What’d we say? | Podcast Transcript

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What’s good with you. Thanks for joining in on the show. I’m Johan Francis. This is ego killer on this show. We talk about the moves you make inside the gym, which literally help you move better out there in life. Where really, really matters. It’s not a stretch to think that everything we do inside the gym actually helps us live and move better outside. It’s not a stretch at all. I think everybody can agree. That’s why we’re out here doing the thing that we’re doing inside the gym. That’s why we’re working so hard. That’s why we’re building up confidence. Iron clouding, our body, working on our martial arts. We’re doing all of these things so that we can be more prepared on the outside internally and externally. That’s why we do the thing. It’s not just pushups set up squats. We’re iron clatting ourselves. I think we all can agree with that.

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I’ve noticed a trend over the years that has to do with you guys inside the gym. I will ask people pretty much on a weekly basis. What you like to do for fun? What you like to do for activity? I will say I’ve noticed the change anecdotally, right? So maybe like 10 plus years ago, whenever I would ask people like what they did on the side for activity, it was something very specific, very specific, very active oriented. There was really no blurred line about it. Right? Most people either did something or they didn’t. And when they said they did something, they would be like, I take this class. I take like body pump or something like that. Or I take, you know, yoga or whatever it is. Like you lift weights, you do this, you do that. That’s what I do for activity. Now, thankfully, that line has successfully been blurred in that type of blurring.

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That’s good. And what I mean is this, when I’ll consult with you guys and I’ll be like, yo, what do you do outside of here? Most people I’ve noticed in the last gonna say about five ish, years or so. All right. Cause again, I meet dozens and dozens and dozens of you every year. Hundreds, I’ve noticed that the answers shifted you guys will be outdoors quite a bit. Back when I started training people in coaching to an opening, my gyms, you either did nothing. Your activity was lifting your hand from the ashtray to your lips or, and I’m using hyperbole there, or it was, you were doing some sort of weight lifting. Now you guys hike. There’s a whole crew of hikers anonymous out there. And I’m really proud that that at its very minimum is what people do to stay active. Like how dope is that?

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I would’ve killed to hear that you guys loved hiking. When I started doing this training, when I started getting into this field, when I’ve been working at the big box gyms, it was very, very, very, very rare to feel like, and to meet people that were like, oh, on my day off, you see that mountain over there. I stick my flag in it now. I mean, at very minimum, you guys are out conquering the trails. It’s amazing. And I love that. There’s a whole connection of hikers anonymous out there. You part of this, look, the pandemic actually opened a lot of people’s eyes. A lot of people started going out on these day trips and these hikes, not that type of trip day trip, but actually walking to stay in shape, cuz all the gyms were closed. All the gyms were closed first and foremost, this is the place where people congregate. This is where people touch metal, right? And then you go over here and you touch iron. And a lot of touching gyms were closed. So what happened was people started to get outside and break out and start to go on their hikes, start to sojourn about the world around them. And that was a good thing. That was a good thing that you had folks that were up in the gym, me heading it out. Now having to say I’m going for a hike in a very long walk.

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That was fire. I kind of noticed a shift before that professionally where people were really getting into hiking. It pricked my ears up and piqued my attention cuz I was like, you know what really tough guys and tough people don’t do hike. That is not the domain of the badass and how wrong I am these days. Similar myopic observations might point to the fact that yoga has been the domain of the hippie and not so much the domain of the intense badass, but here we are. I am very, halfly sitting here saying all of fitness has successfully conflated with each other. That is the best I am loving the fact that everybody is willing to do everything just to stay in shape. I’m loving the fact that I can go to a class with those big reformers, right? Those huge, huge reformers that they have now and see like a 52 year old bald guy who looks like he was lifting weights in the Nautilus gym back in the day, getting it in on these huge reformers, making moves, putting that pride in that ego aside just to stay in shape for whatever it is.

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I love that the connection of hikers anonymous, those of you that do maybe minimum type workouts when you’re not trying to get super stupid active on a daily basis. What you guys love to do is you’ll take urban hikes or you’ll actually hit the trail. I am so down and I’m glad that that’s the move these days now, for those of you who do not work out, unless you’re inside the gym, might I build a case for you guys? And this is what actually what we’re gonna talk about today. We’re actually gonna mail, build a case for you guys getting outside. Okay? So I want everybody to make sure that they’re doing something outside. This is the prescription of many, a coach for a long, long time. It’s been go and get something done on a daily basis and what that was before and what that meant was jump on that treadmill and start walking.

