Mark Bell's Power Project - The Ultimate Fat-Burning Running Tips: Sprint, Don't Jog, and Walk Your Way to Results || MBPP Ep. 1125

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

In episode 1125 of Mark Bell’s Power Project Podcast, hosts Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza hang out with guest Brad Kearns to uncover the ultimate fat-burning running tips. Learn why sprinting beats jogging, the benefits of walking for endurance, and how to avoid injuries while improving your fitness. Brad shares insights on proper running form, heart rate training, recovery, and the truth about modern running shoes. If you're ready to train smarter, build strength, and burn fat, this episode is for you. Tune in now! Follow Brad on IG: https://www.instagram.com/bradkearns1/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆  ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖  ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸  ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐  ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶  ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆  ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

People don't talk about jumping as one of the quintessential human movements and workout modalities. Sprinting and jumping are the two greatest stimulation for fat reduction of any workout you can think of, because the penalty for carrying excess weight off the earth into the air or running down is so severe that you send really strong genetic signaling to drop excess body fat, unlike any other workout. Now, here's the kicker, if your fat max pace is slower than 14 minutes per mile, your best training is medium or brisk walking rather than jogging. But training for endurance exercise needs to happen at comfortably paced heart rates in order to build, build, build and become more efficient with burning fat. Running long distances does not actually help you

reduce excess body fat. So what it does is it promotes the accumulation of visceral fat. If you guys have been enjoying the content we've been bringing here on The Power Project, consider leaving us a review on Spotify and Apple. We've had podcasts with people from Functional Patterns, to Ben Patrick, to Jack Cruz, who roasted us on air,

but we did that for you, to bring you some of the best information in fitness. We're learning along with you, and leaving a review with how you dig the podcast is really gonna be something that helps the podcast move forward. So if you can, leave us a review there, and enjoy the rest of the show.

How's your recovery from your leg and stuff and you were doing a lot of high jumping and stuff. Are you able to get back into that now? Yes, sir. Thanks for asking. It's going great. Yeah, it takes a long time. Like the Achilles, I had the surgery, it took a year to rehab.

Right when the left Achilles was feeling good, the right went to the same problem, which is like this just tendonitis. And so I worked the crap out of it for another year and now they're both good. What got you into that? Cause it seemed like you got into it way later in life. Oh, you know, I always loved the high jump.

And in high school, I was this skinny distance runner freak and you know, made it to the state finals in the mile. Look how huge you are now. That's right, man. Back then I was really skinny and slender. You're like what, 215 though? Cause it's just hiding behind the mile. Look how huge you are now. That's right, man. Back then I was really skinny and slender. You're like what, 215 though? Is it just hiding behind the sweater ring? Is that in Greek drachma weight measurements?

No. But I always loved the high jump. I was fascinated by it and I was terrible. I jumped with the girls at the end of practice. After we finished running, I'd go do high jump practice. And so anytime I found a high jump bar, I would go after it my whole life. And then I coached my kids when they were young

in middle school and I'd show them how to high jump. And now it's sitting there for- Your high school track coach was like, nah. Oh my gosh, our high school, I went to this huge high school in Los Angeles. And like, when I showed up there, I was like, I'm gonna be the star quarterback on the football team. I'm gonna play point for the basketball team.

Well, you know, we were city champions in basketball in Los Angeles and the football team drew, threw many guys to the NFL. I mean, this is, you know, big, big city LA stuff. So I realized like right away, I was gonna be a distance runner and that was about it. Even golf, I was a really good golfer when I was a kid, you know, speed golfer and all that.

I was a nine handicap when I was 15 years old, headed into high school. So like I'm shooting in the seventies. So I'm a pretty competent player as a teenager. So I show up to my high school, I'm like, I'm gonna be on the golf team, kick some butt here. We were the defending state champions of California in golf.

And the number two man, not the number one man, the number two man on the team was Duffy Waldorf, who had a 25 year career on the PGA tour, plays on champions tour now. And so I wasn't even good enough to make the golf team. And so that's where they send those guys is they run circles around the track. If you're not gonna be playing basketball, football,

golf, what have you, there's an outlet for everyone. That's why cross country is the greatest sport because it's no cut, it's co-ed, you go and have fun. Everyone can have a personal growth and a peak performance experience because you beat your best time. Hey, you did a 24, 13, you got 184th, but last week you did 25.

So it was really great to have that distance and endurance community back then and have a place for my athletic outlet, what was strong competitive intensity. I mean, why did I think I was gonna be quarterback at flag football in the park league? You know where the, that you go and sign up and play flag football in the park?

I was on the all-star team, man. I was throwing touchdowns. I was unstoppable. Not so in the high school team, yeah. And then when it came to doing long jump as you got older. High jump. High jump. You got hurt recently, right?

And I think it would be good for us to talk a little bit about jumping and like, where should people start? Cause I think that a lot of people aren't jumping. And then I think that they're thinking like that they can't jump. And so how do we get people into some jumping? Who you saying can't jump, man?

Who you saying can't jump? I think probably a lot of people that maybe haven't sprinted or jumped or done much in the way of athletics in a long time. Yeah. It's funny, like people don't talk about jumping as one of the quintessential human movements and workout modalities, but it's like the greatest,

sprinting and jumping are the two greatest stimulation for fat reduction of any workout you can think of, because the penalty for carrying excess weight off the earth into the air or running down, you know, sprinting is so severe that you send really strong genetic signaling to drop excess body fat, unlike any other workout. So just jumping up and down in place in your home is an incredible workout with great stimulation

for fat loss. So you can get a mini trampoline or you know, anyone can do it's not that hard. And if you're not that well adapted and out of shape, you're going to having you're going to have a four inch vertical lift. And that's fine right now. You just start jumping and high jumps a little more complex because you have the curved approach and there's a lot of load on the body. Amy Acuff, former Olympic high jumper for United States,

she said, high jump is like a car accident because what you really wanna do is carry all this momentum into your takeoff and then slam your foot into the ground and that'll propel you into the air over the bar. It's called angular momentum, but you create angular momentum from like running up this curve, you know, using that centrifugal force into the curve, and then boom, exploding into the air.

So that's a lot of load on your takeoff leg, and that's the part that I try to manage carefully. I don't do it that much, but there's ways you can practice for something like high jump without taking a bunch of reps, you know? Oh, I want to add in something you mentioned about the trampoline. For anyone who's really heavy and is like,

fuck, I can't find anything to jump on, get yourself a rebounder. I don't know if we've talked about it on this show, but rebounders, I'm actually just gonna grab one for myself too. People that are 300, 400 something pounds, they can start like, you can start jumping safely and it's not super hard to slow yourself down.

You might think that if you start gaining that height, you're just gonna fly off onto the field or something, but if you just slow it down, you can actually, yeah, it's amazing. There's been a lot of cool research on it. It's dope. So if you find that like you're older or jumping, even hopping in places difficult,

get yourself a rebound, it's gonna be worth it. Nice. It'll actually be scary. You know, if you haven't jumped or done much in a long time, I think when we're young, you build up this capacity like over time, and then maybe you're good enough to be able to grab the basketball rim,

or maybe you're good enough to like dunk or something. But as you get older, just imagine landing from grabbing the rim. Like that just probably would not feel very good, much less figuring out a way to jump that high. That landing is gonna feel really, probably pretty brutal. And so you wanna try to figure out decent ways to land. And a rebounder is a great way to accomplish that.

They even have them, they have like circular side things you can hold onto so that you're not just jumping and scaring the shit out of yourself. Like you're gonna fall off the sides every single time. But I have one and it feels really good. The stretch that you get in the ankles and the feet and stuff like that. And then obviously progressing to be able to jump

just a little bit off the ground, two legs, very simple. I think people, a lot of times are thinking of like jumping rope and that's awesome. But I think the jump rope can be frustrating. And so it's very difficult for people to get started there. So just start by doing some sort of jumps. And when we talk about jumping, like when you go and do a really hard workout,

even as conditioned as you are, what's the most amount of jumps, that like tough jumps that you'll do in workout? Yeah, I'm trying to learn that lesson because I'll generally take like 20 full jumps over the high jump bar. And that's probably too many. And hey, I'm endurance athlete, I can handle it.

I feel fine. But the elites will know that maybe they only have a dozen jumps in them and they are much more explosive and jumping much higher off the ground than I. So I'm kind of like splitting the difference. We've got to go back to PRILLA Prince chart. You know PRILLA Prince chart?

No, what's that? That was adopted by Louie Simmons into the West side, the conjugate system. And what they found is that athletes in these specific percentages, a lot of times they were in this like 18 and there's again with lifting, they were in like an 18 to maybe high end 23 lifts,

like in a session. And I wanna say, there's a chart that shows you the percentages and how many reps and everything, but I wanna say it was like in the 70% range. So we're talking about like, it's like 70, 80%. It's not even the higher percentage. As the percentage goes up, once you start to get into the 90%,

that's when you would probably, you're looking at, and same with sprinting. And we see a lot of this with a lot of different sports. It's like, be careful on how many max efforts that you have. And then even that max effort should probably look more clean and smooth than it should look max. It should never really probably, it should never,

basically I would say, it should never look max, but it's probably going to, because you're trying to figure out your limits. Yeah, and if it's not completely precise and explosive, you are teaching your central nervous system to fire in a less explosive manner. So if I take too many jumps, the last few, I'm training my brain and my body

to jump with less explosiveness than the good ones. And same with sprinting. Like if you're tired and you go do a sprint workout, you are literally training your body to sprint slower than you're capable of because you're sending the message, this is how I'm firing my muscle. I'm not firing it that much because it's too freaking tired from Tuesday's workout.

So I've had to kind of completely change my mindset as a long-time endurance athlete where you're programmed with this struggle and suffer mentality. Like, let's go two more, let's go three more miles, let's do three more reps. And now it's like, let's rest longer, let's pull the plug on this workout at halfway,

even though I'm really driven and focused and competitive and wanna do what I plan to do. But that's how sprinters actually train. Lion Martinez, my buddy, who's the world record holder in the men's 45 and over hundred meters. He ran 10.79. If you're not familiar with sprint times at hundred meters, this guy is qualifying for the Swedish national championships

at age 45, running against the top guys in Sweden, right? So 1079 was his record. And he suggests that you rest for one minute for every 10 meters sprinted. So yesterday I did a sequence of 60 meter sprints. I'm supposed to rest six minutes from just sprinting a little bit down the track. Between your sets?

Between your reps. Wow. And the reason is what energy system is being used for that short, it's the creatine phosphate system, right? You're using completely the most explosive cellular energy source. It takes a while to regenerate that.

I think it's like, you guys might know this, it's like 50% regenerated after five minutes or something. Like when you do a max rep power lift, you rest for five minutes, you're not all the way back to where you can do it again, but you're pretty close. And so when you take that extensive amount of rest, your sixth rep is just as good as your first. And if it's not for other reasons like,

oh, I felt my lower back a little twinge on that fifth one, then you're done, you go home. And so that's completely different from the endurance mindset of like, hey, we're four miles away from home, we gotta suck it up and keep going, even though I feel like crap. And you start training that mindset,

it doesn't work well when you're trying to be powerful and explosive, let alone jumping. Like, you know, my signature athletic event went from Hawaii Ironman, nine hours. I still have the, I had the record for 33 years. It was broken in 2024. I had the young group's record, 24 and under. So I held it for a while.

Now I'm out of the Ironman scene. 857 was my time when I was in the 24 and under division back in 89. And some European dude just shattered it this year, but it had a good run. He's popping up in PEDs. Yeah, that's right. Let's get his blood tested.

Well, the bicycles are so much faster now. All the times in Ironman are dropping like crazy because the shoes, the bikes. But anyway, now my signature event is like four seconds. The approach and the jump in the air lasts for one second. So I've gone from nine hours to literally, I wanna be competent at a one second effort. So everything, all the mentality is changing

and all these awakenings where I have to get better at resting because resting was not like an option when I was a pro triathlete. You wake up and you see what you can do today. You might go easy and slower and only train three hours instead of seven, but it wasn't about being lazy and taking care of your tendons and your muscles

and your connective tissue. So quick question about that. For an endurance athlete, do you think that like the mindset still is different for the endurance athlete? Like what you were doing back then, was it correct for what you were doing back then? Oh, good question.

Yeah, I mean, cause look, if you're in a competitive environment, it's who endures the best. It's an exercise in self-torture, who wants it bad and all those things. Just like Michael Jordan, when he had the flu and he scored 53 points in the NBA finals, he wanted it pretty bad to get up out of the hotel room

and go to the arena and play basketball. So you have to cultivate that willingness to suffer if you wanna excel, you know, and that can't go away. Otherwise, you know, if you have the slightest, I'm thinking of my last race when I retired from professional triathlon, and this guy caught and passed me on a really steep downhill on the 12th and a half mile

of a 13.1 mile run after we rode 56 miles, swam 1.2 as a half Ironman. And he caught and passed me. And for the previous nine years of my career, I would have chased his ass, I would have got on his back and then smoked him in the home straight away. And this time he caught and passed me and I was like, man, my quads hurt, there's so much pounding on this hill,

forget it. And I let him go, I crossed the finish line and I knew I was like, man, my quads are, there's so much pounding on this hill, forget it. And I let them go, I crossed the finish line and I knew I was done from that interaction with some guy where I said, hey, great job, great race, you're doing great. And you just passed me, you got second, I got third. I lose several thousand dollars in the prize rankings, but I didn't give a crap because I didn't wanna go down

this steep hill and slam my quads. And so once you lose the edge a tiny bit in endurance, watch out, you're toast. Cause it's so incredibly hard in the first place. Like the guys on the Boston Marathon starting line with you, none of those people were thinking about wimping out or how cold it was or how warm it was or how much the hills were gonna be.

