Podcast Transcription: Why Everything You Know About Fitness Is Wrong with Ted Ryce  

Ted Ryce: What’s up, my friend? and welcome back to another episode of the Legendary Life podcast. I’m your host, celebrity trainer, and high-performance health coach, Ted Ryce. This is a podcast for men and women who are looking to boost their energy and upgrade their health.

So, get ready to learn proven health, fitness and mindset strategies to unlock your full potential. And today, I have a really, really important episode today. And the title is “Why Everything You Know About Fitness Is Wrong.” And you’re probably saying, not everything I know about fitness is wrong. Well, I’m going to challenge you on that today. And what I’m talking about is the details, the details of how you should be going about getting the best results.

Let me ask you this: Are you seeing results month to month? What were your results from your workout last month? Are you feeling good? Or do you have a low resting heart rate? Are you seeing muscles developing? Do you see less fat on your body? Are you making the progress that you should, based on your effort in the gym? And are you like most people who you feel really exhausted, you’re full of aches and pains?

And if you’re in that situation, I’ve got a really important episode for you today.

And today, I’m going to bring you brand new information, things that are going to help shift your perspective and get you away from the lack of results that you’re experiencing. Or if you’re kind of happy with your results, this is going to help you even more to dial things in to get more clear about what you need to do.

Before I jump into that, really quick, if this is your first time listening, make sure you click subscribe to wherever you listen to this podcast. And if you’ve been listening for a while, and you want to learn more about my methods and how I do things, I’ve put together a free training, the best training I’ve ever put together, ever. And I even went back and modified it even more to make it better. So, this is brand new. If you go to legendarylifepodcast.com/free You can watch that now.

So, let’s get into it when I was in college. And first getting into the strength and conditioning field, in personal training, I was obsessed with trying to get stronger, with getting bigger, with looking healthy too, just having that confidence, that strength. And I read almost everything I could find that promised to help me do that in the shortest time possible. I wanted results yesterday. But I would settle for today, but yesterday or even a month ago would have been ideal.

And in the process, I’ve tried some crazy routines, things you’ve never heard of. For example, I did this workout called the One Day Arm Cure. And it was put together by the late strength and conditioning coach, Charles Poliquin, a person who I’ve followed for almost about 20 years now. And he just passed away. And it kind of made me think, oh, man, you know, he made such an impact on my development when I was just getting into this field.

One of the things I did that I didn’t like so much was a One Day Arm Cure. So, there was a workout he put together that promised to add three eighths of an inch to your arm and just one day, and then in 24 hours, or even a few days later you’re supposed to have grown an inch on your arm. And get this, you did a set of four arms exercises every half hour from 9am to 5:30pm. Did you get that? 9am to 5:30pm.

So, from 9 to 6pm, you were doing this these workouts, and you had to drink supplements. And I did it and it was ridiculous. And you know what? I did not see a difference on my arms. Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe it’s just complete nonsense. But it didn’t work for me. Maybe it was for people who are on steroids, and I wasn’t. So, I’ve tried crazy things like that. And then more recently, when I…That was in my early 20s.

So, when I started getting into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu martial arts competitions, and really getting into that, I started changing my approach because I wasn’t all that focus on the bodybuilding. I needed to perform well, so I didn’t get killed on the mat, right? In training and also in competitions. And if you don’t know, I have a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And I did a lot of competitions.

It wasn’t a world champion or anything, but I was a state champion. I’ve won more matches than I lost. And I have a bunch of medals from that time and it just had a really powerful impact on me, psychologically.

When I got into it, I realized I needed to change my training routine. I couldn’t just do a bunch of bicep curls, bench presses and deadlifts and expect to perform well, especially when the actual training is so gruelling.

And I went in, consulted with a guy named Juan Carlos Santana. And if you are an OG in the fitness industry like I am, you know who that is. He helped popularize what was called Functional Training, along with Paul Check at the time, and I went and consulted with him. He was my coach.

