Move More

"Bobby, can you do me a favor and stand up? I just wanna make sure you still can."I’ve written about a lot of healthy habits in the past. Most of them were probably pretty obvious, some of them maybe not so much. Today I want to talk about what might be the most obvious healthy habit of all. You need to move more.

“But Coach Stevo, I work out!” 

I said, “move more,” not, “train more.” Training is what you are doing when you are wearing gym shorts, sweating, and holding iron in your hands. Training is intense and goal-oriented. This isn’t about training. When I say “move more,” I mean just that: you need to pry yourself off your couch or desk chair and just move your body as much as you can, every damn day.

Life is Moving

Humans are built to move. Our upright posture and bi-pedal movement makes us unique amongst the Great Apes. Based on our other unique human traits, especially lack of body hair and resulting awesome thermoregulation, some scientists have theorized that the first hunting method humans used was just running down our prey until they overheated and died. Evolution aside, the preponderance of scientific evidence points to movement, especially walking, being pretty much the most awesome thing we can do with our day. Walking reduces the probability of cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, anxiety and depression. Walking also increases bone health, especially strengthening the hip bone (the one you’ll break when you fall in the tub), lowers LDL cholesterol, and raises HDL cholesterol. Studies have found that walking can also prevent dementia and Alzheimer's. To top it off, some of these studies controlled for BMI and exercise. The positive correlation of movement to health was seen in skinny people and obese people. Gym rats and muscle-phobes. The more we move, the longer and better we live. 

Death is When You Stop

On the flip side, not moving also has an independent pathology. Men who spend more than 6 hours a day sitting have a death rate 20% higher than those that sit less than three hours a day.  Women fared even worse with a 40% higher death rate. And once again, that’s after controlling for exercise and BMI.  The evidence shows pretty clearly that it doesn’t matter how much you train, if you spend all the other hours of you week on your ass you will probably die sooner than if you got up and moved around more. But not-moving is also co-morbid. The less you move, the less calories you burn and, assuming you eat the same amount, the fatter you get. But it’s even worse than that because we aren’t eating the same amounts. Women consume 335 more calories and men eat 168 calories more per day than they did in 1971. And in 2009, the average American only spent 2.4 hours per day bearing his or her own weight. The fix is in and the only thing saving us is $15 billion in statins. 

NEAT Tricks to Move More.

Scare tactics aside, we all know we feel better when we move around more. You take a walk to clear you head. You trek to the beach on the weekend. Maybe you stand up from your desk and stretch every now and then. Put it all together and this stuff really adds up. Dr. James Levine has popularized the research into Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or NEAT. This is all the calories you use to move you throughout your day. Basically, everything that isn’t keeping your breathing, conscious, and it doesn’t include exercising. For active people NEAT is anywhere from 1,500 -2,400 kcal per day. That’s huge! That’s the energy equivalent of 3-5lbs of fat per week and way more than you’ll burn with exercise. But how can you maximize your NEAT? 

• Get a pedometer: they cost $6, come in every color of the rainbow, and will blow our mind. Every day try and make the number go up. You’re shooting for 10,000 steps.
• Set an alarm: Set an alarm to beep every hour of your work day. When it goes off, stand up and walk around a little. Maybe stretch your pecs and hip flexors a little, too.
• Drink more water: Constant trips to the bathroom have a funny way of replacing that annoying alarm and providing you with an excuse to walk around and do stuff,
• Grease the Groove: There are a handful of exercises that I try to improve on every day using the GTG method. This means that 10 times a day or so, I bang out 1/2 my max in a handful of exercises. Because it’s super low intensity I don’t break a sweat, can do them all in street clothes, and get better at them without messing with my recovery and all while contributing to my NEAT. So pick something easy like push ups or pull ups, and do a handful every time you have to use the bathroom from all that water you’re drinking.
• Dump your default: When I got a roomate, he brought a sofa that replaced my favorite sitting area. His sofa made my butt sweat, so I couln't sit for more than a few minutes without getting very uncofortable. Having a favorite chair or spot on the sofa means that you spend a lot more time there. I still sit down, but I try to move to a new place or position every few minutes. That way, I am at least adding to the movement that I do between sitting.

