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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 422: When You Stop Moving, You Start Dying | Mark Sisson, Born to Walk
00:55:04
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- [00:01]
Vicks
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- [01:22]
Jenny Uric
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Uric. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I can hardly believe it. I am so excited. I sent out a message on Instagram with a hope and a prayer. Mark Sisson, Founder of Primal Founder of You say paluva? Is that how you pronounce it? Minimalist shoes? Author of Incredible books. One just came out this week called Born to Walk. Welcome.
- [01:45]
Mark Sisson
Thanks for having me. Jenny. Great to be here.
- [01:48]
Jenny Uric
I love this book, Born to Walk. I love what you're doing and I know you sold Primal, but you know we were trying to get move away from the I read this book called Dark Calories by Dr. Kate Shanahan and I know you talk about her in your book. You talk about so many of my favorite people in your book, Michael Easter and Katie Bowman. But we're trying to move away from the seed oils and so I'm so glad. I'm glad you made the Primal. It's such a great swap and the shoe thing is such a big deal because obviously people are having injuries and we're just trying to be more solid on our feet. And so we're going to talk about that. But this Born to Walk book, the broken promises of the running boom and how to slow down and get healthy one step at a time. I took 13 pages of notes from it. It is a jaw dropping one.
- [02:31]
Mark Sisson
Thank you.
- [02:31]
Jenny Uric
I didn't know so many of this stuff. I didn't know so much of it. I had no idea.
- [02:36]
Mark Sisson
Well, you know, there's so many common misconceptions about fitness and what it takes to get fit and all of the things that we think we have to do.
- [02:44]
Jenny Uric
Well, what a blessing, because I hate to run. So I was like, this is great. My whole life I've hated to run. It hurts the inside of my teeth, which I've never said before. And I don't know if that means there's something like significantly wrong with my molars. But like, even in elementary school, you'd have to do that run. And we had this huge field behind our school and you would have to like run the fence line and that was the mile. And I hated it ever since elementary. But I have felt this pressure mark, that I should love it. And this book is about the amazing benefits of walking over running.
- [03:17]
Mark Sisson
Over running. Exactly. Better than running.
- [03:19]
Jenny Uric
Yep, better than running. And especially if you're like me and you're, you know, you're overweight and there's all these myths. So let's start here. I'm, I'm really thrilled to know this. You could say it doesn't actually totally help with weight loss.
- [03:33]
Mark Sisson
No, does. Go ahead. If there's more behind that. You were going to say something else.
- [03:36]
Jenny Uric
Endurance running does not help you lose excess body fat. Full stop.
- [03:41]
Mark Sisson
Yeah. Yeah. So look, so many people over the years have assumed that because so much has been written about running and, and, and aerobics and cardiovascular and calories in, calories out and calories and all the machines have been built around these calorie readouts. And so everybody's assumed, oh, my God, like the, the higher I get my heart rate up and the more I run, the more weight I'm going to lose. And as a result, like tens of millions of people begin a running program blindly assuming that they're going to lose weight. And I think one of the greatest disappointments of the running phenomenon for most people is they don't lose weight. They get frustrated because they're not losing weight. They get burned out because they're. Typically, running is too stressful for most people. Unless you're like a skinny ectomorphic person with great lung capacity and A high tolerance for pain. You should not be running. So this running boom of the last 50 years has been kind of carefully orchestrated, as in a perfect storm of, I think, misappropriated science. Anthropological stories around persistence hunters and our ancestors. The marketing hype behind thick padded cushion shoes that let you put in more miles conveniently and theoretically avoid injury. You don't, you actually get more injured as a result of those. But as a weight loss strategy, running has failed miserably. Now, across the board, some exercise is necessary in your pursuit of health and fitness and longevity. But, you know, we all know the best way to lose weight is to burn off your stored body fat. And 80% of that happens as a result of your food choices. Now, we won't talk a lot about diet here, we do in the book, but developing metabolic flexibility so your body preferentially burns its own stored body fat. That happens at low levels of activity. So if you walk, you're always burning body fat when you walk. Now, when you run, most people run at a pace that's far too stressful on their physical bodies, on their hormonal systems, on their immune system, sometimes on their digestive system. And what happens is people run and, you know, they get back from their 40 minute run or whatever it is, and they're all sweaty and they feel valuable, like, I just hurt myself for 40 minutes and I, you know, I broke through the wall and I did all this. But what they've done is they've burned off stored