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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

Strength Training

58. How Stress Is Making Us Fat

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Stress is not something that can be avoided, it’s just a fact of modern life. In fact, we all need a certain amount of stress to function normally. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress; we …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 58 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about how stress is making us fat. That’s right, stress is making us fat.

Now, stress is not really something that can be avoided. You know, it’s just a fact of modern life, that we all need a certain amount of stress to function. Normally, a little bit of stress is okay, it’s normal, it’s healthy. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress pretty well. We have these built-in mechanisms that kick into gear to help us deal with stressful situations very effectively, this works great, but too much stress or the wrong kind of stress can have some pretty serious health consequences.

Stress can make us sick, stress can lead to a host of other chronic diseases. And stress can make us fat. So in this episode, I’ll be taking a look at stress from several different angles. I’ll explain how stress is making us fat. And I’ll provide some options for how you can reduce stress in your life.

If you haven’t already done so please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, all this month, this is February 2021. We’re doing a 28 day low carb challenge. So the focus this month is to try to reduce the problematic carbohydrates for a couple of weeks. That’s all. It’s not like, you know, zero carbs or anything like that. It’s just like, let’s see what it feels like to ditch some of the problematic carbs, and see how our body responds.

Each week, I’m doing a little bit of training in there. To show you how to do this simply and safely. We’re also encouraging each other people are asking great questions. They’re posting great results they’re having already. And it’s a lot of fun. We’re all supporting each other this month, through the 28 day, low carb challenge. So come join us over there. Just jump on Facebook search for Running Lean community.

Here’s a recent five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from RTM71. And RT says, “This is not just about running. I’m an almost 50 year old malel, I quit smoking five years ago, never really thought about becoming a regular runner until I found this podcast. And it’s not only about running, it’s about a lifestyle. I love it. And Patrick interacts with his listeners on different platforms as well.”

Thank you RTM71. And if you feel so compelled, if you get something out of this podcast, I would love it if you jumped on Apple podcasts and you can just scroll down and leave a quick review. And who knows I might even read it here on the show. Awesome.

Okay, so let’s talk about this how stress is making us fat. So first of all, let’s define stress. What is stress? What do we mean when we talk about stress? Stress is the mental, emotional, and physiological response of the body to any situation that is new, threatening, frightening, or even exciting. Okay.

So it’s like a mental, emotional, and physical, physiological response to situations that are new or different, that seem threatening, frightening, or exciting. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s normal, you know, we all need a certain amount of stress in our lives, you know, there’s a certain amount of optimal stress that happens in our lives that helps us to you know, maintain our homeostasis and maintain adequate health and our athletic performance okay.

But when stress levels reach mental, emotional, and physiological limits, stress becomes a problem. We no longer function optimally, right we become sick we become diseased, we gain weight or it becomes very hard to lose weight or we get injured. You know this is when stress becomes a problem, okay.

So stress is one of the most common problems people face today. And chronic stress really undermines your ability to just stay healthy. An August 2020 Gallup Poll reported that 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. And this is up 14% from the previous year.

So in 2019, only 46% of Americans said they felt daily stress and worry, by the way, that 46% is pretty much what it’s been for a long time, many, many years, it doesn’t really change much. 46% is about what it normally is. But because of this global pandemic, you know, 2020 is like the most stressful year we’ve had, in a long, long time, we’re more stressed out than ever right now.

And current estimates indicate that the annual cost of stress and stress-related diseases in the United States exceeds a $300 billion 300 billion with a B dollars annually. And this is mostly due to health care costs. It also is due to lost productivity, and absenteeism as well. So stress is a big, big problem. It’s very common.

It’s a chronic issue here in the United States and other parts of the world, but especially here, we do everything being here, tell me. So we just have to understand that stress can be problematic. Okay.

Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of stress. So how do we react to stress? What is stress? What are the two main types of stress we want to talk about here? So you know, there’s two types of stress, I’ll talk about those in a minute.

But it’s really how we respond to these that makes all the difference, okay, because we’re all going to experience stress, it’s not like you can, you know, wave your magic wand and you’re going to have a stress free life, that’s just doesn’t work. That way, there’s always going to be something that happens to create that mental emotional, and physiological response in your, in your body in your mind.

So you have to just be able to learn how to handle what comes your way. Okay, so it’s how you respond to stressful situations, that makes all the difference, all right. So, the main two types of stress first of all, we have eustress and that is spelled eustress, eustress. This is the beneficial kind of stress.

This is the kind of stress where health and performance continue to improve even though the stressor is there. Okay, so here’s a good example of a type of use stress, lifting weights, this produces a good type of stress. This is the principle behind lifting weights, one of the principles is the principle called overload.

And if you want to develop muscles, you need to apply the principle of overload so when weight training, the muscle must be forced to work harder than normal, and the muscle must be overloaded, in order to stimulate improvement. So you overload the muscle by lifting a weight that’s heavier than you would normally lift, your muscle adapts, by getting stronger.

And then you continue this process. And that’s how you build muscle. You build muscle during the rest phase, actually, right? So you stress your muscle for a short period of time at the gym. And then the next day you rest. And that’s how you build muscle. So that’s an example of a beneficial type of stress, you stress.

Another example of a type of use stress would be doing interval training or speed work as a runner, right? So you would run very hard and very fast for a short period of time. So maybe you do a sprint workout. You do hard, you know all-out sprinting for 30 seconds at a time. Rest for a couple of minutes and repeat that maybe four or five times that’d be a good stressful workout.

But it’s very short. It’s very intense. You’re stressing your body, but then you back off When your body responds by adapting the same principle as the weightlifting here, you’re overloading your muscles by sprinting, you’re overloading your cardiovascular system by sprinting. But your body responds by adapting and getting stronger, getting more efficient and delivering oxygen to your muscles, and building muscle.

So this is the beneficial kind of stress, you become a faster, stronger runner. So this is like the good kind of stress. And this is fine, we want this, we need this in our life in order to grow in order to continue to be a healthy human being, you want some of this good kind of stress in your life. Okay.

Now let’s talk about the other kind of stress. This is the kind most people think of this is, it’s not us stress, this is distress. And this is the negative kind of stress this is the unpleasant or harmful response to stress. When your body has a distress response to stress, this is where your health and your performance deteriorate.

So it would be like, if you lifted heavy weights every single day, without ever giving yourself a rest day, you totally like tax your muscles, they wouldn’t be able to grow because you’d never give them a chance to rest and go through that repair phase. And you’d probably cause injury. And running is the same. Running is the same thing.

Like if you just ran the same like super-fast tempo, every time you go out and run and you ran every single day, you never gave yourself a rest day you never let off the gas. You’re not slow enough to be in the aerobic zone. You’re not fast enough to be creating adaptive responses like doing speed work, you’re in that chronic cardio stressful running mode.

And by the way, a lot of new runners do this. And this causes a lot of injuries in new runners or burnout. You know, it’s really hard to keep your body under that chronic distress for long periods of time. Okay, so those are some examples of distress, okay? Chronic distress can be very problematic, okay, when your body is chronically distressed.

You can increase your risk of all kinds of health disorders. Chronic distress has been related to coronary heart disease, which is the number one cause of death in the United States. Chronic distress has been linked to hypertension, high blood pressure. It’s been linked to eating disorders, ulcers, diabetes, asthma, depression, migraines, sleep disorders, chronic fatigue.

Chronic stress has also been linked to the development of certain types of cancer. Chronic stress is not good. It is not good for us, it causes all kinds of problems, okay. So there are basically two types of stress. Eustress this is the short term beneficial, good kind of stress, our body responds positively by adapting and improving.

And then we have distress. This is long term chronic, harmful type of stress, our body responds in a negative way, our health and our performance decline, and it could kill us. It has a lot of very bad effects on our body and on our health.

So let’s talk a little bit about what happens when we experience stress in the world. Okay. So again, stress is stress in itself is not inherently bad. You know, we’ve evolved as humans to have an amazing response to stress, you know, something in our environment, you know, would stress us out?

We would hear a rustling in the bushes that we’re not familiar with, well, what’s that that’s something new. So we would, you know, our senses would get heightened, you know, and then out pops a saber toothed Tiger. And when that happens, all these things like kick into gear, our brain sends messages to our hypothalamus, you know, into our adrenal glands. We activate the sympathetic nervous system.

This is the fight or flight nervous system, right? The adrenal glands produce adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone, you know in our body responds by increasing blood pressure, increasing our heart rate, increasing blood glucose, our liver will actually create more glucose and send it out into our bloodstream because we need that energy to be able to fight or flight right. In turn, our insulin levels go up.

We do some more blood flow to the brain, more oxygen uptake we are breathing increases, our muscles tense up, our muscles strengthen. And we have this sense of heightened awareness. These are all the things that happened in our body in response to stress, okay, so this is all good. This is normal, if there’s a saber toothed Tiger there, okay? This is all good if the stress can be released in some way.

So when you set your body up into this fight or flight mode, you’re getting ready to like do some battle or run away very, very fast. Okay. So in my case, if I see that saber toothed Tiger, I am running away as fast as I can, I am not going to take my chances with saber toothed Tiger, right. So, you know, if the stress can be released in some way, you know if we can run away, or if you want to stand and fight the tiger, awesome. And if you win, then good for you even better.

But you know that stress will be released by either one – we fight the tiger or we run away, something has to happen to get our body back to homeostasis, we got to get back to normal. So we are we need our heart rate to drop our blood pressure to normalize, we need to burn off that excess glucose we would do that by running or fighting or whatever, our insulin levels will get back to normal or muscle tensions would release our muscles would relax, our bodies would relax.

So this is all good. This is the way the stress response system is all set up. This is all good, right? But what happens if there’s no release of the stress? Your heart rate is gonna stay high, your blood pressure is going to remain elevated glucose and insulin levels are going to remain high, your body is going to remain tense, and your muscles are going to be all tensed up.

And this condition I’m describing right here, this chronic stress is how 60% of Americans live their entire lives. Right, there’s no saber toothed Tiger today. There’s other things that stress us out instead, but our bodies have this exact same response to whatever we determine is stress in our lives. Okay.

So that stress could be, oh, my boss is a jerk. You know, I got these three projects, he wants me to get them done by the end of the week, or, you know, I gotta homeschool my kids, or you know, just driving to and from work in rush hour traffic. That can be very stressful, right? Or feeling like there’s never enough time to do everything that has to get done. Maybe you’re not sleeping well.

This can keep your body in a state of chronic stress. Feeling overwhelmed by you know, emails and text messages and social media, being distracted by social media. So we never get anything worthwhile done, right? Information overload. constantly comparing ourselves to others worrying about money and finances. Worrying about COVID.

All these things are what stress us out on a daily basis. All of these things create that same mental, emotional and physiological response in our bodies. They all produce that same stressful response as though there were danger in front of us something frightening, right?

And so it’s very easy for us as, as humans today, in the modern world, especially in the United States, to get stuck in this state of chronic stress is not good. It’s not good for us at all. It’s creating a very healthy, very unhealthy environment and our bodies and our minds. And it’s leading to all sorts of, of illness, disease, ill health, and it’s making us fat. So how does stress make us fat?

Well, your body’s response to stress. One of the things that happens is that your body produces cortisol, that is the stress hormone. Your body produces cortisol, adrenaline, blood glucose, so glucose levels go up; adrenaline, cortisol, and insulin.

And again, this is all great if you’re going to fight off the saber toothed tiger or runaway, you’re going to burn that glucose off the cortisol will lower the adrenaline will lower insulin lower and everything will get back to normal. You would use the glucose for energy right and insulin would kind of level out but that just doesn’t happen today, right, because you’re like stuck in traffic or you never get a good night’s sleep or whatever it is.

So your blood glucose your cortisol levels remain high, your blood glucose levels remain high, your insulin levels remain high. And remember, if insulin is high, your body is holding on to fat. If insulin is high, you are in fat storage mode, your body is holding is not releasing fat from your fat cells, it is holding on to it, you’ve got to get the insulin low in order to release the fat in order to become a fat burner to get your body into fat-burning mode, right?

Cortisol increases our blood sugar. And insulin goes up in response to that. And here’s a little side note, cortisol also suppresses your immune system. So it makes you more susceptible to all sorts of illnesses, including some things that you don’t want these days. COVID-19. So cortisol, you know, it’s a stress hormone, it’s fine to have some cortisol in our system, but we, we don’t want an inordinate amount of this.

And we don’t want stress, and cortisol in our bodies all the time. This is how stress is literally making us fat. Cortisol increases our blood sugar increases our insulin. That’s the main reason we hold on to weight when we’re stressed out. And if you want more proof of that, they make a synthetic form of cortisol. It’s called prednisone.

This is a corticosteroid that they use for some people. Some people use this and they get some good results from using it. But the number one side effect of using prednisone is weight gain. People that take it weight gain over 70% report, I’m sorry, people that take prednisone over 70% of them report weight gain, and the higher the dose, and the longer the duration of, of use of prednisone, the more weight they gain.

So if they keep taking this steroid, they keep gaining weight. And as soon as they stop taking it, they stop gaining weight. And sometimes it takes a while to lose that weight. It’s very hard. But that’s just a little sidebar. Like you know, prednisone is the synthetic form of cortisol. So cortisol is not good. No bueno.

We don’t want a lot of cortisol in our system all the time, a little bit every now and then it’s fine. And that’s what the short term, they use stress. That’s why it’s good to go to the gym workout, you know, stress your whole body out, stress all your muscles out quickly, and then let it repair. That’s good. That’s what it’s designed for, right?

But when we’re stressed out all the time, our hormones are just whacked. Hormone regulation, it’s like one of the most important factors in maintaining a healthy body weight, when your hormones are out of whack, your weight is out of whack.

When your hormones are normal, you tend to be at your normal healthy body weight. So just we got to like get this stuff in check, right? Like stress is literally making us fat. If you’re having a hard time losing weight, then you got to check your stress levels. Okay. So how do you know if you’re stressed? I mean, I think most of us know.

But if you’re not sure, I’ve got a list of some symptoms that you can kind of check out. But you have to be aware, the first step is like you just have to be aware that stress is an issue in your life. And I asked my clients this a lot when we hit a weight loss stall, or a plateau and I say, Hey, how’s your stress level? Oh, you know, everything’s great. I’m eating great, you know, blah, blah, blah, but oh, yeah, work is really stressful.

And, you know, gosh, the kids are just driving me crazy. And, oh, yeah. And I find out that their stress levels are super high, and they’re not taking care of themselves. And we dig into it a little bit deeper. And we find that once we start working on the stress, the weight starts to kind of come off again. So we kind of can break through some of these weight loss stalls or plateaus by reducing stress. It’s amazing. Totally cool.

So you may be chronically stressed and not even know it. Here are some common system symptoms of stress. These are this is not a comprehensive list, but these are things that if you experience these things on a regular basis, any of these things on a regular basis, this could just be that you’re overstressed headaches, sore muscles, like neck, shoulder, back muscles, and I’m not talking about from working out.

I’m talking about just like my neck and back and shoulders are always sore. What is that all about? Well, if your shoulders are up in your ears all the time because you’re so stressed out, that’s what we’re talking about. If you grind your teeth all the time, maybe you have a nervous tic like a finger tapping or toe-tapping, a sudden increase or loss of appetite, insomnia, nightmares, could be a cause of stress, fatigue, just chronic fatigue all the time, high blood pressure, impotence, loss of sex drive could be stress related to pry depression, irritation, irritability, anger are all kind of related to stress.

If you’re like hostile, or you experience a lot of fear, panic, or anxiety, this could be stress-related. Stomach pain or nausea. You know, stress can cause ulcers, you know, so if you’re experiencing some stomach pain or nausea that lasts kind of on a regular basis, and you can’t really identify the cause of it could be stress. Lack of concentration, rapid heart rate, low-grade infection, and just a general feeling of restlessness. These are all signs that we’re chronically stressed out, and we need to do something about it.

