April: Hey everybody it’s April Perry and Jonathan Bailor back with another episode of the SANE show. And today we’re talking about goal specific exercise. I’m really excited. Jonathan, I wish that you lived in my neighborhood and could be my personal trainer, but this is the next best thing.

Jonathan: Absolutely. You do have a lovely neighborhood and I would rather live there rather than live in Seattle right now because it is literally pitch black outside, although it is 1:30 in the afternoon. It is not fun times.
Anyway, today’s show is one that I’m actually very, very excited about because we touched on this briefly in the last show, which was this idea of toning your body and there are people that look certain ways and how are they exercising and how should I exercise? Exercise can be as confusing if not more confusing sometimes than eating.

I want to just start the conversation about why exercise can be so confusing and I think how we can simplify it by thinking about it in terms of our goals. It’s not sort of right or wrong or better or worse, it’s what is your goal when it comes to exercise. Does that sound good?

April: This is awesome and if you can help clarify this for me and of all of the people who I am representing right now, we will be forever grateful because when I think about what I have learned about exercising and just looking at what I’ve learned growing up.

I learned that my parents liked racquetball and so they would play racquetball. I learned that it was good to be walking and active and to move so that was great. I had this thing called “Get in Shape Girl” when I was nine and it came with a streamer that you just spun around and do the streamer and wore your leg warmers. The whole point was to have fun in your streamer.

What I learned through elementary school, middle school, and high school is essentially, you’ve got to run the mile, you need to be able to pass your Presidential fitness test, which includes sit ups and in high school it was like what could I do to get out of PE? What could I do to replace PE? I could dance, I took cheerleading, and stuff like that, but as far as what is your goal for exercise and what do you want to become and how do you want to strengthen your body? No one ever talked to me about this. Ever. The question that was always asked was how many calories are you eating? Period. This is just a whole new concept for me.

Jonathan: The really big key thing when it comes to exercise is understanding that much like you said, it’s just about calories, just one size fits all, it’s just about burning calories and honestly, just like that, we now know is ridiculous from a food perspective, 100 calories of Coca Cola is obviously not the same as 100 calories of spinach. We know that. But what we also now need to know is that just moving your body it’s the same, oh, a calorie is a calorie, exercise is exercise. And there’s no more visible example of this and this is going to be a little bit strange and I’ll bring it back to real life.

If you get a chance next time there are the Olympics, the summer Olympics or you can search on YouTube, just look up power lifting. Power lifting is done in weight classes. What you’ll see is people that weigh 130 lbs. tiny people, men, that weigh 130 lbs., very small men, that are taking like 600 lbs. and just throwing it around like it’s nothing and you’ll think to yourself, how? This person is so small and they’re moving this huge amount of weight. How is that even possible? That’s power lifting.
Then you look at body builders and there’s these big muscular animals. In some ways it’s the opposite. They’re twice the size of this power lifter and they probably actually couldn’t even do what that power lifter is doing. If you asked them to snatch 600 lbs. over their head, they might not be able to do it. Those people box exercise. They both spend their entire life in the gym. An Olympic power lifter and a professional body builder spend multiple hours in a day every day in a gym, but they get fundamentally different results because they have fundamentally different goals and they do fundamentally different things while they’re exercising.

It’s not like one is better or one is worse, they are so different. Is Zumba good? It’s not even a complete question. Is Zumba good for having a good time with your friends? Absolutely. Will Zumba make you a better power lifter? Not at all. Is Zumba the most effective way to spend your time in the gym if your goal is to burn body fat? No. Not at all.

The reason I make those extreme examples of power lifting versus body building is one case, the goal is to move as much as weight as possible while staying as small as possible because you compete in weight classes, so you want to be small and you want to move weight, whereas bodybuilders don’t really how much weight they lift, they just want their bodies to be bigger. So two ends of the spectrum. You can hopefully see through that example that our goal with what we want to do with the time we spend exercising, that is extremely important. Just as a calorie isn’t a calorie, exercise isn’t exercise.

April: It’s really clarified a lot of things because I have a lot of friends who are runners. I’ve got siblings who are runners. They love to get out and just run. They want to run. That’s when they’re with their friends, their social time, they enjoy it, and they go for ten miles on a Saturday morning. That would be torture to me. I have no desire to do that.
Then there’s other people, I’m looking and I’m watching and some people at the gym are bodybuilders who are there all of the time. Some of the girls are there at the gym with makeup on first thing in the morning before they exercise. I am not. I am looking awful at the gym. Everyone has different goals, I get that.