muscle glycogen, and that's the body's fuel for high performance activity. They haven't burned fat. You know, much of the book talks about the fat metabolism and how you can achieve that. But when you're a typical runner trying to, you know, go out there and run to lose weight and thinking that you're, you're sweating your weight off and you're melting your weight off, you get home now you've, your watch says, oh my God, you burned 550 calories. And your, your brain goes, yeah, but those calories were, they were glycogen. They weren't fat calories. We still have the fat stored on our body. We were going at a pace way too stressful to burn off fat, way too high a heart rate to burn fat. So we burned glycogen, we burned glucose, we burned blood sugar. And the brain goes, oh my God, like, if we do this again tomorrow, we're going to have to overeat tonight. We're going to have to compensate by eating more food. So Typically, people who enter a running program to lose weight find out that their appetite increases. And once in a while you somebody, you'll see somebody who's got a huge ability to overcome the hunger and all of the natural stuff that comes with that few and far between most people over the years. And you see this in the running community, like if you go to the starting line of a, of a major marathon. Yeah, the front row, the first 150, 300 people, they're skinny, they're trained, they probably should be running. That's probably appropriate for them. Most of the people in the back of the pack still have 10 pounds or 20 pounds to lose, or 40 or 50. And they entered this event thinking it was going to transform their lives. Well, it, you know, as a mental accomplishment. God bless you, that's great you did a marathon. But what did it do for your body if you didn't alter your body composition because you were always breaking down and running at too high a pace for your fitness level? And that's the issue with most people. They run at too high a pace. Now I'm suggesting, yeah, cardiovascular training is a very important thing. But we hear about now Zone two. You know, you talk about zone one and zone two heart rates. Peter Attia talks about it in his book Outlive. And you know, all of Huberman and Galpin and all the people talk about Zone one and Zone two. Most people when they start to run are already in zone three with their heart rate. So if you can maintain zone two and below in 85% of your training, you will burn mostly fat. You will develop extra little fat burning powerhouses. You build more of these mitochondria that, where, where the fat in your body actually burns. You'll develop more capillaries to feed those mitochondria again staying at this, what we call the fat max heart rate. So for most people, that's just a walking pace. You know, it might be a brisk walking pace, it might be 14 minute a mile, might be 16 minute minutes a mile. But most people would exceed their heart rate just breaking into a jog. So this makes walking a much more attractive way to develop aerobic capacity. And, and we can get into all of the other benefits, the, the way it benefits your feet and the kinetic chain. You know, 50% of people who claim to be runners get injured every year. And at any point in time, 25 of everybody who claims to be a runner is injured right this minute. I mean, the NFL does not have that kind of injury rate. So why would you do something that, that is catabolic, that tears down muscle tissue and preserves fat. Bizarrely, that it courts injury, that suppresses your immune system. Because when you train at this higher heart rate, because you're running instead of walking, you produce cortisol. And I think many of your listeners have heard about cortisol. And it's, you know, it's a sort of a necessary stress hormone. But if you secrete it a lot every day, in this case because of running too much too hard, it becomes a chronic problem. It promotes weight gain, it promotes visceral fat. You know, that, that belly fat that's so dangerous, it promotes the breakdown of muscle tissue. It does all the things that we don't want from a training program. So Born to Walk looks at like it first of all assumes that everybody wants to be strong and lean and fit and healthy and, and happy and enjoy their workouts and, you know, be productive in their lives, versus the assumption everybody has about exercise. Well, I got to struggle, I got to suffer. I have to sacrifice. It has to hurt. No pain, no gain. You know, if I didn't feel beat up after the workout, it probably wasn't a good enough one. It wasn't valuable. This book lays it all out and says, look, if you look at the clues from our ancestral history, our ancestors moved around a lot. They walked everywhere. They did not run that. To think that our ancestors might one day go, hey, you know, there's nothing going on this afternoon. Let's go for a five mile jog across the plains of Africa. No. Now people will say, well, but wait, our ancestors were hunters. They were persistence hunters, which was the basis of a book called Born to Run, which came out about 15 years ago. Well, persistence hunters again. They weren't running seven minute miles chasing an antelope. They were crouching and hiding and walking and jogging and sprinting a little bit and then resting and hiding and tracking and sniffing and doing all these things over two hours to track a beast to the point where when they finally, you know, cornered the beast, they could jab a spear in it and voila.