Okay, if you’re experiencing some of these are a lot of these, you know, kind of symptoms. Definitely work on kind of reducing stress, see a doctor obviously, if some of these things are going on, and see if, you know, make sure there isn’t something else happening. But definitely work on things to reduce stress.

So if you think you might be chronically stressed, don’t, don’t freak out on me here, there’s some things you can do to kind of reduce the stress. And one of the most powerful tools to help reduce stress is exercise. You know, go back to this saber toothed Tiger example, you know, our body is being primed. When we get stressed out, our body’s being primed to take action to fight or flight. So exercise is like kind of mimicking that in our lives. Okay. So this is like one of the best things you can do to help reduce stress.

So let’s say for example, you’re super stressed out at work. You had a tough day at work, your boss was a jerk all day, you spent the last eight hours being chastised. And then to make matters worse, you’re driving home. And the car in front of you is driving like way slower than the speed limit. And you’re just like, freaking out, right?

The fight or flight response has already been activated from your stressful day at work, right. So now driving home, this guy is going super slow and it’s in high gear, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure shoots up, you’re breathing, quickens your muscles tense up, cortisol and adrenaline are released. And it’s all systems go, right.

But you can’t do anything about it. Because you’re just sitting there in traffic, you can’t dissipate the stress, there’s no fight or flight response that can happen. So you’re just going to sit there and feel terrible, right. And we do this all the time. Like I used to have to commute to work and oh my gosh, I remember just like it was so stressful.

So really just doing some sort of exercise will help to relieve that stress, okay, you got to do something, you got to like dissipate this stuff from your body, you got to give your body your work your muscles so that they can relax. You got to, you know, do something aerobic to or anaerobic, you know, do some moderate or intense, vigorous exercise to get that blood sugar out of your system. So your insulin levels can go down, right.

So even just like you get home after that commute, and you do like some aerobic exercise for 30 minutes, this can start to relieve tension in your muscles, it can use up that extra energy that you’ve got in your body. And even moderate to vigorous-intensity exercise even produces better results.

And it produces things like endorphins, endorphins or morphine-like chemicals that actually act like painkillers in our body. So they kind of help to kill the pain. But they also have this soothing, calming effect. Research has shown that exercise has an immediate effect on your mood, and that that effect lasts up to 12 hours following the activity. So you want to relieve stress. Get some exercise. It’ll put you in a better mood.

You ever hear people say like oh running I love running, running is my therapy. Well, now you know why. Running reduces stress. It improves your mood for up to 12 hours. After running, people who run regularly are just less stressed out. And generally, they’re just happier, they’re in a better mood. And I would totally agree with this right?

I am in a great mood pretty much all the time. And all the people that I know that are runners are so positive, and, and generally happy and in a good mood and fun. And, and I love that about runners. And this is one of the reasons why I love working with runners is because we’re all in a good mood, we all have a lot of fun, and we laugh a lot.

And by the way, if running makes you stressed out, you’re doing it wrong. Okay? If you run and you’re just constantly stressed, every time you run, you’re not doing it right. So two things you can do.

Number one, you can slow down a lot, like do some really slow runs every now and then just stay in that zone one or two, you know, stay in that aerobic zone. And really just work your aerobic engine, just build some aerobic and don’t overly stress your body. And you can do this for long periods of time, you can run like that. And this is really good for you.

The other thing you can do on the other end of the spectrum is to speed up a lot like do some intense speed drills like sprints, like I described earlier. Those will produce high amounts of stress. But the release afterward is what you’re looking for, you’re looking for that adaptation. You know, and you do this for a very short amount of time, like you’re this isn’t a chronic thing you’re going to do, okay?

So the slowing down or the speeding up the slowing down, you can do for longer periods of time to slow, the speeding up, you want to do very short. But these both produce positive adaptations in your body and in your brain. They both make you feel good. Obviously, there’s many other ways to reduce stress. I just love running. I think this is like the best way to reduce stress.

But other things could be walking, journaling, meditation, getting a massage, yoga, stretching, sleeping, well getting a good night’s sleep. All these are amazing. Like there’s so many things you can do to reduce stress, like you can’t do too many of these things, right? Just find a few things that work for you. For me, every day I get outside and I walk or I run no matter the weather. So it could be pouring down rain, snowing, four degrees doesn’t matter. I’m outside, I’m walking, or I’m running.

I do strength training a few days a week, I do some meditation every single day. I do journaling every single day. I connect with friends on a regular basis. This is one of the best stress relief. Things that I do for myself are connecting with friends. You know, sometimes it’s over zoom, sometimes it’s in person, maybe on a phone call, whatever it is, we have fun, we laugh. And that human connection is so important. And it really does help me to reduce stress.

And then I get it, I try to get a good night’s sleep. So that’s the like little combo that works for me walking, running, strength training, meditation, journaling, connecting with friends, and getting a good night’s sleep. Figure out what works for you. Pick a few things and try them, apply them on a regular basis and see if you can help reduce the stress in your life, it cannot hurt, it can only help you.

And if you’re somebody who’s really struggling to lose weight, or maybe you’ve hit some sort of a stall, then this is a great way to kind of breakthrough that. So I want to encourage you to check in with yourself, how are your stress levels? If you might think you’re a little chronically stressed out, you can do something about it, right?

Pick some pick a few things that work for you, but do something. And if it is the weight, that’s a problem and your diet is good, you know, you’re sticking to a low carb type of diet, maybe you’re practicing some intermittent fasting, you’re not overeating, and you just can’t seem to move the needle. It could be stress-related.

Okay, so this is one time where I think I think running really does help with weight loss in this case, you know, it’s not from a burning calories perspective, but more from a stress relief perspective. So just consider that and pick a few of these things and start applying them and start getting rid of the stress in your life. Well, I hope you all have an amazing day. And if you liked this episode and you got something out of it, please share it with a friend. You guys totally got this. Lots of love. As always keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

45. The 5 Habits Runners Must Have to Lose Weight

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The way you make big changes is by consistently doing new things - showing up day after day with drive, determination, and perseverance. In other words...creating new habits. Breaking old habits …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 45 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I am talking about the five habits that runners must have in order to lose weight. The way you make big changes in your life is by consistently doing new things.

That means showing up day after day with drive, determination, and perseverance doing these new things. Another way of saying this, is you have to create new habits, you’ve got to break old habits and create new ones. And this just might be the single most important thing you can do for yourself. It’s really the only way that you can make meaningful, lasting changes in your life.

It’s how you become anything more than who you are right now. Let’s say you want to become a marathon runner, you’ll have to break the old habit of sitting on the couch every morning watching Netflix, you’ll have to get into a new habit of running in the morning instead of watching Netflix, even when you don’t feel like it.

Creating habits like this, it’s not easy to do, it’s hard to do. That’s why most people don’t do it. So why most people never change is why most people don’t run marathons. It’s why most people will always be overweight and feel unhappy about it. Because most people aren’t willing to do the hard work of creating new habits.

So today I’m sharing with you the five habits that all runners must have if you want to lose weight, and keep it off for good. But first, if you liked this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It is a fun group of energetic, positive, and like minded runners who all have the same kind of goals.

We’re all trying to become fat-adapted, we’re all trying to lose weight, and run better, just make running more fun, more enjoyable to push ourselves to become more, come check us out Running Lean community on Facebook. Now we just want to get right into this today.

The five habits that runners must have in order to lose weight and number one is you got to get into the habit of eating real food. And I say this all the time, you can’t outrun a bad diet, right? Running is great. It helps to build strength, it helps to build endurance, it feels good to run, keep running, it’s just not a very good way to lose weight.

Weight loss is almost entirely an issue of diet. If you want to lose weight, you have to change your diet, you’ve got to get in the habit of eating real food. You know, for most of us, the problem really is the carbohydrates and sugar are like the most concentrated form of carbohydrate.

So we’ve got to like stop eating so much sugar because what happens is you eat a lot of sugar and carbs that raises your blood sugar, which you know, makes your insulin levels go up.

When your insulin is high, your appetite is increased, your hunger is increased, you never feel full and your body is put into this fat storage mode. And fat storage mode is not what we want. If you want to lose weight. If you want to lose weight you got to get your body into fat burning mode, right. So in order to do that, you have to get off the sugar and the carbs. Put your body into a state of a to become a more efficient fat-burner.

When you start eating real food, the kind of food that we humans have evolved to eat over the last couple of million years, you begin to lower your blood sugar. You begin to lower the insulin, you begin to regulate all those hormones that are causing you to hold on to fat and you begin to metabolize fat more efficiently.

So eat real food, eat food as close to nature as possible foods that our ancestors would have eaten. So the first habit you have to adopt in order to lose weight and keep it off is you got to get into this habit of eating real food and once you get into this habit and you’re eating real food consistently it’s just becomes a part of who you are, it becomes easy and effortless to maintain, it’s just becomes part of your lifestyle. So that’s number one.

Number two, is you have to practice meal spacing. The other habit that you have to get into is not eating all the time, because that will also contribute to putting your body into that fat storage mode. Because every time you eat any kind of food whatsoever, your blood sugar goes up, and insulin goes up, and then boom, you’re back into that fat storage mode, right.

But if you’re eating constantly, your body is constantly in that fat storage mode. So if you can limit the amount of times you’re eating throughout the day, you know, we do stuff called intermittent fasting, or you can call it meal spacing, whatever you want to call it.

When you just have some periods throughout the day, where you’re not eating food, then you give your body a break from all that insulin, you give your body a break from being in that fat storage mode, and you put your body into fat burning mode for more of the day.

So if you’re eating six, seven times a day, like let’s say you eat three meals a day, you eat snacks in between all those meals you’re eating dessert, then you’re basically going to be constantly holding on to body fat, you’re always your body’s just always going to be in that fat storage mode.

That’s just what happens, it’s almost impossible to lose weight this way, if you’re eating all the time. And one of the awesome benefits of spacing out your meals and having some time without bringing in any external fuel is that you become fat-adapted much faster. So that whole fat-adaptation process can be kind of challenging, you know, running is a struggle for a few weeks while your body’s switching over from burning sugar to burning fat.

And when you can extend the amount of time that your body doesn’t have that external fuel coming in. In other words, not eating anything, you kind of force your body to use stored body fat for fuel, which is good, we want this, this is when you begin to start metabolizing that body fat more efficiently and faster.

So this really helps to speed up the fat adaptation process. And it helps to shorten the amount of time that running sucks, while you’re going through this process, okay, so it’s really, you get sort of a couple of good benefits when you practice some meal spacing.

So that’s the second habit that we have to adopt that you have to just create in your life is to practice meal spacing, it gives your body a break from the blood sugar spikes, because your body a break from insulin, gets your body out of fat storage mode and into fat burning mode and keeps you there and get you through that tough period a lot faster. So that’s number two.

Number three, the third habit runners have to adopt if you want to lose weight, is you have to reduce stress in your life. This is one of the hidden issues around weight loss. For a lot of people, a lot of people have a really hard time losing weight, who are really stressed out.

Stress plays a huge role in keeping your body in that fat storage mode. This is like the third part of the insulin trifecta, you know the bad trifecta. It’s not a good trifecta. Because what stress does is it releases cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

And along with that is glucose is released from your liver and stress and constantly having that cortisol in your body and constantly having high levels of cortisol and glucose will spike your blood sugar and raise insulin levels as well.

So even though you may not be eating anything, even if you may be eating a good, pretty solid, clean diet, you can still be in that fat storage mode just from putting your body under constant stress. So here’s kind of what’s happening. Here’s the background.

We’ve evolved as humans to deal with stress pretty effectively. You know, back in the day, a saber toothed Tiger would come along and our body would see that and go into fight or flight mode. And we’d release the stress hormone cortisol, adrenaline gets produced, glucose gets produced, increases our blood sugar, insulin goes up, all that stuff happens, right?

These hormones are all working the way they’re supposed to, by the way, because they’re getting your body ready for fight or flight to fight the saber toothed tiger or run away So you would have all this extra energy in your body to fight this animal off or run away.

And I would run away for sure. I mean, that’s how I would probably deal with this situation, right, but either way you would use up that energy by fighting or running away, and then the danger would be gone. And then everything would regulate and everything would go back to normal. Okay, that’s good.

That’s the way our bodies are designed to work. But here’s the thing today, there is no saber toothed Tiger. But we have all this other quote unquote, quote, unquote, stress in our life, we have a boss who yells at us, we have traffic that we’re sitting in, and we got the kids screaming at us, we got COVID, you know, we’ve got the husband who’s not helping around the house, we got credit card debt, you know, we all have all this constant anxiety in society today.

And we have this constant, high levels of cortisol and glucose and adrenaline and insulin, and we’re on this, we’re all in this chronic state of, of stress. And so we’re in a chronic state of fat storage mode. You know, stress is literally making us fat.

And they actually have this synthetic form of the stress hormone cortisol, it’s called prednisone. And when people take this, they gain weight, all the time. So I always ask my clients, I’m like, how’s your stress level? You know, what are you doing about it? Because you have to have some sort of a daily plan, a daily practice for reducing stress, it’s not a one and done kind of a thing.

It has to be an intentional daily practice that has to become a habit. So Habit number three is to reduce stress in your life. If you don’t do this, your body’s just going to stay in that fat storage mode, you need to have a daily stress reduction practice, where you’ll have a very hard time losing weight. So that’s habit number three.

Habit number four, is to build strength and endurance. So why is strength training so important for runners? Well, strength training is actually essential. If you want to be a successful runner, even a long distance runner. And a lot of runners don’t do this. They don’t pay attention to strength training, they just don’t do it.

They’re like I run, I’m good, you know. But what happens is when you put your muscles under stress, the kind of not not the kind of stress, I was just talking about the kind of stress that stimulates muscle growth, you build more muscle, you build more lean mass, and you become a stronger runner.

Building strength also helps you to maintain good running form, and more consistent power output, especially as you begin to fatigue during longer runs, you know, endurance athletes that are over 40 will especially benefit from strength training, because as you get older, your strength declines faster than your endurance.

So your endurance might be there, but your strength won’t. So you need to keep up with the strength training as you go or you need to develop this habit. High intensity strength training also produces an anti-aging effect by helping you to preserve lean muscle mass and it helps you to optimize these adaptive hormones.

Being a lean runner means you’re a strong runner, so building strength in your muscles also helps you to build endurance. Because as a stronger runner, you can run further without getting fatigued, you can become more of a bonk proof runner when you build more strength. So practice some sort of strength training on a regular basis.

This has to become a habit. It helps you to build stronger muscles, stronger connective tissues, that absolutely helps you to burn fat more effectively. When you have more lean muscle mass, you’re a more effective fat burner, and you’ll lose weight more effectively. It’ll help you to increase your overall metabolism, meaning it just speeds up the whole fat adaptation process right.

Also cool to note is that when you build more strength, you increase your power to weight ratio. So that means you are a more powerful runner, you’re leaner, you’re stronger, you’re more powerful, you can run faster, and you can run longer. So habit number four is that you have to adopt is to build strength and endurance.

Strength training helps you to become fat-adapted, helps to increase your metabolism, helps you to lose weight, and helps you to get ripped and look awesome. And it makes you a more powerful, long distance runner.

And then habit number five that you have to adopt if you want to lose weight and keep it off for good. And this is probably the most important one and most overlooked habit. But you have to manage your mind. It’s so important. I probably should have mentioned this first. But I’m mentioning it last because I saved the best for last. That’s why I did it. Yeah.

But basically it underpins everything else that I just talked about. Without the right mindset, you really can’t create these other habits very effectively. You know, mastering your mindset is incredibly important and incredibly powerful. And mindset is one of my key areas of expertise as a certified Master Life Coach and a Master Practitioner of NLP, which is Neuro Linguistic Programming.

