Written by Christopher Kelly
May 8, 2020
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Well, Zach, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. How are things on the East Coast? Are you surviving -- I don't even need to -- that which shall not be spoken? I don't even need to say it. You know what I'm talking about.
Zach: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, things are okay here. We're adjusting. My wife is off work right now. She's a nurse at the school here. The biggest change or the hardest part, I guess, is just keeping my three-year-old entertained, just being inside all the time. It's just tough to go a lot of places, but fortunately, we're very close to my parents, her parents. They both have farms and we can get outside and walk around, see animals and stuff like that, so that's been really nice since the weather is finally warming up.
Christopher: That's great. Good for you. Yeah, that's been my experience with two and three-year-olds. Well, anything up to the age of about at least five, I would say, maybe even beyond, is the outdoor environment represents the best environment for learning opportunities. If you could just get them outside then everything gets better. I realized that's going to be challenging for anybody that's in an urban environment right now, but for you and me both, if you want to make the crazy stop, just get the kids outside as soon as possible.
Zach: Oh yeah, and we're fortunate because my son loves lawnmowers and tractors, all heavy machinery. My dad has -- you name it. He owned a construction business and now, he lives on a farm and that's his entertainment, his excavator, skid steer, bulldozer, everything.
Christopher: Oh, that's amazing.
Zach: Yeah. My son's in heaven when we go out there.
Christopher: That's fantastic. I also would like to think that anybody thinks that you need all that stuff. In my experience, just anything outdoors represents a stimulating thing. I think sometimes we impose our view of what's interesting onto children when perhaps we have something to learn from them in terms of --
Zach: Oh, definitely. It's fun just to see what he finds out there, right?
Christopher: Exactly.
Zach: He may be taking towards some machine or animal or something, but then he finds a little rock or the creek and trees bent over sideways and he's like, "Oh, let's go through the tunnel" and just exploring and stuff. Yeah, it's good for me too, just breaking away. Working from the computer all day and stuff, I feel a lot better splitting away occasionally.
Christopher: Absolutely. Well, let's talk about the importance of strength training and how to do it in this new post-gym world. What's it like for you personally? Are you missing the gym? Are you someone that normally goes to the gym?
Zach: I used to be and I do probably like the environment a little bit better, but I have a home gym as well, so I'm fortunate in that once my son was born. Also, I train a few people out of my gym still. Most of my work now is online, but I used to work in a gym full-time, six days a week. I still really enjoy that and I don't want to lose that skill, so I have my home gym. It's been okay. It's not as enjoyable, like I said, but it just depends on the person. I find some people really like training at home and some people really need the gym atmosphere or feel like they do.
Christopher: Right. Yeah. My experience has been it's great. If it's become part of your social life and that's where you see your friends then the gym is awesome whereas like me, if you've traveled too much during your life especially from one country to the next, the chances of you still having a social life that revolves around the gym -- that's how it was to be when I was 17 or 18, but that's long gone.
Zach: Yeah. Well, for me, I guess when I worked in the gym, it was definitely like I do not want to go back there and train because I was in the gym all the time. Nowadays, working from home, it is kind of a bit of a social outlet. It's a way to get out of the house and stuff like that, but I find the effort is -- I enjoy both. It's fine. It's always been kind of a hobby for me anyway.
Christopher: We should get into the why. Our scientific director, Megan Hall, has done a rather fantastic job of putting together an outline with all the scientific references and I'll link that outline from the show notes for this episode that you can find at nourishbalancethrive.com/podcast. I've also linked this outline from the forum. I think strength training is a quadrant two intervention meaning it's a game level intervention that exploits existing physiology and I think it's something that everybody should be doing regardless of your goal.
While I say that, maybe there are some somewhat suicidal things that perhaps you don't need strength training for, but every client I talk to, really what they care about is healthspan. They care about living as many quality years as possible and I think that strength training always plays a part in that. Actually, that's the first paper that Megan has linked like why bother with strength training? There's this paper titled "Strength Training is Medicine: The Effects of Strength Training on Health", which is a fantastic paper, and then also the importance of type two muscle fibers as we age. Is that something you want to comment on, Zach?
Zach: Yeah. I guess type two muscle fibers are something that are more challenging to stimulate in our day-to-day activity because they're what you refer to as your fast-twitch fibers that you rely on for things like sprinting or if you're producing a lot of power or something like that. Just day-to-day life nowadays, we don't get a lot of heavy lifting or sprinting.
[0:05:10]
It's usually maybe walking around or just like I said, day-to-day activities. That relies more on what we call type one fibers. That is one value of strength training as you help to recruit more of those type two fibers that you just don't get in day-to-day life.
Christopher: Right. Certainly as a cyclist, I notice this as I get older. I used to be riding the elite class or pro and the gun would go off and I would just get shelved. Everybody would be 30 seconds down the road within the first minute of the race. Now, I'm racing Masters for the 35 plus category and it's not that bad. I could still hang at the start now. So what changed? You might make the argument that these fast-twitch muscle fibers are what you need at the beginning of a bike race, and somehow at age 35, I don't seem to be so uncompetitive anymore. I think it's just people are getting older and they're not doing the things that recruit and hang on to these fast-twitch fibers. Would you agree?
Zach: Yeah, exactly. Megan linked some good papers here and yeah, that's what they show. As you age, it's the type two fibers that tend to atrophy and go, and so it becomes more and more important to stimulate those in some way. Like you said, you were super active. You could be doing a ton of cardiovascular activity. You might run a lot. You might bike a lot, tennis, anything like that, but it still just does not recruit those fibers nearly as effective as something where you're just going all out or you're putting a lot of force on the fiber itself as something like resistance training, so it really needs to be something high intensity like a sprint, or like I said, a heavy load.
Christopher: Right. I think Joe Friel did a pretty good job in his book. I forget the title of it. I'll link it in the show notes. I think it's his most recent book. I also interviewed Joe Friel and he made this observation that old athletes, Masters athletes, they have this tendency towards the slower pace stuff. You do oodles and oodles of moving around between 120 and 140 beats per minute and by the time you're a Masters athlete, you can move a pretty good clip at that heart rate, so you feel really efficient, but what you never do is recruit those type two fibers. You never sprint as hard as you can ever except maybe at the beginning of a bike race and maybe that's a problem if your goal, which I think everybody's goal is, is healthspan.
Zach: Yeah, definitely. Don't get me wrong. A lot of low level movement, I'm a huge fan of. I think that's the base of the movement pyramid. We definitely want a lot of that. It's just I think strength training would be the second tier there that we need something.