- [11:33]
Jenny Uric
Right, right. Yeah. They're not chasing an antelope. Yeah, you can't chase an antelope. You're not fast enough.
- [11:38]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, yeah.
- [11:39]
Jenny Uric
So that makes a ton of sense. It's more about the crouching and the hiding.
- [11:42]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, exactly. And it's about over time, over, over two hours. Now the antelope is frantically running from here to there. And, you know, our ancestral persistence hunters are smart and they're going, okay, you know, yeah, we can run for four minutes to catch up to where he was, but then we can rest and watch and wait. Anyway, so the, the point is, our ancestors did not run when they didn't have to. They didn't run daily. They didn't run like metronomically. You know, boom, boom, boom, boom, single space, it was changing direction. They were barefoot, so they had, you know, good stride pattern. You know, they had a well developed gait. So they weren't clomping with, they weren't heel striking down a pavement road. So this whole concept of born to run has been misappropriated by the running community and then by the shoe manufacturing community to suggest that we'd all be better off running. And I'm here to say those ancestors were able to run because they walked a lot. They lifted heavy things. They lifted boulders and babies and lugged logs and built shelters and climbed trees and did all of the bodywork stuff that we now go to the gym to do. And they sprinted once in a while. And I'm clear that sprinting is an integral part of human movement. In fact, the title of the book originally was Going to be Born to Walk and then in parentheses and sprint a little once in a while, but not born to run metronomically for an hour at a time, five days a week, and then wonder why you're getting injured. I'll stop right there. I'm rambling on. Jenny. I'm sorry. I get excited about this.
- [13:11]
Jenny Uric
Yeah, no, it's good. It's so good. It's such a. Like you, you read the book and you're like, so hopeful. Because I'm a mom, I've got five kids and a lot of people that listen in are moms. And I like to walk. And I could walk with any age child. I could put them in a pack, which is like rucking. I could put them in a stroller. I could walk with my kids as they get older. I could walk and talk on the phone to a friend. I could walk and listen to an audiobook, but I so often choose not to because it doesn't feel enough. And so this book is very powerful.
- [13:43]
Mark Sisson
That's a great acknowledgement that many people assume that because they can't run and they can walk, but since they assume that walking is not even close to running in its value as an exercise, that it's not even worth walking, it's not even worth going out the door. When in fact, walking is the quintessential human movement. The more you can find time to walk throughout the day, the better it is for you. So it's not about even just finding like, do I have an hour a day to walk? Many people don't have an hour to walk. Most do and I do and I love it. And, but those who don't take heart, take note that 5, 10 minute walks is probably better spread throughout the day than one 50 minute walk because you're moving your body, your body is designed to move. So this, this isn't about burning calories, right? This is about movement. Your body wants to move. So the more you move through space, the healthier you will be over time. Now, in terms of walking, ideally I would have people walk in, you know, minimalist footwear or barefoot on the beach or the, or the grass or something like that, as opposed to wearing the thick padded cushion shoes because again, two chapters dedicated to just what happens when you do that, right? But this notion I a, I want to give runners permission to walk again because I think if you're, unless you're an elite world class racing runner, you're better off spending a lot of your time walking or rucking like you do, or carrying a baby or a weight weight vest if you want to do that, because it's less traumatic on your joints. And every step you take walking is actually anabolic. It builds you up, it reinforces that strong kinetic chain. For most people who have, are wearing inappropriate shoes and they're running, every step they take, they're taking is kind of catabolic. It's tearing muscle tissue down. It's sometimes reinforcing bad, mechanical, biomechanical habits because you can't feel the ground underneath you and you've got this thick padded cushion underneath and you think you're running on clouds, but you're just bypassing all of this important sensory information that your body requires. So I want to give runners permission to walk again. And then I want to give everybody, particularly people who are listening to you, I want to let you know that walking is the best thing you can do. Don't think about calories burned. That's a whole different thing.