They were like, let's bring this on. I've been training my whole year, my whole life for this. Now the sprinters, they have a little different mindset. We used to watch these guys in Los Angeles, we'd go and train at the same track as some of the great Olympians, Alison Felix, Don Harper, these great Olympic champions were there. And they'd be there for two hours, but what would they do?

You'd watch them, they'd be stretching, they might jog a little bit, They might do some short drills. They might go back and do some more stretching. Then they do a few blasts with a 10 minute rest period after doing run straight away. And so they're there, they're there for a long time. They work hard, but they didn't do shit compared to us. We did eight halves on 230 with a three minute rest period.

It was like, had tongues hanging out and we're on our hands and knees at the end, but not the Olympic sprinter. The Olympic sprinter is a fine tuned, thoroughbred athlete that just trains that body and then takes that downtime and is very careful with all their dispensation of their energy. Yeah, and their form and technique has to be on point.

Otherwise they're teaching themselves to do things with bad mechanics over and over again. Oh yeah, I mean, you go to a big meet in Europe and you're gonna watch Usain Bolt run the 100 meters and pay your $67 ticket to watch. And he's warming up and he feels a slight twinge in his hamstring, he's out. All those athletes will pull out on a moment's notice.

Quincy Hall, you see him in the 400 meters in the Olympics in Paris. The guy that had the dog in him that came down the home stretch and passed everybody. So he wins the gold medal. He was not one of the top top guys before this year. So all of a sudden his career, he just peaks. He's getting money thrown at him left and right.

They want him at every meet on the circuit. And that's where the track athletes make a lot of their money is that these invitational meets where they get an appearance fee and they go and get seen by the people in Brussels or Monteco or whatever, he had to quit the season. After the Olympic gold, he didn't run again

because he was too tired and he maybe had some, you know, biomechanical issues. So he left all this money on the table, his best chance at making huge income because his body wasn't right, because he knows you can't do that as a sprinter. You can do that as an overworked tennis player or golfer playing one too many tournaments

when you have a virus or whatever, but these guys are, they're finely tuned. So I'm trying to adopt that mindset myself and only go out there and push hard when I feel fantastic. And you find out during warmup if you feel fantastic or not. Were the other countries doing the same thing or is it kind of more of an American mindset

of like just trying to totally blitz yourself from every angle possible? Oh, you mean like the endurance scene? Yeah, I mean, the Aussies were, I think my favorite group of athletes because they were generally been the very best for the last couple of few decades and they had this beautiful competitive mentality

where they really enjoyed it and they enjoyed the lifestyle and they were fun loving and free spirited. They weren't all tense and uptight like a lot of American type athletes are. And they'd talk trashed all the time like, mate, I'm gonna bloody kick your ass tomorrow. I've been swimming so freaking good these days. I'm probably gonna drop you in the swim.

I'll stay a bit ahead on the bike and then I'll turn on the jets in the run. I figure I'll get first, second or third. You'll probably be fifth through eighth. I reckon, mate. And that would be talk all the time, back and forth. Then they'd go out and do it. They'd shake hands at the finish.

They'd congratulate each other. And then the guy who got fifth through eighth, he'd say, mate, next time I'm gonna blow your fucking balls out of the water, mate. It was nonstop. But it was all in this really good spirit where like I'm thinking when I would get my ass kicked in a race, I'd think, God damn it,

I got a freaking college degree in accounting. What the hell am I doing? My peers are getting advanced degrees and going to the best law schools and medical schools and I'm getting my ass kicked by a bunch of cocky Aussies. What am I doing with my life? I'd have to recalibrate everything and feel bad about myself and feel sorry for myself and then rally again and get out of bed the next day and go to swim workout and

try to rebuild that competitive intensity because it wasn't really natural where I wasn't completely absorbed and immersed in the culture and it was my life. And that's what the best athlete is all about. Someone who loves the process. They're not worried about the opportunity costs of sacrificing my wonderful college degree to go and race and risk my life going down hills. It's a different mindset. I think also like from what you mentioned there, man, it is important to, and I hope we get into this talk later,

but like, I feel like a lot of great athletes who really do pay attention to the longevity in terms of what they do. Like you mentioned Quincy, putting those opportunities down because you realize something's up with his body. Whereas somebody who, you know, a lot of people get into running, they just want to run, run, run. A lot of people get into jujitsu,

they just want to roll, roll, roll. And they don't pay attention to the signals their body tells them to like, slow the fuck down. You're not like, you want to keep progressing, back off. It's not about training more right now. It's about being smart with what your body's telling you to do. That's great.

You know, my good friend Simon Whitfield, Olympic gold medal in triathlon 2000, Olympic silver in 2008, one of the great triathletes of all time. I was interviewing him after he retired around 2013, I think he lives up in Victoria, BC, Canada. And I said, Simon, describe your current fitness regimen now that you've retired from pro circuit with your medals hanging on the wall.

And he goes, you know, Brad, today I'm coached by my 80 year old self. And I thought that was the greatest one-liner. Watching down your 80 year old self is looking at your stupid ass right now and shaking his head or saying, okay, I support that type of behavior. And probably we can bring some 80 year olds in here

to comment on that or all the beat up old NFL players that are walking with the cane. You wanna make your 80 year old self happy with whatever you're doing these days. I have a question for both of you real quick about this. And I know- Is that cause we're old and worn out now? You guys have more experience than me.

If you're not watching on video, it seems looking me right in the eye. You're more experienced. As I approach my 60th birthday here, and move into a new division against these old wrinkled high jumpers, I can't fricking wait anyway. I wanna know your guys' thoughts on this

because I mean, unfortunately, Mark Sisson isn't here, but Mark recently had a hip replacement, but I know that throughout his years, he was just a crazy athlete. You know because I mean, unfortunately, Mark Sisson isn't here, but Mark recently had a hip replacement, but I know that throughout his years, he was just a crazy athlete. You know what I mean? Um, and seeing that, seeing what's happened to many people who like kind of, who knows why these things happen, but it makes me wonder, do you guys think that when it comes to like, let's say there's certain things in the gym, et cetera, I mean,

does going too hard reduce your long-term mileage for your joints? It makes me wonder, because it's not like you don't wanna be lifting hard and progressing, but do we need to be a little bit more careful with how much we progress? I mean, you've squatted and squatted and squatted. You seem to be doing okay right now.

So I'm just curious, like what- Squatted yesterday too, did some box squats. Right, exactly. So it's not like you have to avoid squatting, but do you think that we just need to be mindful about how are these joints are being used and how much if we wanna be doing this in our eighties? I think the word is reasonable and nobody likes that word,

but I think that that's the key is that you probably need some sort of balance. There might be times in your life where you go off balance because you're enjoying a particular sport and you wanna go for it. And I think that you should. I don't know what Mark Sisson went through or my brother went through getting hip replacement.

I know many other people have gotten Ed Cohen. Yeah. But I think that all those people would probably say, you know, I wish I had maybe different knowledge, but it didn't and it was worth it. I think most of them would say it was worth it. That's an interesting observation. Cause when you have it and you're in your peak,

you might as well go for it. And I raced nine years on the pro circuit. I wasn't really interested in racing 15. And I compressed this time when I hit my peak from 91 and 92 and I won 15 races and I traveled all over the world and over-raced because I was in top form and it was easy to win. I'm like, I'm gonna go to that race too and kick some butt.

And that definitely cost me. And I had a two-year binge of very good performances. I was third ranked in the world. I won national championship. I was just on, everything was cooking. Probably a lot of great experiences. Yeah, yeah. And then after that two years, I was exhausted for two years.

Every day I woke up and I was a little bit off and I'd go and do my checkpoint workouts like up in Auburn near here in the Sierra foothills. It took me 15 minutes and four seconds to get from the river to the Green Gate at the top of the trail. And then during that ensuing two years, it was 1603 or 1547. I'm like, what the F is wrong with my watch? What's going on? to get from the river to the green gate at the top of the trail. And then during that ensuing two years,

it was 1603 or 1547. I'm like, what the F is wrong with my watch? What's going on? I was pushing it hard, but everything was off a little bit. And that sent me right into retirement because when you hit your peak, you don't know what your peak, I don't think any athlete know. This is my peak right now, I'll never be better again.

But then you're gonna drop off. And part of that was from over racing and just compressing the timeline. But of course I would not trade that at all because I'd rather get first in one race than third in 12 different races, right? But the one thing I think about today is the widespread use of substances

to mask the symptoms of the body. And I'm really disturbed by that. And I'm sitting here on my high horse. If you're watching on video, I'm climbing up onto a soap box now. So I made the decision, especially when I was racing on the pro circuit, I never took one thing to alter my sensation

of how my body felt. I stayed away from caffeine. I did not take one single ibuprofen. I didn't take anything. Of course, we also had testing for performance enhancing drugs and I never took any of those either because I wanted to experience the maximum fatigue

of where I was at that day. I did not wanna wake up in the morning, slam two coffees, crush up some caffeine pill and put it in my water bottle and go ride a hundred miles because I would pay the price later. And I think what we have today in general society are people that drop those Advils. This is commonplace in the endurance community

before the CIM marathon here in Sacramento. People are dropping Advil left and right so that their aches and pains go away so they can run 26 miles. Let me tell you how that's gonna play out over the next 30 days. You're gonna be feeling like crap. And if you do that as a routine,

then you're gonna be pushing your body beyond what it's naturally capable of doing. And those muscles and joints and connective tissue need to recover, but you didn't allow them to because you slammed too much Advil. That's probably a recipe for new joints, 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the line. And so I'm trying to get away with as little as possible

throughout the rest of my life. Cause I think I'm gonna come out better that way. So if I get a migraine headache, what I do is I close all the blinds and I lie down in bed for however long it takes to get rid of it. Instead of taking an Advil and going about my busy day, because the next day I'm gonna be way better off

because I kicked that thing and it's in the background now. You have use it or lose it, you hear people say, but I'd also say abuse it and lose it, probably the truth. So, where's the answer? It's always down the center. And people don't wanna hang out in the middle. It's not as exciting to do, let's say you go to the track and you have the capability

of running 400 meters in like a minute, you'd probably be excited and you want to do that. And maybe you like the pain of that, you like some of the suffering of that, but do you have the patience and do you care about it enough to do eight sets at like a minute and 20, you know, with a certain very particular rest interval

and do you have the motivation and are you into it enough to do all the stuff before, do the, you know, cool, do the warmup, do the cool down, do all the things, right? A lot of times we just get excited by like the main thing that we can do, the cool thing that we do, warmup, do the cool down, do all the things, right? A lot of times we just get excited by like the main thing that we can do, the cool thing that we can do, or the thing that we can film for Instagram or whatever it might be. How much you bench.net.

It's not how many sets of 70% max do you bench.net. That's coming soon. And if you're not watching the video, yeah, yeah. He reserved that one. If you're not watching on video, Mark was looking at he reserved that one. If you're not watching on video, Mark was looking at me in the eye the whole time and you hit me hard there because yeah, I like to, I get jazzed about the actual,

how can I raise the bar today? And I remember after the middle school track meets that I'd coach, the meet would be over and I'd rush out of the stands and put up the bar and I could take 10 jumps before they cleaned up and I had my, I didn't warm up. I didn't do anything. I didn't even have the right shoes and it was no problem at age 40 or 42 or whatever to do that.

Now that I'm 59, it takes me an hour to do my preparation drills and all that stuff before I can take a single jump. Otherwise I'm going to pay the price. So as we go through those older age groups, if you're listening and you're in one of the older age groups or headed there, oh my gosh, the preparation time is more time consuming and more strenuous sometimes than the actual, you know, the candy that you're going for with the timed effort or whatever you're trying to do. So that's, I think what's really cool is like, I see this now in the major sports, they're finally getting wise to the idea

that they need to treat these athletes like premium machines and not abuse them. They're still kind of screwing this up, like Lonzo Ball, one of the greatest college players I've ever seen. And how many games has he missed in the NBA since he went pro? And I remember reading about how he came back

from knee surgery in 31 days and is probably gonna play in this important game in 2014 for UCLA. Ridiculous abuse of talent when they brush these guys back. Patrick Mahomes, I just read this week, he wants to play. Even though he had a severely sprained ankle. Wait a second, the Chiefs are 13 and one or something. They don't need him. They're guaranteed whatever in the playoffs.

But why does he wanna play? You gotta look at that 80 year old self. He's shaking his head right now going, Patrick, come on, man, you're the best quarterback. Rest, let someone else give a chance. Yeah, but where is that line drawn though? Because Mark, you have no regrets and you're doing fine now now so it's pretty easy.

