There Is A Method to the Madness
This is a podcast where I will be discussing all aspects of physical fitness. I am an exercise physiologist and personal trainer and owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs for the last 25 years. My passion is health and fitness and I am excited to share my views, some stories, interviews and much more with you.
There Is A Method to the Madness
Please tell me you are in the 20%?!
Unlock the secrets to a healthier lifestyle as we contrast our modern sedentary ways with the active lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Imagine the days when people naturally walked up to 15 miles daily, and how far we've strayed to a point where 80% of Americans aren't even hitting 20 minutes of brisk walking each day. We'll tackle the consequences of this inactivity, from the rise of obesity to the disconnect from our bodies' inherent need for movement, while technology makes life easier yet less physically demanding. Tune in as we explore the natural high of dopamine and endorphins that our bodies reward us with through exercise, emphasizing how crucial it is for maintaining our well-being.
Fed up with the rampant "bro science" on social media? We cut through the noise by focusing on science-backed fitness principles, avoiding the sensationalism that often muddies the waters. The conversation covers practical health approaches, critiquing oversimplified solutions like blaming the food system for weight gain. Learn how making mindful food choices doesn't have to be about perfection, but about opting for the best available option in any situation. Listen to how clients like Jerry, Gina, and Gordon have found success by embracing flexibility in their dietary habits. We're here to simplify wellness and empower you with the knowledge to make informed, lasting health decisions.
Welcome to the Fit, Healthy and Happy Podcast hosted by Josh and Kyle from Colossus...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Welcome to. There is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell. I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Programs and I've been in business since 1994. That is a very long time.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and, most importantly, why things work. Let's chase the science All right. Before I get to all that, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group at Realty Pros. They are both. Their whole team is committed to providing the highest level of customer service and home sales. Give them a shout. Find out what your home is worth. 386-451-2412.
Speaker 1:I'm going to discuss some wild statistics today. It's really, really insightful. So let's look at some numbers that were just published by Michael Easter, who's written a couple books that I really, really enjoy. He is basically a scientist of sorts, gets into a lot of the social sciences and covers a lot in health and fitness and a lot of psychological issues as well. Anyway, great author.
Speaker 1:Here are some latest statistics. He's shown that, regarding our hunter and gatherer ancestors, they likely walked between 7 and 15 miles per day. 7 and 15 miles per day, they had 14 times more activity level than us. 14 times more. All right, and here's the kicker. Right here, this one blows me away. 80% of Americans don't get more than 20 minutes of brisk walking per day. 80%, isn't that crazy? I mean, we don't really need to do that much more research on why we have an obesity problem in this country, the worldwide, but I mean we lead the way in that. Unfortunately, it's not a category you want to be the leader of, but we are.
Speaker 1:So what really else do we need to discuss? I mean, it's pretty clear that we don't move nearly as much as we're basically designed to do. We are designed biologically, genetically. We are designed to work. We are designed to move. We are not designed as people, as biological bodies, to live the modern day lifestyle that we live. There's nothing more we can do about trying to change the way society is going. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of beautiful, wonderful things that technology is inventing. It's like anything. There are tools that we can use, and how we use them is what matters. So I'm not one of those that thinks that we just need to throw everything back in a box and go back to the way it were. I mean that would be absolutely ridiculous right come out that have saved lives, prolonged lives, prolonged the comfortable living that we can now live with today. So there are many great things that have come out of technology, but we have to understand that our bodies and that's the issue I like to deal with, this is my job, this is what I'm paid to do that our bodies are not designed to do what they do today. They are designed to move.
Speaker 1:So there are two problems when you look at this. The first problem is well, like I said, there's nothing we can do. Modern living has changed. We don't have to even roll down our windows in our car anymore. We don't have to lift up the garage door. We have automatic garage door openers, right? I mean, I can't really remember the last time I saw a garage door that you'd had to manually open, outside of the fact when power went out and you had to somehow get that garage door up by unlocking the bolt on it. I believe that happened to me. Well, I do know that happened to me. I'm just trying to think. When it was during one of the hurricanes many, many years ago, I had to find a way to open the garage door and take it off its tracks, so to say.