Christopher: Right. As always, it's not a choice. I say "as always". I just created another dichotomy. Yeah, it's very common. It's not a choice. You can do both. Megan also linked to a really nice paper here on subjective quality of life, "The effect of resistance training on health-related quality of life in older adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis". In this paper, they asked people a bunch of questions about their subjective life experience and they found that people who are doing resistance training, they just have a better quality of life. I think again, this is something that people know from experience is true. It just feels so much better when you're walking up the steps with some groceries, or perhaps one or even two children, when you're carrying a bunch of muscle mass versus when you're a super competitive, skinny Masters athlete with barely two fast-twitch fibers to rub together.
Zach: Yes.
Christopher: "This doesn't feel good."
Zach: I mentioned earlier that I used to work in a gym. The owner was a physical therapist, so we actually had a lot of clients who were older population. It was just really neat to work with them, to see the confidence that they gain. They gain strength and mobility and everything quite quickly. I heard anecdotes all the time even outside of this research paper of just feeling better, moving better, feeling stronger. Like you said, it's day-to-day activity stuff. It's nothing special. It's not like, "Hey, Zack, I'm so excited. I squatted 200 pounds" or something like that. No. It's like, "I was able to pick up this box out of the back of my truck and take it into the basement and I just felt so much stronger. I wasn't in pain afterwards." So like you said, it definitely helps with the quality of life.
Christopher: That's victory right there. Then also, bone health, is that something that clients ask you about ever? It's one of those things that people don't really ask about unless they've done a DEXA scan and there is a problem and they're trying to solve it.
Zach: Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say. I don't hear about it unless someone has been diagnosed with it, but it happens. It's very common especially in women as they age. That is another benefit of resistance exercise, is the bone density aspect. Connective tissue health as well, loading it in some way helps to strengthen it basically.
Christopher: Right. Megan talked about the importance of dietary protein, but without the stimulus, the protein on its own is not really going to cut it, right?
[0:10:04]
Zach: Yeah, exactly. You need both.
Christopher: Also, I feel like there might be this kind of -- what is it? Is it a myth? Is it misbelief? I'm not sure, but when you say bone health, I think a lot of people think about minerals. It's like, "Oh, I just need to get some calcium into my diet." In fact, my mother was diagnosed with some sort of osteopenia and they just said, "Just take some Vitamin D, some calcium and you'll be fine" as if that was enough, or as if bone, that's all it was. It was like a piece of rock with calcium in it and all you need to do is shove more mineral into it and it would be fine, but I don't think that's true either, right?
Zach: Yeah. It's like a muscle. You stress it over time in some way and it'll adapt and become stronger. Again, the reason it weakens over time, it can be a nutritional thing, but it also can just be use it or lose it. Again, a lot of people are more sedentary and we don't get the physical labor like we used to. That environment is not conducive to bone health and strong bones.
Christopher: Yeah. Megan links a couple of papers here, lower risk of sarcopenia. I think Ken Fearon did a really good job of suggesting that perhaps the most appropriate word is myopenia. Sarcopenia would be off the flesh whereas what we're really talking about is off the muscle. The muscle is where the problem lies. She cites a couple of nice papers here, "Effects of Different Types of Exercise on Body Composition, Muscle Strength, and IGF-1 in the Elderly with Sarcopenic Obesity" and "Effects of Resistance Exercise on Bone Health". If you're interested in the references, come to the show notes and you'll find them there.
Muscle as a glucose sink, this is another one where if you've got the feedback, if you've got the diagnosis then all this stuff becomes so much more interesting. Anyone that's ever worn a continuous glucose monitor will tell you that there's only so much you can do by screwing around with carbohydrate intake. At some point, you need to think about where the hell is this substrate going. If it goes in the hatch, where does it go after that? Muscle mass as a sink is probably the most important part, and also obviously, the activation of that muscle mass. If you're carrying a large amount of muscle mass then you don't need to do anything. There'll be a significant amount of glucose disposal via that skeletal muscle without you moving it, but if you wear a CGM, you'll find out very quickly that even a very low level activity will make a huge difference in preventing those postprandial spikes, which I think is important.
Zach: Yeah, definitely. Like you said, we have the liver and then where else is the glucose going to go? The more muscle you have -- it's exactly as you said -- the more spaces it has to go basically. Yeah, someone who has more muscle mass, they're going to tend to be able to get away with more carbohydrate.
Christopher: Megan sites a couple of nice papers here, the "Association of Thigh Muscle Mass with Insulin Resistance and Incident Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Japanese Americans" and "Resistance training improves indices of muscle insulin sensitivity and β-cell function in overweight/obese, sedentary young men". Again, if you're worried about "How many carbs should I eat to sort out my blood glucose variability?" then you need to be thinking about both sides of the equation, not just the carbohydrates.
Talk about body composition. This must be something that clients ask you about. What types of questions or requests that you get from clients with respect to body composition?
Zach: Yeah. A big one is obviously weight loss. When someone's talking about weight loss, really what they mean is fat loss. You don't want to just lose muscle and weight, and everyone -- I shouldn't say everyone, but a lot of people assume, "Oh, if I just lose this weight, I'm going to be really muscular underneath and really defined." You hear the word "toned" thrown around, which I don't know what that means, but it basically means very little body fat with some muscle mass on you.
If you're not resistance training or providing some stimulus for your muscles, if you're trying to lose weight, you're very likely to lose muscle just as likely as fat tissue, so it becomes very, very important if you're trying to lose weight. Like I said, you definitely want to maintain bone tissue, muscle tissue. You want to retain all of that, so it becomes very important in weight loss. Obviously, if you're trying to gain muscle, it's obviously important. You need that stimulus there to grow. If someone's trying to improve body composition then strength training becomes my pretty much number one modality for exercise. We usually will say nutrition is where you get the weight loss and resistance exercise is where you get the body composition. Obviously, both are needed, but I like to say it that way.
Christopher: I'm glad that you did. I was going to ask you that question, but I realized it was going to be really hard to phrase it in such a way that made it sound like it wasn't a choice. Of course it's not a choice. You can do both.
Then of course for all the athletes, there is some evidence that there are fewer injuries in resistance-trained athletes, which I think is something that all endurance athletes obviously care about especially at this time. I think about that a lot when I'm riding my mountain bike. I'm like, "Is this the thing that's going to end up in the emergency room?" I could really use not going to the emergency room anytime soon.
[0:15:03]
That has been my subjective life experience. When I lost a ton of weight on Keto, and no doubt a bunch of muscle mass with it too -- it's just anecdote is what it is. Maybe it's an association that I'm hallucinating, but I did seem to end up getting a lot of injuries around that time too. I ended up with two broken bones. I've never broken a bone in my life. I've never broken a bone since putting the weight back on. It does make you wonder, are you just losing muscle mass or are you just losing fat or are you losing everything?