And he put me on a four day a week program that combined both strength training: I’d do four strength training exercises, actually eight strength training exercises in supersets, but four major lifts and then four supplemental lifts that we’d superset and it was like Power clean, a deadlift—I can’t even remember all the exercises—a bench press and overhead press.

It’s like basic barbell stuff, mixed with some more sports-specific supplemental exercises. But the next day, it was just an all-out assault. It was this leg routine that involves jump squats, jump lunges, regular squats, regular lunges, and you would do like 24 reps of squats, then 24 reps of lunges, 12 on each leg, then you do 12 jump squats, then 12 jump lunges. And you’d repeat that like four times.

And that was after you did medicine ball tosses and sled drags, and some speed ladder works. And we did all this crazy workout. And I use that to do my last competition in Jui-Jitsu, where I ended up competing against the guy who went on to be the world champion. And this was a local tournament and this guy showed up. And the bad news is I lost to him in my first match. But I won all my subsequent matches.

But the good news was I was in great shape. I even have a photo of me from that time that I’ve shared before and my neck is big and define, my shoulders, and you can see the all the striations in my abs. Now I don’t look like someone who was like a fitness model where veins were all on abs because that isn’t healthy and it doesn’t help you perform. That’s strictly for show, strictly for show.

I was healthy and strong-looking.

The thing was, I was also in a lot of pain during that time, I was doing all this high intensity training with a Jui-Jitsu. And then I was doing more high intensity training with the weightlifting and all those the leg…It was called the leg crank routine, that routine that I just talked to you about.

And after my last competition, when I was 30 years old, because right before I turned 30 years old, I was like, “man, I really…” I wanted to prove to myself that at 30, I was still in good shape. And I did it. And I also went to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert for my 30th birthday with a few of my friends and had a great time.

But after that, I realized that I can’t keep this up. And I started having issues with my fitness because I was in a lot of pain, joint aches. And I just knew I was going to have to change something. And also, I was struggling with my personal training business because I was spending so much time training.

And fast forward about five years later, I was now in my mid-30s, and I had a good thing going. I was working on my online business. I was just getting started blogging and doing certain things. I hadn’t started Legendary Life yet, or what came to be known as Legendary Life, for you folks who’ve been listening for a while. And the truth be told, I was so busy training people and building my business that I let my own fitness slip. And I didn’t even realize it, until one of my clients was doing photography as a hobby. She did art and she’s actually really talented and now has good thing going in Miami.

And she offered to do some photos for me because she needed to practice. She actually hired this guy to coach her on how to use lighting better to take photos, because if you probably have taken photos, you know it’s all about lighting, right? It all has to do with the lighting. So, we went into a gym at this multimillion-dollar building. I can’t even remember the name of it. But it was literally right on Ocean Drive actually, in Miami Beach.

And we’re in the gym there and we’re doing some photos and I take my shirt off. And the guy there, they’re both Venezuelan, and the guy who is coaching her on the lighting. He didn’t speak English that well, but he was like, “Man, suck in your gut”. I’m like, “Suck in my gut? Don’t you see how big, massive and strong and powerful I look?” And I just didn’t get it right. What was he talking about? I’m not fat.

And then the days passed and I finally got the photos and then I looked at them I’m like, ‘Oh my God, my body has changed. I’m fat. I can’t see my abs and I look fat. I look muscle fat.” I look like one of those guys who drinks too much beer but does a lot of bench presses, even though I wasn’t. Well actually, maybe I was drinking a lot during that time. That was before Gisele and I got married and I was meeting a lot of women.

So, I looked terrible, especially if you compare to how I used to look. But I felt good in my clothes. But I also had high blood pressure, and I had some other things going on, and I wasn’t healthy, and I didn’t feel good.

And I was doing these high-intensity routines, and they were really crushing me. And they were short. And the worst part is, I did all the workouts. I trained as hard as I could, but I wasn’t getting the results.