Maybe this is a chance for me to clarify my goal. Personally, because I’m a mother, I’m almost 40, I’m happily married, I’m looking at what my exercise goal is. My goal is to be as fit as possible, spending as little time in the gym as possible and spending as much time as I can with my family, with my loved ones, cooking healthy food. I’ll make that trade off all day long. I’ll chop vegetables all day with my family around me, helping kids with homework, being there with my husband, than going off and being in a gym for two hours a day. I want to be healthy and I want to be fit. I don’t want to be in a gym any more than I have to be there.

Jonathan: By way of analogy, I think in the SANE model or the Eccentric exercise model, that is exactly what we’re targeting so people will say, well, what about this, what about that? Again, it depends on your goal and our goal in this instance is by way of analogy, because it’s the only way I can talk is if you want to become a better at accounting, the actual professional of accounting, you would do accounting, it’s very goal specific.

There are things you can do to just become more intelligent. Reading great literature will make you sort of smarter. A lot of the reason in taking general education that we give, it’s not that we expect you to be able to do calculus in the real world, it’s because doing calculus actually forms different neuro pathways in your brain, which are useful globally.

So like that, we don’t do bench press, which is a form of workout, it’s like a pushup because we expect that someday we’re going to be able to walk down the street and someone’s going to throw a barbell on our chest and we’re going to lift it up.
We do that simply because just like we can make ourselves generally smarter and the more generally intelligent we are, the more general life problems we can solve. If we’re generally fitter and we’re generally metabolically healthier and we’re generally happy with the way we feel and look, life just becomes easier. It’s like having a global body intelligence, like you have a global mind intelligence. Does that make sense?

April: Yes, I am all for it.

Jonathan: And that then explains with that goal, that’s the goal. The goal is not to be a better marathon runner, it’s not to have fun. That’s a different goal. If you want to have fun you can play video games with your friends. You could go roller blading with your friends. That’s a different goal.

If the goal is to sort of general overarching metabolic fitness, there’s two ways you can do that. There are two really effective forms of exercise, one is very low intensity, low impact activities. Things like yoga, things like Pilates, things with playing with your kids, going rollerblading, walking, bike riding, just being active.

There has been a huge amount of science done that shows when you’re just generally active without putting a bunch of negative stress on your body, not a bunch of impact on your joints, like jogging on pavement puts a bunch of impact on your joints, that’s generally making you healthier and better and fitter. That’s good.

Then, there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is for short periods of time, putting your body under very safe, very low impact, very intense stress. Stress can be you-stress and destress, right? You-stress is positive stress, destress is bad stress. So just like for example, if you need to get a really intense project done for life and it’s sort of like, I have to get it done this week and I’m going to focus on it. That makes you better and stronger and you feel proud of it, whereas if you have these nagging stresses that go on for weeks and weeks and weeks, that burns you out. Human beings do good with short bouts of intense stress. Our body can actually super adapt and get stronger because of that.

When it comes to global adaption, being physically active and then having short, safe, very intense bursts of activity, those two things give you that sweet spot of global metabolic conditioning and intelligence.

April: Okay. So how long does it take to see results from that? I guess that’s a question. Is this one of those things when I started eating SANEly, it took several months for me to even notice a difference. Let’s say someone were today, started doing Eccentric exercises, really pushing themselves, make an effort to be more active, what are you looking at? Is this something where you look out over the next year how your body is going to change? People want to know, should I keep doing this? Is this something I should continue with?

Jonathan: From an Eccentric exercise perspective, it’s actually very, very easy to quantify progress because especially if you’ve ever weight trained before, if you do Eccentric leg press, you’ll start with let’s say 100 lbs. and you’ll do 6 Eccentric repetitions of that and then write that down and then if you do as recommended on a SANE and Eccentric lifestyle, which is to increase resistance the next time because your body will get stronger.

What you’re going to notice, actually if you’re just getting started and this is part of the coolest part of the SANE and Eccentric lifestyle, is the speed of progress when it comes to how much stronger your muscles get as you start exercising because you start exercising Eccentrically, it’s not uncommon for people to double the amount of resistance they use in a short period of time. Then if you want to see how that translates into real life, you might say, okay, great, using simple numbers for math, I was leg pressing 100 lbs., now I’m leg pressing 200 lbs. Great, next time someone throws a leg press machine in the middle of the street, I’ll be able to leg press more. That’s not the takeaway.