I’ve studied the human mind in depth for many years. And I’ve learned that when you’re armed with the right mindset, you can basically do anything you want. Seriously, you can do anything you want. And every single day I coach people on managing their mind and creating a more powerful mindset so they can get the results that they want.

You know, they know what to do, their mind is just in the way. Here’s the thing, your thoughts, create everything you have in your life, the good stuff, the bad stuff, all of it. Knowing this is key, it is critical to creating the life that you want for yourself.

Here’s an example. If you constantly have the thought, ‘I can’t lose weight, I always fail. This never works for me.’ If you keep thinking this over and over and over and over and over again, this becomes a thought habit. It becomes a deep seated belief.

And that belief, that thought habit, is going to cause you to constantly feel discouraged, it’s going to cause you to constantly feel frustrated. And feeling discouraged and frustrated, will cause you to go off plan, it’ll cause you to just say like, ‘screw it, why should I even bother, I always fail anyway. It never works for me.’

And this is just a thought habit. You know, it’s a thought that has created your current results. It’s a thought habit that’s created your current weight. Your thoughts always create your weight. Think about that.

If you change your thoughts, you can change your weight. When you learn how to manage your mind, when you create new thought habits, new thought patterns. You can deal with setbacks, you can deal with failures, you can deal with disappointments, you can deal with all kinds of frustrating things, without quitting on yourself.

When you manage your mind and you create these new, more empowering beliefs, and you practice those, instead, you start to build trust in yourself, you start to become incredibly confident in yourself. You find that you have the mental strength and the motivation you need to keep you going even when things get tough, because I promise you things will get tough, they always do.

So managing your mind is probably the most important habit that you need to adopt. If you want to have success in running, and losing weight, and really everything in your life. Now, these five habits are all required.

If you want to make meaningful, lasting changes in your life, kind-of sort-of doing one or two of these, it’s just not going to work. It’s not good enough, it’s not going to give you the results that you want. And I know that trying to figure out all this stuff for yourself can be very challenging.

I mean, if it was easy, if you knew how to do all this perfectly, you probably wouldn’t be listening to this right now. Here’s the thing. I’ve already done the hard part, I figured all this out. I’ve already made all the mistakes so you don’t have to.

And I coach people on how to get these results and how to do these five habits and how to create these new five habits in their life every single day. And here’s something I’m excited about and I’m gonna share this with you right now. I’ve created a new program that lays out exactly how to do all of this step by step.

It’s called Running Lean: The Weight Loss Training Course for Runners. In this new program, you will learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean, fat burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without the calorie counting, and develop all the habits required to make this last a lifetime.

I’ve taken everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve been trained on, everything I’ve been coaching my clients on, and I’ve packaged it all up into this online training course that you can go through that your own pace. Now, all this stuff, it can feel very confusing, very overwhelming.

So what I did was, I put it all together into this like, framework, it’s very easy to understand. It’s a framework that you can just learn and begin to implement for yourself. It’s an online self paced training course. It has like over 40 video lessons to guide you step by step, it’ll show you exactly how to create all these habits that you have to have, in order to become an efficient fat burner.

You become fat-adapted, and then of course, you begin to lose weight, which is amazing. It’s a nice little side benefit. This is a comprehensive training course, you will learn how to break the sugar addiction and get off of the refined carbs.

So you can start burning fat, which means you’ll lose weight fast, you can become a fat-adapted runner, so you can run farther than you ever thought possible. You can stop feeling hungry all the time. So you can take back control of what you eat. And when you eat.

You’ll learn how to develop your own nutrition plan that works for you. That includes foods that you love to eat, you’ll learn how to fine tune that nutrition plan so you can hit your exact goal weight, you’ll learn how to properly fuel for those long runs and for races so that you can achieve peak performance at every single workout.

Most importantly, you will develop the mindset required to make all of this sustainable. And I want to make something very clear. This is not a diet. This is not something that you’ve done in the past. This is a transformational training program.

And it’s designed specifically for runners and it will permanently change your approach to nutrition and to running into weight loss and all that stuff I want for you, I want you to stop feeling frustrated, I want you to stop feeling defeated because you keep hitting the wall in your weight loss goals or in your running whatever.

Instead, I want you to start feeling so energized and so confident that you could run all day. And just think about how much easier running will be when you aren’t carrying around all that extra weight.

I can tell you from experience after losing 40 pounds this year, that running is much better. You know, if I strapped a 40 pound weight to myself right now it’d be like, damn, that is crazy. I can’t believe I was running with that much extra weight.

But becoming a fat-adapted runner means you are an efficient fat burner. And this is the goal. This is what we’re trying to get to here. To become a fat burning machine. It means that you have this almost unlimited source of fuel on board at all times your own body fat. Running is so much easier when you’re fueled by fat.

I just ran a marathon this weekend I did it fasted, meaning I did not have any calories before the run I hadn’t eaten for like 12 hours before running a marathon. And then during the marathon I took in zero calories. I was efficiently burning my own body fat for fuel.

And I had one of the best marathon experiences I’ve ever had. I actually got faster later on the run. My fastest splits were the last six miles. This is not normal for me at all. But because I’ve become an efficient fat burner, I’ve increased my running performance by a lot. So in this program, I break it all down for you. I’ll show you exactly how to do it, how to become a fat adapted runner. And so you can start experiencing those kinds of results for yourself.

Oh, and there’s a cool little side effect. When you become an efficient fat burner you lose weight, right? You can’t lose weight when you’re burning sugar for fuel, you only lose weight by burning fat. So in this program, I break it all down and show you exactly how to do it.

I have to say that I’m pretty sure this is the most comprehensive online fat adaptation training course for runners that’s ever been created. In fact, it might be the only one. I know that no one is teaching this material this way. No one out there is combining fat adaptation with building the habits of stress reduction, strength training, explosive workouts and mindset that you have to have in order to make all this work.

I know nobody else is doing it this way. And I’m going to encourage you to jump on this opportunity right now to enroll in this class, because enrollment is open now into this training course. But it closes in a couple of days, I’ve only got it open until Sunday, November the 8th at 11:59pm.

After that, I gotta close the doors for this session. And then I don’t know when I’m going to be running this course again. Okay, so you just have to make a decision. Do you want to keep reliving your same old past? Stuck in all those old habits that got you where you are here today, doing the same things over and over again, that you have been doing and getting the same results like some sort of terrible Groundhog Day?

Or do you want something more for yourself for your future? Who is it that you want to become? Because that future version of you would encourage you to do something to take some action now, the only way you can become more, the only way you can become that future version of yourself is if you do something different today, if you start creating new habits today, because nothing changes, if nothing changes.

Now, a lot of people have been asking me about this. And I typically don’t talk about pricing and stuff like that, because I don’t want to, I don’t want to be salesy, okay, but I’m going to just tell you this right now, this course is worth well over the $1000. This is like thousands of dollars of material here that you will learn it is amazing.

In fact, similar courses like this sell for about one thousand bucks. I was teaching this course earlier this year, I was teaching it live to a small group of people, and it was around seven hundred bucks. And people were glad to pay. That was an amazing bargain at that.

But I want to remove money as a barrier for you. So I decided that I was going to make the investment into this program, a no brainer for you. So enrollment into the weight loss training course right now, just until Sunday is only $297 bucks, this is a one time payment, and then you’re in for life.

That’s it, I want it to be a no no brainer. And I think it is. Oh, and I have something else to announce. When you enroll in the weight loss training course, you can also join the Running Lean monthly coaching group. So your monthly membership gets you bi-weekly live coaching sessions with me.

So you get personalized guidance and feedback, which means you’ll always be able to stay on track. This is a group coaching program. So we do it over Zoom. And we all get to share our stories and stuff together. So you get the supporting encouragement from this small community of like minded runners, so you can learn from their experience, you get accountability.

So you start really showing up and you keep moving towards your goals, right. And then if you happen to miss any of the live coaching calls that we do over Zoom, I record them all and put them on a membership website. So you’ll have 24/7 access to all the recorded calls. This is really like the most cost effective way if you want to get some coaching and work with me.

And here’s something cool just for you guys. I’m giving you a first, your first month free, you can actually try out the monthly coaching group for free for your first month. Just check it out and see what you think. If you don’t love it, you will I know you’ll love it, but if you don’t meet this – no big deal, you can just opt out.

But after that it’s only $39 bucks a month. That’s it. That’s another total no brainer if you ask me. So again, I feel like I need to say this. I’m not here talking to you about all this stuff, and offering you this program because I want to sell you something that is not what I’m trying to do here. I’m offering you this program because I know it will change your life.

You’ve been asking me Patrick, how do I do all this? How do I become a fat-adapted runner? I want to know how to do it. How do I lose the weight when everything I have ever tried has always failed? You know, how do I figure out how many carbs I should eat so that I can run and lose weight? You know, how do I fuel for these long runs?

You ask me all these amazing questions. And so I’ve put all those answers together into this program. I want you to become more. That’s why I’m talking about this today. I honestly don’t care if you purchase this or not. That’s fine. If you want to make that investment into yourself, I think that’s an amazing choice for you to make.

If you don’t, I think that’s fine. I know that this program is life changing and it will get you the results that you want. If you want to go and enroll right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/course and you can get right in.

I want to quickly address a couple of common reasons why people choose not to do something like this. Because I’ve gotten some. I’ve been on some phone calls with people. And we’ve talked about coaching and stuff. And here’s, here’s a couple of the things that they tell me that I want to share with you, because you might be thinking the same things.

The first is, I’m not ready for this, maybe later. How many times have you wanted something? You know, you want to lose the weight, but you’ve said, You know what, I’m just not ready, maybe later. Maybe later is like the number one killer of people’s hopes and dreams.

How long have you wanted to lose weight? Probably a long time. How long have you wanted to change how you feel about yourself? Probably a long time. I don’t want later to turn into never for you. So that’s why I’m curious or encouraging you to take action today.

That’s why the enrollment for this program is only open for a few days, because I want you to just make the decision now. Just do it, I want this for you, I want you to want it for yourself. Because you deserve this, you’re worth it. Your long term health and happiness is worth it. And so I’m encouraging you to just make that decision. Now, don’t say later, do it now.

Another thing people say is I’m just gonna figure this out myself. I’ll just go figure it out, I’ll you know, go on Google, or something. And I’ll just try to figure it all out. And that’s fine, you can do that you can save a few dollars and spend all your time struggling to try to figure it out yourself.

Or you can just spend that little bit of money now. Save yourself all that time, all the effort, save yourself from all that struggling to figure it all out yourself. skip all that skip all the struggle, strip out, skip all the overwhelming confusion and learn it from somebody who’s already made all the mistakes and figured it out.

Because I’ll have you know if you can simply pay a couple hundred bucks and have all this figured out for you is not a no brainer, I think it is for me. I gladly pay for courses, where someone else has spent years learning what works and what doesn’t, figuring it all out, putting together a system or a framework that shows you exactly how to do it all, then I can come along and just pay a few hundred bucks and boom, I get the whole system.

I don’t have to deal with all the struggling, I get instant access to all those years of knowledge. It’s like boom, knowledge download instantly. I love that and I gladly pay for that all the time.

And another thing people say that I just want to address is they’re like, you know, this sounds good. Patrick, I totally agree with you. This sounds amazing, but I just can’t afford it. And I just want you to know that if you’re listening to this now, and you’re thinking about this, and you’re thinking I really need a program like this, because I haven’t been able to do this on my own.

But you think oh, I don’t think I can afford this right now. Here’s the thing, here’s, I’m going to tell you something that is probably the most important thing you need to hear about losing weight about becoming the best version of yourself.

If you feel like you want to enroll in this program, and you think you can’t afford it, then you’re in this place called desirability versus feasibility meaning that you desire to lose weight, to become a fat-adapted runner, to be healthier, and to become that amazing, happier, more confident future version of yourself. But you don’t think it’s financially feasible for you. So what you do next, will ultimately determine what happens in your life. Because thinking it’s not feasible, is actually a form of self-sabotage, that you probably didn’t even realize you’re doing until I just pointed it out to you.

Here’s the truth, you have to ask yourself this vital question to determine whether or not you really want to become that fat-adapted runner or whether you want to really lose weight. And the question is this: am I going to be 100% responsible for my own health and happiness, or am I not?

You know, that’s where you are today. Because you’ve done the things you’ve always done. And if you really want something to change in your life, if you really want to lose the weight and become a lean runner, then you have to do something different. You have to choose to make that happen for yourself.

So the question isn’t, can I afford it? The question is, how can I be 100% responsible and make this happen for me? If you choose to do nothing here, that’s fine. Just means you aren’t willing to get out of your comfort zone. It means you’re probably driven by fear. And you’re probably not going to get there, you’re probably not going to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, which is fine.

You’re just going to probably continue to struggle with your weight, just like you’ve always done. So let’s go back to that important question you have to ask yourself right now, are you going to be 100% responsible for your own health and happiness? If yes, then just enroll in this program. It’s a no brainer.

Again, do you want more of your past or more of your future? My hope for you is that you choose to go all in on yourself, that you make the decision to become the person you’ve wanted to be for so long now that you take action now and start working on becoming more because your future self will thank you because you made this commitment today.

To enroll, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/course. Now, if you’re still unsure about whether or not this program is right for you join me in the Running Lean community on Facebook this Sunday at 4pm. I’ll be hosting a live q&a session where you can ask any question you want, I’ll answer everything for you. They’re cool. I really hope you’ll join me it will absolutely change your life. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, gonna talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

39. Learning to Love the Process

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Oftentimes when we take on a big challenge like changing how we eat or training for a marathon, we don’t get the results we want fast enough. The weight isn't coming off as quickly as you want or …

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Podcast Transcript

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 39 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m talking about learning how to love the process. So oftentimes, when we take on a big challenge, like changing how we eat, losing weight, or training for a marathon, we don’t get the results that we want fast enough, the weight isn’t coming off as quickly as we want, or the training isn’t getting any easier.

Running is still really hard. When you’re focused solely on the end result, and you’re not there yet, it creates this sort of tension. And you begin to hate the process it takes to get you there, because it’s hard. It’s why they call it a challenge. But this is not a very useful way to approach anything worth doing. So today I’m talking about learning instead, how to love the process, and how it’s a simple mindset shift. But it will absolutely change how you approach everything you do.

But first, if you liked this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It is a fun group of positive energetic runners like you. It’s a grip that kind of goes hand in hand with the podcast. We share common goals, we were all trying to lose weight, we want running to be easier, we want to live a healthier life.

I do weekly trainings in there on a host of topics like the mindset of running, nutrition, weight loss, and other fun things. Here’s a recent comment from one of our community members, Carrie, Carrie says, “You have completely changed my whole mindset around eating and running. You said in one of your podcasts that you love to motivate. And that’s exactly what you do. I’m down 11 pounds since August 3, and my runs are getting better. Thank you with three exclamation points.”

By the way, I love this. Carrie, thank you for sharing. Carrie is just one of the many positive motivated people we have in the Running Lean community on Facebook. We also do fun things like group challenges. September, we’ve been doing the intermittent fasting challenge. And we’ve been talking all about why we would want to even participate in intermittent fasting.

Why is that even a thing? Why is that important? Especially for runners, really intermittent fasting for runners. And it helps. How’s that even possible? So we’ve been talking about that.

And I’ve got more challenges coming your way soon. Especially as we’re getting into the holidays, just a little teaser, like we’re going to be doing a holiday challenge that’s going to be really fun. So just come join us just go to Facebook, and search for the Running Lean community. It’s fun.

Also, did you know that you can get help with your running and your weight loss goals? Yes, it’s true. Listen, becoming a fat-adapted runner, breaking old habits and creating new ones, developing the mindset it takes to make all of these healthy changes permanent to make it a new lifestyle.

This can all be daunting, it can be challenging to do on your own. That’s why I offer one-on-one coaching. Working with me as your coach, I’ll help you figure out the right nutrition plan for you that will get you to your specific goals.

