The Liz Moody Podcast - Ranking Fitness Advice From Social Media (with Harley Pasternak)

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

With all the contradictory advice online, establishing the optimal workout routine can be SO confusing. So today, I’m joined by expert Harley Pasternak to rank fitness advice from social media to clear things up.  Harley has a masters in exercise physiology and nutritional sciences, he worked as an exercise and nutrition scientist for Canada's Department of National Defense, he's a five-time bestselling author, and he has the biggest celebrity client roster in the fitness industry—Halle Berry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Ariana Grande to name a few. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • How to structure a week of workouts with minimum time, maximum results • Walking vs. running: which one is better • When to lift heavy weights vs. light weights • How important VO2 max is • Why your body stops responding to exercise + the simple fix • Where the 10,000 steps goal came from and if it’s legit • If there’s a connection between cortisol and belly fat • The difference between local fatigue and general fatigue and when to use them • The single best thing Harley says you can do for your health  Check out the previous ranking episodes of The Liz Moody Podcast: • Ranking Gut Health Advice From Social Media (with Dr. Karan Rajan) • Healthy Eating Advice: Ranking Best & Worst From Social Media (with Nutrition By Kylie) • Therapy Advice: Ranking Best & Worst From Social Media (with Lori Gottlieb) • Money Advice: Ranking Best & Worst From Social Media (with HerFirst100K) For more from Harley Pasternak: • His Book, The Carb Reset: https://www.harleypasternak.com/books  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harleypasternak  • Website: https://www.harleypasternak.com/  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Puori: visit Puori.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY at checkout for a discount and special offer. • LMNT: head to DrinkLMNT.com/Liz to get a FREE 8-count sample pack with any order. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 421. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It took me into my late 30s to establish a regular workout routine, and a lot of that was because I found it so confusing. Was I supposed to do Pilates for a long-leam body or is Pilates way less effective than strength training? Our hit workouts, the secret to weight loss, or do they spike our cortisol and make it impossible to lose weight? On the Liz Moody podcast, we are always looking for the real science that can actually change our lives. So today, we are ranking fitness advice from social media. The top ranking is S-tier. That is superior advice, the best of the best, and then it goes in order, A, B, C, D, E, all the way down to F-tier, advice that you should definitely leave far behind. Today, I am joined by Harley Pasternak, who, okay, I need to give you guys his

credentials because they are wild. He has a master's in exercise physiology and nutritional sciences. He worked as an exercise and nutrition scientist for Canada's Department of National Defense. He a five-time New York Times bestselling author and he has the biggest celebrity client roster in the fitness industry. We're talking like Hallie Berry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, the list goes on. His newest book is called The Carb Reset. It's basically a myth buster for a lot of the BS nutrition stuff you see online. So it's very up the alley of exactly what we're doing here today. This is part of a new series where we have already ranked therapy advice from the internet with Lori Gottlieb. We have ranked nutrition advice. We've ranked money advice with my friend Tori from her first 100K. So scroll back

in the podcast so you do not miss any of those. And then let me know in the comments what topic you would like to see us rank next. Anybody you would like to see us rank something with or if you disagree with any of the rankings that Harley and I get into today. Okay, Harley, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to get your takes on all of this stuff. I just feel like you've accumulated so much expertise over the years. I feel like you're going to have some very strong opinions. I have very strong opinions. Okay, so let's start off. This is lazy. Wrong. Sorry. This is lazy millionaire on Instagram. She thinks that we should be walking versus running because running makes you hungry and it spikes your cortisol. So I'm going to play the video.

Everything that I did to take my physique from this to this. Number one, I started working out less. In the first photo, I was running about five miles every single day. I no longer do that. I still walk, however, about five miles every single day. But it's a difference between walking and running. I think it has something to do with like the spiking of the cortisol, the running. And also the running made me extremely, extremely hungry. It made my cravings all over the place. And as a result, I would oftentimes eat a lot more,

even though I wasn't tracking calories or anything like that. Yeah, she makes a point, actually. I'm a huge advocate of doing forms of physical activity that you don't need to mentally get psyched up to do. No one needs to mentally prepare them. to go for a walk in the same way you do to run. Walking removes any need for special equipment or running outfits, certain running shoes. You can walk in almost any footwear, especially as a guy, but women can wear more comfortable footwear and walk. I think there's definitely on higher incidence of injury with people that run versus walking. I think a lot of people with

pre-existing injuries can actually have no problem walking versus run. I know I can't at this stage run. I was a hockey player hurt my back, so I really can't run anymore. I think there is a relationship between the intensity of exercise and appetite. You've heard the term working up an appetite. If you go walk a mile and come back or two miles, you're probably not going to come back from a walk. Just like, I'm ravenous. I just walk two miles.