Zach: Oh yeah, definitely. One thing too, and this kind of ties in with it, we're talking about resistance training helping other athletes not get injured, but a lot of people are afraid to lift weights because they assume they're going to get injured. Actually, there is a paper on this and the incidence of injuries with resistance exercise is very low compared to other sports. I need to pull that up, but it's one of the lowest. It's very rare especially if you have someone teaching your proper form and things like that. As long as you ease into it correctly, which we can touch on a little bit here in a while, it's really not any more risky than anything else. It's possibly even less risky than a lot of other activities.
Christopher: Yeah. With mountain biking, it's not like a series of bad exposures. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. It's not like a series of bad choices that leads to the problem. It's one catastrophic event like you're fine for years and then there's one event that you end up breaking something. That seems to be the way with mountain biking, but I think there's some good evidence that regardless of your endurance activity be it running or biking or swimming or something else that strength training in its own right improves exercise performance. I think that Mike T. Nelson has done a really good job here and I can link to my interview the importance of strength training for endurance athletes because I think he did a really good job there.
Also, neurocognitive health, that's our neurologist friend, Dr. Josh Turknett's area of expertise. Of course, I say that the strength training is a quadrant to intervention, so obviously, Josh cares about that and therefore, the importance of strength training. Megan sites a really nice paper here, the functional and/or structural brain changes in response to resistance exercises and resistance training leading to cognitive improvements. Who would have thought that? You can lift weights and grow a bigger brain. I think that's not like the conventional meme of people that spend time in the gym. I even see podcasts where people use the word "bro" almost like an insult, like a self-deprecating insult as if to say that somebody that goes to the gym could never be an intellectual where obviously, that's not true, so it's slightly funny.
Zach: Obviously, I'm biased, but yeah, there are a lot of benefits and I'm happy with what Megan put together here.
Christopher: I hear these terms like "bro science", that sort of thing. Hopefully, especially if you come to the show notes and you have a look at some of these references that Megan has cited, we've done a good job of convincing you for the case of strength training. Regardless of your goal, strength training should be a part of your regime. The question then becomes, "Well, what the hell do I do now that somebody took my gym away from me?" How do you do that? Have you been inundated with questions from clients asking that exact question?
Zach: Oh yeah, definitely. A lot of it just comes from the assumption that you need a real complex program or you need multiple different exercises for each muscle group or you need to lift the heaviest weights possible with the hardest exercises, a lot of which is misheard or false assumptions about what needs to happen to make progress. Really, you can do a ton of stuff and a lot of beneficial things with just your bodyweight. Also, if you get creative enough, you can find heavy things around your house like a backpack. I'm sure you can load up a suitcase or something. You can find modalities if you really need it, but also, with your bodyweight, there are plenty of challenging exercises to put tension on your muscle.
That's really what we're trying to do, is to place an adequate stimulus on your muscle, tension, and that can be via load. You might lift something really heavy or it might just be a challenging movement pattern. I can throw out some names, but I'm not sure people would know what I'm referring to. Lower body, if you just try to stand on one leg and squat down as low as you could on one leg, that's going to put a lot of tension on your muscles, so there are a lot of ways to get the benefits without a fancy gym basically.
Christopher: You just reminded me. I wonder when was the last time I tried to do a pistol squat.
Zach: Yes, that is what I'm referring to, a good old pistol.
Christopher: Exactly. I think that most endurance athletes listening to this will know that they can't do a pistol squat and I would join them in that. Megan makes a really important point here in the outline, adaptability.
[0:20:01]
I've been talking to my wife, Julie, about this a lot recently. What do you do in uncertain times? I think there was a great deal of uncertainty about the future already before the pandemic. What do you choose to study at university, for example? How do you protect yourself against change? I think adaptability is the answer. The ability to reinvent yourself is perhaps the most important thing. I can almost guarantee that some machine-learning algorithm is not going to take your job in the future if you have a high level of adaptability and the ability to reinvent yourself. Maybe this is just a dry run. At some point, you're going to need to reinvent yourself, and adaptability is really, really important. You already mentioned there, Zach, obviously it's not that hard to find heavy objects around. I bet there's somebody listening to this where there's an exception like "I don't have any kids" and "I don't have any dogs" and "I don't heavy objects throughout the house." Have you met anyone like that?
Zach: No, but again, you can do everything you need with just your body weight. You don't even necessarily have to have any weight, but if you want to get creative and you do more variation then your weight does offer that. Again, you truly don't need a lot of variety to get a benefit.
Christopher: Megan has some great suggestions here. Load up a backpack with weights, sandbags, buckets, water jugs, heavy objects like rocks, kids, pets. I can tell you what I do actually, and I'd like to know what you do as well, Zach. I think that's something that I find quite interesting. Tell me what you do rather than what we should do.
What I've been doing recently -- and for a long time actually before the pandemic -- I love this approach of trying to weave movement into your day rather than doing all in one big bolus. Going to the gym is kind of like that. I think there might even be some evidence to suggest that you can't overcome eight hours of sitting with an hour in the gym. It just doesn't work like that. I feel like I maybe learned this originally from Paul Jaminet. Am I right in thinking that Paul Jaminet was talking about this at least six years ago?
Zach: I don't know. I refer to them as like micro workouts, which are exactly what I do, but I'll let you finish. I'm not sure if Jaminet did talk about that. Maybe.
Christopher: Okay. I feel like that was maybe where I heard it originally, but it's been so long, I started to forget, but yeah, just this idea. Habit formation is super important. Simon has talked about that on the podcast quite a lot, rather than using some form of willpower, to make the decision to go do something and just make it part of your routine. For example, I boil the kettle and then I do some press-ups. I'm usually halfway through the press-ups before I realize consciously that I'm doing press-ups. It's not like I'm using a bunch of willpower to make the decision to do the press-ups. Then I do the same thing when I go out to walk the dogs on my way back.
Obviously, this is very specific to me, so this is not going to be specifically useful to anyone else, but you get the idea. I live in the redwoods in Santa Cruz and redwoods have these giant limbs that fall occasionally when they're dead. They're super good firewood. The trunk of a redwood tree is really crappy firewood. It's just not very dense and has a lot of water in it. It takes forever to dry out and then it's rubbish firewood, but the limbs are really dense hardwood. I live at the top of a steep canyon, so I'm dragging these really quite heavy redwood limbs out of the canyon and then I cut them up to use them as firewood to fire our wood-fired hot tub, then I do ten chin-ups. There's a chin-up bar at the end of my shed. Again, I'm not really making -- it sounds complicated, but I'm not using willpower to do all this stuff. If you put a camera in my garden and film me, you'd see that I'm doing exactly the same thing every day. I'm not using willpower is the point.