Speaker 1:So we live in a different society and every year we have to do less and less. We were talking at the gym this morning with some clients about like how different it was just riding in our parents' cars. I mean, the kids today would be mortified. What we drove around in, I mean, and that's just cars. We look at everything and it's changed Again. That's a beautiful thing, right? We no longer have to get out the old map and figure out how we're going to drive from here to Pennsylvania or from here to New York or from here to Wyoming just naming places. I go, or would like to go, to Wyoming, actually to visit my sister Mary would love to get out there.
Speaker 1:But anyway, we no longer have to do those things, right? We can just simply open up Google Maps. We can plug in the address and boom, it's right on our phone. I mean, it wasn't that long ago where we had those systems in our car, right? They weren't programmed to our phone yet. They were just the first GPSs that you can put in your car. Remember that? I mean that wasn't even that long ago, and now those things are obsolete. Heck, just speaking of things like that. Most kids today may not know that you can get the old radar detectors out and try to detect when a police officer has the radar out. There's probably still things like that, but that was high-tech stuff when I was in college and I mean now it's like silly to even look back and think the stuff that we called high-tech. So the world has changed.
Speaker 1:I think I have made my point. You probably are thinking of other points that go along with this. It's kind of fun to go back, but the reality is that's not what our body is designed for. It's designed to move. It feels better when we move, which is why, when we exercise, we get a dopamine increase, which is why when we exercise, we get endorphins in our bloodstream. All the positive hormones come out when we exercise because it's our body rewarding us for when we're doing what it is supposed to do. That's really what the body does.
Speaker 1:By the way, it's got its own internal system of positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. So if you go out and you get overstressed, you're barely sleeping because you're burning the candle at both ends and you go to bed super late and you're not eating healthy food. So your body's really, really stressed out and then maybe you're doing a little bit too much partying or things like that. You get up the next day and you're like, oh man, I feel like crap. Well, there's a reason for that your endocrine system, your hormonal system, is flooded with some of those negative hormones like cortisol and others, kind of making you feel like crap. Right, so there's this negative reinforcement that the body says man, I don't like you doing that. It's like, well, why? Why? Body Body says because you're trying to kill me. Because that's what the body thinks. And remember, the body's ultimate objective is what Does everybody remember? Homeostasis. That's what it wants. It wants to keep you alive. So it's going to reinforce all of the positive things that you're doing, for example, procreation, right, your body says, oh, that's what we're here to do. We have to do this. There's reward centers for all of these things. So exercise is one of those things. This is what we're supposed to do and it's also quite simple.
Speaker 1:Let's just go back to what Michael Easter's statistics said. He was talking about how much more activity our hunter-gatherers, ancestors, had in the form of just steps, walking, covered, things like that. 20 minutes a day. 20 minutes a day. 80% of our population is not doing. I mean 20 minutes a day compared to 7 to 15 miles. So in 20 minutes you might get oh, I don't know, I mean some people might get 2,000 steps in that. So that's a mile, I mean, you know. I mean some people might get a little more, of course, but you know we're talking a mile. I mean, you know. I mean some people might get a little more, of course, but you know we're talking a mile. And most people aren't willing to do that. I'm saying willing because they're not doing it. It's not like people are forced to sit on the couch so they're not willing to. So it's not complicated. So what's the problem? I'm asking you that.
Speaker 1:You know, if you're listening to this in your car, a lot of people tell me they listen to this when they exercise. I want you to think about that. I think a lot of us have ideas. I always say that people try to overcomplicate everything. I mean I've said before on this podcast, but I'm never going to sit here and assume everybody's listening to every podcast and know everything I've said. That would be quite narcissistic of me.