Brad you just literally said you wouldn't have changed it any other way when somebody's thinking about their 80 year old self but in the moment they're like yeah but I'm really good at the thing like where do you like how could you possibly tell somebody like actually maybe this crossing that line is not for you bud. Attention all UFC fighters, your sport is really unhealthy for you and you might have some post-concussion syndromes. Yeah, I mean, if you're going into the packed arena, that's gonna be a difficult point to get across

to a top fighter or a top athlete. But like I was saying, I think these athletes are now better and better trained. And so these guys that get through an NFL season, they're probably not as beat up as the guys in the 70s and 80s who were popping pills and then going to the beach and sitting on the lounge chair. You're trying to get healthier and you're probably eating chicken for every meal or the same beef cuts for every meal. And trust me, I know how good some cuts can be. You can make anything taste good. But Good Life Protein is the place that you want to go

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It's a tough question to answer in the fact that, you know, each person is going to be a little different the way they want to handle things. I was watching the Aaron Rodgers documentary the other day, and he was saying he's a perfectionist. And I've been around a lot of people. I've heard people say things like that before. They'll say they're a perfectionist or they'll say that they're perfectionist or they'll say that they don't like to do anything unless they do it 100% right.

And I'm always like, a lot of times these people are, they're not Aaron Rodgers. They're not, you know, they're not Patrick Mahomes. They're not, and so I'm just kind of like, I'm just not gonna say anything. Good for you. That's so admirable. But I think a lot of people are crossing the line

and they're doing things. They think that things have to be so hard all the time. And I have been saying this for a really long time. I don't think things need to be that hard. You need to be able to recover from stuff. So when you were talking about, we were talking about reading or going to a seminar. you ever go to like a three or four day seminar and just get completely crushed?

And someone's like, what are you learning? You're like, I don't know. You can't even barely- You got a bunch of business cards though. Yeah, you can barely see and you're just like, you're all jacked up because you listen to like 30 different speakers and stuff. It's too much information in a short period of time.

And so you don't really have any time to recover from it or process it. And our body just works this way, whether you're learning something physically or whether you're learning something mentally. And so your recovery has to be baked into everything. It has to be kind of built in. And it's cool that you wanna do 10 sets

at this high intensity, but what have you done beforehand? Chad Wesley Smith used to talk a lot about, you're only as good as the program you were doing to get into this stage right now. So what was the preparatory stuff? Like if you're like, Mark, let's go out and do some high jump,

I'd be like, that would be awesome. But hopefully we would start out with just some mechanics of some jumping since I haven't practiced a lot of that. And we wouldn't have a bar probably, probably just like land in the pit a bunch of times and just, hey, when's the last time you jumped off at one foot? I don't know, why don't you do that

for a couple of weeks on your own, three times a week or something, and then we'll reconvene and we'll work on it. So I think a lot of people, they like to push too far, but I think one of the reasons for that sometimes, in some cases, it's because they haven't gotten it. They never got it, they never got there. Like if you had a pair of abs before,

if you had some abs and you're like, I'm comfortable being 15% body fat, I don't really care about the abs. Like that makes more sense when somebody's already kind of gotten there, they don't care about it as much a lot of times because they know they have that capacity and they know if they wanted to, they could go right back towards that again,

but it's not fitting with the other things in their life. Whereas somebody else who's pushing, who's barely getting there, they're just gonna hang on to that one thing probably super aggressively. I gotta add in to it. This is so funny. And we're gonna get some more stuff

as far as like walking and running correctly, but this principle of building a proficiency of volume follows through with every single physical practice. When we had Andre Milanochev here, right? We asked him a question about like, if you were gonna build somebody strong, what would you have them do? He's like, I'd first have them do years

of learning how to handle training volume before they increase their intensity and start working with higher weight. I think he might've said five years. Yes. Wow. Who the fuck, anybody who's interested in powerlifting most. Raise your hand if you'd like my five year

strength training program, it's available online. Right, but you do look at some of these best powerlifters, a lot of them do have a history of doing some volume training when they are younger, right? And then another interesting thing is like the same thing with, you know, jumping, like you just mentioned. If you wanna, if you're someone who's never jumped before and you're like, I wanna start jumping.

So you start doing box jumps and landing off of a box and your feet start feeling sore, you get stress fractures, you're like, oh, this isn't for me. Well, maybe you should have just started hopping and maybe doing some skipping, right? Same thing honestly with Jiu-Jitsu. A lot of people get into Jiu-Jitsu and they wanna start rolling every day really, really hard,

but they've built no proficiency and efficiency with movement. And then you're wondering why your body's getting so beat up. You're doing a martial art and your body's fragile and weak. You need to probably build a level of strength within your body while also building a level of proficiency before you start trying to go everyday Pahada like the pros do and you get beat up and you're like, why isn't this working for me? Because you haven't built a level of volume and proficiency. It falls in line with everything. And I probably bet you could speak about this with running

and the general population trying to do a high mileage like the pros do. Oh, I mean, it's so relevant to anything that's endurance related because you require an aerobic conditioning base to benefit from anything that's difficult and challenging. And it bugs the crap out of me when I see all this promotion of like now vo2 max

is the ultimate longevity marker and here's a great workout to build your vo2 max is called the four by four by four have you heard of this where you go four times four minutes as hard as you can and then a four minute rest period then you do it again this is a brutal workout and it will not serve anyone if they are not extremely well-conditioned aerobically. In other words, you need to be able to have that base in order to absorb and benefit and adapt to this four by four by four. But what happens is we get fixated on the science

and research shows with a six week study of UC Davis students who got paid 60 bucks a week to go slam an exercise bike and they push them really hard and they do these workouts for a short period of time and they have a tremendous explosion in their fitness but we're not looking at the 80 year old self is not watching that study and saying this is the way to train but again we're looking for the shortcut we're looking for that you know that quick boost of fitness that we can get from a four by four by four, but it's negating the idea that it takes years and years

of comfortably paced aerobic exercise in order to even consider a challenging workout where you're going four minutes as fast as you can four times. I texted you a video, if you can pull that up. I think I might've even sent this to you this morning, but it'd be good to hear some of your reaction on this and we can talk about a distance running and maybe where some people are getting, getting things maybe wrong.

We have the wrong conceptualization of effort. We think it should be loud, but it's actually soft. One of my coaching mentors, Tom Talaz, he would say, hey, I want you to run 100 meters and I want you to do it at 15 seconds. Okay, now we're running at 14.5. Now we're on one at 14. They do that a couple of times. We were just getting a little bit faster and he'd ask you, it's like, how big was that

a change? And be like, not that big. Going from 15 seconds to 14, five. Isn't that much doesn't take that much. And he'd be like, that's the point. When you look at these incremental adjustments, we don't dig and tighten up and try harder. Our arm just goes through a slightly bigger range of motion.

We put just a little bit more force into the ground. It's not huge. What is the smallest change I need to do to get to the next speed adjustment I need? We have the Cool way to look at stuff. Yeah. And I think that's, again, the central nervous system comes into play here because you have to, you know, kind of build into making your hardest effort. I watched the the sprinters at the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon in 2022, all the

greatest athletes in the world and track and field came there and there was a warm-up track where you could stand above it on this railing and watch them warm up and I didn't even want to go watch the meet. It was so fascinating to watch these athletes prepare for their 10 second event or their 20 second event. And they're out there in the hot sun for an hour over and over again, practicing their start, practicing their drive phase, their transitions and doing their drills and just getting that body conditioned for these maximum efforts.

And of course they're putting in a lot of base when you're warming up for an hour, it's an actual workout and it's pretty strenuous because they're practicing sprinting and all that. And so of course then that's how you see them. I'm always wondering how these guys, Quincy Hall and the other 400 meter guys, they win the gold and then they raise their arms and start jogging around the track. Whereas when I'm in my track meets, when I'm on the 400 meters, I'm about to collapse and

see him as making the cut sign. I can't even catch my breath. I'm panicked for a while and then I catch my breath. But it just shows how supremely conditioned the top athletes are where they are going the fastest as they can down the home stretch, but they're so well-trained that they recover in four seconds so they can raise their arms and mug to the camera.

Yeah, here's some action from Eugene, the men's 100 meter, 2022. And interesting, look at that blanket finish where they have to look at the replay, just like in Paris in the 100 meter final when Noah Lyles won by three one thousandths of a second. And my contention is that for the rest of our lives, for all you listening, even you younger listeners,

that's what we're gonna see in world championship finals in the 100 meters, because the coaching is so good, the athletic training is so good, we're gonna see blanket finishes forever. In contrast, in 2008, if you can pull that up, the Beijing Olympic final in the 100 meters when Usain Bolt blew everybody away and was celebrating and pounding his chest.

I don't think we'll ever see that again as long as we live. And that's why I call that one of the greatest athletic performances we've ever seen and we'll never see again. What do you think about Gout Gout? Oh, his name is pronounced Gout Gout. Okay, what do you think about Gout Gout? This is a guy in Australia where it's spelled Gout Gout

like the disease. Yeah. Yeah. Gout Gout. What aot. Okay. What do you think about goot? This is a guy in Australia where it's spelled gout, gout like the disease. Yeah. Yeah. Gout, gout. What a name. Yeah. I like gout. He's young, right?

He's like 16 or 17 or something. Yeah, yeah. My friend in Australia just sent me a video where they're on the news saying, his name is actually pronounced, gout, gout. So that sounds better than gout, gout. The funniest irony is, I said it wrong, but it's a white man correcting an African.

I had to say African's name. And you're right, but it's just so funny. Excuse me, it's Goot Goot. Okay, here goes Bolt. He knows he's at top speed. Oh boy. And he's looking around like, and not only did he showboat there,

that was the world record. Yeah. That was the world record where he lost unknown hundreds of a second there from fooling around. Is Goot Goot that tall? I don't think he's that tall or that large. He looks like a really slender young guy. Okay, okay.

But for those of you unaware, this guy's running world-class times at age 16, and he's recently broken the age 16 world record in the 100 and 200. So he's faster than Usain Bolt by some margin at that age. And you look at the videos and like, he's one guy that you can't discernibly tell that he's even slowing down

because all the sprinters slow down, especially in the 200 meters, they just try to hang on in the last 50. And this guy is like accelerating. Also, do you see his like, do you see his rotation too? It's crazy how much more movement he seems to have than these other guys. It's beautiful mechanics.

Mark and I, we were talking before we hit record about the high knees and the sprinters having high knees. And it's not that they're driving their knees high while they're sprinting. What they're doing is they're slamming the ground with such tremendous vertical force that the knee is bouncing up into the air and revealing a high knee form.

But he's not trying to raise his knees on every stride. He's just slamming the ground with tremendous vertical force production. And those of you physics majors watching, that is the essence of running fast. It's a vertical force production. And those of you physics majors watching, that is the essence of running fast. It's a vertical force production per stride, uh, factoring in body weight as well. So Usain Bolt was 200 pounds and he generated five times his body weight in

vertical force production per stride. So he's generating 1000 pounds of vertical force into the ground on every stride. Thereby his strides were eight feet long in the hundred meter race like 44 strides versus like 47 Everyone took a little more and that's because he was 6'5 and so like the lay persons looking at him like well He's so tall and that's why he beats everybody but it's not It could be considered a possible advantage, but not really. And especially in the first 20 meters, Su Bingtian from China, who's probably 5'8 and 150 pounds.

He's the fastest starter. Christian Coleman is the fastest starter of all time, getting out of the blocks and all that. When you're 6'5, it's a little harder to unwind. But anyway, that vertical force production is what makes for sprinting speed. And a lot of what you and I have been talking about in the last couple of weeks

and some of what you've been talking with Mark Sisson about in this book that you're written, the book's coming out in January, right? Yeah, it's available for pre-order now, Born to Walk, it's called. And it is a little take on the bestselling book from 2009 called Born to Run. And this was a book that glorified

the amazing ultra endurance feats of the Tarahumara native living peoples in Copper Canyon in Mexico. And the great American ultra runners went down there and did this amazing race. And the book talks about how we're naturally adapted for endurance, which is a really strong evolutionary biology insight that the human species is the greatest

endurance creature on earth. There's a YouTube video I saw where they had a simulated race with like eight different animals, including the human and the cheetah was one of them. And so at a hundred meters, the cheetah beats everybody. And then the antelope takes over and the antelope is the fastest for the mile. And then when you get out to a hundred miles,

the human can beat even a great endurance horse. We see this in the Western States run where they run the same course. And so, oh yeah, there it is. Wow, this guy's fast on the screen here. So if you're watching, you're looking at, oh, there's a bear. All right, let's place your bets everybody.

Las Vegas, oh, the camel, the camel made the cut. This is great. And this is like making the Olympic finals, the final eight. In lane number two, it's the human. Bringing up the rear now at 250 meters, yeah. So we were also talking a little bit about how the mechanics of running is so different

depending on what somebody's running. Like if somebody's running 200 meter or 100 meter, it's gonna look quite a bit different than somebody who's logging several miles. It's actually very difficult for people that haven't been running in a long time to just casually go out and have good form on a run. It's also really rare.

It might be more common for people to have halfway decent form if they slowed down, but that's really rare, that ain't gonna happen. Like most people are gonna go out and they're gonna look at their watch or look at something and they wanna have that nine minute or 10 minute mile pace. And it's like, whoa, you get over like a mile or two,

like that's gonna be very difficult for you to maintain without any experience. Oh my goodness. I mean, this is what the book's about is it's called Born to Walk. And so it's taking down this notion that humans are actually born for endurance running, which has been, it's a misappropriated and misunderstood insight from evolutionary biology. So we do have these amazing endurance attributes. One of them is being bipedal and being able to stand up and we have Achilles tendons and we have all these attributes that make us way better at endurance running than our gorilla and chimpanzee cousins.

