Full transcript of the “No Sweat Couch Potato Recovery Program”
1-Introduction
00:01 : Thank you, thank you, and good morning. It’s still morning. I’m Mike Schatzki, and I am a recovering couch potato. And how did I get to be a couch potato? It was easy. I didn’t have to do anything.
00:15 : I’m a professional speaker and trainer. For the last 35 years, I’ve gone around the world doing speeches and doing a lot of two-day training programs. And I thought, I’m in great shape. I’m on my feet. I work and you know, I’m… And as I got a little older, you know, I huffed and puffed up the stairs. But I’m okay, right? I have a black belt in denial.
00:36 : And then, you know I got a little concerned, and Jeannie was even more concerned. Jeannie, my wife here, say hello. She took one of those fitness assessment programs. I go, alright, if she’s gonna do it, I gotta do it, right? And I’ll ace that test. I’m in great shape. So I’d get on that treadmill, and I’m hanging along in there. Do you know what they said? It was all lies! They said I was an out-of-shape middle-aged male. Slander, I’ll sue! But you know what? They were being kind. I was a terribly out-of-shape middle-aged male.
01:09 : And so, slowly but surely, I got myself fit, and I made all the mistakes, and I, you know, got injured, and I started again. But finally I really got there, and I felt great. And I told everybody how great I felt, and how they should do it too. And you know how insufferable the newly converted can be? And the folks who were exercising said, “Wonderful! We love it, you love it, do it.” But most of the folks who I talked to politely kind of… You know how people, they’re polite, they kind of put you off. But the real response was, “Exercise, yuck.” Right? Didn’t wanna do it, and they weren’t gonna do it.
01:51 : So I’m saying, okay, is exercise the only way to get fit? So I started doing a little research, a little more… Turns out, isn’t. Turns out exercise is one pathway to getting fit, but not the only one. And that’s what sorta led me to the whole process of the No Sweat Couch Potato Recovery Program.
02:13 : Now, we all know that bad things happen to people who are not fit, right? What are the bad things that happen? Heart disease, strokes, diabetes, etc., etc. Fitness yeah, exercise yuck, right? So that’s where we ended up.
02:34 : So, okay, how do we get fit without exercise? Well, the first thing to focus on is, what is fitness? Now, we kinda have gotten like an equal sign, okay? Exercise, that is, get your heart rate up, sweat, work out, equals fitness. But is it? Exercise is only a pathway to fitness. So what is fitness?
02:57 : Well it turns out that fitness has to do with physical activity energy expended. That is, we use two kinds of energy. There’s energy that you’re using right now just sitting there, because your body needs a lot of energy just to function. Your brain uses about 20% of it, and the rest of you, your heart and all the rest of it. And then there’s physical activity energy, which I’m using as I walk around.
03:22 : And fitness, it turns out, is using the amount of physical activity energy that your body is tuned for and expects, and that developed over the eons to equal what you needed to do to gather enough food energy to survive. So it’s very species specific.
03:46 : Here’s Glopy, a little box turtle that lives around near the house. He doesn’t move very much. Doesn’t need to. He can survive with very little motion. For a turtle, he’s fit. He doesn’t sweat. Here’s Jessie, one of our two cats. Now sometimes he races around the house, up and down, up and down, up and down. But he also does a huge amount of this.
04:09 : That’s what cats do. They expend a huge amount of energy when they hunt, fill their belly, and then they sit around until they get hungry again, because that makes sense. Why expend energy when your belly’s full? So he’s fit for a cat.
04:22 : Now, we used to live here and here, and to hunt and gather, we used these. But now, we live here, and to hunt and gather, we use these. Now, till not that long ago, 50 or 60 years ago, it didn’t matter that much because, even though we didn’t use those feet that much, a lot of us worked pretty hard at our work, and so we still had a lot of physical energy expenditure.
04:49 : But over time, we stopped doing this at work, and started doing this. And so, what happened is in the ’50s, the ’60s, and so forth, those bad things that happen to people that aren’t fit started to explode. Heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. All that stuff started to explode. And researchers started saying, “Hey, what’s going on?” And a lot of people suspected it was fitness, so they started doing some research.
