Habits and Hustle - Episode 488: Mark Sisson: How to Look 40 at 70 (The Real Secrets Behind His Age-Defying Body)

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Listen to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XENYK73THs  At 70, Mark Sisson looks better than most people half his age. In this Fitness Friday episode, I’m sharing an excerpt from our conversation where he shares the counterintuitive strategies that kept him injury-free and thriving while his endurance athlete peers broke down. We dive into the concept of metabolic flexibility, why he's now on a "campaign to eradicate running" and believes walking is the single best thing humans can do for themselves, and the “eat to live” mindset that can change your relationship with food.  Mark Sisson is the OG of the ancestral health movement, creator of the Primal Blueprint, and founder of Primal Kitchen (sold to Kraft Heinz). His newsletter Mark's Daily Apple has been teaching people how to optimize their health since 2006, making him one of the earliest voices in what's now a massive wellness industry. What we discuss: Why Mark Looks Decades Younger Than His 70 Years The Injury That Changed Everything and Led to His Anti-Running Philosophy What Metabolic Flexibility Really Means (And Why He Popularized the Term) How to Access Any Energy Source Your Body Needs at Any Time The "Eat to Live vs Live to Eat" Mindset That Transformed His Relationship with Food How Orthotics Actually Weaken Your Feet Instead of Helping Them Why Modern Medicine Treats Symptoms Instead of Root Causes Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off  Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. 99designs by Vista: 99designs.com/jen20  – click "Claim my discount" to get $20 off your first design contest.  Momentous: Shop this link and use code Jen for 20% off  Prolon: Get 30% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit https://prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift. Find more from Mark Sisson: Instagram:  @marksissonprimal Blog: MarksDailyApple.com  Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements

Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank our sponsor, Momentus. When your goal is health span, living better, and longer, there are very few non-negotiables. One of them, quality. And when it comes to supplements designed for high performers, nobody does it better than Momentus. Momentus goes all in on NSF certification, which means every single batch is tested for heavy metals, harmful additives, and label accuracy.

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An absolute must for both men and women who want peak physical and cognitive performance. So if you're serious about leveling up, go to livemomentous.com and use code Jen for 20% off. Just act now. Start today. Gen for 20% off, live momentous.com. Mark just quickly is like the OG in the health and wellness space, in my opinion. As an entrepreneur, he had this thing called the Daily Apple. You still have it, by the way. Yeah, it's not like it's gone. Right. But it was, it started in 2006, which makes it almost like, it's 17 years old. Yeah, 17. And still one of the best newsletters that I've ever read.

You're welcome. And Primal Kitchen, which is in my kitchen right now. So I'm just going right for the jugular. You look so good. How old are you? I just turned 70. You just turned 70. Okay. You look like you're like 40. Your body is insane. What are you doing? I want to know everything. I want that. I want to know what your routine is. Well, your regimen is. You know, it's some genetics. Okay. You know, you cannot discount that.

Some do. I've been athletic my whole life. So I started a routine, a habit of working out daily in my early teens. It started with running, but I also started lifting weights in my teens. I've always been competitive. So the level of my athletics was such that I would be forced to dig deep and, you know, find the pain cave and all of the things they talk about right now. I chose to be an endurance athlete. So I chose to, first of all, it was a marathon runner in the 70s, quite a good one.

And from there, I got injured after seven years of overtraining and beating myself up doing that. So I switched to triathlon. And so my first triathlon ever was Iron Man in Hawaii in 1981. I went to 15th in the 82, Hawaii Iron Man. So I've always somehow been associated with a type of workout that is basically managing discomfort. You know, some people will play soccer and basketball or I now play, you know, Frisbee, ultimate Frisbee. But in those days, I was just managing discomfort. for it every day. How deep a hole can I dig for myself? Right. You know, and, and hopefully

recover from it and improve as a result of it. So it was all about performance for me for the longest time. What's interesting is that, like, people who've done that for as many years, like you said you started in the 70s and like your body doesn't seem, like, I don't know, I don't know you on a very deep level, I just met you, but you don't seem like your body's broken down. Like you look like you're very fit, that you're still very active, you're doing ultimate Frisbee. How did you even maintain that ability, given the fact that, like especially people who are runners like you, their bodies break down so quick after a while. Oh, I'm now on a campaign to eradicate running.

Really? We'll talk about that. Yeah, I want to. But, you know, as I think walking is the best thing a human being can do for oneself. No, I mean, I've lifted weights. So I've maintained muscle mass. I've maintained range of motion. I stretch a little bit.

I don't do yoga for better or worse. You know, we'll talk about diet. I mean, I think 80% of my physical, you know, results, my body composition as a result of my food choices, which is what I've written about for 30 years. Right. You know, it started with just real food, but then sort of morphed into paleo and then primal blueprint and then keto and then intermittent fasting. So I've been at the forefront of a lot of these different modalities or these different

ways of eating that manifests themselves in improvements in metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency. You talk about that a lot. We're going to talk all about the metabolic flexibility. I know that you're like a big advocate for that, obviously, for good reasons. Talk about that. By the way, did you start the whole idea behind that? Because I always, whenever I like click on something or back when, like, I would always

hear you talking about metabolic flexibility. And other people would say, when I was speaking to Mark, we were talking about, right? I mean, Rob Wolf and I popularized the term many years ago. And it just became, it became this way to describe a state of the body where you could access any substrate for energy that was available at the time or necessary at the time. So whereas most people spend their lives just being good at burning carbohydrates, right? They eat a lot of carbs. They turn it into glucose or glycogen.