Another part of habit-stacked stuff is when I get back from my bike ride, I do some heavy deadlifts and not very many, just one or two sets of five and I'm coming within one or two reps of failure. Also, this time of year, I'm doing tons of chopping wood. I'm just looking at right now probably two cords of wood that I've chopped in the last couple of weeks, and a lot of it is lifting very heavy rounds. We also have tanoak trees here. Their wood, they're really heavy. I've never tried to weigh one, but I'm guessing it's at least two thirds of my body weight, some of the rounds, to lift them. They're pretty heavy. I'm just not going to the gym. I never was and I feel like I've managed to make it work. I'm really happy with my body composition. I'm reasonably happy with the amount of muscle mass I'm carrying these days. Now, tell me what you do, Zack.
Zach: Yeah, I'm very similar. I work from home, and so I go out to the gym whenever. It's usually the same times every day, but I do break it up into two or three smaller workouts. It actually started when I had my son. It was basically like okay, he just took a nap. I'm going to run outside and do a set of overhead presses and then I'm going to come in and make sure he's okay and go back out. I also just like it because it breaks up my day a little bit better. I do feel better like that. Really research shows it's mainly volume across the week like the total amount of work you're doing, which seems to be most important for muscle mass.
[0:25:04]
For strength, it's really frequency, how often you're doing a pattern or movement. So going back to the muscle mass issue, volume, it doesn't matter necessarily when you get that in. It's just a matter of getting it in at some point across the week, like I said. There is somewhat of a minimum, it seems. It seems like you need to do a particular pattern at least twice a week or you need to exercise a particular muscle group at least twice a week, but beyond that, any frequency can work. You can do two times a week, three times a week, four times a week up to every single day, if you want, if you manage your intensity and how much you're doing over time.
Christopher: I realized that I've seen the goal. The people know my goal and it's mostly the same -- it's certainly the same as our clients' goal, which is, like I said, healthspan especially in this time. I really don't know when I'm going to be racing my bike again. I don't have any bit specific performance goals. I should also say that I've not really found -- this regime that I'm doing now has worked really well for performance. The last cyclo-cross season I did, I'm only racing the older Masters category, but I won every race that I started, which for me is a pretty good record, right? I'm not really doing anything super fancy for strength training, but I know that if I did nothing at all, I definitely would not get that result. I'm not sure it needs to be super -- but that's a good question for you. What's your goal? First of all, what are the different types of goals that you typically service, and then what's your goal specifically, Zach?
Zach: Yeah. Other people, it's usually that they want to build muscle, get stronger, lose fat, or just feel better overall. Those are probably the main ones, or optimize performance. For you, I agree, you are challenging your muscles in some way every day or most days, so I think that's going to be good enough for you. Now, for someone who is a beginner and they need to get stronger or they're already weak and they need more muscle mass or they're a beginner, the only trouble I see with that approach is that you need to challenge yourself more and more over time.
Christopher: Right. There's no progression, right?
Zach: Yeah, there's no progression, but for you, you're happy with where you're at, so in that case, as long as you just keep challenging the muscle you have, that muscle is basically going to stay there as long as you're stimulating it frequently enough. For someone else who is relatively weak or they want to get stronger or they should get stronger to improve bone density or muscle mass or something like that then they do need to challenge themselves more over time, but that doesn't have to be with anything fancy. That can be day-to-day activity. You may notice if you're doing it frequently enough like let's say you're carrying logs every day and on day one, you can only carry a little bitty one, if you're doing that enough, over time that little bitty one, it may feel hard on day one, but eventually, you're going to be able to carry more and that one's going to feel easier and easier.
Christopher: Yeah, and of course, you probably adapt without even noticing it like I'm just going to go ahead and lift that one even though I couldn't do that two weeks ago, and I may not be terribly conscious of the fact that I'm now lifting something heavier than I was two weeks ago.
Zach: Exactly. Research is showing that you don't -- a lot of people assume that to get stronger, they need to go in and lift a weight to absolute failure. Research is showing that you do not need to go to failure to progress. That is one method and approach, but you can actually stay quite a bit shy of failure and still make progress as long as you're doing more over time. I'll just throw that out there.
Christopher: Are there any prerequisites for endurance athletes? I'm sure there are some people listening to this that have never done any strength training. Where do you start when you're at home? That's pretty challenging. I've seen somebody coach somebody and I've watched them regress through movements like "Okay, let's start with this" and then they see them try to perform the movement. They've not said anything explicitly, but they've then gone to what looks like a simpler movement and said, "Okay. Can you do this?" No, you can't do that either. It looks like they're worried that the endurance athlete has some basic limitation maybe of mobility so they can't really even get started until these problems are addressed. Is that something that's common? Do you see that a lot in runners or cyclists that may become tight in very predictable ways and they need to do some work before they even start with strength training?
Zach: I do see that they lack mobility in certain areas, but I don't think that should necessarily limit them completely. There may be more exercises that favor, but I'm not worried that someone's going to injure themselves with a bodyweight movement or something that's really low load and something where you -- I'm with the belief that most injuries happen because it's more you do too much too soon. Someone's probably seen this image of a baby squatting with a perfect back straight and we assume that we should be able to squat like that, but very few people can do that.
[0:30:01]
Hip anatomy changes, hip structure, and you just can't do that, but I'm not going to be afraid that someone's going to injure their back if they're squatting down and their low back rounds. A lot of people, I think, assume that their pattern has to be perfect. I'm not always going to load someone right away, but I'm going to try to challenge them in certain patterns. I usually ask for video over time and an injury history, but beyond that, you're going to be okay if you start slow enough and you ramp it up slowly over time based on how you feel.
Christopher: Okay. You just reminded me that -- and we've not had much of that recently, have we? But at one point, there was a really good stream of people posting videos especially from the side of various different movements, and then you giving them some useful feedback, which is incredibly helpful. It's not as good as being there with you in person. The feedback isn't as rapid, but it's still better than no feedback whatsoever. So if you are worried and you have access to the forum, that's what I'd recommend, is you just take a video of yourself and then have Zach have a look at it.
Zach: Yeah, definitely. Feel free to tag me. I still get emails sometimes, but yeah, the forum is a great place to do it and other people can learn from it.