05:16 : Did some research, and they found that athletes, who were easy to study, ’cause athletes tended to do their fitness routines, their energy expenditures, in fairly compact amounts of time. They found that those athletes had far lower disease rates, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, than people who didn’t do that. And so was born the “Aerobics Doctrine.” You wanted to be fit, you had to exercise, you had to sweat. You Know, no pain, no gain.
05:50 : But actually, exercise really is not the fitness, it’s the pathway. It’s one way of expending that energy. What is exercise? Exercise is a relatively new invention. Before the ’50s, and ’60s, and ’70s and the aerobics revolution, nobody did that, except people who were training, right? Because what is exercise? Yeah it works for fitness, but it’s a recently invented pathway to fitness, it’s the use of athletic training techniques to achieve fitness. Some people love that, we’re not talking to those people. We’re talking to all of the rest of the people, who don’t. This is an athletic training technique, so is this, so is this.
06:29 : Now all those things works, but for a lot of people the response is, exercise yuck. So what’re we gonna do, how do we get there, how do we go from… And there’s a Harvard Medical School Health Letter that comes out, and one of their articles one guy said, “The aerobics revolution encouraged the few, and discouraged the many.” The people that liked exercise said, “Yeah! We’re for it.” And everybody else said, “Well, I have to exercise, I can’t do that, don’t want to do that, aren’t gonna do that, so I guess I’m stuck, I’m never gonna be fit.” But there is another way. So what’s the other way? Well, actually, I’m not gonna tell you, you’re gonna tell me. We’re gonna do a little two events here, two real quick events, and there’s a quiz at the end so pay attention.
2-Natural Pathway to Fitness
00:00 : Now, from here to about the table there’s about 15 feet. So, I’m gonna pick up these two dumbbells here, each of which weighs 30 pounds, and I’m gonna walk 15 feet up, turn around, and then I’m gonna walk 15 feet back. So, that’s event number one. Now, then number two, I’m gonna walk up and down without the dumbbells but I’m gonna do it twice. Okay, so we’ll walk up, turn around, walk back, and then repeat, walk up, and then walk back. And so here’s the quiz: Of the two events, which one did I find more tiring? Which was harder to do?
00:52 : How many would say one time with the dumbbells? Okay, how many would say the second time without it? Okay. Actually, the first time was more tiring. Why? ‘Cause I’m not used to walking around carrying 60 pounds. Okay? That’s a little tough. Alright. Not that I can’t do it, but it’s a little harder, whereas just walking up and down without it, I didn’t feel anything, right? So the, event one was really a little more tiring. Second question: Which one used more energy, first or second? How many would say the first? How many would say the second? Okay. Now, if you say the first, you say, “Okay, Mike walked 30 feet carrying 60 pounds, so 60 times 30 equals 1800 feet, right? 1,800 pound feet. Second time, he walked twice as far but didn’t carry anything, right? So, it was zero.” Except it wasn’t. Because what else did I carry besides the dumbbell?
01:48: Your body weight.
01:49 : Me, my body weight. Exactly. What actually happened was the first time I carried 60 pounds plus 200 pounds of me, 30 feet, for a total of 7800. The second time I didn’t carry the dumbbells but I still carried all 200 pounds of me 60 feet. I used almost twice as much energy walking back and forth without the dumbbells as I did… But I didn’t notice it. Why? ‘Cause our legs are so strong. We just never think about it, but our legs are so strong. And I can walk up and back with those 200 pounds. If I were carrying 200 pounds on my back, I’d practically fall over, right? But I can carry my 200 pounds there and back and not even notice it. Okay. So, when I spend a lot… Just by walking, I spend a huge amount of physical activity energy. So, you get the sense where we’re going. Walking is how humans became fit. That’s how we are fit. Because over the eons, we didn’t exercise. In fact, running takes more energy than walking, and it’s not because you’re going faster.