Versus if you do wind sprints for two miles worth, you're definitely getting a different experience in your metabolism and it could have repercussions in your appetite. So she does make a point. It's not to say that people should not run and you're making a mistake by running, it's just that you don't need to run. And I think approaching things with a voice of moderation,

sensibility, logic, and accessibility is just something that I agree with a lot more than what's the most you can do as opposed to what's the least you need to do to get basically the same results? I've been on a running journey for the first time in my life lately. I started it for my anxiety because I asked my husband and my sister, what were my blind spots when it came to my anxiety, and they both said my breathing.

said I might want to work on like my cardiovascular health if I wanted to help my anxiety. And I looked up some research around that and there seemed to be some correlations there. I feel a significant difference, obviously, in the way my heart is pumping, the way my breath is going when I'm running versus walking. Is that difference that I'm feeling beneficial? There are benefits of running. There are lots of health benefits associated with running, jogging, wind sprints, and walking. And if you really enjoy it and it brings you joy and it's something you look forward to doing and it's not hurting you or harming you and you don't feel any certain pressures to have to run, then by all means run. I will say that with running, it's not if you're going to get injured. It's just when you're going

to get injured. The pounding on your joints, the up and down, it often does lead to an injury at some point unless you're really limiting your mileage. You're really working on recovery. you're including strength training to train those muscles that are not getting worked so that you can help reduce your chance of any mobility issues and injury. So yes, there are lots of benefits for what you're doing. All I would say to most people is you don't have to do that to get great results. Do you have to do something, though, that gets your heart rate up in some way at some point during your week? Yes and no. I think there's been too much emphasis placed on this zone one, zone two, zone three. I'm an exercise physiologist. I spent a decade in school. I'm still a professor at the

university. We don't talk in terms of this zone one zone zone two. There was one podcaster. I won't say his name. He's a nice person. I think he's having a tough time right now. He popularizes zone one, zone two, zone three thing. He's actually not trained in the field of exercise physiology. He's not trained at all in the area. But it was cool for the podcast. And so people use those measures. Training is all about specificity. If you want to get good at running, you have to run. If you want a good good at activities that require a high heart rate, you need to train with a high heart rate. Do you need to train with a high heart rate to live a long time? No, definitively not. If you go to any of the pockets with people who live the longest in the world, people in Japan, Singapore,

South Korea, China, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, Greece, Italy, France, all these countries. These are not people that are doing wind sprints and that are pushing themselves to get super high heart rates to live a long time. They're people who are really approaching things with balance and they're approaching things with moderation in everything they do. So you do not need to do that to live longer. But if you enjoy it and it brings you joy, by all means, do it. Okay. I have so many questions about that. But I do want to get a ranking for this first. So walking versus running, running makes you hungry and spikes your cortisol. That specific advice. Would you give it S to your absolute best, F tier, absolute worse, or somewhere in the

middle? I'd give it a B. Okay. She's right to some extent. But it doesn't mean you should not. run. It just means you don't have to run. Something I struggle with is I work out for my mental health. That is like my number one driver. I feel mentally better if I have sort of burnt off my energy. Like I've worn myself out a little bit. But then I will scroll on TikTok and people are like, oh, you're raising your cortisol by burning off your energy. It's making you puffy. It's making me bloated. It's making me have belly fat. So when I'm doing these workouts, I want to get lean, tone, thin and the cortisol is the thing preventing me. And I would say 99.9 times out of 100, that's not their problem.

That's not why they have belly fat. And that's not why they have puffiness. And that's not why they have all of these other things. Well, why do they hardly? There's hundreds of reasons. Number one, if they have belly fat because they're eating more calories than they burn. That's why they have belly fat. Okay.

They're eating more. If you have excess fat anywhere in your body, you're eating more calories than you're burning. So you don't buy into the concept of like cortisol belly? No. This is not a thing. And if they're puffy, if they feel like, they're not getting lean in tone despite lifting weights, despite kind of doing all the hell.

So if they're puffy, it's either result of excess body fat or excess water retention. If it's excess body fat, it's because they're consuming more calories than they're burning. If it's water retention, it can be a byproduct of a high sodium diet. It could be a byproduct of a hormone cycle, where you're at in your hormone cycle. It could be a byproduct of fighting infection. We have a cold. We're puffy. It could be a byproduct of overtraining.

That's something that often happens. When we over-train, we could be retaining water in our body. We could be a chronic inflammation from tearing muscle tissue and not giving it a chance to heal. So I think there's so many reasons this cortisol word have to put it to rest and leave that up to the physiologists or your physicians to worry about excess cortisol levels. And tiny question, and then we'll move on to the next thing. You said we could like cut down our rest time between sets. I always get so bored and Len on like scrolled on social media by rest time between sets. When I train clients, we do two different forms of actor rest.

The most common thing is I'll take two exercises and I'll go back to back. So let's say we're training hamstrings and triceps. I'll do, let's say, a set of ham crows and straight into a set of triceps and back to hampscrolls and back to triceps. And then a set of abs. And then hamstrings, triceps, hamstrings, triceps. So you're never resting as a, like in general. But while one muscle is going, the other one is resting. So the muscles themselves are resting.

We call that local rest, not general rest. And is there benefits for that beyond being less bored between sets and getting more efficient? I think it's more efficient. I can get my clients in and out in 30 minutes. Okay. If you're spending two hours in the gym, what are you doing? If you're spending an hour in the gym and you're working out more than two days a week, you're doing it wrong.

You're definitely doing it wrong. Now, if I'm training someone for strength and powerlifting, we have massive rests between, sets and we're doing one exercise. To be like a bodybuilder type of thing? I would say more about strength. Okay. You can sculpt a body by supersetting and going back and forth between exercises and not necessarily generally resting, just locally resting.