And I’ve shared this story before. And I’ve showed this picture before it. It looks bad. If you look at how I used to look and then how I looked when I was in my mid-30s, I was fat. And my body fat was like 22%/23%. That shouldn’t be acceptable for any man. But that’s certainly not acceptable for a fitness professional. And I knew I had to do something about it.

And what I’ll tell you was: I had this realization that I was doing things wrong. And of course, nutrition was a big part of it. And I’ve shared that story in the past as well. But what I also realized was that my workouts were not making me feel good. They were hurting me, literally and figuratively. So, hurting me, meaning my joints were aching.

And what I mean by figuratively is like, “Oh, man, I’m just exhausted afterward.” I didn’t feel good from working out. It was something that I dreaded, and that I pushed myself through. And I just felt like shit afterwards. And I thought, “Oh, you know, this is my age. Maybe I just can’t train like I used to. Maybe I’m just too old to do this type of training.”

And some time went by, and I started to realize what the problem was, and it’s not really my age, right? That’s like saying: oh, wow, when I was 20, I could go out, I could drink 20 beers in a night. And I could wake up and I’d be hungover for four hours. But now I can’t do that anymore. Is that really because of age? Well, yes. But well, you shouldn’t have been drinking 20 beers in a night to begin with it. Your body just was able to handle your stupidity. And I’m talking from personal experience here. And now it can’t handle your stupidity anymore. Can’t handle that type of abuse and neglect that you could in your 20s.

And with more specifically with fitness, I realized that most people have what I like to call “the intensity mindset.” So, what does that mean? What is the intensity mindset? Simply stated, it’s when you’re approaching fitness from the idea that the single most important thing that you can do, and the single most important thing that’s giving you results is how hard you train.

And this mindset really extends to thinking that if you’re not seeing the results that you want, must be because you’re not training hard enough. Or we’re just as commonly, if you’re training hard and seeing some results, then training even harder, will lead to better results, or faster results. And this mindset, this idea that intensity, you know, really pushing yourself is what drives results, and there’s no gain without pain. I mean, that’s been around in fitness for a long time.

But the rise of CrossFit, Interval Training, Orange Theory, boot camp classes, in the last, I don’t know, really 10/15 years. It’s only ingraining deeper and deeper into the fitness culture. And unfortunately, there’s one big problem with the intensity mindset. It doesn’t work. Why? Well, the answer is really simple. You end up with something that Joel Jameson, a mentor of mine, calls recovery debt.

I really like that because we understand debt really well, especially in Western societies, because we’re all in it to some degree, or we have dealt with it. And it sucks when you’re in a lot of debt.

And recovery debt is what happens when you put a ton of stress on the body. But you don’t give it the energy and recovery it needs to repair. So, you go in the gym day in, day out, busting your ass, lifting weights, doing endless intervals, pushing yourself to the edge of fatigue, and yet, it never quite seems to pay off the way that it should. Or the way that you thought it would.

And you play, “Oh, maybe it’s my hormones.” Maybe if you’re a guy, you think you have low testosterone. “Maybe it’s low testosterone, it’s the age. Some mysterious thing happens to my body because of the age, and I just don’t get results like I used to.”

And that is not the case, by the way. Anyone can get results. But you have to do things the right way. And we’ll talk about that in a bit. But if that sounds familiar, and you’re one of the people that are spending so much time and energy on training and dealing with the stress of daily life, that there’s just not enough leftover to go towards recovery and rebuilding your body.

And that’s why I tell people the current model of fitness is broken, it’s broken, right? And you’re probably following it. In fact, if you ask some of the leaders in health and fitness, they’ll tell you…Or let’s talk about body transformation, what do you need to do to transform your body? It’s really simple. Get into a calorie deficit, make sure your protein is a certain amount, and then lift weights. And it’s really that simple. It’s really that simple.

Except it’s not that simple. Because if that’s what you’re doing, and you have poor sleep, you have high blood pressure, your resting heart rate is 80. And you sleep seven hours a night, but you wake up four times, or you sleep five hours a night. You just can’t push through it like that, you can’t push…Or you can, but it doesn’t give you the results. And it is certainly not helping you become healthier, and it’s not something that you’ll be able to keep up.