03:01 : If you walk half a mile or a mile, say, in 18 minutes, which is very fast, or at a leisurely pace of maybe 22 minutes, when you get to the end of the mile, you will have expended the same amount of energy. If you go fast, you’ll expend more energy per minute but it will still be the same ’cause you’ve moved your body a mile. If you run that mile, there’s something else happens. What happens is there’s a jump. Every time you take a step, there’s a little jump. That little jump means that you spend 30% more energy running. Well, primitive humans couldn’t do that, because there was only so much food to have available, had to conserve food. You wanted to get from here to there, you walked because running was too expensive, running was for emergencies, to run away from something or to run after something. So, we naturally… That’s how…
03:50 : And, by the way, in your handout, all your handout, most of the handout is scientific references, because everything we’re saying here is backed up by scientific studies and all the references and the URLs to find the… You can actually go read the papers. And what the anthropologists tell us is that primitive humans, before agriculture, had to walk 10,000 to 20,000 steps a day to hunt and gather enough food to survive. And so, walking became how we became fit, just as the turtle only has to go this far. We have to go a lot farther in order to survive, and so our fitness is through walking. Walking? Just walking, really? Just walking? You don’t have to get your heart rate up, you don’t have to sweat, you don’t have to change clothes, you don’t have to take a shower? Just walking? Give me a break. We’ll show you in a couple of minutes how the research shows conclusively, but let’s talk about the benefits of being fit: Energy, weight control, health, brain health, lifetime mobility.
3- Energy
00:00 – So let’s start with energy. I feel fantastic! I feel better now than I did 16 years ago when I started getting fit, a lot better. I have so much more energy! It’s so great. It’s so great, I just can’t tell you. And that’s the problem, I really can’t tell you. See, I can’t insert you into my brain to see how it feels, right? But just this one little thing. There’s two types of age. There’s chronological age and there’s energy age. So what’s your energy age? Forget about your chronological age. What’s your energy age? What you find is, as you get fitter and fitter, your energy age gets younger and younger. Because my chronological age is 71, but I feel better than I did at 55, when I started getting fit.
00:46 – So the most powerful and nice thing about energy is that it shows up soon when you start getting fit. It shows up soon. You sort of have to get over the hump, but after about three to six months, you’re gonna start to feel that energy. And then what happens is you get a cold. .Right? You’re out for a week or two. You won’t believe it, but you’ll start to feel antsy, you’ll start to miss that energy expenditure. And then when you finally get over your cold, you’re up and going again, you wanna get back right into it right away. So after about three to six months, you’re gonna feel that energy starting to build, so it’s immediate.
4-Weight
00:00 : What else do you get right away? Weight. If weight’s an issue, fitness is really, really important. Now, you’ve probably heard and you see all the ads on TV. “Come to the gym, do this and you’ll lose weight.” No. Turns out all those ads are wrong because, now there are always a few people who you know got fit and they lost weight and they didn’t have to diet. But that’s the tiny minority, that’s the tail of the bell curve. When people do studies, scientific studies of large populations who do fitness and try to lose weight, what they find is that people in fact do not lose weight just by getting fit. And the reason is simple. We have an appestat. The appestat tells us whether we’re hungry or not, and it’s absolutely fine tuned. And if we expend 100 calories more, 200 calories more, 300 calories more, okay? 100 calories, about 2,000 steps. We expend that extra energy our body notices. If I expend an extra 100 calories, my body notices and it says, “How about a couple of Oreos?” Well, a couple of Oreos is practically 100 calories. I can munch down those two Oreos, I didn’t even remember I did it.
01:18 : But now I feel good again, because I’ve compensated for the extra energy. Our body wants us to have an even keel. So for most people, just getting fit won’t by itself to get you to lose weight. But do you have to lose weight in order to be healthy? Well, the world tells us we have an obesity epidemic and we have to lose weight in order to be healthy. But turns out that’s not true either. Here’s an interesting study. 1999 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, prestigious journal. Followed 25,000 people for 24 years and what they wanted to do was they wanted to know how fitness and weight interacted. So these were people who had gone to the Cooper Center in Dallas for a complete physical and work-up. And part of what they did was, they had to get on a treadmill so that they knew what their aerobic fitness level was. So these weren’t what people reported that they did, this is we knew because you got on the treadmill. So you knew who was fit and who was not and then they knew what they weighed and then they follow them for 24 years. And here’s what they found; so we start out here and the green is the fit and the red is sedentary. And you all know what BMI is? Body Mass Index, okay.