You’ll have someone there, me, holding you accountable. I help keep you on track. I help you stay on track and moving towards your goals. I encourage you to do things that you don’t want to do so you can become the person that you ultimately want to be. And most importantly, you’ll develop the mindset required to make these changes for life.

So if you’re ready to make some big changes in your life, if you’re ready to lose weight and ready to love the process of doing it, then you have to apply for one on one coaching with me just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, one word, do it now I promise you will not regret it. We’ll get on the phone. We’ll have a chat. We’ll see if this is a good fit for both of us.

Okay, let’s talk about learning to love the process. So here’s what I see happening with people and I see this with my clients a lot. You have a goal. You want to lose weight or maybe your goal is to run your first marathon. So you create a plan, you change your diet, you change your whole way of eating, you start eating all the right foods, you start feeling healthy.

And things are going pretty well. Or maybe you start training for your marathon. So you put together a 17 week training program, and you start running, and you get out there and you’re running for five days a week, whatever it is, you’re doing great. But then something happens.

You look at the scale, and you’re like, you know, I’m really not losing much weight, I’ve lost a couple of pounds. And you know, this is hard, this is hard work. It’s just not, it’s not going fast enough, it’s not happening fast enough, I’m not losing weight fast enough, or, you know, I’m running five times a week, and my endurance really isn’t improving like running still sucks, it’s still hard, I’m not getting any better, it’s not getting easier.

So what we do is we get super hyper focused on the end result, we get focused on the goal, to lose the 40 pounds, run the 26.2 miles, but you’re not there yet, you’re you’re where you are today, you still have 38 pounds to lose, or you’re only up to running, you know, six miles.

And so there’s this tension, there’s this turmoil, if you will, that you sort of create inside yourself, I want to be there, but I’m only here you’re not seeing immediate, you’re not seeing immediate results, you’re seeing some small changes, but they’re small, it’s taking too long. You know, it’s not going fast enough.

You know, I don’t look like that one woman on Instagram yet, or I can’t run 18 miles yet. So you get frustrated, you get frustrated, because you’re not where you ultimately want to be. And first of all, this doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like you’re climbing a mountain and you’re in you’re kind of like the at the base of the mountain, you know, you’ve you’ve started, you know, you’re working your way up, but you’re still you got a long way to go.

It’s like saying, oh, this isn’t, this isn’t working, this isn’t going fast enough. And you’re like looking up at the mountain, you’re like, I want to be at the top, but I’m not there yet. It’s like, you gotta like do the work to get you from here to there. Okay, you can’t just like hate being where you are, and expect it to be like, easier to get to the top. That, that doesn’t make any sense.

So you get frustrated, you hate where you are, you’re putting this hard work in, it’s not working fast enough. And by the way, fast enough according to who? Like who’s saying you should be losing weight at a certain rate? Who says it’s going to take you you know, six weeks to lose 40 pounds when it took you eight years to put it on?

That doesn’t make sense, or, you know, to run 26 miles, it takes some time to build up to that. So anyway, I don’t know why we put these arbitrary timelines on things. I used to do that though, and I get it. And I used to put timelines on my goals. And when I didn’t hit the goal in the timeline, I was pissed off, I got frustrated.

And a lot of times I would just give up. So that’s another whole story, though. That’s another topic, I’ll save that whole goal setting and timelines and stuff for another day. But just know this, when you are frustrated with where you are, it’s gonna be very difficult to get to that result.

So what happens when most people are in this situation and what most people do when they’re not getting the results fast enough? When they’re frustrated, when they’re hating the process, they quit, right? They’re like, screw, it’s too hard, it’s taking too long, it’s not worth it. I’m just gonna go back to eating the way I was eating, which by the way, is definitely not going to get you to your goals.

Or I’m just going to sleep in on Saturdays and spend all day on the couch watching Netflix, which definitely won’t get you to that goal. So they give up on these big goals. They give up on these dreams because it’s not happening fast enough, and they begin to hate the process.

When you hate the process, you are going to have a very, very hard time sticking to that process. It’s all going to be terrible. It’s just going to suck all the time. Is that how you want to approach accomplishing this goal? Is that how you want to go through life? Because we’re always going to have goals that we’re working towards, right?

Here’s an example from my own life just so you can kind of put this in perspective. So I’ve been trying to increase my lean muscle mass. I’ve been trying to build more muscle And it’s hard work, I will tell you it is difficult. And it’s taking a while. And I haven’t been seeing much progress. And I was beginning to get frustrated with all of this.

So I’m putting in a lot of hard work. I’m strength training three times a week, religiously. You know, I go to the gym and go at it hard. And I’m starting to think why even bother, it’s not working. And I was hating what I was doing, I started to just hate the whole thing. It just was terrible.

And just a little backstory, I’ve always had a hard time like bulking up. And this may be my genetics, I was always a skinny kid until I got fat. And then I was the fat guy with no muscles. Then I got skinny again, and I trained for Ironman. You know, I was going to the gym all the time, but I could never really bulk up, I could never really put on muscle.

And so I was just thinking, maybe this isn’t for me, you know, I’m 53. Now maybe it’s just not possible for me to build muscle. And I was really kind of hating the process. So I had to make a decision. I came to a point where I was like, okay, I can’t just say, ‘This is too hard. It’s taking too long, it’s not happening fast enough. You know, I’m just gonna say screw it, why even bother.’

Or I could adopt this new mindset, I could learn to love the process. And for me, the process is going to the gym three times a week and working out. The process is putting in the training, lifting the heavy things, pushing myself harder each week, learning everything I could about this topic of weight training and how to do it more efficiently, how to get the most bang for the buck.

So I started studying the subject of resistance training like crazy. And I started pushing myself super hard each week at the gym. And I started to really get into this and sort of love the process.

So much so that I’m actually becoming a certified personal trainer, because I’m like, I want to learn everything I can about this and be able to teach it to others, especially as we get older, it’s very important to continue to keep your muscle strength up build muscle is so good for your, for your joints, for your bones, for your overall health. To have more lean mass, it’s great for fat burning, it helps you for running.

Most runners don’t do enough strength training. And so I want to help runners learn how to do this stuff the right way. Anyway, I’ve learned that I need to love this process. And it’s still going to take a while for me to get to the goals. You know, it’s still going to take a while for me to build the muscle or look the way that I want to look.

I’m getting there, I’m starting to see some progress. It’s slow. I think it’s easier when you’re younger to build to like bulk up like the Instagram dudes I see. You know, they’re like ripped, and I’m like, okay, whatever. It may take me a while to get there. But my goal is to get there eventually.

And it’s taking a while but I’m enjoying the process. Now, I’m loving the process. I’m not frustrated that it’s taking a while because I know the results will come. If I love the process, or hate the process, but I keep doing it, the results will eventually come. You can either hate every minute of it, or you can love every minute of it. The choice is yours to make.

And I see this with my clients, a lot of my weight loss clients. Because you know what? Losing weight is hard. Most diets fail and most people fail at losing weight because they’re just focused on one thing. They’re focused on the number on the scale. And when I work with people, we talk a lot about becoming the healthiest human being possible. We work on breaking old habits and creating a new, healthy lifestyle, new habits. The goal is permanent lifestyle change, not some temporary quick fix. The goal isn’t really the number on the scale, although that eventually will happen.

But it takes time. And you have to learn to love what you’re doing. This is why it’s so helpful to have a coach so anyone can just tell you what to do. You can actually go on YouTube and learn what to eat, you know.

But with a coach, you get to learn how to love the entire process. You get to learn how to change your mindset, you learn how to adopt a whole new attitude, a whole new identity around what it means to be a healthy human being.

And my clients, they learn to love themselves, they learn to love their new way of eating, their new way of approaching nutrition, and exercise and fitness. And they, they love this new life, they learn to develop the mindset required to make lasting changes. They learn to love the process, yes, they still have goals, they still want to, you know, lose 30 pounds or whatever it is.

But they’re not so focused on the goal that they hate everything about what they’re doing every day, because they’re not there yet. The results will come in time, you just got to stick with it. And it’s a lot easier to stay on track when you love what you’re doing.

Honestly, this is the key to succeeding at anything in life is to love what you’re doing, love the process, not only love yourself, but love the process of getting there. Because the reality is, when it comes to like losing weight, it does take time. You know, I often remind my clients that it took them years, decades to gain the weight, it’s not going to be gone in a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

But if you can love the process, when you learn to love this healthy new life that you’re living, when your focus is not only on a number on the scale, or some short term gains, and instead your focus is on optimizing your long term health and overall fitness, it’s still going to take the same amount of time. But it will be way more enjoyable getting there.

Another example of this is with my running lately, so I’ve been training for a rather big running event in October that I’m not really talking about too much. I’m being very vague, I know. And normally, when I have a big event like this, I dread the training, I dread it. It’s grueling. It’s very hard work. I hate the long runs.

But I’ve noticed something over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that I have really been loving the training. It’s been fun, we’ve been going out with a few friends. I’m only running like three times a week. I’m not taking myself too seriously. I’m increasing distances. And I’m not like dreading those long runs. I’m actually looking forward to them. And without really even trying, I’ve just learned to really enjoy the process of training.

And yeah, it’s still hard. Sometimes running is hard sometimes, right? Running 18 or 20 miles will probably always be somewhat challenging. But if you hate every minute of it, if you are dreading every step, you know, you head out the door and you’re like, Oh my God, this next three hours of running is gonna suck. That’s no fun. It’s no fun at all.

So instead I’ve been loving the training, I’ve been loving the process of just going out there and doing the and putting in the work. And it’s way more fun doing it this way. I promise you it’s way more fun. When you hate the process, every moment feels like failure. But when you love the process, every moment feels like success.

The end result is the same, you’ll eventually reach your goal. But you’ll be a completely different person doing it. Alright, that’s all I got for you here. Here’s what’s coming up in our Running Lean community. September intermittent fasting challenge.

We’ve got one more training coming up and we’ll be talking about some advanced fasting methods that you might consider trying, why would we want to do these things? What’s the point? How will it benefit me as a runner? How does this help with weight loss and running? All that stuff?

I’ll talk about all that stuff next week in our September intermittent fasting challenge training. I do these on Sunday afternoons, by the way. So join us this coming Sunday for that not next week. It’s this Sunday, just so you know. And it’ll be fun to have you in the group. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.

26. Chris Wissman on Maintaining Peak Performance as a Real Human

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Chris Wissman is co-founder and Director of Fitness Programs at Real Human Performance here in Cincinnati. Chris considers himself more of a holistic health coach than a personal trainer. His …

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Podcast Transcript

Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 26 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today, I have something very special to share with you. It’s an interview I did recently with Chris Wissman.

Chris is one of the cofounders of Real Human Performance here in Cincinnati. And he’s the director of their fitness programs. Chris considers himself more of a holistic health coach than a personal trainer though. And his approach to health and fitness is a lot like mine.

So for him, it’s not just about lifting weights or eating right, there’s so much more going on, there’s so many more things to consider. You know, if you want to get to your ideal body weight, or maintain peak performance as a runner, you have to consider the whole human. And that’s what Chris does.

And I say this is an interview, but it was more just like a fun conversation that he and I have. So we work out together. And he and I have these awesome conversations while we’re working out. And one day, I was like, do we need to record these conversations, I think people would get a lot out of this. So that’s kind of what we’ve got going on here. You’re gonna dig this, promise.

And if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a Facebook group that goes hand in hand with this podcast, we take a deeper dive into these topics. You get to ask questions and get answers totally free. But if you listen to the podcast, you have to come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook, and starting July 1.

So that’s coming up very soon here in a matter of days, starting July 1, we are doing a 31 day no sugar challenge for the whole month of July. The challenge is for you to stop eating sugar. Sugar is just so terrible for you. Really is the first step if you want to lose weight. If you want to become a lean running machine, you’ve got to stop eating sugar.

So all during July, we’ll be talking about sugar, you know, all the reasons why you need to get off of sugar. I’m going to be walking you through this step by step. So each week I’ll be offering support, some tips, some q&a sessions, some coaching, I’m going to be talking about it here on the podcast, I’m going to do everything I can to help you make that transition off of sugar, and into becoming a better human and lean running machine.

So grab a few friends to join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, you can just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. And you can find it there but join us for the no sugar challenge. It’s going to be amazing.

Okay, so in the interview, Chris and I talked about a lot of cool stuff. So we talked about what chronic cardio is like the cycle of chronic cardio and what runners need to do to break out of it. We talked about why we should be adding in some more high intensity workouts like sprints, we talked about how running slower (sounds counterintuitive) will actually help you to run faster.

We talked about sure sugar burning versus fat burning, and the benefits of becoming a fat adapted runner. We talked about what happens when you don’t get enough sleep, the importance of managing stress as an athlete. Why you might want to rethink sucking down all those energy gels during a race. Talk about intermittent fasting and the surprising benefits of when you work out in a fasted state.

Why athletes practice periodization and why you should too and a bunch of other stuff. So this is a really, we talk about a lot of stuff in here but it’s a really fun interview. And Chris, he’s just an all around awesome human and a good friend. I think you’re really going to dig this conversation. So here it is.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, today I’m talking with Chris Wissman. Chris is a holistic, functional health coach and movement coach. How’s that, Chris?

Chris Wissman
That sounds perfect, man.

Patrick McGilvray
We were just talking about what do I call you and Chris was like, here’s some words you can use, you know, but what Chris does is he helps people to become the best version of themselves, you know, through functional fitness through coaching. And he does it with a really cool approach, something that I try to, you know, mimic in the way that I coach people, which is taking a holistic approach, like looking at this from a bunch of different angles.

It’s not just about work. Now, it’s not just about lifting weights, it’s not just about eating right, you’ve got to like factor in all these different things. And one of the things that Chris and I are going to talk about today, I hope we get into this, I’m sure we will, is about stress and the amount of stress that we put on our body on a regular basis.

So we as runners are really notoriously bad at resting. And we’re notoriously bad at overworking ourselves, and not listening to our body and not being like aware of, you know, how we’re feeling and then adjusting. We’re just like, hammer on all the time. So I want to talk about that a little bit today. So we got a few things we’re gonna talk about. Chris, how’re you doing today?

Chris Wissman
Good, man. Good. It’s good to be here. I’m really excited and excited to see you back in the gym. And I’m stoked to talk about this stuff as this is the stuff that I I love to research all the time and just keep up with.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and Chris and I work out together. And he’s my coach, you know, when we’re at the gym, and we have these conversations about, you know, about food and stress and running and all this stuff. And, and I’m like, dude, let’s just put this, let’s just record our conversation. So that’s what we’re doing. So cool.

Chris Wissman
Yeah. I love that you mentioned the running and the chronic state of running. And I think you mentioned to me not too long ago that people jump into a running protocol to maybe lose weight, and where that it can help. But if we’re in that kind of chronic state, the black hole training model of just some people refer to it as the stage three training model, the level three, it just becomes like a chronic stressor. And like you’re saying with the stress, and it’s, it becomes really hard to if your goal is to lose weight, it becomes really hard to lose weight. While you’re chronically stressed, the body actually wants to hold weight in that state to survive. And certainly, it gets confused.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I was just talking about this with a client yesterday about what stress does to your body. So what stress does is it releases this hormone called cortisol. And cortisol is a stress hormone. And but when you’re when your body releases cortisol, it like floods, your system with glycogen, you know what I mean?

So glucose levels go up, your insulin levels go up. And we all know that, you know, when insulin is high, you’re in this fat storage mode. So people that are chronically stressed out whether it’s because of their job or their, you know, family situation, or because of what they’re doing to their body, the way they’re running or working out, find it very difficult to lose weight because their body is constantly in that fat storage mode.

Chris Wissman
Yeah, that’s exactly when cortisol is a great thing. It’s a survival mechanism. But we can’t be chronically releasing cortisol, we kind of get, at some point in time, you can’t produce it as well. And that becomes really problematic.