They work out. They burn that. They never burn fat because they never get to the point where the body says, let's burn fat. There's always plenty of calories available in the form of glucose or glycogen. So metabolic flexibility describes the ability to extract energy from the fat stored on your body, the fat on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen and your muscles, the carbohydrates that are on your plate of food, the ketones that

your liver makes in the absence of glucose. And once you develop the state of flexibility, a whole world of like empowerment opens up where you're not tethered to appetite and cravings and hunger all the time. Your day isn't dictated by when meal times are. You have all the energy you want all the time for the most part. And one of the side effects of that is because you're continually burning off your own stored body fat, you tend to have low body fat, which a lot of people think is a good thing. Yeah. And I'm one of them. We're both one of them.

So back to, you know, how did I get to where I am today? It's a combination of some initially starting with aerobic athletics, cardio, they call it in those days. And then. They still call it cardio. And transitioned over to weightlifting and speed and strength, which I think was probably the right way to do it. And then recently have combined the two of them. So I was, you know, telling your husband, I ride a fat bike on the beach, a fat tire bike on the sand. in Miami do that at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. It's a brutal workout, but it's a lot of fun.

Wow. Just all the resistance from the sand. It's all the resistance from the deep sand. But, you know, the good news is you don't even need a helmet because there's no cars. The worst it's going to happen is you fall over because you're going so slow. You can't even keep the bike upright in the sand so you fall into soft sand. I do that. I do stand up paddling. Well, how long do you go on the bike for when you do that? Minimum an hour. And actually, I have one in L.A., and I took it down yesterday. I had an hour and half ride down to Mescal and then down to the beach and it was low tide. And I ride the low tide line down to Venice Pier and back and then up to Mescal to finish. It was an hour and a half.

Wow. It's a great. It's amazing. I want to get one of those bikes. I do that. Yeah. I'm surprised more people don't. It's really one of the coolest workouts I can imagine. The bikes are very stable and sturdy. Yeah. And so between that and stand-up paddling, which is my other sort of, I would say, cardio except my heart rate never gets above 130 when I'm doing stand-up path. I can get it to 170 still on the on the fat bike. Do you do e-foiling still? I don't. I saw my foil. So it's one of those things where I'm at a stage of my life where I'm managing risk better. Yeah. And so I stopped snowboarding two years ago. I just don't have the need for speed anymore. And I was a I was a avid snowboarder for a long time. One of the best weeks I've ever had in my life. I took my 17-year-old son

at the time. We went up and did helicopter snowboarding for a week. in northern. Like hell of skiing, but hell of snowboarding? In fact, we went with skiers. You know, Wow. You know Tony Horton?

Yeah, of course. I know Tony's a very good friend. So he and I... I'm front with them too. Yeah, we went up to Michael Wiggly's place. Anyway, so that's like my idea of adventure, snowboarding and deep powder. Now that I'm 70 and I'm just relegated to doing,

going down groomed slopes in Aspen or, you know, mammoth. I'm like, I don't need the speed. And if all I'm doing is trying to stay safe, and scrub off speed. Let me find something else to do. So I did that with, so no more snowboarding for me. And then with the foil, it's great and it's an amazing feeling. It's like snowboarding times five in terms of the feeling of floating and flying. But, you know, at some point, when you've done it enough times, you're just, you know, doing figure eights around a loop around a lake or around the ocean. It kind of loses its adventure, yeah, nature for me.

and I had an accident on it that sort of made me think, yeah, you know, maybe it's not appropriate for me to keep doing this. So I sold my foil recently. So when was the accident and what kind of accident was? I just, you know, I just had a long, for me, a long session like 45 minutes. And I literally hadn't touched the water once in 45 minutes. It was just going back and forth. I thought typical of skiers, too, one more run.

Yeah, yeah. I'll make one more run. And on that last run, I did a tight turn. turn and I got too high out of the water. And when you're out of the water, you lose the lift and the flight. And so it started to fall. And with a foil like that, you're riding a guillotine. It's a very sharp blade, the wing.

So I kicked it aside while I kicked it so hard, it flipped up and cut me in the back. So I, you know, I just said, ah, you know, that's the universe saying, this was fun while it lasted. And, you know, what's next, you know. Exactly. Well, I have a couple of them in my, in my garage because my husband's a big foiler, too. Did you ever do, by the way, any of those 100-mile runs or just marathons? Just marathons.

So you didn't do those crazy 100 miles? I mean, I probably would have and could have, but by the time I retired from running with injuries, I was unable to do the kind of training that was necessary to do that. So I would have been good at it because the longer the distance was, the more efficient I was. You know, I was not a very strong, I was quite strong as a 10K runner, but marathon was a much better distance for me because I could maintain such a high level. of my aerobic capacity. Right. Wow. For a long period of time.