Speaker 1:So I have said before that one of the greatest compliments I ever got is that and this came from a client that I trained was that I took the more complicated areas and I made it make sense to them. So they were getting blown away. They were more into triathlons and running and stuff like that. So they read a lot of the high-tech stuff on training and they would get really, really confused. And I would look at it with them and I'd say, look, it's really about this, it's really about that. And they thought, oh, wow, that's great. And I like doing that because I consider myself to be a pretty rational thinker, I consider myself to be an objective thinker, and you don't know how many times that I've sat around and read some of the journal articles that I get and I laugh. I literally laugh out loud and I'm like nobody gives a shit about this.
Speaker 1:This isn't helping people whatsoever. I mean I get it. It's helping somebody get their thesis, it's helping somebody with their dissertation. I get it, but that's really all it does. I mean we are not going to learn that much more about physical exercise. That is going to help us take that next leap into fitness. We're just not. I mean we might learn some new things. I'm not arrogant enough to say we're not, but we're not going to learn that much more about nutrition and about physical exercise. That is going to help us with the root problem, and the root problem is people are simply not moving enough. The reality is we need to get people to do it. It has to matter. So the over complication of things is a problem. That's an area that I can help with. I try to fight.
Speaker 1:I mean, there are huge, massively big accounts out there in the social media world and I don't want to offend anybody, but the bottom line is people that would fall under the category of bro science and they are so annoying. They really don't have not the ones I know, they don't have this scientific education to even put science after their name, but they're kind of under that category of bro science and what they do is they come out with all these hacks of different things people can and should be doing, which could be anywhere from altering their testosterone levels with either doing it with their doctor or otherwise, or doing super hard challenges or cold plunges or all these different types of things that would fall under the category of bro science, but they really make it so stupidly complicated that I shake my head. I mean, the reality is you just got to move more and eat less if you're trying to lose weight, and if you're not trying to lose weight, you just have to eat, eat more. Yeah, there you go. You just have to eat, eat more. Yeah, there you go, rob, tell them all, eat more. You just have to move more and eat healthy. You know these comments that come around. I mean I, I saw it with this guy and and one of the people I follow, the non-bro science.
Speaker 1:I actually follow the science and he retweeted a tweet and, by the way, twitter, oh my goodness, it is just. I say it all the time to people that are close to me. I'm like, why do I get on there? Because I just shake my head and get frustrated, and it is just such a place where that can happen. Anyway, this person retweeted this comment of a guy who talked about going on a trip to Italy for eight weeks and he claims he ate more and he claims he exercised a little bit less and he claims he lost two and a half pounds.
Speaker 1:Now, this guy has a big following. I don't know what he is. He's not a bro science guy. He is just a person that a lot of people seem to know, and he tweeted it and then, of course, everybody wrote afterwards oh, that's because of the american food system. And he kind of was alluding to that. And then he said when he came back, within two and a half months, he gained his weight back and he claimed he was eating less and moving more, but he still gained the weight. Basically, what he was trying to imply was that the American medical community, or, you know, the FDA, was trying to kill him, basically, that you know we over here are being poisoned with all these foods.
Speaker 1:And look, there is no question that we need to do a better job over here in the United States and I'm not going to get here on a rant about that. But there's no question that there are foods that are allowed over here that aren't allowed in Europe. Nobody is disputing that. There's no question that there needs to be greater regulation, in my opinion, on food. In most scientific opinion, there needs to be greater restrictions on certain food processing and on certain food dyes and things like that. I'm not going to dispute that.
Speaker 1:But anybody that's going to sit there and say that they're hopeless, you know like oh, I came back and I gained, it wasn't even a lot of weight, like two and a half pounds, and I was eating less and I gained. It wasn't even a lot of weight, like two and a half pounds, and I was eating less. Oh, you know, there's no way I can be my best weight over here. I mean that's lame. I mean that's really, really lame. It's like okay, so maybe there are more processed foods where you are in the United States than where you were in Italy. Okay, this is true, maybe your eating habits were slightly better over there. But you can't tell me that. You can't take that knowledge, which he seemed like he knew enough to come back and eat healthfully. But that wasn't his point, right, he had an agenda, he had an agenda. Everybody has an agenda on social media nowadays and it's really not helping anybody. Like getting people to hate scientists is ridiculous, all right, it's really really ridiculous.