But if I'm training someone for powerlifting or weightlifting and they're working on a one repetition max or a certain performance thing, I want them to totally rest between sets so they have time to re-synthesize the energy in that muscle we're about to train again. Their neurological system has a second to rest. We don't over-stimulate their neurological system. Their cardiovascular system has a second to rest, so they're not huffing and puffing. There's two forms of fatigue. There's general fatigue and there's local fatigue.

If you're exercising and you get tired and you can't continue, you're lightheaded, you're winded, you're not, whatever it may be like, I'm exhausted. you're tired. We call that general fatigue. If you're doing a bicep curl and the bicep gets tired and you stop, you can't do any more with the bicep, but you're fine. If you switched body parts, you could keep going, that's local fatigue. And so those are the two differences we take into account when I'm training someone. And if you're training and you get general fatigue, is that a sign of something like you're training wrong? If you're not trying to bodybuild, you're just trying to do your normal workouts? General fatigue is not something I want to include in my workouts with my clients at all,

unless I'm training them for stamina for something. So I just trained a client who just did a movie in London and every scene of the movie, they're running through London. Someone's got kidnapped and they're trying to save them. So for them, I'm trying to work on building up their general endurance because they have to deliver lines and be physically active eight, ten hours a day over a period of four months on set. I'm working on their cardiovascular conditioning

and I'm strength training them in a way to reduce their chance of getting injured along that way. Okay. So that's how I would train them differently. Someone else I'm training to be a superhero. It's all about making them look like an athlete. And for them, we're sculpting, toning, and tightening. I'm focusing on local fatigue.

I'm going to tire out your hamstrings. Then I'm going to tire out your triceps. Then I'm going to tire your shoulders. But you're not leaving my gym like, oh, I'm dead. I don't want to do that. So for most people who aren't going to be running through London, filming 100 takes, we don't ever really want to feel general fatigue? I don't think you need to.

Okay. If it brings you joy and fulfillment and a quality of life, by all means, it's something that we don't need to. There's this real American thing. I think it's a human nature thing, but really America's all about the extremes of everything. It's like if you're going to work, work as much as you can. If you're going to have money, have as much money as possible. I think this idea of what's the least I need to do to get the most results? For me, that's important.

For me, my approach to exercise, to nutrition, kind of to life is what's the least? least I need to do to get the most results, as opposed to what's the most I can do to get results. Did you know that more than two-thirds of protein powders tested have lead levels above California's Prop 65 safety limits? And in some cases, they have more than 10 times over. And a broader study found that nearly half of top-selling U.S. protein powders exceeded those safety limits with more than 20% clocking in at twice the allowed levels. This is so important because protein is something that a lot of us consume every single day, trying to be healthier, and then we're consuming something that's actually making us less healthy. A huge wellness tenant that I talk about is pay

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I've been drinking Element every single day for literally years. I usually use one packet a day, but I break it up and I kind of spike my water throughout the day. So it makes my water taste amazing and it helps me stay consistently hydrated, which for me means more energy, fewer headaches and way clearer thinking. That's like probably the biggest difference I notice is my brain just works so much better. Research actually shows that you hydrate better when you sip throughout the day instead of chugging all at once. An element makes that so much easier because plain water is honestly so much. boring and I just will not drink enough of it otherwise. I even use a glass straw because

research also shows that you will drink more water if you drink it through a straw. Right now, I'm obsessed with the lemonade salt flavor. It's my favorite hands down. Zach and I fight over who gets the last packets that we have left. Although I also love watermelon, but like lemonade oh, it's so good. I also love muddling a few raspberries in a glass and then I'll add the lemonade element and then I'll sip it all afternoon or I'll use it as like a fun little moktail. Element is a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix with no fillers, no dodgy ingredients, and it delivers a powerful dose of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to support real hydration. Electrolite imbalance can cause headaches, fatigue, cramps, and brain fog, things that so many of us deal with daily. You can get a free eight-count sample pack with any order at drinkelement.com slash Liz.

It is totally risk-free. If you do not love it, they offer no questions-ask refunds. You truly have nothing to lose. drink l mn t.com slash liz. So we're going to dive into some of the heart health stuff a little bit deeper. This is from Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She says that the Norwegian 4x is one of the best ways to improve VO2 max, and that VO2 max is incredibly important for longevity.

So here is that clip. There's the Norwegian 4x. This is one of the best ways to improve your V02 max, and that is where you go four minutes at an intensity that's pretty high that you can maintain and sustain for that entire four minutes. Usually it's about 85% max heart rate. So you're going pretty hard for the entire four minutes, as hard as you can maintain for the entire four minutes.

And then you rest for three minutes. Rest as in low intensity, very low. You want your heart rate to come down. And then you do it repeat. So you do it four times. So this is called speed play training. It's a Swedish word that's fartlek. Fartlek means speed play or interval training.

And so Swedish athletes have been using this technique for many years, the idea that you do something intense, and then you do something low intensity, high intensity, low intensity. And during that low intensity period, you're recovering from the high intensity period. Rather than running at three miles an hour for half an hour, you run for six miles an hour and then walk for a mile an hour. And then six miles an hour and walk a mile an hour.

