The Rich Roll Podcast - Tony Riddle's Natural Lifestyle Philosophy For Optimum Health, Happiness & Vitality

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Here to rewild us and reconnect us to that which is most essential is barefoot ultra running phenom Tony Riddle.  Returning for his 2nd appearance on the podcast (his first being over 3 years ago on episode #463), Tony is a natural lifestyle coach who has devoted his life to studying what makes us human and how to live naturally in the modern world. Today we pick things up where we last left off in an old school, no video, audio-only conversation convened during my recent visit to London that goes deeper into Tony's natural lifestyle practices. Tony and I cover his various endurance feats and training, his unique coaching philosophy, and the principles that underscore his new book Be More Human, a bible for deconstructing the ways of living that aren’t serving us, and reconnecting with new ways of living that are more in sync with our human biology. Show notes + MORE: bit.ly/richroll717 Watch on YouTube (audio only) Newsletter Sign-Up: https://www.richroll.com/subscribe This conversation is packed with a battery of actionable practices and strategies to rewild and reboot your life. My hope is that you employ these strategies and they allow you to maximize your human potential. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich

We can't all live in nature, but it doesn't mean we can't live naturally. We should be able to get our needs met in every environment, that's the point. Often what we hear within the rewilding circles at least is demonising the zoo, the human zoo. Actually it's not about demonising the city life, it's about just dismantling, deconstructing ways of living that aren't really serving us in those environments, and then reconnecting to ways of living that of course are more in sync with our human biology and the lyrics of my friend nick mulvey happy is the man that breathes in the morning so it could be right i i just sit and i just do some breath work in bed even just open my eyes instead of going right there's my phone and

checking in just check in with yourself just breathe for a moment down regulation start calm it's the everyday stuff it's the environment stuff what can you take control of in your everyday habitat in your everyday environment because otherwise all that work is just it's literally symptom relief and you really need to get to the cause of it because we might be going on runnings the cause or cycling on the bikes the cause i would say it's the stuff that you've been doing for 10 and a half hours a day that isn't natural then you go and try and run with and try and cycle with that then compromises that chain.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Stress, anxiety, overwhelm, fatigue, obesity, depression, and lifestyle illness are just a few of many hallmarks of our modern, fast-paced, convenience-focused world. And it doesn't really take a genius to see that what ails us is very much related to our disconnection, our divorce from food that nourishes us, from the movement that maintains us and the natural rhythms of our bodies and the planet. So here to rewild us, to reconnect us with that which is most essential and remind us that we don't live in nature,

but that we are nature, is the barefoot, ultra running, unschooling lifestyle coach and legend himself, my friend, Tony Riddle, returning for his second appearance on the podcast, his first being a bit beyond three years ago. That was RRP 463. It's a great one. Check it out if you missed it.

Today, we pick things up where we last left off in an old school, no video, audio only conversation that was convened during my recent visit to London. We cover his various endurance feats and training, his coaching philosophy, and the principles that underscore his wonderful new book called Be More Human, which is really this beautiful Bible for deconstructing

the ways of living that aren't serving us and reconnecting with new ways of living, ways that are more in sync with our human biology and allow us to thrive, to connect and meet our human potential. I always love spending time with Tony. He's super smart, very engaging. This one is full of practical and actionable tools that are going to help you rewild, reboot, reconnect, and refine your life. I think you're going to dig it. So let's quickly take care of a little business and thereafter, enjoy me and Tony Riddle. and thereafter, enjoy me and Tony Riddle. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at

recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read

reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you.

I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, let's do the show. let's do the show old school on the road no crew no video no distractions except the noise coming from portobello road but you know downstairs it's okay man the ambiance in here nice to be in your presence thank you for making the trip down from the countryside. Yeah, over, I guess it's an over trip. It's over.

But thanks, man. Thanks for inviting me. A lot has happened since we first met up at my house. I think it was almost exactly three years ago. It must be. Yeah, you've done a lot of things since then. It was pre-Lanzin John O'Groats, wasn't it? I was about to run that link.

Right, I think it was right before that. Right before that. And were you still living in London at the time? Yeah, we were living up in Hampstead. In Hampstead. And so I was choosing routes where it was just mind-numbing routes that you just go around places like Regent's Park and run round and round and round and round and round and round. Right.

You know, and then knew that, ah, well, when I finally go off on the road, it'll be like being unleashed. This is a great running city though. There's so many epic places to explore by foot. Yeah, it's like I talk about this with the nature immersion work that I work with clients and now a bigger audience, right?

Through other forms of media in the book, right? But it's 3,000 parks in London. Yeah but it's um 3 000 parks in london yeah it's unbelievable how much greenery there is a million trees that's almost one tree per person in london to sit under and be what an environment right it's got to be up there with the top cities in the world in terms of how they've mindfully created an urban landscape while incorporating natural environments yeah into the experience. Yeah, it's labeled as a forest now, isn't it really, London?

In terms of how many trees are available here, parks, allotments, gardens, it's vast. Yeah, and yet you split the city, headed to the countryside to live on like a regenerative farm or? No, we went to, we went to the- Tell me about that. So it was like a big exodus out of No, we went to, we went. Tell me about that.

So it was like a big exodus out of London. So when London kind of went into lockdown, we were with, you know, four kids at that time. You know, what was then a, I think Lola must have been 10, Tallulah, Millie eight, Tallulah three. And then the young bowman came in, you know. And we were in a two bedroom apartment in Hampstead with a terrace. And it's great because we're minimalists, right? And we live on the ground and our beds are just mattress toppers

that we can roll up and put away. So it's not like we're struggling for real space. There was space there, but we only really had a terrace. And whereas when we lived in Hampstead, the beauty of Hampstead was Hampstead Heath and getting in the ponds and actually being really close to that. There's a woodland there, right? One of those big parks we're talking about there.

When that was suddenly removed, it was like, oh, wow. Well, what is London for us? Need to rethink this. And the reason we were living in Ibiza and we moved back to London, right? And the reason we moved back there because I was looking to get this book out into the world, right?

And Katerina was the one who said, look, I think we should go back to London. You know, I think that's where we need to be until we get the book done, then we look at moving. And then it was like, well, the book's done pretty much. And at the same time, lockdown has hit and we were just, I guess, everything was up in the air. And it was an opportunity then to really just tune in.

Where do we want to be? And so we thought about the Southwest, getting down to the Southwest coast. And yet I was just about to go and run the Three Peaks. And a friend of mine, Seth, who owns this retreat space that is the regenerative biodynamic farm, big retreat space, 42 acres it's known as as but there's like 170 odd acres there he said look we're not using the space do you want to come and stay for a weekend i said just perfect time instead seth because

just about to go on this next adventure and explain this big endurance event i'm just about to go on with the whole family and when we get back we're looking at moving on so we're looking at getting down to the southwest so maybe we can drop in on the way there and he said I love talking to you Tony normally I speak to friends it's like what are you up to and it's oh I'm just about to go to this or do this event and it's like yeah I'm going to go and crack the three peaks and run them barefoot um said come and stay we'd love to have you so as soon as we arrived back we were kind of done with london and we arrived at 42 acres which was meant to be a weekend um seth and his partner renata were having a baby and they really liked having katarina and the kids and myself around and we're learning so much in that process and katarina's got such amazing wisdom when it comes

to you know parenting and and that home lifestyle she's like really refined it and um like rewilding parenting in a way so it became this um well how long would you like to stay for and i said well katarina really loves to be here she's just growing so much since being on the land how about we cap it six? So we spent six months living on this huge estate with a small community because there's still a community of people there that look after this retreat space. Huge lake and we'd go from, you know, I could get up in the morning and just take a stroll to this big lake, sit, just be, no one around, all the way through the winter, like cracking the ice to sit in there and just amazing experience. winter like cracking the ice to sit in there and just amazing experience and it really highlighted well that's that's where we've really got to get to so if anything it was a stepping stone in thinking that this is this is where it's at this is where we want to kind of move towards let's say knowing it was capped only six months where we were staying six months came around and we still

hadn't found a home we were searching but because of this big exodus everyone wanted to leave london it was an opportunity for people to work from home suddenly people were really questioning their lifestyles at that time right but it meant the housing market there was nothing and even if there was like four kids and it just it just yeah we couldn't find anything and our friends then another retreat space called broughton sanctuaries in north yorkshire it's like a 3 000 acre estate that they're rewilding so they've reforested like a thousand acres of this estate wow i contacted them said look we're a bit homeless at the moment do you think we can come and stay and he was like well how long i said well i don't know yet we don't know we're trying to find something the nomadic rewilding guy yeah he's a roof over his head and so we just we rocked up

and they were like yeah okay, okay, you can stay. We moved about a bit on the land where we could stay. And just before leaving, we managed to find a house where we are now. So it meant

that there was something that within six, within a period of time we could come back to and we had somewhere to stay, which is quite remote where we are now. It's super quiet.

But it's an extension of walking your talk right like everything that you're about indicates that this is the type of environment that you would choose to live in and raise your children in yeah i think we originally we we left london katherine i left london when lola was um a newborn really like nine months i guess and we were just assessing at that point where would we want to be and we moved out of London and then we moved into well first of all we went to my parents and we were living with my parents for a period of time for six months then we moved into Windsor and we lived in this lovely little community like picket fences and cottages and a

big willow tree in the square no cars and but certain things weren't quite aligning it was a community but it wasn't aligned with say our values right so food was a question and you know just certain behaviors were a question and weren't quite where we were and they were on a different path you know it's no judgment of where people were it's just their path right and so we at that point we're like well where would we want to be and then friends that I was with and bouncing in and out of London with were like, you should come to Ibiza, have a look at Ibiza. So next thing we moved to Ibiza. And that kind of was a transition.

It never felt like it was going to become home. But what it allowed us to do is pluck ourselves out of that community, immerse in a community that were very much aligned. You know, suddenly it was, you know, cacao ceremonies, voice awakening work and plant medicines and ecstatic dance and all this stuff and being able to walk around butt naked and barefoot pretty much all day, right?

And we had Lola and Millie then and Tallulah. And we were pretty much naked the whole time. It would be, come on kids, let's get to the beach. And the kids would just jump. We had a big old Cherokee at that stage like battered up old thing that didn't really no one cared really and the kids were in the back of that climbing all over the seats naked and then you get to the beach naked get back in the car naked arrive back at the house naked and that was life right um but unfortunately

I was still having to flying and out so I'd have to come into London and then back out had it been now everything would have been online it would have been very different for me I could have still having to fly in and out so i'd have to come into london and then back out had it been now everything would have been online it would have been very different for me i could have you know we would probably still be there but there's this notion that the islands are an island of transformation and when it and when it when it's when you're done you're ready to leave it kind of spits you out pushes you away yeah we it kind of felt that way so we were coming back on christmas it's a bit repetitive now, but Katerina had said, I think we need to go back.

And you've given us an amazing time here. It's been incredible, but it's your time now. Let's get this book done. That was the push. Yeah, and to get a book out, you have to participate in the world. You can't opt out of modern Western society

and expect anybody to be interested in your book, right? So you have to remain in contact to some extent with London or urban centers in order to do that, which you did. But I think it brings up a central point that's at the core of all of your work, which is like, how do you live this more naturalistic lifestyle,

more symbiotic with your you know, your natural biological rhythms and those of the planet while also, you know, existing in the world. Because I think a lot of people, it's easy to look at you and go, oh, he's the barefoot freak and he doesn't have any furniture and his kids are running around naked and he's, you know, doing cacao ceremonies. Like, that's not my life. Like, that's not, I don't, I have trouble like accessing, you know, what aspect of that is applicable to like how I'm living. In relatable, right? Yeah. Or relatable, right? Like, yeah, he's squatting. That's cool. Like,

am I going to squat? I don't know, maybe, but how do I connect with this? And I think really the power of be more human is this edict that you repeat, you know, over the course of the many pages, which is like, this is not about like being a Luddite per se or opting out. It's about trying to, you know, find a rhythm that works for you,

where you can kind of take from this wisdom and build these habits and practices into your life without completely disrupting the way that you live. Yeah think and again it's walking that path and not just talking the path right so we um when if it i think i think if it wasn't for lockdown we carved out a really nice lifestyle in london you know hampstead was pretty great oh man we had this amazing life and um again you could have that nature immersion and exit you know and throughout the book i also put this you know we can't all live in nature but it doesn't mean we can't live naturally and we should be able to get our needs met in every environment

that's the point it's just more if not we we here we're in the rewilding circles at least it's like this demonizing kind of the zoo the human zoo actually it's not about demonizing the city life it's about just dismantling deconstructing ways of living that aren't really serving us in those environments and then reconnecting to ways of living that of course are more in sync with our human biology like how we can move within everyday spaces you know if we looked at rewilding that way in the sense that i do it's like you can rewild your movement your gut your sleep you know your everyday behaviors in those experiences and I think that's that's that for me has been the the message really and then it and then it's much more relatable you know I've I've I've lived in

cities I get it and I also get what it is to be a papa to four kids and have businesses in London you know sure you know and still manage to carve out time to become an endurance athlete. So I'm 100% aligned, right? Yeah. I live it and I walk it, but also I have clients from all different backgrounds, all different demographics, right?

From, again, students through to billionaires. It's always the same message, right? My favorite is the example of the elder, I think he's an Indian gentleman in the book. You kind of walk through like how you helped him transition his life and how he kind of lived it hour by hour as an urbanite. Yeah. What was that guy's name?

So there's Yehudi in the book. Are we discussing Yehudi in there? Yehudi's a Jewish guy. Oh, he's Jewish. Yeah. He was basically brought natural birthing really into the UK. So if anyone rewilded natural birth in the UK, it's Yehudi. And he was ostracized at that time when he brought it in.

