Slow the F Down: Dismantling the Modern Fitness Lie with Brad Kearns

Dr. Mindy  

Brad on this episode of the RE center podcast, we’re gonna talk about fitness in a way you’ve never heard me talk about it before. So I wanna introduce you to Brad Kearns. He wrote a book called Born to walk. He co authored it with Mark Sisson. For those of you that know Mark and the book’s title, like I said, is called Born to walk. But what’s going to be very surprising to you is that Brad is actually a elite athlete. He’s a former two time US national champion. He is number three world ranked professional triathlete. He is currently competing in the Masters category for track and field and high jumper. He has a huge curriculum vitae when it comes to fitness, and he believes that we are pushing ourselves way too much, especially when we age. So my interest in bringing Brad on is that I have seen this, not only in my own 55 year old ex athlete body, but I have heard from a lot of you all who are starting to get injured over and over and over again as you work out, and why I wanted to bring Brad to to you all and to the resetter podcast, is there is another conversation that needs to be had around fitness and aging, and it doesn’t mean you become a couch potato. It doesn’t mean you just take a stroll for the with the dog. It actually means that you understand how to use walking to your best fitness advantage, and Brad is going to teach us that. So you’re going to hear a lot about his beliefs around walking versus running as we age. He has a real interesting way of explaining this zone, one cardiovascular effort that we need to get into to be able to burn fat. So those of you that are trying to lose weight, this is really important, because as you age, working out harder, working out more doesn’t mean you’re going to burn fat more, so please pay close attention. He’s going to give you a formula that you can follow. We also talked about strength training. Where does strength training and resistance training fit in? We also went into the endorphin rush. This one is going to blow your mind. It blew mine, which is you’ll hear it’s about halfway through, maybe a third of the way through this conversation. He talks about, why do we get an endorphin rush when we work out? And it is going to shock you, because it’s not a positive. It’s actually leading to something evolutionary wise that will blow your mind. I’m not going to give it away. It’s so good, but why again, in general I’m hoping you’re going to get from this conversation is that the goal as we age is to work with our bodies. It’s not to just completely try to manipulate the number on a scale. It’s not to fit in your skinny jeans. So other people tell you that you look good. I’m not telling I’m not saying those things aren’t important. But what I’m hoping you’re going to get from a lot of my podcasts, but also from this conversation is that we need to shift how we eat, we need to shift when we eat, and we need to shift how we exercise as we age. And Brad is bringing this to the world in a really huge way, and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Brad Kearns, enjoy. Welcome to the resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again, if you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

Let me start off, Brad by just welcoming you to the resetter podcast. I guess I should say where resetting your health, you are never too late to reset your health.

Brad Kearns  

Oh, I’m honored to be with you. Mindy. Thank you so much for your interest in the great work that you’re doing. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

and you know, what’s really funny is that my 35 year old self would be really disgusted that we’re having this conversation. My 35 year old self was like, walking, walking. Why would I walk when I could run? My 35 year old self was like, the only thing you need to do in a workout is push yourself so hard that you’re out of breath and and you gave it your all, and that’s how you knew you did a good workout. My 45 year old self said, You know what, I’m injuring myself a lot. And my 55 Year old self is no longer interested in doing anything but walking and hiking. So can you tell me what happened to me in the last 20 years? Brad,

Brad Kearns  

you got wise and the knowledge and experiences, you know, our greatest assets. I mean, there’s a lot of aspects of aging that are no fun, but I love to think that that life experience and that wisdom and perspective is the one thing that is shining, and I really lean on that myself. Now you’re talking to a guest that just turned 60 last week. Wow, and I feel great, and I just competed in my first track meet in the 60 year old plus division. Oh, wow. Kick some butt. So like, I’m smiling, and it’s all just, you know, it’s all just a daily commitment to neutralize this accelerated aging that, unfortunately we have come to believe is the norm today. And it doesn’t have to be the norm, if we can, you know, take some take some measures. And like you described as the decades go on, I should say, like I just had a big party, and I made this big poster. And the title of my poster was, 60 is the new 60. And what I mean by that is all this lip service and this bladder 60 is the new 30. Ha, ha, ha, I feel great toast. Thanks for coming to my party. It’s more like look, we got to wake up and realize that chronological aging is something that we need to respect and need to adjust and recalibrate. And that’s exactly what you’re describing, is you can get away with things in your younger years. And I think, as we’ll get into with the topic in Born to walk, and talking about the running boom and the fascination with marathoning and ultra running these days, this is a young person’s game, largely, and something that you want to do as a bucket list item in your 20s is not appropriate for older age groups. We’re talking with your wonderful audio engineer and podcaster Brock Armstrong, our old friend and I want to talk about Brock’s neighbor up there in Victoria, British Columbia, Simon Whitfield, one of the greatest triathletes of all time. He was the gold medalist in the 2000 2000 Sydney Olympics and silver in 2008 had a great career on the pro circuit. And then I was interviewing him by the waterfront there in Victoria, and I was saying, Simon, now that you’re retired, he was long gone from the circuit a few years I said, describe your your current fitness regimen now that you’re not traveling the globe and kicking butt in triathlon competition. And he goes, you know, Brad, today I’m coached by my 80 year old self. Oh, wow, that was the best one liner I’ve heard. And where there’s a video on YouTube of that title, coached by your 80 year old self. Simon Whitfield, and of course, what he’s describing is, you know, looking down and either shaking the 80 year old self, shaking your head going, What the heck are you doing? Mindy, you know you’re gonna be sorry when you’re 4555 and not to mention 80. So if we want to honor our our 80 year old self, then we have a whole different set of decision making parameters, as opposed to when we show up at the CrossFit box for the fourth time that week and people are chairing your name, Mindy. Mindy, you can do another rep, you can do another set, and of course, you can, but you’re borrowing from the bank Dr Tommy wood, one of the leaders in ancestral health, he says you’re liquidating your assets when you push yourself too hard and immerse into a pattern of chronically, overly stressful training patterns.

