Episode 090: Welcome back to another installment of Real Health Radio. This week I look at exercise and fitness and their role in health.
I explain what exercise and fitness are, how they benefit us, the role of hormesis in this and the major factors that determine how beneficial exercise is for you. I also discuss signs of overtraining, the type of movement that is the most supportive of health and the role exercise plays in physique.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 90 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/90.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey all, and thanks for joining me for another episode of Real Health Radio. On this week’s show, it’s just me and I’m going deep exploring a topic. This week we’re looking at exercise and fitness. I’m kind of shocked it’s taken me 90 episodes to get here. It’s something I regularly talk about with clients, so I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to cover this, but here we are.
As part of the show, we’re going to look at the definition of exercise. I know this may seem obvious in that everyone knows what exercise is, or when they see exercise, they know it’s exercise. But I think getting a better grasp of what it means can help with a broader understanding, and it really forms the basis of some of the ideas that I’m going to cover.
We’ll also look at how exercise affects the body. From this, we can see how it’s either beneficial or, in other cases, how it can be a problem – because while exercise is typically thought about as always being health-promoting, this isn’t really the case. We’ll look at some of the things that make the difference, so what’s needed for exercise to be healthy and what’s going on when it’s not actually healthy.
We’ll also look at the idea of fitness. This is another term that I feel most people misunderstand or have a really narrow view or narrow definition of. This can mean that fitness can be increasing while health is actually decreasing. So we’ll look at a definition of fitness or a way of thinking about fitness where someone’s health and fitness are in tandem and they’re moving in the same direction.
Then finally, we’ll look at the best forms of exercise for you, so what you should be doing. There’s lots of myths around this stuff, so I’ll deal with this here as well. There’s a lot to cover as part of this show.
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Let’s start then with the definition of exercise. I looked at many different sources for this, and generally, the same ideas kept coming up, with the definition having two component parts.
The first part is that exercise involves some level of bodily exertion and activity or physical action, so it’s some form of movement. The second part of the definition then relates to the outcome of the exercise. What is the reason for that physical activity or that exertion? It’s for developing or maintaining physical fitness, for keeping healthy, for improved wellness – all of which are very broad terms and can encompass a lot of different things.
To sum this up in one definition, exercise is physical movement that leads to improved health and fitness. This definition is important, and it’s something I’m going to come back to, because lots of what people are doing that they think of as exercise is actually pushing them further away from health. We then have to ask ourselves: is that really exercise? Or would it be more appropriate to refer to this as overexertion or physical stress or some other name? But we’ll come back to this in a little while.
00:03:40
First off, I think we should look at some of the benefits of exercise. When it is done in a way that fosters improved health and fitness, what does this really look like? What systems, what areas are impacted upon?
The short answer to this is everything. Every organ and system in the body is positively influenced by exercise, whether that be directly or indirectly. Part of the reason for this is that exercise or movement is essential for human health. The way that we think about air or water or food, exercise is the same. It’s like a nutrient for our body.
But if we are to look at the different systems and what’s involved, first off is the cardiovascular system, cardiovascular health. Most people are aware of this. This is the system that is talked about most frequently when it comes to exercise and the benefits of exercise. The cardiovascular system is also known as the circulatory system, and it is the system that transports blood and nutrients around the body.
Nutrients in this sense can be very broad. It can include fats and carbohydrates and proteins. It can be electrolytes and other vitamins and minerals, oxygen, carbon dioxide, hormones, immune cells – the list goes on.
This really brings up an important point, which is we break systems down so that they’re easy to talk about, but with everything I’ve just listed above, it demonstrates that the cardiovascular system has a direct impact on digestion and endocrine function and immune function and energy metabolism. Everything is just so interconnected. So the body’s main highway system, which is our cardiovascular system, is improved through exercise.
Exercise helps with the health of our musculoskeletal system, our muscles and our bones. It helps to build stronger and bigger muscles and muscles that are more sensitive to insulin and use more energy, like all things that are important for health. It helps to strengthen bone and increase bone density, so it helps with joint mobility and with general flexibility – again, good things.
I will add that not all exercise will do every one of these things. Some are skewed more towards one group of benefits while some other forms provide some other group of advantages. But if we’re talking about exercise in a general sense and clumping everything together, all the different forms together, this is how it can help across the board.
It’s supportive for the immune system. It can reduce the incidence of upper respiratory tract infections. It can reduce markers for inflammation in the body. Inflammation is associated with many diseases that we see today, whether it be cancer or diabetes or heart disease, so exercise can reduce the risk of these inflammatory conditions.
It has an effect on the mind, known as neurobiological effects. This is a very broad category, but exercise improves things like depression and mood, ability to learn, your ability to handle stress, concentration, memory, reasoning and general cognitive function, and it helps prevent, even, against diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It has a positive impact on sleep and healthy functioning of your circadian rhythm. We’ve evolved to move during daytime and be still at nighttime, so the movement in the daytime actually helps us to sleep at night.
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But really, like I said, exercise enhances all of our systems in the body. Rather than me going through every single one, I want to move on and just show how exercise has this effect on the body.
This was actually something I talked about recently in another podcast. I did a whole podcast on hormesis, which you can find at www.seven-health.com/79. As part of this, I explained how exercise works because of its hormetic effect. If you haven’t listened to that other show, then you can check it out. But for now, I’ll cover the part that pertains to exercise and how it works to enhance health.
