as I said, it really does work them ability and it works the strength of its heavy if you do it really fast it's conditioning, as you can see it was almost conditioning doing it that way, I would like to think that I'm pretty good shape is a very effective exercise I don't know how people do exercise videos and talk, so actually, carol s says, you know that what they're seeing in this is that it is a genius and if you're familiar with yoga, it is like you and then also that they were used to be able to do tons of these, but at one point they injured their shoulder. Do you have any suggestions for someone that has an injury in their body? Yes, so actually I'm going to talk about recovering a couple slides, but you can still do that that's why I said that this is such a cool exercise you can do this in modified ways, so if you are dealing with a shoulder injury, shoulder injury, the push up is obviously going to probably be the bigger problem for you. So rather than going down into the push ups, you can just maintain that stabilization and work the rose because those were going working try steps depending on if your injury was scapular, whatever the issue was with your shoulder but you can rebuild the muscles around that and try to stabilize, stabilize and still do the motion, and you don't need to use the weights to do it. You can just use just their arms to do it, but you're still going through that same flow and you're absolutely right. That is very similar to a bin jassem flow kind of motion or sun salutation in a lot of ways, and a lot of people want to know is this an everyday thing? Is that it once a day thing? How many days a week do you do this one session per week is all you need. Honestly, I can't believe it, really. So if you're just going to do that, I would say spend twenty minutes working on it, and that doesn't mean twenty minutes doing the cardio, but even if you did that really slow for twenty minutes, you're going to be breathing heavy, you're going to get the benefit out of it. There's lots and lots of research. Actually, that has shown that you need about fifteen minutes of elevated heart rate work per ten days to maintain cardio health. So not only do you not need to be hitting the gym every day for just helpers health, you actually really might be doing yourself a disservice. Yes on my way lifting they say that you should very your workout routine because then your body will plateau or something just wanted if I know what they're doing at different rates but no one in there were you ever a plateau sometime that so doing that in different speeds in different rates honestly it's farther mr council's different exercises and it really is because if I if I don't use any way to do it really slow I'm effectively doing yoga which is great I love you but it's something different whereas if I do that with real heavyweights it's a completely different exercise it's very stressful on the body in a good way and it's changing up however, this is my like one favorite exercise to do all this stuff I don't always do that, you know I can mix it up, but sometimes you get you, uh not bored but you just don't know what you want to dio this is a really good default and it's something that you can't get better at and you can start doing really have you wait some days and get up there? I mean, I do this with a forty five pound weights or fifty pound weights now normally so for the element here about lifestyle versus structured exercise, so this is really, really important especially for me and especially for parents who are listening anybody who is a parent and stays at home and this applies to other people who aren't parents, but if you're a parent and you're at home and you're with your kids, you are very familiar with doing squats with an unusual wait all day long unless they're in my case where it's like this, I calculated that on average I do seventy eight squats every day they just can't keep things in their hands you have to pick them up and they won't let go so what's funny about that is that it's unusual weight and there's lots of fun, primal kind of move things where people want you to get outside and pick up heavy objects and move them other places and do the movements that we consider natural whether it's climbing over iraq or picking up something heavy and moving it somewhere else it's problem solving honestly is what it is because if I were to say to any of you let's go outside and find a ten foot wall, how would you get over that? Maybe somebody just run and not get there, but you have to try to figure that out and those are things that do happen sort of in life in some way, so if you have an active lifestyle you don't need structured exercise necessarily and the studies have shown actually the less that a active lifestyle is more effective at keeping you healthy and toned then structured exercise so how do you do that if regular life you don't have to be a parent you know you can just get up every twenty minutes or so from your desk and walk around a couple times you can walk to work you can carry groceries you can pick up heavy things and move them around you can take the stairs instead of taking escalator those little things do count housework does count to some extent you know pushing a vacuum does count staying active but honestly not sitting down as much as possible if you're standing most of the day you're really doing yourself a big service people will take it as far as to have a treadmill desk in some cases where they're walking two to three miles an hour all day long one of my recent podcast interviews we was a doctor who was on a pie tate travel the entire time we were interviewing and he said that he does seventeen miles a day but no structured exercise at all I have in a like doing these kinds of workout stuff so I'm not saying you shouldn't but maintaining that level is really cool because it does something else for you if I wanted to get back in shape for a a big race or something like that the distance between where I am now having not worked out to that level in well over a year or two would be very, very small because I am maintaining this level of active lifestyle I talked before about the ultimate standing desk mean the ioan it's true I never set a desk I don't sit from four fifteen in the morning until about eight o'clock at night I'm saying you have to do that but one of the reasons why I was able to really chow down on the food that we had this afternoon I maintain that lifestyle and because of that it's just ingrained and it doesn't become a chore it doesn't become something that I have to go d'oh it's a lifestyle krav maga and one here another crop of guys so for those who don't krav maga is the israeli form of martial arts and I bring it up because martial arts is a really amazing way to develop new neurons it's a very interesting skill set it puts you into a fearful situation that you can grow from and learn howto handle yourself better if you want to help inoculate yourself against dress doing a martial art is a pretty good one and something like probably the reason I recommended is because it doesn't require you going through years of the more artsy elements of many martial arts krav maga is fierce and violent and very to the point it works at any fitness level and any strength level to be able to very quickly defend yourself, defend your family and get away from a very harmful situation. So that would go into these strength last skill session. But I particularly like mention that one, because since we're all talking about efficiency here, one of the most effective ways to learn how to not only protect yourself, but also put yourself into a stressful situation, I can handle it the right way, which is really cool. Actually, you know, we've been talking about optimizing and outsourcing, and one of our chatters says that they need to outsource their exercise. That thing, unfortunately, can't outsource your exercise. Well, you get a coach to tell you exactly what to do if you want to think about it, yeah.