Dr. Mindy 

Yeah, it’s interesting, because that’s really what I discovered in my 40s. And I hit a crossroads mid 40s where I was like, You have a choice here. You can keep running, which I love to do, and injuring yourself, and then having to recover, and then run again, and then injure yourself, and then have to recover, and then maybe at some point, replace a hip or a knee, which have become really popular, or you can get out now before all the joints start to wear down. And so I started walking. And do you know that the first time I started walking, I was so again, disgusted with myself. I’m like, this isn’t working out. This is what I do with friends, or this is what I do with the dog, but this isn’t a workout. And then something clicked in my mind, and I was like, Could I just call this a forward movement workout? I’m doing a forward movement workout. It’s just a little bit at a slower pace. So can you tell me that was about 45 what happens? What is that moment in which we shouldn’t be running? Maybe we should be walking, maybe we should be hiking. How do we know when that critical moment happens, and what do we need to look out for?

Brad Kearns  

Yeah, great question. I mean, certainly you can. You can reference your age there. But really what it comes down to and getting permission to run comes down to the fat Max, heart rate. And this is an important calculation of the metabolic effect of the workout, as evidenced by your training heart rate. And we have good information where this is dr phil Maffetone, one of the leaders in endurance training, pioneer in heart rate training. And. The Fat max heart rate is the point at which you’re burning the maximum number of fat calories per minute during exercise with a minimal amount of anaerobic stimulation and stress hormone production. So it’s a comfortably paced workout where you’re burning the most fat per minute. Now, if you sped up from that speed, whatever it was, of course, you’re gonna burn more calories as you go faster. When you’re sprinting, you’re burning more calories than when you’re walking, but your fat burning would drop in favor of a pronounced spike in glucose burning and in respiration and in stress hormone production. So when you drift out of the fat burning zone, the workout becomes more stressful, and it is prioritizing glucose burning rather than emphasizing fat burning and teaching you to be a good fat burner around the clock. So if you can test this heart rate out, and the the calculation is 180 minus your age in beats per minute. So you’re you’re going to be having a lower number as you age. I just turned 60, so my training fat max heart rate for a sustained endurance training session is 120 it used to be 155 when I was 25 years old. And guess what? I was going faster because I was in better shape competing as a pro triathlete. But it’s all relative. So whatever your pace is, at that fat max heart rate that is an appropriate training pace. It is most likely for almost everyone listening, of 99.9% of people listening. It’s probably a medium to brisk walk, maybe a moderate walk, if you’re unfit or overweight, and if you’re an extremely competent endurance athlete, it might even be a slow jog. So I’m here talking about Marxism, and I wrote this book. And we’re old time crazy freak endurance athletes that used to train all day and compete in the Iron Man and marathon running and all these things, but we were young guys, very fit, and so an appropriate fat, burning workout might have been seven minute pace per mile, or 630 or 615 but we’re talking and chatting about the movie we saw last night, and it’s metabolically comfortable. That’s the whole essence of it, right there. And by the way, it’s for the whole duration of your workout. So maybe someone who’s decently fit can start out and they can jog a couple miles and their heart rate is at 143 but their number is 145 and that’s fine, but if you intend to go out for an hour or a six mile route or whatever it is, you have to make sure that you remain under fat max for the entire session in order to get the desired training effect. And that means, essentially, you’re going to be slowing down toward the end of all your workouts because of cardiac drift. The heart gets heart rate gets higher as you get fatigue. And so we have all these notions from fitness culture like, Well, I’m gonna use my GPS watch and I’m gonna try to do nine minute pace for my run of six miles, and keep it at nine minute pace and not slow down toward the end, so I can get tough and get ready for the race. And That’s complete nonsense from how the body needs to be trained in order to be protected from the breakdown, burnout, illness and injury, as you described, that you experience when you keep going too far over that edge, you incur inflammation and micro trauma. They don’t heal. You go out and run again, and pretty soon you have shin splints, stress fracture, Achilles tendinitis, plantar fasciitis, all these signs that something is wrong. Check, here’s my favorite one, Mindy, a stress fracture, for listeners who don’t know, is a repeated micro trauma to the same area of the body, to the point where finally, a small fissure occurs in the bone. The bone cracks under pressure because the connective tissue is so traumatized it can absorb impact. And so in other words, you’ve had a huge run up of extreme warning signs before you get a stress fracture. So I feel like if you get diagnosed with a stress fracture, you should write with a big black marker on your forehead, L for loser or dunce or whatever we want to say. And I can say that because I had a stress fracture in college, and I remember I lived a quarter mile from the running track at UC Santa Barbara in the dorms, and on the day that I, that I my career ended my final workout with the team, I limped over to the track because it was too painful to jog the quarter mile. And I showed up to practice, and I told the coach, yeah, my left shin is really, really burning up today. And he said, Okay, well, just do some strides on the grass and see if it will warm up and feel better, and then jump in. Oh yeah, like it, that was his advice, yeah. So I ran myself right into the ground and into the the bone scan in the in the imaging office. And then a stress fracture is a sustained period where you have to do nothing, no, no weight bearing. And, yeah, this is just, it’s commonplace in the running community, you know, so

Dr. Mindy  

So what I want to highlight in what you just said that is really important, because I’m always looking at my guests through the lens of of like any woman over 35 is that I would say, if I could, could pull 1000 women nine. 199 of them are going to tell you that they’re working out to lose weight, that they want to work out so they can look good. And I just don’t want what you said to be lost on our listeners, which is what you are saying is actually working out at a lowered intensity, where your heart rate is up, but you’re not pounding your joints is burning more fat. I want, I want to know if that’s true, because that will motivate people. It’s like, oh, wait, are you saying less is more in this moment,