Speaker 1:The bottom line is and I'll repeat it I've been out of college now for 30 years, 30 odd years with my master's and all that. There is not any more information that we know now about nutrition and exercise than we knew then. The only difference would be in organics and things like that, because that just was not really a thing. Back then it wasn't talked about as much. Really a thing back then it wasn't talked about as much. But that's not really as far as the science that goes into weight loss and stuff like that. So there have been some studies on planting and things like that.
Speaker 1:On exercise, the only thing that's relatively new is more focus on the brain, in other words, the brain's perception of fatigue versus actual fatigue. But that's it. Like. We know how muscles grow. We know how fat cells shrink, we know how we get stronger. We know how the heart can go through ventricular hypertrophy and increase the cardiac output and stroke fire. Like. We've known these things. We know these things and it all comes down to consistent exercise.
Speaker 1:So we know what you need to do and it's really really not that complicated. We need to if we need to lose weight. I will repeat you need to move more and eat less. If you need to get stronger, you need to go to the gym two to three times a week. We know that there are many good plans out there. There doesn't have to be a perfect way that you strength train, but you do need to go two to three times a week if you want to get stronger. I used to teach my students all the time know what not to do. Never proclaim that you have the magic way to lift weights, the perfect plan to lift weights. I'm finishing my third book now and I'm making that very clear. This is a program that I have used for strength training. There are many others. There are many great other programs. Of course, this is the one that I've successfully used with people to work out two to three times a week consistently.
Speaker 1:You know I talked on this podcast a couple episodes ago about two long-term clients that I've had over the years Gina Millar with her husband, gordon, who was a client for many, many years as well Just not quite as long as Gina because he died about four years earlier and then Jerry Johnson, both of them clients for about 25 years. Programs that I've used for them to consistently come to the gym ironically, monday, wednesday and Friday both of them three times a week. Many, many, many years doing what we could do when they got there, know what not to do, following a program that absolutely works. Maybe Jerry was dealing with some swelling in his knee that day. Okay, we know not to go heavy leg presses that day, right. In other words. We know what not to do.
Speaker 1:There's not a perfect program. We don't have to listen to influencers and bro science and all these basic charlatans out there that are trying to sell you a load of crap. It doesn't have to be complicated, you just have to do it. And then the second thing is your cardio. We just have to move. There's not a perfect zone. Everybody's like, oh, zone two training, zone two training it's all over the internet now. Zone two, zone two. Zone two has replaced the HIIT training of five years ago, where everybody said, if you don't do HIIT H-I-I-T. High intensity interval training then you are not maximizing your cardio. And I'm shaking my head going not everybody can do that. It's like you find the type of cardio that works for you and you do it and you do it consistently.
Speaker 1:I always tell people to try to get in five days a week of cardio. Try to get in five days a week of 30 minutes, like that is your goal. You want to do more, do a little more, but at least is your goal. You want to do more, do a little more, but at least do that Hell. If you do that, you're doing great Because, remember, 80% of Americans don't even do 20 minutes right, so that's pretty darn bad.
Speaker 1:And then the final thing is eat sensibly. Eat sensibly, like I said, of course we can do a better job with regulations, but guess what? That's above your pay grade. That's above my pay grade, like there's nothing I can do. We can write letters, we can do these things Great but there's nothing we can do except make the best choices we can make.
Speaker 1:When did we become such a nation of blamers? You know it's the government's fault. I'm fat. No, it's not. It is your fault. You're fat. If you call yourself fat, it's your fault that things happen right that are in your control and you choose not to do them. And I'm not trying to fat shame or any of those things. I'm really just trying to make a point. It's not any organization's fault.