Hormesis is a process where a mild or acute stressor creates adaptions in the body that lead to some positive health change. This means that exercise isn’t health-promoting within itself; it becomes health-promoting because of the changes the body makes in the face of, or in response to, exercise.
Hormesis generally works because of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the body’s desire to bring itself back into balance and to be able to do this effectively and efficiently, and do that as quickly as possible. If we were to look at someone’s markers after they’d been doing exercise, you’d see things like increased inflammation. Oxidated stress would be high, hormones like cortisol and adrenaline would be high. You’d have microtrauma in your muscles, like tiny tears because the muscles have been damaged. There’d be a certain level of degradation to your nervous system.
None of these things are indicative of health. Most people would think that these types of changes, you want to be avoiding them – and in lots of scenarios, you really do. But exercise then offers its health benefits because of the adaptions it then makes in return to the assault that is then put on the body. If given appropriate food and rest, the body then recovers.
But it doesn’t just recover to where it was prior to the exercise; it recovers to a place that is just a little better. The body is looking out for your long-term survival. It realizes that it just faced a stress and it took say X amount of time to recover and get back to homeostasis. It knows that there’s a likelihood that this stress could happen again, and it wants to be even better at dealing with it next time. As part of the adaptions that it makes in the recovery, it improves, so you can now go that little bit longer than before, or you can lift that little bit more than you could, or after a bout of exercise, you’re able to recover that little bit quicker.
These changes are really miniscule, but over time – say after 3 months or 6 months or 1 year or 2 years – you’ve made improvements that then are very noticeable. This can be improvements in your performance while doing the exercise, but it can also be improvements in your general everyday life, because as we just went through, exercise has a positive effect or positive impact on all of the different systems in your body, and these improvements are generalized. They’re not just about while you’re doing exercise.
But there’s one piece to hormesis that I haven’t mentioned yet, and this is super important to a lot of what I want to talk about today. As I said earlier, hormesis is the process where a mild or acute stressor creates adaptions in the body that lead to positive health changes. The second part of this is that if the stressor is taken at a higher amount, then it’s actually damaging to your health. Basically, you reach a threshold where it’s no longer creating positive changes and you then start to come down the other side, where it’s now creating negative repercussions.
This is important because within health, we have this idea that if something is healthy, then eating more of it or doing more of it must be even more healthy – that something healthful is nice and linear if you look at a graph, where if you add in more and more, health increases more and more.
Truly, I don’t actually know of any substance or any activity where this is the case. Even the things like oxygen or water that we think of as essential and so important for health, at some certain level, they stop being so. You drinking more and more water is going to lead to water intoxication, and you’ll die. But with something like exercise, it doesn’t have to be taken to this extreme before you can start seeing people reach that hormetic peak, and they start coming back down the other side.
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I want to talk about where or what are the things that make the difference. What are the factors that determine whether you’re benefiting from the exercise you’re doing versus it pushing you further into the ground?
There are four main things that I’ve come up with. Probably like most podcasts, I’ll release this and then think “damn, I really should’ve mentioned that other thing” or “I could’ve used that other one for an example here,” but these shows are just a snapshot in time of what I’ve come up with with the given time constraints of putting a weekly show together. But anyway, these are the four things that I feel are most important.
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The first factor is, where is the person currently at? What is their current state of health? What is their current state of fitness? What is the body currently trying to deal with? Exercise is dose-specific and it is person-specific. What may feel like light work for you or for one person can feel like an all-out assault for someone else. Being aware of the body which the exercise is being put upon is really important.
If someone is starting from a place of never doing much physical activity and maybe having some disease processes going on and being on multiple medications, this needs to be taken into account. Going for a walk might be a challenge for this person. Standing up might be a challenge for this person. There was a great documentary that I watched last year called The Resurrection of Jake the Snake. It was about the wrestling star Jake Roberts. Just so you know, I had no idea who he was; the last time I watched wrestling was when I was 9 or 10. It’s not really a big thing in my life, but I do love documentaries.
Jake was this big deal in wrestling, and his career started to fade quite a while ago as he got more into drugs and alcohol. At the start of the documentary, he is basically just a hermit, barely surviving, living in this not-great accommodation. The guys who come in to help him want to get him to turn his life around. One of their big focuses is yoga – and not yoga in terms of tight pants type yoga, but yoga aimed at ex-wrestlers.
It was really eye-opening to see just how immobile this guy was in the beginning, and how simple movements of just standing or holding a pose caused so much pain and were so difficult. Thinking of this film is just a really great reminder of meeting people where they are at. Just because you or I may find it easy to do something, doesn’t mean that it’s easy for someone else. There’s probably people who find certain things easy that you have trouble to do, or you may even have trouble just to comprehend doing.
Actually, what I find is more common with the people who I work with is for those who’ve taken exercise too far and yet they don’t recognize it, or maybe don’t want to recognize it. This is much more difficult because they can be going to say a spin class, or they can be going to a boot camp class, and they’re able to make it through. They’re still able to do it fine. On the surface, it looks like things are good. But when we have a chat, health isn’t as good as it used to be, and not as great as where it ideally should be.