So I think, you know, I think I would have been good at Ultras. And now that, now with the new, you know, equipment that they have, I have a lot of friends, a lot of friends who are wearing my shoes. Doing them, doing a- Training in, in my shoes for ultras. And then wearing, you know, their special trail shoes for, but doing nine-hour rucking in the mountains over steep terrain, wearing the peluvas, wearing the toe shoes. So why would they be wearing them with their, with their,

training, but they're basically like they look like five fingers, by the way, and you weren't behind five fingers shoes back when. I thought you were. No, no. So, because that's what I thought that was your whole movement, primal, this, that. I mean, I was a big fan for the longest time, but it, you know, they, in my estimation, they sort of left a lot on the table, a lot of design potential and a lot of other things that should have evolved with, with that technology. They never got around to. So I said, I said to myself, well, I'll do this myself. So when did they disappear? They didn't disappear.

They're still around? Of course, yeah. Oh, okay. So because why would people train in these shoes? They're called Palluvic guys. And they're very comfortable. And I will tell you something. They actually look cute on, even though they may look a little strange in the box or in a picture.

Because Mark's wearing a really nice pair. They're like fake leather, right? No, it's real Napa leather. They are? This is actual leather. Oh, because they're actually cute. I think they're really cute. Yeah.

And they are way better for your feet. It's called Foot Health, which we're going to get all into. Don't worry. Okay. But you're saying something that, like, people are training in them, but then why wouldn't they actually run in them? Well, at some point, we're going to encourage running in these, but it's such a strong, a long transition. When you go from wearing restrictive footwear that's thick and cushiony and encapsulates in cases the feet, and you don't work the small muscles of your feet. Right.

Atrophies. The muscles of your feet actually atrophy. And so what happens is you put all that pressure and all the burden on the ankles and the knees and the hips. And that's why people get injured in that regard. Because I have a lot of injuries from that. I had tons of ankle issues. And my feet became flat because I wear orthotics in my shoes. And when you wear orthotics, you're telling your feet,

ah, you don't even need to work your arches out. We'll support your arches for you. We'll, we don't know. We'll get into this. But it's so crazy. So my ultra runner friends and some of my marathoner friends are now spending the day in polovas doing their errands, walking around, passively training the small muscles of their feet all day long.

They might even, they'll wear them to the gym and they'll do their leg work in them, they'll do sprints in them. Anything that you would do barefoot, like if you're going to do barefoot sprints, you do this. But at some point, you know, if you haven't trained well enough to get those small muscles of your feet acclimated and adapted, you know, you can encounter, you can get some injuries. Now, there are people, myself included. I could run forever. I think my paluva is the ones that we make for training are the best running shoes ever made. I've been doing this for 15 years. We just don't encourage it with new people. So where did the whole idea come from that? Like you have to wear like

for me, like, all my feet are flat and narrow. So then they say, where are these orthotics and do all these things? And then, like, that, and then over time, those are the things that are probably causing all these crazy injuries. It's bizarre. But that's medicine. That's so podiatric medicine, podiatry. Yeah. Like, I would tell you, like, I was in college, I was one of the best, I was the best runner at the cabinet cross-country team.

And on the track team at Williams College, I sat my last year out with it with Condor Malaysia, with a knee injury. Yeah. Because I was wearing Nike's thick, cushioned, trainers trying to get 40 extra miles a weekend because I wasn't feeling the pounding. And because of those 40 extra miles a week, all of the stuff that would have been my feet that say, hey, slow down, stop, it's enough running for the week. When you bypass all that information, you send it up the chain to the knees or the hips or whatever. And so in my case, I got Conor Malaysia. Well, one of the, one of the cure, I was one of the first miracle cures with orthotics. In 1974, 75,

I went back to running and racing because I wore these hard acrylic orthotics. Well, they didn't fix the problem. They alleviated the pain. Yeah. So I still wound up with the problems over time. Yeah. But, you know, so for a lot of people, if you're not fixing, and this is medicine, right, you don't fix the problem. You alleviate the symptom.

You bandied it. That's modern medicine. So if you have a, you know, if you're a podiatrist and you believe in orthotics, one of your, you're going to want that approval from your patient. Oh, my God, my pain went away because of the orthotics. Thank you, Doc. Well, went away for now, but it's just moving around to other parts of the body. And I'm not going to say that some people don't need orthotics, but your feet are born perfect.

Some people, oh, I was born with flat feet. Jennifer, I don't know what I'm going to do. I've got flat feet. I was born that way. You were born with perfect feet. The fact that you don't have a pronounced arch doesn't mean that all of the musculature in your foot, including the planter fascia doesn't work. It's just you haven't used it.

Right. You've been encasing it your whole life. You know, it's your parents' fault. They put you in these cute little, cute little shoes. They look so cute, you know, the little Mary Jane's. They did look really cute. You know, and then you get to high school and you start wearing heels and you start looking, go, oh, that looks really cute. Right.

And then the next thing you know, you've got foot problems. No, 100%. And it's overuse over time.