You know, there's amazing stories from him. But he originally came to me wanting to learn how to walk, you know. And he was stooped. He was 72 at the time, so it was like what our template perhaps might have been of a 72 year old right stooped and and just wanted to learn how humble just to come in and say i want to learn how to walk so i said okay let's just hop you up on the treadmill i'll record you first stages you need to see what it is to walk what it what it looks like right where you're at otherwise you're just kind of this, there's incompetence there,

subconscious incompetence until you drag it out. And then he's like very aware that it's conscious incompetence. So he could see the stoop and it was like, okay, let's go through these processes. And to start with, it was getting him back on the ground, just interacting with the ground. So like when we sell this guy without furniture, Yehudi became the guy without certain parts of furniture in his home, but at the age of 72.

And I think the thing with age also, because we have more patience in a way, you know, like he was really patient with it and could allow things to grow and open up and saw that it was a long game. I think that's what he grasped from the very beginning. So I had him interacting with the ground, then rewilding his feet, then rewilding his footwear.

And there's amazing studies around there with footwear. You know, like Chris Dort, University of Liverpool, 60% of foot strength is lost. Well, they've put people back in barefoot shoes or walked around barefoot. It's Vivo Barefoot in this case. Six months of transitioning back into a barefoot footwear, they found a 60% increase in foot strength,

but 40% increase in balance. So for someone like Yehudi, it's like, wow, okay, not just improving the way that he walks, it would be the way that he stands, it would be the way that he squats, or we could then ramp things up and get him into running. So then that became movement for him on the ground. So even his work setup became a standing desk to squatting desk you know i mean

incredible and then we had a tray beneath him that would have stones in it so he could have his feet rather than being on a flat linear surface he's now interacting with that kind of those realms as well very nourishing and then eventually over time become hanging practices lifting practices and then i discuss his commute in the book where you you know, he wakes up and first of all, he's down to the next level of his house. He has a hang. And then he answers his email standing and has his smoothie in the morning. Then off he goes to the tube because his wife could buy him. Off he went to the tube.

And this is up until, I think, 79 before he's retired, right? And he'd walk down the hill, get onto the tube. Gold is green at this time. And the doors would open. People would automatically, because of his age, say, would you like to sit down? No, no, no, he's okay. And he'd start hanging, right?

And I called it the hang, squat, surf on the tube train. The tube is the underground, right? And he'd hang between stops, right? So hanging on a train at 79, up to 79 years of age at this point. And then when the doors opened, he would either stand or he'd squat and then the train starts moving again he'd then surf so surfing is not allowed to hold anything you're using those pads that he's rewilded on his feet and his foundations to stand and then it just becomes an opportunist he's looking for more movement throughout the day you know he doesn't have to find you do he doesn't have to find an hour to go and train somewhere

he's just had a 30 minuteminute commute on the train training, hanging, squatting, standing, surfing, which is like being on a power plate, right? Also choosing the stairs, not the escalator. And that's quite a phenomenal story, you know. It's very empowering because we often look at it and think, well, oh, you know, it's too late for me or, you know, I haven't got the time. And there's a great example of that and he really shifted stuff within me it was like there's a new template there

for a 72 which was 79 who's now 81 you know an 81 year old now he's in cold immersion so i tell this in the book as well right i'll share this he um he heard he was terrified of the cold i mean properly terrified he was born stillborn and he's kind of where he takes into from the deep work he's done the layering that he's got to is that there was ptsd around cold because he was put on a cold slab cold oxygen and um so whenever it was any discussions around even going out in the cold terrified like where that thermogenic kind of loads of layers because you've been conditioned to room temperature.

So we held a workshop, it was called Move, Breathe, Chill. In the early days, it's now called the 100 Human Experience, but originally it was Move, Breathe, Chill, movement, playful movement, breath work, like real conscious connected breath, and then into a freezer that I'd converted at my studio. The day before the workshop, he'd all agreed. Yehudi's like, yeah, I'm definitely coming, definitely coming.

And then that night, an hour on a call with Yehudi, just talking him through, yeah, you're going to be fine, man. It was like a heat joke, it's like a podcast in itself, being on a call for an hour, just going through this process with him. He arrived, actually living the closest to the studio where the practice he was the late one you know rocked up and once we got him through the breath so who's going first i'm going first he was straight in and we have images of him like this like really mouth open roaring you know primal roaring in the cold waters like right of passage at the age, I think he was 77 then, rite of passage at the age of 77.

Dealing with that early trauma of cold. It was very evident in that moment. And then since then, he's been to either Hampstead Ponds or the River Lee. And it's been every day he goes into the River Lee or Hampstead Ponds. Year round.

All year round, man. All the way through the winter now. That's a major transformation. Complete shift. Yeah, now 81, right? So now, suddenly you're 81. You originally wanted to learn how to walk again. And through that, he went,

the reason he wanted to learn how to walk was, I discovered that it was his dream for him and his wife, Wendy, to get to Everest Base Camp. So they walked Everest Base Camp, their 50th anniversary that was why and then since then it's been mount kenya atlas mount it's been something just incredible right empowering yeah that stage you know did you take blood markers also to kind of bear witness to any metabolic changes or any of that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's not your thing, man.

Right? He looks good. He's happier. He's getting in the cold, right? He doesn't need to get involved with that. He's just cruising up mountains. I think we're at this point where we are really, I talk about this, I have an online community and it's like more information, more information, more information.

And we are information rich and experience poor. It's like, how do I experience these things? What am I picking up on? What are my signals? It's like for me running now it's all controlled through breathing and down regulation the moment i sense something i'm picking up on it i even someone's asking me about this i'm tackling this path it's called the southwest coastal path and to to run it it's like a thousand k's all of this amazing coastline but if you think the way it's banked it's like this the camber of it right so um someone said yeah but you know if you think about it you're

running at this you know it's always going to be the same gradient the angle that you're running at i was like yeah i know but that's okay well how are you going to deal with that so just you just bend one leg more than the other and then you're always running like this and you think about you i always think about the legs being like two wheels. You know, those little scooter bikes where you have the two wheels. So if you lean to your right, this wheel becomes shorter, yeah? Right.

To the lean, right? So it's literally just doing that around the bend. So I pull this leg of the right side to move to my right and I pull this left leg more to my left. And it works like a suspension system. So it's as if you were going over terrain and if you went over right

bump it's the right suspension that moves sure so you're then you know it's not felt elsewhere so to go over the right bump i just bend the right leg some more by pulling it and you start to think of the legs being like wheels going over this yeah so so essentially developing a more robust mind body connection so that you're in tune with how your body operates. 100%. And your point being that we abdicate so much control and decision-making to devices or experts,

and all of that short-circuits our own ability to be more interconnected and to listen more deeply to what our body is trying to tell us. Like, oh, I don't need to feel that because this thing will tell me whether i am okay to work out today or not right yeah so much better articulated to me that rich i yeah a hundred percent again i innately wild connected empowered beings i think it's all within us you know and i think the more convenient this stuff becomes the more inconvenient it

becomes over time yeah you know up his phone i picked up my phone i forget we're not on camera we're not on video you know in other words it's all the off camber stuff and all of that like i think we figure it out you know but i yeah so imagine if you're running to your right you pull up your right leg a bit more and it would be shorter on the ground a bit like if you were standing right now standing up this is a great example I had a guy called Janos come and see me, and he's an amputee. And so standing through his two supports, you could see on the side where he's wearing a prosthetic limb, the limb's slightly shorter.

And what it was doing is throwing out his pelvis slightly. So a bit like running, if you were running and you were landing without that ability to understand shock absorption, you'd be driving one side of the pelvis up over time So a bit like running, if you were running and you were landing without that ability to understand shock absorption, you'd be driving one side of the pelvis up over time or hammering the knee over time or striking into the ankle too much. So with him, it was, okay, all you need to do is just bend your right leg. So he bent his right leg and he just dropped his hips in. Rather than standing on a really strong, straight, rigid leg,

just bend the knee slightly and then took him through running and then barefoot running and then coached him into like technique of running. It was phenomenal. He's now coaching. He's like this amazing coach. And Miyoka now has a natural movement studio over there and is teaching basically natural movement within a practice which involves balancing, lifting, jumping, all of these practices, right?

And it all came from that conversation of, ah, okay, there's back pain there. The reason there's back pain, they just bend the knees some more. So if you were standing and you were to put a block underneath your foot when you're standing which would represent the bank where i'm running and it's dropping off into the sea and you just bend that knee some more it would bring your pelvis into alignment and that's the way you look at running it's as if you just bend one leg more than the other they're both landing underneath you and this is the danger of not having your feet landing underneath you. If you're swinging your legs like a pendulum, which is more associated with walking, that leg will have to be straighter and out in front of you when it makes impact with

the land. Therefore, you can't bend it. Try and keep the feet underneath you as if you're on this like a unicycle, but it has two wheels, you know, and it's, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. It be interesting so you're you're in the final throes of of training for this upcoming adventure i want to go through all the stuff that you've done since we first sat down but right now you're getting ready to do this 2000 kilometer run that you're going to complete in 22 days this is what you're referring to this south coast yes like what is the it's known as the southwest coastal path i see and it's just north of where we're living now it's a place called

minehead and you start in minehead which is somerset and then you run the coast of somerset and then into devon and then down to cornwall which is lands end sure where i started landing john groves and then you get back and then you get into South Devon and you finish in Dorset. So 630 mile or 1000k route. The record is 10 days, 12 hours and 18 minutes. So that's going to be my attempt. As far as I can see, no one has

ever turned around and run back again. So I'm actually going to do an out and back on the southwest coastal path and attempt to get the record on the way out. And then in a true out and back sense would be then to get the record on the way out and then in a true out and back sense would be then to get the record or under the record on the way back yeah well if nobody's done an out and back with it though if you complete it you at least get that yeah fkt yeah exactly yeah fkt in its own right yeah that's exciting and and and knowing that that pavement will have a consistent off-camber tilt to it

the entire time, 1,000 kilometers running, where it's not a flat surface. Exactly. That is a very unique chance. It's one thing to say, well, I can run that distance for 10, 20, 30, 50 miles, but 1,000 kilometers. Yeah, it's about 100 k's a day, right? Yeah.

So you could call that five half marathons or 10, 10 k's, whatever you want to call it, or 25 k's per day. But they say it's the hardest trail in the UK. So it has everything. So we were out, decided that we'd go and we'd discover some of it last weekend. So off we went with our bell tent, put a bell tent up, the whole family. And Katerina and the kids would be on the beach and i'd run out and back so i could go to the beach then meet them for lunch and then go off again and so one route going from this place this beach that we found called perenporth going north to do 10k and then 10k back was sand dunes right so

these massive sand dunes are going up and down because the sea was in and then all of a sudden it's rock and then all of a sudden it's like steep climbs 1,700 elevation just on that one little section and then it drops down then it's sand dunes again and then all you have these little signs every now and then they're like acorns that show that it's the southwest coastal path but you're in the middle of sand dunes and when you're in sand dunes like people are always a little lost in sand dunes anyway so you have all these different paths going off all over the place so the navigation stuff's pretty tough and then coming back to perry and paul then going out the other way it's solid rocks and really high ascent elevation again so on that route it's not just a thousand k it's all like

that so there isn't a moment when it's not. So the elevation is a bit insane. There's four Everest in terms of elevation on that route of a thousand. So it's a thousand Ks and four Everest. So like 60,000 feet of gain. 115,000 feet. 115.

Yeah, because Everest is 29.032. Right, wow. feet 115 yeah because everest is 29.032 right wow and are you going to do this barefoot or with vivos or some combination of those two like you did on the three peaks yeah well i'm working with vivo at the moment so um yeah i'm not too sure how much i can actually put out there on this one so it's with with uh i'm having my feet scanned and we're kind of having more bespoke footwear for Tony right now. Right, a special Tony edition. Yeah, man, well, my feet, yeah, they're quite wide.

They've basically, they've had this model of like from normal to where is supernatural. And I've now kind of pushed the boundaries of where supernatural is. Yeah, so at this, with the amount of kilometers you've put on those bare feet of yours, I would imagine they've morphed in unusual ways. Well, it's the strength again, isn't it? You know, you think of that foundation, and I've spoke about this before with you,

but there's 26 bones, 33 articulations, and this accumulation. There's 100 muscles, tendons, ligaments, but 200,000 receptors in your feet. So it's in a foot. We're just talking in one foot. I mean, that's incredible, right? So, yeah, where can we take that, you know? Where can that go?

And I'm really interested in the physiological adaptation. I love all that. But where my mind's going now is more towards, well, even the microbiome, right? Obviously, when you're living in London, it's dysbiosis, right? all that but where my mind's going now is more towards well even the microbiome right obviously not when you're living in london it's like dysbiosis right whereas you want to back out in nature and the sand dunes or the beach or the trail and the roots and the rocks and what do we get from that experience and um footwear is a modern phenomenon it would have been skins or

something right something would have protected us from fawn or whatever it is but we still would have been having this amazing experience and more natural underfoot, the more natural the experience and outcome, right? So I'm more interested in the, well, the microbiome is one, but the neuroplasticity, what is it? You know, what is it that we're also losing from dumbing down the information? So if you went over that terrain in lots of cushion,

you don't really notice the difference through your feet. What is sand? What what is rock what is mud what is root systems it's just all one thing because it's just the inside of a shoe and and also the shoe is shoe shape not foot shape so you're even you're compromising even the shape that you would receive that information through so i'm more interested now i'd like to go into a study where we look at perhaps you know what's what what that, what is lost through that behavior. A bit like picking up my iPhone again now, a bit like the convenience of this.

What are we losing in that process through becoming more convenient? The neuroplasticity, think of navigation, following Gmaps versus actually navigation. It's that abdication, because once you kind of inure yourself to Google Maps, then you're not really paying attention to your environment because you know you can just look there

and it'll tell you where to go. We all know what it was like as kids. You either had to have a map or you had to figure it out. And so you kind of have to be a little bit more aware of what's going on around you or you're going to get lost and you don't have a cell phone to call anyone. Now all of that is taken care of. So we can just kind of bumble about,

without worrying about whether we're gonna run in any kind of trouble. And I think your point about neuroplasticity is super interesting. Like that signaling, with all those nerve endings on the bottom of your foot, like what are those signals that are being sent to the brain and what are the pathways that are getting kind of reaffirmed

or strengthened in your brain as a result of that experience? That's a cool idea. Yeah, like there's rewilding the feet, but there's also rewiring, right? There's a rewiring that's happening there, right? Through different environments that become more and more nourishing, right? What is the difference between this?