It’s what you were talking about when you discovered Mark Sisson, and probably a long time ago, but recently, when we’re kind of connecting the dots, with Sisson’s approaches, what he does is a lot of sprinting, and then a lot of low level like aerobic state movements. If I’m not mistaken, I’d love to do stuff in quite a long time.

But if I, if I remember correctly, that was his approach, and then maybe strength training first. And that kind of system, which helps people not have to stand up again, and that black hole, right, and that and that. There’s no real intention. I think that’s the underlying factor to all these things.

Like, why are we running? What’s the intention? And then if the intention is to lose weight, cool, if the intention is to I want to run a marathon, that’s a different story, if the intention is, you know what I mean? So for me, it just, everyone has to know why they’re doing what they’re doing, before they just jump into it for kind of haphazard reasons.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and honestly, like marathon runners were really great at like, following a plan, you know, following a training plan. Yeah, it’s like run five miles today. And you’re like, well, I don’t really feel like it but just do it anyway, or I’m really sore. I’m really tired. Just like do it anyway, and then do it tomorrow and do it the next day and do it three days from now and like this, just that what we do, you know, and we think we’re like, really, like, we’ve got this like, amazing work ethic.

And we’re like, yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah, the problem is you’re just always, you know, in that you’re stressing your body and you never give it a chance to kind of calm down. And, you know, going back to the cortisol thing, it’s like, that’s a great thing to stress your body sometimes, but then, you know, you want to like, then not stress your body, because that’s correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that’s how we grow. You know, when we lift, we lift weights at the gym, we stress out our muscles, we break them down, we tear them apart, and then we gotta rest so that they will grow.

Chris Wissman
We can’t be catabolic all the time. Catabolic is muscle destruction, you gotta, you gotta go through that healing process. At some point. It’s a guy that I trained through, I always go back to the yin and the yang cycle with all of these things like the balance is so important. Yeah, catabolic, you’re gonna, you’re gonna start rippin’ some muscle, but then you have to rest, you have to come out of that, that a lot of these really high intensity, high functioning athletes are 80%, anaerobic, and that 20% of the time and they’re in that catabolic state.

So it’s not like a 50/50, which is very interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah, they pick very specific times with very specific movements to go tear it up. And on their other training days, their way in low there, they’re getting their mileage in if they need to. It might not be Grace mileage, but you know what I mean?

So they’re staying at that slower pace, like you and I were talking about, and all the other life elements that we experienced that make us not only like, from muscle, musculoskeletal standpoint, catabolic is stressors from every other element is, again, mimicking catabolic activity in our, in our, in our body. And so we’re really struggling to heal. So that rest process is like, dude, sleep is sacred. It is, it is free, you don’t have to pay for it. And if you set it up, right there, there is nothing. That I mean, there are some things but it affects your life so positively. But yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
Sleep is such a key factor here. Like, I just read this study where they tested people, and they like limited the amount of sleep they got, and the like, by an hour or two. And they you know, in this, you know, clinical trial that they did with these people. And all of them started gaining weight just from like reducing the amount of sleep there again, because of the cortisol.

Chris Wissman
It is. Yep. Yeah. There’s a really cool chart that I’ll send over to you. It shows the the graph on the cortisol rise in relation to the sunlight and all of this. It’s it’s a really unique sequence that has everything to do with balancing your rest and recovery cycle. European some people call it your circadian rhythm. Yeah. And so if I had any advice to people, if it was like, the freest thing you can do is to structure your sleep as best as you possibly can.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, for sure. We can get enough sleep, for sure. But going back, you mentioned something that was kind of cool, talking about the intensity of the workouts. And so one thing I’ve been doing lately, and I’ve been having some good luck with this, in fact, I just did this this morning. I did some sprinting.

So yeah, go out for and I try to do this once a week. And I go out for it’s like a 20 minute run. It’s really short, but incredibly intense. Like I do just a half mile jog, just to kind of warm up a little bit. Then I stop and get my heart rate down. And then I run as hard as I can for like 30 seconds.

And then take about a minute off until my heart rate comes back down again. And then just repeat that so I’m running full on as hard as I can for 30 seconds. resting for a minute and I do that like six times. And then through interval training. Yeah, then a short jog to finish up.

Okay, so that’s what that looks like. The rest of the week. I do a couple other runs, where I’m going really slow. So it’s almost painfully slow sometimes. Yeah. And to keep my heart rate down to stay in that aerobic zone. Yes. You know, the fat burning zone, the, the place where you were like build your aerobic engine you oh my god, this is like the best way to build endurance is to run really slow. It’s really hard for people to do that though. They freak out because they’re like, man, I can’t run that slow all the time. But if you if you can get good at running in that aerobic zone, do your endurance, it just goes through the roof,

Chris Wissman
Especially if you regulate breath during it. And the yogis figured this out a long time ago. Like really anaerobic is just like a symptom of not being aerobic don’t I mean, iit’s not like a different state. It’s just like, oh, I’ve become anaerobic now.

Like the aerobic if you can control the breath during the aerobic process, the more you’ll be able to regulate your O2. And there’s a term I’m looking for specifically, Brian McKenzie talks a lot about this. And I’m excited for you and Jen to, to talk about the breath and maintaining our aerobic zone. Because when you come out of it, that’s that 20%, right that, that more chest breathing and more needing for more oxygen. It’s really, it’s a fascinating topic. There’s a lot of really awesome experts out there in regards to in regards to that. And Brian would encourage you to if you’ve never heard of him, check out Brian Mackenzie. He’s an awesome, dude.

Patrick McGilvray
Definitely, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for this episode, too. And, and just so people know, Chris is talking about Jen, who is your partner at human performance. And Jen and I are gonna be having a conversation about breathing soon, Jen is a breathwork expert. And she’s going to be talking about, she and I are going to have a conversation about breathing and running and how to kind of reduce stress using breath work, you know how to, you know, stay in that aerobic zone, using your breath as a tool for that. And some other things that blow she blows my mind when she started talking about breathing.

Chris Wissman
It’s really wild. Every time somebody comes out of her office, they’re like, dude, who is that? What in the hell, how does she know these things?

Patrick McGilvray
So I found that, like, the slowing down has been one of the best things that I can do to improve my endurance, you know, and, and here’s the thing that runners struggle with, they’re like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to be a slow runner, I don’t want to run that slow. But the thing is, in order to get faster, you got to start slow, or you got to really slow down, you can, as you become, you build that aerobic engine, and you become super efficient at that slower speed, and you’re incorporating some really explosive speed work. You can start ramping up your speed. Exactly, it’s going to be so much easier for you. Yep, oh my god, yeah,

Chris Wissman
Without a doubt, you know, you know, that threshold will get higher and higher and higher and higher than your, your efficiency of breath will be the same at a faster pace. And it will seem just as easy if you’re smoking be able to being able to push that envelope, which is it’s really cool.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so one of the issues that people have when they do this, but you know, Mark Sisson calls chronic cardio, it, you know, they get just into that anaerobic zone, and they just stay there all the time, every difficult is, or every workout is like, you know, moderate to difficult intensity, like every single workout is the same, there’s not enough rest and recovery period in between there, this leads to burnout, it leads to chronic stress, it leads to inflammation…

Chris Wissman
That’s the hardest thing ever, when it comes to developing a workout program for the general population, because most people are chronically stressed, right, we go as you know, we go through at Real Human Performance, we go through cycles, right, we’ll go through a heavy phase will go through an endurance phase, we’ll go through a rotation and a power phase and, etc, etc, with and they’re very strategically placed. One after the next so we can lead in these different zones.

But the problem is the the capacity takes takes quite a bit to get if that makes any sense to have the capacity to say do a heavy set of three on like a trap bar, squat deadlift, whatever you want to call it, or a heavy set of three on a push press, or a heavy sled boy, you have to be really a balanced human being to be able to go in there and, and push it like a corporate athlete, if you will. So that’s why my passion is really helping people understand their life stressors. Like you said, it’s easy to build on that. The foundation, like we’re talking about, has to be laid. And sometimes that’s hard to convince people to take the time to do. If that makes sense.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and yeah, and it’s building the foundation. It’s like the, it’s the foundation. It’s like the most important part. It really is. And then there’s this idea of like, periodization, you know, or like, you know, you know, just, you know, following like not only listening to your body and kind of like, if you need a rest day take it but also like, like a professional athletes, for example.

They go through these training seasons, you know, so they’ll have a season where they start out really slow, and then they gradually build in intensity. And then they, you know, get to this critical point they do whatever event they’re going to do and then There’s this period of rest, you know, where they’re not doing any, hardly any training at all.

And, you know, that gives your body a chance to, like, you know, rebuild on the inflammation to come down. And you get to do other things like spend time with your family and connect with your friends and you know, do hobbies and all these other things that you like to do that make your life worth living, you know. But again, there’s like this idea in that a lot of runners follow this, which is like you’re always training. So you’re always at, like, this intensity level of like, a seven or something seven or eight, you know, and just like, that’s how you do like, 100% of the time.

Chris Wissman
There’s a reason that athletes pay coaches a lot of money to design them periodization protocols because it’s keeping them from getting injured. It’s, it’s lengthening the lifespan of their sport, and, and then making money, right. So it’s, that’s the professional, I guess my point is the professionals do it like that for a very good reason. You don’t have an option, but everything is very crucial in that world. It’s there to make a living.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I can’t, I’m not a professional athlete. Yeah, no, right. But I can say from my own experience of years of like, just pushing it all the time, that I was stressed out, I was always I was inflamed.

I was, you know, addicted to carbs, carbs and sugar, like and glucose, like I was running on on sugar, you know, and I became, you know, I started gaining weight, and I started becoming, you know, pretty stressed out and inflamed. And just like, unhealthy as a runner, which is a crazy thing to think about, you know, because most people think, Oh, you run marathons, you’ve got to be like, the healthiest of the healthy. And it’s just not true.

There’s plenty of people out there that are just like me, like I was, which is like, just, you know, totally addicted to carbs and sugar running on glucose taking 18, you know, gels with them for a long run, whatever, right? And just like never, you know, always gaining weight, always under stress, and not understanding why they aren’t in perfect health.

Chris Wissman
Intention, man. Yeah, that’s exactly it. What is the what is your intention here? And then if it’s not, pure intention isn’t lining up. The results are lining up with the intention. There’s something wrong. And that sounds like that you’ve discovered that.

I had a similar thing. A couple years ago, on my birthday. I guess it was my 30th birthday. I started feeling really dizzy in a restaurant. I don’t know if I mentioned this in the last podcast, did I? I don’t think so. Anyway, because it was kind of a, like a eye opening experience. Got really dizzy at a restaurant on my birthday, I was under a lot of stress.

At the time, I was sleeping probably four or five hours a night, probably four coffees a day. Any element of life that I could think of I was getting stressed from I was trying to make a pretty extreme diet change. I was heavy, heavy strength training. It wasn’t like an 80/20. For me with a 20 strength. It was like probably four days a week of heavy lifting and very little aerobic activity.

So I ended up passing out in this restaurant and what looked like I wanted to anaphylactic shock. And no one was really, ever really able to give me any answers. I went to the hospital and got all the scans and the tests. And I believe that I just have had a total shutdown of my nervous system. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.

But it was just from chronic stress, right? It was just without recovery. And the body perceives stress. Perception is almost all the same, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional, or nutritional, or dehydration, all these things equal kind of the same thing at the end of the road.

It’s a hormonal dysregulation. It’s an end you can’t recover without setting down, getting out of that catabolic lifestyle, getting out of a catabolic state and resting. And so once I understood that, I didn’t really I, I kind of had to make a lot of changes. And that’s kind of why I was making mentioned on my being very cognizant of my caffeine consumption because I can become addicted to that very fast and I noticed my cortisol getting jacked up.

If I break that one coffee in the morning, and I start doing two a day. I know, like a weekend I’m like, oh, your mind tries to play tricks on you. It’s like yeah, it’s alright, you’re running low. Today, you’re gonna do a X, Y and Z, you should get a little extra energy and it’s fake.

And at that point, it’s not I’m borrowing and borrowing that energy. So and everyone’s different in that regard. So it’s just that the stress element of all this is, is, is of the utmost importance, utmost importance if you’re going to be doing any kind of activity, and it’s hard, man, that’s life right now, like, people have kids, and they’ll have really intense jobs, and they have to maintain relationships at home and at work and with their family. And so that the balance, yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, man, I mean, you’re talking about so many important things there, you know, and, you know, the stress that we put ourselves under. Even if we’re, quote, unquote, like, super healthy, like, you were like, I thought I was, you know, like, you can, that stress can really cause a chain reaction, and lead to all kinds of health issues, you know, you passed out in a restaurant, basically, because your body was just like, shutting down, you know, yeah.

And for a lot of people, like, I know, my experience was that I was, like, really inflamed, and just gaining weight, like crazy. And I couldn’t figure out why. And, and part of it, you know, was diet, but you know, another big part of it was, was stress and constantly putting myself under stress, whether it was from, you know, work or from relationships, or from, you know, the kind of workouts I was doing, it’s all related.

And that’s where you know, what I started talking about what you do and how you help people, Chris, you know, I mentioned, you take this approach, where we look at all these things. And that’s what I love, like working out at Real Human Performance. And I love your approach is because we talk about these things. And it’s not just about lifting the weights at the gym. Yeah.

Chris Wissman
I try to explain that to people that haven’t been in there. Like, how’s the gym? I’m like, wow, and it’s not really just a gym. I try not to get frustrated.

Patrick McGilvray
They’re like, well, you know, LA Fitness is cheaper, you know? Yeah. I’m just like, Yeah, I’m

Chris Wissman
Like, whatever. Just come in for a month and tell me what you think.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And so like, yeah, you’ve been such a big influence on me, honestly, like, this has been really, I’ve had an amazing health journey and health transformation over the last few months, in part by, you know, some of the things that you and I have been talking about some of the things that you have taught me, you know, I mean, a few years ago, I ditched the sugar and the carbs.

And I like, kind of went more of on a like a ketogenic type of diet. And, you know, and you and I talked a lot about that at the time, and I had a lot of great results from that, you know, and I remember one of the biggest results I had was that I was training for these ultra marathons at the time, and I’d really slow down my running.

But dude, I could run all day, because I was just running on fat. I was completely fat adapted. I was fueled by fat. And I could literally run, I would do these ultra marathons in the summer 30 mile trail races, you know, and I wasn’t breaking any speed records. But dude, I could run all day. And I was just doing like, for fuel. I was drinking water. And eating almond butter.

Chris Wissman
Yeah, like that was about you gave me some of those coconut balls that you had made back in the day. Yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
And so I was doing these fat bombs and coconut oil and stuff like that. So I learned all that. But then it got I didn’t I didn’t have the whole I didn’t have the whole picture. And I went back to like, you know, doing the carbs again. And, and that’s when things started to go kind of slippery, slippery slope, you know, started going downhill for me.

I started becoming more stressed out, more chronically inflamed, and started gaining weight. And the last few years have been this low decline of my health. And I finally had to just be like, dude, what is going on here? So thinking back to what we did before I’m like that worked for me and I had amazing results. I remember feeling so good. Back then I’m like, I gotta get back into it and become fat-adapted again. So that’s where I am today. And these last few months have been amazing, you know, I’ve lost like 35 pounds, dude. Yeah, dude, I’m not inflamed anymore. Like I can see my abs again.

Chris Wissman
So happy I can be a part of that. That’s frickin cool.

Patrick McGilvray
But one of the things that I really had to wrap my head around is that, you know, running is not a really effective way to just lose weight. You know what I mean? I was trying to use running to lose weight and I kept running more and more, and it wasn’t working.