They’re now getting bouts of lightheadedness. This can be happening while they’re working out; it could be at other points in their day. They’ve noticed they’re having more difficulty recovering from exercise. They used to be able to do a class and be fine, but now the next day they’re sore, or two days later they’re sore. They’re noticing their overall energy is lower than it used to be. It’s a little more difficult getting out of bed in the morning, or they have more ups and downs in terms of their energy.
This one can often be difficult to reconcile because often they feel the best or have the most energy on the days that they do exercise. This can be for the whole day, but often it’s just a couple of hours after they’ve done the exercise. After they’ve done the exercise is a time at which they have a real ability to focus, a real ability to concentrate unlike any other point. So to them, it can feel like exercise is that one thing that is really helping them out.
Sleep can be affected. Despite feeling more tired than ever before, when they’re getting to bed, they really struggle to get off to sleep, or they’re waking in the night. Or sometimes they can just have general restlessness, or they can feel like they’ve been given an adrenaline shot, something like Uma Therman in Pulp Fiction – or maybe not quite that intense. They’re just noticing they’re waking up almost in a fright in the evening time when they’ve been sleeping. Or they’re noticing they’re having lots of night sweats.
Reproductive function is affected. Both men and women, this can be a reduction in libido or just a disinterest in sex. It can lead to men having more difficulty getting an erection, or more likely to have premature ejaculation. For women it can lead to less lubrication, more pain during sex, and a difficulty achieving orgasm.
In terms of cycle, things can go awry. Cycles can become more irregular or more unpleasant in terms of symptoms, or they can completely stop, known as amenorrhea.
Digestion can become affected. This could be more gas or bloating or heartburn. It could be an increase in transit time, with lots of loose stools and undigested food. It could be a real slowdown in transit time, where someone is going every 3 days or once a week, or it’s like pellets when they go and difficult to pass.
Immune function can be affected. Recurrent illnesses can become more common, things like coughs and colds or urinary tract infections. People can struggle to really shake this stuff. They get something and then it hangs around for months, or they’re constantly just getting over one thing, and then in no time they’re hit again. There are people that don’t get some of this immune stuff, but they do when they finally take a break. They take a holiday, and on the second or third day of the holiday, they’re just in bed, wiped out with a cold or a flu, or they break out in cold sores or they have hives.
From a mood perspective, things can also be not great. They used to be fairly happy, “glass is half full” type people, but they now struggle with anxiety and mild depression. Like the comment I made around exercise and energy, this can be a difficult one to reconcile, because on the days that they exercise, they have better mood, and on the days that they don’t, they have more anxiety increases. So it seems like exercise is the solution, not the problem.
All of this stuff is really common in the people who I see, and they don’t see exercise as their problem. They make it through the classes. They feel better on the days they exercise. They know that exercise is healthy, so why could it possibly be a problem for them? But when I’m thinking about this person and where their body is at, it’s not in a good place. They are the equivalent of someone who is injured. Despite the mixed messages they’re receiving, they need to be taking it very easy with exercise, if not abstaining completely from it so their body can heal.
This is due in large part to the other three factors that can determine whether exercise is healthful or harmful in terms of its impact.
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The next factor is overall load of stress. What are the demands that are being placed on that person at the moment? What are the other life factors that are going on for them? The amount of exercise or the intensity of exercise that some single guy in his twenties who’s going to college a couple of days a week and has pretty low responsibilities is going to be very different from someone who’s a mom, who’s in their early forties, who has three kids, is barely getting enough sleep, is struggling to juggle everything that’s being asked, and who’s still dealing with structural issues from giving birth.
Exercise is a stress on the body, and that doesn’t make it inherently bad, but we have a finite amount of stress that we can deal with. If you’re already struggling under a real burden of stress, adding more on is rarely going to make things better.
This doesn’t mean that exercise can’t be helpful in a stressful life. It can, but it has to be appropriate. Maybe a walk is going to be more helpful than Barry’s Bootcamp. Maybe going for a swim is going to be more helpful than hot yoga.
None of this stuff is about value judgments. If some tough workout genuinely helps your overall health, then go for it. But typically they provide some momentary façade of helping, but if we were to really check the balance sheet, they’re subtracting more than they’re adding. The overall load of someone’s life has a real determining factor on how much exercise someone can do and what exercise they’re going to benefit from.
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The next factor is the food that someone is giving their body. As I mentioned earlier, your body, to get the health benefits of exercise, it needs to make adaptions. For these adaptions to happen, it needs the raw materials to provide the energy and the nutrients so that your body can improve.
In a recent podcast, I talked about the concept of energy flux. You can listen to that at www.seven-health.com/87. I really suggest that you do check it out, because I’ve had a number of clients comment how helpful they found it and I’ve had a number of people email me saying the same thing. But one of the comments that I made as part of the show was that these days, it feels like everyone is trying to get by on the least amount of food possible, trying to attain some dress size or some weight or some body fat percentage through restriction. Hunger is seen as the enemy, and people are looking for ways to suppress cravings and just get by on less food. We’ve become a society that is perpetually dieting.
The problem with this is that food is the resources your body uses to do all of its tasks. It is your body’s currency. When the amount of food that you eat is reduced and then you exercise, you force the body to use some of its resources. Your body can’t run on a treadmill and not use energy, so it has to use energy during that exercise. But it’s now a different story as part of recovery. You can’t force the body to recover the way that you want to. It gets to decide. So, certain functions get turned down and get turned off because there isn’t the resources, and your body focuses on survival as opposed to thriving.