02:37 : And basically, a lot of people say, “Okay, about 25 is good, actually 26, 27 is probably the safest weight.” But say 25 because that’s sort of in the parlance, and so if you look at people who were fit versus sedentary? People were sedentary but thin had more than twice the death rate from all causes, all cause mortality versus people who were thin and fit. Huge, right? Well then they looked at people in the 25 to 30 BMI and they were even a little worse up to 2.5, two and a half times more than the thin fit. And the people in the 30 and over, three and a half, 3.1 times the death rate of people who were thin and fit. But, it was such a large study, almost 25,000 people, that there were people in these two groups who were quite fit, okay? So what happened with them? In the 25 to 30 those who were fit had a death rate that was only a tiny bit higher than those who were thin and fit. And for the folks in the 30 and over? Still only a tiny bit higher, only a tiny bit higher. In other words, fitness practically totally compensated for weight. And so yes, being sedentary and heavy is a lethal combination, but you can overcome that by being fit.
Now, how many people here, anybody here ever dieted besides me? Anybody ever take on a diet? Okay.
04:18 : Okay. Has anybody here ever go on a diet, take weight off and then put it back on again besides me? Has anybody ever done that? Anybody ever do that more than once besides me? Yeah, right. So on a scale of one to 10 how hard is dieting?
04:36 : 10. Yeah. For me it’s 10, for you it’s five. For a lot of people, it’s 10, so it’s really hard but we’ve all done it, right? But it’s almost impossible to keep it off unless you are fit. And here’s why, let me show you a little study. These were people who went on a crash diet, medically supervised in two groups. The dotted red line, those were the folks who were sedentary. The solid blue line, they were on the same diet but they weren’t given a fitness regimen. Now they were all eating the same amount of calories so the people in the fitness regimen lost a little more weight than those that weren’t. Alright? ‘Cause they’re burning a little more calories. At the end of the weight loss period then they had a follow-up period, and here’s what happened to the folks who lost the weight. The folks who were fit and maintained their fitness regimen stayed the same. But folks who weren’t and stayed sedentary popped right back up again.
05:38 : This is sorta what the researchers expected, right? That confirmed their hypothesis but, sometimes in research the most interesting results come when the participants don’t follow the rules. And that’s what happened here. Because some of the people in the non-fit group started an exercise program or a fitness program, and here’s what happened to them. And some of the people in the fitness group stopped, either right then or later on, and here’s what happened to them. Wow, right? How come? Well, it again has to do with our appestat. Our appestat is powerful. It controls how much we eat. What does it take to put back on, say, three pounds in a year? What?
06:29 : One week.
06:29 : [chuckle] You could do it in one week. But let’s say you’re really trying hard not to put that weight on. What does it take? Well, three pounds. Anybody here ever eat potato chips, besides me? Great.
06:43 : Let’s say I eat three potato chips. That’s about 30 calories, right? About 30 calories. Three potato chips a day for a year. 30 calories times 365. Well, a pound of fat is 3,500 calories. So, one potato chip a day is a pound of fat. Three potato chips a day, three pounds of fat. I don’t care how well you count calories, you’re not gonna be able to manage that three potato chip control a day for ever and ever, when your body is trying to convince you to put the weight back on. Now, why is your body trying to convince you to put the weight back on? Because your body thinks that you just went through a horrific famine. It doesn’t know you have a supermarket down the street. It thinks you’re out there in the woods or on the plain. And so it thinks you went through a terrible famine, and it wants you to get that weight back on just as fast as it can. Whatever food there is it wants you to glom down so that you are protected if there’s another famine.
07:51 : In fact, people who do lots of dieting, sometimes end up higher, because after awhile your body says, “We live in a place where there’s lots of famines. I better put on extra to protect us against those famines.” So, why does that change? And it does. We know from physiological studies that things happen in your gut when you get fit, and there’s a change that causes this to happen. Why? Why does that happen? Well, because if your body notices that you’re expending energy but also eating enough food, there’s a switch. Bodies have compromises. Because the problem with putting on that weight again is that it’s harder to move it around. It takes more energy to move it around. There’s only one thing that’s more important than surviving the next famine, and that’s not having the next famine in the first place. And if you’re moving, and your body assumes that the only reason you’re expending energy to move is to find energy to eat, and you’re expending energy but you’re eating enough, then it’s gonna resist putting on that weight, and that’s what happens.
08:58 : And so, if you lose weight, enormously difficult to keep it off if you don’t have a fitness regimen. And if you don’t wanna lose weight or don’t need to lose weight or whatever, but you wanna stay the same weight, the likelihood is it’s gonna be very hard over time to do that, unless you have a fitness regimen. And I know for me, fitness has made it possible for me to stay the same, ’cause I was edging up, and then I got a little higher than I wanted to be, went down. I never would have stayed there had it not been for being fit. So, it really does work. And the nice thing about… Just like energy, the weight thing happens now, so you see immediate results from your fitness activities.