And you do this interval. And the idea that it helps with recovery, you're taking your body to an extreme, but then you're bringing it back down to a couple. period, that's great. You can do that. It's right, but it's not necessarily applicable to you or necessary for you. And if someone, you know, if I pull a 110 year old out of Okinawa, Japan and say, have you been doing the four-by-four Swedish technique to stay this, you know, live this on, they're like, no, I just live up the hill. And every day I walk up to my hill to get my groceries

and walk back down and I've been doing it since I'm a little girl. And that's what I do. And you're like, good. It's about chronic movement in a safe way over a period of a lifetime. I feel like there's an immense amount of research at this point that connects high VO2 max with longevity. And this is supposed to be one of the best ways to improve our VO2 max. So what do you make of that whole? So when you read something that something is correlated to something, right? It doesn't mean it's causational. Right.

People with high VO2 maxes are correlated to people who live longer. If you have a high VO2 max, what else are you doing? If you're training with intensity over a chronic period of time in your life, you're more health conscious. It means you probably have less disease to start off. It means you're probably sleeping better. It means you're probably eating better. No one's going to live a shorter life because they're not doing four-by-fours and speed planing and super intensity exercise and training in Zone 3 and all of that stuff.

It really does come back to chronic submaximal movement, walking, dancing, moving, weight-bearing. I think it's really important when we think about things. we think about things with logic, moderation, balance, sustainability. It's less about extremes. Where would you rank the idea of doing something like a Norwegian 4x4-by-4 to improve our VOT2 max? Maybe a C or D? Okay. The average person is not doing wind sprints anyways and can't.

And we'll probably get hurt or tear a hamstring training that intensely. I would say that message is probably for 5% of the population at most. Where would you rank the idea of paying attention to VO2 max as a health indicator? F. And tell me why. I focus more on inputs. Focus on inputs. Ask yourself, what are the habits that I give messages to everyone. I try and tell people to strength train at least 90 minutes a week. Move at least 90 minutes a day. Walk at least 90 minutes a day. If you want to run, jog, dance, skip, elliptical, stair climb, great. But slowly, over 90 minutes a day, just in general. And that includes walking to the bathroom. That includes walking to your car, just in general. I tell people to get ideally at least 90 minutes of

deep sleep and 90 minutes of rapid eye movement a night. And so what are the habits around that? What time you go to bed, not having alcohol at night, putting a cold room when you fall asleep in. Little things like this. Your input of eating, make sure you're eating this and you're eating that and not eating that, the things you can control.

Most people don't have access to VO2 max testing. With the mask? Yes. I've done it. So what percentage of the American population knows their VO2 max? I'm sure if we were to ask one of the online GPTs or whatever they are and what average American, how many knows what their VOTMACs, how many have access to VOTMAC.

So we're worrying about this like minutia that's so irrelevant to us on a day-to-day basis. I'm more interested in what's your resting heart rate? What's your sleeping heart rate? So for resting heart rate is lower, better? Absolutely. Lower is better. And more importantly, how quickly does your heart rate come back to its resting level after you exercise with intensive?

That I'm more interested in. V-O-2 max I can talk about forever. I taught exercise physiology at university. I can speak about it with the best of them. But I'm in the trenches and I'm telling you it's irrelevant. It's a distraction. So the things that are relevant, how can we get our resting heart rate down? How can we have our heart rate recover faster after we work out? Number one, chronic movement moving at least 90 minutes a day. So I tell people over 10,000 steps a day. Do certain things that make you huff and puff a little bit. That's the way I explain it. Like huff and puff and puff means you have trouble answering a question just for sure. short period of time. So I went to this place for dinner. You can do that a little bit, but you don't need to do that much. Okay. So that is where we are kind of pushing our heart a little bit. A little bit. So let's say if I have a flight of stairs, I might go to my kids school to pick them up. The kids are on the third floor. I'll go really quickly up to that third floor. That's my thing for the day. Okay. Of my intensity. Okay. And these are going to lower your resting heart rate.

That's going to make me better at returning back to my resting heart rate after I do something intense. The more you do it. Okay. Training is about specificity. You get better at the things that you practice doing. The second thing would be putting on muscle mass. Putting on muscle mass is just massive for everything, for heart health, for reducing your chance of diabetes, A1C, mental health. Everything gets better when you're strength training on a regular basis. Those two are profoundly important. Sleep is really important. If you're not sleeping well enough, your heart rate's going to be higher throughout the day. So I think those are the three things to really focus on. Focus on your inputs. And let's not worry about so much of these tests that are not widely.

available for everyone, the average person doesn't know about. We want people to live longer. What's the number one cause of death that we can control in the Western world? Number one is obesity. I thought it was cardiovascular disease. Which mainly happens as a result of obesity. Okay. So this is why I'm personally interested in like the four by four and all this like heart health stuff is because the number one killer in my head is like of women and men and at least in the U.S. is cardiovascular disease. So I'm like, I need to be working on my heart health over here. And if you're a jogger and you're a runner, there's a lot of people that die as runners or joggers because they have super bad blood lipid profiles and have arterial plaque and all the running

of the world is not going to make that go away. So number one is obesity. That's the thing we can control. We can indirectly control cardiovascular disease by limiting obesity. That's the number one thing. So if you're eating more calories than you're burning, you're contributing to obesity. So let's focus on that. obesity. You don't need to worry about your VO2 max to deal with obesity. Number two, and this is important, is smoking. If you're not obese and you don't smoke, you've just removed two-thirds of every cause of death right there. Done. Number three is accidents, falling off a lot at work, texting while you're driving, playing with guns. These are real things. So if you're not doing those things, you're reducing another massive amount. And the fourth is mental health and drugs. That's where I

focus. That's where I focus all of my energy with clients, with communication, with educating people, not a red food die in some. No one's dying of maricino cherries because they had too much food not. Not fluoride in water. That's not why people are dying. We have to focus on obesity is the biggest driver of mortality, followed by smoking, accidents, mental health and drugs. Right there, that's where 95% of all of our focus should be, because that's 95% of all of our focus should be, because that's 95% of all deaths that we can hopefully avoid. Uplifted on Instagram says, stop taking a cold shower right after training.

