Throw a Rock at the Rabbit, Don’t Chase It
When we think of being successful and performing at the highest levels, we tend to think about pushing ourselves beyond our limits. As we’ve seen, pushing past the point of exhaustion is a losing strategy. Getting adequate rest is a critical component of high achievement. So, too, are some of the other strategies we’ve talked about: carving out time in your schedule to meditate, do yoga, practice breathing techniques, or just go for a long walk.
Notice that in the list in chapter 7 I didn’t include doing boot camp, spin classes, or marathon training. Not that there is anything wrong with those pursuits—exercise can be good for your health, it makes some people feel great, and it was the game changers’ fourth most cited strategy for kicking more ass. The problem is that a lot of us are so focused on “exercise” that we forget about movement. There’s no question that the human body was designed to move and that most of us don’t move nearly enough. Sure, exercise is technically a form of movement, but it is a short, intense burst of movement. Sustained, functional movement is not the same thing as exercise.
So even though many of my guests identified exercise as one of the most important things they do, I’m going to slightly modify that piece of advice and focus on movement. In my experience, when people focus too much on the idea of exercise, they often waste a lot of time and effort. When I weighed 300 pounds, I resolved to exercise my way out of it. I worked out for ninety minutes a day six days a week for eighteen months. No matter how much it hurt or how tired I was, every day I did forty-five minutes of cardio and forty-five minutes of weight training. The demotivating (and demoralizing) result was that I ended up a very strong obese person. The truth is that the highest-performing people I’ve coached—including CEOs and hedge fund managers—are also the type to overexercise or train for Ironman triathlons while running companies. The result is predictable: reductions in libido, sex hormones, and sleep quality, and injuries and inflammation that often result in chronic pain that, ironically, leads to less overall movement. A few do pull it off, but it’s unusual for it to be sustainable.
Once you free your muscles and joints to function as they’re intended to, you’ll look healthier and feel better. You’ll be able to pick up your kids without cringing in pain. You’ll be able to stand tall throughout the day without slumping into a hunched position by noon. And you’ll finally be able to exercise effectively and do so for years without getting injured. Being able to move correctly is the foundation of any type of exercise or athletic pursuit. There is no type of exercise on Earth that does not require functional movement. So this chapter will focus on the importance of movement and what the experts say about how to exercise for the most game-changing results.
Law 22: Don’t Run Until You Can Walk
High-risk sports—including running—don’t make you a better person, but the injuries that come with them are a tax on everything you do as a human being. When you rewire your nervous system to move well, high-risk exercise becomes low risk. And all the energy you waste moving wrong becomes available for you to put to better uses. Exercising for the sake of exercising is not only a waste of time, it’s also bad for you if you do it wrong.
Remember that scene in The Matrix where Neo looks at the world and sees ones and zeroes the way only a hacker can? There are experts who can take a look at the way you stand, the way you walk, and the way you move and know more about you than you’d ever expect. Kelly Starrett is one of those guys. He’s a famous figure in the world of CrossFit and has taught some of the world’s top athletes and executives to move well. He is also a coach and physical therapist and the author of an unusual but awesome fitness book, Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance.
Kelly wants to change the way you think about running and moving. Running enthusiasts believe that running is a healthy, smart way to exercise, even perhaps something that makes us uniquely human. But is that true? Are humans really meant to run? In our interview, Kelly explained that he was always athletic, but while playing football in high school he developed knee pain that ended up plaguing him for years. He later discovered that his pain was stemming from his incorrect running form. His feet were weak, he didn’t have the range of motion necessary to run properly, and his knees were paying the price.
This is not a unique problem. According to Kelly, 80 percent of people who run at least three times a week are injured over the course of a year. That number may be shocking, but it isn’t because running is inherently dangerous. It’s because most people don’t have the motor control and range of motion they need to run safely. In order to perform any sort of exercise, whether it’s yoga, Pilates, CrossFit, or running, you have to make sure that you are asking your body to complete only movements that it is capable of performing properly. This often requires going back to basics and learning the right form for simple movements that our current sedentary lifestyles prevent us from doing correctly. In other words, you need to master a movement practice before you can begin an exercise practice.