However, we're not adapted to run day after day for long distances and it's an extremely difficult sport that is very, it's very unhealthy the way we're doing it in mass with this running boom. And like you say, it's because we run with poor technique which generates excessive impact trauma throughout the body. The research on running overuse injuries is stunning. Yale University School of Medicine says that,

reports that 50% of runners are injured every year of regular runners. Wake Forest University says 73% of regular runners are injured every year with an overuse injury. And that 25% of regular runners are injured at any given time. You know what the stats are in the NFL? It's like 8%.

So the running community has worse injury stats than the NFL. So if no one's getting tackled out on the roads and the bike paths and the trails, we have a big problem with the sport. And the big problem is the sport is too difficult for the average person, especially someone living a comfortable,

sedentary dominant life. And the actual act of the human running gait is in trying to maintain that for miles and miles, it's too much, we're poorly adapted, we don't have the hip flexor flexibility or the glute functionality or the hamstring strength to actually run with correct form. And correct form is characterized by a mid-foot landing

over a balanced center of gravity. We just watched the videos of the sprinters, whatever speed the athlete is running at, they're exhibiting this beautiful running form. And what we've seen mostly on the roads and trails and in the mass participation events like New York City Marathon just had record finishers of 54,000 people ran the marathon in New York City.

That's better than sitting on your ass all day. And so it's a nice cultural phenomenon to see people out and participating in these events. But if you're doing it in the wrong manner, then it becomes stressful, exhausting and injurious. So I talked about the injuries. We can also talk about how running long distances does not actually help you reduce excess body fat.

It has no correlation to fat reduction. It might even hurt it, right? Because we're not sending the right signals. So what it does is it promotes the accumulation of visceral fat. And we've heard a lot on this show already, the difference between subcutaneous fat, which is generally, it's unpleasant, but it's not a huge health risk in and of itself.

It's just, hey, you have some extra fat. Doesn't make you unhealthy. It's not gonna affect your blood work adversely, but visceral fat is extremely unhealthy. And it's the essence of accelerated demise and disease risk when you start packing on that spare tire. So why does running long distances

and burning a bunch of calories cause you to add visceral fat? It's because it's done in an overly stressful manner. And when you have two chronic overproduction of stress hormones, which is also the definition of modern life, but it's also what happens when you train at too difficult of a heart rate, slightly too significantly too difficult of a heart rate, which is what most people are doing, then you're in this overstressed pattern and too much cortisol causes the accumulation of visceral fat.

It dysregulates appetite, especially sending you for the quick energy treats because you're constantly depleting glycogen and exhausting yourself from this pattern of workouts that are slightly to significantly too difficult. And probably most people can raise your hand and relate. If you've had a day that was too stressful, too much energy, too much stress hormone production, you're gonna wanna sit on your butt

and take the whole pint down of Ben and Jerry's rather than eat in a sensible manner because you're stress balanced. If somebody liked running and somebody wants to do three miles or five miles or just build an aerobic capacity, how do we kind of circumvent this? How do we still get out, be able to get out and do a run every once in a while? Yeah, yeah. Good question. So here's the cutoff from an appropriate aerobic conditioning session is one that's conducted at or below your fat max heart rate.

And fat max heart rate is the point where you're burning the maximum number of fat calories per minute with a minimal amount of stress hormone production or anaerobic stimulation or glucose burning. So envision this pace where you're burning the most fat calories per minute. And if you were to speed up, of course you burn more calories. The faster you go, you burn more calories. When you're sprinting, you're burning way more calories per minute

than when you're jogging. But if you were to speed up beyond fat max, what happens is calorie burning, fat calorie burning goes down in favor of a quick spike in glucose burning. And we have a graph in the book, we put it on the screen, but that's a very important concept to understand because when you're trying to build endurance properly and trying to build aerobic base conditioning properly, it has to be emphasizing fat burning rather than glucose burning.

And if you always are stimulating more glucose burning and de-emphasizing fat burning, what you're turning into is a sugar burner. And a sugar burner tends to be a sugar eater. And that's why the fat stays on the body. Let me ask you this too. Does that kind of mean that when you're doing some of these runs, you want to purposefully take it a little bit slower than you think you can go? Because I think one of the aspects about people trying to improve at running is, inherently you wanna challenge yourself with each run,

you wanna hit a little bit of a PR. It ends up being a little bit grueling, right? So how can people gauge this? How can people find what that heart rate is? Is there like a general breathing pattern that lends itself to being able to know that you're in that type of zone? Yeah, both, good.

The fat max is a quick calculation, be 180 minus your age in beats per minute. That's Dr. Phil Maffetone, the world's leading and aerobic training pioneer who has been touting this stuff for about 30 or 40 years. And now people are finally listening, like you have to slow down in order to get faster in endurance sports and you have to become really good at fat burning.

And you do that in these fat burning emphasize zones. So everyone's talking about zone two now, zone two this, zone two that, zone two is really important. VO2 max workouts are really important. And I really appreciate the emphasis on zone two because the top of zone two correlates with your fat max. So when you're in zone two, it's a very comfortable pace. It's not exceeding that important cutoff

between an aerobic stimulation workout and one that's too stressful to really be qualifying as an aerobic workout. However, we've seem to forgotten the importance of zone one. And I'm like, what about a little love for zone one? So zone one is very comfortable and zone two is moderately, you know, you're at that pace where you can hang, you can maintain it.

That's what you ran in the Boston Marathon. You're plugging along. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard. It was enough to, you know, keep you, keep you focused. But the great conditioning occurs in zone one without that stress and that risk of overdoing it when you get into this pattern of constantly bumping up against the very top of zone two, because it's so frustrating because I hate running

this slow. So if you check your pace at fat max heart rate, that's how you determine what pace you should maintain for the duration of your run. So we can do it for a mile. That's nice to know what your fat max pace is for one mile. And that's how you track improvement. But if you're going for a five mile run, you want to be at or below fat max heart rate

for the entire run. So you're gonna have to maintain, you're gonna have to take a slower and slower pace as the workout goes on. And people don't like to do that either. They like to look at their GPS watch and try to hold that 10 minute per mile pace. But a proper aerobic training session

might start out at 10 minute pace and then go to 10.30 and then go to 11 and then go to 11.30. Oh, it's getting warm in the summertime. Then it goes to 12 minutes. You have to honor the heart rate, not your pace or any of these outside quantifiable variables that have nothing to do

with how to condition the body. And so, okay, now we know our fat max heart rate. I'm almost 60, so I'm a 120 guy. A 40 year old would be 140, would be their fat max limit. Then you go out there and see what your pace is. Now here's the kicker. Do you know what the human gait pattern changes from a brisk walk to a slow jog at around 14 minutes

per mile? So if you wanna run, if you wanna go 14 minutes a mile, you kind of have to jog, or that's a really fast walk where you're doing the race walking like in the Olympics. So if your fat max pace is slower than 14 minutes per mile, your best training is medium or brisk walking rather than jogging.

And jogging is a special occasion, like you said, where maybe once a week, sure, you can go out and do whatever you want on Sunday and have a race against your cousin who came into town for Thanksgiving and see who can go five miles the fast as they can or whatever.

But training for endurance exercise needs to happen at comfortably paced heart rates in order to build, build, build and become more efficient with burning fat. Then what happens over time, if you do this correctly, is right now you might go out there and do a test and your one mile fat max test might be 1323, around four laps around the track.

But six months time, if you adhere to this and have the discipline to remain in zone one for most of your training, then you get down to 13 flat and 12 43 and 12 12. And you keep going and keep improving without that interruption that's caused by the frequent overuse injuries or the exhaustion, the burnout, the fatigue, the things that we see

as kind of like a centerpiece of endurance training culture for some reason. Being able to handle the stresses of your day, the stress of exercise, and being able to stick to your nutrition plan takes good rest and good quality sleep the night before. And if your mouth is opening during sleep or if you're snoring,

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And this is where you can kind of have some fun with it too. I think you, you know, along with your walk, you might be able to make the walk a little bit more challenging with a weighted vest or try to find areas where there's maybe a little bit more hills. In addition to that, you could also, like I like to do this when I'm walking,

not all the time, but occasionally, I like to do some explosive movements. Just jump up on something, maybe skip for a little bit, maybe jog for a little bit, go back and forth between a walk, jog. I think that a lot of what you're talking about is a lot of people are, they're trying to run almost on a daily basis and they're running

a little bit too far, running a little bit too fast, breaking the body down, they're ending up with injuries. A lot of times people are getting the skinny fat. If you can speak upon some of the stats that you heard with how oftentimes at a marathon, I think people are thinking, I'm gonna prepare for this 10K or this half marathon or marathon,

and I'm gonna lose a bunch of weight, I'm gonna sign up for this thing, and it's three months away. And by the time I get to the competition, I'll probably have lost a little bit of weight and so on. But that was not my experience. I actually gained weight when I started running because it just made me super hungry.

Right, that's it right there. I mean, you're doing a tremendous endurance effort and it stimulates appetite. And it also, this is called the compensation theory of exercise. It's a scientific phenomenon where strenuous exercise causes you to be more lazy throughout the day and to overeat.

And it's that chronic depletion of glycogen where once in a while you do a big jujitsu workout or a big session in the gym, your glycogen's depleted, you go and get a nice replenishment and you're fine tuning insulin sensitivity. But if you drain yourself of energy day after day after day, you are triggering the appetite centers in your brain to overeat and overstuff

because of the survival instinct mechanism that the body does not like to be depleted of energy day after day after day. So it's a tough cycle to get into. And unfortunately, it's the norm in the endurance training world is to see how many miles you can accumulate each week in the name of getting fitter and fitter.

And like we were talking about, they had a study at the Cape Town South Africa Marathon and discovered that 30% of the participants exceeded healthy BMI index. And then the World Health Organization reports that around 30% of the global population also exceeds the BMI index. Some research says much more than that.

In America, it's now 65% of people are overweight or obese classified. So you're at a race, a 26.2 mile marathon race, and you can't distinguish from the participant and the crowd in terms of body composition. That's kind of not the intended purpose of all these people putting in all these miles and burning all these calories

in the name of trying to reduce excess body fat. It simply doesn't work. And that's the compensation theory kicking in. Dr. Herman Ponser, the author of the book, Burn, this is his life's work, is calorie burning in humans and other primates. And he contends that there's actually an upper limit. We have a ceiling of maximum calorie burning per day

that the human hits over time. It's a really strange concept to try to understand. We had Joel Jamison talked about it on this podcast as well. And he basically said, I forget what the number was, but if there was kind of like a number, like maybe it was like 20K or 18K in a day or something like that, or 10,000 or 12,000, or I can't remember the number was, but if there was kind of like a number, like maybe it was like 20K or 18K in a day or something like that or 10,000 or 12,000,

or I can't remember the number, but what he was saying is that like your organs and stuff like that will start to shut down. Oh yeah, I mean, Ponser's talking about like average calorie burning per day. And so if you burn, the idea is that if you burn a lot of calories during exercise, you will make up for that by being more efficient at rest.

And that could be considered a good thing or like even during exercise like Kipchoge, the greatest marathoner of all time. When he goes for a 10 mile run at six minute pace, you know how many calories he burns? Fewer than your ass trying to do a 10 mile run at six minute pace because he's so incredibly efficient, it's not tremendously stressful. Same with you doing your routine rope swinging workout.

If I tried that, I'd be huffing and puffing and I'd burn 372 calories and you only burned 180. And that's a good thing because you're a more efficient athlete. But what happens with people who are exhausting themselves with overly stressful training patterns is they do get lazier throughout the day. And this is both consciously and subconsciously. So consciously it's like, yeah, I'll rake the leaves next week because I just did a heavy 10 mile this morning. And then subconsciously, you don't feel like getting up and getting another pack of Post-it notes down the hall. You're just going to scratch on the back of the thing. You're just a lazier, slower moving person,

and you go and eat extra food. So the calories in, calories out model, despite some people hammering this, that this is still true, it's a very nuanced concept, and it's not as simple as adding up the calories you burn during exercise and thinking that you're gonna lose 20 pounds if you run 20 miles a week for a year.

Will we still end up with this dilemma through walking? So here's- Can we over walk? Can we do too much of it? That's a great, it's a great thing to think about here because in today's world, we are so dominant with sedentary patterns that it's super unhealthy. It's one of the biggest genetic disconnects

that we can think of. So there is no upper limit to the health benefits of being active. So if we all decided to take off from podcasting next summer and hike the John Muir Trail in the Sierras, 225 miles, for six weeks of just walking all day long and engaging in nature, it would be supremely

healthy in every possible way. It would be a great break from the hectic life and all those things. And they've done research on, they call them super exercisers, and they had an actual study group of people that reported being active for over 30 hours per week for decades. And these people have tremendous longevity potential and all that. So there's no upper limit to how active you can be to benefit your health and benefit your longevity. It's great. What's the difference or what's the distinction or the cutoff? It's that fat max heart rate. So everyone needs to go out, get a heart rate monitor, an actual chest strap that's really

accurate and run four laps around the track and test your fat max heart rate and know that that's your capability where you're burning predominantly fat and if you go any faster it starts to change the intended benefits of the workout and can put you into those overstressed patterns that are so common. And so how do we know that most people are doing it wrong? The average marathon time today, there's 2 million marathon finishers around the world is 430, four hours 31. That's a 1018 pace per mile. That is a really accomplished athlete to be able to run a 431 marathon.