Christopher: Exactly. That's the point. It's just so much more efficient if you're doing all of your calls one-on-one. You've got nothing to be embarrassed about. You're surrounded by a bunch of other newbies like me, so no one's going to be judging you. Yes, they should just come to the forum and post the video.
Should we talk about some specific exercises then? So assuming that you're some sort of endurance athlete and let's say you're somewhat competent. Perhaps you've been going to the gym before, and so maybe normally, you would have performance in mind, but obviously, as I said, that's not so important now, but as regular listeners of the podcast will know, racing was always just the icing on the cake and really, we were in love with the process, and so we're not so worried about goals anyway. Where would you start? Can you give us how do you even break this down? Lower body? Upper body? How do you divide and conquer here?
Zach: Yeah. At the most basic level, I look at it as it's ideal to have some type of lower body pattern or exercise, some type of upper body push, some type of upper body pull that attacks all chains basically. You can break that out a little bit more like you could do -- instead of just upper body push, we might look at upper body horizontal push, which would be pushing horizontal to your body, and then there would be like a vertical push where you're pushing overhead, so parallel to your torso. The same thing with the pull pattern, you have something like a chin-up, which is a vertical pull, and something like a horizontal pull like a row or something where you're pulling horizontal to your body.
You can make it more complicated, but the most basic level, if you're looking for just a simple structure, twice a week of a lower body exercise that's challenging, an upper body push and upper body pull. That would be where I would start someone, like I said, just super simple. Like you mentioned earlier, building the routine is often the hardest part, just getting started, so I'd rather almost underwhelm someone at first and just start there. Three exercises I might pick. If someone's very new to exercise, I might do the exact same thing on those two days just so they ingrain that pattern. They learn it faster. If you have a ton of different exercises then beginners are going to struggle a little bit more to learn them. We might pick a pushup for an upper body push and we might do that both days. We could do a pushup on one day and a bench press on the other day. That's another type of upper body push.
Christopher: How can you do a bench press without gym?
Zach: Well, yeah. I didn't know. Are we specifically talking about just training at home?
Christopher: Exactly, so let's assume that no one has access to the gym for a while. I'm not sure. What do you think?
Zach: Yeah, I know. I think that's a good idea.
Christopher: You've probably been following this more closely than I have, but I'm not expecting gyms to exist again anytime soon.
Zach: Yeah.
Christopher: I think even if they start to remove some of the restrictions that people are calling a lockdown, I'm not sure that the gyms are going to be one of the first businesses to reopen.
Zach: Yeah. I do usually have clients try to get at least bands to add just a little more variety. That would be the next step up in equipment to get, but if we assume that you have nothing then it would largely be pushups and you can alter your hand positions. If you're a newbie, you can do a pushup on a wall or slightly inclined. If you're more advanced, you can elevate your feet. You can introduce slow lowering phases, so instead of lowering fast, you might lower like five seconds. You could get fancy and do like a one arm pushup or use the other hand to just give you a little bit of support, but mainly use the strong arm.
Just a simple template would be try to get ten reps of a certain pattern. If you can get ten reps -- ten is arbitrary, but if you can get ten reps then make that pattern a little bit challenging. Let's say you start with a pushup. You can do three sets of ten reps.
[0:35:00]
Next time, make that a little harder. Elevate your feet a little bit or try to, like I said, use mainly one arm, a little bit of support, and over time, work towards the most challenging pattern, which is probably like a feet-elevated, one arm pushup or something like that.
Christopher: Okay. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get to the one arm pushup, but certainly, I could be making my normal routine slightly more challenging, which is something I've not thought about for a very long time. Personally, I find some of the complexity overwhelming. My wife is the same actually. The fastest way to stop her from doing anything and me is to give me a bunch of exercises where we don't recognize the names even, let alone the movements, and then I have to spend a ton of time on YouTube or whatever trying to figure out what the hell that thing is. Even after a couple of weeks, I'm still having to refer back to the video like, "Oh, what was that thing again?" Do you know what I mean? You have a bunch of novel exercises within that one workout and then there's like A and B workouts on different days and stuff, and so you have to keep coming back to the videos even several weeks later. I feel like that's the enemy of routine.
Zach: Well, that's why like I said, if someone's a newbie then they may have three total exercises they're doing the whole week. They'll do those three on day one and then the next day, they do three more and that's it. They're exactly the same though. I do try to figure that out. This may not be relevant to our conversation right now, but when I'm working with someone, I try to get an idea of do they like a lot variety because some people will get bored if they're just doing something super simple. Some people like complexity, and so I try to get an idea of what they're familiar with too. I'll ask them, "What exercises are you familiar with or have you done in the past?" and things like that. Yeah, definitely don't feel like -- if you know an exercise in each of those categories then go for it. Just challenge yourself with that given pattern.
Christopher: That's interesting. I wonder if then the most important thing is noticing, knowing yourself really well, knowing whether you're the sort of person that needs novelty and needs to keep moving on and doing something different or whether you're more like me where I do one or two of the same thing. That's the natural tendency. Whenever you deviate from that then perhaps you're moving towards nothing happening at all.
I know if I was to buy one of these fancy online programs, maybe I've been following some podcast and I like these guys and I know that this is how they make their money by selling online programs, and then those guys, they're trying to impress and they're trying to make things perhaps more complicated than they really need to be so that when you open this thing that you've just bought, you don't think, "Shit, I already knew about deadlifts" even though that may be the most important exercise. They're trying to impress and then what ends up happening is nothing at all because it's just too damn complicated.
Zach: This is off topic, but I actually started working on a little e-book like training simplified just because probably the two audiences I see a lot that struggle with resistance exercises, number one, people who feel overwhelmed, just like we're talking about. They just feel like, "My goodness, there's so much out there. It's so complex." Number two are people who they may come to me and they want a program and I get all their training history background and I start them somewhere and they're like, "Whoa, I'm doing way more than this. This is so easy. I'm not crushed when I'm done," but I'm like, well, are you progressing, and so many of them are not. They're doing exactly the same things as they were doing two years ago and they feel like they've got a good workout, but they're not seeing results if they're trying to get stronger, lose body fat, build muscle or something like that. I think for both of these audiences, it's so helpful to just scale it back, focus on just a few patterns, and get better at them over time. That's really what you're trying to do.
Christopher: Okay. You talked about upper body there. What about the lower body? You mentioned the pistol squat. What else have you got? What else do you think about?
Zach: Yeah, so any type of -- the starter one would be a squat. For some people, that might be squatting to a chair and trying to stand up from the chair. That'd be an easy one to start with for some people. For other people, it's squatting as low as you can with two legs. Then it's moving to something like a single leg pattern, which would be a lunge or a split squat. If you need me to explain any more of these in detail, I can.