Where should a movement practice begin? In 1995, two physical therapists, Gray Cook and Lee Burton, started working together to gather statistical data to help prevent injuries. Their research on human movement patterns evolved into what is now called Functional Movement Systems, which assesses people’s ability to move properly. It’s hard to know where to start any project unless you establish a baseline. Though some problems are obvious, other limitations to your range of movement may be less so. Functional Movement Systems has created a standardized program that measures your mobility and provides techniques to address your limitations. Once you have the mechanics to be able to exercise correctly, you will be able to run or do any other form of exercise without risk of being injured.
According to Kelly, the good news is that the body is able to self-correct once it learns how to move correctly. The wiring for proper alignment is already there, and when you practice putting your body into a better position, it turns back on. Kelly and other therapists work with their patients to practice proper patterning, which he describes as pulling the wires through the conduit that has already been laid. You weren’t born with stiff muscles and inflexibility; years of bad habits have caused these problems, but they are fixable.
The number one cause of the problems Kelly sees in his patients is sitting too much. This surprisingly goes for athletes as well as people with more sedentary lifestyles. This is another problem with the whole idea of “exercise”: people tend to check it off their list in the morning or at night and then spend the rest of the day sitting in a chair. So essentially they are sedentary people who move for forty-five minutes a day but think they’re superhealthy and virtuous. Kelly asked the members of a professional football team he was working with to track their daily movement patterns and found that they were sitting for fourteen to sixteen hours a day. Those were professional athletes! Sure enough, many of them were experiencing chronic knee pain and low back pain that were negatively impacting their performance. Kelly found that their problems weren’t stemming from athletic injuries; they were caused by lack of movement.
Another leader in the world of movement is BJ Baker, the first strength and conditioning trainer for the Boston Red Sox, who has been involved in the training, preparation, nutritional counseling, and rehabilitation of professional athletes in virtually every sport. He agrees with Kelly’s assessment and says that sitting for six or eight hours a day can undo the effects of a one- or two-hour workout.
BJ conducts functional movement assessments with his patients to quantify which movements they can and can’t perform. When he evaluates kids as young as eight years old, he often sees that they can’t perform a simple squat. The kids themselves are sometimes shocked to discover that they’re unable to perform fairly basic movements that don’t require a lot of strength. But it’s not strength that’s required to complete these movements; it’s stability and mobility of the joints, which little kids who spend most of the day seated are lacking. However, by sitting lesss and practicing correct movement, these abilities can be regained.
Many of BJ’s patients experience tremendous healing just from learning to move properly. For example, in his interview, BJ told me about a client named Bill who was on statins for high cholesterol and medication to lower his blood pressure. He was forty pounds overweight and had atrocious posture. In fact, he had lost a full two inches from his height because of rounding of his spine. BJ corrected his movements, addressed his posture, and made small changes to his diet. After eight months, Bill was able to stop taking both of his medications, he’d lost forty pounds, and he’d gained back an inch and a half in height. All it took was improving his posture and core strength and reestablishing muscle tissue length, and Bill was able to undo twenty years’ worth of bad habits!
I grew up thinking it was normal to be in pain when I moved. It didn’t stop me from playing competitive soccer for thirteen years, in agony the whole time. Much of the pain—and the constant injuries—went away when I learned to make small tweaks to the way I moved after practicing yoga with experienced teachers several times a week for five years. Yoga is awesome for flexibility and learning how to activate certain muscles in the body, but it’s not the best way to learn how to walk, sit, or move most effectively. Even after all that work, learning proper functional movement by working with experts who assessed the way I moved and made small tweaks to the ways I sat, moved, and walked gave me another level of freedom in how I moved with results that reflected themselves in the way I showed up in the rest of my life.