But now I understand it’s more of a hormonal issue, you know, and, and once I figured that out, and then figure it out some of the stressors that I was putting my body under the weight, you know, just started melting off. Yes, and then you know, then there’s that period of time. After adaptation, you know where as a runner running on sugar, you got to switch over to being fueled by fat. So you got to get the sugar out of your system takes a few weeks. But then once you get to that point to that’s where the magic happens. And that’s kind of where I am today. And I love it.

Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah, without a doubt I, under that that stressful state that I was in I was I was fat-adapted, and I had all these benefits from it as far as like, no brain fog. And I just didn’t get hungry all the time, like you would in a normal eating scenario. But one thing I found out about myself with that situation was that my liver was under a lot of stress, and it wasn’t able to keep up because we can produce our own glycogen, theoretically, we don’t have to have a healthy individual doesn’t have to have carbohydrates, or sugar.

We can do all of that on our own. What I found out through one of my friends, Jared Ziegler to the living proof Institute, and that dude’s on another level, but that I wasn’t, I just, he just pointed me in a couple of directions.

He didn’t tell me very much, but I intuitively discovered them that I was not producing glycogen, my liver was really stressed. So I had to back off a little bit and then then really slowly reintroduce, and find what my kind of we talked about last time and metabolic type was. And I mentioned last time that I was more of a carbo type.

And I think that I’m more of a carbo type when I’m stressed, if that makes sense. Because, and I didn’t have the availability, I don’t have, I didn’t have the full life force to have all my systems working in synchronicity, when I’m under a lot of stress. And now with this recalibration of sleep after the break, and coming back, and then having a consolidated schedule, I can really tune all these things in.

So I guess that it kind of leads back to what we were talking about the ancestral eating type, you know, is understanding that and understanding that it matters, how we evolved, in what our ancestors had availability to eat. That is literally how our genetics are made up. And now, there is epigenetics, where you can change slightly, but we still have some kind of hardwired things, if you will. So that’s where it all goes back for me. And the majority of the people have access to heavy fat dense fuel. A lot of the times, you know what I mean? So whether it be wild game, or you name it, you know what I’m saying?

Patrick McGilvray
So, and I’ve been like, really fascinated by that whole topic lately of ancestral eating, which is yeah, basically eating what your particular ancestors ate, you know, like, when you just say like, the Paleo diet or something like that, that’s kind of a one size fits all for everybody. And everybody has their own interpretation of it.

Some people it means just eat bacon all the time. Some people just like just eat cheese, or whatever now. Yeah. So but if you can, if you can look at your particular genetics and your particular ancestral eating patterns and the things that your particular ancestor did. My ancestors come from Western Great Britain, Ireland and Scotland, mostly. Yeah, and so they were eating a lot of fish. And a lot of, they eat a lot of oats, they have these like oat cakes, which is something that they’ve been eating for, you know, a couple 1000 years.

Julius Caesar actually makes note of this in a document where he you know, he ended up in, in Great Britain, you know, any any came across the Britains. And he made this note of them eating these oatcakes. And so that’s something that my ancestors used to eat. And then, but obviously, it wasn’t highly processed, like that kind of stuff is today. And then, you know, certain game animals too.

Yeah, you know, so anyways, so there was this. So those kinds of things like you can actually look to your own history. And even within the last 500 years or so, is a good way to look your great grandparents or their great grandparent, you know, somewhere in that lineage there and see what they were eating, because we have some good records of that, you know, we even have, like recipes that people have handed down, you know.

Chris Wissman
And it’s worth testing. You know what I mean, to see how you do on that there is a good old brand out there, it’s called One Degree, they actually have a barcode on their bag, and it tells you exactly what farm their oats came from. So it’s like guaranteed glyphosate free. Cool, really cool brand, just side note, but yeah. So once you gain that knowledge, then you can look back and think about what they’re eating like you did and test it out and see if it works for you. A lot of times it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but it just depends on where you’re at. And your your journey of making these these changes. So I think it’s fascinating nonetheless.

Patrick McGilvray
I mean, it’s totally worth experimenting with, you know what I mean? Yeah, like if you’re if your ancestors are from, you know, the tropics, they’re gonna they’re gonna eat a much different diet and you’re, you’re going to be predisposed to, to thrive on a much different diet, then, you know, the Inuit Eskimos and the Arctic, you know what I mean? So yeah.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s, that’s, that’s really cool. And those people are probably exposed to, they’re probably eating fat, fatty fish, and then tropical sugars. So I think one of the misconceptions with fat adaptation is that we no longer use sugar. And that’s not that’s not the case really, at all, because we’re producing our own and we’re converting proteins, and we’re really in the training zone into sugars, right.

And especially for super catabolic, even our muscle. So it’s not like it’s this direct gear shift from sugar to fat, you know what I mean, it’s a constant mesh of different types of fuel. But just having the availability, to get the most efficiency out of that fat is what I think is important to understand. Because before we didn’t, we weren’t able to use it unless we were like, in this starvation situation, and you were just out in the wilderness forever, and you would have to burn your stored body fat. So forcing yourself to start using that is really, really cool.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and that fat is, is such a great source of fuel. It’s like a, especially if you’re an endurance athlete, because, you know, it’s, you know, glycogen is great for short bursts. If you’re a sprinter. You know, if you’re Usain Bolt you want to be you want to have those glycogen stores filled up, you know, but if you’re a long distance runner, or an ultra runner, you don’t need to have that added glycogen, you can get all the energy you need for that long distance running, just from your fat, it’s such a clean burning type of fuel. And you can you know, we have hundreds of 1000s of calories of fat just on our bodies, even the leanest of us. So we don’t really need to bring all the gels and sports drinks and all that stuff for those kinds of events.

Chris Wissman
Especially if you’re not going to train right the next day, like the majority of us are not, like you said are not professional athletes, right. So after you train, a healthy body can go without fuel immediately. And we’re you mentioned fasted workouts. I know a little bit more on waiting after the workout regards to, again, a healthy body, if you do your exercise or your run, you can wait a little bit and let the body do its natural hormetic process.

When we interrupt that hormetic process with immediate fuel, or immediate cold shower to blunt inflammation, then our body gets assistance. So you’re, you’re essentially taking away from that workout or that recovery of that workout a little bit.

If you’re able to wait a little bit, you know, take a walk after you’re done exercising, or if you’re done running, and then cooled down. And maybe that 60 minute mark could start replenishing. And if you’re gonna go right back at a hard one, the next day after training or something really serious, then you might consider the glucose then.

If you’re not going to train the next day, or if it’s going to be an aerobic day, a light day, you don’t necessarily need it, you know what I mean? So that’s a really interesting thing to think about as as people progress with their training as the as someone like me might be a little different because I struggle I have the opposite of struggle where I really don’t want to put on so I might need to go replenish right after and that seems like peachy rosy but it’s it’s a pain in the butt.

Sometimes they have to worry about how much fuel to put in. Before Patrick and I just got started was talking about since we’ve opened the gym back up. I’ve lost like 12 pounds and just sheer movement and activity. And so everyone’s going to be unique with generally speaking you don’t have to refuel immediately after.

And sometimes from what a lot of these guys are saying there’s huge benefits to going into a workout. Again, I want to keep stressing a healthy body going into a workout fasted. We’re talking all sorts of anti-aging effects, and then and then being more sensitive to insulin again, and tons of things, which I think is fascinating.

Growth factor and hormone regulation and testosterone production. And it’s really wild. And to be honest, you mentioned that in our note overview. I hadn’t looked at that a lot in a long time. And I thought it was fascinating when I when I started pulling this stuff back up and I was like, dang, I wasn’t sure I didn’t know about all that at least anytime recently. I wasn’t I wasn’t up on the research there. It’s pretty cool.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, a couple of things that I love about working out in that fasted state is number one, you produce more adrenaline, which means you actually work out a little harder. Then if you are working out in a fed state, okay, so number one you can, you can intensify your workouts and do some good explosive training. And it’s good for the long distance training too.

Number two, you produce more growth hormone when you’re in that fasted state. So you could actually like, you’re gonna get better results from your from your workout, and the recovery time will be shorter, because of that growth hormone that’s being produced.

Chris Wissman
It’s kind of like that hormetic response I was talking about, right? Like you’re not assisting your body in this process that it has to do. And it gets better at it, slowly.

Patrick McGilvray
And if you’re like trying to lose weight, working on a fasted state is a great way to really access those fat stores and start to use the fat for fuel, meaning you’re burning body fat while you’re working out. So it has all these amazing advantages. And it’s almost like cheating in a way. Because like, I know that there’s some professional athletes that did train in a fasted state now because it gives them that same kind of edge as if they were taking performance enhancing drugs. Yeah, without any of those crazy side effects.

Chris Wissman
It’s, you’re exactly right. I mean, the clarity you get sometimes on a fast is like, your body’s not working, it can focus on what your task at hand, you know, you’re not digesting food. And that’s like the big thing with going to bed. Without food in your stomach, the body gets a chance to do its thing gets a chance to physically and emotionally recover.

From all the standpoints of life, we always have food in our system, then we’re just constantly having to spend a ton of energy, I forget the percentage of energy spent on digestion versus what you think like, say you had 100 calories, I think 40 of them go to digesting the food. I’m not a big calorie person.

But just to give you an example, it is a huge working process to metabolize food, and to turn it into fuel. And the body gets hot. When you’re eating a bunch of food, like my body temperature will go way up. I can just physically feel like radiating heat when I have a lot of food to process. So just think about how much work that is.

So there’s a reason that all the ancient ancient traditions and religions have incorporated fasting for it since the beginning of time. Yeah, something we had to deal with, like the feast famine cycle, and we’re out in the wild. Like there might be times when we didn’t get it, and everybody talks about that. But it’s, it’s real. Like, there’s times we went without food for a long time, and are fine. Fine, totally fine.

Patrick McGilvray
You touched on something though, that’s really important too, also for long distance runners, that when you are constantly shoving food into your stomach while you’re running, especially doing these longer events, you’re spending a lot of energy digesting that food.

So energy and blood gets pulled away from your extremities from your muscles to work in digesting, especially for the ultra runners who are actually eating a lot of food like pizza, potato chips and stuff like that out there. So instead, if you can work out and do these longer runs in a fasted state, you don’t need to constantly be fueling your body. You’re not using all this extra energy that you need for your legs to be digesting all this food. I mean, it makes sense, right?

Chris Wissman
You know, it’s, it’s right. It’s exactly right. Yeah, I noticed I would watch I watch a lot of Ultras. I’ll watch the ones in Colorado, and in Meadville, and just something that I don’t I’ve never done one I’ve always wanted to so I end up watching him and these guys are like at breaks eating big pieces of pizza. I’m like, what are you doing?

Patrick McGilvray
I mean, I will totally tell you like I was eating so much. Like when I did my 100 miler, I ate so much food. And honestly, looking back on it, it was probably a lot harder than it needed to be for that.

Chris Wissman
You think there’s a better way to fuel what these breaks for people. And I don’t, I’m not trying to be judgmental, but I just assume there’s got to be some. Why is it that we just resource to junk at the brakes might excuse the excuses that I’ve heard is that we burned it so fast that it doesn’t matter. I don’t I mean, like you get a cellular response from everything that you’re putting in. So it’s like, is there something better we can be doing for these guys and you guys and gals at these checkpoints to not have to have all the garbage?

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, like I was under a lot of GI distress during that particular race for sure. A lot of Gi issues. In fact, eating anything became extremely hard like I had to force myself to just eat like salty pretzels or was just something to get the salt in and potato chips because everything else was making me like nauseous, you know? Yeah, and a lot of that has to do with just, you know, constantly having all that blood, you know, in your stomach trying to digest all this food that and it just it really upsets your stomach. So a lot, a lot of runners have issues with GI issues.

Chris Wissman
I wouldn’t doubt it. I mean, I touched last time, that idea of the disrupt somatic inhibition, and there’s all kinds of terms around it. But all that really means is all your organs are inflamed, so as a musculature, most muscular scope, musculoskeletal system around it, sorry. So you get a stress response in your gut while you’re in the middle of 100 mile race. I struggle with that.

Patrick McGilvray
And it’s kind of self induced, right? Yeah.

Chris Wissman
Yeah. Like you want everything on your side when you’re running 100 miles. Come on.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. I mean, and I don’t know what they I mean, there’s a different answer for everybody. But like, one of the things I experimented with, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, which is on these Ultras, I was doing almond butter, and I would get those like little packets of Justin’s almond butter, and they would be just be almond butter with some, like, maybe some maple syrup in there or something like that.

Yeah, so there was a little bit of sugar in there, but mostly, it was just like a lot of fat. And, and your and your stomach doesn’t have to work very hard to like, metabolize that. And almonds are already ground up. Yeah, but you’re using mostly your, your fat stores for energy.

Now, the sugar packets, you know, the gels like that are just like liquid sugar, basically do the same kind of thing. But they cause an amazing amount of distress and people in people. And but what they do is they you know, it’s like liquefied sugar, basically. And so you get this glycogen hit right away, you know, it’s like, your muscles can access that right away.

But that causes a lot of stomach distress for a lot of people. And so like on an endurance event like that, you can’t do that you can’t be sucking down this sugar all the time, because it will just, you will be sick to your stomach.

Chris Wissman
Yeah, then I did an adventure. I saw my Uncle a quite a while ago. But I remember I’ve never had one of those gel packs. And I remember tasting it. And I was like, whoa. Like the sweetness and the sourness from that it’s something I’d never experienced in my life, it was probably because I’m in the middle of this excruciating race. And my body hadn’t taken any calories. So it’s just like exaggerated. But nonetheless, I, I only had one or two during that race. And it was it was wild.

Patrick McGilvray
I mean, they work to deliver that glycogen like, you know, it gets turned into glycogen right away. And so it works to like, give you that quick energy. But that only lasts for 30-40 minutes, something like that. Yeah, you know, more like, you can’t do that for 24 straight hours, if you’re in long distance races, you know, or, I don’t know, maybe some people can. Like I said, it’s kind of different for everyone, you kind of got to figure out what works for you.

But once you become once you don’t need the glucose for energy, if you’re just relying on the fat, you don’t need to be putting all this sugar and all these carbs into your body. During these kinds of races. You could do some, like, eat some strawberries, you know, you could do Yeah, some some kind of natural forms of of, you know, dense nutrient dense carbohydrates, sweet potatoes as a great thing to have and something like that, you know, easy to digest tons of great nutrient dense carbs. And, and it’s more of a long lasting type of fuel.

Chris Wissman
Yes. There’s a couple of guys that are talking about and I’ve never experienced them. But I’ve heard really good things about something called ketone esters. I only found the production of them through like one company. This has been a couple of years back, but you really just rang a bell a fuel during races and I remember something called ketone esters. So I would maybe look at that. See what you think about that.

Patrick McGilvray
I’ll have to look that up because I have not heard that before.

Chris Wissman
The only thing I remember about them other than their name was how expensive they were.

Patrick McGilvray
I didn’t know that. Like there’s a way that you can like drink ketones somehow to like, kind of get your body into ketosis faster or something like that. But I haven’t really looked into that either.

Chris Wissman
The description was rocket fuel, so

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. Anything else you want to talk about before we wrap it up here? That’s been really awesome, by the way.

Chris Wissman
I think that’s about it, man. And I always go back to making sure that everybody is under the least amount of unnecessary load possible. And I think that’s something that anyone could just take a look at any element of their life and see where they can get rid of unnecessary load, or, or address unnecessary load. But again, whether it be food or relationship or dehydration, or lack of sleep, or lack of movement, you know, you all everyone knows what they could be doing better, you just have to sit down, ask yourself that, and just encourage people to do it, you know. So I think that’s it.

Patrick McGilvray
I love it. I love that intuitive approach to not just eating I love the intuitive approach to eating to, you know, what fuels you eat, what sounds good right now. But I also love that intuitive approach to physical exercise.