And it's never changing, right? It's more natural expression again. But you could take it beyond feet and just think, it's in the book again, I have this organic, inorganic consumption leads to inorganic behaviours and being, right? So really, the more organic the consumption, the more organic the behavior in being. I'm not just talking about what we consume as in what we eat.

It's like thinking, well, what am I absorbing from all of my senses? So even just wearing huge amounts of layers and not experiencing nature again through my skin or through my eyes and my ears or running with headphones in, what are you removing yourself from, right? And then the layers and the skin and the contact and what we inhale like you know even running through a forest look at the amazing potency of a forest they're now linking to like phytoncides that are antibacterial antifungal right and we're missing all of that that's so valuable right for ourselves and our own senses that's antibacterial and antifungal but i had

this profound thought the other day running through a forest and i was thinking it was um almost like a like a farm really for trees you know whereas they're that is for softwoods which aren't native or indigenous to that land so what's the difference then for us you know as we go on this path of reforesting the globe right because we feel like we have to reforest now what are we losing in creating straight lines of trees and planting the same trees that perhaps aren't indigenous, you know, because perhaps those trees and those ancient woodlands are there for that,

you know, the being within that environment to inhale the properties that are specific in that environment for healing. You know, what are we losing in that? That was a profound thought the other day. Taking it beyond the- Well, we're applying our matrix on top of nature healing you know what are we what are we losing in that as a profound thought the other day taking right yeah well we're we're applying our matrix on top of nature rather than just allowing nature to you know do what it would do like it'll find its own way to optimize that environment and thrive

without our involvement yeah so the difference between like purposefully reforesting or rewilding an environment versus like allowing or just letting it be and letting it do whatever it wants to do. Yeah, it's the controlling within that again, right? Of where we would like, it's like a board game in a way. I'll chuck in a bit of that and I'll throw in a bit of that and I'll move that over there and I'll play with that. Oh, there we go.

There's a little bit of human hubris that gets injected of that. I'm going to move that over there and I'll play with that. Oh, there we go. There's a little bit of human hubris that gets injected into that. I mean, I'm sure there are ecosystems that are so decimated it requires some human intervention. How do we expedite the process of getting this back into a healthy state? Absolutely.

Yeah, I have friends that are really heavily involved in rewilding and regenerative processes now and it's come a long, long way. It really has. And there's planting methods, I think it's known as the Milwaukee method now, and they kind of plant different groups of trees

that become friends, and it's not straight lines. It's like bringing back what would be the community or the friends of the trees. So that's fascinating. Yeah. Are you acquainted with Darrenren o'leen you met darren no he's my buddy back home and you guys are very much on the same page he does lots of things he has a podcast but he he does these segments on his show and he's writing a book about this on the subject of like fatal conveniences, like these things you were just referencing,

like all of these things that we do, these habits that we've adopted that are part and parcel of just being in the modern world that we think are making our lives easier, but are actually like, if you really deconstruct them, are not in our best interest. And just to be kind of more mindful of the truth behind these things, whether it's chemicals

we apply to our skin or using Google Maps instead of paying attention more, there are just an endless laundry list of things that we really don't think twice about that perhaps require a second look. And you're kind of the master, the Zen master of all of these things. It's come around because I,

we, unfortunately, it was my grandmother's funeral, but I had an uncle there. They came back to the house and we were discussing, he had to climb my parents' stairs to go to the toilet. And he said, oh, it's so difficult getting up the stairs these days. And I started to unpack what that means. And and well my mum calls them bungalow legs so bungalow legs when you start living on a single-story house suddenly the stairs become challenging because the single-story house

called a bungalow here right so suddenly you develop bungalow legs so that to get up the stairs is now a huge effort it's become inconvenient whereas living on one floor was convenient at one stage right for them so for him it's become inconvenient the stairs are now a struggle and then we went we went right into then well even think about food systems right what it would have been at some stage for us right to get food if we went right back to hunter-gatherer foraging and then suddenly into farming and agriculture and it would have meant huge pulling and pushing and involvement still on the land not the same as what foraging or hunter-gatherer but there's still huge physiological metabolic load for that right versus now where we just i'm picking up my phone

again we just pull pull so we pull the screen down and we push a button right that's getting food right so there's again that's hugely convenient, yes, but look at how disconnected we are from that system. That's just the physiological stuff, but think about how disconnected we are from actually the senses, that neuroplasticity again, or opening up digestion even. Like that old, I had a guy called, was it Mindful Martin?

He was on one of my very first retreats, and Mindful Martin came and he had a raisin for each one of the attendees and he puts a raisin in the hand have you played this before? no and you look at the raisin spends about an hour with this raisin right in your hand and you're rolling the raisin around

and the raisin before your very eyes just gets bigger bigger right it's like just keep and you're identifying all the wrinkles of your raisin right and looking at this thing as if it's like you've never seen a raisin before but it goes on and on it's like this process that he takes you through and you realize you're suddenly salivating right all your salivary enzymes are up right because your whole digestion is prepared for this raisin right and then

eventually it allows you to touch your lips with the raisin you touch your lips and again it's like oh my god this raisin and then finally when you put the raisin in your mouth it's like the best raisin you've ever tasted right so you bring that into like foraging and foraging i did a retreat at 42 acres where we were staying for a period of time and tasha's there she's this amazing foraging coach and she pretty much lives on the land and but i can identify stuff but lives it it's different to oh these are the five things you can pick and these are five things you can identify stuff but lives it it's different to oh these are the five things you can pick and these are five things you can't pick she lives it right and breathes it and it's so knowledgeable and so i took people on this adventure where um i took them into the woods in

like a line like um well firstly i stopped them at the entrance to the woods and i said okay i need you to repeat these words trust the the process, respect the process, be patient whilst in the process and while you finally figure out this is all process, you just be. And then, yeah, okay, so right, here's a blindfold. I'm going to put your blindfold on. So they put a blindfold on

and then I walk them in a chain. The person at the front is my friend Arthur at this stage and he has his eyes wide open and he's now walking them into the forest and then around this lake and then i position i take one off the back and i put them into the forest in either tree or one was particular was like in amongst these bluebells in wild garlic it was insane like high definition

for your eyes sit like next one next one next one and then they had to practice 100 cycles of breath like alternate nostrils for right and left hemispheres. And then once you'd completed your 100 cycles, you'd take your blindfold off. And then I'd come back round. By the time I dropped everyone off around this lake, I was back to the start. And you just, like, they're completely blown away

by the senses have completely opened up through breath being blindfolded and hearing nature and then suddenly seeing nature, as if they were on psychedelics or something. was like their first experience seeing nature again but fully plugged in and then i'd have them then taking 10 things that they can find in the area to build something a structure some kind of using their i called it their imaginative architectural minds at that stage and to build something with intention and that they could either it's a gift to the forest or they could perhaps come back and that was where they their place would be

and and then i then we then finished that walked them back and met tasha in the forest kitchen and then she took everyone out to forage and their senses were completely open she says she never had a group that were that open before like feeling everything touching everything and whatever they picked then became part of the dinner in the evening for the forest kitchen that was absorption that was digestion that was fully having a relationship to the food on their plate you know and compare that to you know i again it's in the book right i put maslow's hierarchy of needs in there and understanding your fundamental needs like food right and if your fundamental need is is one of the basic fundamental needs at the very bottom of the pyramid right and that would

be getting a food need met right versus we're in port bella road right now and i've got to get the tube and i'm going to leg it into this convenience store here and tear in there grab a sandwich that has a really long shelf life or something you know um not caring about the soils that it comes from or any of that relationship just tear it open and wolf it down as quickly as i can in an upregulated state to get on the tube and then you know being enthralled in the chaos of london right all upregulated because i've been rushing who gets their food need met right right? In that relationship, because that's not absorbing that food, right? And it's where the food comes from.

So it's having a, even down to that level, like having a better relationship with the food, you know? Yeah, that's powerful. The heightened, you know, sensitivity to your environment that is so accessible through some pretty basic- Basic, yeah. Exercises. Free. And I couldn't help but think, is so accessible through some pretty basic exercises. Free. And I couldn't help but think, yeah, free,

truly available to all of us that can create that kind of shift. And then the neuroplasticity piece, right? Like I'm sure certain areas of your brain then light up. Right, like that heightened, yeah, like then to go forage in that heightened state to be so much more aware of what's available to you is powerful.

And then what is the shelf life of that? Because for someone like yourself, you live it, you've had these experiences, you've carried them into your life and you've built a life around those practices. I'm interested in whether, you know, those people who had that experience when they go back to their life, do they find a way to build that in or does it kind of dissipate? And before you know it, they're kind of back to doing what they were doing. Yeah. It's giving sort of flaw it's always giving them tools because i i you know i have this

um you know i no longer call retreats retreats i call them experiences because retreats would sense that you know retreating from something right and that's bad this is good right but for me it's an experience and we gain something from an experience right and for some of the some of the people there it's just understanding there's a relationship with food, you know? So there's a sensitivity around your food that might just be preparing your meal or a number of meals per week. And then the other one was just to sit and be with the food you're about to eat or downregulate with breath just before you're about to eat. They're, again, very simple practices that you can then offer. And then when we start to

down regulate and we start to take more time we're no longer so chronophobic as well right that fear of time i've got to get to this place on the you know and it's and actually we carve out more time for ourselves because we start to feel so amazing within those practices themselves right it's like getting here i could have easily you know jumped in a cab or got the tube but it's like no you know it's 30 minutes an amazing walk right you know for some that you know, jumped in a cab or got the tube, but it's like, no, you know, it's 30 minutes, an amazing walk, right? You know, and for some, you know, if I think back to when I was, you know, I said when I arrived, it reminds me of my mid-20s to early 30s.

I'd be in a cab, right? Yeah. I'd probably be hammered in a cab, you know, around this area. So, and it's equally understanding that we're all on this amazing path, right? And it's for some that have been on those experiences with me, for some it's just identifying that understanding of this is what it looks like in nature almost. And this is what it looks like in the human zoo.

And how can I bring some of these practices into this everyday environment? And also it can be just small steps. You know, if you think about going up a flight of steps, there's a step and then there's a flat part of the step and there's an up part of the step. So there's a small part of the experience and then you have to integrate it, right? So I make a step, integrate,

then on the flat part, go up again, integrate, flat part, rather than seeing it as this huge incline, you know, because you suddenly look at that and you're like, oh my God, that's a huge step I've got to make. And the point being with these practices, it's not. It took minutes actually just to enter the woods with your eyes closed. And it took minutes actually to do 100 cycles of breath.

You could try just before every meal, even this practice, like inhale up through your nose. You don't even have to count because self-accounting gets in the way and it's a chemical metabolic cost for thinking so just try and inhale for as long as you can into a relaxed belly start by relaxing your pelvic floor and your lower abdomen breathe in for as long as you can now try and extend the exhale and by extending the exhale we get a lowering of heart rate and blood pressure and six cycles of that is a minute just do that before

eating at least you're then you're improving the absorption of the food because if we're not doing that then what are we doing it's just satisfying a want whereas we need to think about more about needs food is a need but i have to digest it to reach the need right so how can i look at improving absorption and i think yeah those practices might seem extreme, but it doesn't take a minute, you know? Right. Four seconds in, six seconds out, six cycles, one minute. Do that before you eat. Or grace, sit with your family and just have grace, you know, before you eat. Right. Those old practices, you know? Yeah, that is a means of down regulation, right? On some level to just bring a little conscious awareness into your daily experience

and to mindfully engage with yourself to create an optimal state, whether it's for eating or for walking into a stressful situation. I mean, I think I wanna spend a little bit more time on down regulation. I think that's like a really powerful takeaway for people. It was cool to see you demonstrate that in the documentary,

like after a hard day on the three peaks run to like lay on a bed and like prepare your body for a state of overnight repair, right? Like to enter that phase of this extended endurance adventure with a conscious intention and a technique to kind of lure your physiology into a place where it can be receptive of that experience.

Yes, restorative again, isn't it? Right. Yeah, I think firstly describing like up regulation, down regulation, right? So up regulation, we could call fight and flight, you know, that fight and flight response or fight flight freeze that we experience. That's almost been normalized.

Well, we're all in a chronic state of it. Yeah. So again, if we look to nature as an example, there's Bruce Parry is a great person to talk to because he spent so much time with independent tribes. And he talks about his Penan and Benjeli tribes and how they're just in a frequency that you and i can only really

achieve through meditation right they're they're in there tuned in right and they're in this perfect harmony the whole time through left and right massaging that those hemispheres and that's a real down regulation they're in that and only when it becomes an a threat or an acute it becomes an acute response fight and flight it's acute it's not meant to be this extent extended chronic state so we so they're in down regulation say for their percentage let's say it was a 90 10 or an 80 20 even right 80 down regulation in this rest and digest moving through a landscape being the landscape in that foraging state that i took people in blindfolded that's them right that's where they're at that's why i bring those practices because it's so inspiring

hearing that and then 20 might be oh it needs to be an alert state but even their alert state i would say is more of a positive alert state it's like on you know not anxious but on you know just versus then it can be um we talk about the chronophobic kind of behavior of, let's talk about the underground, right? So behavior in the underground sometime when we lived in London and people would go, I had one guy come tearing down the stairs and he hit the bottom of the stairs

and then he went to do like a turn to the left, but he did like a Scooby-Doo of his legs and his legs carried on going, and then he just planted, that was it, face-planted on the deck. And then brushed himself off and then carried on running. And the doors of the tube shut, and it went. And then when I finally

arrive at the platform and I look up, the next one's in two minutes. You know, because the tube trains are every two minutes, right? It's two minutes to the next one. So the induced state of panic for no real benefit, like there's no payoff for inducing that like state of fear and anxiety.