Age and Ballistics

I am lucky enough to have four surviving grandparents, three of whom I visited this week. Two drove 12 hours round trip to spend Father’s Day weekend at my parent’s house, and the other was in the hospital having emergency surgery. Their age-range is 10 years but their “physical age range” might as well be 30 years. For the purposes of illustration, let’s take my Mom’s Dad and my Dad’s Mom. He is a healthy weight, has excellent markers for heart health (other than a congenital murmur),  above-average strength and muscle mass, excellent recall, and can walk anyone other than Denis Nizhegorodov into the ground. She has been dramatically overweight and underweight, had a heart attack last year, and even before the heart attack woudn't pick up a Sunday paper let alone walk all the way to the end of her driveway to get it. These two people could not be further apart in terms of health, yet are only 18 months apart in terms of age. So what gives?

Well, genetics. They matter. A lot. But you can't do anyting about them, so let's move on.

Gravitational Acceleration

When we are young, we grow a lot. We grow muscles, bone, red blood cells, fascia, and everything else we need to do what we want to with our bodies. Starting at puberty, we usually see improvements with every application of consistent and progressively intense stress (and ample recovery time), but things eventually start to slow down. It’s a hell of a tool, but time has a hell of a way of dulling its edge. And if you ask anyone who’s past that point of diminishing marginal return, they’ll tell you that the day you start dying is your 30th birthday.

It starts with recovery time. You won’t be able to get back on the horse as fast from hard workouts or injuries. It’ll take you longer to lose fat or gain muscle. Things will hurt that didn’t and range-of-motion will start to evaporate. You will be able to get stronger, faster, and hotter, but the gains will come more and more slowly. Like a ball thrown into the air, gravity has a way of slowing everything down until it comes crashing down to earth.

Velocity

All is not lost on the next 2/3 of our lives, however. There is a handful of simple things that we can do to insure we age gracefully and as my Grandfather put it, “take out the trash on the day we die.” Key among them is to never stop training. Always have a goal; always be trying to improve; always train smartly to get there. By obeying CPR, and trying to get better at something every damn day, you will generate a lot of momentum. But don’t just think in terms of strength or cardio. Gravity’s effects are universal so you’ll need to look at every aspect of your movement health, chiefly power and mobility.

Age saps all our muscle fibers, but none as acutely as the fast-twitch muscle fibers. Loss of these fibers is the major reason older people lose balance and coordination. Their brains know they are falling, they just can’t recruit the fibers necessary to right themselves. Training for power early and continuing to do so while we age is an excellent way to postpone those life-changing falls that happen later in life.  

When I’ve coached clients in their 80s, one of the hardest activities we do is just getting up off the ground. Not Turkish Get-ups, I’m talking about just getting up. Strength is a factor there, but the main culprit is simple mobility. The connective tissue of the body, as well as the skin, loses elasticity as we age. The solution to this is the same as with fast-twitch fiber: get all the mobility you can, when you can. Stretch, activate, stabilize and always lift with a full range-of-motion. Your body wants to seize up to protect itself, but those shortened ROMs are a one-way ticket to LifeAlert if you don’t take mobility work seriously when you are young.

Other things like lean-mass, bone-density, and CNS coordination will all benefit from consistent, intense strength training and intelligent recovery. And the benefit of age is always experience. By the time you have 30-40 training years under your weight belt, you’ll know how to listen to your body and maintain the velocity that you created in your youth. 

Time of Flight

Of course, if you ask me to, I can recommend a single exercise that trains all the weaknesses of aging: the kettlebell swing.  It's ballistic so it trains power; it's intense enough resistance to maintain strength, muscle mass, and bone-density; it really trains the muscles that gravity hits hardest (the hinging and pulling muscles); it uses the full mobility of the hip; and it gets the heart going like nothing else. In short, keep swings in your diet if you wanna live until you die.

You shouldn’t get freaked out about getting older. As Maurice Chevalier said, “it’s not so bad when you consider the alternative.” In fact, you don’t even really need to change your training philosophy. Whether your goal is to get faster, stronger, hotter, healthier, or if you just want to improve you flight time, training smart doesn’t change. Just stay in touch with your body and keep trying to improve your weaknesses. If you never stop training and focus on mastering the basics, you will launch yourself into your golden years with solid base of health and a lot of velocity.