Jumping straight into a cold shower shuts down inflammation too fast, which blunts recovery and muscle growth wait four to six hours after lifting before the cold plunge or only do cold water before your workout. I would say that's between an A and a B. You're not supposed to have a cold plunge after you strength train. When you strength train, you're causing these little microterrors in your muscle fibers and your connective tissues. Those are functional tears.

We like those tears, and that causes inflammation, and inflammation is blood flow coming to those areas to help them heal. And in the blood is nutrients and oxygen to help those muscles heal and connective tissues heal to become stronger and healthier than before. If you create cold, you're driving blood flow away from those area, which hinders your ability to recover from this functional trauma you exposed to it, this good trauma you exposed to it. So you want to avoid extreme cold right after.

The research with that is more plunging than it is showering. With showering, it's more so shocking you rather than the muscles themselves. You're not really, you know. It's not getting deep enough kind of. I mean, on the plunge part. In general, I would say a quick hit of cold water to your face after a strength training workout's not going to hurt you. Even to your skin, it's not going to hurt you.

But soaking in it for a prolonged period of time in cold after strength training is not a good idea. Ablifted on Instagram also says stop chugging protein with zero carbs. you need both. Carbs and protein after your workout spikes muscle protein synthesis way more than protein alone. That shake, add some fruit or oats to it, fuel the recovery. I would give that a B or an A. Okay. That is correct. Is that carbohydrates will help with an insulin response. Insulin will help usher in that protein to where it needs to go. That is correct. However, the idea that we need to do it right after a workout is no longer what we kind of hang our hat on. Okay. It's more about throughout the day, did you get enough protein throughout the day, is more important than did you get it in this

little window right after? Is there anything we need to eat pre-or post workout optimally? I would say a stimulant pre-workout is probably something that definitively does help. Like a caffeine type thing? Caffeine. My work in graduate school was looking at the effects of caffeine and aphedrine for exercise. And we know that caffeine 90 minutes prior to exercise does a lot of things to help us exercise better or longer and more efficiently mobilize free fatty acids, burn more more fat and actually be better at strength training. As far as a meal before after, I don't think about pre-workout meals and post-workout meals. I think about meals. Plan your breakfast, lunch,

and dinner and at least one snack throughout the day and then decide where your workout goes into it. And I wouldn't work out right after a big meal. I would work out before a big meal. And I think that's the best way to think about it. Okay, cool. Unless you're doing prolonged endurance activity, if you're going for a four-hour run or a five-hour run, you know, something very prolonged. You need to carboload before for the 20-hour, four hours before, and the eight hours before and the six hours before. But if you're just going to work out, I wouldn't worry about that.

Nicole Louver, on TikTok says the key to seeing results is to take rest days. If cardio doesn't need to be extreme, you can stop running yourself into the ground. If you can, walk for 10 minutes after each meal, aim for 10K steps a day and maybe have two to three steady state sessions a week, but that is plenty. Strength training leads, cardio just supports. I would say B, there is a good point. It depends what are you resting from? Strength training is something you definitely don't want to be doing every single day with a level of intensity, especially if you're repeating, hitting the same muscles. You can not only slow down your results,

you can actually overtrain and start to feel flu-like symptoms and get swelling and get injured. So she's right about that. You don't want to strength train, especially the same muscles too often throughout the week. A rest period is helpful. But if you're walking, No, you can walk seven days a week. You don't need to rest from walking. You can do it every single day of your life without wear and tear on your body unnecessarily. It actually is helpful to walk every single day, physically, mentally. So you don't ever need to rest from walk. I feel like a big part of the confusion in the fitness world is that we're conflating all the different goals of movement. So we're conflating weight loss with looking like toned and fit, with longevity,

with for me, mental health. And I actually feel like there's probably different things we would do for all of those goals. And that's where some people are like, well, this is helping me. This is helping me. And sometimes I feel like they actually work against each other. Yeah, they can work against each other. So look, number one is this. If you want to live longer, goes back to the things like make sure you're not obese,

make sure you don't smoke, make sure you're not addicted to some unhealthy drug or any drug you're addicted to. You deal with mental health issues as they come along and you're not doing high risk things like climbing a ladder with no one around to spy you or texting while you're driving. That's longevity. If it's about body composition and looking great, then it comes back to a lot of those same things I just talked about, but then you start dealing with specific composition of calories you're ingested. So it's less about overall calories because that's the main thing with