The same results are possible for you when you learn to move your body the right way. Whether or not you choose to run, swim, lift, put your feet behind your head, or dance, doing it with the right form will improve your ability to change your game. But choosing a form of exercise that will provide the most benefits in less time matters, too, which leads us to the next law . . .
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Law 23: Strong Muscles Make You Smarter and Younger
It’s tempting to believe that running a marathon will make you a better human being, and it might the first time you do it because it will increase your willpower. The bigger truth is that too much cardio stresses the body and takes too long to achieve results. High performers exercise efficiently, which means stimulating the right hormones using the right protocols at the right times.
Charles Poliquin was one of the first biohackers out there, long before I wrote the definition of the term. He’s a world-renowned strength and conditioning educator and coach who has helped many of the world’s most elite athletes kick ass to achieve hundreds of medals, wins, and personal bests in seventeen different sports. For decades, Charles has been investigating how the signals you send to your muscles create changes in your body, and he really doesn’t care whether you or I or anyone else likes what he’s learned. He’s a visionary who tends to know things years before everyone else catches on, and that’s exactly why so many pros work with him. It’s also why I like to hang out with him and invited him to be on the show.
Charles has come to the conclusion that strength training is better for your brain health and overall performance than long-distance aerobic exercise, which he claims ages the brain. That view has really pissed off some people (namely endurance athletes), but it has been verified by some of the latest medical research. If you’re one of those pissed-off people who love endurance exercise, stay with me. I’m not saying you should quit your favorite exercise altogether, but I would suggest you make sure you’re working on your muscle strength, too. (That’s true whether you’re a woman or a man.)
In 2013, scientists looked at what types of exercise were most beneficial for patients who were suffering from Parkinson’s disease.1 In a clinical trial, they tested three forms of exercise: low-intensity treadmill exercise (walking), high-intensity treadmill exercise (running), and a combination of stretching and resistance (weight) training. I was already familiar with the study when I spoke to Charles, but I did not know that he had actually consulted on the protocols used by the scientists. He told them before the study started that the aerobic work would worsen the patients’ condition, and it turned out that he was right. Charles calls this a “no-shit-Sherlock” study. As he expected, the patients who did a combination of stretching and weight training had the best results, while some patients also benefited from low-resistance walking on a treadmill.
Do those results translate to those of us who do not have Parkinson’s disease? Charles believes that the answer is yes. Though he says there are some legitimate benefits of aerobic exercise, especially for people with high blood pressure or who are obese or sedentary or have significant visceral belly fat (fat stored around major organs), long-term aerobic training has substantial negative effects that many people fail to realize.
First of all, aerobic training raises the cortisol (stress hormone) level, which causes inflammation and accelerates aging. A high cortisol level elevates the amount of oxidative substances in the body. These oxidative substances increase inflammation in the brain, heart, gastrointestinal tract, and other organs. To be clear, resistance training elevates the cortisol level, too, but this elevation is offset by a release of other beneficial hormones that does not occur after aerobic exercise.
A 2010 study tested cortisol levels in more than three hundred endurance athletes (long-distance runners, triathletes, and cyclists) and compared their measurements with a control group of nonathletes. The results showed that the aerobic athletes had significantly higher cortisol levels than the control group, and there was a positive correlation between higher cortisol levels and greater training volume. The researchers concluded, “These data suggest that repeated physical stress of intensive training and competitive races among endurance athletes is associated with elevated cortisol exposure over prolonged periods of time.”2
Another study in 2011 looked at the effects of cycling on healthy, active young men, and found that it significantly increased cortisol levels and inflammatory markers.3 This is a big deal, since chronic inflammation is at the root of many life-threatening diseases including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.4 It also has a more immediately noticeable link to decreased mental clarity and energy.