In terms of the adaptions and the homeostasis that I talked about before, this is how exercise provides the health benefits for your body: by bringing it back into homeostasis and then making it that little bit better. Well, this doesn’t happen if there’s not enough energy for this to happen. Maybe your body is at least bringing things back into balance, so you’re no longer improving, but things are staying the same, but often this isn’t the case and things are actually getting worse because of exercise. Your body isn’t able to bring things back into homeostasis.
Just like the way that health improves with exercise, this can be going in the opposite direction, but very minor changes. Things are maybe 1% worse, so hardly even noticeable, but over a period of 3 months or 6 months or over years, these marginal changes start to really add up, and you can find yourself in a much, much worse place than you were.
The idea of clean eating is pretty problematic. I’m a big proponent of people eating real and unprocessed foods, and this can be a factor in the healthfulness of someone’s diet, but it’s just one factor. If someone is not taking in enough calories or they’re not taking in enough carbohydrates or proteins or fats, then it doesn’t matter how much kale or how much maca powder someone chooses to consume. I see this endless focus on nutrient density of food that people eat, where they’re trying to concoct some smoothie or fruit bowl with the most amounts of superfoods, but if you then end the day 1,000 calories down on what your body really needs, no superfood salad, no green smoothie, no handful of supplements is going to make up for this.
So yes, food quality is a factor, but its relevance is based on you doing so many other things right. If you’re not, then all of the extra vitamins and minerals aren’t going to save you. One of the most important things of getting right is having enough food come in – taking in enough food for all of your body’s daily tasks, and also for your body to actually repair and adapt so that it can turn exercise into something healthful as opposed to just something harmful.
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The final factor is adequate rest and recovery, having proper downtime, getting proper sleep, because it’s in this state that the adaptions happen. This is where your body looks at the damage that is done by exercise – that increased inflammation, the microtrauma in your muscles, the degradation in terms of your nervous system – and it then repairs those systems, not only back to where they were before, but makes them much better and makes them more resilient.
We live in a world where rest and relaxation and downtime and play are bad words. They’re like synonymous with being lazy or lack of motivation. But they are incredibly important. If you’re exercising and you want this to be something that is health-promoting rather than just a negative stress on the body, then taking time to recover is incredibly important.
Those are the four main determining factors that dictate whether a given exercise is going to be helpful or harmful. Where is your body at to start with, what are the overall life stresses that you’re going through right now, what is the level of food, and what is the level of rest that you’re giving your body?
If we go back to people who I’m seeing in my practice that aren’t benefitting from exercise, typically they aren’t respecting where their body is at. There’s this laundry list of symptoms that is telling them that things aren’t right, things aren’t good, and yet they don’t recognize it. Sometimes they have high overall levels of stress, although this isn’t always the case – although psychological stress is often very high for these people in regards to things like body image and self-esteem. But basically, in 100% of the cases, they are under fueling their body for what it needs. They’re eating way less than what is needed for normal, everyday function, and then they’re throwing exercise on top of it, creating further havoc.
Then on the rest front, it’s typically not happening either. Some of this is conscious, where they are always on the go and they’re not giving themselves that time off, and other parts of it are unconscious, like they are trying to sleep, but they’re laying awake at night and it just doesn’t happen no matter how hard they try.
I will add that I have been here myself. Back in 2008-2009, when I was doing triathlons and I was doing marathons, I was overtraining. I was studying nutrition at the time, and while I wasn’t restricting my food intake consciously, it was lots of vegetables and lots of high roughage foods that weren’t providing enough calories. So I started to notice I was feeling more tired. I was waking up with night sweats. I was having to urinate the night. My digestion was very rapid. I was having loose stools and I was seeing undigested food in my stools. I’d also wake up in the night with horrible cramps. I didn’t know it at the time, but with hindsight, I can see that I was pushing myself too hard for the amount of fuel that I was taking in.
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I know there’s also this whole category of overtraining syndrome and that there are different stages with this. Often for those who are hardcore in the fitness industry, they think that if you’re only training three or five times a week, you don’t have overtraining issues – that overtraining is something that affects professional and semi-professional athletes, that unless you’re training at some elite level, your problems are not coming from overtraining.
But for me, if someone is exercising and they’re not repairing and refueling properly and their health is getting worse, then that exercise is not working for them regardless of whether the word “overtraining” is the right term.
I think this can be really hard for people to wrap their heads around, in particular because we have this skewed idea of what a healthy body or a fit body looks like and the way that more and more exercise is put up on this pedestal, and we have this “no pain, no gain” mentality.
The people who I work with with this stuff, they look like regular people. If you met them on the street or you met them at a party, you wouldn’t know that they were undereating. You wouldn’t know that they were overtraining. Some may be at the low end of the BMI, while others, it’s a real mix across the spectrum.
I think for a lot of women, it’s only when they notice that their period is missing that they realize maybe something isn’t right. And even then, this isn’t often enough to recognize. I would also add that unfortunately, so many women are on the pill, and because of this medication, they still have a monthly bleed. This isn’t the same as a regular period; it’s a pill bleed. Because this continues to happen, they just don’t notice. It’s only later, when they come off the pill and they don’t get their period back, that they notice it. But in reality, their body may have stopped prioritizing reproduction years ago. They just didn’t notice because the pill masked the symptoms that would’ve let them know.