So, let’s talk a little bit about the negative consequences of just pushing through the pain and how your body is fighting back. Because the truth is this intensity mindset inevitably leads to why so many people fail at fitness. In fact, someone the other day was saying, “Oh, yeah, well, people always say that when you start exercising, you feel better. But that’s not true. You feel awful when you first start exercising if you haven’t been doing it for a while.” And I was thinking… Well, at first I was like, “Oh, you’re an idiot. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But then I realized, yeah, he doesn’t understand he’s doing things…He thinks going into the gym, he probably does— not probably, he does way too much. He doesn’t build up and thinks that just crushing himself in the gym is how you get a good workout, instead of building an adding over time.

And instead of like, if we use the analogy of getting a tan, he’s the type of person who would say, “Oh, I need to get tan because I have, I don’t know, a photo shoot coming up or I’ve got a graduation or wedding and I want to look nice and tan, I want to have that healthy tan. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into the sun and stay there for eight hours for one day.”

And then what happens right? Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because that person would be in the hospital with some serious sunburn afterward, getting treatment, but the point I’m trying to make is you go out there and you get a sunburn and what happens? You feel, oh, God…Have you ever had a bad sunburn? I’ve had way too many, unfortunately. And your skin turned red it hurts. It hurts to have a shirt and people get near you. You’re like “Stay away from me. I have sunburn, stay away!” and you’re afraid of anyone touching you.

And if they do, you just want to punch them because you’re like, “Ah, why I told you not to get near me.” And then they’re like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. And then your skin peels. That’s what most people are doing when they go into the gym. They do that to themselves. And they end up with joint aches and pains. And so, their skin’s not peeling because it’s not a sunburn.

But they applied too much stressed, too much stress to their body and they have all these issues that joint aches and pains, the muscle soreness, the excessive muscle soreness. A little bit is okay. But excess a muscle soreness, “Oh, I couldn’t walk for five days. I couldn’t lift my arms over my head for five days.” That is exactly the opposite of what you would say is a productive workout.

Now it sounds really idiotic when I talk about it in terms of sunburn, right? Because it’s so obvious how bad a sunburn is. And you’re scared of cancer, too. So, it’s not quite as obvious for people, and it wasn’t for me for a long time, until I started shifting my perspective on things. It’s not obvious for you either, most likely because you’re you think, “Oh, working out is good. Oh, being sore is good.”

We have these misconceptions about what we should experience we think it should be painful and we should be in pain and we should be sore and not being able to walk down stairs or you know, “Oh, I’m so sore. I slept poorly.” Or ‘I’m so sore, I’m more agitated.” And the problem is sooner or later, if you build up a big enough recovery, that the body starts to fight back.

Changes in brain chemistry, drives you to want to eat more and move less, you lose motivation to go to the gym, or you get to the gym, but you just can’t push yourself as hard because you’re so exhausted, in fact, is many times people like, “ I don’t know what happened, I performed so well, just a few days ago, then I went back to the gym and did the same workout and I couldn’t push myself. I couldn’t lift as much weight, I couldn’t do as many reps and I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t sore.”

And so eventually you find yourself mostly just going through the motions. And this is unfortunately, the daily grind that literally millions of people are putting themselves through. They put in the work day in, day out, but they don’t see the results. And the harder they work, the worse they eventually feel. The joint aches and pains get worse, the fatigue gets worse. It doesn’t work.

And this is exactly why I wasn’t getting results. And when I started really pushing myself hard in my mid-30s, I wasn’t 20 anymore, I wasn’t just focused on having a good time and working out. I was working long hours per week, every week. And I was dealing with the stress of trying to run my business and I wasn’t good at the marketing business stuff. And it was really stressful to figure it all out. And to keep my clients happy at the same time.

And also, I was going out, I was meeting girls, I was drinking too much. That’s what I felt like I had to do if I wanted to have a social life and to meet women in Miami Beach. That kind of is what you have to do. You don’t have to, but I felt that way. And that’s what most people do, right? They go out and they have drinks. So, it was taking a ton of energy away from my recovery, and my body simply couldn’t keep up.