Brad Kearns  

indeed. And I think what’s really cool to see now is this calories in, calories out, model of thinking is finally getting destroyed and exposed for what it is, which is an extreme oversimplification of what might be true on a biochemical level. But what happens when you train in a manner that’s chronically overly stressful and you have a chronic overproduction of cortisol is you send the genetic signals for fat storage, for adding fat or holding on to fat, rather than fat reduction. And fat reduction is a question of hormone optimization, where you teach your body to become good at burning fat around the clock, and then you stimulate with the appropriate workout, where you get excess post exercise oxygen consumption, and you’re able to, you know, gracefully and permanently change your physique and be able to sustain it, even when you go on the cruise for a week or you get ill for three weeks and you don’t work out. So it’s not about the calories burned at the workout, because what’s happening when you burn a lot of calories at the workout, and it was a little too difficult, is you send the signals for appetite dysregulation and increase caloric intake. And this is a genetically programmed survival instinct for when you get depleted. The brain does not like to get depleted of energy. It’s perceived as a life or death threat, which it was back in the times when we had to continue forging for food, even when we got low blood sugar. And so you will inhale extra food. And it might not be a direct association where you know that 6am spinning class, you come out, you feel good, you’re full of you’re full of euphoric endorphins. You go through a busy day at work, and then what happens later that night is, instead of one scoop of Ben and Jerry’s, you inhale the entire pint. Yep,

Dr. Mindy  

yep, yeah. I mean, that’s really well said. So basically, if you are increasing your intensity and your output, the other thing that’s going to increase is your appetite and desire for food and and I really nd your cortisol, which is also not great for menopausal women, that tanks all the other sex hormones. So I think that’s why I really want to like piece these pieces out. Because what women don’t realize is that the extreme of their workouts is not giving them the same result that they had in their younger years. I think we got away with a lot more in our younger years, although I too was, you know, I was a competitive tennis player, and I had compartment syndrome. I had worked out my my legs so bad that my whole lower legs were completely swollen. We I ended up having a fasciotomy and and then I went and, no, I went back and continued to pound the pavement on the tennis court. So there is, like, I what my main focus for bringing you on to this podcast is that I really believe there is a moment in which what worked for us in our younger years with exercise now, that same activity that was amazing, and it was helping us lose weight, and it made us feel so good, and we were a badass, that same thing has now tipped into harming you, and it’s very it’s a very hard moment for the that type A, you know, competitive woman who who get, who is getting endorphins from her workout. So is there? Is there an age that we should stop doing that intensity. Are there symptoms outside of stress fractures that would tell us we need to stop that, like, when does that activity need to shift?

Brad Kearns  

Yeah, thanks. That’s a great a great opening. And I think one of the most important symptoms is your intuitive sense of how your exercise program is working for you and affecting your mood and your overall integration into busy, hectic modern life. And so if you’re kind of tired and lazy during the normal course of the day, that could be a strong indication that you’re pushing it too hard. And there’s so much value to be had from staying active and going through the motions and doing all the appropriate workouts that you love to do, but just dialing everything back three notches, and we talk about in the book at length, this this runner named Elle wood Kipchoge. He’s the greatest marathon runner of all time, two time Olympic gold medalist. He’s the guy who ran the one hour and 59 in the marathon, which is absolutely stunning, superhuman performance. But. He’s put his training log on the internet for all the exercise physiologists and the coaches to scrutinize, and he runs 83% of his weekly mileage in Zone One. And so that correlates to the average person a moderate, medium or brisk walk. But that is how the greatest athlete in the world trains his body to be an endurance machine. And so we need to take that picture and say, I need to adjust my intensity according to my current state of fitness, and also the energy that I have to allocate toward toward training. Because the greatest marathon in the world sleeps 10 hours a night. He takes a two hour nap in the afternoon, right? He doesn’t have any other stress in his life. And so all these things we have, the the scales of justice, you know, with the blind lady and we have to put all the stressors on one side. And so exercise, job, kids, responsibilities, traffic jams, catastrophic fires, are all on one side of the stress rest scale. And the other side would be, for example, a walk, or a medium to brisk walk with your dog, where you’re getting a cardiovascular training effect, it’s actually very, very beneficial for your fitness. It just doesn’t feel like you’re straining yourself. And so people have this notion like, Well, I must not be getting in shape, or I’m not burning enough calories to meet my fat reduction goals. But again, fat reduction comes as a consequence of hormone optimization and an act of energetic life, which sets you up to make good decisions when it comes to nutrition and meal choices and how much Ben and Jerry’s you’re going to slam Sorry, I lost you another podcast sponsor, but

Dr. Mindy  

I wouldn’t Ben and Jerry’s. Wouldn’t be it. So so let’s I want to zone in on this hormone optimization, and then I want to go back to the different zones here in a second, so we can make this really applicable to the women listening to this. So by hormone, when I think hormone optimization, I think insulin, cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, like I think about all these hormones that are pulsing through us all day long, that what you’re saying is, if you that the goal is to optimize them. But when with hormones, that doesn’t mean more is better. It means they’re balanced. Is that? What you’re saying for