I previously had Nicola Rinaldi on the podcast. She’s the author of the book No Period, Now What? That is all about hypothalamic amenorrhea. In layman’s terms, this means someone who’s not getting their period and it’s being caused by issues linked to the hypothalamus, which is a gland in your brain. A lot of what is identified in the book is to do with stuff I’ve talked about here, where there is high amounts of exercise in comparison to the resting and the refueling that has come in, and that this leads a woman’s cycle to stop happening because the body’s just not prioritizing reproduction. Reproduction is much lower on the order of priorities, so the body just stops doing it.
I highly recommend checking out the book if this is something you have going on. I also highly recommend checking out the podcast. I’ll put it in the show notes, but you can find it at www.seven-health.com/63.
For women, there’s a condition known as the Female Athlete Triad. Being a triad, it has three parts. The first is an eating disorder, such as anorexia or bulimia, or it could be just severe to moderate calorie restriction. I would say a lot of the diets that people think of as “healthy” really would come under this bracket of being calorie restriction. The second part to this is amenorrhea, which means lack of menstruation, or oligomenorrhea, which means irregular periods. Then the third component is osteoporosis or osteopenia. That means the thinning of the bone or low bone mineral density.
This is really commonplace, and much more commonplace than people realize. So often it is not picked up by doctors. Some women seek help because they’re not getting their period or their period is irregular, and no one asks them about their exercise or their eating habits. Or maybe they’re asked the question of, “Are you eating a healthy diet?” to which the person says “Yes.” Then maybe they are asked about exercise. But unless the person comments that they’re a professional marathon runner or that they’re training intensely every single day for hours a day, they’re typically told that exercise is healthy, it’s not going to be causing a problem for you, this is not what the issue is.
But when they run some tests, it’s then common for issues with bone health to come up. Things are deteriorating in terms of the bone health at a stage in life when new bone should be being laid down. But when exercise is stopped, when food is increased, when rest and relaxation is prioritized, all of this can be reversed. It might take time, but repair does happen. Periods return, bone density increases, but only when the body is given what it needs for this to happen.
As I mentioned, this is talked about in great detail in No Period, Now What? I highly recommend checking it out.
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I now want to talk about fitness. It’s a word that most people probably think they understand the definition of, but when I look at how people train and I look at how people eat to support that training and then we chat about fitness, I don’t think people truly understand what it’s about.
The way we think about fitness will depend on the reason that someone is training. If you are a professional athlete or you’re attempting to become a professional athlete, the idea of fitness is more narrow in its definition. It’s about training in a very specific way that makes you better at a chosen sport. The end goal with this is winning a gold medal, winning the league, breaking some world record. In this instance, there are lots of sacrifices that this individual is then prepared to make to reach that high level of fitness. Some of this may be damaging to their short-term or even their long-term health. But for athletes in this position, it’s a tradeoff they make, and it’s often a tradeoff they make very consciously.
But for the rest of us, fitness should be viewed from a very different perspective. Fitness for everyday folks should be about doing exercise or movement that enhances all aspects of our lives. While we may want to improve our 100-meter freestyle time or increase our deadlift or be able to beat our best 10k run, these improvements should have the knock-on effect of enhancing our lives bigger picture, macro level.
One of my favorite definitions for fitness is by Coach Scott Abel. He was actually my first question this show, and I’ve been thinking about having him come on again because he just speaks so much sense. You can listen to that interview at www.seven-health.com/02. You also get to hear me be very nervous in my early days of interviewing, and hopefully, you’ve noticed it’s got better since then.
But back to Abel’s definition. He defines fitness as “the ability to meet the demands and vicissitudes of daily life with relative ease, with some extra energy available for emergencies and unexpected situations.” I had to look up what “vicissitudes” means, and it means changes. So basically, fitness is the ability to meet the demands and changes of our daily life fairly easily as well as deal with unexpected challenges.
As part of this definition, I would add that it’s not just about physical body. It’s also about mental and emotional strength, so mental and emotional fitness, and how this helps us to better cope with everything that life throws at us. Fitness should enhance your ability to do your job. It should improve your resistance to stress and give you the strength to better cope with it. It should allow you to have better relationships. It should give you a body that helps to create and utilize energy effectively so you can make it through the day.
One of the biggest reasons that this is so important is because fitness, much more than weight or body fat percentage, is a key determiner of health and longevity. Someone who is heavy but has good fitness has a much better outlook than someone who’s lean but lacks fitness. I know this is a big part of the “health at every size” message, that we should be focusing on fitness and not weight if we really want to improve health, especially at the population level.
I’m currently reading a book called The Obesity Paradox by Carl Lavie, and it looks at how in many scenarios, the people who have better outcomes after say a heart attack or with cancer are those that are sitting at a higher weight. So while it’s been drilled into us that if you’re thinner, you’re healthier and your outcome against disease is going to be better, he demonstrates through a lot of research that this isn’t the case. A big portion of why this is so is down to fitness. Being fit, more than someone’s weight, is a better protector.
The sad thing from my perspective is that what is presented these days under the guise of fitness often has very little to do with the definition that I described earlier. Fitness has become associated with a particular look. It’s someone who is lean, often having visible abs, or if not, at least having a very low body fat percentage. They are typically attractive based on our society’s narrow definition of beauty – something that was bestowed on them through birth and has absolutely nothing to do with the “hard work” that they’ve done.