Inertia and Momentum

When I was a Marine Corps officer candidate*, I went to a little 3-day taste of Officer Candidate School that was staffed by actual Sergeant Instructors from Quantico. After pick-up and a group run carrying all of our trash, my makeshift platoon was introduced to Gunnery Sergeant Mata. If you speak Spanish you'll get the joke. He called our names one-at-a-time and identified something unique to each of us that rendered us unfit for his Marine Corps. (I was guilty of having ridiculous side-burns which he later ordered me to shave off. Dry). To demonstrate how we weak we were, Gunnery Sgt. Mata issued the following so-simple-they-were-brilliant orders:

"Get on your face right now."
"Aye, Gunnery Sgt.!"
"Get up right now."
"Aye, Gunnery Sgt.!"

He repeated these orders until we either 1) could no longer respond, 2) cried out in pain, or 3) both. This took about 90 seconds. Getting up was the hardest thing I have ever done and it was only 90 seconds, performing a single task, with nothing more than bodyweight. Why? Inertia. Literally and metaphorically.

"Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed."- Newton's First Law of Motion

The deadlift, the Turkish Get Up, and the burpee would be on any decent trainer's Top Ten List of Awesome Exercises. One of the things they have in common is that they all involve getting something off the ground (a barbell, a kettlebell, you); the other thing they have in common is that they are all freaking hard. This is because the force you must impress on an object at rest comes entirely from within you. You can't rely on the stretch reflex to give you a little 'umph' in the deadlift or the TGU. And when you're face down in the dirt on your twelfth burpee, ain't no one gonna get you up but you.

Get on your face right now

The average American adult spends less than 30 minutes a day bearing their own weight. Think about what that means for a second. That means we are standing, walking, and moving on our feet less than 1/48th of our day. We are sitting or lying down 98% of our adult lives. Gunnery Sgt. Mata wouldn't have to tell most of us to get on our faces; we already are. And it takes a lot of force to get over that much inertia. I spent 25 years there. But one day I was compelled to change that state. Shame, fear, and the very real possibility that I might lose my wife was finally enough to get me to put on a six-year-old pair of running shoes and try to make it to the end of the block. Before that, I was flat on my face. The inertia was real and getting up was the hardest thing I've ever done.

Get up right now

One day, you just have to get up. You have to change the state you're in and move in a direction that is worth moving in. But it takes a lot of force to change the course of your life. For the next 2-3 weeks, everything you do will be hard. If you were in shape before it will be harder than every before. You are going to be weaker than you remember, slower than you thought, and more sore than you can imagine. Every time you work out for the next 14-21 days, it's going to feel like getting off the ground wearing a backpack full of sand. But you have to do it. You have to get up, put on the shoes, and train. Every. Damn. Day. Because in 2-3 weeks you'll learn something else about the laws of physics.

Aye, Gunnery Sergeant!

Inertia is a bitch, but she has a sister that is the best thing that will ever happen to you: momentum. The more times you get up, put in the work, and deal with the pain, the easier it will be. The more you do, the more you do. Habits have a way of begetting more habits because in 3 weeks you are going to notice your first results. The training will become part of your daily life and you start to look around and wonder what else you can be doing to get stronger, faster, or hotter. After 3 weeks you will want to do more reps, run more miles, eat more protein and none of it will be a fight. You'll have momentum. And getting up won't be nearly as hard.

It's not about you

When the my fellow officer candidates and I were face down in the gravel, Gunnery Sergeant Mata would yell something else at us. After what felt like an eternity of "up-downs" or diamond push ups, one of us would grunt in pain or half-ass an "Aye, Gunnery Sgt!" And when any of us experienced these lapses in bearing, Gunnery Sgt. Mata would tell us, "It's not about you." When you're tired and hurting and you don't think you're going to be able to get up again, it's easy to feel selfish. But sometimes, it's not about you. Gunnery Sgt. Mata was trying to tell us that even at their most exhausted, officers must lead enlisted Marines. They can't afford to be selfish and lose their bearing. And this applies to everyone looking to change their life. In February of 2008, I was pounding pavement because my wife deserved a better me (it was actually a surprise Valentine's Day present). Only you are going to be able to get your own ass off the couch, but sometimes the reason you get up is for other people. So look around at the people in your life and remember, it's not about you. And like Rif says, "that kettlebell won't swing itself."

*So we're clear, I was never a Marine. I was not selected for, did not attend, nor complete OCS. I was an officer candidate from November of 2008 to February of 2010 and that alone was enough to be a formative experience in my life. The picture is actually Gunnery Sergeant Mata yelling and my friend Gram. I'm 3rd in line to get fucked with.