- [16:02]
Vicks
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- [17:24]
Mark Sisson
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- [17:30]
Jenny Uric
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- [17:31]
Mark Sisson
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- [17:54]
Jenny Uric
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- [18:24]
Mark Sisson
One of the things that you know when people are entering a new eating strategy, a new, what we call a woe, a way of eating. Particularly if they're keto or carnivore or they're trying to cut carbs. You know, some people get hungry. They tend to, if they're home, they tend to like, okay, I've got a snack in the, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to be hungry and I don't want you to be hungry either. But one hack is to go out, to open the door, to go outside and take a 10 or 15 minute walk. And you'll find that by doing so, your body starts to take fat out of storage, put it into the bloodstream, start to burn the fat as fuel. And that energizes the body enough to make those hunger that, that sort of craving that you thought you had go away for now and kind of hold off until the actual meal time. Lots of ways in which we can incorporate walking, you know, into our daily life. I mean, a lot of, a lot of the moms that I talk to now who take their kids to school, they either walk their kids to school or, and then of course they get the benefit of walking back or they, if it's a drive to school, they park, you know, a half mile away from school and everybody walks the last half mile. It's a great way to spend family time and get every, everybody in the family walking. People who work, you know, find a group who on the lunch break because, you know, it doesn't take an hour to eat lunch if you, you know, it takes less than an hour. In my case, I just ate lunch and I think I scarfed it down in seven minutes. Getting ready for this podcast, Find a group to go on a half hour walk around the business campus or around the, wherever you are. If you're taking phone calls, if you're. A lot of people have a walking desk, you know, they have a treadmill at their desk or a walking pad or some people have a long hallway that they can take calls in a hallway or go outside. I do a lot of calls while I'm walking. I sometimes reserve some of my calls for when I'm walking because I'm multitasking and it's tough for men to multitask. So that's the only kind of multitasking men can do is walk and talk. Yeah, but right, so lots of ways to do this now. Yes, I want you to go to the gym twice a week and lift heavy things. I want you to do two good high intensity weight training sessions a week, but not four, not seven. Two. Yes. I want you to find a way to sprint once in a week. Sprinting doesn't mean going to the track and running, you know, 100 meter dashes with your spikes on. Sprinting is anything that gets your heart rate up. That's an all out effort. So it could be on the treadmill in the gym, it could be on the elliptical in the gym, it could Be on the rowing machine, it could be on the assault bike, it could be on the rope pull machine, it could be jumping rope. There's lots of ways to incorporate this concept of sprinting that don't involve actual running sprinting. Right. But the concept is to give an allout effort at whatever you're doing. You know, just everything you've got for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, depending on how trained you are for that. And you obviously have to work into that. But. So now let's break it down. Let's go back. So now if you. All you think about is walk as much as I can, and that covers 85% of my workout strategy for the week. Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, stair climb, take the stairs instead of the elevator, park in the parking lot in the far corner. All these ways to move and walk. That all counts. And don't think about calories, just it all just movement. Just move, move, move, move, move. And then now you're looking at, okay, now I only have to find time to, like, go someplace for an hour, which is to go to the gym twice a week. And then that's my two big, you know, weight training workouts. And then once a week I can find whether it's again, jumping rope in the house or. Or if you've got a stationary bike at your house and going all out for these brief pulses of sprints. And this program will get you to 85% of your max performance in a much kinder, gentler fashion. That allows you then time to go throw the football with your kid or go rake the leaves with your kid or whatever it is, do the movement throughout the day. But you know, what happens is so many people, again, the running, it's so exhausting for most people that once they finish their run, they go, okay, I'm done for the day. I don't have to move for the rest of the day. I compressed all of that movement into that one run. I burned off all those calories. Yeah, I'm hungry and I've overeaten and I'm going to do it again tomorrow, but I don't have to do anything else for the rest of the day that involves movement, and that's the wrong strategy. That is not a strategy that promotes health, wellness, longevity, muscle mass, strength, and all of the other things that we say we want.