Here’s a great example. Let’s say you weigh 200 lbs. Again, just simple math. And you’re walking up a flight of stairs and today, when you get to the top of the flight of stairs, you’d try to be carrying on a conversation with another person, you get embarrassed because you’re out of breath and that is certainly not a fun thing to experience.

Part of the reason you’re out of breath is because right now you have legs which could leg press 100 lbs., so every time you walk up a step, you are trying to lift a 200 lb. body with one of your legs and those legs are capable of leg pressing 100 lbs.
Let’s say it’s a month later and you’ve been exercising Eccentrically and you still have a 200 lb. body, but now your legs are twice as strong. You still weigh 200 lbs., but you’re now lifting that 200 lbs. with a leg which is twice as strong as it was before. So one would then imagine conceivably you could cut yourself in half, carrying 100 lbs. up the stairs is going to be much easier than carrying 200 lbs. up the stairs. You can’t do that, nor would you want to do that, but what you can do is make the legs that are carrying you up the stairs twice as strong.

April: Okay. I like that. And I love this idea of progress. As you were talking, I just found something exciting. Can I share it with you?

Jonathan: Absolutely.

April: You were talking about writing things down. I thought I have been writing it down. I have my Eccentric exercise notes that I’ve been taking and I haven’t been doing it every single week, but I’ve been doing it often and I just went back and looked in May, which is when I started this.
I joined our gym and I’m laughing now because here are my numbers. For my leg press, I was at 70 lbs. And I could go harder than 70 lbs., now, I’m 215 lbs. for my legs. That’s a big deal. I’m kind of laughing now because 70 lbs. is all I was doing?
The same thing, the overhead shoulder one. I was at 30 lbs. now, I’m 55 I think. It’s just kind of fun to look at these numbers and see, these used to kill me and now I am stronger. So I’m glad I wrote that down. I haven’t looked at that in months. So thanks Jonathan.

Jonathan: So, in terms of results, and those are just a general life philosophy. Those are things we can control. We can control how we’re working at the gym, we can control whether or not our muscles are getting stronger, up to a point, at some point, no human being will ever lift 5,000 lbs. It’s a diminishing margin of returns type of dynamic, but those are the kind of goals, eating more non-starchy vegetables. I’m going to write that down and I’m going to gradually increase it over time. I’m going to do leg press. I’m going to gradually increase it over time. I’m going on record saying this.

If you gradually increase the SANEity of your eating, over time and consistently, and you gradually increase the amount of resistance you’re using at the gym, you have to gradually get better results. Bottom line. If you were to say, every week, I’m going to eat 100 fewer calories until I’m eventually starving myself completely, like eating zero calories, you’ll lose weight. It’s just biology. It’s not healthy. You shouldn’t do it, but if you stop eating, you’re going to lose weight.

If you continually increase the quality of your eating and you continuously increase the quality of your exercise, it’s impossible not to increase the quality of your physical appearance and the quality of your health. It might not happen as fast as you want it to and you might not reach the end state of a 20 year old fitness model.

I could play basketball as hard as I can and I would never be as good as Michael Jordan. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t play basketball. It doesn’t mean I can’t get better at basketball, it just means that I may have some genetic limitations that other people don’t have.

April: That’s really helpful and I have to throw [Inaudible 16:53] for all of those women out there who are getting older and men too. Our metabolisms slow down. As we get older, our hormones are changing. I know in the next 15 to 20 years I’m going to have even more changes because I’m still relatively young. I’m 37 right now.

As you’re becoming stronger, as you’re eating more SANEly, but then as your hormones are changing, [Inaudible 17:26].

Jonathan: It doesn’t have to be two steps forward and two steps back. In fact, eventually, we all will die at some point. You’re not going to live until you’re 200 years old.

April: I’m okay with that.

Jonathan: But we can slow it down and here’s just one way to think about it. In fact, exercise is the only thing that’s ever been shown in a clinical setting to reverse aging at a cellular level. So there’s a way to measure how your genes are fraying at the ends of the [Inaudible 17:54] years and you look at chromosomes. There’s some studies done on elderly adults where they’ll do resistance training and they will actually show that literally at a cellular level, they are younger, cellularly. I’m just going to speak transparently here and just stick with me. After we’re born, on some level, we’re gradually dying.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: Maybe that’s not completely true, but let’s just go with it for a little bit. We’re a little bit closer to death. It’s a wonderful podcast.