5-Health
00:00: The next two, Health, General Health and Brain Health, are a little different ’cause they’re about probabilities. So let’s look at what happens with health benefits. And walking, just walking, the studies are absolutely, 100% conclusive. JoAnn Manson, study published in 1999, New England Journal of Medicine, surveyed 72,000 women for eight years, Perspective Study of Walking as Compared with Vigorous Exercise for the Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease in Women. The operative paragraph in the conclusion? “The magnitudes of risk reduction associated with walking and vigorous exercise are similar when total energy expenditures are similar.” It doesn’t matter how you expend the energy. You can do it walking, you can do it with exercise, as long as you do it.
00:52 : It has to do with… And there’s so many more studies. There are a lot in your handout. Just a couple more. Walking Versus Running for Hypertension, Cholesterol and Diabetes. 33,000 runners, 15,000 walkers. Walking and running produce similar reductions in cause specific disease mortality, people with hypertension and it goes on, and on, and on. So will walking get you there? Absolutely.
01:17 : Here’s another study. Looked at people who did steps, counted their steps. Looked at 200,000 people followed for six years. And was very simple. People who were basically sedentary, which is about 4,000 steps a day which you do anyway just to live, come to work, go to shopping, whatever, they considered that the baseline. And they said, “Okay, that’s sedentary. What happens if you… ” Get up to 7,000 steps they had a 41% reduction in all cause mortality?” 8,500 steps, 49%. 10,000 steps, 54%. Huge, huge reductions in all cause mortality. Biggest hit from zero reduction to 41% just adding 3,000 steps. Another 3,000 steps, you go from 41% to 54% reduction. But there’s a problem. The problem is that while this is absolutely true, it’s not now if you’re under 50. Because the real things which start to happen to people that relate to fitness, which is strokes, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, heart failure, diabetes, those things start to develop. When they do autopsies of young people, they find lots of plaque but they aren’t there enough to start causing problems, but around age 50, we start to see this happening. And so you say, “Yeah, but I’m 40, I’m 30, I’m 20.” So we have trouble with probabilities.
02:43 : If the weather forecast says there’s 50% chance of rain. What does that mean? Does it mean it’s gonna rain every other drop? No, it either rains 100% or rains 0%, right? And so how do you know if the weather forecaster knows what they’re doing? Well you’ve gotta look at 100 days where they forecast a 50% chance of rain and if on 49 of those days it rained 100%, they know what they’re doing. If only 10 of those days it rained, you know they haven’t a clue. But would you send your child off to school without an umbrella on a day where they said there was 50% chance of rain? Well, sure sometimes there wouldn’t be. But hey, it’s a pretty umbrella and it’s fun to carry. [chuckle] So why not? Take it with me.
03:29 : All this is statistical until it’s not. And it’s all very probabilistic until suddenly, it’s not. About a year and a half ago, my physician retired. New physician. Have a history of heart disease in the family but my cholesterol is fine. He said, “You know, there’s a new test you can take. It’s a CT scan. It measures calcium in your arteries, in your heart, coronary arteries. Tells you how much plaque you have.” I said, “Why do I need that?” He said, “It’d be good just to have a baseline. You have a history of heart disease in the family.” And I said, “I don’t know.” So I called my brother who was the one who turned me on to this physician. I said, “Hey, did Dr. Gelber ask you to do that?” He said, “Yeah.” What did you come out with it? He came out with zero calcium score. That’s great. It means he doesn’t have any plaque, right? So I said, “Alright, I’ll do that.”
04:13 : Now, if you have 400 that’s really bad. It means highly likely that one of your coronary arteries is severely blocked. Not totally, you’d have a heart attack but severely damaged. 1,000 means you’re a candidate for immediate open heart surgery. My score came back 1,738. Panic. Get a cardiogram, a Doppler cardiogram, echo cardiogram. It was okay. That measures how your heart pumps. So then they put me on a stress test with the nuclear, stick you with nucleotides, measure you under a camera. Then they get you in a stress test, then they stick you again and put you under the camera. From the time that test was finished, to the 15 minutes later when they brought me the results, I think was the longest 15 minutes in my entire life. ‘Cause I expected the doctor to come back and say, “I have scheduled you for emergency, quadruple bypass open heart surgery in the morning?” Instead he said, “You’re fine.”