Yeah, and it starts like, I mean, there's stages to it. It's a cumulative. And unless we find practices that enable us to step outside of it, this is why experiences or what we could call them retreats, right? Or workshops,

they enable us to get tools that we can then bring into those everyday environments, right, that can change our, maybe even our internal beliefs, but certainly allow us to step outside those everyday behaviors that perhaps aren't serving us, right? oh how about this in the lyrics of my friend nick mulvey happy is the man that breathes in the morning right so it could be right i i just sit and i just do some breath work in bed even just open my eyes instead of going right there's my phone and checking in just check in with yourself just breathe for a moment down regulation start calm you know and then try and remain calm and i'd prefer even to rock up two minutes late for something calm than I would to be up regulated mess because it's about then who's receiving me and what am I bringing into that environment. What energy are you?

And then everyone else goes all up regulated. You're not getting a good result out of that. No, it's like turning up for a meeting or imagine an interview or whatever it is and you're in that state. I go for a lot of these practices with our kids because it's so important at a young age to learn this if i knew most of these modalities when i was a kid i would have crushed it you know instead i was a mess in all my exams didn't come

away with anything and you know it could just be a simple practice with kids imagine mock exams rich or about oh you go through these practices as well as doing the exam so that you can remain calm in that situation. Because you know what? This exam is going to, this might be how the rest of your life plays out in this moment, right? And for some it is. There's so much involved in their education,

that's their careers and everything for the rest of their lives, but not being taught, well, these are practices that will enable you to think smarter in that environment, you know, and behave differently within it. So what would be one of those practices? I mean, you took us through the simplest of breath exercises, but I know you do a lot of stuff with like alternating nasal breaths.

Like what would be one tool that you could give to people? I would work with those extended exhales really. Like if you put your finger on your pulse, when you inhale, you'll notice your pulse picks up. And and then as you exhale you get a lowering of your pulse so it's tuning into that lowering of the pulse so even if you had someone that had you know blood pressure right i'm gonna go down my blood pressure red go to the doctors blood pressure goes up for most people when they enter the doctors right but if you started extending your exhales you'd have a different outcome so think of it like that i start to extend exhales it's whenever i've been on radio or it's been tv which is new for me i used to sit and just put a breathing app

on i put this on now this is by eddie stern eddie stern's like a stanger teacher put this free app out into the world it's brilliant it's genius and it just has a sliding scale of and you can set ratios on there. So this is like a four... Four seconds in, six seconds out. And it just gives you that tone. It has a circle on the inflates and then closes back down again. Right. And I have people working with that. And that app is called his name, Eddie Stern?

No, it's called Breathing App. So it's just Breathing App. It's free. If you have trouble finding look up eddie stern it was i think it was a stanger teacher like madonna and people like that but amazing to put a free app out there right and um so it has this disc on it so even if you're in a situation it could be a quiet coach or something and you can't have the sound on you just follow that inflated ball and it closes and opens and you just work with the breath to that

and it's so hypnotic i get people that having trouble sleeping five minutes of that they're done right it's so quick to drop in and it's a tool that you can just carry in your pocket right um and then eventually it gets to the point where you're just familiar with the breath like the four seconds in six seconds out um where to breathe through and i you know there's a lot of people out there operating like the breathing police at the moment right you need to breathe through. There's a lot of people out there operating like the breathing police at the moment. You need to breathe through your nose and breathe through your mouth. It's whatever is comfortable. I prefer you to inhale up through your nose.

There's this whole relationship with nitric oxide and what that does. It's a vasodilator and bronchodilator, so we know that with blood pressure and how we basically absorb oxygen, it's going to improve through that breath through the nose. It's also associated with parasympathetic rest and digest again right so down regulation and then you have these extended exhales and that could be out the nose or out the mouth just that's one way so that's breath um equally it could be um there's one of those 3 000 parks in london or one of those 8.4 million trees that is nearly enough for every person in

London to sit under the studies show just 20 minutes in nature is enough to lower heart rate and blood pressure just 20 minutes you know equally you can get that through staring at nature scenes like that on the wall with the trees there over your shoulder books with nature scenes in equally they've been suggested that will lower heart rate and blood pressure so if even if it was at your desk have something living on your desk that is you know within that urban linear box that we're in then just maybe if you're walking anywhere is to think one step one breath and start to slow the walk down appreciate the walk and even think about getting taller you know rather than shorter looking down

at a screen become taller take in your environment in your settings um what's the other new stuff that's coming through the visual field work so looking at the visual field opening up that panorama opening up the view that's also associated with parasympathetic so if you think of our screens being the obviously the complete opposite of that like really focused in hyper visual state right um is associated then with what would be a sympathetic state this fight and flight a wider taking a wider gaze and a softer yeah and try and soften your visual field and wider so and especially if you're out in nature like those guys that took those blindfolds on like wow okay and open up the visual field so if you think visual field breath work

nature and then you know it's not enough even just to you know i did a piece on this the other day it's it's even with meditation breath work we can often just get and sit like with the breath i'm just going to sit now and do some breathful meditation but if your physical vessel is starved of movement and compromised and stiff and rigid and then really it's not the best vessel to receive so i would look at kind of just some mobility practices as well that help especially with that respiratory system think of where that is oh it's the thoracal spine can i do some mobility or ranges around that to open things up hanging is brilliant for that okay because again it opens everything up um enables that whole respiratory pathway to open up

and then again just look at moving throughout your day like moving through a landscape and make it make it inconvenient make movement inconvenient look at your own landscape right how do i get from there to there in the most inconvenient way you know i set people in my online community it's called nat life tribe and i give them homework i meet them three times a week and i give them homework we might finish on some simple like low gate walking or crawling practices and where your homework is you have to hoover your whole apartment in a low gate walk so low gate walk is like being on the ground almost right real knees over toe work trying to remain upright if you were down in a low squat with your heels up but you could walk in that position right yeah and so it's as if you're

foraging off the ground like that but now you're hoovering instead because we no longer forage off the ground and then others might be like crawling right now you have to think of weird and wonderful ways to crawl around your apartment because again it's hugely nourishing right and it's stuff that we've lost within this landscape and the thing about this landscape unfortunately again on that term of neuroplasticity, we are literally just moving from one linear box to another linear box on another linear street, right? We have headphones in or heads down in phones. So it's how can we nourish that within those urban environments?

So again, it's not demonizing the city, but it's finding ways of living within it that are enhancing. Right. And it does require you to kind of set aside your ego a little bit. I mean, you have all these videos of you like crawling around on the ground with your kids and like waving your arm,

flapping your arms around and stuff like that. Like there's a little bit of shared DNA with Ido Portal and the work that he does, like bringing play into all of this and making it joyous and fun and not being so self-conscious. Like, you know, we're not gonna be able to go down work that he does, like bringing play into all of this and making it joyous and fun and, and, and not being so self-conscious. Like, you know, we're not going to be able to go down on Portobello road and crawl around, you know, like we might get arrested. I don't know. You've probably do this

or have done it. I don't know. But I, you know, it's like, people are going to clam up. Like, I can't, I can't be that way in the world. Right. Like, But how can we let go a little bit of that? I mean, you've got to quote something about like, we have to become less ego conscious and more echo conscious and echo being broadly defined as our physical vessels, but also our environment in which we share. Yeah, so it's disconnecting from the ego system and reconnecting to our ecosystem and there's

practices in there that i i call rechilding right so it's about taking people through a process so they can remove all the all that armor and awkwardness that comes you know it's like when did adulthood when did it become so serious right when when was that what was the point and i often talk about schooling because we unschool, and it's not, again, to demonize schooling, but it's to say, well, what happens within that schooling environment, right? Whereas we are very playful. If I look at my youngest, he's like just play the whole time, right?

He's even playing with his emotions when he lets rip and just starts tearing the house down or whatever he's doing. He's still playing. He's playing with his emotions when he lets rip and just you know starts tearing the house down or whatever he's doing he's still playing he's playing with emotions and then Tallulah is like she's a buddhica she's like really wild and roaring and you know just full of energy but they're so playful and so that's up until Tallulah's now six so she would be ready for school right five or six and then you enter that environment and then that play that you're allowed to play with all your emotions and your expressions is suddenly in a container, right,

in a linear room all of a sudden, in a chair with a hierarchical system. And suddenly you're no longer allowed to speak when you would normally just let rip and just let stuff go. So we all then get a bit locked up, even in our throat chakras, if you think about that, from a very early age, right? So that's expression expression that goes and then we're allowed out to play in an environment that is adult led in a way right it's painted lines and stuff that we think they would want

to play around very specific parameters of what that play can yeah and within health and safety right so it's not it's not this isn't again it's not the schoolness this is the systems that we've created over time right and then within that then you're then returned back to the classroom environment and then over time that play experience becomes lunch break right and then you have pe and pe is then very specialized less generalist very there is play within it but it's specialist place it becomes a sport right and it's repetition and repetition of movement in a way so my practices have been but we we have these workshops now called 100 human experience and it starts with an opening circle usually around a

fire and then we set intentions we have people to kind of introed within it and then then i open up play so it's now the circle opens up and I have people just meandering around in a circle and they walk around they brush shoulders they make eye contact now they bump shoulders and bump bums together and all of a sudden laughter comes immediately it's done like within five minutes complete strangers suddenly just giggling away and then it continues right now you stop and you hold their shoulders you look at them in the eyes then you carry on walking and then eventually it's like when you stop make eye contact really strong eye contact then walk off again because if you'll notice here very little eye contact will occur in where we are right now in

london right and then eventually those layers those facades though that armor is broken down with 100 complete strangers suddenly you start working as one that collective bonding starts to occur and then i have them holding each other's shoulders and then yelling into each other's eyes you are loved right and all of a sudden you can see people just cracking at that moment right it's very emotional even just to have someone look at you in the eyes and say you are loved and especially after you've dealt with getting the armor away that's broken through that allows that emotion and then it continues and it turns into this very playful there's so much humor and belly laughter that is in that moment.

And when we return back to the circle before going into the next practice, which is usually breath, the sharing is always, you know, Oh my God, it's as if I've just re-entered back there and I can't believe that I gave all that away. And that's re-childing, just as that's re-wilding, but it's re-childing for me and you know it's it's it's such a powerful powerful practice almost beyond what the breath work and the ice bath is because you're stripping away many many layers there and going back into a playful state of mind it's like play isn't just play it's a state of mind which then opens up new worlds and And we have people that, well, we've all been stuck at some point, right?

And we get stuck and we almost get stuck in a character. And we can get stuck in a character of depression. I'm holding men's circles and the amount of guys that come on those circles who are locked in with depression, right? And we go through the same practices, like really playful stuff. And it's a way all of a sudden of reconnecting with your imagination brain let's say right and you can imagine yourself in as a different being altogether you can imagine yourself in a completely different position in life you can imagine yourself

as someone completely different to the person that's stuck right now and they reawaken from that through acts of play there's trauma work in play it's fascinating when you go into it like as a modality for dealing with mental health issues even right and then we have to say well where does that stuff enter oh well is it perhaps when i had my playful state of mind removed could it be that that i no longer can imagine myself in these different worlds and i think we talked about this on the last podcast there's that um it's peter gray he wrote this book called free to learn right so i'm gonna i'm gonna mention it again because i think it's really valuable as he asked 10 leading anthropologists what play looks

like in nature and they look at three independent tribes different geographic locations and first the first thing they come back with all all of them it's like they're the most well-adjusted well-rounded individuals they've ever met right are the children and what does it what does it look like and they said well from infancy through to teenage years all the kids do is play and they play at being everything within the environment so that they play it even being they play at the adults imagine through that experience they have birth they have death they have all these different rites of passage that occur, but also they learn to track animals. They learn that stuff that I've taught people blindfolded to go into. They learn foraging seals. They can build shelters. They can track. So suddenly they enter adulthood. Is adulthood

any different then? Isn't it not just the playful state of mind that they're achieving? They're managing to walk around. It then brings Bruce Parry's work in where they're in this permanent state of meditation that you and I can only achieve. Is that possible for us then? You know, if you think about it, if you really unpacked it that way. So there's so much to that playful state of mind

that we could open up and unpack. Yeah, the level of layers, the extent to which we build these, you know, castles around our identities and our personas and the adherence to social constructs and rules, all of that calcifies our ability to just be who we are and play by its own definition requires a sort of transcendency of the logical, rational,

you know, like looping mind, right? It is a flow state of sorts in the sense that when you're playing, you're not really thinking about what you're doing, you're being, right? And when you're being, there isn't room for all of those narratives to get in the way, right?

But the more we erect these walls around ourselves, the more difficult it is to connect with that primal state of play because the ego intercedes and tells us like, you'll look like an idiot if you do that. Or what is somebody gonna say if you behave in this certain way? And all of these things create a

prison of our own making that is driving you know it's it's obviously more complicated than that but you know has to be on some level at the root of some of these you know depressive tendencies that we're seeing on the rise yeah again i think it goes back to imagining yourself in other realms even you know and those kids in nature, again, they're learning everything about their environment. I mean, that's one consciousness, is it not? That's understanding real biodiversity because you've literally been everything within that habitat, right? So, and then versus like the men's circles that I'm holding, you know, in the UK, it's like, what is the number one killer in men under the age of 50 is suicide, right?

So there's what's happening here, right? Right, and there's something uniquely British about not, men are not demonstrative in their emotions here by default, right? Well, again, I think- There's a cultural norm around like- How far we go back, though. It's like, where do we go? Because if you think about, say, the Celt ancestors, they were again about being and being at one with land and

huge emotional stories and and weaving folks taught stories and song and is it it feels to me it's almost like when the written word come in almost you know it's like that that what what do we lose in those processes but i think you're%, I think for the guys that I meet, suddenly you get them in a circle and yet they're communicating all of a sudden. You create a ceremony and then it's as if it's so in our DNA to hold ceremony in circle. When you create it, men open up and start sharing.