Brad Kearns  

sure? Yeah, and it could be more is better in the simplified case of like a male who’s aging at an accelerated rate and his testosterone is tank for all these reasons, especially cortisol, antagonizing tosterone, and the correlation for the female of her estrogen levels and all the things that make a female the best that she can be, that’s the part that intervention with optimal sleep habits, good food choices and an appropriate exercise program and number one on the list, as a lot of Experts are now contending even ranking higher than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen is to be more active in general everyday life, because our our genetic expectation for health entails that we are in constant movement throughout the day. We have this from the research of the Hadza the hunter gatherers, yeah, Nia, and they walk three to nine miles a day, and they’re on the move all the time, and when they’re at rest, they’re in a squatting position, so they’re still loading their skeleton and stretching their their fascia and their connective tissue. And it’s not like de loading everything and sitting in a chair and turning into a bob. And there’s also research that even as little as 20 minutes of stillness, this is the sitting is the new smoking research that’s been very prominently it’s so bad for your body, it’s shockingly bad where you have a disturbance in insulin sensitivity just from sitting for as little as 20 minutes. You have a decline in cognitive function for going longer than 20 minutes of straight concentration without a break, for movement and working your eyes and just, you know, just breaking up and moving. And so if we think that’s the that’s the foundation of health, is frequent everyday movement. And then, of course, you’re up on this pyramid. And of course you have a great fitness program where you’re doing resistance exercise and you’re doing occasional, all out efforts. And if we had more room on the title of the book, we would have called it born to walk and sprint a little bit, because that is the highest return on investment of any form of exercise. But unfortunately, most people don’t pay any attention to it, in some cases, because they’re too exhausted from all these in between medium workouts that are, you know, too strenuous to build fat, fat burning capacity and optimize hormones, but not really, truly, you know, strenuous enough or well organized enough to promote fitness increases from a properly conducted sprint workout.

Dr. Mindy 

Okay, I want to deconstruct what you just said again for the menopausal woman. So you’re saying that walking at a at a fairly swift pace, it is should be your primary and then you should sprint every once in a while. Can you, can you tell? And then, like, and then, are we lifting weights? Like, like, what is how that’s different than just every time I go in? To the gym, I just completely tank myself. You’re saying that actually the majority of your exercise should be fairly moderately paced. Is that what you’re

Brad Kearns  

saying, that’s a really nice way to say it. I would say it even stronger, because people are so bull headed about this that they need to be slapped in the face and saying, Look, you have to slow the F down, and get into a very, very comfortable pace. But look, as soon as you get out of the chair and go walk down the driveway to get the mail, your heart rate’s double resting heart rate, so you’re getting a workout. Even just walking casually, walking is the centerpiece. But we can also put like Pilates class, yoga class, going to the park with little kids and picking them up and putting them on the slide and then picking up again. You know, all forms of general movement where your body is moving and active, but you’re not crushing yourself with a CrossFit session or a super peppy spinning instructor saying, all right, two more sprints, you guys. You’re doing awesome. That is that comes few and far between for proper fitness stimulation, and this is the whole category of hit high intensity interval training, which gets all this attention as a wonderful workout modality, and it gives you better results than just jogging more slowly. But this has also abused and overextended so many people because the hit workout itself is too strenuous. And if it’s 10 sprints of 32nd at this morning spinning class, you would be much better off doing five sprints of 14 seconds with longer rest in between. And then you truly challenge your body to maximum output. And that’s when you get some of these amazing hormonal benefits, namely, like the cascade of adaptive hormones into the bloodstream when you do a sprint workout. And so you get these anti aging, nourishing hormone optimizing effects from pushing yourself really hard for a really short burst, which is the proper way to train, and how that you know, the elite sprinters train. They’re doing workouts that last for two hours, but they’re doing a lot of warm up, a lot of stretching, a lot of comfortable drills, and then they’ll do four times, 60 meters with a four minute break in between each one. Now, of course, I’m talking about world class athletes, but the average person can go ride their stationary bike at the gym and pedal carefully, gently for 10 minutes, and then launch into a 22nd sprint and then pedal gently for two or three or four minutes. Do another one? Do a handful of those, cool down, and you’re done. And that’s a vastly superior training stimulation to huffing and puffing for 47 minutes while the class is on and you’re trying to hang on till the end. What happens is, then you kick into this, I guess you would call it hormone dysregulation, where you just want to eat and lazy around the rest of the day. This is called the compensation theory of exercise. It’s a branch of medicine and scientific study, and it contends that when you when you put a lot of energy output into, let’s say, a really difficult workout, and you do it as a pattern, you engage in an assortment of compensatory behaviors throughout the day, and these happen Interestingly, both consciously and subconsciously. So consciously is, hey, could you rake the leaves in the front yard? And you say, Yeah, I’ll do it tomorrow, because I had this killer spinning class at 6am and I just want to sit and rest right now. So that’s, that’s the permission, where you give yourself permission for not only the Ben and Jerry’s but to hold off on the leave raking till tomorrow, and then subconsciously, your body conserves energy. There’s this concept of the zero sum game. Dr Herman ponzer talks about this in his book, burn reproduction, repair, growth and locomotion are a zero sum game. So if you borrow too much from locomotion, which would encompass all forms of exercise, movement, you know, moving your body, you have to turn down the reproduction dial, the repair dial, repair recovery, immune function and the growth dial, which would be like getting fitter from a workout where you challenge yourself appropriately, rest and recover, which you didn’t do in tennis, and your legs blew out, instead of having three days of swim training in water aerobics and then coming back on the tennis court and improving your serve by three miles an hour, because you’ve adapted to the hard training that you built up to. That

Dr. Mindy  

was so well said. And you know, it’s interesting, because it’s really taken a lot for my brain to unwind from the attachment to that high performance. And I see a

Brad Kearns  

lot well said right there. That’s a tough one to let go. I mean, really hard.