That's a lot of training, a lot of dedication, but it's only 10 minute 18 seconds per mile. So all the joggers and the millions of people that may be not at marathon level, 1357 starts to creep up on you if you're monitoring your heart rate and realizing, wow, I can't really efficiently proceed for long distances at a pace that's faster than 14 minutes per mile. So then the recommendation to walk is where you're still getting fantastic aerobic conditioning in zone one or

maybe even zone one and a half or zone two with a brisk walk without any impact trauma because the impact trauma of the 50% overuse injury is coming from that jarring breaking overstriding pattern that most people exhibit because they're not generally physically fit enough to run with correct form for any measurable distance. Now, can most gym bros who are in good shape and work hard and play pickup basketball, can they go run a mile or two? Absolutely. And it's a fantastic way to broaden your base of conditioning. I like watching the CrossFit games where the guys are jogging around the stadium

and then they're doing 10 muscle-ups. I remember when I went to my first CrossFit Games and watch and I elbowed Mark Sisson, I was watching with him. I'm like, look at these guys, they are so slow. And he goes, have you ever done a muscle up? I go, no. He goes, well, they have rings in the Expo, you can try one. And I went up to the rings and tried to do one muscle up.

And these guys were doing 10 muscle ups and then dropping the rings and running 200 meters around the stadium and then coming back and doing 10 more. And it was like 10 sets of 10 muscle ups and then dropping the rings and running 200 meters around the stadium and then coming back and doing 10 more. And it was like 10 sets of 10 muscle ups and my grand total at the expo was zero. So I'm like, respect to the CrossFit people, man. No wonder you're jogging that slow around the stadium.

You gotta go hit 10 more muscle ups, yeah. Let me ask you guys this. And I know Mark, you've like, you know, especially for people who are heavier, you've mentioned how beneficial, you know, super shoes can be, right? But I wonder, you know, if we're saying that, you know, to get better at running, you probably need to go a little bit slower than you should. You need to probably strike the ground in a certain way.

Certain amounts of shoe technology make it much easier to compensate in your foot strike when you get tired. Instead of you stopping, you're then just gonna start striking with your heel because the shoe can allow you to, right? So do you guys think that this is a net good or do you think it's a net negative for someone who's trying to get in shape

using walking and running? The shoes specifically, you mean? Yeah. What do you think? You've put those things to the test. Did you wear those in the Boston Marathon? I did. I did. I still wear them, I wore them this morning.

Boing, boing, boing, boing. Yeah. I think through the streets of Boston, boing, boing, boing. I think they're very helpful, you know, and what Nseam is talking about is a carbon fiber foot plate and it, you know, can help kind of launch you forward a little bit. And so I think if we are trying to figure out like a way to,

we're trying to figure out a way to like do certain exercise, do certain movements, but also minimize damage. So to me, I look at it a little bit like a lifting belt. Is the lifting belt gonna allow me to like maybe lift incorrectly? Maybe, maybe, but I'm pretty conscious of, you know, where I'm putting my feet and how I'm twisting and turning and all these different things.

And so I do my best to try to have the best form and technique that I can. A lot of shoes are going to squish your feet, which I'm not a huge fan of, but that's why I wear I wear Paloovas quite often, which is almost like a gentle automatic toe spacer, just kind of as you're going throughout your day. And so I don't wear, like if I'm gonna wear like a gentle, automatic toe spacer, just kinda as you're going throughout your day. And so I don't wear, like if I'm gonna wear like a quote unquote, like real running shoe,

it'll only be for like specific occasions. So this morning I did probably, I don't know, eight or 10 90 second interval runs. They weren't like crazy fast. It wasn't anything too, too wild. And in between that I walked. And so I chose to wear those shoes for that to minimize the impact because of the ground that I'm on. You know, I don't always love going to the track. The track would be great because that will help minimize some stuff as well. But

yeah, that's kind of where I stand on it. And I also, I'll wear the Paluva's, the ones that you lace up. I think you guys made more recent ones that I really like for sprinting. And when- Yeah, the Strand ATR is a little more buffed up of a tread and more protection, more robust shoe for more high impact.

Those feel amazing for sprinting. And I haven't tested them out yet. I want to sprint with them on the field as well and kind of see what that will feel like. But I'm imagining that that will feel really good. So that's kind of where I stand on some of the shoe stuff. Yeah, I mean, modern technology enables us to do this stuff that's pretty difficult and challenging.

So running shoes in and of themselves, when they were invented in 1973, Nike invented the first waffle cushioned running shoe. It kicked off the running boom because before that, if you look up Onitsuka Tiger Marathon shoe, that was the pre-Nike shoe that the guys had to run in in the Olympics. And there wasn't that many joggers in America back then.

The Boston Marathon has been going since 1896, but there was no more than a thousand or so participants until like the seventies. And then it started to grow like crazy. And now there's 30,000, whatever. But you had to wear this extremely minimal shoe with minimal padding. Kind of cool looking.

Yeah, I mean, they're rocking them now. They brought these stuff back, you know, but that was someone trying to run long distances in that shoe is a skinny, athletic, very graceful, very well-adapted person. Because if you put those on and try to take off down the road as today's jogger, it's not gonna work well for you.

You need all that cushion and all that support and all that technology to allow you to hang in there for five mile run or whatever. So we just have to respect like the balance. I guess the weight belt's a great analogy too. Like, you know, is it a crutch that's gonna help you lift more weight that you're really not strong enough to lift

because your core is not strong enough, whatever. You're still getting the workout stimulus, but then with your great analogy there, walk around barefoot or wear Paloovas all day long if you insist on running and doing this very difficult sport that you require elevated cushioned shoes simply to be able to do it. But away from the argument about the super shoes is just the general running shoe with that elevated heel. It enables a heel strike. Take off your shoes and go run barefoot down the parking lot and try to heel strike.

You're not gonna do it. You'll do two strides and you'll be like, ow, that hurts. But when people put these shoes on, they can shuffle along for five, 10 or 26 miles with poor form and send that jarring impact throughout the lower extremities without immediate penalty because the shoe is so comfortable and cushiony. And what it's actually doing

is it's destroying your proprioception, your awareness of what that impact really does feel like. The heels there, but the heel only absorbs 10% of the impact trauma. So it's not that cushion heel that's making it easy for you. It's a little bit easier than barefoot, but 90% is still going into the body and it's going into the body in an inappropriate manner

because your landing was jarring and overstriding pattern, which is impossible to do in bare feet or in those 1960s era shoes. So the early runners before the running boom were skinny, fast, wore these tiny little shoes, and that was the sport. That was the only people that were adapted to do it were high school and college athletes,

and maybe some of them kept going and ran around their neighborhood. And a lot of times they get pulled over by the police because they don't know why someone's running through a neighborhood. Now we see everybody, the sport is open, the chapter title is opening the floodgates in one fell swoosh, get it?

Because these shoes now allow the average person to go and jog, but the argument is you probably shouldn't be jogging, you should probably be walking unless you have that capacity and that ability to burn fat while you're moving in endurance workout. So two things probably it's important to if you're going to be using not even a

super shoe, but like just let's say it's a some Nike running shoes, some ultra running shoes, et cetera, to still have a level of awareness in your running. Because like if you're getting so tired that you're starting to heel strike, maybe you need to slow down, adjust and start paying attention to where your foot is hitting the ground as you're running. Yeah, I've never really thought about that.

Like, does this happen when you get tired? Is it a cause of fatigue? I'll say this. Or are you starting out of the gate that way? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, no, because I'll say two things real quick. I mean, I'm not like someone who runs a ton. I do a lot of sprinting,

but when I do longer distance runs, I do notice that, mean, I'm not like someone who runs a ton. I do a lot of sprinting, but when I do longer distance runs, I do notice that, okay, I'm good on mile one, mile two. When I start to speed up, when I start to get lazy, if I'm wearing a shoe that has that extra stack height, I'll start to become a little bit lazier. I'll be like, oh shit, it's happening, okay. Wow. I need to slow down a little bit.

But that's because I have an awareness of my foot strike because we've been paying attention to this for a long time. That's fascinating, because I never get tired running, so I've an awareness of my foot strike because we've been paying attention to this for a long time. That's fascinating because I never get tired running. So I've never really noticed my form change from just kidding. But yeah, I suppose that would be a major thing, especially when your hip flexors get blown out at mile 20 of the marathon. All of a sudden you're a shuffler now and that shoe is coming into play with that nice fat heel.

But there's also, according to the Harvard research, most people are running like that right out of the door. And that's because weak hamstrings, weak tight hamstrings, weak tight hip flexors, dysfunctional glutes, not enough ankle mobility to dorsiflex properly, and not enough forward lean in the trunk where you need a few degrees lean, but if your core is not strong enough.

So these are these lists of dysfunction that cause people to run with poor form. And sometimes you hear tidbits where the shoes are causing poor form. The shoe is an inanimate object. It's not causing anybody to run with poor form, but the shoe is an inanimate object. It's not causing anybody to run with poor form, but the shoe is enabling poor form from people with super tight hip flexors,

dysfunctional glutes, tight hamstrings, not enough ankle flexibility, and so forth. So it's kind of like allows the shuffle to happen whereby if you were wearing the Tigers, you'd start to get tired, you'd slam onto your heel and go, ow, I better stop running. The second thing I have a question about for both of you guys, and it's actually in line

with what you mentioned about the Tigers. I'll use these Vivo boots, right? Cause they have a little bit more, they're flat, but they have a bit more cushion than the normal ones, right? But the thing is, concrete's still hard. And I'm very aware of that. So like, I will switch off between certain runs on using some ultras I have that have a little bit more padding,

and then these barefoot shoes to run or to strengthen my feet on these runs so that I can get better at handling that stress with each strike on the ground. Now, the thing is, again, you know, one thing I tend to notice is, like, a lot of people want to use cushiony shoes because concrete is hard, right? So the adaptation to getting used to running on concrete, what are your thoughts on that?

Should we be trying to see if we can run on different surfaces? Should we like, it makes you wonder, because back in, I would assume hundreds of years ago, people weren't just running purely on concrete. It was maybe on other types of surfaces, dirt that might not be as like, I don't, you know what I mean?

So what are your thoughts on these, like some of these more cushiony shoes, other types of surfaces, dirt that might not be as like, I don't, you know what I mean? Oh, for sure, yeah. What are your thoughts on these, like some of these more cushiony shoes, just being a protective mechanism to be able to run on concrete safely? Yeah, for sure. And by the way, humans were never running for recreation until the 70s running boom.

They ran for work or they ran for Olympic competition, trying to represent Finland and run the marathon and so forth. They ran for work or they ran for Olympic competition, trying to represent Finland and run the marathon and so forth. Or they ran as soldiers like Fidipides. And so now we have this weird sensation of the running boom where people are doing this training on fricking concrete and it's horrible for the body. It's, you know, you gotta find a place to run that's softer.

It would be the best recommendation. And isn't there, there's a difference between concrete and asphalt too. Like asphalt is way more forgiving than concrete. So if you can run on an asphalt, but the whole thing is probably not a good idea, especially when you have this injury rate, especially when you have this propensity to add visceral fat

because the workout is too stressful. And we can determine this by our fat max heart rate. So go for a walk on concrete, your body can handle that because thanks to the cushioned shoe, you can probably even handle it barefoot to a certain extent. But we're talking about a very, very unnatural, difficult and destructive act of simply going for a nice, innocent jog in your neighborhood on the concrete sidewalk

or even on the street, even on the trail in the sense that it takes a lot for the body to be able to hang and run with good form. Yeah. And you wanna be able to cheat it a little bit. Maybe you can do some hills, you know? So maybe you find a hill where there's some concrete and that will definitely be different

because every step that you're taking, you're elevating a little bit more. For years on this podcast, we've been talking about the benefit of barefoot shoes. And these are the shoes I used to use back in 2017, 2018, my old Metcons. They are flat, but they're not very wide and they're very stiff and they don't move. That's why we've been partnering with

and we've been using Vivo barefoot shoes. These are the Modus Strength shoe because not only are they wide, I have wide ass feet and so do we here on the podcast, especially as our feet have gotten stronger, but they're flexible. So when you're doing certain movements, like let's say you're doing jumping or you're doing split squats or you're doing movements where your toes need to flex and move, your feet are able to do that and perform in the shoe, allowing them to get stronger over time. And obviously they're flexible. So your foot's allowed to be a foot.

And when you're doing all types of exercise, your feet will get stronger, improving your ability to move. Andrew, how can they get the hands on these? Yes. Head to vivobarefoot.com slash power project and enter the code that you see on screen to save 20% off your entire order. Again, that's at vivobarefoot.com slash power project. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Something that's interesting though, about like just running in general. I don't really even know, jogging is interesting.

Jogging is an interesting piece of the puzzle. I don't know where something goes from jogging into, running and then running into like faster running and sprinting and so on. where something goes from jogging into running and then running into like faster running and sprinting and so on. Sprinting looks pretty beautiful. Like sprinting looks really nice. When you see high level sprinters sprinting,

it looks amazing. Oh, brings me to tears watching Usain in 2008 Olympics. Oh my gosh. And the same thing with- It's magnificent. And the same thing with watching somebody run. Somebody runs a mile, like a mile runner. You're like, wow, that looks incredible.