That is very different, you know i think it's it's within us it's almost in those what i call the like the primordial like union primordial database it's within us right there's something within our dna that ceremony and circle enables us to tap into that which is whatever again a rewilding right there's also letting stuff out i have guys like allowing them to roar and shout and yell and express that suddenly they probably put a lid on that because they felt it was so inappropriate that level of that level of masculinity letting that stuff out and why do we need to let that out well so it doesn't erupt in places where it is inappropriate right so it's giving them a

modality but work on this right a healthy cathars Yeah, and one of the guys, he went into, he said he hadn't been able to go to his local shops, just felt, just couldn't get out to do it, just felt disconnected and a level of depression, of course. And then post-weekend, like 24 hours, 24-hour experience, right, went into his local town, went into one of his local shops, and they're like, oh, how are you, man? He's like, oh, you, man? He's

like, I'm great. It's well, we haven't seen you in ages. Have you been on holiday? He's like, no. I said, have you lost weight? It's something very different about you. You look, do you look really, you look great. And he said, yeah, I just went, just went and spent 24 hours with this guy, you know, and explain, unpacked it with them. And it's just, again, it just, it was was playing with experience had them in deep play for work like playing partner partner work forehead to forehead when one moves the other one has to mirror the movement and i had them even sparring and play fighting and rolling around and playing with each other's weights and again things that we we almost

have lost like that level of expression or human contact. And I think partly the three years we've had has meant a real disconnect from human contact. And I explained to one of the guys, think about it like this. You wake up in the morning, get hit with early light immediately. Serotonin, one happy hormone. Tick.

Okay, he has a family. Okay, hugging. Go and hug your family. Oxytocin, another happy hormone. Done. All right, now get out and move more. Okay, so then we have dopamine- hormones associated with happiness done right now we have um let's maybe up the um intensity of it then we can bring endorphins in and then all of a sudden right

we've got four happy hormones you can put in the happy hormone shaker give it a good shake and bam out you come and that you could see there was almost like the guys like, yeah, but that sounds so simple. But it is. Take me behind the velvet rope, Tony. You know, come on. It's so- It's that thing. There's an adage in recovery that's similar. Like when you've been sober for a while

and you're in this 12-step community, at some point you reach this Rubicon where you're like, yeah, I get it, man. But like, what's the next thing? Like, what's the next, I've done all that stuff, like, but I'm still struggling with this. Like, tell me the secret that you haven't told me yet. It's like, no, it's just back to these principles.

You just need to practice them a little bit more. Like the human mind wants to find, and you see it like played out on social media. Like, what's the one thing that, you know, nobody's telling you. And the truth is, and everything that you are is about this, like it is, there is no secret. It's these very basic things that we've always known

that we need to find a way to return to. And the process of returning to them involves unlearning so much of what, you know, we've been indoctrinated in and opening ourselves up in a childlike way to these, you know, innate pulls that we all have that connect us as humans, whether it's the campfire or the breath exercise or hugging your family members or like embracing the day

by acknowledging the sunlight into your eyes upon awakening. Like all of these things are so crucial and fundamental. And yet in this age of reason and enlightenment, we dismiss them as trivial because we exist and value our identity from a perspective of what is going on in between our ears, the intellectualization of everything. And this is like a thing I have with Julie.

She's more on the polarity of human experiences. I would place her much closer to you. And because of my upbringing, my default setting is to pivot back to that intellectualization of everything. And I've grown a lot and become much more open to different experiences or we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

But when stressed, I will revert, you know, and then she's like, what do you know? And it's hard, man. You know, it's like those, because I can see, you know, there's wisdom in both of these things. They have to coexist on some level, right? And finding that right balance for me of being open to what I know and to new experiences,

and also relying on the intellect when appropriate is like this dance that I'm always in this, it's not a war, it's more like a relationship. Yeah, well, there's symbiosis in that, right? Isn't there? Sure. I think, as I said at the beginning of the conversation, there is this information rich and experience poor moment. And it's just been mindful, is there values,

is there a philosophy in there somewhere within us, right? That we can go, well, the information at least I'm gathering is just, like for me, I have this physical, social, spiritual understanding, right? Within the physical self, I know there's movement and play and sleep and rest and how I eat and digest and sunlight and water, right? And sex, right? Okay, so the information I'm going to gather, I'm going to go and put this back. What I'm going to do now, as I have all that information, I'm going to implement it

and action it and experience it, rather than get lost in this information the whole time. It's a bit like studying, right? You can go from school to college, university, and then postgrad stuff, and then keep going, keep going, keep going. Because actually, the big wide world of when you finally have to go and implement that stuff can be quite scary so sometimes it's easier to remain in education and also it sometimes helps feed the ego of when i do get involved in a conversation i can articulate that conversation well and i have enough information behind me to prove that i'm an intellect right so there's or there might be a frustrated academic underneath it right that needs to learn and i i very much went into information, information, information.

And then I go, right, experience, experience, experience, experience. And I think that's a healthy balance. It's like go and actually practice it. Give it time. You know, give it the hoodie time, right? Know that this stuff's always going to be here. We are so abundant of information. But if we don't go and experience it, you know, what are we losing?

Right, and well, wisdom is birthed out of the experience of that information, right? Like putting that information into action from that, you know, is what arises. Like we have too much information right now, not enough wisdom. If you want the wisdom, you've got to apply the information

and experience it yeah because again it's actioning is the growth right so it's growth happens in action right let's go and really experience this stuff and in that you also find perhaps what it is for rich what it is for tony to experience it right so we get our own interpretation. So it's not just our own unique interpretation, it's also our unique way of processing and then perhaps expressing, right? So what is the universe uniquely assigned for you and uniquely assigned for me is completely different.

And the more and more I get to experience and be, the more I get to fully tune into what that is, right? And to fully express what it is through me you know rather than maybe through the voice of another you know right yeah and i think in that in that place you can find a deeper reservoir of empathy and non-judgment of others yeah i've there's a funny one around judgment because i've you know in this in my kind of online communities or few of them in there is thinking what others think of them this've you know in this in my kind of online communities or a few of them in there it's thinking what others think of them this judgment you know it could be about the playful

work or hanging even on the tube or it could it could be anything within their environment right and then it's you know people i feel that people may be judging me and then you realize that well it's judgment you're judging them for judging you. So judgment is the tier, right? That's where we need to do the work, right? Yeah, the meta-judgment that's going on. The bigger picture of judgment, what is that? How dare you judge me judging you, judging me judging you. Judging you, that's there, right?

Yeah, man, that's there, right? So the book is organized under these four principles, all R's, reboot, reconnect, rewild, and then refine. We've talked a little bit about unlearning, talked a little bit about reconnecting, rewilding. What else can be said about this, you know, process of understanding these pillars? Well, I think I look at rebooting, it's almost like this, there's a lot of practices in there for rebooting, right? Even that, the breath that we've discussed is an opportunity to just have a reboot in a moment, you know?

Right, like big reboots, like full life reboots all the way down to mini. So for me, it's very interesting period because a lot of my stuff went online. And so there's been an adjustment within that that had to happen. So within our environments, when I have a studio that's set up

and if I'm say mentoring someone it's now more more often it's online and sometimes you are receiving you know all kinds of information right and some of it's like a lot in there to process and and if i left that studio and just open up the door and walked into the house my family are then receiving that as well so for me it's you know i there's a reboot there okay i'll just stop at the door take a breath long exhale okay walk out and then the next door i open take a breath long exhale walk in you know so just breathing just imagine you had like a crazy day at the office and then a crazy commute home and you're carrying all that

stuff and then you arrive at the door and you open up the door and you walk in with all that stuff and you have kids and the kids dying to meet Papa at that moment and it seems like a lifetime and then all of a sudden you've brought all this kind of you could call it toxic, right? Information in the house. So that can be a reboot on a micro level, right?

A bigger reboot might be, okay, I'm going to go and I might get into an ice bath at home we have a couple of setups i have a barrel and i have a big dip tank there and so that's that's maybe on a on a bigger level of that or you could go even higher than that and i might go to psychedelics or something you know to have a real kind of reboot reconnecting that's for me is mainly around reconnecting to the fact that we're nature and not not separate of it it's interconnected us and nature we are one in that sense so i think there's the spending more time in those organic situations to become more of an organic being and to have

more organic behaviors in those environments everyday environments the more more nature immersion the more natural the outcome will be i would say and then trying to bring as much of that then into everyday environments so there's maybe that reconnection starts off with yourself and then perhaps then it moves out and okay maybe i might want to be doing more around the environment or environmental issues that are going on in the world but it starts i think with the with the human within that conversation biodiversity we have to reconnect to the fact that we are nature. And then we realise we're sitting around this huge table of interdependence

with the plants, the rocks and the animals, and it's all one thing, right? And rather than seeing we're separate of it or controlling of it, rewilding is that state, it's getting back to that position of, well, again, what is it to move through a landscape, to be the landscape, to inhale the landscape, not just reconnecting to the fact we are, it's rewilding all the behaviours within it, you know? And then refinement is, you know,

even when you think you've absolutely nailed it, is to keep going back and keep going back and keep going back to refine things because there's so much value in that refinement. But more often than not, I along that along all of those journeys is to go in with complete compassion for yourself and others right so um there's a guy on one of our last um 100 human experiences i he he comes in and he delivers the um a practice on alignment so he had everyone sitting in a circle on our bums in a long sits.

Your legs are straight out in front of you, but you're sitting up like all barefoot. So there's like a hundred people in a circle with their feet all together. It looks amazing. We have a fire pit in the middle. Love that. Just that alone.

I was done at that point. Don't need an alignment circle. Yeah, there's no video, but like Tony's lit up like a Christmas tree just imagining that. This is your dharma and your heaven spot, like a campfire and a lot of bare feet pointed in your direction. Yeah, and just doing deep work together, you know,

and going through that reboot, reconnect, rewild. This is the experience. And he really brought something that was quite special and it drove something within me. So there's, he would ask questions. It'd be about alignment, it might be, you know. We did a lot a lot of voice awakening work you know i was saying at some stage we would all been told like from the moment you're born right you come out making all this noise in the world and then everyone's like don't speak trying to keep you quiet or the children be seen not heard

kind of behavior comes in and then you sit in a classroom where you're you have to pick hand up to even speak so the suppression of the stakes of what you're going to say yeah are heightened so then we could say rebooting rebooting would be a voice awakening practices to reconnect to the fact that i have this natural voice and then we rewild the voice you know and then there's refinement within that even looking at that level so he so within that circle it's like well who we have a voice awakening coach prior to that her name is kate lister she is phenomenal so she gets everyone playing with their voice and you get people that come up and they're like a bit awkward you know and um one guy um on the last what was his name um i won't mention his name actually so he was a 55 year old dude and he said oh tony when you

asked me to come up speak at the very beginning i was so nervous and then we actually unpacked it and went right back and it was school assembly where the trauma came in so the school assembly was oh he has to come out to the front stage and talk to a whole tribe of people that he probably hasn't you know he's only met a few of them that have become his mates and he now has to speak in front of that whole audience which some might excel at immediately but if you haven't been given the tools and the modalities to be able to go up there, a bit like walking into the exam and doing breath before that, then that's traumatic. So his PTSD was in there, right?

So whenever he has to stand up, he's like, can't speak. So we gave him voice awakening work. So then you sit in the circle and it would be, Chris would say, in this giant foot circle of 100 humans in El Cis around the fire, he would would say so if any of you came here today you know maybe you had difficulty speaking your truth if you felt that you you've now worked through that and we've processed that do you think you can make a step

forward and they do like a I called it the Angela riddle which my mum she used to do these bum exercises in that L-sit position try and move around the lounge like that so like hip hinging for a bum and so it's like this bum shuffle you'd make a bum shuffle forward or you'd make a bum shuffle back and you had this whole series of questions but you went through all the chakras this way right it's fascinating right and then eventually you had people forward people back all around this circle so they're no longer in this really organized circle it's very fragmented right in that sense but they're all moving towards the fire so they all have this purpose of getting to the fire this path and that was the thing about the path look around you we're all walking towards

this same direction but we're all at different stages you know so we're all basically being asked of different things and different process and we're all at different stages in life but ultimately we're all on the same path and then he said now just reach over maybe that person in front you can just about reach them with your toe but reach and touch them the person behind you reach them where your fingers and now can you see that we're all connected you know on that path it was so powerful beautiful you know yeah, all of this is very holistic and on some level individualistic. These practices and modalities and lifestyle habits are all about integrating mind, body, spirit, et cetera. The reductive human wants to say, Tony, just give me the three things. Like, what do I, you know, like,

what's the most important practice? Or should I do breath? Or should I do meditation? Or is it important that I do the cold immersion? Like, that's the human animal, right? This is a matrix of, you know, countless practices, some small, some big, all of which you're free to experiment with, all of which you can find, you know, in Tony's work and in his book, et cetera. And I'm sure you get this question a lot, especially you're doing media around the book. Like, what are the three things that I should be doing that I'm not doing? Or, you know, on some level it's about communicating

these ideas in a way that's digestible and practical for somebody who's trying to understand where you're coming from. Well, again, Nick Mulvey's lyrics always come to mind for me, happy is the man who breathes in the morning. It's not enough just to breathe in the morning, so we need movement and we need to kind of wake up that physicality, right? And get into the vessel, get grounded, I would say. So move, move more, more you know and move in ways that you can't really recognize as exercise in a sense that might mean um sitting less on the couch you know watching netflix whilst being on the floor play with different sitting positions if you're on zoom

maybe turn that hour-long zoom session into an hour mobility session you know some ground sitting positions in the book, right, that you can play with. There's six in there. I have tutorials and things like that you can have a look at. But have a little play. And if you have kids, just observe the kids on the ground, how they move, and they're your best teachers.