Dr. Mindy  

And I look at a lot of both men and women, but specifically women in their 50s and 60s that are getting hip replacements and joint replacement and knee replacements because they’ve been pushing too hard. And I’m like, I don’t want that either. And I think what’s interesting, what I see in our culture, is we put those women up on a pedestal, and we’re like, oh my God, look at her muscles at 65 years old. That’s amazing. Look at how fit she is. And then you end up in a deeper conversation, and you find out she’s had two hip replacements. She’s. Uh, you know, waiting for a knee replacement. And my brain just looks at that and says, That is not how we’re meant to age. And so I want to go back to you mentioned the Hadza tribe in the new book that I’m writing. I’m highlighting the grandmother hypothesis. And in the grandmother hypothesis, if we break down what the grandmother did, she walked. It was a seven hour journey to be able to go and find tubers with other post reproductive women. They went walking. They took several of like the younger members of the tribe, like the toddlers. My guess is that they’ve put those toddlers on their back. They went searching for tubers, which are down in the ground. So they had to squat down once they found them. And then they had to use grip strength to be able to dig in to get the tubers out. And then they brought them home to the tribe to keep the tribe alive. Okay, let’s break that down. She walked, she rocked. She didn’t even realize she was rocking. She She grabbed a toddler, strapped it, or baby strapped it to her back so she had a little extra weight. She squatted and she and grip strength. To me, when I look at that, I’m like, those are the four things we should be doing. I

Brad Kearns  

mean, now there’s all the research scientists are listing the same four things, yeah, the grip strength study. Yeah. All we have

Dr. Mindy  

to do is go back and look at evolutionary biology and be like, What did, what did the post menopausal women do in the hunter gatherer days? Oh, we’ve got some had some grandmothers that can show us this. Now let’s deconstruct that. And then science comes in and says, grip strength. Grip strength is the most amazing thing for aging. And it’s like, yeah, you can never lose if you go and look at evolutionary biology, you will never lose your way. So would you agree? Oh,

Brad Kearns  

for sure. And it’s just, it’s kind of a proxy to the grip strength is popular in medicine, because you can have a thing on the on the table in the doctor’s office. But if you’re if your grip strength is there, it it indicates that you’re leading a healthy, active lifestyle. Same with the the Cooper Institute and UT Southwestern in Texas. They did a study with 66,000 people around our age in the in the 5050, plus category, and they time them in the mile run, the simplest longevity marker you’ll ever find. And they found that those in the superior category with their time had a huge like, a six times more probability of living healthily till age 85 and those in the worst category, the flunking category, very, very likely, looking at accelerated disease and demise. And I’ll give you the times if anyone’s interested, females able to break nine minutes and males able to break eight. We’re in the superior and if you were slower than 12 as a male or slower than 13 as a female, that was in that needs to improve category where, again, we’re talking about a guy in a lab coat with a stopwatch. You’re in an important study. Ready, set, go. You’re going to give it your absolute best for one mile run, yeah, but I love those markers, because anyone can kind of embrace that and then strive to improve their performance over time again, by this broad based approach to fitness, where you’re not just running yourself into the ground every time you get injured, you’re regressing your fitness and having to heal and put energy into healing, instead of just building steadily and carefully, yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

and if you’re putting energy into healing, because your locomotion took it was so stressful to me, that’s that’s accelerating aging. So of course, even if I’m 60 years old and I look like I, you know, could be a fitness model. That doesn’t mean that that is what I’m supposed to be doing. We this is, this is my big thing is we have aging. And I think you’re on the same thing. We have aging so misrepresented. We think that a successful aging is looking as good as you did at 25 I think successful aging is not ending up having joint replacement surgery and and feeling like you have vital energy and you love living in your body as you go along. Are there any other markers of successful aging that you would throw into that?

Brad Kearns  

Well, I’m really fascinated by the the fitness standards, because it also suggests that you’re able to do cool things and be able to play with your grandkids and hike up a mountain in the summertime, and when someone invites you without like this whole upheaval of your life, you’ve probably heard of the $2 million man, Brian Johnson, with all the testing and markers and supplements he’s in LA too, but He seems to enjoy it, and he’s doing a good service to humanity, I think, by reporting back, but I do second guess a lot of this bio hacking and high tech, quantified approach to wellness and longevity, and especially because I don’t think we place enough respect and emphasis. This on the people who are out there getting it done. And I compete in masters track and field, like I mentioned, and you see some of these outliers in the in the competition at the highest level, at Nationals, my friend Sue McDonald, who’s been on my podcast, she’s broken 15 world records in the past 16 months in the female track and field for over age 60 and she’s run her age in the 400 meters. So at 61 she ran a world record, 61 seconds for one lap around the track. So whatever she’s doing, by definition, is better than any female in the history of the Earth has been able to run a lap around the track at age 61 so it’s got to be working. And generally, when you talk to these athletes, and I’ve talked to some other Olympic athletes on my podcast, and learned about their their routine, Shelby Houlihan, who just came back from a suspension and is kicking butt, one of the fastest middle distance runners in the world, and you say, tell us about your regimen and your your blood testing and your your your time in the the chamber, with the with the ice and the the whole thing. And they say, Well, you know, I try to have fun in the off season and not be too strict about my diet, but they’re very, very consistent with their emphasis on taking care of their bodies and sleeping enough and then getting the training in and working the body and building the muscles in an appropriate and sensible manner. And there’s less emphasis on the interventions and the hacks, such as spending too much time in the cold tub, or, you know, obsessing about their the supplement regimen and all the things that like taken to the extreme, Brian Johnson is showing people like he takes 138 pills every day. Yeah. What about it? So?

Dr. Mindy  

So a lot of the women that I that are in, like, our reset Academy, a lot of the women that follow me, you know, I think they’re like, I know I need to move my body. I know I need to exercise. I Pro. I’ve been doing most of that, most of my life, to keep my weight down. Is what is the purpose of exercise? As we age, like, like, take weight out of the picture, because I can tell you for myself, the purpose of exercise dramatically changed. And if we’re not motivated by losing weight, what could you tell the 60 year old woman who is like, Well, why am I what? Why am I exercising? What is it doing for me? I don’t want to run a marathon. I’m not trying to break records.