Fitness in a sense has become this aesthetic goal that huge chunks of the population have no chance of achieving, and for those who achieve it, only a very small percentage can do it while keeping their health and sanity intact. And there’s nothing wrong with vanity. There’s nothing wrong with setting goals and working towards them. But there is a problem with someone training in a way that impairs their ability to concentrate at work or leaves them cranky and short-tempered with their partner, or it starts to create symptoms like I’ve described earlier – trouble sleeping, irregular periods, irrational thoughts about food or what will happen if they miss a training.
This pursuit of aesthetics under the guise of fitness also leads to people shunning healthful activities. They believe it’s not enough if they do some activity, but then aren’t dripping in sweat or completely exhausted afterwards. If they get a trainer and they don’t feel like they’re going to pass out, or if the next day they aren’t aching so much that it’s difficult lowering themselves into a bath or onto a toilet, they believe they haven’t worked hard enough.
If you look back 50, 60, 70 years ago, formal exercise was something done by a really small percentage of the population. This is especially true if we’re thinking of women. The idea of women going to the gym was nearly unheard of. Even just going for a run or cycling regularly as a woman was a rarity and something not done by most.
For example, this is the 50th anniversary of Kathy Switzer running the Boston Marathon. In 1967, she ran the race, and it was only by accident that this was allowed to happen. At this stage, the Boston Marathon was a men’s-only event, and when Switzer applied, she used her initials. She applied as “K. V. Switzer,” so they gave her the bib, and it was only when Switzer started running and then the officials noticed this that they started to shout for her to stop. One of the officials even tried to run over and tackle her. Luckily for Switzer, she was running the race with her boyfriend, who was an AFL player and also a hammer thrower, so this really big guy, and he shoved the official to the side so Switzer could keep running. There’s photos of this incident, and it really made world headlines.
The Boston Marathon were not happy about this happening, and the director of the race afterwards even is quoted as saying, “If this girl was my daughter, I would spank her,” which gives you some real context to the world back then. Despite Switzer competing in the marathon in 1967, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were officially allowed to run the Boston Marathon.
We can debate whether a marathon is a really healthy thing to do or not, but the fact is, it’s only 50 years ago that women couldn’t or shouldn’t do things like this because people thought of women, or some people thought of women, as being too fragile.
If you fast forward to today, in most circles, this phenomenon has been reversed. Huge chunks of the population are going to the gym or doing circuits or participating in some form of sport or exercise, and doing things that would be described as “unwomanly” or “unladylike” not that long ago.
Obviously I’m generalizing here and speaking of those who are more affluent and have the means to exercise. Those who are living in poverty often aren’t fortunate enough, but I’m going to leave that topic for another time.
But what I see is this procession of young, attractive wellness bloggers and fitness trainers “advising” the public about health and fitness. The way they talk about food is dripping with judgment and morality. They use pseudoscience masquerading as real facts, typically to veer people away from certain “toxic” foods or whole food groups that they label as “dangerous.” Restrictive eating then becomes the norm, and what we do to achieve our health and fitness goals is based on some cookbooks with dubious science and Instagram pictures of food from wellness bloggers’ feeds.
I really do feel for people, as it is completely confusing. Every day we see conflicting messages about what people should or shouldn’t be doing, and people are normally just trying to do their best, even if they’re following ideas that don’t seem that sensible.
One of the biggest issues, and something I’ve already mentioned, is the conflating of losing of weight with increased fitness and increased health. “If I’m lighter, I therefore must be healthier and fitter.” But as much as this goes against the common narrative, that just isn’t true. Fitness isn’t about a look, but about practicing habits that are both sustainable and that actually enhance your life – not just the moments when you’re in the gym or you’re doing that exercise or you’re lifting heavier weights or you’re able to swim further, but all aspects of your life.
Fitness is incredibly important for health and for the enjoyment of life, but please keep in mind what the term really means.
00:43:30
If I’m thinking of the kind of movement or activities that are best supporting for health and for fitness so that these two are going in the same direction, there’s two key areas.
The first area, which is actually the more important part despite people paying very little attention to it, is low-grade movement – the type of stuff that used to be characteristic of our everyday living but has now changed because of all of the labor-saving devices that we have in the home. That kind of movement is referred to as non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT. It’s things like walking or standing or gardening or cutting the lawn or old school washing of clothes or cooking or foraging for food. It’s the almost constant movement that most traditional societies used to do.
I’m not saying that we need to turn the clock back, that you need to go wash your clothes in the stream or you need to go harvest your own food with a sickle. And I’m not saying that the only forms of movement that you should do are low impact forms of movement and that these are the only things for health and fitness, because you should be doing other things. Probably “should” is not the right word here, but you can be doing other things.
But what I’m saying is that our notion of what it means and what is required to be fit and healthy is skewed, and that the first port of call should be more of this low-grade, regular movement, and then the exercise component can be like the cherry on top.
I don’t want to be in a situation where if I suggest that someone could do more gardening or take a walk to assist with their fitness, that they then look at me like I have two heads, because this kind of stuff is just the antithesis of their definition of fitness exercise, which for them is about crushing circuits or high-intensity interval training.