And their foot is pushing way back behind their body as opposed to the sprinter where their knee is kind of moving more forward and their foot is moving more in front of their body, a little bit more like front side mechanics. But jogging kind of always looks like shit. And it's just not like it's, like you were saying, shuffling.

Like a lot of people just kind of shuffle. And if you are to go out and jog, and you're to move around a little bit, and you're like, let me jog with better form, you know what's gonna happen? You're gonna end up running. You're gonna end up moving faster because you're like, let me jog with better form. You know what's gonna happen? You're gonna end up running. You're gonna end up moving faster because you can't, I mean, jogging, I guess it can like look okay,

but it's just never gonna look all that good, I don't think. Go to Palluva YouTube channel, Brad Kern's Running Technique Instruction, and you can show some B-roll here. But jogging with correct form still entails this concept of strong foot. And when you take off off the ground, you wanna dorsiflex your foot immediately.

So you wanna have a strong engagement of the foot as soon as it leaves the ground rather than dragging it, which most people do, they leave the ground and the foot is just floppy and then it lands on the ground again. But when you have this dorsiflex foot, then you can impact the ground and coil and harness kinetic energy

for an explosive takeoff. So even when you're going slow, there's this concept of running, like you're pedaling a bicycle, if you envision pedaling a bicycle, and the bicycle forces the foot to be dorsiflex because it stays on the pedal. You're not bicycling and losing the pedal going behind you.

So you have this nice, tight use of the ankle joint and the foot itself to try to be strong throughout the stride. This will be fun. You can practice this on your next run. But when you have that strong foot, rather than dragging lazy foot, it makes a big difference. And you can run slow, medium or fast.

Now that takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of energy to do that. it makes a big difference and you can run slow, medium or fast with correct form. Now that takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of energy to do that. It takes less energy than dragging your feet. Yeah, but it's gonna be very difficult for somebody, which is good, like it's good, it's difficult. I also show like marathon pace later, where instead of that big bicycle pedaling circle,

I'm making this tiny little pedaling circle where my foot's not going that much off the ground and not generating that much vertical force like Usain Bolt, a thousand pounds. I'm generating one and two times body weight or something small, but it's a big difference and it allows you to concentrate on what it's like to actually jog slowly, jog medium, jog faster with good technique. It involves using that foot as a great key.

And then of course, standing straight and preserving a straight and elongated spine and preserving that pelvic integrity because the biggest tell, the biggest risk factor for running injury is what's called contralateral pelvic drop. And it's when you have kind of a floppy pelvis with each stride and you look like kind of a sloppy jogger

that you might see jogging through the park rather than someone when you impact the ground, you wanna be able to absorb that. You're doing, it's like a thousand mini high jumps. Every time you take a stride is a jump in the air and then a landing. We're not getting to the exact part, but I think you're getting the idea here

if you're watching the video a little bit where my feet are active rather than just shuffling along. And then people will write in the comments, there's no way I could run a whole marathon with your perfect form, it's too difficult. And the answer is you're wrong because when you do harness some kinetic energy with every step off the ground, you're wrong because when you do harness some kinetic energy with every step off the ground,

you're going to spring forward and it's going to be less effort. It's gonna be more efficient use of energy rather than, what do you call it? Dissipating your potential kinetic energy into the ground because your foot is slapping the ground. So if you're running along and you can hear yourself striding on the sidewalk,

you have some running technique errors that you wanna think about because you wanna run like a deer and be silent and approach someone from behind and they didn't even hear you because your running is so graceful. And that's about using the strong foot and taking advantage of the ground

and taking advantage of all the coil, the energy potential that we have in the arch, the Achilles tendon, calf muscles and so forth. It's gonna take some time. People, they just have to get used to trying to adhere to having better form and technique. When you try better form and technique, you most likely will get tired.

I think that that's why we have a preset technique for squat, bench, deadlift, you just bend down, just pick it up, right? But that's not necessarily the most efficient way. And so over time, as you work it, as you get more used to it, you'll be able to move a lot better. And I think a huge factor here is breathing.

If we could just think about, not everything has to be like nasal breathing all the time and you don't have to make it be too crazy, but if you're working on your form and technique with a jog slash run, you're picking up your pace a little bit here and there and your nasal breathing, as soon as you start to lose some of that nasal breathing,

now it's time to walk. Exactly. And you can keep that very simple. Yeah. And then you can kind of, you know, reinvestigate, you know, the run again, pick it back up. And if over time, you know, you did three or five or 10 of these,

the form starts to dwindle down, well, the session's over. Time to walk it out, get back to your car and wait a day or two and do another workout. Yeah, and Seema, you asked earlier, like, can I tell by my breathing or by heart rate? And so the heart rate is the best, obviously, but then you can try to nasal breathe during a workout and the spike in ventilation is strongly correlated

with the exceeding fat max heart rate. So if you go into a laboratory, it's called ventilatory threshold and you see a nonlinear spike in ventilation when you drift past full fat or fat burning emphasis. I mean, over simplifying it. It's not like you're burning only fat and now you're switching to burning only sugar. In fact, at fat max heart rate,

you're burning like half your calories from fat, half your calories from glucose. But then is when that spike occurs in ventilation and that spike occurs in glucose burning and fat calories start to drop because you're not getting enough oxygen. And oxygen, fat needs to be burned with oxygen. You can't burn it without oxygen. You can burn sugar without oxygen or with oxygen. So if you don't have a heart rate monitor, you're not obsessed with looking at your number

and setting your beeper alarm. If you close your mouth and try to breathe nasally, you will notice that it gets super difficult when you're going at a certain speed that's probably about your Fat Max heart rate. People are really frustrated hearing this and adhering to it because it's so fricking slow and your zone two limit comes up

and you're not moving very fast and you're super frustrated because you think, I can usually go much faster than this and last for 10 miles, which is true, but you're training sugar burning rather than fat burning. And that has a lot of long-term consequences. So let's understand. We talked about Kipchoge a little bit last time probably,

but the greatest marathon runner ever on the planet does 83% of his weekly mileage in zone one, not zone two, zone one. And zone one for almost all of us listening, watching correlates with a walk, not even a jog, because it's very, very comfortable. He calls it, Kipchoge calls it 50% capacity. He has a shuffle that he does.

Well, his shuffle is running six minute miles at altitude, but that's the one for him. But I just mean like when he starts his workouts, he's actually running pretty slow. Yeah, yeah, the guys warm up properly, and even the top runners in the world are running eight or nine minute miles and doing a lot of taking care of the body

when they cool down as well. But it's such a mind blowing insight to think he's running around 130 miles per week, week in, week out. That's how you become the top marathoner of all time. But a hundred of those miles are walking for almost everyone out there, correlating to walking. So when people are not doing that and they're instead running 50 miles a week

and slugging along and doing nine minute pace with their buddy on Tuesday night and eight minute pace on Thursday afternoon. They're training harder, literally in a direct comparison or relatively to the greatest runner of all time. And he's actually more genetically gifted. He sleeps more than you. He eats better. He meditates more, all that stuff. So we should probably be training

relatively less strenuously than the great runners of the planet. But in fact, people, that's why they're getting injured 50% of the time. And all those things are happening and the spare tire is being accumulated because it's too stressful of an endeavor. Yeah, it's important to realize that like the capacity of these runners has been built over decades. You know, like, Kipchoge's been doing this for a long time. And if you just started running and you're trying to be like Kipchoge, or you're trying to be like any good athlete, it's like, well, maybe you need to actually start down here for a few years and give yourself the time. Because, again, I think it all comes down to the fact that, like,

we're all going to be doing this for a long time, whether it's running, whether it's Jitsu, whatever it is. And if you try to speed run in the beginning, you might just kick yourself out of the game because of stupidity that gets you injured, right? You might just have to quit early because you've gone too hard too soon, rather than just like give it 10 years.

As crappy as it sounds, like give it some years of like doing the boring work. This show is sponsored by Encima's new program, GiveIt10Years.com. You can become competent in jujitsu and rope swinging and everything else. It just takes a decade. In 10 years, yeah. Just give me a decade.

It's called gimmeadecade.com. Yeah, that's something that we don't wanna listen to. And then it gets into, we have a chapter in the book called the ordeal of the obligate runner. And then it gets into, we have a chapter in the book called the ordeal of the obligate runner. And you made me think of this now because like, well, if you're receiving this information that the greatest marathoner runs in a very,

very comfortable manner for the vast majority of his training, why are you pushing and torturing yourself and suffering so much with your own little training program. And this brings into play the emotional aspects of what people are doing out there who are highly motivated, driven, type A, goal-oriented, and seem to want to suffer in a perverse way to balance perhaps what's a comfortable, convenient,

predictable modern life. But I think there's this tendency in the highly driven motivated population to push oneself too hard in the name of just dispensing energy in an inappropriate manner so they can run away from other problems in their life that they're supposed to be facing, but they're really not facing.

And they did a research way back in the 70s, and they identified this phenomenon known as the obligate runner. And they did a research way back in the 70s and they identified this phenomenon known as the obligate runner. And the obligate runner is someone who is compelled to run to excess to the point of even getting injured. And there are very great many parallels to an addict in terms of what are the qualifying points to be an addict.

Joe Nifflin was a food expert, she was on my podcast, and there's like nine checkpoints, and if you answer five or more, you're an addict. And she talks about food addiction, which is very common because like, I can't live a day without food. Yes, that counts, you know, and so does the other one, but like runners who are obligate runners need their run

just to feel normal and baseline. Otherwise, they're agitated, frustrated if they miss their workout. And that is the definition of an addict is you need that hit not to get high like we perceive, but it's like you need that hit to get to baseline. And so if you're, you know, feeling frustrated because you're missing a workout or you went slower than you hoped on your five mile run or you didn't make the podium in the last race and you have all this negativity and frustration associated with your athletic pursuit,

these are signs of addiction and a mental health consequence of pushing your body too hard and struggling and suffering for running. And it's so commonplace because when you think about it, like who the heck wants to get up at, you know, oh, dark morning and run for hours to prepare for this marathon that is pure torture and suffering every step of the way. I'm sounding kind of negative now.

And I also want to put in a plug for this was my life. So I'm allowed to kind of pop off a little bit. I was, I was deep into the endurance scene and pushed my body so hard that it was like, I lived and breathed this stuff. But now as I extricate a little bit and realize what was I thinking, sometimes it was my misplaced competitive intensity that was too strong. And I might've been better off being more patient,

taking better care of myself, taking more vacations, applying my competitive intensity when I wanted to in an appropriate manner with those guardrails like the Aussies who can have fun and party all night, even if they got their butt kicked in a race, or I'm going home feeling sorry for myself and I'm not an accomplished, productive person because I'm not winning every single race,

and all these things that come in as a consequence of sort of addictive or overly obsessive behavior and overly obsessive approach to what should be a hobby and a balance point for the comfort and convenience of life ideally. What do you think is, what's something about running that? It seems like a lot of runners have mental health issues.

And where do you think the stems from? There's the real from this episode. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think some of the mental health stuff comes from and what is it about running long distances that maybe plugs in really well to being able to assist potentially with mental health or to help kind of, I guess, bring some of that down a notch.

Yeah, it's an interesting topic to reflect on when we compare this addiction to that addiction. And running is a prominent treatment tool for addicts because it gives you this dopamine high or the endorphin rush, just like the substance that you're trying to wean off. And so there's not a lot of sympathy or empathy for runners who are addicted

and they're gonna come crying with their tail between their legs to get therapy. I'm addicted to running. I'm really fast and I have a six pack and I have a bunch of finisher medals. They're not gonna feel, they're not gonna have the same place in society as someone who's struggling to try to get off alcohol and so forth.

And so it's kind of an underground, worst kept secret of the endurance community is that some of this stuff has gotten taken a little too far. And when I was a high level triathlete, I trained with some really serious people and a good number of them came from a really rough previous life where they were addicts to substances or stuff that was really, really destructive. And so now they're applying this out of control sort of mindset behavior pattern to something

that is by and large vastly higher up the chain of things that you can do that aren't perfect for your body. And so, you know, we kind of just accept it and go, that's okay, same with a CrossFitter who's going to class five days a week instead of two and a half to three, right? And you know, do two hard classes, do half of the class on Wednesday, and then walk a lot in the park on the other days

and you'll make the CrossFit games. If you go six or five days a week, you're just gonna get a shoulder surgery in four and a half years. We can admit that all around. And so why is this happening? One, I think there's no entry barrier here. So if you wanna be a CrossFitter

or you wanna be addicted to Jiu-Jitsu, you kind of have a few more hoops to jump over, but running, you can buy a new pair of shoes. You're supposed to buy a new pair of shoes every 250 miles or something. That's like running marketing lingo. Like the foam will compress and then you'll need another shoe. So you can put the shoes on and go and run away. And I mean this figuratively and literally, you're running away from the other problems in your life. And it's an effective distraction and coping mechanism in a manner of speaking.