Christopher: Well, I think the best medium for this is video, and this is obviously not video. Maybe the best thing to do -- I know for most things, you have a video that you like. That's another overwhelming problem, is you just try and Google these movements and you're going to get millions of videos. Who knows whether any of them are any good? That's one of the important things that you've done for me and our clients, is just to be able to filter that stuff and say, "Okay, you need to watch this one." It's incredibly helpful. Maybe I'll link those when you say something. Elaine is super good at following up getting the right thing from the interviewee and having that link in the show notes for people who want to see what a perfect squat looks like or what you think is the most helpful video. Is it just as simple as lowering your body weight? Is there any way to get that wrong?
[0:40:08]
Zach: If you're unloaded then not really. Again, I do not think someone's going to hurt themselves unless they go from never squatting to doing ten sets of 100 reps in day one. It's just doing too much, too soon, but again, some of the people who know strength training a little more may say, "What if their knees cave in? What if their lower back rounds?" I'm still not concerned. Your knees should be able to cave in a little bit, not snap in half. You're going to be okay if you're not doing too much.
Christopher: I'm laughing here, chuckling here because of course, I'm a person that does that too. This dovetails nicely with what I've learned from you about pain management. If you fill your head full of these ideas that you're going to break unless it's perfect then guess what? Pain is generated in the brain. I think there's a really good chance that it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Zach: Yeah. That's something I'm pretty passionate -- well, I shouldn't say passionate because I haven't dug into the research near as much as some of the other ones I really look up to. You had Zac Cupples on the podcast awhile back. He's really good. I mentioned some of the Barbell Medicine guys. I don't agree with everything necessarily, but yeah, so much of the pain is in your brain and we often create what's called a nocebo effect. If you assume something is going to hurt you or you go into it intimidated and scared, your body is more likely to send a pain response in some way even if there's no tissue damage whatsoever. The body is very adaptable. It's very malleable. It can get away with some movements that aren't perfect.
Christopher: Right. You talked about a pull, a push, a squat --
Zach: Well, we haven't talked about a pull yet. We talked a little bit about a push, pushup variations. We talked a little bit about lower body, which was a bodyweight squat then you can move to some type of single leg movement. A pistol would be one of the more challenging ones for sure, a lunge, a step up. Any of those are great. I can have Elaine link to some of the more challenging exercises that I don't think a lot of people might know the names of that are so great to do when you need very little equipment.
Then moving on to an upper body pull, this one's probably the most challenging to do. Strictly, if you are just using your bodyweight you have nothing at all, it's pretty hard to load, but if you can go out and find a tree trunk, do it like a pull-up, something like a pull-up. What I have some people do is take a towel and put it into the top of your doorframe and shut the door and then hold onto the towel, lean back, and you can pull yourself up with that like you're leaning at an angle basically.
Christopher: Right. I got you, kind of like a TRX.
Zach: Yeah, it's exactly like TRX, like a suspension trainer. That would work. Also, some people, if you have a really sturdy table -- Megan actually mentioned this in the outline -- you can lay underneath it and just pull yourself up to the table. Those are some variations, but again, just pick one of those and make it really darn hard over time. You can wear a backpack and lean back and pull yourself up with a towel if you need more load. There are a lot of ways to still do it.
Christopher: Yeah. You just reminded me, that's the one thing we don't have in Santa Cruz, is any good climbing trees. The tanoaks and redwoods, they're really rubbish climbing trees.
Zach: Yeah.
Christopher: We were in Hawaii recently and they had these fantastic trees on the beach and you could climb and do all kinds of -- I don't care how tall you are. There was a perfect branch for you to do chin-ups on right there on the beach. It's incredible.
Zach: Those would be some of the big three categories. Megan also listed carries, which is basically just pick up something heavy and walk around, which is great because it's just loading your entire body. It works your grip and your traps. It even works your lower body if the weight is heavy enough. We talked about stimulating bone. If you have something really, really heavy on you and you're just walking, that's enough to create a stress on the bone, so that's another good one too. Surely, most people can find something really heavy around their house.
Christopher: Right. It's literally like carrying a suitcase, right?
Zach: Yeah, exactly.
Christopher: For me, I've got this bag that I put my firewood in. I have to split it quite small before I take it to the wood-fired hot tub. I don't know what it weighs, but it's pretty heavy and it's lopsided. Does it matter that it's lopsided? Is it better to find one on each side?
Zach: No. I would just mix it up a little bit, but no. That kind of goes back to our talk on perfect movement and position and posture. That's kind of a rabbit hole to go down, but no, that'd be fine.
Christopher: Okay. What else? Did we miss something there on the -- you talked about a squat. Where does the deadlift fit into all this? That's the one thing I have, is a trap bar for deadlifting, which I've really enjoyed.
Zach: Yeah. I was talking about how you can make it a little more complex. Like I said, basically, we have lower body, we have upper body push, upper body pull, but you can break that down a little farther.
[0:45:00]
I said for upper body, you can break it into horizontal and vertical patterns. For lower body, you can break it into more anterior dominant patterns such as a squat. That works more the muscles on the front side. It still works backside too, but just think of it as more anterior quads. Then you have more hip hinge patterns, which work more glutes and hamstrings. That's where a deadlift pattern would fit in, but you're actually still going to work your glutes and hamstrings to some degree with something like a lunge or a squat. That's the only reason I'll make it more simple, but yeah, if you're someone who's more advanced, I think a trap bar deadlift is a great lower body exercise in general that would fit that category overall.
Christopher: I just had a look on Amazon whilst you were talking and it seems like all the hex trap bars are still available. I guess the challenge is getting hold of the plates.
Zach: Yeah.
Christopher: The shipping for those can be very challenging. I think I got most of mine from some guy on Craigslist, but I've heard that there are all kinds of crazy stuff going on, people selling exercise equipment on Craigslist.
Zach: Oh, yeah. The bands I was talking about, they sold out for a long time, the ones I recommended, just a lot of people buying. Even dumbbells were hard to find for a while, adjustable dumbbells. Yeah, a lot of things are selling out. Yeah, trap bar is definitely a great tool if you can get your hands on one of those.
Christopher: Well, maybe it's better that we're -- like what Josh said when he talked about his demand theory of cognitive decline, this creativity of trying to solve the problem without the usual apparatus could be one of those important signals that tells our brain that we're better off alive rather than better off dead. This is exactly the sort of creativity that I think Josh was talking about.