So the first part of the fitness equation in terms of movement is low-grade movement. The second component is then movement or exercise that is of a higher intensity, so probably the kind of thing that most people think of when they hear the word “exercise.”
One of the questions that I get very often and one that I see asked and debated online all the time is, “which is the best form of exercise?” I know I’ve mentioned about doing the low-grade movement, but what about the exercise? If I was to pick the best thing, what is the best thing that someone should be doing?
My response to this question is always the same, which is: what do you most like doing? Or as someone who isn’t currently doing any exercise, what most excites you to try out? Because the truth is, there is no best exercise. We talked at the beginning about how exercise works to enhance health and that it’s done via hormesis and it makes adaptions and that this leads to better health and fitness, and that these benefits are cumulative. They occur over months and years.
So really, the best exercise is going to be the one that you keep up. This is going to be most likely if you actually enjoy doing it, if there is some intrinsic motivation in terms of you enjoying the process rather than just some end goal.
I’m always encouraging people to try things out that sound like something where they can forget that they’re even exercising. Yes, it might be tough, but they’re enjoying it. This means that people need to get out of the narrow list of things that they think of as exercise. The only options aren’t just lifting weights or going for a run or going for a swim. It could be rock climbing. It could be playing tennis or squash. It could be salsa dancing. It could be going surfing, going horse riding. Really just think, what fun ways can I come up with that involve moving my body?
There’s also another reason outside of just the fact that if you enjoy doing something, you’re more likely to keep it up. This is the idea of play. There’s been a huge amount of research done on the benefits in our life to incorporating more play. I know “play” is a word that people often associate with kids and that kind of thing, but even as adults, we need to have play in our life. Brené Brown talks about this as part of her suggestions for wholehearted living. Ari Whitten also mentioned this in his Energy Blueprint course.
There is a neuropeptide called orexin, and orexin is a substance that is used to regulate many things in the body, but particularly things like energy and wakefulness and appetite and mood. One of the things that can increase our orexin levels – and increasing it is a positive thing – is play. If you take two people and you put them through the same physical exercise, if one of those people finds that exercise fun or novel or playful, there will be an increase in their orexin levels. If one of those people doesn’t have that relationship to the exercise – so they don’t find it fun, they don’t find it novel, they don’t find it playful, they’re just doing the physical act – then orexin levels don’t increase. Same exercise, very different outcome.
This is why it can then be so difficult, if not impossible, to answer the question of “which is the best form of exercise?”, because it’s not static. How someone then relates to that exercise changes what it does for the body.
Increasing fitness is going to come from having regular low-grade movement, and then supplementing it with other forms of exercise that you enjoy. And that’s while taking into account those other factors that I mentioned earlier, which is looking at where your body is at, what are the various stresses it has on it, making sure you’re eating enough, and then making sure you’re getting enough rest and enough downtime.
This also means that there will be times when the best thing for someone’s health and fitness is no exercise at all. The body has other priorities and other demands that it needs to deal with, so the rest and relaxation needs to increase while the movement side of things needs to be put on hold. This can be not much fun for those who have really prioritized exercise and it’s been a real big part of their life, but it’s not forever.
00:50:00
Something I want to mention is how exercise can change our physique. Maybe you’ve seen those memes where there’s two pictures side by side, and underneath one of the pictures it has the word “runner,” and it’s a picture of some guy or girl and they look very thin and frail at the end of some marathon and they’re about to break down. Then the picture next to it has the word “sprinter” underneath, and it has some jacked guy who’s bulging with muscle, sprinting to the end of a 100-meter or 200-meter final. Or it’ll have two women from behind, and one has a small butt and it has the word “runner” under the picture, and then the other person has a butt like J-Lo or Kim Kardashian and it’ll have the word “squats” under the picture.
It’s this idea that certain types of exercise that you do dictate your shape or your physique. The problem with this is it’s not really true. Yes, exercise can shape the kind of body you have, but a huge part of this is genetics and what your natural shape is.
Michael Phelps doesn’t look like he does just because he swam an inordinate amount of lengths as a child. He was naturally built to have a swimmer’s physique, so when he did swimming, he was instantly pretty good at it, and then the consistent practice just enhanced this. If Michael Phelps as a kid had decided he really loved powerlifting, I doubt anyone would know who I was talking about right now.
I was just listening to Dorian Yates be interviewed on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. Dorian Yates is a professional bodybuilder from the UK who was Mr. Olympia six consecutive times. He talks about being naturally strong and really taking to lifting weights as soon as he picked them up. If Dorian had instead fallen in with running, I doubt anyone would know his name. Sure, he knew how to dedicate himself, but if he dedicated himself to something where he didn’t have that natural predisposition, it wouldn’t change things. Instead, he dedicated himself to something where he had a natural advantage and just escalated that.
If I think of myself, I know that this is true of me. I can consistently lift weights in the gym, but I’m never going to be a huge guy. I really struggle to put on muscle. But I am naturally a very good runner, and I find running very easy. I’ve done now a lot of running, which was made me even better at it, but I had a natural tendency that was always there.
For example, I ran the Milano Marathon two years ago, and it had literally been years since I’d done any consistent running. I think it had been five or six or seven years since I’d done consistent, regular running. I walk the dog on a daily basis, but I just don’t run. So in preparation for this marathon, I did eight or nine training runs. That was it. First run back, I think I did 15 kilometers or 9 miles. Second run back, I did 24 kilometers or 15 miles. More than half a marathon.