Brad Kearns  

Yeah, now we have to go to what is it that really motivates people to get on the path? And I think we have to start with instant gratification. Because, as we know, like the doctor bringing the patient in at age 37 says, You better quit smoking, or you’re gonna get lung cancer in 20 years. It doesn’t fly for the people who are smoking, and obviously don’t give a crap about what’s happening later. So if you can find something that you enjoy, that brightens your day, that is not too strenuous, because I think that’s the hugest mistake, is we sign up with that personal trainer. We buy a 12 week package. We get sore every time. And the trainer says, I was just talking to someone earlier today. And she says, Yeah, this trainer at the gym, I heard her client complain that she was sore after. And the trainer said, You’re welcome, right, straight face, right, completely meaning it from the bottom of her heart that that’s what I’m here for, is to bust your butt. So we need to tone down all that frenzy fitness lingo, and instead say what works for you and what gives you joy and adds richness to your day. And then that’s the magic formula. And if it’s difficult to start or you’ve had some setbacks in the past, then we lower that entry bar so low where it’s like, okay, I want to get you going on a five minute morning regimen. And I have videos about this, because this has really changed my life, even as a long time athlete, my first 16 minutes of every day is a mobility, flexibility, foot care, emphasis, yoga, flowing yoga, a little bit of core strengthening and some mini bands and stretch bands. It’s no trouble for me to do. I don’t have to psych myself up for it. I don’t have to carve out a time in my calendar, it’s as automatic as the next person going and pouring some coffee and doing the crossword puzzle. But if those things can somehow slot into busy life, then you awaken yourself to the wonderful potential of a truly fitness and active base lifestyle. But I know those barriers are there. I have close friends, family members, people around me that are looking to me for support and suggestions, and I finally realized Brad better back off his high horse, because people are not thinking along my wavelength. They’re thinking like, I don’t have time in the morning for working out Yeah. And I say, Okay, let’s take a let’s take a shallow breath there, right? Shallow breath to relax, deep breath to get agitated. Let’s take a nice, calm, mellow breath and think you don’t have time. How are we going to address this, this issue? Because if you can make time for yourself in the morning, you open up yourself to being a more disciplined focus and self prioritization. So I’m talking about baby little steps here. I guess is the long answer to your question,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah. And I think you’re bringing up some really. Valid points, which is, I love this idea of the exercise. The best exercise for you is the one you can stick to and that you love. So I think that’s, that’s the big one. And I don’t think we’ve been trained to love exercise that they especially women. I think a lot of women really hate exercise, which is why I hope that the ones listening to me are like freeing themselves from from like you can do. You know, anything, any movement that you love, is going to be better than sitting on the couch and doing nothing? Yeah.

Brad Kearns  

I mean, so you mentioned something earlier about the six pack girl bragging about how how much pain and suffering they endure. And it’s sort of like a superiority thing to throw down and say, I hate it, but it gives me my six pack. You guys try it too, and that’s that part we need to shatter and get sensible, yeah. And

Dr. Mindy  

as as they limp away, because the joints are all like, I’m, you know, I really, I’m just really trying to break apart these horrible paradigms that women start to get hooked into. And one of the challenges as we age is that actually as women, I think men too, but mostly women that we feel like we’re tossed aside if we’re not, you know, as thin or as beautiful as we used to be. And so we do all these harmful things to ourselves, including working out so incredibly hard that we have to get a joint replacement so that we can feel worthy to the culture, so that everybody can be like, Look at you. You’re aging so well, I have a very as an ex competitive athlete. I have a very different slant at 55 at working out my my number one thing is, do it every day. Enjoy it. Avoid joint replacement surgery. Mind your blood chemistry. I’m always looking at my blood to make sure my hemoglobin, a 1c and my CRP are really down, are low. But don’t tip yourself into a place where you’re now harming yourself because you need to look a certain way in order to feel worthy. That is my big beef on aging with with exercise.

Brad Kearns  

Yeah. Well, Said, you heard that joke about, how do you identify? You can tell a crossfitter from across the parking lot by their incredible physique, and then you can tell a crossfitter up close by the surgical scars on their shoulders. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

exactly the one thing that I will say that I butt up against because with not having the strenuous exercise is the endorphin high. And so I’ve tried, you know, like I’m a runner. I love to run. I used to love to run. I don’t run it very much. I do exactly what you said. I do occasional sprints with a lot of walking, a lot of hiking and so, but I don’t get the same endorphin high. Are there certain activities we can do as we age that will give us that same endorphin rush? Well,

Brad Kearns  

I think that’s certainly allowed to pursue that wonderful euphoric feeling that you get from strenuous exercise, and the harder and or longer the effort is, the more endorphins flow into your bloodstream. And this, again, is a genetic survival mechanism to keep you going when you’re starving and your low blood sugar, but you still need to hunt and gather for seven more hours or whatever. Also interesting to note is that the endorphin rush, from evolutionary perspective, this is what happens when you’re also when your time has come. So when the Zebra is getting chased by the lion, and the zebra realizes that it ain’t gonna happen, and it lies down to get eaten. The body is flooded with endorphins so that one’s death can be as painless and peaceful as possible. So knowing, having that notion in your head, realizing what you’re chasing at your next Soul Cycle workout or whatever it is a high. It is a form of addiction. When you start chasing that to the regular because instead, it’s supposed to be a life or death response to a challenge. So I’ll report I’m not an endurance athlete anymore. I’m obsessed with sprinting and high jumping, but I climbed the cactus to clouds trail in Palm Springs last fall with my friend, and it took us 15 hours. And it’s the it’s the steepest hiking trail in the United States, so it’s the toughest trail known perhaps in the world, with an elevation gain of 8400 feet in the first 9.3 miles. The whole thing’s 22 miles. It’s an amazing way past my capability. But we’re like, Hey, we’re getting old. We better try this and do it one more time, or whatever we can do. So I was flooded with endorphins that whole day, because I was extending so far past my capability. Guess what? I did it. It felt great. I leveraged the endorphin high to perform a great achievement and enjoy it after. The point is not to abuse it. So I don’t want to be like a spoil sport and say you should never do those intense spinning classes, because they make you feel great, and it’s way better than sitting your butt on the couch. But we just have to get that perspective of like, okay, don’t liquidate your assets. You know, save up. Save up. Prepare yourself for a peak performance effort, and then go out there and blast it on Saturday morning at CrossFit, where the people are chanting your name for your final set, because you’re gonna do better than last. Peak, that’s great. And that’s a recalibration. That’s a recalibration of mindset to instead of associating your workout patterns with the endorphin high and that being the driving reason that you’re doing, that’s crazy. That is going to be your 80 year old self is now shaking their head up in the clouds, going, what are you doing? Dummy,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah, I did not know that that’s what endorphins were for the