- [22:55]
Jenny Uric
I have spent decades of my life feeling like I'm coming up short, so I'm going to get emotional. I think the book is really powerful because it changes your whole view of, like, what's worthy. And I just think like, what a wonderful thing, Mark, like what an incredible book to put out into the world and to combat those myths you wrote. Gosh, I've got so many notes you wrote. If you are over fat or unhealthy in any way, you most certainly should be walking, not running. Sorry, this is not up for debate. So just like, what a thing that it changes my whole view of walking. The book changed my whole view of walking, even though I already like to walk and I know about walking and I read Katie Bowman stuff, but I always felt like it was like the second rate choice to running. So I mean, it's really a phenomenal book. You clear up the myths and then you spend chapter after chapter talking about the benefits of walking. It's good for, obviously for our immune system and it's good for our brain and it's good for depression and it's good for fat metabolism. It's good for our mitochondria, it's good for longevity. I mean, they're so, so many benefits. And you can do different things like walk uphill, backwards for a little bit. You can do different things to break it up and give it a little bit of variability. But what an enticing book, Marc, and so impactful. All right, let's talk about this. Let's talk about the brain. How about this? Swedish. Sweet. That's a hard word to say. Swedish researcher Dr. Anders Hansen reports that just taking a daily walk can reduce your risk of dementia by 40%.
- [24:33]
Mark Sisson
That's powerful, right? That's really powerful. Yeah, let's unpack that. So the first part of this is dementia is a late onset disease. So it happens to people as they get older and older. Now it's, it's happening earlier and earlier, but typically, you know, it's in your 70s and 80s that it really starts to, to impact. And it's your 70s and 80s when most people start to slow down. Why do they slow down? Because they have, they've stopped working out. They're not going to the gym because they're not strong. They're not walking because their feet hurt. They're not walking because they've got, you know, either back pain or they've got some, typically it's some form of pain, some form of sarcopenia, muscle atrophy over the years. And you know what I tell people is when you, when you stop moving, you start dying. So the subtext of this is move as much as you can, as often as you can for as long as you can. That doesn't have to be again training for and competing in a marathon or triathlon that doesn't have to be grinding out 40 or 50 miles a week. If you look at really old people in Asian societies, their movement is slow. It's Tai Chi, it's qigong, it's just putting the body through different ranges and planes of motion. The idea that movement and pumping blood through the body not at 180 beats a minute on your heart, but just making sure that your lymphatic system is working. Because our bodies expect us to move a lot, our lymphatic systems expect us to move so that we are able to move lymph through and clear out some of the toxins that way. So when you talk about lowering the risk of dementia through walking, it is through all movement. But walking is the movement that anyone can do and everyone can do. This concept that as you get older you earn the right to not move, right? You earn the right to sit on the sofa and watch soap operas all day or whatever it is, that that's your thing. That's not how longevity works and that's not how having a, a free and clear mind and great cognition later in your years, it requires this kind of movement. Now let's just go back and you, you know one of the things you said, you talked about depression, many people run and they'll claim, oh, but Mark, I run. It's so good for my mental well being, it clears my mind. Well, two things. First of all, those are the same people who when they get injured and can't run, go absolutely crazy because they're, they beat themselves up, they feel guilty, they feel like, oh my God, now my depression is really going to sit in. Walking does just as much for clearing your head and making you much more creative in your thoughts than running. So you don't need to run to have that meditative thought, thought clearing, anti depressive mentality. Unless you have so invested in the running concept that if you can't run, if you get injured or you get sick, then you, you know, your depression increases when you're injured. As a runner, how do you recover? You walk, right? Walking is, is available to every runner who's been injured. It's just that they somehow think it's not valuable. So this whole idea about brain health and cognition and sort of depression and anxiety, all of these things are mitigated by a nice walk outside in the fresh air, smelling the smells, listening to the sounds, not wearing metal banger head music on, but just being outside and Being in nature. It is again, not about calories. Forget this thing about. Well it's, I'm not, I'm not sweating that much when I, when I walk. So it can't be valuable. No, it is very valuable. And you know, in your case I would say the more you can find time to walk, the better off you'll be.
- [28:19]
Jenny Uric
Wow, it's so powerful. So, so powerful. I mean you will learn so much from this book. Walking stimulates something called divergent thinking which allows you to ponder numerous scenarios and solutions in a free flowing manner. A three phase study shows that a 12 minute walk delivers a boost in happiness, energy focus and self confidence. You talk about walking more than 1.8 miles a day. You have faster brain processing speed, better working memory for quick decisions. The bilateral hippocampal volume in the active group, 12% more. I mean this is incredible. It just goes on and on and on. It's such a worthy activity. You talk about the muscular skeletal system. So this is strengthening your bones and your joints and your connective tissues. Because falling is such a leading cause of death and injury once you hit a certain age. This is incredible. 43% reduction in sick days amongst those who walked a minimum of 20 minutes a day, five days a week. And it's a small amount of time. In some cases it's not.