But the whole reason for writing the book and like, you know, bearing our soul talking about this stuff is like, hey, there's a better way. And if you slow down and engage with nature and be good to your body, maybe that'll be an overall better personal growth experience than slamming all these mileage and writing it down dutifully in your notepad that you're running 50 miles a week and pushing and pushing until the body falls apart. Yeah, why are marathons 26.2 miles in the first place? Oh boy, oh boy, getting me revved up here. So this is, it's a fun little story that we tell in the book, but it also has tremendous meaning and significance behind it. And so the 26-mile marathon was what people think is what this great old-time Greek soldier named Phidippides ran from the city of Marathon to Athens, which is around 26 miles. And he announced victory in battle and then collapsed and died. That's how the legend goes. He said, Nike, Nike,

Nenekei, that means rejoice we conquer. And then he dropped dead after telling the leading Athenians that they won the big battle. The problem is that it never happened, but it's been immersed into running legend today. That the reason we run 26 miles is to honor the great Phidipides who announced victory in battle and changed the course of Western civilization. And so the story was made up in an 1879 poem by Robert Browning. He just made it up. He took his liberties with Greek history

because Phidipides was a real person and he was amazing messenger runner. And he just wrote this poem. And then 20 years later they had the first the reenactment of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 and they said hey let's do a marathon just like you know that Fadipides guy ran the marathon from marathon to Athens let's have that in the Olympics and so they added the marathon to the modern Olympic Games and that's how it became this

glorious ultimate running achievement but it's not based on reality. And in fact, Fidipides was, he was a hemorrhoid dromas it's called, it's a foot messenger in the army. So these guys were very, very important to the army to send messages because they were faster than horses especially over hills and stuff. And so they were a big part of the military strategy. And what he actually did was he ran 153 miles

from Athens to Sparta in 36 hours because he wanted to request the Spartans help in an important battle. He got to Sparta, he found out they were on vacation, they were on religious holiday. So he turned around, he took a quick break, had some more figs and turned around and ran 153 miles back to Athens to say,

hey, we can't go to battle yet because the Spartans are still on vacation and we have to wait. So he ran 306 miles in four days. So if we wanna have a marathon today to honor Phidippides, it should arguably be a 153 mile race, maybe a 306 mile race. And he was again, he was running because he was a soldier and it was a matter of life or death. So it wasn't like he was doing this whimsical, hey, let's run a marathon like Fadipities.

And the reason this story is significant is because now we have what marketing hype has driven us to consume as a, it's a fraudulent foundation for running 26 miles and having that accomplishment as something that's a great human achievement. And same with the Ironman in Hawaii. The Ironman in Hawaii was a bunch of drunk sailors sitting around an awards banquet and talking trash and saying, what's the toughest event in the Hawaiian islands? And they had just finished the Waikiki rough water swim, 2.4 mile swim was one of these big races.

And these guys were at the awards banquet and they were talking about, well, you know, there's that bike ride around Oahu, it's 112 miles. That's pretty tough. Oh, what about the Honolulu marathon? That's a tough race too. And someone said John Collins was the leader, the founder of the Ironman. He said, well, if someone could do all three in one day, he would be a real Ironman. And then the next year they had whatever 12 original people signed up and completed the

first Ironman. But it's putting three major events together into one. So should we really be doing this? Is it really healthy? It's absolutely not healthy. It's not correlated with health in any way. So it's an extreme fitness endeavor that maybe is only best attempted

by the guys and gals we watch in the Olympics who run the marathon and race the marathon. And it's incredible and they're incredible athletes. But I think if we called the marathon 13.1 miles tomorrow, we just changed it to 13.1, we'd all be better off. And it's still an extremely long ass way to run. And it's a tremendous accomplishment to run 13 miles

and 26 is getting to be ridiculous. Yeah, 26 miles is far. But 13 is, you have to train, you have to focus, you have to endure. It's a tremendous bucket list achievement if you wanna do it once a year or twice a year or once in a lifetime. But the 26 is just thrown out of nowhere

like spaghetti onto the wall. And now all the marketing hype is convincing people like, oh, you're a runner? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, what, you do a marathon? Well, no, I've done a 10K. Oh, okay. Well, you're just down here or not unless you've done a marathon? Well, no, I've done a 10K. Oh, okay. Well, you're just down here or not,

unless you've done a marathon. What's a world record half marathon anyway? Oh, they're now like 57 or something. I mean, the world record in the marathon is two hours flat. And these guys are there, there's something to behold. I don't know if you saw the Paris Olympics in the female marathon, Sifan Ahsan did one of the greatest. I mean, she is the most versatile runner of all time by far.

And what she did was so mind blowing. She got a bronze medal in the 5,000. She got a bronze medal in the 10,000 and the 10,000 was Friday night, or maybe it was the 5th. She got a bronze medal on Friday night, Sunday morning, she shows up to the marathon. She's running the marathon too. She gets to the finish with the world record holder, Acepho from Ethiopia, out sprints her for the gold.

Bronze in the five, bronze in the 10, and gold in the marathon in a single Olympics. Oh my gosh. And in previous world championships, she's been a finalist in the 800 meters and the 1500 meters, winning gold medals at world level competition. So her range extends from two laps to marathon.

That's crazy. This is never before anything, anyone close man or woman has never shown this range at world-class level. Wonder what her build looks like. 5'8", 108, like. 58, 108. 56, 108. And we have the listing of all the height and weight

of the great marathon legends of all times in the book because it's like making this argument that running is really for skinny, highly adapted freak athletes. Frank Shorter, who kicked off the running boom with that gold medal in 1972, 5'10", 134. For those of you listening and trying to get relevance out there, oh, the Atlanta Olympic Games, 1996,

Thugwani from South Africa, 5'2", 99 pounds. So these are the people were emulating and lining up on the same starting line as. I'm thinking of the correlation to like powerlifting, like, hey, let's go load up the bar after the podcast and I'll try to lift 500 pounds too. I would have like, be that guy on Saturday Night Live, remember when his arms came off.

It was like the steroid Olympics or something, Dana Carvey or somebody lifted and the blood spurted out. So it's like, we're literally lining up on the same starting line, which is kind of cool in a way, you know, but it's also kind of not cool because especially for like older athletes and the Ironman, I think half Ironman should be the race if you're over 45 or 50 years old.

They shouldn't let old people out there. And same with the marathon. That it should be 13.1 for anyone over 50. That's your race, you're done. Go home, dude. You're 57 years old. What are you doing? Let the young people do it.

Anyway, that's my rant about the standardized distances. What's up with this YouTuber, the speed guy who challenged Noah Lyles? Yeah, yeah, that was pretty cool. So Noah Lyles is the fastest man in the world. He won the gold in the hundred in Paris, and he's also the top 200 meter runner in the world. Is he the fastest though?

Well, he won by three one thousandths of a second. So he's hanging on by a thread to that fastest man. But he's interesting character because he's real, is a real showboat. And he dresses up and he does his fashion show and he does his entrance and he hogs the camera time and he talks a lot of, he talks a lot of smack but he backs it up.

He's the fastest man in the world. So now he's kind of branching out and really trying to build the sport. And they did this stunt with the well-known MrBeast. And then I guess this guy, I didn't hear of him before this, but this iShowSpeed guy has like 30 million YouTube followers and he streams his life or his gaming. And he challenged him to a race

and MrBeast put up a hundred grand. So you see Noah sitting on the box of cash after he wins the race. But what I was amazing was like, this dude, he's only 19 years old, Mr. Speed, he gave Noah a pretty good battle there, especially out of the blocks. I mean, that is impressive.

But the thing is too Noah slowed the fuck down towards the end. Like you saw he was like going like this as a joke. Oh yeah, yeah what I mean? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, now we're talking about Tyreek Hill of Miami Dolphins challenging Noah Lyles and saying, I can kick Noah Lyles ass

and it's all for fun and games and it's elevating the profile of track and field. So I think it's cool, but let's not be kidding ourselves that a track and field athlete who's the fastest man on the planet is no match. I mean, the NFL guy is no match for him. Although Tyreek Hill is a legit track and field athlete who's the fastest man on the planet is no match. I mean, the NFL guy is no match for him. Although Tyree Kill is a legit track and field athlete.

He ran 10 flat or 10 one in the hundred back in his day 10 years ago. But Noah Lyles ain't gonna be catching any passes over the middle either. So let's just kind of, I wanna celebrate, you know, all athletes instead of have these wars of like, you know, who's better is Econor McGregor against, who did he fight?

Oh yeah, Mayweather. Yeah, yeah, I mean, who cares? I'm glad those guys are, or Logan Paul against Mike Tyson. Jake Paul. Jake Paul, sorry, sorry guys. That's all good. 1988, Mike Tyson was the most savage athlete

and the most amazing performances I've seen in sports. And I wanna remember that. I don't remember some, even though I give him credit for getting back in the ring, it's like, these are stunts and I don't know, I'd rather see like guys in their prime and all that kind of thing. You're mentioning the range that that athlete had with-

Sifan Ahsan from the Netherlands. Yeah, all the different forms of distance running. And then you mentioned to me the complexity of like a 400 meter. Can you explain some of that? Cause I think that's really interesting. Crazy. Maybe you can explain a little difference

between like the hundred meter, the mile and like the 400. Yeah, so we're talking about like the energy systems that the body uses for all out maximum performance. And the ATP creatine phosphate system is the pure energy that exists in the cell already. And so it can be used for immediate maximum energy output for a very short duration, it's zero to seven seconds. So when you're doing single rep power lift,

single rep max, you're using ATP creatine phosphate, you're not burning fat when you're doing single rep power lift, single rep max, you're using ATP creatine phosphate. You're not burning fat when you're lifting that bar and you're not even burning glucose. You're just burning the creatine phosphate. And then if you try to go all out for longer than seven seconds, you actually can't literally. So in the hundred meters,

they're decelerating for the final few seconds of that race because they've generated all their maximum energy from the blocks to around seven seconds. And you can't make ATP fast enough to literally generate maximum output, just like you can't do anything longer than seven seconds arm wrestle or whatever at full full outputs. Then you transition over to it's called the lactate pathway, right? So lactate is a fuel source for maximum energy output, but we always talk about lactic acid and we think lactate is a poison, but lactate is the fuel source, but it generates a byproduct of hydrogen ions

and they go in the bloodstream and they burn and they cause the lactic acid burn, which is somewhat of a misnomer, but it makes sense. It's the byproduct of producing lactate. So that'll get you from like seven to 30 seconds of full maximum effort. Then when you go past 30 seconds up to two minutes, you have to burn glucose through anaerobic glucose pathway.

So it's anaerobic, but you're burning sugar, glycolytic workout, whatever. And then as you go from two minutes, longer and longer, we're talking about all out for the concept here. So it goes as fast as you can for four minutes, like the VO2 max workout or whatever. Now you're burning a greater and greater percentage of fatty acids in an aerobic manner, the longer you go.

And the exercise physiology textbooks are mind blowing when you think about these insights. Like, you know, when you think of an anaerobic sport and then an endurance sport, and you think like, well, you know, what's the ratio? A minute 15 all out is 50-50 aerobic to anaerobic. I was shocked to learn that. I would have guessed, you know,

way, way longer is mostly anaerobic. A six minute all out effort is 79% aerobic. So you see the greatest milers in the world, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, we talked about him last time a lot, where he's running, you know, three minutes and 43 seconds for a mile. That is a highly aerobic activity. So these milers are running a hundred miles a week to prepare for an event that takes three and a half minutes

because there's so much aerobic system contribution. So a truly powerful anaerobic athlete, like a high jumper jumping for four seconds or a power lifter doing one thing, these are very short duration and anything that's even a bit longer. Just like you talked about, what's it called?

Hydrox, was it? Oh yeah, hyrox. Hyrox. Andrew said the endurance guys are kicking ass because they're going for a long enough time where it's mostly endurance, it's mostly aerobic, and it's not that much anaerobic. So the 400 meters is a special event

because you're sequentially exhausting these energy systems because you're kind of trying to go all out for Quincy Hall one in 43 seconds. So he's blasting that ATP creatine phosphate. He's blasting through the lactate pathways. Then he's coming around the turn. He's still got 10 more seconds. So his body's consumed with lactic acid because he's exhausted that pathway and now he has to kick into anaerobic glycolysis pathway.

And so when you finish and cross the line, particularly in that event, you are just worked like, I mean, it's the race of truth for, in my opinion, so beautiful, it's one lap around a track, it's pretty simple. But anything past 400 meters is a highly aerobic athlete. And we don't really realize that Marco Arup, the gold medal in the Olympics in the 800 meters,

141 from Canada, he just ran a half marathon in like 107 or some unbelievable time. So the 800 meter guy who's running two laps in insanely fast time, it's like 50 point something, 50 point something. So this is like a top high school athlete It's like 50 point something, 50 point something. So this is like a top high school athlete that can go 50 point something in 400. You don't want any part of that

even for run straight away. He's running 800 meters, winning the gold and he shows his range going all the way up to 13 miles. Now the average person who's out there jogging and putting in these miles and is maybe even the gym goer who's spending 45 minutes on the StairMaster. They're dispensing almost all of their exercise energy to extreme endurance pursuits

and completely neglecting the high-end explosive power, which is the most important for longevity and for fat reduction and all these things. That's why, I mean, you see all the females on social media saying, you know, look at my body. I got this being sculpted in the gym. I don't jog at all. Tara Garrison, my friend who's Inside Out Health podcast,

she is rip city, but she used to be a softy marathon runner. And she has her physique showing pictures of when she was a marathoner running massive miles. And now she's in the gym and does zero running. And it's a complete transformation because now you're finally starting to work these anaerobic pathways. And those are the things that you lose with aging

where you kind of maintain endurance and aerobic conditioning pretty well. Even as you hit 40, 50, 60, there's people that can still do it. They can still hike up the mountain for six hours, but can they come near their body weight, deadlifting or squatting or any of those checkpoints. Most people are discounting that

when that would be the best payoff. I'm talking to my mom, she walks a couple of miles every morning. She's 87, fantastic health and fitness. I'm like, you gotta get in there and push that leg press, mom. That's a very, very important thing. Well, I walk in the park every day.