Speaker 1:We can all go to Publix or Target or Aldi's or Winn-Dixie, wherever you shop, and go in there and make the best choices. I mean it doesn't take Einstein to figure out that if you go to the produce department and you pick up a nice looking sweet potato, that it is probably a hell of a lot less modified than those gluten-free pretzels on aisle 17,. Right, I mean it doesn't take Einstein to help you shop right. I mean anything with a label and with a gazillion ingredients on the side is going to have more shit in it that you probably shouldn't be consuming, and there's nothing the FDA can do much about that if you're going to continue to pick up highly processed bags or boxes of food.
Speaker 1:But we want to blame other people, other things and organizations for our own choices. If you know me, you know that's always been one of the things I talk about in every walk of life, like rarely are there victims, rarely are there accidents, and when I talk about victims, I talk about in situations where people have had the ability to choose. That's what I mean by that choose. That's what I mean by that. Rarely do we have situations where people absolutely choose the absolute best right thing to do and they still gain weight and struggle with their fitness. I'm just keeping it in that arena right now because that's the arena I know something about and that's the arena I get paid for.
Speaker 1:So you're listening to this. I want you to think about what do we need to do Mostly? What do you need to do right? Because we can't change anybody else. We can only change ourselves. But you do have somewhat control over your circle of friends, right? If you have somebody that constantly complains that you know America just wants them to be fat, I mean, come on, how ludicrous is that? There are people that believe that, by the way. Or or throw in other countries. I mean, look, everything comes down to your choice with it.
Speaker 1:How do we convince people to do the walking, to do the weightlifting, to eat healthy? Get the D word out of your vocabulary Diet, eat healthy. Change your eating habits. Like, how do we get people to take responsibility for themselves in this area? I promise you, the clients that I've had the most success with absolutely do that. Sure, I'm there as a tool, I'm there to help. Or Ellen, anybody else that's ever worked at Maxwell's is there as a tool to help and to guide, but they've got to do the work. You know, if they show up to their appointment two to three times a week, that's a win. They did their part, we did ours. I mean that's a great thing.
Speaker 1:And the ones who have had success. When we say to them, did you do your cardio yesterday? They say of course, I went for my walk. I always do, I love it. Great, they're doing it and they're always. They're also the ones that try their best to make the best food choices.
Speaker 1:The eating part is hard. I get it. We're not always going to eat perfect all the time and there is no such thing as eating perfect, but we can always choose to do our best at the moment. That is always my rule of thumb. Like I'm not an extremist where if I go to a venue and they don't have certain foods that I eat, I'm not going to starve myself, I'm not going to not eat. I'm sorry, that's stupid. I mean, who wants to live that way? But I am going to make the best choice available. I'm going to look around.
Speaker 1:I might walk around the stadium a few times to see what kind of food trucks, to see what they got, and sometimes it's just man, there are not very many great choices, but you know what there is. There's the best choice of the non-great choices and I just think if we went through life doing that all of the time, maybe your friend takes you to Panera and you go okay, I'm going to make the best choice. Maybe uh-oh, god forbid the best choice. Maybe uh-oh, god forbid close your ears. Maybe they take you to McDonald's. Oh, my God you're going to not eat. I don't know. I mean, I guess if you don't have to eat, you don't, but can't you even make the best choice there? I mean, look, I'm not publicizing trying to get people to go to fast foods. My point is no matter where you end up, you can make your best choices.
Speaker 1:And I a hundred percent believe that if everybody made the best choice they could, and all of the situations they get in, they're going to be really, really well off, they're going to be good, they're going to be golden. You know? And Jerry, back to my old clients who just passed, jerry and Gina and Gordon, you know what? That's what they did. They made the best choices they could, day in and day out. Never perfect Neither am I. They made the best choices they could and it seemed to work pretty damn good. All right. So let's think about that today. All right. Now let's think about getting a new garage door. Does your door make a ton of noise? When you open it? It sounds like you're waking up the entire neighborhood. Okay, that's my garage door. It really is, and that's why Zach Hawk came over to help me with it. And that's what Overhead Door of Daytona Beach does? They're the premier garage door company in the Daytona Beach area. Give them a shout at overheaddoordaytonacom.