Brad Kearns  

zebra lying down and going right get it

Dr. Mindy  

over with to be eaten, getting ready to be eaten. That is crazy. Brad, I never even thought about that. What are your thoughts on wrecking it’s

Brad Kearns  

really cool to see it becoming popular. I do have one little side question to ask everyone, which is like, what about just, what about just hiking without the weight on your back? Like, is this a necessary? You know, are we? Are we needing to torture ourselves in order to get score the points as we break free from our addiction to CrossFit, spinning or endurance training, because, again, that fat max heart rate will sneak up on you like you cannot even believe. Because what I mean is like you’re gonna hit your beeper alarm. Mine’s 120 you listening? At age 30 is gonna be 150 that thing starts beeping at a shockingly low intensity level. So I think the main benefit of rucking might be to equalize performance, like when I hike with my wife and we get to a really, really steep hill, I push her from behind, and both of our heart rates go up right to the max of our fat max heart rate, because she’s getting a boost and I’m working a lot harder, yeah, and so that’s my association with rucking. Is like, if you want to go out with your partner and you’re way fitter, then throw on 27 pounds, and you guys are both gonna be huffing and puffing, but be careful with these fitness crazes whereby you might be too, too strenuous for you and defeat the purpose of an outing. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

it’s interesting. I resisted wrecking for a long time for that exact reason. I was like, Really, we can’t just go hike now. We gotta, like, put on a weighted vest, like, I just wanna go hike in nature with a friend and enjoy myself. And then I actually saw the studies on osteoporsis and how it helps menopausal women prevent osteoporsis. And I’m not a big fan of genetic testing, but I can look at the genetics of my 85 year old mom, and I can see she has osteoporosis, and I can know that that’s something I want to prevent. So I started, I started wrecking, I started looking into it, and I think it’s it matches the Hadza tribe. I think that’s exactly what those grandmothers were doing. They probably had to put it a kid on their back. They had to put a basket of food on their back, there was something that they had to do that added in a little extra weight on their body. And it would make sense to me, with little extra weight on the body while you’re working, would send a signal to the bones to be stronger. Sure,

Brad Kearns  

any weight bearing exercise is wonderful, yeah. And so in that respect, that can be a huge benefit. We also want to categorize like our needs for fitness are this aerobic or cardiovascular conditioning, and then we have the the intense need to engage in resistance training to preserve lean muscle mass and lean muscle strength throughout life. A lot of experts, like Dr Gabrielle Lyon Dr Peter Atti are saying that preserving muscle mass is the single biggest factor for longevity, and then we have this all out brief explosive performance as a huge indicator of fitness anti aging and overall health and vitality. So we have these pillars of fitness that we need to pursue, and when we talk about resistance exercise and building or preserving lean muscle mass. The best way to do this are brief, intense sessions that don’t last forever and ever, but you’re doing a set of 12 to failure, and then you’re moving to the next station, the next station. Dr Doug McGuff, author of body by science, he has this big five workout where you go to the gym once a week and do five machines of the major muscle groups of the upper and lower body. It’s the lat pull down, the chest press, the overhead press, the seated row and the leg press. And that covers all the major muscle groups of the body. You do a single set to failure, not that much rest between sets. So the whole thing takes only 15 minutes, and you do it once a week. And he has extensive research showing that that frequency of the workout, once a week, and that duration only 15 minutes, is optimal for actually building strength and increasing the strength of your muscles in those major muscle groups. In other words, if you were to going to go two times a week, a lot of times, that’s tipping over the edge, and you might get some overuse and some regression and fitness. So the objective to maintain muscle strength requires 15 minutes a week in this context. And so again, we don’t have a time limitation at

Dr. Mindy  

max, max, max failure, like single sets of failure. Yeah,

Brad Kearns  

failure, you know, whatever. There’s all kinds of different opinions and parameters, but if you put your muscles under resistance load, you don’t have to do it day after day after day, or you’re gonna crap out right? And the same with sprinting is even less frequent. Can be optimal, like once every seven to 10 days. If I’m talking about high impact weight bearing, sprinting on flat ground, most people will be starting with sprinting on the stationary bike, the rowing machine, or up the stadium stairs or something that’s inclined. So you’re not getting that impact load on the joints and tendons that aren’t ready, but you do want to take it to max for very brief duration once in a while, and that is the complete picture of fitness and anti aging in stark contrast to the grinding and the the overuse of steady state cardio at slightly to significantly, too difficult of a heart rate.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, that’s so beautifully said. And again, I go back to, what did our ancestors do? Let’s re let’s repeat whatever they did. So do you think the trend? I mean, I’m listening to you, and I’m starting to find more and more people that are in this camp of like, let’s not kill ourselves with exercise. Do you you know exercise like nutrition and a lot of health fads, they have trends. Do you feel like this what we’re discussing right now, are we at the beginning of this trend of people being just a little more careful with their bodies as they age? Or do you feel like we have a long way to go before people wake up to this. Yeah,