obesity, but now we're dealing with the composition of the calories you're consuming and wanting to consume more of proteins than other things and certain kinds of carbohydrates more so than other things. And strength training differently than you would for longevity, maybe doing a little more strength training and more focused on certain body parts than otherwise you would do. So I think that would be a difference with that. And when we talk about exercise, there's no such thing as just exercise. There's two categories, distinct categories. One is designed to get your heart rate, healthier, burn more calories. And we call that cardio aerobic. I call it steps. Walking, running, jockeying, skipping, cycling, swimming, anything where you're doing some chronic submaxima movement

that you create general fatigue, not local fatigue. And sort of, to some extent, the more, the better, to some extent, right? Yeah. Great. The other form is what I call resistance training, strength training, calisthenics, yoga, Pilates, kettlebell work, dumbbells, barbells, all of that. That's about creating local fatigue. The more is not the better. You want to approach that like you would with taking antibiotics. If a doctor says take one a day for the next 10 days, you're like, I'm just going to take five today and five tomorrow and be done with it. Not only will it not work as well, it could backfire and make you sick. So with strength training, it's about dose, frequency, duration, intensity, and you want to be very specific with that so that you elicit this response from your body. You expose it to a stimulus.

Your body's like, whoa, what was that thing you just made me do? Oh my gosh, this is crazy. I need to adapt to it so that I can handle that stimulus. Once you've adapted, you can't keep giving it the same stimulus. The same exercise you've been doing that. Bicep curl with the five-pounders for 20 reps that you're doing three times a week. It's no longer going to help you. Your body's used to it now. You're talking about essentially progressive overload.

Yes. Well, not just progressive overload. Progressive overload is giving your body more and more. I'm talking about variation. The first thing I wrote was a thing called General Adaptation Syndrome. I was a scientist in the military. there was a guy named Dr. Hans Seeley, who won the Nobel Prize many, many years ago, professor at McGill University, who created the general adaptation syndrome.

And it's basically this. Liz, I call you. You answer the phone. Answer the phone. Hello. Liz, your house is on fire. The first thing you feel is what? Terror. Terror. Your heart rate goes up. Okay?

Yeah. Cold sweats, stress, cortisol, your friend cortisol, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, what? What do I do? Right, right, right. I wait 60 seconds and I start giggling. Just kidding, and I hang up. Your heart's still racing at that point. Yeah, right? And I'm mad at you. You're mad at me. The next day I call you again, you answer the phone. You're like, yes, Harley. I'm like, Liz, yesterday. I was joking today. I'm not even kidding. It's on fire. What do you feel? Skepticism? But you still feel a little elevation of heart, right? Okay. But it's reserved. It's not as much as day one. You're like, wait, are you serious or are you joking? What's happening right now? Right? I laugh and I hang up. The third day I call you. Call display says Harley. Do you answer the phone? No. No. You've adapted to me. I'm the stimulus. You're the organism, right? But what if I have someone else called the next day? Someone totally different.

You're going to answer the phone. And instead of them saying your house is on fire, someone hit your car. Different stimulus. Your heart rate's going to get up. You're back again. So we approach strength training that way. It's not about more and more and more. There's only so many hours in the day. You can't go from 30-minute workouts to five-hour workouts today. You can't go from lifting five-pound dumbbells to 5,000 pound dumbbells. It's not just more and more and more. It's changing the kind of stimulus. Different exercise. Different number of reps, different amount of resistance, different rest periods between sets. How do you know that, though? If you're just the average person trying to navigate the gym,

you're like, okay, I got it. I do my RDS, whatever. But then it's like, okay, well, tomorrow I have to do something different to confuse my body. It feels very confusing and exhausting. I don't think you have to, it's not about tomorrow changing the program. Maybe tomorrow you need to hit different body parts. Right. For sure. But I think that at least at some point, you need to be changing up the workouts. Okay. So let's say if you're used to doing 10 reps all the time of stuff, I do five sets of 10 reps of everything, for example, then maybe the two months from now you come in like from now on, instead of doing five sets of 10,

I'm going to do three sets of 20. As a result, you're going to need to change the weight, right? It's a very different experience, even if you don't change up the exercises. I feel like there is a lot of talk online about lifting heavyweights versus lifting light weights. And a lot of people are like, if you want to be toned, if you want to have a model body,

you should be lifting these lightweights and doing a lot of reps. but if you want to get like big and beefed up or whatever heavy weights. But then a lot of people are like, well, women can't ever beef up no matter how much they lift, which I see women. I'm like, I don't know if that's true because they look pretty beefed up. I'm going to give you some trivia. Okay. What was the decade that women were allowed to run the marathon in the Olympics?

Was it the 1950s, 1930s, or 1980s? I'm going to guess 80s. Yeah. How crazy is it? It wasn't until the 80s. And we didn't get a credit card until 1972, right? Oh, no comment. It wasn't until the 1980s that women were allowed to run the marathon

because we were scared of damaging women's reproductive organs from running. There was no signs behind it, none, zero whatsoever. It's just this fear that it's just masculine running that long. It's the same with strength training. Small weights don't make small muscles and big weights don't make big muscles. That's not how it works. The number one factor with the size of muscles is hormones. Men have more testosterone than women.

As a result, when men's strength train, versus when women's strength train, men's muscles tend to get bigger because we have more testosterone. Now, if women take testosterone, like female bodybuilders, look how big their muscles get. Or certain Olympic women athletes, right, especially East Germany back in the Cold War, they were bigger than a lot of the male athletes.