Okay, I can do that. I can do that. I can't do that. Just play with it. And you'll find that the more and more you play around on the ground, the softer and more mobile you'll become over time. So what might start off as stiff, you know know you'll get signals to say that's enough now i need to move so rich i might be kneeling it's a little bit of a niggle there it's a bit

tender okay move next thing next movement and the more you move and the more you then you go back to it so you stretch the discomfort over time rather than sitting in discomfort for too long getting an emotional response and then going no i can't hack this anymore it doesn't work it's just play with the edges of discomfort and comfort until you can push the boundaries of that until eventually like me sitting becomes more uncomfortable for me than actually being on the ground i much prefer being on the ground and it's assisted so much within my endurance work i think in the documentary there's a the one man two feet three peaks I've just run up Snowdon and back down again and then completed two marathons after that and there's a whole elevation of like 7,400 that day and we get back to a campsite and I'm now kneeling on the ground eating food with

my kids you know and that mobility stuff on the ground enables me to then stand up and move again if i went to sitting i'd get so locked up in hips and ankles and everything else so just try and yeah think about nourishing movement and the movement will enable other practices breath great easy simple breathing practices you know it's free movement is free on the ground don't need a gym membership for that don't need to exercise working from home anyway just improve that space create a space where you can move to begin with i guess right so that's that that's um i would then look at right the voice work if you have trouble speaking or articulating breathing helps because then you can remain calm when that upregulated voice comes in you can breathe that

but also opening this stuff up i i would get a cushion and like scream and yell into the cushion and let stuff out just really have a practice of that it doesn't have to be with the voice coach in a big hundred human circle it can just be in your apartment with a pillow if things get too much for you and you feel like you have to let go it's much better to let go and screw the lid even tighter. Be playful. Can you just look at maybe what's an adult version of the play stuff that we can think of? Dance.

Put music on and play with your physicality. Dance. Draw the curtains. No one's looking then. Do you know what I mean? Just have a proper dance but i see myself i'm embarrassed of myself but you can start with shakes like you can even start with simple shakes on the spot boom boom boom boom and find that and you suddenly start to find ah

there's play in that there's movement in that and start to let that go because the rigid forms start to break down after a while and that's not woo-woo again because there's so many studies around this kind of tremor work and trauma releasing work and through vibrations and shaking and that's all there right so stuff gets locked up in the body and that rigidity gets locked up and then the where i'd really go and i think this is probably the really important one to unpack because we all do lots of this and that's the sleep right and but it's not the sleep it's the environment of which we sleep and going back to that inorganic consumption leads to inorganic behaviors and beings it's the one thing really that it's not so free to begin with but it's very

freeing over time is to look at the environment of which you sleep that you spend a third of your life in and try and make it as organic as possible. So that might mean switching out the soft furnishings and the fabrics and even the paints, go to clay paints and just over time, bit by bit by bit, that might mean my budget only allows a pillowcase this month. Just choose a pillowcase. If one pillowcase is an improvement, it's an organic pillowcase, right? And just think about that expression then is that's what i'm inhaling that experience for eight hours clean up the air could mean air purifiers right systems like that um if you're in like portobello road like we are now you are not going to open a window and sleep like that right so you need to think right but i've trapped that in this space so we know the air quality in here is just as disturbing as it is outside right then you can think well

lighting right how do i get my lighting back to how it would be in nature so it's less like daytime light it's more like nighttime so that's what we call biological darkness we unpacked a fair bit of that on the on the first pod right around melatonin but we now know that melatonin is um heals oxidative stress it's an antioxidant antiviral work um it contributes towards digestion um immune anti-cancer properties it's vast right way beyond and some of those studies around diabetes even they're suggesting through one journal that it's like after a number of months of supplementing on melatonin the change within insulin they're no longer diabetic so it's after a number of months of supplementing on melatonin, the change within insulin, they're no longer diabetic.

So it's vast, man. And so I think just with the anti-obesity, anti-cancer properties around melatonin, that's lighting. So where we could go in the bedroom is then think, right, can I switch my lighting over time to be amber tones? And to begin with, depends depends on budget that might mean a glass jar with a tea light in it right you know or it might mean a bit more budget amber glasses and the other big thing within that environment then is to think firelight right so firelight

and information around the fire so if you're in your in the tribe let's say there's one study that we've talked about in the past, which Professor Siegel, University of California, three independent tribes, and not one of them sleeps for eight hours. It's between 5.7 and 7.1 hours. But what's different? There's the temperature, so thermogenic temperature, the temperature again. There's lighting.

And there's also, there's stuff that happens around the fire so that's the communication and what we're absorbing so when we say inorganic consumption that also means what you're possibly absorbing through your phone at night not just the lighting because we can get past that by wearing amber glasses and we can think yes okay i can still sit up scrolling because i've got my amber glasses on it's actually actually what you're consuming. So if it's like murder, thriller, intense stuff, is that conducive with sleep? No. So I would go, well, try and keep the tech out of the bedroom

and think, you know, the bedroom's for bedrooming, right? Sleeping, sex, whatever it is. But try and keep the work and stuff out there. If you work from home and it has to be, that's the only room that you can work in, then try and really disconnect from it, change something within it to make it more of a ceremony for when you do go to sleep but you're definitely being mindful of the information that you receive before sleep because that will also play out so that guy that was running for the tube that morning

it didn't start when he woke up you know it starts really from when we go to sleep. Sure, sure. Yeah, I think that, I mean, look, obviously, the more you align your biological system with the circadian rhythms of the planet, the more, you know, attuned you're gonna be and the more likely it is that you're gonna have a restful night of sleep. I think so much of what people consider to be sleep disorders are really just ruminations

of the mind. Like they haven't moved enough to kind of activate the appropriate hormone balance over the course of the day. And I count myself guilty of this. Like I'll live in my head and I'll be looping some narrative of some problem that I have with somebody or some resentment that I have or somebody or some resentment that I have, something like that, and I can't shut it off, right?

I cannot, I can't, like every time I try to move my thinking gently towards something more down regulatory, if I'm not being super aware, it'll snap back to that narrative. And it is like paying attention to that has been amazing. But when I'm in that state, it is an upregulated state and it makes restful sleep close to impossible. It keeps me up at late, et cetera.

And I think this is a really common thing. And people are like taking sleep medication because they believe they have a sleep disorder, but it's not a sleep disorder. No. It's an anxiety of the mind. Upregulation again, right? Upregulation versus downregulation.

Yeah, I've had a number of people come that perceive themselves as insomnia again. But firstly, it's the environment, the habits within the habitat before sleep is one. And then it's putting practices in place that enable you to get to down regulation so if you rather than allowing the mind to go back it's not enough to just down regulate and breathe i'd use stuff like that breathing app because you just focus in on it it's a bit like counting sheep but you you're guiding it through breath and you go deep with that and it doesn't take long it doesn't mean taking a device in but

you can do all that on flight mode and turn the screen off that's that's a powerful tool right right i don't want to make this about me but i i can't like have you here and not like at least solicit your input on like my chronic lower back problem i've talked too much of it about it on the podcast so i don't want to linger on it but much. But it's really prevented me from being as active and as mobile and as agile as I would like to be. And I've been on this learning curve, this education about all the, it's very complicated, like all the different things that could have,

probably did contribute to this condition and that are exacerbating and perpetuating it from, you know, stored emotional trauma all the way to, you know, glutes that won't fire, you know, like very basic things to more kind of ephemeral things and trying to kind of settle on a modality of healing and kind of where I'm at with it right now is a combination of multiple things, but a lot of it has to do with natural movement and trying to get muscles that have never fired to start activating and then slowly

through natural posture and movement, trying to strengthen these underutilized muscles and basically shift my pelvic posture into better alignment so that the movements that I want to engage in aren't causing me pain. Yeah. Okay. So if I observe you when you're sitting. Yeah.

So your right shoulder and right side flexors are quite dominant and then your head hinges to your left yes always okay my head is always going to the left and then even the way that you communicate about your back immediately your shoulders end up right around your ears immediate response of this stress that's there right so there's an obviously emotional tears to it right layer to it i would go well if we're talking about natural movement and movement, what have we just been doing for, we've been here a while now, right? We've just been sitting, right? And sitting again is not a natural form, right?

So if we just took natural movement back to its real basics and just said, okay, I need to be performing on the ground in order to heal and reconnect, reboot, rewild, refine those joint actions. And the more aligned my joint actions are, the more appropriate the joint actions are, the more stable my pelvis and my lower back can be. Every time I sit, I then compromise that. I go against the way that the joint actions,

every joint action is compromised through sitting, right? We talked about hip flexors and glutes. The reason we have to switch our glutes on because they're so stagnant when we sit, right? Whereas if you squat, you don't have that relationship, right? And you're always experiencing your body weight in the same areas of your feet when you stand up. You could say it's an endurance event, just squat and standing right alone look to the hadza again thousands

and thousands of years have been living the same lifestyle they're just as sedentary as we are right they spend 10.5 hours sitting right they just it's this notion that they're always busy and active and hunting no it's been 10 and a half hours sitting just their 10 and a half hours are on the ground sitting and every ground rest position is we could call like a prerequisite or something that has to be involved engaged into how we stand then how we walk and how we run so when we just go to one sitting form in a chair which isn't conducive for standing up there's little wonder why we have chronic back conditions neck conditions even knee conditions because we're no longer taking the knee even into the depths of range that it needs yeah yeah so it's then not about this not about it's basically

quick fixes of i say quick fixes of further distraction from the truth and the truth is we just don't move enough right and and we sit for long periods of time but in inappropriate shapes which then create symptoms and then we're trying to then search a symptom relief so we go and see this specialist this specialist this specialist but we haven't changed the behavior right you know so i would go to the i deal with the cause level for me personally that's where i've always gone with backs and knee injuries is to get the optimal or natural ranges back into them right right so that would begin like still but still you still have because you're still having symptom relief like you can see this person this person

but then what are you doing with that otherwise it's more information right yeah well what I need to do is then flip the experience and say well what's the natural what's the natural sitting positions right let's just keep doing this stuff because the symptom stuff's working for me right now really helps to go and see this practitioner sometimes that's just an emotional hug right that's what that becomes because it's chronic it's sometimes it's no longer existing where it did right sometimes there's even a blockade and we hold on to it for a bit longer and we have to find a way a mechanism releasing it but then keep going back into this like trigger point works fantastic but it's not fantastic on its own because you have to go back and see the trigger point specialist again have trigger points specialist and then go

and change up your movement and make your movement as organic as possible so i would go try and flip even to start with because it seems so extreme to think i'm going to suddenly go and sit on the floor for 10 and a half hours just do segments of it and bring more of it into your everyday. Otherwise, it's seated posture that affects the way the hip joints behave, affects the way the pelvis behaves because you've created like counter-nutation with the pelvis, compromises the SI joints, abs are off right now. I have to work really hard to remain upright.

Mid-back and shoulders can pop up. there's so much that happens just from sitting and the more compliant the chair the more stiff we become in it and the more awkward the positions we get into right right whereas if you sit on a really hard seat suddenly you're actually more aware well if you sit on a really hard floor you'll be more aware sit on a really cushioned floor you can you have it's a more sympathetic to play with so that's sometimes nicer then you can use supports and bolsters and things to help so if you're sitting cross-legged maybe to start if it's too intense put a bolster underneath your butt if you're sitting in a squat and you can't get down because your ankles aren't quite flexible enough put a little wedge behind your heels and allow your pelvis to relax in those

sitting positions because often there's tension there as well. So relaxing the pelvic floor really helps. I think lower abdomen, let that stuff go. And then look at the behaviors of the joints. How do I mobilize the ankle more? How can I mobilize my hip more? And the more mobile the hip, the more stable the knee. The more stable the knee, the more mobile the hip.

The more mobile the hip, the more stable the pelvis and the lumbar. And think about that, even that joint-by-joint approach. I by joint approach when if you apply that joint by joint approach to how we're sitting now yeah where's the ankle mobility where's the hip mobility and where's the knee stability so unfortunately it has to be lumbar pelvis and then the mid-back and we all know what the couching slouching surfing um swiping typing posture looks like now it's really evident that thoracal spine gets um a real kyphosis going right and the head position ends up more forward and the problem with that then again is that when you do go to walk we're no longer aligned the head isn't up the chest isn't up the pelvis and all those three aren't stacked appropriately their heads a huge weight

the more forward it is of that base of support, the longer you have to stride, the longer your levers, the more forces you have to deal with, you're tall, right, so you have to do even more work, right, because of the length of your levers, and I often discuss this with parents, with kids, and if you don't keep these modalities of movement alive, and you go into a school environment, and you don't keep the movement modalities of movement alive and you go into a school environment and you don't keep the movement modalities alive as a parent outside of that right like parkour is great for that and free running is great for that because they're really expressing their physicality it's very natural that when you get to a certain age teenage years you suddenly have massive growth spurts and whereas if you were divorced from movement and you suddenly weren't moving around how nature

intended and suddenly you have a growth spurt it's like baby giraffes walking around and no idea how to move their limbs anymore whereas if you carried on moving naturally throughout your day like punctuated in amongst your day i'm gonna just sit more on the ground or i'm gonna hang or i'll do this suddenly those growth spurts aren't so alarming because you've created a micro kind of adjustment as you've addressed it. So I'd really think about, it's the everyday stuff, it's the environment stuff. What can you take control of in your everyday habitat,

in your everyday environment? Because otherwise all that work is just, it's literally symptom relief and you really need to get to the cause of it, you know? Yeah. Because we might be going on runnings the cause or cycling on the bikes the cause. I would say it's the stuff that you've been doing

for 10 and a half hours a day that isn't natural that then you go and try and run with and try and cycle with that then compromises that chain. Yeah, I think I shared this last time. My default is sitting, doing like this, or at a desk preparing to do something like this, and then popping up and immediately going and working out.

And then when I'm done, just sitting back down again. Yeah. Yeah. So what you said, it's like, okay, so let's just look at getting from the chair that you've been in for hours to going straight to exercise. That's like going, right, here's the jelly in a real liquid form, and I pour it into the mold, right? That's like going, right, here's the jelly in a real liquid form, and I pour it into the mold.

That's you working out now, the liquid, because you come super loose when you've worked out. And then you put that, and then you sit down. That's the jelly in the mold, and then I set it like that, you know, without doing the mobility work, the deep ranges. Whenever I'm even out on a run, I get down into deep squats, and I get down into low gate walks. Like mid run, you'll just drop under that.

Somewhere in there and I rest in it, like a rest on the run and then I go off again. And then when I get back, I'm straight into deep squats. I don't have to do all the mobility work because the squat is enough. It puts all the dorsiflexion in, all the stuff through the lower extremities, drops the hips in.