Every. Damn. Day.

How often does Melanie Roach perform the snatch? How often does Haile Gebrselassie run? When do writers write and musicians play? Every. Damn. Day. How often do you do the things that you want to be good at? Skills are just habits multiplied by time. And hotness is a skill that you can chose to master if you put in the work. Every. Damn. Day.

The Serial Accumulation of Habits

Go to someone who does what you want to do at the highest level you can find. Whether it's professional football or just someone who turned their life around and took control of their body. Ask them the five most important things that it took to get to where they are; these are the five habits that they needed to have in order to meet their goals. In the case of the latter person, it might have been portion control, getting an enjoyable fitness routine, finding a trainer they liked, putting down the soda, or finding a sport they liked. Ask them to rank those habits from most effective to least effective. Now wake up tomorrow and start doing #1. Every. Damn. Day. In three weeks, start doing #2. In 6 weeks, start doing #3, and so on. I promise that if you can dedicate yourself to this simple "habit accumulation plan" for 12 weeks, you will not recognize yourself. The secret is doing them one at a time. Every. Damn. Day.

I can't make this more complicated because it isn't. I can't sell you something here because the only thing it takes is you. If you don't know what to do, just ask. If you know what to do, do it. 12 weeks. That's three months and everyone in your life will ask how you did it. And the only thing you will have to tell them is, "I just got up and did it. Every. Damn. Day."

The Holy Grail of Hotness

What if I told you there was something you could start doing now that would make you burn fat, build muscle, prevent disease, extend your life, and make you smarter, hotter, and better in the sack? What if I told you that this "Holy Grail" was backed by every scientific study on the above mentioned attributes, and recommended by even the most ancient texts, scriptures, tomes, and scrolls? What if I told you that it is something that you already know how to do, requires zero effort and costs literally nothing; it will actually save you millions of dollars in your lifetime. Would you be interested?

How much money would you pay me to tell you this secret? And would you still pay me if I told you that after you know the secret, an act that is proven, easy, and free, you won't do it. You'll laugh like it's a joke and then go on being fatter, weaker, dumber, and less hot than you want to be. Because that's what you will do after you read this article. That's what you will do when I tell you that the Holy Grail of Hotness... is sleep.

During the first six weeks of this year I did an experiment in hypertrophy (putting on muscle). I put on 8lbs of muscle in that brief time and did it with less than 45 minutes per week of actual "lifting." To be sure, those were the hardest 45 minutes of my week and by the end of the 6 weeks, I needed two full days of rest between sessions. So I had the consistency; I had the intensity; but what did I do to guarantee my results? I slept between 9-10 hours a day.

I know that this seems counter-intuitive. We Americans tend to think that more is more. If we want to be hotter, then we need to work harder! But physiological change takes place when your body has time to focus on it. And when is your body most free to convert fat to energy and build new muscle? When it's not coordinating the demands of your brain telling it what to do. When your muscles are atonal and your energy demands are constant. You get hotter when you are asleep!

All fitness goals need three things. Consistency, Intensity, and Recovery. The more you do of any one of these, the more important the others become. The harder you work out, the more rest your body needs to recover properly for the next workout. This goes double when you are trying to lose fat. In a caloric deficit, your body's recovery times are seriously compromised (because it takes more time to convert fat to energy than Snickers Bars to energy). If you start working more and more or harder and harder without also increasing the recovery time, you will get stuck in the dreaded "Overtraining Death Spiral." The Death Spiral is where people are working harder and harder, eating less and less, and going to the gym more and more in an effort to lose that last 10-15lbs. They get weaker, slower, sicker, and will never see a change because their bodies are being stressed to the breaking point. Their cortisol levels (stress hormone) go through the roof and their metabolism drops more and more in an effort to keep pace with their drastically increasing levels of activity and caloric deficit.

How do you reset the clock on your gains? How do you kick-start your metabolism? How do you steer clear of the Death Spiral?! Get some freaking sleep. Here's how:

• Tell yourself "it's OK." You aren't being lazy, you're challenging yourself to become more efficient with your time.
• Start going to bed 10 minutes earlier every night. You aren't gonna miss anything. That's what TiVo is for.
• Don't do anything else in bed other than sleep (and that other thing).