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.