April: It’s so optimistic here.

Jonathan: Why is that? We know with the way biology works, there is no steady state. You’re either growing or you’re dying. There is no stopping. A flower is either growing or it’s dying. A human being is either building new tissue or tissue is going away. Your body isn’t stagnant. That’s the difference between biological organisms and mechanical things. Mechanical things can just stay the way they are, biology doesn’t.

That’s not true after we’re born, after puberty, after we’re done with the natural growth cycle of a human being, only at that point are we on the gradual decline, unless we intervene.

We talk about muscle protein synthesis. We talk about building calorie hungry lean tissue. These are the interventions. You can absolutely have a man or a woman who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, when their growth hormones, and there is a hormone that is literally called growth hormone is radically higher than it would be otherwise, because they’re eating more protein because they’re eating more healthy foods and because they’re doing more resistance training because they are triggering growth and maintenance in their body. There is no steady state. You’re either growing or you are decaying.

By doing the Eccentric training and by doing the SANE eating, you can keep the growth and development going for as long and as healthily as possible.

April: That’s exciting. This applies mentally and emotionally in so many ways as well. I think that sometimes there’s this idea that as you get older, you just are going to become better. You’re just going to become better because you’re older. I don’t know if I’ll ever be in a nursing home. I can stay in my own home forever, but no matter where I am, I can be doing something to help continue to grow, whether it’s my mind, my spirit, my body. All of that together is exciting.

Jonathan: Absolutely and that’s the key when we talk about different goals around exercise. You can start to see this is really different than the goal of I want to have abs. The goal that I want to have abs is no better or worse than the goal of I want to run a marathon or the goal of I want to bench press 300 lbs. or the goal if I want to dunk a basketball. It’s a very distinct goal.

There’s a lot of things you could do to help you get abs that will not help you to avoid being in a nursing home when you’re older. In fact, it will actually make it more likely that you’ll be in a nursing home when you’re older.
When we talk about why are we exercising, the why is so important. Like you said, it’s not only for exercise, but for life and so why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we exercising the way we’re exercising? The fundamental principles are the principles of SANE eating, satiety, aggression, nutrition, efficiency, the fundamental principles of the exercise guidelines, the Eccentric or smarter exercise guidelines is we want to maximize positive safe stress on your physical body that causes growth while minimizing negative stress or the risk of injury.

April: Great. Okay.

Jonathan: Just like we say with eating, we want to sort of maximize essential nutrients and minimize things that are addictive and toxic. For example, you could sprint up stadium steps as a form of intense exercise, but if you were sprinting up concrete steps, it’s not debatable that that is riskier than being on a stationary bike where you’re pedaling as hard as you can with a lot of resistance so you’re not moving quickly for 30 seconds and then stopping. You can’t fall and bust your head open on concrete steps. If you’re in a more controlled environment, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad and that no one should ever do stadium stair training, it just means that when you look at what our goals are, you get a different exercise prescription out the other end.

April: And I think one of the things that’s most helpful to me is to identify my goal and then own my goal because my problem is that I set a goal and I say, okay, this is what I want. I don’t want to be in a gym a lot. I really just want to be healthy. I want to be with my family. I don’t care if I have ripped arms. I feel like this is what I want.

Then, I look around me and see oh, all of these people are running marathons, but actually, look at all of those muscles. I look around and see people with different goals who are doing different things and inside my mind I just feel, oh, wait, maybe I have the wrong goal. Maybe my goal isn’t good enough or something like that, which is silly. I think that as we’ve talked today and as you helped me to clarify with the exercises I do need to be consistent with my goals, helping me to realize I can justify what I want to do and do it without worrying about what anyone else thinks.

Jonathan: That’s an extremely important, April because we’ve covered this in a previous show and it’s worth reiterating, which is that we can’t be a 10 out of a 10 at everything. There are things we can be a 10 out of a 10 at, but we know we have to pick those. People who are going to be Olympic athletes are probably not simultaneously going to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company while simultaneously being an awesome parent. It just doesn’t happen.

April: There aren’t that many hours in the day.

Jonathan: You’ve mentioned in a previous episode. What if I see some of my friends who spend a lot of time exercising and who do count calories and they’re slimmer and more tone than I am. My response was kind of, well, if you right now are spending no time worrying about what you’re eating, it’s just sort of organic and natural and cool and you’re at the gym for two hours per week, if you’re willing to triple the amount of effort you’re putting into your SANEity, we can certainly get different results, but that’s the balance we’ve got to find. I think you’re doing a great job and I think hopefully most people that are listening or watching this are looking to say, we’d rather go found a school in a third world country for underprivileged people than to be able to see our abs. That’s just for us.