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I myself might have a more contentious relationship with the treadmill. The treadmill has been kind of I’ve noticed over the years, the more that I am on the treadmill, like you have to really be up on your shoe game or else you’re gonna get the knee, the ankle, the foot kind of dysfunction or pain. So I kind of me personally, I will use the treadmill as a tool, but back in the day we would prescribe like, yo at least go and walk on that treadmill. You know, you know what it is? 35 minutes a day minimum. That’s what you should be doing something every day. Now that’s not even the first thing that folks think of. They’re thinking of looking at Google earth up or that Google up the Google maps and going for a hike somewhere. And I think that again is the best.

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So look, I know, I see you guys out on walks all the time, right? I see you guys out on walks. I see you guys with the headphone and the earbuds and all this beautiful. You’re doing the thing the right way. So today what we’re gonna talk about and I’m gonna build a case for you. Maybe you’re not hiking all the time, but I wanna give you the reasons that being outside training outside and being part of a hikers anonymous is actually great. And I want you guys to do that more. If you don’t do it at all, start doing it. If you do it, occasionally work it in once a week. All right. Work it in once a week. For the longest time, I know that I believed that was not the business. You’re not gonna go out here and hike. Like where are you going?

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How do I get back? Now, the trails are populated. Now the trails are populated. They’re almost clogged up, right? I love it. Like if you’re gonna train for any type of outdoor activity, if you’re doing a, a, a RA, an obstacle course race, you’re doing a regular just run, you know, a 10 K or whatever type race. You have to do it outside to train. Yeah, you can train on the treadmill, right? You can train on the treadmill, but you wanna have some very specific goals when you train on that treadmill. In fact, the treadmill is a good place to actually set yourself up with pushing your anaerobics in a certain way. You wanna push your anaerobic threshold up on that treadmill. You want to use the treadmill like theorized equipment that it is. You can run at a specific pace. So that’s what your treadmill’s for.

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It’s for challenging. That pace challenge, that pace when you’re on your treadmill, but go outside and do the thing, do the thing and look for your 11 minute mile. If you’re running not very frequently, Eleven’s safe, it’s doable. You don’t have injuries. You don’t run a whole lot. This is a nice goal. 11, 12 minute mile, push that pace on your treadmill, push that pace on your treadmill. And one of the ways that you can do that actually is to do what we did in college, which was set up a stress test when we’re in college. And if you do any type of kinesiology, right? You jump on your treadmill and you have a bunch of diodes and those suction cups on your chest, right? You’re looking for heart rate variability. You’re looking for really what you’re looking for also too. If you get the real fancy setup is your oxygen intake.

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You’re looking for the volume of oxygen that your body’s taking and what we did. Well, we jumped on either a treadmill. Sometimes they’ll do this on a bike, but they’ll literally push you to your absolute limit. And they’ll see when your body goes into anaerobic shifts into anaerobic uptake where your body doesn’t have enough oxygen inside of it and needs to pay off what we call an oxygen debt. That’s your lactic threshold. If you’re used to training and running, you know about this, that’s what your treadmill’s for by and large pushing that alactic threshold, the lactate threshold. Same thing. That’s what that treadmill’s for is forgetting that to move the needle on your alactic threshold, to move it farther to the right on that graph. That’s what you use your treadmill for. Otherwise, grab your shoes, get some shoes, grab your shoes and hit them trails.

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All right, hit those trails. Make like you’re a pioneer make like you’re a PI and go outside and let’s investigate. Let’s hit the trails that we’re let’s hit the rivers and lakes that we’re used to. There’s no need to go out full bore, full blown adventuring. Not yet. What we want to do is go somewhere nice and familiar and investigate. There’s nothing wrong with that. Right? Over time, you might be able to venture out a little bit farther and farther over time. You turn that into a nice Cantor or a jog. And that’s the business right there. All right. When we’re inside working with the treadmill work for a very specific goal, maybe you or someone, you know, that is trained for a marathon, right? I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure or the pain. Maybe someone, you know, has trained for a marathon. Well guess where those marathons are typically run, unless it was inside the pandemic or run outside.