It's amazing just to get to a resting squat and try and keep going back to that and keep reinforcing it yeah and you don't you you don't know extra weight or anything like that just full body movements for you i wouldn't worry about weight of this size time because the the structure can't handle its own weight right now right so why add more to it right so i would start to look at the the foundations of that structure what are the movements that i can be doing throughout the day that will just help reinforce my competency of moving my levers around and being stable enough for those levers to move from right and then add more weight yeah but you

have to get you know you have to get that framework and the foundations of that framework super strong. It's interesting to reflect back on my life as you're sharing this and to recall like my preferred posture for sitting was a squat. Like I had incredibly flexible hips and I could sit in a frog-like position, you know,

with my butt almost on the ground and my knees up high and all of that, and eat food or do whatever I did as a young child and maintained a high degree of flexibility as a young athlete, as a swimmer. But through running and these other things that I've done, I've lost so much of that flexibility. I still have it in my shoulders,

but really in my hips, hamstrings, glutes, all of that, like, you know, I used to be able to just no problem, put both palms on the ground without bending my knees. Now I would have to really like work up to that. Like so much of that now has just gotten really jacked up. And you know, just how and why, I guess through my lifestyle habits and perhaps through, you know, it's,

but it's all, I know that it's reversible if I give it the intentionality that it deserves. Yeah, but again, it's going back to what are the habits that led to it. So if the preferred sitting position was that, okay, let's start trying to work back to that preferred sitting position because there's so much value in that preferred sitting position not just flexibility it's strength to be able to hold it right you have to have strength to hold those shapes whereas you could say right i'm gonna go

i'm gonna work on i'm gonna work in the gym and do all this mobility and do all this and then i'm gonna sit down again and then well well but we haven't learned anything we're going back to the same environment which is the chair right i through working more on like online and suddenly mentoring and meetings and god knows what else erupted in the last three years for me the book coming out and then working documents meant so much more screen time for me and yet i've got all of it on the ground but the thing i'd notice is through my own practice when I'd be coaching people movement practice coaching I'd spend much more time crawling I'd spend much more time in low gate walk to the point it was like repetitions and hours of it something like four to five hours of moving around on the ground I'd I'd divorce myself

from a part of that I've had I've had to work to get it back in because that was a new phase for me. And whereas I thought, ah, the running's enough and this stuff I'm doing and this is enough and still coaching and mentoring or still teaching my online community like three sessions a week, it's still not enough really because it's the everyday movements that count.

It's throughout the day. Right. And when you de-escalated that, what were the differences that you noticed? I noticed it when I kind of went back into, right, I'm now going to run this Southwest coastal path. I didn't quite feel as strong. I was competent.

I just call it competent, really. There's a level of competency that goes. So I've now, that's's just that's the part i have to edit right okay there we go and then put that back in again right you know so what is it in everyday life of rich what can i edit i take it out and i go and work on that part and then i'll put it back in again yeah you know it's so funny like the solution to becoming more competent in order to tackle this massive endurance challenge isn't more running. It's more crawling around on the ground for you. Yeah, more low gate walk and jumping,

like jumping from great heights to lower because then that's plyometrics, right? And how quickly, once I've landed, how quickly can I get off? Because there's, you know, it's 115,000 feet elevation over those 10 days. That means there's eight Everest really if I'm turning around and running back in elevation.

So not only is that running up, it's running down, dealing with the forces that are on the way down. And there's elements when I do have to crawl, right? But there's how much can I put through that physicality that enabled me at some stage in my evolution to be upright, that enabled me to run. And in nowhere in that evolution was there ever a chair, right? So if we want to become really, again, strong in that physicality, I think we have to just, it's not, again, it's not, I was about to say sit less, move more. It's not, it's sit less in the chair, you know,

because when you sit less in the chair, you'll move more anyway. Right. Yeah. And not just squatting either, like a multiplicity of different postures. Yeah, there's so many many like the beauty of having like the microbiome the more diverse the better right so the more diversity of movements and positions that you can but think biodiversity again i think you know rather than because

diversity could be like i'm sitting in a chair and i just moved it moved a little bit yeah yeah it's actually getting it back to the most organic um example of that on the ground you know so how could i up it even being in my apartment on the linear surface oh i go to the park and i play with different rest positions while i'm on the ground there reading a book yeah and then you've got microbiome you've got undulating surfaces you've got other things that deal with and that's again neuroplasticity each one of those movement patterns that we're working on the ground with also there's a neuromuscular conversation there you know rather than again being in a chair where we disconnect from that physical vessel we become divorced from it and and with that we can find ourselves in weird and

wonderful ways and hours have passed right i'm slouching now right all my systems are off my abs are completely collapsed my back's rounded and then how would i get up from here i'd stand up with this same shape right so well what do we do then tony if we're sitting for you know these periods of time and and like rich gets up and you want to from your um sitting for as you go and then train i would at least get out the chair, hold the back of the chair. I call it a posture squat and just allow your heels to pop up

and drop into a squat. A few little bounces, stand up, do a few of those and then walk off. Why is having the heel elevated so important? I've heard you talk about that a lot. Well, because again, you can focus on posture. You can start to think about keeping the chest up and the head up then.

Whereas if you were to get straight out of the chair and squat down when you've been locked up in the ankles and the hips more often not the back ends up really rounded within that conversation so it helps with the part so i call it a posture squat it helps enhance the posture keeps the head up and the chest up um for some it's it's the fact that the ankle is there isn't enough dorsiflexion in the ankle anyway to achieve the squat so then what happens we try and achieve a flat-footed squat we end up over pronated in the ankle the knees and the hips and that again isn't the best foundation for standing walking or running or jumping or balancing yeah so in that case i would then put a wedge behind the heel and there's even by cork wedges for squatting now so you have a thick edge and it works way down to

a thin edge and so to start if you could go right set a timer you know portale is kind of 30 minute squat challenge right put the thick rays behind the heel 30 minutes a day for a number of days right can i start to bring my heel down to the thinner edge over time and then eventually on the thin edge and then eventually to the ground but that's step by step by step by step, allowing that physiology and the mind to make the micro adjustments that are needed. Otherwise we go straight into it, force the ankle into a position, the knee into a position,

the hip into the position, do that for 30 days. I do the squat challenge for 30 days. And then what have you learned from that? You've learned to create a really unstable foundation, really, for how you stand. One of the things that I've become hyper aware of, that I've noticed more and more as I'm paying more attention to what's going on in my lower back, etc., is a loss of balance, like a lack of balance that I used to have. Like if I stand on one foot, like I used to be able to do all kinds of crazy yoga postures and balanced exercises.

And recently I was like, wow, I can't even hold my posture stable on one leg, let alone like lift the other leg or do anything like anything compound, like just basic stuff, like putting on a sock while I'm standing on the other foot, I find myself teetering and I'm thinking, is this because I'm getting older?

No, it's because you've lost that foundation of stability and sort of dispersed strength in all the right places to hold your body upwardly stable. Yeah, so I could go, what would the reboot be for that? I work with, there's a guy called Tom I'm working with. He's like 77. He plays a lot of tennis. And we've been working on footwork and balance techniques

rather than tennis because ultimately that is what he needs to play tennis, right? Otherwise he's just relying on whipping his arm out and not getting to the ball in time or creating an injury through that and it starts off being barefoot again lifting your head your chest and your pelvis everything is stacked and being barefoot the reason barefoot is that's your foundation again you make a reconnection to that so he starts just eyes closed and feeling into the big toes the smaller toes the big pads behind them that we call the ball of the foot,

then the outer edge, and then the heel. Because the arch isn't tangible, right? Because you can't experience gravity through an arch. Well, your lateral arch you can, sorry. But think about the pads where you're making contact to the ground and really tune into them, right? Heighten your awareness of them. And you take your visual state out

so it enhances your proprioceptive state and your vestibular your inner ear within that communication which is like your somato system so that's based on visual vestibular and proprioceptive and you keep tuning in keep tuning in keep tuning in and start to then move segments so you try and work like a imagine like a broom handle from the top to your ankle and And rather than moving with your head, you move the whole pole like a metronome needle. And that's you. But keeping your awareness in the base of support, the feet the whole time and work with that. And then try and draw a circle around that base of support

without creating any breaks in that pole. So the pelvis doesn't hinge or the back doesn't hinge or the neck is one long thing working like this, yeah? No camera here, guys. You have to kind of work with me. So it's like a pole being held from the top and the bottom the bottom is the ankle and you grab the pole from the top being your head and you draw a circle that's the first stage and work on that and that's that'll start to bring your segments or your understanding how to move your segments around your base of support then i would go um have your feet a little wider and

then work from like tick tocking So as you go over all your segments with your head and your chest over your left side, you think about lightening your right side and increasing your perception of your left foot, those pats. And then you take your head and your chest and your pelvis right over to your right side, lift your left foot.

And then eventually you go all the way over and stack all your segments and then lift the leg up. And then you go back over and you lift. Right, and so Tony's sort of teetering back and forth. Yeah, and you're organizing all of those segments above your base of support. And you really keep tuning. Do not lose perception of the base of support.

What can happen is we get so lost in the action of like what I'm doing with the leg that we take full focus away from what we're using to balance on, which is the base of support, our foot. And then you can go from right now I'm on one leg and then start to think about, right, can i draw a circle with this left leg right whilst keeping my perception on here so the key then is to keep your awareness but also be able to draw a

circle with this leg like just from the hip not not your whole body or not from the foot alone or the knee it's from the hip to the ankle proximal being the hip and the distal point being the foot and you draw a circle say 10 one way 10 the other switch your weight over 10 one 10 the other and that's the first stage that will make a huge shift already to your balance right getting away from shoes that are narrow in the toe box that compromise those 26 bones 33 joints and 100 muscles tens ligaments and the proprioceptive feedback they give. Getting away from cushioning, because the cushioning also dumbs down the awareness.

So that study is really important. That one I mentioned earlier, Professor Chris Dorp from the University of Liverpool, that returning back to Vivo Barefoot Shoes, all being barefoot for six months, was a 60% increase in foot strength, but also 40% increase in balance. So that was without doing the drills. So I'm giving you some exercises to go with this.

The environment would be the foot. This is like the practices to add to that new environment being nature or footwear that's wide enough to enable your feet to perform like feet. For some, that conversation is really hard because they've become so desensitized to an environment. The foot is quite rigid on another hard surface so what could we do um i would maybe work on softer surfaces to begin with and then over time the the feet will start to open up and behave and then

with that balancing work then try hops so draw a line on the floor and once you're on one foot try and hop from one side to the other all the way along the line and then hop back again but do it in the like the running shape you know when i say about running so the head is up the chest is up the ankles pulled underneath you of the opposite leg have your hands up just go ding ding ding ding ding ding and then back again yeah and then change legs ding ding ding ding you only need like the length of this room or it could just be to begin with a meter at a time right and then change legs hop hop hop and then change legs hop hop and then work with both feet together hop hop hop hop yeah and play with kind of the elasticity and the ground reaction work within that and that will reinforce the the when i need to be on and when i need to be off so you start to get those natural responses

to when the glutes need to be on when i land yeah and the glutes need to be on when I land. Yeah, and the glutes need to be on when I balance. So you can bring all that work in. Then there's heckling. Heckling, you can work with another person with it or you can play with yourself with this, right? So you keep that same segments aligned with the head up and the chest up. Head, chest, pelvis stacked above your base of support. Tune into the big toe, the smaller toes, the heel.

Try and think two thirds of your weight being forward, only a third remaining in the heel. With the other leg that's now off the ground that we've managed to draw circles with and everything else use that leg to try and throw you off balance so kick it around thrash it around whatever it is and don't worry about what your head and chest is doing the objective though is not to put that foot down and even if that means hopping or jumping around the room to try and get stable again, do that. And that is also a recharging practice. You could say that's like dance, you know, to start with. And you're literally just trying to use the leg to throw your balance, you know. And can you keep tuned into the foot that keeps stabilizing you? Right. So the foot that's stabilizing you is doing everything that it can to just hold you upright.

Yeah. So you're activating all these weird pathways and muscles that generally aren't triggered. Yeah, and I would go into eventually the language being that not seeing the foot as separate or outside of you. So you are the foot, you know? You are the foot. I think that might be the title of this podcast

some of this stuff we covered well sort of uh for people that are new and didn't listen to our first podcast we went into a lot of we spent a lot of time on your backstory in that one but one thing we did do was after we recorded the podcast, you took me through some technique work and we kind of ran back and forth on my pool deck and we filmed that and made a video of that, which we'll link up in the show notes there. But a lot of that had to do with thinking about, you know, lifting the foot,

like lifting the leg as opposed to overthinking where you're placing the foot right it's like a pop up yeah like changing your focus exactly yeah yeah so maybe explain that a little bit you're not refined this somewhat now because i've been yes what was that three years ago three years ago a lot of miles of refinement and really going deep into kind of the softening or I really like introducing the language of like leaving no trace, you know? Like leaving the least amount of impact on the earth. Right, and part of that being like when your foot lands,

like how quickly can you lift it back up? Like how gently can you, and when you're barefoot, like you're very hyper aware of how, because I have a very heavy foot. And that was one of the things you were pointing out. Like, man, you're barefoot, you're very hyper aware of how, because I have a very heavy foot, and that was one of the things you were pointing out, like, man, you're just pounding it, like you're landing so hard. Yeah, whereas you're trying to imagine you're almost like stealth-like.

So going back to that head, chest, pelvis is to try and think about keeping all those segments upright. Visual field, open up your visual field so you see everything, rather than hyper-focus on one little one area. So if you imagine you're looking down right now as if you're looking at your screen i can only see really to that glass the rest of it's a blur so when i'm running i have that amount of time to react by the time i get to the glass whereas now i'm looking at the the guitar over there right i'm looking out the window almost i still see all of this i can see the glass i can

see everything so i have all this time to be really proactive rather than reactive. And my movement brain will make all those calculations. That's how sophisticated it can go. Visual field opens up. Nasal breathing will help you be more relaxed. Visual field will help you be more relaxed while you're out there running. So that's less tension. We become more efficient.