And the way I changed, the shift that I made that was so important that I want to share with you, is I started shifting…This is something that has even…You’re going to hear some things that I’ve been developing over the past eight months that I’ve been using with my one-on-one coaching clients. And what I’ve started to develop instead of the intensity mindset is the longevity mindset, and health-driven fitness, longevity mindset. Okay, because you don’t want to kick ass now for a year, you want to kick ass 10 years from now.

I mean, I’m 41 I’m about to be 42. You think I want to tell stories when I’m 51 about how I used to be in great shape when I was 41. Nobody wants to hear that and nobody cares, right? It’s just like, well, everybody just wonders, well, what happened to you? What happened? You got lazy? Did you get injured? Did you have a car accident? Why aren’t you in great shape anymore? And again, nobody wants to hear it? Yeah, we’re not interested in it. None of us.

And what I want to tell you is that the longevity mindset, it starts to happen, when you find that the most effective way to reach your fitness goal, it isn’t just by training harder. But it’s by incorporating specific strategies and methods that help shift your body to help you recover from your training, so puts you in a recovery state. So, it helps you balance the stress in the recovery. It’s about balance.

And balance for me might be different than for you. You might be under more stress than me, you might be under less stress than me, you might have more injuries than me, you might have less injuries than me. Hopefully, you have less, I really hope so because I’ve got a lot that I deal with.

So, let’s talk about this because I want you to be…The best thing about this isn’t just about changing your mindset and getting worse results because you’re not going to push yourself hard. This is about getting better results. It’s about feeling better. It’s about feeling less aches and pains. It’s about sleeping better. It’s about feeling less stress in your life. It’s about having a workout program that’s not taking away from your life.

It’s not something that, “Oh, I have to do this because it’s good for me, but I feel like shit when I do it, but I have to do it anyway, because even though it sucks, just like paying taxes and paying my bills every month, and doing all those other things I don’t really want to do, it’s something I need to do, so I do it. And I just go through it.” And Americans in particular were really good through pushing through the pain, right?

And a lot of us are so type A, but what I’m telling you is it doesn’t get good results. That’s like saying, “Hey, I’m going to work really hard and I don’t want to make a lot of money. I want to work to the bone, but I don’t want to get paid too much from it.” And that’s what I’m kind of saying, let’s be smarter about this. Let’s have this longevity mindset. And let’s use health-driven fitness. So how do we do that? Let’s get into it.

So, number one is stop performing exercises and workout routines that hurt your joints. One of the first things I do with clients is I asked him about their injuries, I asked them about their joint aches and pains, and we make sure that we deal with them, and we make sure we don’t make them worse. That’s the first thing I do when I work with a client.

So, if you have chronic aches, pain, soreness, and tenderness on your body, your muscles ache or you’re in pain, you’re persistently in pain, you have persistent muscle tension, stiffness and pain. Your muscles are constantly stiff and sore. Your joints are always sore, achy, tender, maybe you have achiness in your bones. You have spots on your body that are always tender, achy or sore. maybe you have some parts of your body, your fingers, toes, hands, feet, arms, legs, back, head, neck, whatever, that constantly ache and feel sore or painful.

You have certain spots on your body, that constantly the pain just rarely lets up. Your pain is so bad that sometimes you have to pop Advil through the day, like my buddy Joe de Bernardo, former NFL player, who was living off of I don’t know, what was Tylenol or Advil just to get through the day.

And you have persistent pain that disrupts your normal lifestyle, because it causes you to be fatigued, it affects your sleep at night and makes you more irritable. And what I want you to do is don’t… maybe you have some injuries. Are you adding to that problem? Are you performing exercises that hurt your joints, because hey, someone told you need to squat to get results? If you don’t squat, then you’re not working out. If you’re not dead lifting, your bench press, then you’re not working out.