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Guess what you, you have to get used to doing, going outside. Okay. So this is for you, your part of hikers anonymous. What happens when you’re at the beach? Really, really bored. All right. You get really bored. Maybe you didn’t bring your pet, right? The cooler’s empty, no more soda. And what do you do? Maybe you might go for a run down on this packed sand, using the ocean breaks as hurdles and start jamming down that Sandy beach, a little jog on the beach. One of my favorite activities to do when I used to be heavy off into this training, I’d drive up to the beach and go for a run. You are part of hikers anonymous, right by and large. Whenever you’re in here, maybe you’re a student you’re studying, right? Trying to get that advanced degree, trying to pass the next test.

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Maybe you have exams best way to clear your mind. Well, one of the better ways to do that is to get hit in the face with that sun. The sun’s doing what it hits done since a more immemorial time, which is just flooding your body. Exciting. All of that feedback, getting the blood flowing, returning your body to its natural homeostasis. I think there’s a lot of ness from the sun. A lot of it that we can’t really fully fully explain, but it just feels good to be out in the sun. Feels good to be out in the sun. Even you who might have the skin thing where the sun kind of hurts. You can’t deny that being out in the sun feels very much like returning home. It’s almost as if the sun is a reminder to our endogenous bodies that yo, we need to be out here.

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Your part of heart is anonymous. Getting outside, going for a long walk and a hike of meditation out there in the sun. There’s a reason why nowadays you go to the parks and you see lots of yogis practicing outside. That probably is the business. All right. Being outside is beautiful. So here are the reasons why training outside actually can add to your proficiency as a as an exerciser, right? It makes you more makes you stronger when you return to the gym and makes you generally healthier overall. All right, you need to be part of hikers anonymous. Number one, you challenge your foot mobility and placement. There’s a lot of talk lately about the nature of footwear. We all seem to be on board with the mutiny against Nike. We’re tired of, Nike’s inability to provide with shoes that don’t have individualized toe compartments, right?

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And we’re used to seeing all the tow shoes. Now there’s all this consternation about Nike being like amongst other shoe companies, not just Nike making shoes that feel like casts around our feet, right? And so what there’s a movement or a thought paradigm today is yo the shoes that we’re wearing, they’re actually designed to slow down our foot mobility. Well, there’s a lot of things we could do to counteract at and not just, and it’s not just the fault of shoe companies. We should really be outdoors a lot more. We should spend a little bit of time barefoot when we can all of these minor adjustments, especially when we have flat feet, like I do are very, very good for us. Now. I wouldn’t take to the level of one of my best training buddies back in the day we decided, Hey or well, they decided that in order to get more traction out on the track, we were running sprints and preparation for some competition. Well, the homies decided to take off their shoes fully. And this was underneath a very, very angry California son and a rubberized track, like a college track. I said, Hey guys, I’m gonna sit this one out and let you guys run barefoot on the hot track.

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When they got done, they were in pain. Let’s just say that hot rubber and epidermis, ah, BA friends. They’re not friends. These guys burn their feet up so bad. And I was like, guys, come on. We’re better than this. So spend some time maybe when you’re doing your gardening, maybe when you’re walking outside to get the mail, don’t worry. Don’t trip about having bare feet. Because what we’re doing is we’re actually challenging our foot mobility. It’s kind of like some of the videos that I’ll post about stretching the wrist and giving the wrist a chance to return to full mobility by obstensibly recalling its ability to move in all directions. What we end up doing in life, which again, hearkens back to what I just mentioned about us feeling like our shoes are a cast. What happens is our movement patterns become singular. They become singular.

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It’s like reading the same. It’s like waking up and watching some of those morning news shows, you know, with Michael stray or whoever’s out there these days. And they talk about the same stuff every week, which is why we like those shows because it’s comfortable. Look, movement patterns are great for your body. They’re comfortable. Our body likes movement patterns, but our body likes even more. The ability to respond to the natural world. All right, our body is built to respond to the natural world. The moves we make in the gym help outside. And so we wanna make sure our feet and our ankles are calves. And that whole structure up remembers what it’s like to step on a pebble remembers what it’s like to stumble and recatch and regain our balance real quick remembers what it’s like. If you’re flat footed to redistribute the weight around the anterior side of your foot, in order to maintain structure and balance, you need the world’s terrain, join hikers anonymous.