Brad Kearns  

I never thought about it that way. That’s interesting. What I see is kind of like this division of society where we have the people that still don’t give a heck about healthy living, fitness, exercise, eating choices, and we’re gonna see this accelerated decline in demise. There’s a stat from Dr mcguffs book where he says, at the rate of increase, rate of type two diabetes that we’re seeing now on the graph, if it increases at this rate, because it’s so expensive to care for and now we can care for type two diabetics for 30 or 40 years instead of 12, and then they die. So we can care for these people, but it’s very expensive. If we continue at this rate, the United States Treasury will be bankrupt in 2060 by this single disease pattern. Yeah, something’s gonna have to, we’re gonna have to, you know, hit a brick wall and make a sharp turn in society as a whole. But if we’re talking to the sliver of culture that is interested health, fitness, such as a listener to the resetter podcast, I’m gonna say you’re probably in that group, like you’re not listening here to fall asleep at night. No, maybe you are, which is okay, because we want you to be good. But you know, generally, the people who are interested in healthy living and fitness, that’s when we’re trying to just take it to the next level, and, you know, scrutinize some of this, these cultural programming that’s now, flawed and dated and distorted, and so I think that’s where we’re seeing a lot of nice progress. But still, if you go and immerse into the running community, everyone’s still obsessed with the marathon as the ultimate accomplishment for fitness, and we need to stand up and say, Look, you have to realize that these fitness goals are antithetical to health period. They are not associated with health same with making it from good high school player to collegiate to mini tour, satellite tennis tournament. These are not healthy young people. These are people that are straining that shoulder joint to such extent that they’re having to ice it and get shots and all that, but that’s what you know. What elite level athletic competition is all about is dancing on that razor thin line. But what we’re seeing, I think, in elite sports, are people like LeBron James going until 40, still kicking butt and flying through the air. So the elite athletes are setting the tone for taking better care of their bodies in the off season and even during the season, and they’re not all shot up with pain killers and all the things that we used to do in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And see now that everyone walking around with a cane who used to be a big timer. So that’s kind of setting the trend for the average fitness enthusiast, and I think that’s the way out for most people, if you’re right now listening and you have some injury, dysfunction and fallout from your younger years, there’s a way to correct course, and it starts with going on Amazon and buying a $7 mini stretch band where you can do all these wonderful hip flexor drills and a mini band and strengthening for the glutes and the things that you can do first thing in the morning, and set yourself up for success. Whatever you’re doing, if it’s rucking or spinning class or sprinting up the stadium stairs, and, you know, the bread and butter stuff, the juicy stuff,

Dr. Mindy  

I think, I think a discussion like this, I hope people are hearing it from two angles. I hope people are hearing it from the angle of it. Don’t make it so hard, like you don’t have just enjoy it, create some variation. Sprint every once in a while, lift some heavy stuff and enjoy whatever you’re doing and do move every day. And then I’m also hope, based off like what you just said, that people who keep injuring themselves selves, especially women who are losing. Collagen, as estrogen goes away, that they’re starting to understand that maybe there’s a point in which we need to course correct this intense exercise. So I really, I appreciate you, Brad. I love what you’re bringing forward to the culture it’s really been a part of my aging evolution is to put down that, push on through at all cost, athletic brain, and just enjoy it. And I just think it’s incredible that you’ve now written a book on it. So tell me a little bit about where people can find your book and more information on you.

Brad Kearns  

Oh, thank you so Mark Sisson and I, my longtime writing partner, your former neighbor there in palisade. And the book is titled, born to walk, and it’s a little bit of a cheeky take on the best selling book from 2009 Born to Run, which glorified the amazing genetic attributes of the human to perform amazing endurance feats. But when we when we kind of misinterpret that and think that humans are meant to slog down the sidewalk for miles and miles every day. So we’re kind of calling out the running boom for a lot of the flawed notions that have been programmed into enthusiastic endurance athletes. But then, you know, we got into a lot of the juicy part of the second half of the book, which is glorifying walking as the essential genetic expectation for human health and what it means to have a broad based, functional fitness program that supports longevity and supports health and honors your 80 year old self. So it’s a it’s a treatise on how to do fitness the right way, especially if you’ve had some frustration and struggle in the past. And you can go to born to walkbook.com and we have all these premium bonus items. You can download PDFs and get discounts and fun stuff for for supporting the the message here, and then I have the be rad podcast and cover all kinds of health, Diet, Fitness, longevity, peak performance topics. I would love to have you on there sometime. And thank you. You know, I think my audience would would love the message you’re doing here, especially that focus on your your females in those age groups, because it seems to me sometimes like that’s the most devoted and passionate group of people, where they really have a tremendous interest in doing things right and Aging Gracefully. And I sometimes feel like my peers, the dudes who were 40s, 50s, 60s, a lot of them spent seven hours yesterday watching the Super Bowl and sitting around and eating chips in guacamole and talking about how they had a really good arm in high school, and they might have played in college, but they got an injury, and it’s like we need to figure out how to remain participants and devoted enthusiasts to fitness and peak performance Throughout life, not just watch other people perform. Yeah, right.

Dr. Mindy  

That was really well said. Yeah. You know, my next book is really about looking at the cross section between this grandmother hypothesis and what, what are all the things we can unpack that that these had grandmothers did. And this doesn’t mean that you have to be a grandmother. But and fitness has been one of those. And literally, I’ve spent hours. I even interviewed Kristen hawks on my rock on my podcast here, who is the anthropologist, who is the champion of the grandmother hypothesis. She’s gone and lived with the Hadza tribe. You can go listen to that podcast, and I am convinced that the anti aging movement and this desire to bio hack ourselves do anything extreme to our bodies as we age is actually doing the opposite of that, and fitness is one of them. So you you did a really thank you so much for laying this out, because I really hope that your book conversations like this start to change the way we are treating our bodies as as we age. So appreciate everything you’re doing. Brad, thanks

Brad Kearns  

so much for having me on the resetter podcast. Mindy, of course,

Dr. Mindy  

thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it, so please leave us a review. Share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is. You