05:14 : I said, “I don’t have any plaque?” He said, “Oh you have tons and tons of plaque. Your body makes plaque. Even though your cholesterol is fine, your body makes plaque. But what’s happened is your fitness has reformed the arteries so that they have adjusted, as the plaque has grown, they’ve adjusted. And you have no… What’s called perfusion defect. You have no blockages at all.” So it was, keep up your fitness regimen and see me in six months. So it’s all statistics until it’s not. And so, you see, for 15 years, I carried that umbrella just to maintain my weight, feel energy. But am I glad I did that for those 15 years? Never knowing if it would one day save my life? Oh my, you have no idea. ‘Cause I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you today if I hadn’t.
6-Brain Health
00:00 : And also, brain health. Anybody here ever experience a situation where a loved one develops dementia? I know that’s what happened to my mom. The last five years of her life, she went from being here to not being here. It’s very hard and there’s nothing we can do, except we can prevent. 100%, no. But 50%, yes. Unbelievably, and they really didn’t think this was true until very recently. A whole lot of studies coming out showing that fitness promotes brain health and substantially reduces the risk of dementia. There’s several studies referenced in your handout; here’s just one. This came out in March this year. Longitudinal Relationship Between Caloric Expenditure and Gray Matter. Fitness produced more gray matter, larger brain volume, which correlated with a 50% reduction of memory decline or developing Alzheimer’s.
7-Lifetime Mobility
00:00: And then finally, so what’s 100% about? 100% is about lifetime mobility, the ability to walk. Now, y’all can walk, right? So what’s the big deal? The big deal is older Americans can’t walk very well. CDC, Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, does surveys, call people up, asking questions. Age group 75 to 84 who self report that they can’t walk for five minutes, 14.5%. Another 30% say they have difficulty walking for five minutes. It means they’re functionally dependent. Somebody has to take care of them. That’s 44, 45%. Gets worse. In the 85 plus group, 34% say they can’t walk for five minutes. Another 34% say they have difficulty. So we have essentially 70% of that population functionally dependent. That is not necessary, absolutely not necessary. But we think it is.
01:07 : And the reason is, that there’s two truths that get merged into a falsehood. Truth number one is a lot of elderly people are frail and can’t walk. Second truth is that as you get older, you lose something. Merge that into a cause and effect. As you get older, you lose something, therefore, you’re frail. Nope, absolutely not. Why? Because what we lose is not from where we are, but from our peak capacity. If you go here, US Powerlifting Association, great place to look at this because we’re talking about world class athletes.
01:42 : People in their… Who are 40 to 44 in the weight group of 198 or less, which is how they do weightlifting, the bench press world record is 617. Now, bench press. Lie on your back and push the bars up. Imagine 617 pounds they could lift. Go higher. In the 70 to 74 group, the same weight is still lifting 402 pounds, but see what happens. These people are at their peak performance, and the peak performance as you get older goes down. And we get a little higher like to 80, 84, we’re down to 243.
02:18 : Alright. And they don’t yet have one for 100-year-olds. But if you take that… If you extrapolate that down, they’re probably gonna be… 180 pounds will be the record for 100-year-olds. So these people who are at their peak capacity are losing something. That peak capacity goes down. But for the rest of us where we’re nowhere near our peak capacity, we go back up.
02:42 : When I started getting fit, I also wanted to lift some weights ’cause I was so weak. The most I could bench press was 15 pounds in each hand. Talk about being weak. I wanted to get strong. Now, if you lose something as you get older, I shouldn’t be able to do that, right? But we know from lots of studies that people even the oldest, oldest can actually build muscle. Well, they build strength in their muscle, not actually build new muscle. They build strength in their muscle. And so I started at 15 pounds in each hand, and I worked my way up to the point where I can now lift about 150 pounds. I can bench press 150 pounds. I’m probably now at my peak capacity. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to lift more. So I’m gonna probably start to go down. But if I live to be 100, and can lift 100 pounds, will I be happy? You bet.