April: You have to make your own decision, yeah.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

April: I think it’s really, really helpful and to know that I could do that if I wanted to. One of my husband’s favorite phrases is, “Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.” I love that because for each of us, we all have our uniqueness and we all have something that’s special about us that we can do, but at the same time, I think we want to make sure that we are progressing enough that in our minds we can say, okay, I’m taking really good care of myself.

If I know when I’m at the gym, I’m giving it my all for that time that I’ve allotted to be there and when I know I’m home and I’m eating and making good choices, I’m making the best choices that I can with the resources and the time and energy that I have, then I can go to sleep at night feeling great. It’s just when there’s that discrepancy between what you know you could be doing or you don’t like your results and you want to do better and you’re going the best way in life, that’s really stressful to live in your head.

Jonathan: This is a key takeaway. At the end of the day, what the SANE and Eccentric lifestyle provides is just an alternate path. To be clear, there’s two paths. You can eat less and exercise more, and that’s the conventional path or you can eat more and exercise less, but do that smarter.

The thing that is not different between those two things is that the amount of effort you put into them is directly proportionate to the amount of results you get. If you eat 200 calories per day you will lose weight faster than if you eat 1,200 per day. If you eat optimal SANEity, and you exercise Eccentrically consistently at a level 8 or 9 and you’re consistently increasing your weights, you’re going to get better results.

Now, you have an option, you can pick which path you want to take and then you can pick how much effort you want to put into that path and you can know that on both paths, it’s diminishing margin of returns.

So I don’t care whether you’re counting calories or whether you’re increasing SANEity. April, I think you sell yourself short sometimes and I think all of us sell ourselves short.

If you’re 200 lbs. overweight, you can lose 100 lbs. quick. I don’t think you’re overweight. I haven’t seen you recently, but I think you’re quite fit. So at this point, we’re talking about going from being like significantly way better than average, to being like super fit and that’s not easy in any sphere. It’s diminishing margin of returns. So giving ourselves permission to celebrate where we’re at and to understand the better we’re doing if we want to do better, it’s like progressively harder and harder, the better you’re doing, to do even better. It’s not linear.

April: Thank you. This is really helpful. I feel like if I could give you a standing ovation right now, there you go, Jonathan, that was your standing ovation. I think this is the information that needs to be out there. This is what needs to be shared with our sons and daughters. This is what we need to be talking about in the media. This is what needs to be emphasized because everything that is being talked about right now is about how to eat less, how to exercise more, how to be hungry, how to always compare yourself, how to always feel you’re not enough. That is not healthy, mentally or physically for anyone.

What you are teaching and what I love about SANE is that the more I can remind myself of the things that I already know, and the more I can put my effort for things that I know are going to help my body get stronger and happier overall, it changes my life. I say this all of the time. You’ve changed our family. It’s unbelievable.

Alia and I were just talking the other day and she and I have been SANE about a year and a half and we were just talking about how much it means to us. This means a lot and that’s why I’m here podcasting with you and that’s why I’m so excited to help share this because I feel such relief. When I hear your message, I feel like I can breathe again. I want everyone to be able to breathe. So, thanks.

Jonathan: Thank you, April. That means the world to me. I really appreciate it. I want to make sure that our listeners and viewers feel that same sense because it’s extremely powerful and it’s transformative as you said and I appreciate your example for all of our listeners and viewers.

To help with that, I want to give the next action which is to do two things that we’ve talked about here is to write down your goals. There’s not 100 of them, there’s like 5. A short list of goals. Then I want you to write down where you’re at with them. There has to be some way to quantify it.

Maybe one of your goals is just Eccentric training like April has done. Like pressing 75 lbs., and then you’re going to do better and then you’re going to compare only to that, not anyone else, not to what anyone else is saying, but you’re going to write down your goals, not someone else’s goals, you’re going to write down your current status and then you’re going to take small steps to compare your goals and your progress with your previous self and nobody else. That’s the next step and the stretch goal because that’s very hard to do.

April: Love it. Thank you Jonathan. And thank you for everyone who joined us today. Thrilled that you’re with us. Please share this, get this message out there, help other people so they can breathe as well. And remember to stay SANE.