Are you listening to that nonsense, because there is no exercise or exercise tool that you have to use? So, if something’s hurting you, don’t do it. And if you’re following a workout routine, that hurts you, don’t do it, because what’s going to happen is that chronic pain is just going to get worse and worse. And if you damage yourself enough, then you’re going to have to replace joints, you’re going to have to replace your hips or your knees.

Or if you have wrist issues, they don’t do risk replacements or ankle replacements, they fuse things together. Or maybe you have a herniated disc in your low back or neck, like I have both of those, you have to get a disc replacement surgery, which I did not get. And what I want to tell you is don’t do that. Do things that improve the way that your body functions. There are so many methods to strengthen your muscles without hurting your joints, that’s completely unnecessary.

So that’s the first thing I work with on people structural balance by using corrective exercises, isometrics. I’ve performed a lot of this stuff. I’d never let my coaching clients hurt themselves to get in shape, because long term, you’re not going to be able to keep it up. If you don’t care about any of the other things that I mentioned, because you’re just mentally tough and a little bit stubborn, then think about you can’t keep it up long term. Because even if you can mentally push through the pain, you will start to lose function.

And that’s the thing that really messes us up. It’s not the pain. A lot of us are mentally tough; we can push through it, we live with pain, we adapt to it. It makes us insufferable at times maybe or irritable, but we push through it. But when we lose function, “Oh, that’s the scary part. Oh, I can’t do that anymore.” That’s the scary part. So don’t do that.

And two, stop beating yourself up with exercise. So, I’m not talking about joint aches and pains here. I’m talking about. Are you having trouble sleeping due to your workouts? Are you feeling exhausted instead of energized from your workouts? Do you feel more stressed after working out? Do you have a high resting heart rate when you wake up in the morning because you’re not recovering from your routines? Do you have low heart rate variability, if you track heart rate variability? Do you have high blood pressure and it’s not getting better from your exercise routine?

That is beating yourself up. Your exercise routine should make you feel better. And if it’s not making you feel better, you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing absolutely wrong. And that’s why the title of this is” “Why Everything You Know About Fitness Is Wrong.” If you have a high resting heart rate, if you have high blood pressure, if you’re tracking your heart rate variability, and it’s low, and you’re not able to tweak things, so that you’re feeling better.

Because what we’ll do is we’ll say, “Oh, I’m going to work out five times a week because five is better than four. Oh, you know what, maybe I’ll do six times a week, because working out six times a week is better than working out five times a week.” And there is some truth to that. But if you’re doing six intense workout sessions, it has to do with managing the intensity.

And if you’re doing six intense workout sessions, and you’re having all these symptoms that I’m talking about: the trouble sleeping, the constant soreness and achenes, feeling bad from workouts instead of energized, and not seeing an improvement in your health. If you’re really fit, you should have healthy blood pressure levels. You should be under 120 over 80. If you’re really fit, you have a low resting heart rate, right. And if you don’t have that, then you’re doing it wrong. So, stop beating yourself up with exercise.

Three, this kind of goes with the same thing: stop blindly following one size fits all routines, “Oh, I saw The Rock in his workout, and then so I’m going to do his workout. Or I’m going to do Tom Brady’s workout.” Listen, that’s not going to work for you. Okay, it’s not going to work for you because you’re not The Rock and you’re not Tom Brady.

And what I’m saying is you need to personalize your approach to your life, your limitations, your strengths, your weaknesses, your lifestyle, and make it work. You’ve got to get something that makes it work for you. In other words, it’s got to be making you healthy, it’s got to be something that you can sustain. So, stop following celebrity workouts, stop looking for on bodybuilding.com, or Tea-Nation or Men’s Health or Shape Magazine or wherever else you’re getting this stuff from, personalize your routine. Personalize your routine.

Number four is stop using stimulants as a crutch for your low energy levels. Man, I love coffee and I love tea, like the next person. I’ve been drinking Vietnamese coffee almost every day for the past week we’ve been in Vietnam. It’s like cocaine is for people who can’t handle Vietnamese coffee. It is so strong. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know exactly all the… I haven’t read that much about it. But it must have an insanely high caffeine content.