On race day, it was unseasonably hot in April time. It was 25 degrees. There wasn’t enough water stations to deal with this. But I still ran the marathon in 3 hours 38 minutes. Most people who train for a marathon do so for months and months with a goal of maybe breaking 4 hours depending on their level of fitness, and I barely trained and was just outside 3.5 hours. I’m not saying this to gloat; I’m saying this because I have a natural ability to run, and I have a natural distance runs frame. Yes, I’ve done practice and I’ve done time with this, but I naturally was geared towards this.
So yes, people can change their body shape through training and exercise, but for the vast majority of people, these changes are going to be a shift into the direction that they already have a tendency towards rather than some huge transformation.
I mentioned just there about my previous life as a runner, and one of the questions I’m regularly asked is what exercise I do. In the same way people are always interested in finding out as a nutritionist what I eat, they also want to know what exercise I do.
The actual bulk of exercise that I do is walking. I have a dog and I go for walks with her twice a day. This usually totals about 90 minutes a day, but can be shorter or longer depending on what I have on. I live in the countryside, so walking is across fields, it’s in forests and woodlands. The environment is very encouraging for walking. Being outside just makes me want to walk forever, and I just want to take it in. I know if I didn’t live where I do and I didn’t have a dog, my walking would be a lot less.
The next exercise I do is playing golf. How often depends on the time of year. In the winter, it might be once or twice a month. In the summertime, I can play two or three, even four times a week. Really, these are my two forms of exercise. I have a decent size garden, so I do a lot of gardening in less rainy months – and it’s a stretch to say that gardening is exercise, but it is low-grade movement, and often it’s not that low-grade.
I am a member of a gym, and the gym has a pool and has a really great weights room, but my attendance here is pretty sporadic. I have good months where I’m regularly there, and then other months where I wonder why I pay the membership dues. But if I have to choose between being out with the dog or being out on a golf course versus lifting weights or swimming in a gym pool, for me, walking or golf excites me much more.
Growing up, I spent a large chunk of my childhood on the beach. The majority of our holidays were beach holidays. Living in Sydney where I was, I was never that far from some of the most amazing beaches in the world. So if I had that as an option, I know that surfing or bodysurfing would be how I would spend my time. Maybe at some point, I’ll move somewhere where this is an option again.
So really, the exercise that I do is stuff that I thoroughly enjoy, and it’s not about changing my physique. There’s nothing wrong with that as a goal; it’s just not very motivating for me, and I prefer to be out doing something else.
00:56:10
The final thing I want to mention before wrapping this up is the idea of fasted exercise versus non-fasted exercise. Should you eat before a workout? This is another common question that I get, and another one that’s constantly asked and argued about online.
The answer to this is it depends on you. Looking at the research, there is no overwhelming result that shows you’re better to be in a fasted state, nor is there an overwhelming amount of research showing that you’re better to be in a non-fasted state. It really comes down to you.
I know for me personally, I don’t do well being in a fasted state before exercise. I end up running out of energy very quickly. I end up needing to pee loads while I’m trying to do exercise. I can start to get pretty nauseous or get lightheaded. So myself and fasted exercise, it just doesn’t work.
But I have clients who swear by it, and if they try and have breakfast or try and have a meal before working out, they feel heavy. They feel like it’s just sitting there. so they lean more towards being in a fasted state.
But if I were to add it up, more clients lean towards eating than not eating before exercise. This is especially the case once they get over the notion that being in a fasted state helps them get leaner or leads to more weight loss or whatever myths they have in their head. When they drop this idea and then they just compare fasted versus non-fasted, paying attention to how they feel, they typically feel better eating beforehand.
This doesn’t have to be a huge meal. Often having a full breakfast or a full meal before training is too much. But if they have a banana and some yogurt or a banana and a boiled egg, this is enough food to make them feel more energized, but not feel heavy. So they’ll have this, they’ll then do the exercise, and then they’ll have a main meal afterwards.
But please just know that there is nothing to support the fact that you get better results in a fasted state. Some people do, some people don’t. Base it on what works for you, not some meme or what some ripped guy in the gym told you.
That is it for this week’s show. I’m actually going to be doing a separate show all about exercise addiction and exercise compulsion. I’ve got one guest lined up to speak about this, and possibly another in regards to overtraining. But this is a topic that affects so many of the clients I work with, and so many of the people in the various Facebook groups that I’m a member of and I see.
Next week, as always, I will be back. It’s a guest episode. It’s already recorded, and I’m really looking forward to bringing it to you. But until then, have a wonderful week, look after yourself, and thank you for spending this time listening to me ramble, as always.
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Great podcast Chris – thank you! So much useful
information well summarised and skilfully delivered.
Fantastic podcast Chris. I really enjoyed this and will be sharing it far and wide. You are providing such a valuable service to us all. You really cut through all the usual BS that exists around health and fitness on the internet. I, like many others I’m sure, am truly grateful.
This was an excellent podcast!!! I loved the definitions of fitness – fitting exercise and fitness into our lives, instead of making them INTO our lives.
Great podcast, very interesting, thank you! What is your opinion on counting steps, measuring your activity with fitbit or in general somehow externally monitoring your level of activity and checking the right level? Is it ok or should exercise be more intuitive?