You know, if I’m feeling stressed out, or I’m feeling tired, this is not the day to go, you know, push it extra hard as a day to like, slow it down. Take it easy, or just rest. Yes. So I love that awesome man. Back Yeah, well, as always, it is so fun talking to you. And having these conversations, Chris, like I said, we just sit down, we just start talking about whatever it is, or know where it’s gonna go. But it’s fun today. So where can people like reach out to learn more about you?

Chris Wissman
Well, so we have Real Human Performance, we’re going under a little construction in the background as far as like digitally and all that because we’re just creating some new programs, the website is going to look a little different over time, or social media will look a little different.

Personally, I had to get rid of one of my social media accounts, which is drawing too much energy from me. So I went and resorted just to Facebook. And I’m gonna start jumping back on health wagon on Facebook and helping people with that. So I’m not on Instagram, but Real Human Performance is on Instagram. You can also go to our website at realhumanperformance.com. And you can check me out on Facebook, and I think it’s just Christopher Whitman. And I’m gonna start being a lot more engaging on Facebook with the information that I help people with.

Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Love it. Thank you again.

Chris Wissman
Of course, man. Thank you.

Patrick McGilvray
So good, right. Good, good stuff. I just love these conversations with Chris. Remember, we will be continuing this conversation in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So I’d love for you to join the group. Chris is a part of that group. And you can ask him questions there too. And remember, starting July 1, 31 days, no sugar challenge begins. It’s just a few short days from now. So join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, grab a few friends, it will be fun. Just search for the Running Lean community and join us. Well, that’s all we got today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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14. Sarah Buckley on the Myths of Strength Training for Runners

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Today, I am sharing a conversation I recently had with my friend Sarah Buckley. Sarah is a badass personal trainer, owner of Persist Fitness Training and creator of Run Strong Cincy - a strength …

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Podcast Transcript

Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.

Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host, and I’m the life coach for runners. And I teach you how to stop struggling, how to stop struggling and start getting results in your running in your weight loss journey in your life. And it all starts with managing your mind. And that’s what I created this podcast for. That’s what I teach you here.

I want to teach you how to manage your mind so you can create the life that you love, the life that you really want whatever that looks like for you. Today, I’m sharing a conversation I recently had with my friend Sarah Buckley. Sarah is a badass personal trainer. She’s the owner of Persist Fitness training here in Cincinnati, and she’s the creator of a program called Run Strong Cincy.

And that’s a strength training program that’s designed specifically for runners. It’s awesome. Now, there are a lot of myths around strength training and running. And today here Sarah breaks it all down for us. And she explains why strength training might be kind of misunderstood in the running community. Especially in the long distance running community. It’s kind of an eye opening interview.

Sarah and I discuss how managing your mind is the key to every good thing you want in your life from building muscle to overcoming food addictions to running a marathon. It all begins with mindset. I’m actually very excited to share this interview with you. So I’m gonna stop talking now. Here’s my interview with Sarah Buckley.

Today I am talking to my friend Sarah Buckley, about strength training specifically for runners. And she’s going to share a bunch of awesome knowledge with us today. Sarah, how are you doing?

Sarah Buckley
I’m good. Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate you having me on today.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so tell us just a little bit about you know, who you are and what you do?

Sarah Buckley
Sure. So I am a strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer. I have been in the business going on nine years. And I own Persist Fitness. That’s my business. And I work with a lot of runners. I’ve been working with runners my entire career as a personal trainer, and I have a significant running history myself, which is why I feel very passionate about working with that population. You know, I have been running since I was little. I competed in college, did the marathon half marathon kind of stuff post grad. And when I moved to Cincinnati, I didn’t know anybody. And so of course, my running community was the first place that I plugged in. And as they say the rest is history.

Patrick McGilvray
So what is it about? Well, like why do runners come to see you? What do you see? Is there kind of some of the main issues that they come to see you?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, so I actually kind of accidentally developed this program, when I was training for, you know, half marathon marathon and triathlons and I started playing around with my own strength programming. Because I was having a resource issue. And that resource was time, I had to get my mileage in. And I love lifting weights. So I didn’t want to quit.

And I also understood how beneficial it would be for my health and my performance to continue lifting. So I started to really take a critical look at my programming and my exercise choice. So that every single movement and every single exercise that I was doing was giving me the absolute highest return for my health and performance as a runner.

And so that program started out as me working with myself and then bringing in the rest of my running community. I have probably trained over 100 runners easily in the past six years, and I have a really strong group that has stuck with me. And so yeah, we are focused on health and performance and optimizing those two, while also accounting for your running programs. So You know, you have your miles on X, Y and Z days, you are tapering for this specific race and the strength. Part of your training runs directly alongside that as a complementary, rather than a competitor story, kind of part of your training.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I think that’s good that you have that perspective as a seasoned runner yourself, to be able to coach people and train them to get get to their race goals, because a lot of trainers are not, you know, half marathoners or whatever, and they don’t understand what it is to go through that training period, how you peak at a certain point, how you taper and things like that. And so having that knowledge under your belt, I think gives you definitely a great advantage to help people.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, thanks. I agree. And then just also, I think the running mind is a little bit different than some other athletes. And so I think having, you know, been an avid runner, having been both a competitor and a recreational part of that community for a long time, I really feel you know, connected.

And I feel like I’m in a unique position to communicate kind of the benefits. And I really deeply understand their why. And I can find that, you know, what I have to offer is really strongly connected to their why, it’s just a matter of having that conversation.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, when you’re talking about the mind of a runner, you know, I always say that running is 20% physical and 100% mental. And then I follow that up with saying like, and we runners were very mental, you know, we definitely have a different sort of mindset when it comes to goals, fitness, endurance, all that kind of stuff. We’re a little little out there sometimes. And we like it. We like being out there. Not everybody gets us. So and that’s okay. Yeah, we’re okay with that.

Yeah, so I know that there are some kind of myths or misconceptions about strength training, because I’ve heard a lot of people say things like, you know, you can’t build muscle while you’re, you know, training or as a runner as a long distance runner, you know, you don’t really even need to go work out at the gym and things like that. Have you heard some of these myths?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, definitely. And these are conversations that I have with my runners frequently. There’s a lot of information out there. And I think sometimes the strength conversation and the running conversation are happening in silos. So neither is really considering the like applications of the other, even though when we’re working with a real live human athlete, as an individual, we can’t operate in silos, because all of these things holistically are forming this athlete.

So for instance, the example of you know, putting on muscle because I’m like, way more, and then I’m going to slow down. That is something that I try to dispel immediately when I’m having conversations with runners, if you’re a beginner, in the gym, if you’re a beginner for strength, it’s very likely that you are going to build some muscle, you are your body and might actually recomp, meaning you might shed some body fat, and kind of put that weight that scale weight back on with muscle.

However, as far as the weight that you’re carrying, muscle is so much more valuable for your health and performance than that other weight is. So if you had to choose between the two, I would want you to have the muscle. And also of course, there is a point of diminishing return.

However, from a scientific standpoint, your nutrition number one and that’s a very important kind of separate conversation would have to be very, very dialed in for you to put on, you know, the maximum amount of muscle especially as a training endurance athlete, because those are kind of competing energy systems. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying you have to really be dialed in on quite a few different things to move that needle forward.

And secondly, muscle even if you’re, you know, just for general health, it is healthy, it’s safe. It’s protecting your body so it’s protecting your joints, it’s making you more resilient. You know, your organs are underneath. If you have some muscles in the front, you know, even like a fender bender, having some muscle in your structure can actually protect you from the world.

So it’s not something that we need to worry about. I’ve never worked with a runner who I thought needed to shed some of this muscle, you’re carrying too much around, in seven years.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s definitely one of the things I hear a lot people talking about. Or that, you know, you can’t build muscle as a runner like it just you’re, you know, it can’t happen, it’s impossible to do. Like, what do you say to that?

Sarah Buckley
So it’s not impossible, I think we said there’s some things that would need to be dialed in. And that would be a kind of a nutrition conversation. Just, you know, protein is something that builds muscle. And so if an athlete is interested in putting muscle on, there’s gonna have to be some, you know, kind of broad nutritional guidelines that would need to be followed in order to put muscle on.

That being said, there’s scientific protocols that basically do what’s called hypertrophy and hypertrophy is the scientific name for putting on muscle. So as long as an individual is consistent and over a long enough timeframe, so say, three to six months, depending on that individual, individual variables like age, gender, those types of things. As long as they’re hitting that rep scheme, and that volume scheme, they’ll put muscle on, especially someone who’s training age, meaning how long they’ve been strength training is low.

Patrick McGilvray
Okay, that’s awesome.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, we call those beginner gains, because you get super strong super fast, because everything is new. So your body is on the fly there. It’s adapting very quickly.

Patrick McGilvray
Hmm. And so how would this help a long distance runner?

Sarah Buckley
Great question. So when we look at the physical demands, kind of zooming way, way in on what’s required of the body to actually run? First of all, it’s very high impact. So most of us who are in the running role, understand that conservatively, every single step when you’re running is three times your body weight, plus overcoming momentum, plus overcoming gravity, and each leg is landing about 1000 times per mile.

So this is a quite a high impact sport, which is, which is okay, that’s fine. But from the strength side of things, we need to look at how we can stay safe when we’re constantly pounding, constantly pounding, and all sports are reliant on one major foundation, and that’s being able to maintain correct position for specific amounts of time.

So for endurance athletes, it’s being able to maintain proper and efficient running biomechanics for a very long time. So you have this high demand for muscular endurance. So strength training is absolutely necessary for an endurance athlete, because simply running does not put the appropriate external load on your body is necessary for a scientific adaptation to take place for you to actually get stronger within those positions.

And secondly, running also requires almost all of the different ways you could move your body, it requires single leg strength, it requires Single Leg level change, where you know, you have knee bending and hip flexion, those kinds of things, it requires both stiffness and mobility in your joints.

And it requires rotation, that’s basically all of the components of movement that the human body allows for. And it’s all happening in an extremely short window of time, over and over and over and over and over again. So if that’s not an opportunity for over usage to happen, I don’t know what is. So we have to train that body to be prepared to do all of these necessary biomechanical things to run efficiently.

And like I said, you might be, it might be an hour and a half, it might be five hours that you’re required to maintain these pretty high level positions of your body. And strength is the only way that you can get to that place.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, the way you’re describing this and the way you’re describing the mechanics of running, just makes it sound like it’s so hard on your body like how could you not want to be stronger? You know what I mean? Because it would just make you be able to absorb all that impact to be able to push through the the repetitive motion and get to, you know, you know, have a successful workout or a successful race because without the strength involved have, oh my gosh, I could see how this could be, I’m could see why a lot of people get injured.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t want to discourage people from entering into the running world, I think the running community is one of the best and strongest and most accepting and accessible fitness communities that is available. And I absolutely love it for that. But just like a runner, who goes from one mile to three miles and three miles to five miles, and so on, and so forth, until they’re running their marathon, you have to earn that mileage.

And I think something that people don’t consider is that they think, oh, running is just walking like, but faster. And it really isn’t that simple. It’s highly complicated. When you kind of look at it, you know, the way that I’m looking at it, I’m looking at it from a human body perspective. So I would love people to think about their strength in the same way that they think about their progression of mileage. Which is like, I’m not ready to run five miles, because I haven’t put the base work in.

Similarly, like, I might not be ready to run at all, because I have, I don’t have these kind of specific strength prerequisites, in order to maintain position, keep my joints healthy. You know, and especially for a starter performance aside, the main goal is going to be health and sustainability in the sport. And then we can talk about performance, once we have this pretty significant bass, similar to how a runner, you know, would approach their first say, half marathon or marathon, I don’t think as much work as necessary for maybe a 5k. But you know, the longer distances certainly.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, what are some of those like beginner type of injuries that you see people coming in with? Like, what is kind of the main thing where people are, are, maybe they don’t have the right mechanics, or they don’t have the right strength in the right areas, like what are you seeing?

Sarah Buckley
So I see a lot of kind of random knee and that it’s really nothing, there’s no diagnosis, but it hurts all the time. And it’s probably like arthritis, or bursitis, or tendinitis, these things that are caused from, you know, doing the same thing over and over again. And, you know, consistent loading on a joint the same way over and over again.

So I see a lot of joint stuff. So hip, knee, even like ankle or foot things, is probably the most common. And I have to say almost every kind of pain, I want to say injury, because a lot of it is more just kind of chronic aches and stuff like that is coming from upstream, it’s coming from the hip. And the hip joint is very special and specific to what runners need, it needs to be able to, you know, rotate in it’s ball and socket, but it also has to be strong through its entire range of motion.

Or else you have a very significant energy week, which is going to likely come out in the knee because the knee doesn’t really it doesn’t. Of course, it does something. But as far as when we’re talking about performance and health and running efficiency, the knee is kind of just like following up with what the hip is telling it to do. So the hip isn’t healthy and strong, the knee isn’t going to be able to kind of execute on that follow up, and so on don’t down the line.

Conversely, if you have a lack of foot strength and toe dexterity, it can move up the chain. And that’s when you kind of start to see ankle issues. And again, knee issues, shin splints, I get a lot of plantar fascia stuff. And I truly believe that just just even just gaining some general strength, not even specific to your sport, but just lower body strength, stiffness, and bracing and breathing capabilities in your core will take the load off of those areas.

Because truly, you know, our body is designed to absorb and distribute forces through our core. And when I say core, I kind of mean like, from your armpit to your armpit and down to your hip towards your other hip and then on your back as well. So your torso is your core. That’s where forces come from in your body and that’s where we can absorb them. So the more stiff and strong we are in our center area, the less our joints have to absorb. So just some general training in the beginning can certainly start to reduce, you know, pain and discomfort in our limbs.

Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And I know that there’s a lot of different exercises that people can do and different strength training circuits and things like that they can do to build up all of those areas and strengthen the hips and strengthen the glutes. and strengthen the hamstrings and calves and all this stuff.

And you know, you get the whole thing abs, whatever. What is like one exercise that somebody could do just like at home since especially we’re all locked down at home right now anyway, like what would be like the one thing you would say that people could do that would give them kind of an overall good strength exercise or whatever?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, great question. So for all of my runners, regardless of whether we’re in the gym, or if we’re quarantined at home, I prioritize strengthening our posterior chain, which is your back and your vectors, which are the muscles that surround your spine, and they’re responsible for protecting and keeping your spine stable, your low back, your booty, your glutes and your hamstrings, because those are a runners engine, and those are a runner’s brakes.

So those are likely areas where I see energy leaks. So any movement that is a hinge. So one example would be a deadlift, where you have a soft bending of your knees, and you’re pushing your hips back and your belly button down and kind of reaching towards mid Shin, you’ll feel your hips load up, because you’ll start to feel a stretch in your hamstring.

When we’re at home, something that works great if you have a little bit of equipment, you can just stand on a band. And you can hold the band on the outside of your legs and do your hands movement from there. But also, I actually just made gallon weights by using old gallon cartons that I just taped and one of them is filled with sand and basically dirt and it’s a little heavier and more dense. And then the other one I filled like three quarters of the way with water. And it’s a little bit unstable because the water sloshes around, and I secured it with duct tape. It’s kind of whatever. But it’s working for me right now. Awful items. But I think nailing a hinge pattern, being able to lengthen your hamstrings under load is the absolute first priority for any runner, I don’t care if you have been running for two days or 20 years, you have to be able to load your hamstring in a lengthened state.

Patrick McGilvray
And doing that you said to do these bent over hinges or the deadlifts?

Sarah Buckley
Especially, you know, if you were to Google ‘deadlift’, you’re gonna see somebody probably doing it with a barbell, but the movement is the same. And it’s you’re acting as your hips, if your body is a door, your hips are your hinge, and your upper body is the door and your legs are staying in the same place. So they’re the doorframe so your upper body is opening and closing your hips will be pushing backwards as your belly button going down, and you have a soft bend in your knee, that’s the biggest thing I see is that people bend their knees all the way and they do more of a squat, rather than being a very so think about your the knee bend that you’re looking for is the same knee bend that you would have on your landing. When you’re running. It’s not very deep. It’s a tiny degree.