I didn’t have any today. I had tea today, because I felt like I’m too crazy when I drink the Vietnamese coffee. And I just have a few sips of it, too. But it’s so strong. But I like it. It’s something I’m not going to be able to experience after I leave Vietnam because it’s not something I’m going to get in Thailand, not something I’m going to get when I’m back home in Florida.

So, what I’m telling you is that…But I don’t need it. I’m drinking because I have this one time to do it. And it doesn’t bother me that much. It doesn’t affect my sleep at night because I only have a little bit and I have it in the morning. And I don’t drink it during the day. Although there is some—just a quick tangential point here—there is some weasel poop coffee that Gisele and I are going to try this afternoon. Because we never tried it. We never had a chance to try it when we were in Vietnam before, and we’re going to try that today.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say here, the point I’m trying to make is so many of us, we rely on coffee to get through the day, we drink 3, 4, 5 cups of coffee per day. And we feel terrible in the morning. And we don’t feel good until we have our coffee. In fact, that’s the thing that we look forward to. It’s the first thing we do in the morning, give me my coffee to jolt ourselves to alertness.

But the problem is you’re taking a drug. Caffeine is a drug. It’s like cocaine, it’s like heroin, it’s like marijuana. It just happens to be legal. And it doesn’t mess us up in the same way as a smoking a joint or snorting some cocaine might, but it certainly affects your health. And I know this is a controversial point because some people say, oh, people who drink coffee, have less heart disease or less cancer rates or whatever. And people go back and forth on this.

But what I’m talking about specifically, is not so much a long-term health issues, because that’s kind of up in the air and maybe has something to do with your genetics, whether you’re faster or slow metabolizer of caffeine, so that’s probably part of it. But what I’m trying to say is if you wake up in the morning, and you feel terrible, and you need coffee to get you going, that’s a problem.

If you don’t have the energy to do your workout, because you’re just low energy all the time. That’s a problem. You need to take a drug to go work out that’s a problem. Need to take one of those pre-workouts, that’s a problem. I never take that stuff. I can’t because I feel like I’m gone have a heart attack if I take one of those and start pumping, you know, start working out hard. I can’t. I’ve experimented with them before. It actually stops me from working out hard, because I’m like, I just feel my heart pounding too aggressively. And I just, it’s like, this is wrong, I shouldn’t feel like this, so I don’t do that. But I know a lot of people who do.

And what I’m trying to say here is, regardless of what the research says about long term health benefits, or the detriment of your health from drinking, caffeine, or coffee, taking pre workouts, what I’m saying is, how do you feel when you wake up in the morning? How do you feel getting through your workout? Do you need it to get through your workout? And how do you feel after workout? And do you fall asleep easily at night? Or are you someone who you take something, a stimulant, in the morning to bring you up? And then you’ve got to take something at night to bring you back down? Is that where you’re at? Because that’s a problem.

And number five is stop neglecting stress management. So, I’ve talked about this before: people who are stressed die earlier than those who aren’t stressed. And more specifically, people who feel stressed, take longer to recover from exercise that don’t feel stressed. And one study showed 48 hours for low stress, versus 96 hours for high stress. And so, I want to ask you, in the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?

In the last month, how often have you felt you were unable to control them? Important things in your life? In the last month, how often have you felt nervous and stressed? In the last month, how often have you felt confident about your ability to handle your personal problems? How often have you felt things were going your way in the past month? How often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do?

Did you just feel so overwhelmed? How often have you been able to control irritations in your life? How often have you gotten into political arguments on Facebook? How often have you felt that you were on top of things? How often have you been angered because of things that happen that were outside of your control? And do you feel like the difficulties are piling up so high that you just can’t overcome them?