In addition, your body produces harmful free radicals in response to the oxygen-rich environment generated by increased respiration during aerobic training. These free radicals create oxidative stress, meaning that they overwhelm the number of antioxidants in your body that can counteract their damage. Oxidative stress is a major contributor to the aging process, and it is well established that excessive aerobic exercise can cause oxidative stress.5
Charles and I recommend supplementing with antioxidants and/or probiotics to counter these aging effects of aerobic exercise, but he believes that it’s even more effective to simply add resistance training to your routine. Strength training triggers the release of anabolic hormones that help counter oxidative stress and build muscle, bone, and connective tissue, which also lets you do more cardio without the damage. We know, for example, that to prevent osteopenia, which is loss of bone, strength training is very valuable, while aerobic sports decrease bone mineral density, which can lead to osteopenia.6
Charles told me about a group of studies conducted at Tufts University back in the 1980s that looked at factors that could predict aging. The studies revealed that the most important parameter was muscle mass, and number two was strength. Those markers outranked cholesterol level, high blood pressure, resting heart rate, maximum heart rate, and all other factors as predictors of healthy aging. The reality is that starting at age thirty, we begin to lose as much as 3 to 5 percent of our muscle mass per decade.7 This degenerative loss of muscle mass is called sarcopenia. But although the loss is pretty much inevitable, it is also wholly reversible. By stimulating the muscles and nervous system together through a combination of movement and weight training, you can rebuild lost muscle and experience less inflammation, reduced oxidative stress, greater strength, and better bone health, all while slowing down the aging process. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me!
Mark Sisson, a health and fitness expert and the author of the bestselling book The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy, coined the term “chronic cardio” over a decade ago to describe the way so many endurance athletes were training: at about 75 to 80 percent of their maximum heart rates for long periods of time. Mark himself used to train the same way. A former long-distance runner, triathlete, and Ironman competitor, Mark used to take in a lot of carbohydrates to support his endurance sports. The combination of that lifestyle of inflammatory food and overtraining had left him with osteoarthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, and a career that had basically evaporated.
Mark became a coach and saw the same problems manifest themselves in the athletes he was coaching—they were training too hard and too long and not getting the results they wanted. He started researching how to improve endurance without overtraining and found a formula that worked: moving around a lot at a low level of activity, lifting heavy things only once in a while, and sprinting once a week. The key to endurance training, he says, is low-level training combined with occasional all-out, really hard training. That was how our ancestors moved. They didn’t run for an hour or more at a time. Instead, they consistently worked at low levels of exertion, which burned stored body fat, and then exerted themselves fully once in a while, when they were in danger or chasing animals for food.
It’s not easy for most of us to replicate this pattern today, so Mark suggests doing anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour of low- to moderate-level aerobic movement, such as walking briskly, hiking, cycling, etc. It doesn’t need to be every day, but doing it at least a few times a week is important. The goal during these sessions is to maintain the heart rate that burns mostly fat. For very fit people, this could be as high as 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate, but it is more like 60 to 70 percent for most people. This is the ideal level of activity for decreasing body fat, increasing the capillary network, and lowering blood pressure and reducing the risk of developing degenerative diseases, including heart disease. Many of the benefits start at much lower levels of intensity—as little as a twenty-minute brisk walk daily.
Mark also recommends adding a few anaerobic interval workouts once or twice a week to this routine. He says that weight-bearing, anaerobic bursts are the best type of training for building muscle, and lean muscle mass is essential to lowering inflammation and gaining overall health. This type of training also increases your aerobic capacity, boosts the production of natural growth hormones, and increases insulin sensitivity.
Though they have very different backgrounds, it’s interesting to note that Charles and Mark recommend remarkably similar protocols for almost identical reasons. So does someone you might be surprised to learn is an expert in this area, the seventy-eight-year-old, world-renowned Dr. Bill Sears, who has written more than thirty books on neurological development and parenting.