I go, that's outstanding. And you have an A plus. Many people have an A plus in cardio. And then what do they have in strength or mobility or flexibility? C minus and failing grade. Come on, let's bring it up. But if you're putting too much energy out,

you probably experienced this. When you were preparing for that Boston marathon, I don't wanna see you in there powerlifting, dude. You gotta run 26 fricking miles. I don't want you touching a weight, ideally, because it's gonna compromise the energy you have to put in those 20 milers. And so if you're putting all your energy out to endurance

and sacrificing that and discounting that, that's gonna lead to suboptimal body composition, longevity, fitness, general health, everything. Yeah, I was able to lift a little bit during that time, but what I did is I just reduced the reps. I thought sets and reps and hypertrophy, signaling just takes too long and requires too much and it's gonna burn up too much energy.

So I actually did more like med balls, a little bit of sled dragging. And just, if I do something, I would do something kind of heavy-ish for a set or two of like five to six reps. That felt pretty good. That's kind of interesting. Yeah, I mean, we were talking before we recorded

about hybrid athletes and how amazing it is to have these broad-based fitness capabilities, like turning on and Seamus Instagram, like, what are you doing today, man? How can you do all these things? But it's like, it's a lot to juggle, it seems like, to be able to maintain- He's been working on that too.

Juggling. Juggling, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, hand-eye coordination. Other race drivers are big on that stuff, right? Yeah, it makes a big difference. Being able to, especially like being able to do that while keeping calm, not like not letting yourself

hold your breath while you're doing it. I think that's when it really starts to help with other stuff. So. It's sort of like an analogy to juggling all the stuff in your busy life, huh? You're able to juggle it, stay calm. Yeah.

I sent you this clip, I think maybe yesterday or this morning, you should check it out. Do you need audio? Sure. Yeah, add it in there. Yeah. These triathletes, man, I mean, I was a long time ago and now like the level of performance

in that sport is so stunning. They are so fast and I guess so well-trained because we thought we were training as hard as we could and spending all day out there training. And now these guys are blowing doors on the great legends of all time, like Mark Allen who came in here. I mean, he was unbeatable.

He trained very, very hard and was very super ass talented of a human, but the Ironman times are getting shattered now. Some of it's technology and stuff, but I also think, and this goes across all sports, that the training is so much better in the knowledge transfer, thanks to the stuff that you guys are doing here

and bringing these people in. So if you wanna be a hybrid athlete, you watch the show with Ferguson, what he's doing and learn and figure it out. Whereas before I think everything was so primitive and rudimentary and like in triathlon, it was really about volume and how much work can you absorb without falling apart. Now I think it's a little more specialized and precise

and the anaerobic threshold workouts that the elite runners do where they're just tipping up to that point where they would burn, but they're not going into burn a lot and therefore it's easier to recover from, but they're bumping up that threshold sequentially over time to where they can go and race. And like Ingebrigtsen was saying that he never exceeds 87% in training and workouts, which is really something for all of us to embrace and realize, like you don't need to blow it out. Like you said earlier, you just kind of work on that, work on that capacity, work under the radar

where you're not shattered after a workout, but that's still deeply immersed in the culture, in the gym culture and in the endurance culture that we wanna slam ourselves. Going back to the chapter about the obligate runner, what for, what are you doing? Why are you torturing yourself so bad when you really know deep down

that it's not even gonna make you better? Mark Allen, I think he has some multiple personalities. I don't know if you ended up hearing the podcast when he was on there, but he would talk about certain things. When he would talk about a race, he would like use a different voice. Eddie Murphy. Oh yeah. He'd make a different face.

And we were all kind of terrified of that. Oh yeah. The grip. The grip was an intimidating figure. Yeah, and at rest, the grip was okay. He was a normal guy, but you know what that nickname came from or emanated from?

Yeah, you mentioned it. The grip of death. And so when you trained with him on the bicycle, he would ride so fast that you held your handlebars and you were holding on for dear life. Yeah, yeah. And you talk about that mentality and that willingness to suffer.

And this guy, I mean, it's like bringing me to tears almost thinking about he wanted to win that Ironman so bad. And in 1987, he got a new sponsor, the cereal company, put him on the cereal box as the Ironman and he hadn't won yet. Dave Scott of Davis, California, where we stand right now on hallowed ground, he had won six times in a row,

but Mark was beating up on everybody. And so he was like, he's gonna break through and beat Dave Scott someday, but he'd never done it before. And now he's got all this pressure on the cereal box. He had a 10 minute lead at mile 20, if I'm not mistaken at the Ironman, after had a 10 minute lead at mile 20, if I'm not mistaken, at the Ironman after a beautiful day of blowing everybody away on the swim and the bike and the run.

And then he had to walk, Dave Scott caught him and won again. That was Dave Scott's sixth win. And he went right into the hospital with internal bleeding and lifeening condition from pushing his body that far in the hot lava fields of Kona. And he had all this misfortune like that before he broke through in one he probably talked about. But the human that can push your body so far that you're going from the finish line right to the hospital,

I don't want any part of that guy in a race. I wanna kind of have that little bit of a background thinking like, do I really need to do this to my body? But if you wanna win, that's what you gotta do sometimes. I think he was doing like six minute mile paces or something wild like that. Maybe it was even faster.

Those guys ran. And it was like with a heart rate of like 140, oh, it was a 12 minute run that you met. Yeah, the fat max test or the maximum aerobic function test. I believe he did a 528 pace per mile for- Yeah, something disgusting. Like five miles. So he's talking casually as if you and I

were doing a brisk walk. I don't get it. And he's running five something mile. And Kipchoge, his fat max heart rate pace is probably around five minutes per mile because he runs a marathon at 434 pace per mile. So you think about someone, if you saw someone running down the street

at five minute pace per mile, you'd think they stole something. You'd be like, what's that guy sprinting from? That's his casual talking pace. What do you think he can run 100 in? Interesting. I mean, these guys now, when it comes down to the final lap of 10,000 meters, which is extreme,

it's the second longest race in the Olympics, or Stéphane Assane coming around the final corner of the marathon, the girls bumped. You gotta pull up marathon finish Paris. So they came around and they had all these barricades because it was theatrical finish and the Champs-Elysées are somewhere. And they actually had some body contact.

After running 26 miles and they're sprinting full board to the finish. Yeah, so they're fast. I mean, Grant Fisher, he got two bronze medals for USA in the 5,000 and 10,000. Greatest distance achievement, probably in our lifetime by an American since going back to the seventies when we'd win stuff. But now the Africans have dominated

for the last several decades, but this guy snuck in and got two bronzes. And he worked on that finishing sprint. I talked to his coach on my podcast and how they'd prepare for that. Like they do a really hard workout, get his ass really tired and then go, okay, now we're gonna do some sprints

because that's what you're gonna do in the Olympics. So it's no joke. I mean, this is not like, you know, Rocky Balboa, you know, struggling and getting to the finish line. They're pouncing and going down that last straightaway. Is this the one? Yeah, just get a little further up.

And if you're watching our video, you'll see it packed. It's so bouncy even late in the competition, it's amazing. Yeah, and the speed they're running. I mean, this was actually a warm day and it was like the hilliest Olympic marathon course that they've ever had. They took them way up a hill and now we coming around.

So Asefa from Ethiopia is in the green and Sifan Hassan from the Netherlands in the orange. She's already got two bronze medals, including Friday night. And there she goes trying to sneak in, body check, body check. Oh, shit. But look at that speed.

That was. End of a marathon. Yeah. That was close to wiping out. Imagine look at that speed. That was a marathon. That was close to wiping out. Imagine how bad that would hurt. That would have been terrible. I thought she kind of stays right in front of her. Oh, these are girls broke. These are girls broken. Shit.

You gotta be an announcer for this, Brad. So Husson is now coming in the final stretch in Paris in front of the cheering crowd and Tigist Aceffa in a nice second place silver medal. She broke the world record the year before in two hours 11, which was a shocking lowering of the female world record. By comparison, this is slower because it was hot day and a hilly course, but they can now run.

The world record was broken in Chicago this year by another African, Chep Nowitch, and she ran 209. And if you go back in the annals, like the Olympic record for men was 209 until recently. So the women are lowering the standards so quickly and the men are now at two hours. So yeah. But again, it's like aspiring to be a 1,000 pound

power lifter, don't even think about that. Go and do some safe exercising in the gym and get yourself in shape. But we're obsessing about these athletes and now I wanna go and break four hours and push myself way harder than they push themselves in training. That's the real problem with the running boom in essence,

is it's not about struggling and suffering. I thought this clip was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, the triathlon finish. Oh, it's just music, so you can shut it down. I thought it was audio to it. What's funny is like, unlike other sports, we have pedaled our bicycle at full speed on a time trial for at least an hour in the case of Olympic distance race.

And so when you get off the bike and start running, there's no feeling like it in sports when those quads feel so rubbery from racing a bicycle for an hour as fast as you can. And then you got to go run six miles. And people would ask like at training seminars, you'd get a question from the crowd. So, Brad, how do I get used to the,

they call it the transition from bike to run, how do I get used to get my quads better for the transition? And the answer is you don't, it's never gonna go away. It's just part of the sport to like, and your arms are pretty tired because you've also done a swim race where you're going as fast as you can out there in the lake or the ocean

and bringing it home. It's crazy how many guys, that guy ended up passing up and then I think he ended up getting passed up. But to try to figure out when to turn it on has got to be difficult. And then you're probably just already just, you probably don't feel like you have anything left.

Oh yeah. Simon Whitfield, when he won the gold in 2000, it was actually the first gold ever given in triathlon because it became an Olympic sport in 2000 after I retired in 95, so I never did the Olympics. But the guy who was leading from Germany, he was celebrating his ass off when he got onto that blue carpet and he was so happy

because he was assured of a medal. There wasn't that many people behind. And then the camera cuts to Simon in full sprint and he's a great runner. And he's just zoning in on this guy. And he's like, you're gonna chase him down. It looks impossible. Like there's not that much time left.

And he just closes this gap and blows by him right before the finish. Wow. And the guy was still, it was interesting. Like it was still after they interviewed the guys after and the guy said, I was so happy to get a medal in the Olympics. That was my goal.

I wanted to get a medal and he got a medal. All right. It wasn't gold. And then you talked to Simon and he thought, he said, I never gave up. I believed I could do it. He fell during the bike. He got back up on his bike and kept going.

And he goes, I just was thinking gold, gold, gold. That's all I could think about for that final mile. And so, you know, sometimes you manifest that, especially in competition, when it gets really tough and you think you're all those sayings, like, you know, you think you're giving it your all, but you have a little bit of a boost when some idiot comes and passes you,

unless you're Brad Kearns in his final race, when some idiot comes and passes you and I say, good on you, mate. I'm done with this crap. So you and Mark Sisson have a long track record of making some amazing books. Why should people add this one to the library? Oh my gosh.

Well, Born to Walk is gonna be a really fun read because it is going to get us to rethink some of these flawed notions where we appreciate endurance running as something that's health promoting and helping you lose body fat and a reasonable goal as running a marathon. And we wanna kind of break through that hype

and that misinformation and actually convey how fun and sensible it is to build your aerobic conditioning through walking. And we talked about the pace and how you need to slow down, but the human is also obligated to walk and be in movement throughout the day. And this is going back to evolutionary anthropology and how we evolve.

We evolved in near constant movement throughout the day. We know this from researching the Hadza today, right? They just move around, the men walk nine miles a day and the women walk three to five and they're busy gathering and doing all this stuff. And so our genes expect us to be in movement. And if we're not in regular movement throughout the day, we experience it's systemic inflammation from sitting. It's really, really unhealthy.

Even sitting or being still for as little as 20 minutes has a noticeable decrease in glucose tolerance and an increase in insulin resistance and a decline in cognitive function from 20 minutes of stillness. That means that throughout the day, we need to pop up and move around and regenerate our fat burning and our blood flow and our oxygen so that our brain can work well. And that's a species appropriate life. There's a contrast in the book, which is cute. The pantera leo is the African lion. The African lion's genes require it to be asleep

for around 20 hours a day. And then at sunset, it's too hot. It doesn't dissipate heat well, so it has to sleep all day because it can't dissipate heat. And then around sunset, it will launch a 30 second all out attack. That's all it has is 30 seconds because it's such a fast-twitch animal and it either eats and feasts and celebrates or they're going to try again the next day. But when it catches something and has a feast, it's been known to sleep for 24 hours straight. So that's like the lion living its best life is sleeping, attacking for 30 seconds, sleeping the day away. The human is kind of the opposite. We are built to move around

and walking would be the centerpiece of that. But of course that can count as anything. It can count as Katie Bowman's wall angels. When you get up and redo your back after hunched over at a typewriter, but we need to be in movement throughout the day. And so walking is a way that short walks, long walks, whatever it is, it makes you a better, healthier human

on top of all the discussion that we had about aerobic conditioning. Thanks again for being on the show. BornToWalkBook.com is the website, go find it. Yeah. Strength is never a weak, this week is never strength. Catch you guys later, bye.