Because if that’s the case, then what you need to do is you need to stop doing things that stress you out more, like drinking coffee, for example. Pay attention to an experiment. Do you feel less stressed when you drink coffee? Or more stressed when you drink coffee? Forget about the long-term stuff. I’m talking about day-to-day productivity. What about your exercise? Is it making you feel more stressed? Or is it making you feel worse, because maybe it’s taking you longer.

Maybe you’ve had a death in the family. Maybe you’ve had a divorce that you’ve been dealing with. Maybe you’ve got a ton of things going on. Maybe you were a victim of a crime. I don’t want to get into your past history, but maybe you had trauma as a child, maybe you were sexually assaulted. Maybe you were a victim of child abuse. Maybe your parents were fighting all the time.

Maybe you grew up in a low-income area and it was just a nightmare place to live. I mean, these are all things that can affect us from an early age. And then some of the things that I mentioned before, those are things that are affecting us, right now, some of the things that we have going on in our lives.

And if that’s the case, you need to balance, you need to find balance, and adding more stressful exercise is not the answer. It’s not the answer. So, stop doing that. Love yourself. Be good to yourself. Do not push yourself. maybe you had a bad situation a divorce, your partner cheated on you, whatever it is. Maybe your boss was an asshole, maybe you got fired. Maybe you have employees who just are acting terribly right. And you’re just so stressed out over it. Don’t beat yourself up more. Don’t beat yourself up more. Do things to make you feel better, because that’s going to help you solve the situation and get past it.

So, don’t let exercise be another stress in your life. Make it be a positive stress, or actually there’s two types of stress: you stress and distress. You stress is a positive stress, where when you apply it to your body, you actually get stronger, kind of like going out into the sun for a short period of time, so that your skin has a chance to adapt and develop a tan. And that’s what you want to do.

But most of us distress ourselves with exercise, right? We feel worse. We’re the people who go out in the sun and spend two hours or three hours out there and we’re just like, “Oh God, my body has just been traumatized. It’s been cooked by the sun. Oh, I feel terrible.” That’s what we’re doing to ourselves with our “healthy fitness” regimen. And that’s just never going to work long term, and it’s not going to give you the results that you want now. It’s not going to help you become a high-performer.

So, just to briefly recap what we talked about. Have that longevity mindset and be health-driven with your fitness. Make sure you pay attention to your heart resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, if you want to track that. Your blood pressure. Make sure you’re making an improvement in those things, along with your muscle growth and your fat loss. And number one, stop performing exercise and workout routines that hurt your joints. Make sure you focused on making yourself feel better.

Two, stop beating yourself up with exercise, especially if you’re developing signs of that recovery debt. That right, you’re either not getting the results that you want or you’re feeling exhausted, instead of energized from your workout, you feel like working out is just another stress on top of your already stressful lifestyle.

Three, stop blindly following one size fits all routines. Get something that that’s customized. Four, stop using stimulants as a crutch for your low energy levels. There are plenty of things that you can do. Even some supplements that can actually help benefit you in a healthy way instead of just jacking up adrenaline, because that’s what coffee does, it jacks up adrenaline among other hormones and neuro chemicals. It’s like putting adrenaline into your body. That’s why your heart starts beating faster.

And five, stop neglecting stress management. Don’t be one of those people who has a heart attack, even though they exercise. Get focused on the things that matter. Manage that stress. Don’t neglect it.

So that’s all I have to say. I hope you learned a lot from this. I hope it shifts your perspective. And I hope you start thinking more about how to make yourself healthier, and not just how to add more exercise, or how to add more intensity into your routine because that isn’t what works. You’ve got to be measurement-driven. You’ve got to you got to have a plan.

You’ve got to have a strategy got to make sure that you’re measuring the things that matter and making a difference in your health and fitness. And what you will get as a result is you will experience that vibrance, that vitality, that glow, that confidence that feeling good, that aura of just feeling good that people give off when they’re doing things that make themselves feel better.

That’s what I want from you. I want the best for you. Please, love yourself, take care of yourself, and find that balance for yourself, for your particular situation, lifestyle and body, That’s the thought I want to leave you with. Have an amazing week, and I’ll speak to you soon.