Number one is that. Number two is, if you want to build a bigger house, you need more building materials. You need more wood, drywall, nails, stucco. Okay, well, that's food. Food is the building blocks of our body, nutrients. So if you want to build bigger muscles, you need to eat more food to build bigger muscles. So those are the two most important things. And the third, which is less important, is training volume. When I was a bodybuilder, Monday was chest day. The whole day was only chest. I would do five or six chest exercises, five or six sets of only chest with big rests between each. I was doing 30 sets of chest on Mondays.

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When you train people, though, because you train like supermodels, you train superheroes. Would you train somebody who wants that long-toned body in a different way than you would train somebody who wants that beefed, a bulked-out body? No, not really. Wow. It's the, I mean, I'm not giving people hormones, so that's irrelevant. It's the diet that's going to translate that training to look like two different things. Halle Berry and Catwoman.

I mean, she looked pretty good, right? If you knew the heavy weight she was strength training with to transform her body, it was incredible. I have female clients that train so heavy on certain exercises and not on other ones. Not on other ones because the risk of injury is high. If you're doing shoulder press with something high, I don't want to tweak your neck. Okay. But on a stiff leg deadlift or a glute exercise, training heavy on glutes doesn't make big glutes. Unless you're eating lots of extra cows, to make bigger muscles, you need bigger food.

So when you're training a superhero versus a supermodel, what would be the difference in the food side of the equation? So number one, I would have the superhero consume a lot more calories in the day. I've had some 5,000 calories a day, 6,000 calories a day to put on muscle for a role. I've trained Iron Man, Spider-Man, Catwoman, Greenhorn, and X-Men, all these people. And it's really in the diet. The diet's going to convert what we do in the gym to look a certain way. And is that super high protein?

It's a lot of things. You're super everything. When you're trying to eat more calories, to get 5,000 calories a day, you can't do it from just adding more protein. Okay. If I'm training someone, like a lot of the Victoria Secret models I've worked with in the past, or Sports Illustrated cover issue, they're training heavy too. I mean, not always heavy. We use light weights.

We use medium weights. We use all different things. On certain body parts, we train heavier than other body parts. So larger muscle groups, which include glutes, hamstrings, upper back, they're only engaged at higher resistance and higher velocities. Smaller muscle groups are engaged at lighter resistances and lighter velocities. So as an example, Pilates. Pilates would be like cleaning your car with a toothbrush.

It would take 100 times longer to do it, but you could get into the little tiny crevices and cracks really well. So should you do Pilates like once a year to clean your car? I love people doing Pilates one day a week. Okay. For core, it's really great for small little stabilizers. It teaches you to really engage your core. I think Pilates is great at that.

Okay. Pilates sucks at hitting glutes in a meaningful way or upper back in a meaningful way. It's submaximal, and it's a slow velocity. It's low resistance and slow velocity. I can achieve in a fraction of the time the benefits that someone would be doing Pilates the whole time. But it's really good at hitting those tiny little stabilizers in the core.

You don't want to put lots of weight for abs, and you don't want to be doing explosive movements with abs. It's really about controlled, concise movements, which is great. But if someone really wants to transform their glutes and their upper back posture and their hamstrings and all that stuff, I got it. So Pilates one day a week. Yes. Strength training three days a week, four days a week.

What's the Harley Passion Act, like ideal week? Everyone's different. And I base it on A, the person, their goals, their injury status, how much time they have, what access they have to equipment. So as an example, I have a client who's on set right now filming something. Their days are so busy and they have four kids and they've got a lot going on. So for her, I've given her these 10-minute circuits, two exercises, back, like a minute of A, a minute of B, a minute of A, a, minute of A, minute of A, minute of A, minute of A, 10 to 15 minutes a day, seven days a week, different body parts each day. Because that works for her. I have another client, their schedules, they're constantly traveling. They don't have access to a gym, maybe two days a week. So I have them doing half the body on day one and half the body on day two in the gym and their workouts are longer because they have a lot more to cover. And the rest of the time, I have them doing.

steps. So I think there's not one golden rule of thumb, but I would say you should be doing at least 90 minutes a week of strength training. Okay. However you split that up. Yeah, it's at least. It's not a maximum. It's at least. Okay. And then you like the idea of doing one day of like Pilates for those little workouts. For some people who like it, it doesn't mean you need an hour of Pilates. Yeah. You know, sometimes someone teaching you some great Pilates abdominal movements that you could even do on your own in 10, 15, 20 minutes is fantastic. But I think Pilates is really great at it's teaching you to connect with your core in a way that some people just go through the motions when they do abs. But if you have a really good Pilates instructor, it can teach you to engage and really connect with

your core. But this idea of like, I want a long-toned body. That is not a lightweight thing. And it's just terrible. When I see women do that and they're like, I just, I only train with weights under five pounds. I'm like, are you stuck in the 70s? Do you not want to vote to? Like, what else are you doing to set women back? This is, this is not, women are not inferior to men at all. In fact, women are probably physiologically better than men in a lot of physical tasks. Women have a higher pain threshold. Women can hire more intensity. Women's recovery is better quite often.

If you look at the record of the women's marathon time and the record of the men's marathon time, the women's marathon times are getting exponentially faster, where men's are not getting exponentially faster. So aerobically and endurance-wise, women have benefits. So swimming is another great example. So I think don't sell yourself short. If you want results, you need to train with intensity. It doesn't mean everything has to be heavy.