Zach: Again, to make it harder, you don't have to have a really heavy load. Again, deadlifts are great because you can load them up so heavy and it's a fairly simple overall pattern, but you can move to something like a single leg deadlift or something like that, which is super challenging. You don't need much weight at all. Again, if you found something fairly heavy to hold in your hands and you did a similar pattern with just a single leg then you're not going to need fancy equipment or something that heavy. That is hard.
Christopher: So what else? Did we did miss anything? Was that all the big movements?
Zach: Yeah, that's really the big thing. Like I said, as you get more advanced and you want to make more progress, you are going to have to do more overall. That doesn't necessarily mean more complex movement patterns, nothing like that. It just means basically more volume, more total work done across the week. So instead of two times a week, you probably need to bump up to three, four or five times a week. You may need to pick more exercises, just do more sets in general. Just do more overall, but again, I would just assess where you're at, where's your starting point. If you're doing nothing at all then just get the routine down. That is going to be a stressor on your body already, so you're going to create an adaptation. If you're doing two sets two times a week and you're not seeing progress and you feel recovered, go to three sets twice a week. Make really small changes, but if you're progressing on what you're doing then leave it where it's at.
Christopher: Right. You reminded me of what Simon has been really good on the podcast before talking about the SEEDS framework. It's both an acronym and a metaphor, so we're talking about one of the pillars here, exercise. The metaphor is these tiny things that you plant in the ground, they compound to make a big difference over time. You basically just said the same thing in different words. So if you're a complete noob here, just pick three things that you can do in two minutes or less and that's your starting point. Don't make it more complex than that. Don't take longer than that. Don't make it harder than that. Just get the ball rolling.
Zach: Oh, definitely. Something that comes to mind, a great example, I had a client the other day who had been doing pretty much nothing. For his upper body, I just told him to walk up and down the steps twice and then do a pushup on one of the steps and that was like his habit. You can create a cue that you talked about like as soon as I brush my teeth, I'm going to walk upstairs, make the bed, come downstairs and do five pushups on that step, something like that.
Christopher: He probably needed, as I would, your permission that that was enough, right?
Zach: Oh, absolutely.
Christopher: Even if you come up with that on your own, you assume that it's not enough, but when you pay someone good money to tell you that that's what you need to do then suddenly, they're a worthwhile activity.
Zach: Well, like I said, it's really just about doing a little bit more than you have been. There's no need to start out with something very fancy. Just again challenge yourself on some basic things.
Christopher: What do you think about blood flow restriction training? It was one of those things that ended up in the gadget graveyard. Why was that? Sometimes it's interesting to reflect on why something ended up in the gadget graveyard. I'm not sure why it was with -- there's like a little bit of friction to get going with the blood flow restriction training like knowing how to put the cuffs on. I believe there are some systems where they make that pretty frictionless, but I remember them being quite expensive.
[0:50:02]
I got these blood flow restriction bands from Amazon and then Tommy taught me how to put them on and it was like just enough friction to where I didn't want to do it. I also remember it being truly apocalyptically awful feeling like when you got going with it and when it was working, it's just the most -- I guess that's the point really, but it was so wretched, it made me not want to do it again.
Zach: Well, that's what I was going to say. It sounds great. I like it. Don't get me wrong. The benefit of it is that you can essentially stimulate your whole muscle fiber pull. Those type two fibers we talked about earlier, usually you need to do something really, really explosive or really heavy, but the nice thing about blood flow restriction training is you can actually lift a load that's really light. If we're talking percentages, about 30% of your potential, so if you can lift 100 pounds with something, you could just put 30 pounds on there and you could achieve the same stimulus or equal stimulus using these blood flow restriction cuffs. That sounds great. For example, if you're injured or if you're kind of elderly then that's really beneficial, but like you said, it is so hard and it burns so bad. It is not fun.
Again, it sounds nice. It's like, "Oh, you don't have to lift as heavy. I'm going to get these benefits." Again, if you're someone who can push through the pain, which you need to do, you need to really push yourself, then it's a great way. Again, if we go back to someone who needs -- let's say they're fairly strong and they need some type of stimulus and they just don't have any weight or way to load their muscles then they can put these blood flow restriction cuffs on and they can do something fairly easy. For them, a lunge might be fairly easy, but if you put these restriction cuffs on, it's going to be way, way harder and you're likely to simulate those type two fibers with something like that.
Christopher: But perhaps if you're injured then it could be a completely different story, right?
Zach: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's great modality if you're injured, definitely. I'm totally a fan of them. It's just I think people assume they were going to get better results or it's some new, fancy thing. Research is showing that the results are about the same. It's good. The only thing is it's not really going to stimulate connective tissue or bone density as much, but muscles, it definitely will.
Christopher: Right. I guess the best thing is the thing that you keep doing really. For me, it's very utilitarian. I'm thinking about I want to enjoy that hot tub in the evenings with my kids underneath the stars, and so it seems like a worthwhile activity to drag these heavy redwood limbs up the side of this steep canyon, and then I don't notice that it doesn't feel very comfortable whereas the blood flow restriction training has no purpose and it hurts like hell. This is very difficult and the reward -- I guess you'd have to -- Simon talked about this on his XTERRA Podcast recently that you're probably going to have to hack the reward. If it feels so awful then you need something rewarding afterwards to make you keep doing it. It's like the trigger, the routine, and the reward. Where the hell is the reward with blood flow restriction training? I'm not sure there is one, so maybe you need to figure something out as the reward.
Zach: Well, like I said, some people really -- I don't know. They enjoy it. They just enjoy the burn and that feeling.
Christopher: The masochistic type.
Zach: Yeah. You do get a really big pump. The muscle just fills up with fluid and it feels in that way nice and you really have to push yourself to go to that level needed to stimulate.
Christopher: Megan makes a really good point here and I think this is especially appropriate for all the athletes that we work with, not all of them, but a lot of them say this. They say things like, "I've got all or nothing" or "I'm a type A person and I either go all in or I don't do it at all." I think that Simon has been the antidote for that, but Megan makes an important point here. The danger with strength training is to go all in on the lifting and then not do the recovery. It's as important as the lifting. It probably is as important. Obviously, you agree, Zach, but is that a problem that you see a lot?
Zach: Oh yeah, definitely. It goes back to what I was talking about, the two audiences I see. One is people are just overwhelmed. They don't know where to start. The other one is the group that are just doing so much just to feel like they've worked out, but yeah, they just don't have the recovery piece down. You're just not going to adapt to that stressor if you don't recover in some way. Many of the people that tend to overthink all of this, they try to make things a little more complex than they need to be. They're the ones that I found do lack on the recovery a little bit. They're just trying to do everything.