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So that’s number one. It advances our foot mobility and placement and gets us away from the movement. Pat, the repeating movement patterns, which are kind of pernicious to our foot health. Number two, the sun, the vial sun converts certain precursors into vitamin D. You need that vitamin D. So there’s all kinds of studies. I’ve known some people that have I remember I had a cousin too, who suffered a little bit because she lived in Northern Canada, right? And she was not being exposed to that vitamin D and getting low feeling depressed because she started to make the correlation like, yo, maybe I’m not getting enough exposure from the sun. My vitamin D is way down. So that’s kind of an indicator. Get out there and get some of this good vitamin D all right. What happens? The UVB rays, the invisible Ray from the sun.

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So it doesn’t even really have to be direct sunlight. Although I’m assuming that there’s no filter from the cloud front that would filter out UVB. So you go outside and it’s cloudy. You’re still gonna get hit in the face with that UVB. But once that UVB hits your skin, right? Penetrates, that starts to hit that they dehydro cholesterol inside the body, right? The ones in the skin. And it starts converting into D three, which is a precursor to vitamin D. Let’s just call it vitamin D. So it starts to turn the precursor of vitamin D into vitamin D via the sun. You have to get that if you want your vitamin D status, cuz you can eat it too, but you need both to get that in. So that’s one of the reasons you need to be outside just to get hit in the face with some of this beautiful vitamin D <laugh> right?

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Because look, if you don’t, we have vitamin deficiency and nothing actually will kill us. Fast will Hy lack of hydration will take you out quick. Very, very quickly. Everything in your body is surrounded by an aqueous environment. Even, even, I mean, fats, fat cells are not, but fat cells have a very singular purpose inside the body, right? Everything else pretty much enjoys a water environment. So water’s important. <Laugh> like, that’s, I’ll say all that to say water’s important, right? But the next thing that’s most important is creating energy and that’s where your vitamins come in. So if you’re deficient, it really has a profound effect on your body. You feel like. If you don’t have your vitamin status where it needs to be. So keep those vitamin statuses high, stay healthy behind those vitamins. All right. So that’s the second reason to be a hiker anonymous and being around plant life seems to elevate our mood in general and it decreases anxiety.

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It makes us feel attached to the world around us. There’s a ton of wellbeing benefits. If we’re outside, according to many studies point blank period, it’s a return to a dormant part of our DNA that only enjoyed the comforts of nature and being outdoors. Let alone plants, plant life, plants indoor. There’s a reason there’s a gigantic industry around supplying your internal environment with outdoor things like plants because they have a positive effect on your mood. People understand that they release oxygen into the environment. They take up that poisonous carbon dioxide and they release the oxygen. We like that right when we’re outside and we’re running next to a stream or we’re on the beach, getting hit in the face with all those great ions, right? Those improve our mood. Also those do have an effect they say, so there are short term benefits to being outdoors because it generates a positive mood and environment.

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Let alone the social environment of people being outdoors. Also enjoying the same type of vibes you’re under. So you gotta be part of hikers anonymous too. And look, I hope the more that I talk to people, even the most lethargic of you are still going outside and getting it done. All you gotta do is hit that block a few times, hit the hit two blocks the next time four blocks, right? Maybe you can keep going until you find a trail hit. That trail hit that trail. Don’t forget that as you’re hitting the trail, you gotta come back. So there you go. You just doubled the length of time that you’re out there, hiking, doing your thing. This is now the domain of everybody and I’m glad to see it. So give that a shot and I’m gonna end it right there. Go to EO killer show.com.

(23:45):

Let me know how you guys get outside. What else you guys do outside? That’s kind of unconventional like the episode. You can go to apple podcast and rate. It does wonders for the show, brings more eyeballs to it. Vibes of the show, spread ’em to everybody. Let’s let everybody get some of this ego killer vibe. Please. If you do that, what you can do is go to apple podcasts and big up me, big up the show. All right, I’ll give you a shout out. If you do email me for a free gift, I’ll send it back to you. And until the next time stay up.