03:31 : So you see, it’s not about that I lose something. It’s that we lose something from our peak capacity. Most of us are nowhere near our peak capacity, nowhere near. So some examples. My granddad lived in central Massachusetts, had a quarter acre garden, you think a quarter acre. You put a house on a quarter acre, right? He plowed that thing by hand with one of those until he was 85. Really robust guy. And then he quit, and he wouldn’t do anything. No matter what you said, he wouldn’t do anything. When he passed away at 96, he couldn’t walk. Use it or lose it.
04:07 : Here’s somebody who used it. Constance Douglas Reeves at age 101 on the cover of this book. She’s a horse woman who taught kids to ride. Here she is on a horse at 101. She passed away a year later at 102 from injuries she sustained when she was thrown from a horse. And I just saw the other day, a little squib about someone. They were celebrating his 102nd birthday. He was playing tennis until he was 100.
04:34 : You see the thing is, the human body can walk as long as it lives, absent catastrophic illness or injury. Dan Buettner wrote a book called, “The Blue Zones.” It’s part of a project for National Geographic. Went around the world looking for places where there are lots of 100-year-olds, and he found them. In one place, one precinct in Okinawa found 32 100-year-olds. And of those 32, 28 were walking, functionally independent. Only four were having trouble. Exact reverse of what we have here in the US, exact reverse. Only 12 or so percent really had trouble walking. The other, all could do it.
05:15 : So it’s real simple. My wife Jeannie started a walking program when she was 68. It took a long time. She averages now about 9,500 steps, but it took her about two years to get there. And that’s okay because as Confucius said, “It does not matter how fast you go, as long as you do not stop.” Say’s you take however long it takes. Her birthday is in January, good excuse to go someplace warm. One year, we went to the Villahermosa area in Mexico to visit Palenque, which is a small Mayan ruin area, very compact, lots of interesting stuff. We probably climbed over all those little pyramids all day long. By the end of the day, we did like 15,000 steps.
05:58 : And if you’re normally doing 10,000, it’s easy on a day or two to do 15 without breaking a sweat because you’re used to it. So we had climbed over and we saved the biggest pyramid for last. So here we are at the end of the day, probably now having done 13,000 steps and here she is on her 72nd birthday at the top of the largest pyramid in Palenque having climbed up there without breaking a sweat. Use it or lose it. Okay, so if you wanna be able to walk forever, you have to walk a lot now and never stop.
8-Conclusion
00:00: Objection. Objection, Your Honor. Objection in the court. That’s all very nice, but we can’t do it because we don’t have enough…
00:06 : Time.
00:07 : Time.
00:07 : Time. Well yeah, in order to do this, you need to make getting fit, a higher…
00:15 : Priority.
00:16 : Priority. Except there’s a problem with priorities. Because when I have a high priority, something even with a higher priority comes and bumps it, occasionally, often, very often, frequently, almost all time. And, “Fitness I can do tomorrow, and this meeting I have to do today.” Or, “This thing I have to do today.” Right? Anybody here ever had the experience where you had to drop off or pick up a child at school? So was that a high priority? Well actually, yeah, a very high priority, but a high priority can get bumped by a higher priority. “Gee Sally, I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up at school today. A meeting came up at work that had a higher priority. I hope hitchhiking home in the rain was a formative experience for you.” No. No. There weren’t priorities that came and bumped picking up Sally. Because you see, picking up Sally is not a priority, it is a requirement.
01:08 : You see, we don’t have enough time in the day for all the priorities, but we do have enough time for the requirements. And so if you make getting fit, and staying fit, a requirement, you can do it. So how do you do it? Well, there all sorts of ways. You gotta get creative. You can just… Jeannie never goes for a walk, she just does all sorts of stuff. She’s on her feet, going back and forth, doing all sorts of things all day long. She just picked up the pace. Sometimes at the end of the day, if she hasn’t got enough steps, she’ll hop on her treadmill. If she’s talking to her sister for an hour, she’ll hop on a treadmill and talk to her for an hour, or she’ll walk around the house, or she’ll walk outside.
01:45 : So if you’re on the phone with somebody, you don’t have to have papers in front of you, and it’s gonna be more than a two-minute… Walk, don’t sit. So easy. Oh, you couldn’t get a treadmill, could you? Nah, ’cause they’re so expensive, like $5,000, right? Well, if you want a gym-quality treadmill, that’s gonna be used 24/7, a lot by runners, yes, it will cost you five grand. But if you want a nice, good walking treadmill like what we have, which is that, 750 bucks. About the same cost as your phone. Yeah, watch TV. Anybody here watch TV? Do you sit? Try walking. The treadmill won’t cost you anymore than the TV did. Great way. Haven’t got enough room? Get a folding one. They’re available. Or get a dog. Dogs are great way to be fit.