Christopher: You need to recover as hard as you train. Then of course sleep is part and parcel of that. It's probably the most important intervention for recovery. I've done a number of good podcasts on sleep especially with Greg Potter and Ashley Mason if you're having trouble sleeping because I know that that can be a problem especially in these times, I think.
[0:55:03]
Zach: Definitely. I'll have to link to a study that shows how valuable sleep is to adaptations with strength training. It's so big, huge.
Christopher: Megan obviously did a really good job on the importance of dietary protein for strength training and muscle mass. Also, she mentions here anti-inflammatory, whole foods. I think you probably have something to say about that, Zach. You've seen how diet-induced inflammation, surely that would limit your gains with any strength training.
Zach: Oh, yeah, definitely. Inflammation is -- yeah, definitely. It's part of the process of adapting to exercise, but yeah, you're just not going to recover as well if you're inflamed. Just like what we were going back to, that's another way to limit your recovery process to adapt to the stress.
Christopher: Do you have any particular preference for timing, time of day? You already mentioned that you need to be hitting muscle groups a certain number of times per week, but is there a specific time of day that you think is helpful?
Zach: No. Again, this goes into the minutia, but there are studies showing that people tend to perform higher intensity resistance exercise late afternoon, but there are also studies showing that you adapt to when you consistently workout. That's what we're talking about earlier. I think it goes back to consistency like pick a time that works best for you and stick to that. Try to make it part of your routine as much as possible and then you just don't have to think about it as much. For me, I tend to do one of my workouts very first thing in the morning. One is another specific time later in the day, but it's just because that's what's easiest for me and that's how I get it in. That's what I encourage my athletes to do as well.
Christopher: Megan makes one last point here. Get other people you live with involved. I think that's an excellent tip. That's the other problem. It's great temptation just to do my own thing. I've got my little routine that I described and how do you get someone else involved with that when it's not necessarily -- I don't know. It's like this is not the opportunity to go grab someone and say, "Oh, this is exactly what I'm doing right now." That seems like it's just not going to happen, but yeah, I think that is important during this time when we're all being forced to spend more time apart, to make an extra effort to get the people that you live with at least involved in all of this. Can you grab one of your kids or your wife or something else? I think that's something I could learn from Megan here. I should give that a try. Also on Zoom as well, can you do it on Zoom? Have you ever thought about that, Zach? Have you thought about doing group sessions on Zoom?
Zach: Well, actually, a lot of trainers are doing that now. They're having to do that, and so that is definitely possible. I guess I've coached some people via Zoom like a live session. I've never done a group, but I have done one-on-one with that, so that is always possible. One thing I was going to say, going back to what you were just talking about, getting others involved, that's another thing that's nice with the resistance exercise. It doesn't have to be so structured. If you go out for a bike ride, you're gone. It's a period of time like a run or something like that. With strength training, if you have your couch, you can do a pushup with your feet on the couch and then rest for a while. Go play with your kid or do something, come back, do a pushup. It doesn't have to be so structured. You're just putting stress on your body, so unless you have a really specific goal, but to get the benefits of strength training, it doesn't have to be this dedicated time slot where you have to rest X time, et cetera. It allows you more time to do other things.
Christopher: You've just reminded me what the hell I was talking about. When I go for that walk in the mornings, quite often I've got my boy, and quite often I've got my boy on my back. Yeah, sure, he's like part of the load that I'm carrying. I forget, so again, it's so much part of my routine that I forget I even do it. Then when I'm splitting wood outside, my kids -- are your kids like this? I suppose it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. They don't really want to be outside on their own. Do you know what I mean? You can't just push them out the door and expect them to stay out there. They just want to be where you are.
Zach: That's true.
Christopher: If you're outside chopping wood, they'll stay out there as long as you're chopping wood, but the moment you go indoors, they're coming in with you. I don't know whether that's something specific about my kids, but I doubt it.
Zach: No. Cal is definitely like that, my son. Yeah, I actually try to go outside and do as much as possible. My gym is in the garage, but if I can go and do a pushup in the yard, I'll definitely do that over being specifically in my gym or something like that. I'd rather get outside on the grass or just out in the sun in general. We all know the benefits of that too.
Christopher: Right, yeah, exactly, the pleiotropic effects of sunshine. Yeah, exactly, anything you can do to get out in the sun is also going to be beneficial.
Zach: That is one benefit of getting out of the gym that I've been trying to get clients to think about. You don't need to be indoors all the time. This way, it can force you outside potentially and that's definitely a huge benefit.
Christopher: That's really interesting to think about, isn't it? I keep coming back to all these things like, oh, do we really want to go back to the way we were doing things before? We've figured out some little kinks here and it ends up being outside.
[1:00:02]
Is that going to be better or worse than what we had before? Would you go back to going to the gym? I don't know. You might argue that you lost something from your social life, but that's like arguing you can only socialize your kids if they go to school. I think you'll find there are other ways that you can socialize.
Zach: Yeah, definitely. There are benefits to come about this and that's what I've had clients referring to. No things aren't perfect necessarily, but if you learn to push through this, it's going to snowball in other areas too. You learn that adversity and adaptability like we touched on at the very beginning, so I think it's all going to be okay even though you don't have your gym.
Christopher: You sound like you've said that before on a client call.
Zach: Oh my goodness, yeah, several times, but again, I understand the worry. It's unfortunate. That's why I'm very passionate about this, simplifying training more. It does not have to be so complicated. Like you said, these programs that are for sale, a lot of them are super complex and fancy. Again, that can be okay for the right person, but again, it doesn't have to be so challenging.
Christopher: Right. I think that's a good place to wrap up. Was there anything I should have asked you, Zach?
Zach: No. I think that's everything. I think that was a good start. Again, if people have questions, if you do have access to the forum, definitely tag me in forum checks for any questions on this. I'll try to link to some of the exercises that we've talked about. I think that's it.
Christopher: Yeah, exactly. Come and support Nourish Balance Thrive on Patreon and then come over to the forum and shoot some video of yourself and have Zach critique it or come and have a look at some of the other videos that have already been posted. I would love to get more stuff going. At one point, we had these challenges going on the forum and that's actually how I started doing the press-ups. I'm just wondering what the next one should be, but maybe somebody else should tell me. I don't like to always be the one that's pushing forward with the next suggestion, so maybe someone listening has got a good idea and we should get that going on in the forum. Yeah, come and join us on the forum.
Zach, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you on this most important of topics. It's been super good. Thank you.
Zach: Yeah, no problem. It was fun.
Christopher: Thank you.
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