Dr. Sears was in Singapore for a lecture when he visited a beautiful greenhouse where the trees and the plants were dying off at alarming rates despite receiving the best possible care. Finally, the caretakers noticed that the trees were not moving and put fans in the greenhouse. When the trees were able to move a bit, they began to flourish. Dr. Sears uses that observation as a metaphor for understanding human health at its most basic level: like plants, humans need more than just food, water, and sunlight to thrive. We also need an environment that stimulates movement.
All forms of conscious movement lead to a cascade of effects that stimulate neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons), neuroprotection, neuroregeneration, cell survival, synaptic plasticity, and the formation and retention of new memories. Moving also makes you happier, most likely because it stimulates the release of endorphins. The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index shows that people who exercise at least two days per week experience more happiness and less stress than those who do not.
Though they are a generation apart and come from dramatically different backgrounds, Kelly Starrett and Dr. Sears are in full agreement. As Kelly puts it, cognition is bootstrapped onto the nervous system. If you want to upregulate cognition, you have to upregulate movement. The only thing that’s debatable is how often you have to do so.
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Law 24: Flexible People Kick More Ass
Though stretching doesn’t always lead to visible results, it can change the way you move and perform. A key ingredient of high performance is resilience, and aligning the mind and body through stretching, yoga, or another type of movement is a powerful way of developing that.
When you picture elite performers, it’s hard not to think of Navy SEALs. That’s why I invited Mark Divine, a retired Navy SEAL, onto Bulletproof Radio to share how he became one of the best in the world at what he does. Today, instead of leading teams of elite warriors, he teaches teams of executives how to maintain the intensity, focus, toughness, and calm that were the hallmarks of his distinguished military career. Mark is so calm and good-natured, in fact, that he laughed instead of laying me out on the floor when I mentioned that he had a name better suited for a career as a stripper.
Mark explained that one of the things that most helped him change his game was practicing Ashtanga yoga, in part because it reminded him of his martial arts training. He memorized each series of movements and went through them progressively, graduating from one series to the next as he had when he’d earned each of his belts doing martial arts. It felt achievement-oriented and militant, which is an accurate description of that school of yoga. (There are gentler forms of yoga that work, too.)
But because Mark was doing the same set of sequences over and over, he began to develop overuse injuries similar to what people experience when they perform the same military calisthenics or CrossFit moves every day. The repetition causes dysfunctional movement patterns that can result in an injury. Mark loved the benefits he was gaining from his yoga practice—including mental clarity and flexibility—but he was getting injured and burnt out.
At the time, Mark was a reserve officer, and then, in 2004, it was his turn to go to Iraq. Not long before, a friend of his, Stephen “Scott” Helvenston, had been one of four Blackwater military contractors who were in a convoy ambushed by insurgents in Fallujah. Scott and the others were killed cruelly. The graphic imagery of the killings rattled Mark, and he knew that he would soon be stepping into the same area where his friend had met a violent end. Then, just days before his deployment, a terrorist group posted a video of the decapitation of Nick Berg, an American radio tower repairman from Pennsylvania.
As Mark traveled to Baghdad, he had never been more nervous in his life. Keenly aware that anything could happen, he felt on high alert. Unable to sit still, he went to the back of the plane and began doing yoga, which calmed his mind and helped him regain control of his emotions. He felt much better as the plane turned its nose toward the Iraqi desert. By the time it landed in Baghdad, he wasn’t in a perfect Zen state by any means—it was in a combat zone, after all—but he was far more calm, present, and centered and ready for what would come next.
That turned out to be a very good thing. Mark hadn’t been on the ground for more than fifteen minutes when he heard someone shout, “Incoming!” followed by the unmistakable whistle of a mortar flying toward him. It exploded about a quarter of a mile away. Okay, he said to himself. Welcome to combat.