More efficient and also minimize the risk of injury because we're not tense. Keep the head up, the chest up, the pelvis stacked. Think about getting your feet off the ground, but it's not like you're just pulling them up because that would mean kicking your legs back behind you almost. Think almost like they're... You're riding a bike.

They're like, yeah, like a unicycle, so in a cyclic pattern. And because there's a trajectory to the leg so by the time you've pulled it you've already moved forward you know so you have to think it's like an arc but only pull the leg as if it's going underneath your hip there's a great guy for this named nicholas romanoff he has the pose method right so all that pulling mechanics is in there so if you he did a great book on the pose method of triathlon right that's a brilliant book to unpack because there's cycling in there swimming in there and there's there's running in there

and it's in a much simpler format whereas i've studied like i'm like a level three in pose and also one of the only six people on the planet to teach pose movement right but there's in in the textbook version it can get can overwhelm a little bit it stimulates the intellectual mind but when you go out and experience it it's a little different so you play with just yeah pulling the pulling the leg and that gets the hamstrings involved not so much about picking the knees up and driving through the knees you'll think about your hamstrings and hamstrings are huge pulling muscles so if you think you're the bicep if you'd like pull your bicep right now and you flex your arm to do that that's a bicep well you're the bicep, if you pull your bicep right now and you flex your arm to do that,

that's a bicep. We have a bicep femoris as well. It's like a huge hamstring that we pull. So you get used to the pulling cycles. And then when you're going over terrain, rather than even any thought of putting your foot down, forget that, just think about getting off the ground. And the lighter you get, the better

because it just gets softer and softer and softer and that's in that pulling cycle it's refining the pulling cycle there is a cadence to that where we have to observe somewhere between 176 and 182 beats per minute i know i often work with breath with this i kind of breathe in tempos now i'm working on refining that so there's a four little intakes and then four outtakes. And I match that to my tempo of pulling. So it's like pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull. So the breath is totally in sync with your running cadence.

Yeah. And then you don't have to get so... More often than not, we're over-breathing. So it's like you don't need to breathe don't need to breathe that hard right you can soften the breath um but i really feel that yeah softening the knees a little bit thinking about being upright really tall i have this language of leading with the heart and then your feet follow so by that i mean your actual sternum your chest plate think about that actually being a lead segment so it's proud of your face it's actually further forward in your actual head and that huge weight being your rib cage and your pelvis you'll be amazed at how we can almost think like a piece of cellophane in front of you like a huge piece of cling film like

that and you're literally falling into that with your chest and just keep picking your feet up and those feet will stay underneath you and what i'm discovering out on that path that the southwest coastal path by keeping the feet underneath you just they're just shock absorbers it's like having these incredible shock absorbers underneath you which you can't find when you're having this huge pendulum effect and landing on your heel there's huge kind of forces you're dealing with it like landing on a rigid pin you know whereas allow yourself to land underneath you and it's much softer and that cyclic action will come through it. That video was good though. We covered a fair bit of

that. I think that's worth going back to. I think so. I mean, what you just described is a little bit different because I mean, I haven't gone back and watched it in a very long time, but I do, I do recall something about like, you know, the lifting part. Yeah. So it sounds like, you know, in a nuanced way, you're, you're letting go of some of that and focused on just the, the light touch of the feet and the, I mean, I do remember the leading with the heart part and they sort of leaning forward aspect of it.

And for people that are listening to this and you're new to Tony and you're thinking like, well, you know, the whole barefoot thing is, you know, bollocks. You gotta be like,

we went out and ran in Malibu State Park, Malibu Creek State Park, running over all kinds of gravel, small boulders, all kinds of thorns and roots. And it was a very terrain. I couldn't imagine doing that barefoot. And it was a marvel to like watch you, you know, dance over that terrain

and crush it and do it joyfully. Not like, oh, this is hurting, but I'm gonna like get through it. And then in watching the One Man, Two Feet, Three Peaks documentary, you know, some of those ascents and descents, I mean, under like wet, sharp boulders, you know, a lot of like technical, like much more technical as you, I mean, under wet, sharp boulders, a lot of technical, much more technical as you get above

the tree line and are approximating these summits. And to see you do that barefoot, it's really quite something. Well, I think there's something to observe in that as well. I went up the day before as well. I did a practice, just said to catch around. I'm just going to go and run up there just to see how it feels. So I did, it was like I did the four peaks really. So I did, you say that in the, like you went out

and kind of did it the day before. Like, only you would do that. So I did snowed in the day before and it was like quick up and down 147 I think. And, it's like a thousand meters plus.

It's 2000 something that one. Oh, is it? And then, so it's two thousand something that one oh is it and then so that's the so that's the first so that's the first ascent and then down um which i was the camera crew right on the day going off they were just like we had no idea who's going to tackle it like this so they then had to position another guy midway point so they could capture the content as they had aspirations they thought they were going to run with me i think and then um so tore up and then on the way down of that first day um it was really busy and so i had to swerve to miss some people and even if you're in footwear this this would have happened right i just hit something really full-on broke a toe and then

wasn't until we returned back to where base camp was at that moment where i can then get some plant-based gains on board at that point and then just get off again back out i um i was just like okay feet don't feel that great and then we noticed i had a there was a blood blister that had formed so i'd obviously already made adjustments getting down because i'd broken a toe the adrenaline and everything of running down on that first stage and really pay much attention to it and then went out and did um two marathons after that it's like 52 miler after that and then returned back to base camp and it was really evident like the you could even see there's a white like a white marker like i've

been wearing a ring around my toe and then a purple end to it and a purple part behind it and then went on to the next one the next one then scar fell scar fell was next that's like so snowden is the highest welsh peak and then the english highest peak is scarfield and then there's ben nevis to finish which is scotland and the english one scarfield it's very it's like boulder fields like huge sharp boulders everywhere and i from that first one i think just i lost a lot of the elasticity in that there's as i said i think there's 7400 elevation on the first day that then crept into the next two days and getting the mileage in i'm then doing two marathons two marathons and then onto next mountain. There was rigidity in those legs, and there was stiffness in the feet.

So it then became, like when people say about taking up barefoot, that was the example that I could give. It's like I'd lost the compliance, and my own compliance, and my own softness, and my own elasticity, and I'd become hitting hard on hard. So it suddenly became like, ooh, every rock hurt on that next one and then after scarfell was out the way it was almost like the midpoint it was like the one in the middle that had to be the one that cracked tony and it was and i had to endure that i had to go through it

was almost that was the rite of passage on that event and then i found that elasticity back in on um the beginning of ben nevis and then Ben Nevis we had severe weather came in my intention with that was to I could have done it basically we could have broke it the fastest known time we could have done it a day earlier but at base camp where we were in Scotland

we arrived back and the film crew were there and they're like Tony how's that and what's happening tomorrow and I said oh you know I think we're going to I think we should go up with, let's not go back out now. What we'll do is I want to go up with Katerina and the kids and we'll go tomorrow morning. So I think it'd be much nicer to make that memory with the kids.

And he said, well, what about the record? And I said, oh, screw the record. It'd be amazing to have that memory. Let's go up with Katerina and the kids. And so we left it. And so instead of going up that day, it was like the next day. And yet severe weather came in. So we then had, I think it was minus four and 50 mile per hour winds that came in.

So there was no catcher in the kids going up that day. But it did mean enduring that when we were up there. And again, that cold gets in and you then create again what feels like hard on hard with the feet. and you then create again what feels like hard on hard with the feet yeah so as romantic as the idea is there's there's that uh you can see why through humanity we developed skins and we developed um something that protect us from those environments and that's just a layer back then it wasn't aesthetics and it wasn't cushioning and it wasn't of an unnatural shape. It was something that was from the earth, let's say, right? Right.

And the lesson from that for the average person who's contemplating getting into the barefoot thing is patience. Yeah, 100%, yeah. And I think that the kind of learning curve, the arc towards competency is much longer than people realize. I found myself, I get enamored with it and I do it for a while and then I end up defaulting back. And I don't think I've ever stuck with it long enough to really

have the dividends pay off. Because I haven't been fully invested in it. Again, I would go into, you know, what is it that we're trying to achieve from it and, you know, what's the purpose and why am I doing it? And for me now, it's on that. It's really beyond the physiological, as I said earlier. I think there's that whole neuroplasticity there.

There's the microbiome that's involved in it and just interacting with different environments that again we can have that conversation that we are nature not separate of it right rather than this right i'm wearing a huge piece of rubber and i'm disconnected i'm going to go around stamping my print on the earth right it's like okay how can i be leave no trace it's bigger picture kind of that isn't it leave no trace least leave the least amount of impact on the planet right not just when you're running, but yeah, just think it's that relationship that we can have through running.

But yeah, it ticks multiple boxes, but I guess the more and more gadgetry we involve ourselves in, the more and more heart rate monitors and phones and GPS, how much of that, how much are we losing, right? Yeah. You know, and you might start off with just, even if it means a walk in the park, just go and investigate that.

How's it feel to take your shoes off? You know, there's that school group I took out and they gave us the real, you know, because there's no, oh, adult mask and all the, oh, I wonder what people think of me, but they invited me to take kids out to this place called Virginia Waters, very near to where we lived in Windsor.

They're called Busy Buttons. They're like an unschooling group, creative group. Tony, do you think you can take the kids out rewilding? I said, ah, kids don't need rewilding. Yeah, but we'd really like you to. I was like, okay, let's go. And we went on this coach and we arrive at this place in

virginia water and all the kids get off they're super excited and we go and walk out into this um over a bridge and into a meadow and firstly i'd sit all the kids around to get them all in a circle and say okay just just sit and tune in for a bit i even bought my adult coaching at that stage and just have a think what can what can you hear you know what what if you close your eyes really tune in what can you hear you know and us your eyes, really tune in, what can you hear? And us, we'd be looking for the bumblebee or the bird or the sound of a leaf or the blade of a grass. And they were like, a lion, I can hear a lion. It's like, this is brilliant.

Yeah, that's where it's at, right? So then the next thing is, okay, so I looked at the Lao and Luella who is their busy buttons and I said, okay, let's just get them up. So then the kids are up. So let's try this. Just take your shoes and your socks off. What? And I said, yeah, just take your shoes and socks off.

Yeah, but we're not meant to have our feet out. And so that was, well, kids do need rewilding, right? Because we've basically put this on them, right, already. And so once they got their shoes and socks on, it was the most remarkable scene. It was embedded in me now. So shoes and socks came off. Literally, the moment they put them down

and their feet were down, they were off. And they were running around like absolute lunatics, screaming, yelling the lion. They were doing all of that. Completely freedoms. That's what it is. That's where it's at. But we've again created the,

oh, I wonder what people might think of me if I do this and do that. So, you know, the conversation earlier about that. So the guys said, what should we do with them? And I was like, we don't need to do anything. Get out of the way.

Yeah, just step out of the way. You know? Yeah. Well, I think that's a, I mean, that's profound on so many levels. And I think that's kind of a good way to end this, dude. I mean, just to cogitate on that, like how can we have more of that in our lives?

Yeah, invite more of that in. Bring more lion in. Yeah, yeah, man. More lions. Yeah, more roaring. More barefoot roaring. Okay. We're going to go wander the streets of London

and we're going to roar barefoot. Yeah, let's go do that. We can do that. I'd love that. Cool. So Tony's book, of course, once again, Be More Human. I'll link it up in the show notes. And the documentary, One Man, Two Feet, Three Peaks

is on YouTube now. Yeah, it's up on YouTube. You can watch it for free. You can. If you want to support Tony, though, you can find it on, I think it's on Vimeo also. It's free on Vimeo as well now. Oh, is it free on Vimeo now?

Yeah, yeah, we're putting it. It's just rolling. There you go, dude. And are you going to film this next adventure? I think we can do it differently. I've been speaking to the guys. It'd be really nice to create almost like a diary format so they're going to meet me at certain stages

and then I can bring in the charities as well what we're raising funds for. You want to shout out those organizations? Well there's a SAN in Namibia so we're getting behind this community there about protecting their lands and their rights.

Through sandal making as well, they're making barefoot sandals which is rather fabulous. And then there's Sonia Guajajar. There we go. I did say that right. Have you heard of her? Mm-mm. So there's a documentary that's being built through Earthrise,

and she is a Brazilian indigenous environmentalist activist who is a politician as well. And so she is running an election, so she could be the first kind of Brazilian indigenous leader, let's say. And so the documentary is being built and I'll be raising funds towards that documentary that will help amplify that voice again. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Nice, man. In the meantime, is there a place that is best for us to follow this adventure? Is there going to be some kind of live streaming thing or just your Instagram? Yeah, as I say, we're going to build like a diary. So I've got guys that are going to come out and meet me and they're bringing Chris and Will and Will will edit on the day. So rather than be with me for 22 days. Right, it should be like kind of a vloggy, vlog type thing.

Yeah, we can do like 90 second reels, I think we're putting out there. And that will then include like interviews with people along the way, along the route. And also through those organizations, we can get little interviews going that we can edit those in. It'd be a really nice way of doing it.

And then perhaps there is a way of kind of amalgamate, putting that together that will create a mini doc, I guess. Yeah, nice. Yeah, man. So the best place to check all that out is amalgamate putting that together that will create a mini doc i guess yeah you know nice yeah man so the best place to check all that out is instagram at the natural lifestyle and also vivo they're behind it so they're um i'm sponsored through vivo so they will be no doubt there'll be enough stuff going around their channels too yeah cool all right well to be continued yeah you find yourself great it's good man yeah i love that all right love you brother i'm here to support you in All right, well, to be continued. Yeah, beautiful, man. You find yourself in Los Angeles. It was good, man. Yeah, man, love that.

All right, love you, brother. I'm here to support you in any way I can. I love the mission that you're on. I think it's really important. And you're just a beautiful guy, man. And I think what you're doing is a great service. I appreciate you. One beautiful guy to another, man.

That's awesome. Thank you. Right on, man. Peace. Thanks. That's barefoot. That's a big one. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch,

my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful.

or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis.

The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiete. Thank you, Georgia Whaley,

for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.ナマステ Thank you.