02:38 : And so… Okay, so how much you have to do? How much you have to do? Well, here it is. Basically, the sweet spot where you like to get to is 10,000 steps. 10,000 steps is about 500 calories. Which is about what we need for our bodies… What our bodies expect. That’s fit. But you don’t have to get there right away. I want to tell you, go very slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. If you’re here, your first goal should be here, because look, that’s the biggest hit. That’s the huge hit, from four to seven, gives us this. This is the sweet spot. This is where you’re gonna feel the best energy, is in here. Okay?
03:18 : So get to here for health and get to here for energy. You’ll feel great. And you get all the way to here, you’ve got another 15%. How fast do you have to go? Not fast at all. I have a friend, she’s very fit. Does a lot of walking. She married a guy, John, a wonderful guy, a schlump. [chuckle] “Come on, John, we’re gonna go walking.” “Oh no.” “Come on, just come on, we’ll do just 10,000, do 2,000.” “Oh no. I can’t do it. Oh no.” They both now walk about 10-12,000 steps a day, I can’t even keep up with them. Are they trying to go fast? No. It’s just that as they slowly, but surely, built up their step count, their strength built, and they went from _______, because that would just be their natural pace, as they got stronger and more fit and more aerobic capacity. So don’t worry about how fast you go. It doesn’t matter. Just do it, alright? Just do it. So how do we get there? How fast? How long? Buy a pedometer.
04:28 : First thing, buy a pedometer. Now, the Fitbits are okay, but the problem with the Fitbit type of things, there a lotta different models and makes, is that they don’t count the day-to-day steps. They count really well if you go for a walk, but if you’re just walking around, which is the same amount of energy… If I take 20 steps here, and then I keep right on going, I take another and another and another, it’s the same amount of energy if I take 20 steps. I talk to you for a bit, come take 20 steps, and I talk to you, same energy. It doesn’t matter whether I do it all at once or little bits all day long, but those Fitbit things don’t count the little bits very well. So we like the mechanical ones.
05:08 : I like the Digi-Walker, the Yamax, that’s the one the scientists use, that’s sort of the gold standard. It’s mechanical, there’s a little thing in there, you can hear it clicking, but it counts pretty much every step, it’s within 5%, which is good enough. Okay? Cheap, easy to get on Amazon. And then what you do is, you see in your handout, on the next to the last page, a little baseline form. And here’s what you do, you get the pedometer, and then you spend a week, doing nothing unusual but you log what happened. So on Sunday, it turns out you did a lotta steps, you got 7,000, you went shopping. But the next day you felt tired. We’re not gonna count that. Then the next day, it’s these days during the week, normal day, normal day, you felt great, at the end of the day. Okay, we’ll count those. Saturday, you went for a walk with a friend.
06:00 : You did 6,700 steps, but you felt tired, so we’re gonna throw that out. I only want the days where you felt really good afterwards. So you add up these five days, divide by five, now that’s your baseline. Now, here’s the trick. You only add 500 steps, which is just five minutes of walking. Only add 500 steps. I tell you, if you do more, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re gonna get tired, you’re gonna get sore, you’re gonna get grumpy, you’re gonna get mad at me and you’ll quit. I guarantee you. Just take your time. It doesn’t matter if it takes you two years. Just take your time and only, only, only add 500 steps until that extra 500 steps above your baseline feels really comfortable. Then, add another until you reach your goal. But the key is, you gotta make sure that you log your steps every day.
06:57 : So if you look on the very last page of your hand out, there is the “No Sweat, No Guilt Walking Log”. Alright, you can copy that and make as many copies as you like. But they key message is, no matter what happens, log your steps every day. Okay? Always, always, always. Whether you met your goal or not, it doesn’t matter, log it every day. Just make it absolute habit. Don’t put yourself down. That’s why we say “no guilt.” Didn’t make it? Fine. Analyze why, come up with a plan. And if that doesn’t work, come up with a plan B, or C, or D, or whatever, and then you’ll get there. That’s basically it.
And so, your mission, should you choose to accept is, is to make getting fit and staying fit, a requirement for the rest of your life. Thank you.