Later, a couple of SEAL team guys drove up to retrieve Mark and took him to the SEAL compound at one of Saddam Hussein’s former palace grounds. There, it was hard to find a place to exercise. Yet, he says, SEALs will always improvise to find a way to train, even when operating on combat missions that go late into the night. The nearest gym was located at Camp Victory, and getting there required a combat drive in an armored Humvee. It was not worth the risk or the time. So Mark began running around the compound in a three-mile loop and doing body-weight training. Soon he felt the itch to do yoga, but he was not aware of any yoga classes being held in Baghdad or Iraq. So he decided to follow his intuition and just go it alone, based upon what he had learned from hot yoga, power yoga, and Ashtanga yoga.
Finding a small patch of ground next to a lake in the compound, he set up shop. It wasn’t as picturesque as it might sound—for starters, the house was pitted with pockmarks from a firefight—but there were some trees to provide shade from the desert heat, and the spot was removed enough that he wouldn’t get awkward stares from the other warriors on base. Mark skipped breakfast every morning and found a refuge in his new training spot, where he started playing around with different combinations of yoga poses, functional interval workouts, self-defense moves, and breathing and visualization exercises. He found that when he was finished with the practice, he felt amazingly clear and calm.
By that time, he had enough knowledge of movement and breathing practices to be able to combine them sensibly. If he needed to recover, he chose the poses, breathing techniques, and visualizations that he knew would help him recover and ward off combat stress. If he wanted a workout, he would choose more aggressive poses to warm up and then complete a body-weight routine before doing some seated poses and concentration training. That practice became Mark’s center post in the storm of combat. At the height of the Iraq War, he was able to start each day feeling calm, present, energized, in control of his emotions, and ready for the mission at hand. We could all use a dose of that.
Over time, Mark worked to evolve his routine into a practice that was customizable for anyone who wished to take it on, and he began using it to train other Navy SEALs. What he found along the way is that yoga is the perfect complement to a solid functional fitness program, not a replacement. Paired with some form of weight training, yoga provides a well-rounded workout that balances hormones, increases strength and flexibility, and is phenomenal for stimulating the release of growth hormones, which are essential to cell reproduction and regeneration.
Mark’s practice integrates a breathing exercise, mental training (concentration, visualization, or meditation), and functional movement. Those movements can consist of traditional yoga poses, CrossFit, swinging a kettlebell, or anything else that forces you to become aware of your body in space and time and that connects your breathing with movement. Through a consistent practice, Mark found that he was cultivating his inner domain, curating his thoughts and emotions, and really connecting with a warrior spirit. He named his practice Kokoro yoga, after the Japanese concept of the warrior spirit.
Working inward like this has helped Mark recover better from his workouts and allowed him to progressively build his fitness skills without degrading his performance through plateaus, burnouts, or injuries. He considers the primary physical benefit of this practice to be spinal health. It keeps the space open between the vertebrae, allowing blood and energy to flow. If your spine is healthy, he says, your nervous system will be healthier, and that will radiate out to the rest of your body.
Another benefit of Kokoro yoga is detoxification. Twisting poses detoxify your internal organs, and the mental training detoxifies your mind and emotions, allowing for greater focus and concentration. A third physical benefit is flexibility in both joint articulation and muscular flexibility. This does not mean that you have to be able to put your feet behind your head or twist yourself into a pretzel in order to do Kokoro yoga—quite the contrary. Mark calls these types of show-off moves “stupid human tricks” that are ultimately irrelevant.
That said, after a few years of learning proper movement through my own yoga practice, I’m pleased to be a forty-five-year-old, six-foot-four, almost muscular guy who can perform the stupid human trick of putting my foot behind my head—something I couldn’t do when I was sixteen. (Yes, sometimes people stare when I do it in an airport before boarding a long flight . . .)
So do you need to learn yoga to change your game? Not really. But it’s one of the most effective ways to gain physical strength and flexibility at the same time as mental calm and clarity. You can make some progress with online training, but nothing replaces the subtle movement tweaks a great teacher can make in person.
Action Items
Try a few types of yoga (tight pants optional) to see what works and what teachers resonate with you. Ashtanga, Vinyasa, or “flow,” yoga, and Iyengar are common forms to try.
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