When I say training heavy, it's not like that's all we do. We actually don't do it often. But there's certain body parts you have to train heavy. If you're doing hip thrust on glutes and you're putting a 10-pound dumbbell on your hips trying to do glutes, you're just going to eat your quads. You need to put too much weight for your quads. Your glutes are forced to get involved. If you're doing stiff-leg deadlifts with little five-pound dumbbells, the only thing you're working is your lower back. You need to make it too heavy for your lower back so that your hamstrings and glues are forced

to get engaged. Can you give me one piece of Harley-Pasternak S-tier advice and one piece of Harley-Pasternak F-tier advice? For superior, I would say every meal approach the path, P-A-T-H. A palm of carbohydrates is P. A stands for all the vegetables you want. T stands for a thumb of healthy fat. And H stands for at least the mass of your hand of protein.

That's a great way to think of a meal. You don't have to count your calories or take out of a scale. Look at your hand. Bigger people tend to require more food, have bigger hands, and vice versa. For F, I would say using the word cortisol too much. If somebody's listening to this and they're just like so confused about this whole fitness world and they just want to do one thing when they turn off this podcast to start feeling better in their body, what's the one thing you would have them do?

Cut out alcohol. I would say that's just the simplest, quickest thing you can do to make everything in your life better. It's terrible. We used to think, oh, a glass of red wine is good for heart health. No. No amount of alcohol is good for you at all. Pick anything else. I mean, almost anything else. Alcohol will hurt your sleep. Alcohol will contribute to all kinds of health issues. Alcohol will lead to bad decision making. Alcohol will lead to a poorer diet. Alcohol cut it up. You know one of my big takeaways from this conversation and from your work is that fitness doesn't exist in a silo. It's connected to your sleep. It's connected to what you're eating, is connected to what you're drinking. And I think we talk about it,

like, it's just off on its own. And you're like, it is absolutely not. We need to be thinking about it holistically. And the other thing I'll say is when it comes to taking health advice, I always say this. A lot of red cars are fast, but not all fast cars are red. When you take health advice from someone in a specific area, not all people educated and credentialized in that area are the best, but the best in that area are educated and credentialized. I think that's really helpful. What's one habit? It can be in the fitness space or any space that's changed your life. You know, when Fitbit came out, I got involved with Fitbit early on. This was a long time ago, maybe 16, 17 years ago. That changed my life. All of a sudden, I had a way to quantify how much I moved or didn't move,

to quantify how well and how much I slept or didn't sleep in a non-invasive way. That for me was just the simplest hack is to put numbers and be able to measure my actions or inactions. I know I'm going to hear from people who were like that study on walking 10,000 steps a day was from like Japan. They were trying to sell a product. There's no magic number for steps. Ready? I'm going to mic drop. That was me. That 10,000 steps, a lot of that was me. I helped Fitbit with messaging and marketing. And I came up with, I helped come up with that 10,000 step number. Not because it was based in research or studies specifically. It's because at the time I had just written a book called the World Diet, where I took a you're off my practice and I traveled to the 10 healthiest countries in the world.

This is before the blue zone. And I wanted to understand like why are they living so much longer than this? Why don't they have heart disease and cancer and diabetes in the same rate? And I looked at their nutrition and I looked at their calories in and the way they burn their calories. And I found at the time the average American was walking 4,200 steps a day. And of those 10 healthiest countries in the world, they were all walking almost 10,000 steps a day. And I thought that was an interesting thing they had in common is this chronic movement. And so I suggested, along with some other very smart people over there, that 10,000 steps today is a great goal for people to have because it's doable. I know it sounds daunting, but it's really not.

And it's helpful and nobody's going to get hurt for walking 10,000 steps today. But you sure as heck will get a lot healthier if you do. So there's nothing magical about 10,000, but you're using it almost as a proxy for move as much as possible throughout your day. I used it as if I took the healthiest populations in the world, those are people that are moving, closer to 10,000 steps per day with like 9,400 steps per day. And I said, let's try and emulate that. Yeah. And that's really where it came from.

So if you're mad at 10,000 steps per day, you can be mad at me. I don't mind. There's also a lot of really fascinating research about taking, I think it's 7,000 and up, the huge impact it has on depression and anxiety and mental health, which is always research that I pay attention to. And I will say walking 10,000 steps per day is better than 7,000 steps per day. But I believe they said there's a diminishing marginal return at a certain point. And they're like, look, as long as you get 8,000 steps per day, you're doing great.

You are doing great, but you're doing better at 10. Amazing. Harley, this was phenomenal. I love your takes on all this stuff. Can you tell people if they want more from you where they can find you? Yes. My new book, The Carb Reset, you can order all your favorite book resellers, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, etc. And on Instagram, Harley Pasternak, H-A-R-L-E-Y, P-A-S-T-E-R-N-A-K.

Okay, that is all we have time for today. Make sure that you're following the Liz Moody podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you like to listen. Let me know what other internet advice you want me to rank. We can do any topic you're interested in. So hit me up with that in the comments. And then go back and check out all of our other ranking videos. We have relationship advice, nutrition, therapy, money advice. And yeah, I love you.

I will see on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other question. qualified professional. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with hormone issues, you are especially going to want to listen to this ad. Every single

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