Patrick McGilvray
Gotcha. Like would this be like a Romanian deadlift?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Romanian, or RDL or deadlift, do like the same thing, but different ranges of motion. So yeah, exactly. Patrick.

Patrick McGilvray
Cool. That’s good. I’ve done a few of those.

Sarah Buckley
Good. Yeah. Good for everybody.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, they suck. No, that’s actually a really, it’s a really good strength training any I’ve found, and from what I understand any type of squatting, like that is going to help a lot for runners just because you’re, you’re strengthening that whole posterior chain also, you know, you’re hitting the glutes, and you’re hitting the hamstrings and the calves and the hip flexors and all that stuff. So that’s all good.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, and I really like compound movement, meaning it’s one movement that checks a lot of boxes. Yes. Efficiently from like a weight loss standpoint, I really like it because it’s not ice. Like it’s not a bicep curl. Your bicep is like three inches of your whole body versus your RDL, your deadlift, which is literally recruiting all of your muscle fibers for your entire body. It’s quite a bit more of a workout. So from a resources standpoint, I really liked the compound lifts. Not that we don’t hit isolated stuff we absolutely do. But again, if we had to choose one, and we’re prioritizing, it’s gonna be the compound lifts.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and I think maybe a good rule of thumb for people when they do start going back to the gym, is to avoid the machines because those are very isolating and to do more stuff, just on the floor, you know, on the using the rig or whatever they got there, right.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah. And, you know, I don’t use a lot on machines, I don’t train within one specific kind of like program, I’m more of a hybrid. So I would consider myself working within a system where multiple tools can be brought in depending on the needs of an individual. So I will never say no to machines.

However, like you had said, they’re very isolating. So it’s unlikely that you’re going to get the benefits from a compound movement. And also, it puts you in a prescribed range of motion that may not be what you’re ready for, or be structurally what you have the capacity for. So I know a lot of people, particularly with shoulders that have big time trouble with machines.

So I would recommend having a coach look at your movement. Dumbbells are king for stability. I love using dumbbells. And I would recommend that over any machine any day, for any individual, except for maybe somebody who’s either doing like powerlifting or weightlifting, specifically, but even those folks are going to use the dumbbells for their accessories.

Patrick McGilvray
And I think what you just touched on something that’s so important, which is having somebody like watch you, that knows what they’re doing. And that can help you. I’ve seen some people the gym, the way they’re lifting weights is just terrible. And you’re just like, oh my god, you’re so doing it wrong, you’re going to hurt yourself. And we don’t want that. So having somebody to watch over you to help you to create the movement that works best for your body type for your shape for what your goals are. I think that’s so important.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think that kind of hits on another, like myth as well, which is where I hear a lot of my runners saying two things, one of the things that they say is that they want to get in shape before they come to work out. And then secondly, you know, because I think of, and I again, love the running community.

A lot of the reason that people are plugged into running groups, or become runners is because it is so social, and it is so supportive, and it is so inclusive, and I think you can find some of those same markers in group fitness type classes.

And when we’re talking about getting assessed and using your resources wisely, and getting kind of in shape, that would not be the route that I recommend for runners based on what kind of energy system they’re trying to train based on progressions that I would be recommending for them, because you haven’t been assessed on your individual needs. So we don’t know where you stand.

We don’t know what your strengths are, we don’t know where there’s opportunity to grow. And we certainly, you know, the emphasis is on the individual to say when they’re ready for the next thing. And all of those decisions can be made by a coach who’s working with somebody because the variables are, you know, they vary.

So it could be someone who’s coming off of an injury or could simply be someone who’s having a hard week at work and their stress is really high. And there’s really no value in continuing to stress that system. All the way to okay, you have a race in two weeks, so I’m tapering you in the gym. So that’s something that those kinds of circuit, specifically kind of timed circuit based classes, I don’t necessarily recommend those for my runners because it is very depleting to their recovery tank. And it is not adding value to their long term goals, because of the lack of assessment because of the lack of correct progressions and variations for themselves.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it’s really not a one size fits all, you know what I mean? It’s just like, it’s so individual. So individual.

Sarah Buckley
Communities are wonderful, like I said, for the workout, but when we’re talking about training, just like your training for your race. There’s a difference between going to a workout class and going to train for you, for yourself, for your goals, for your why.

Patrick McGilvray
That’s a very good point. Yeah, you touched on something else earlier that I want to kind of mention, which is you you said like doing these compound exercises are better for your kind of for your, like weight loss goals. And one of the things that I firmly believe, and I think it’s kind of one of those myths about running in general is like if I just run I’ll lose weight, you know, and when it comes down to it, running is not a very effective way to lose weight.

I think exercising in general is not a very effective way by itself to lose weight. The problem, a couple problems with it are number one, people tend to work out or run and then they overcompensate with what they eat. And so they’re just they’re negating any kind of gains they may have made at the gym or out on the road.

So another problem is that the main reason we are overweight, especially here in the United States is that we overeat. And the over eating has to do with, you know, social cultural things. It has to do with psychological reasons, hormonal reasons, but it’s mostly like there’s physical, mental and emotional causes that are sort of hidden, and that have kind of programmed us to be overeaters, you know, and no amount of running is going to fix that.

And so, you know, I tell people, like you have to address the underlying issues, if you want to lose weight and get to your, you know, natural weight, not everybody needs to like fit some perfect airbrushed model version of whatever people think reality is, but like, what is your natural weight, where should you be, if you’re not there, then we need to address those issues.

So you know, but I do, but here’s the thing, here’s where I’m getting to it, this long, roundabout way of saying it, is like running is a part of that, it is a part of staying healthy and staying fit. Running makes you feel good, you get that release of dopamine and endorphins and adrenaline and like it just it’s, it’s a good, it makes you feel good. It’s good for your mental health, it’s good for your physical health, it’s good to get outside and get some vitamin D, get some sunshine, how does strength training play into someone’s overall, you know, kind of weight loss goals for the people that are interested in losing weight?

Sarah Buckley
Sure, so just to kind of touch on what you just kind of left off with, with the running. The reason that, you know, I became a strength coach, and I push lifting the weights so hard and believe in it so deeply, you know, my, my tagline for my business is empowerment through movement is because I truly believe that pursue personal emotional mental growth far surpasses the physical gains that you will have in the gym.

And it’s a way to do something and to have success on something that you’ve never done before. And you feel amazing, you feel like a badass, you are able, you’re you feel very capable. And so there’s all these other, like high value, things, high value words that you’re getting from your lifting experience, that I think are going to again, we can’t work in a silo.

So from a holistic standpoint, that checks many boxes when I start to think about mental and emotional health. And I think, at least for me, I provide a safe, accessible place for people to come do those things. Because I understand like, it can seem intimidating. When you just go out on the road, you’re by yourself. Maybe people in cars see you but you know, you’re very separated from them.

Versus in the gym, you might be face to face with someone who you feel like it’s watching you. And so I think that, that that’s why I’m here to be on that journey with you. And that’s kind of the soft science things, and anecdotally why I believe in doing it that way. But the hard science absolutely supports that as well. So yeah, running in and of itself, weightlifting in and of itself, these are tools towards weight loss, whether you have just strictly an aesthetic goal or a weight loss goal that’s tied to help. Both are great.

So doing the high, you know, compound movements that’s recruiting a lot of muscle. You know, it’s just, it just makes more sense, wouldn’t you rather burn this amount of calories doing a compound lift and this amount of calories, doing 50 bicep curls, and only targeting one part of your body and the rest of your body now is not getting what it needs.

So and also it’s a great way to put on muscle and build muscle is to do those compound movements because you are using every muscle in your body. And so we know that having more muscle is helpful to weight loss. Even though you know muscle weighs more, I say it’s helpful to fat loss, because that scale number could potentially go up but your percent body fat is going to go down.

So that’s something that I was mentioning earlier. And so it’s the quality of the number that we see on the scale. And you’ll look different and you know your body is going to change. But the weight that you are carrying is working for you; it is adding value to your life every single day.

Versus on the other side. Maybe there’s risks that are involved with the weight that you are carrying. And so I think that you again, all those conversations need to be happening. That’s why I said this kind of nutrition is very important. But it’s kind of separate because we need to, you know, be talking about emotionally, why is this happening? It’s not just about eat this, don’t eat that, like, why are we eating what we’re eating? What, what history do we have with food? How do we address behaviors at a behavioral level? And those are probably just manifesting themselves in overeating, binging restricting those kinds of those kinds of behaviors.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and you know, I call that buffering. And that’s where you’re putting a buffer between your, your emotions and your and your mind, you know what I mean, you’re trying to stuffed those things down, so you don’t have to experience them, maybe it’s a negative emotion, some kind of feeling you don’t want to feel and so you just eat the whole bag of potato chips, or the whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s, or you sit in front of the TV and watch Netflix all day long.

And it’s a way of numbing yourself and feeling good, because you kind of it replaces that kind of dopamine hit that you would get from doing something like working out or running, you know, so it makes you feel good for a moment. But then when you’re done with that, but with that buffering experience, whatever it is, we finish the pint of ice cream, you’re gonna come down crashing from that, and you’re still left with feeling the emotions, and now you’re beating yourself up because you were you ate something you knew that was bad for you.

And it’s actually making you gain weight instead of losing weight. So, yeah, it’s, it’s just such a, there’s a, there’s a lot of factors involved here, there’s no like, you know, there’s no magic bullet. And here’s the thing, people want a magic bullet, they just want to be like, you know, I’m just going to eat these five things and work out three times a week and run three times, and I’ll be fine. Like, and a lot of times, that doesn’t work.

And they need to understand there’s so much more going on under the surface that they have to like, be willing to uncover and look at, it’s like these dark corners of our minds, and our emotions that we don’t want to look at. But once you start bringing those things up, you know, it, it’s not, it doesn’t feel good at first. But once you start to realize you can like feel your emotions and not have to eat over them or, you know, just, you know, sit around because of them. Like you can be such a more well rounded and healthy person mentally and physically.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, I’ve shared this with you before, but I have a long history of every eating disorder, disordered eating, those kinds of things, different behaviors. And I, myself, I worked on it, you know, big time in a kind of concentrated area, and then every single day, similar to other kinds of behaviors, you know. Whatever your age, I’m in recovery is how I would describe myself, like, you know, so there’s things to work on every single day. But you’re right, it’s so nuanced.

And, you know, for me, it has just been, you know, running, you know, I have a history as a runner, and now I’m more of a lifter, but those two things complemented, my, you know, emotional, well being journey. Because they’re unlike everything else, they’re very constant. You know, one mile is one mile, always. And it’s always, like, accessible to you, you know, even if it’s slower, or even if it feels crappy, you know, it’s still one mile.

That’s similar to how things are in the gym, you know, five pounds is always five pounds. And so, you know, and it’s always just a, you know, something else with running. I mean, I think some people are at the level where yeah, they are trying to beat somebody. And that happens in the lifting world as well. But you know, it’s a way for you to just kind of be with yourself. And also both things are really hard.

And I think it’s important for us to put ourselves in positions that feel really uncomfortable, even if it’s extreme physical discomfort, because that is going to train us to be unable to adapt to emotional discomfort and just be in our feelings, you know, mental discomfort feels like out of control. So, I really think that there’s so much carryover to physical training when we are dealing with like you said, those dark corners.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s such a good analogy to the you know, getting uncomfortable getting outside your comfort zone because that’s the only time you can actually learn that’s the only time you grow that’s the only time you expand your consciousness that you expand, you know that you grow who you are, and become you know, a different person when we stay in our comfort zone.

We just stay stuck in the here and now and that’s it and we can never grow and be you know, we have these dreams of like, here’s who I want to be I haven’t you know this person I want to be but I’m not willing to be uncomfortable at all to get there. Guess what? You’re never going to get there. And so it takes getting uncomfortable out on the road when you’re running, it takes pushing yourself farther and, and faster and running up that hill 27 times.

It takes going to the gym, and embracing how bad it’s going to suck for those first few weeks at start doing that, but the results on the other side of that are just so good and so amazing and, and it works with our feelings to let but like when we’re pushing down our emotions and not wanting to feel them because it’s uncomfortable.

We just stay stuck there, you know, in that emotional childhood, so to speak, you know, in order to grow and become an emotional adult, we have to be able to sit with our feelings, experienced them, process them, manage them, and that will allow us to grow when we get really good at managing our, our emotions, man, we can do anything, there’s really nothing we can do if we’re not if we’re willing to feel our emotions.

And I think we get so stuck in trying to stuff all that down. And we have all these excuses why we can’t do things like, you know, go work out at the gym or, or you know, run a half marathon or whatever, we have all kinds of excuses. You know, a lot of it just has to do with us not wanting to get uncomfortable with our emotions. It’s crazy, but this is really awesome. This has been a really cool conversation, Sarah just so cool.

So where can people like find out more about you? Or like, what can they do? I know we’re kind of in a situation now where it’s can’t go to the gym, but what can people do right now to connect with you?

Sarah Buckley
Great. Yeah, so even though gyms are closed, I’m still running. My run has been strong since the strength program over zoom. And I’ve had people who are good with it. And you know, the doors are open here. I’m welcome to have additional participants. We have a couple different times a day a couple different times a week to kind of accommodate everybody’s schedules right now. So you can find information about that at persistfitnesstraining.com You can also email me sarah@persistfitnesstraining.com. And, yeah, I’ll reach out to you ASAP.

Patrick McGilvray
And this is for anybody whether they live around the Cincinnati area or not, because you’re doing it on Zoom right now. Right?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, and actually, even when we go back to the gym, the way that my running program works is that it’s extremely flexible. So people can come in and be in the gym with me or they can train remotely. So there’s an opportunity for them to have programming delivered to them. And but we are still coaching, um, you know, we’re still communicating about their needs. And so, you know, kind of depending on where you are physically, geographically where you are in your fitness journey, those things will all be accounted for.

Patrick McGilvray
So you can do some kind of personal coaching and assessments over zoom with people, right?

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think it’s everything, of course, now it’s a little bit different with the assessments. So typically, I would have someone come in and run for me and do all of these things. But I’ve been able to do like, what’s something that’s very important for me is to look at as joint health, we talked about the hips stuff.

So that is something that I could get a pretty good handle on over zoom, just by directing people to move a certain way. I mean, I’ve been looking at, you know, human bodies move for seven years, and my hobby is exercising. So I, you know, I’m training with a bunch of people. So I’m looking at people move for like, many, many hours a week. So over Zoom, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn close to what we would be able to do if we were in person together. This is the situation we’re in.

Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, that’s cool. I’m glad you’re still offering this service to people because I think it’s really important. I think it’s important for runners to get stronger and to realize that it’ll only serve them in a positive way to, you know, get stronger and build that strength and muscle fitness. Yeah.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, absolutely. And similar to your running group, we have our community too. So you know, you get to see your people. Oh, and I forgot to mention that anyone who’s interested in joining, especially now when we’re doing during quarantine, I will be gifting you equipment that you will need because I understand people don’t necessarily have access to everything and I want to accommodate for that.

Patrick McGilvray
No way. What, you’re gonna like send them stuff like in the mail?

Sarah Buckley
I’ll send them something if they’re not in Cincinnati. If they’re in Cincinnati, I’ll come and drop it off on your porch.

Patrick McGilvray
Oh my gosh, that’s awesome. Yeah. You’re so awesome, Sarah. Hey, this has been really awesome. We’re gonna get you on another time and we’ll continue the conversation because there’s a lot of things I want to talk to you about here that come up here. Yeah. So we’ll do that another time. But in the meantime, you guys go check out. Persistfitnesstraining.com, sign up for one of Sarah’s remote classes. You can do it no matter where you are in quarantine right now. So awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Buckley
Yeah, thank you for having me on Patrick. I loved our talk.

Patrick McGilvray
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