- [29:17]
Mark Sisson
Well, because so many people don't walk at all, Jenny. So many people literally don't walk at all.
- [29:22]
Jenny Uric
Yes. Walking for as little as two minutes after a meal can help control blood sugar. I mean this is a phenomenal book. It's called Born to Walk. Okay, here's another thing you talked about. I thought this was really interesting, Mark. So it's like everyone is struggling, right? I mean if you look across the world, especially in the United States here, it's like. Or people are upset and they're stressed out and they're anxious. And I was like, oh, this is really interesting. You wrote, okay, so you're talking about sitting. Sitting is the new. People say smoking, but you said sitting is the new path to more sitting. Inflammation, obesity, muscular skeletal dysfunction and stupidity. Great.
- [29:58]
Mark Sisson
Had to say. It had to be said.
- [30:00]
Jenny Uric
It's a great sentence. I love that you threw in stupidity in at the end. But you wrote this stillness leaves our cells confused and agitated so that the energy we are designed to burn through basic movement and exercise can gets reallocated into overactive inflammatory processes and stress reactivity. And I just thought, Mark, maybe that's what's happening.
- [30:22]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
- [30:23]
Jenny Uric
In our world is that our cells is for our kids, for us. We're sitting, we're on video games, kids are on screens, they're sitting for homework. School days too long. Our cells are confused and agitated. I feel like this is probably the problem. This is like the main problem.
- [30:38]
Mark Sisson
It could well be. You know, people talk a lot about um, one of the benefits people say about running is, well, you know, I lost, I lost 10 pounds the first week running. That's why it must have worked. Now I plateaued, I stopped losing weight after a week. I haven't lost weight for the last two years since I've been running, but I lost £10 the first week. Well, that's partly because you've burned off that glycogen in your muscles. And for every gram of glycogen the body stores 4 grams of water. So you've sweated that out. The other thing is that it's the anti inflammatory process of doing something active from having done nothing active and decreasing the inflammation and inflammation. Systemic inflammation in the human body involves storing water, water storage. So part of the loss of the, of the weight was water weight, either in the glycogen stored in the muscles or from counteracting this otherwise inflammatory sedentary life. That's the cells confused like, okay, we have a certain amount of energy that we must expend every day and we're not doing it by moving. So we're going to rev up the, you know, amp up the amount of activity that we do that is causing reactive oxygen species, these free radical, what we call free radical damage just by virtue of trying to burn off some of this, this extra energy that we're not allocating to movement throughout the day. So it's a really interesting arena that hasn't really been explored that much. But the concept is there that, that sitting and doing nothing is inflammatory and that doing something reduces that, that inflammation. So I mean that's, that's basically the, the bottom line is that sitting and doing nothing is inflammatory and doing something active. And it doesn't have to be running or lifting weights, but just moving around throughout the day doing dissipates some of that untapped energy that the body has, is confused about. Sitting is inflammatory and it creates these reactive oxygen species, this free radical damage that then manifests itself as increase in sickness and illness. Metabolic disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease, all the diseases of civilization that we talk about, they're all rooted in inflammation. So those things that we can do to decrease inflammation are going to benefit us in the short term. We won't get sick today, and then in the long term, we probably won't get sick tomorrow.
- [33:01]
Jenny Uric
Wow. I mean, you just look at the kids, right, Mark? It's like, you know, the increase in all the sorts of different drugs that kids need. And they're just, like, struggling. Kids are struggling. And to say sitting leaves ourselves confused and agitated. Like, oh, and you even talk about how, for adults, the average western Westerner working in an office environment sits for some 13 hours a day, including commuting, working, and leisure time, sleeps for eight hours and moves only for three. So, so much interesting information in here. Sitting for just 20 minutes has been shown to generate a significant decrease in glucose tolerance and an increase in insulin resistance. Even brief breaks from prolonged periods of stillness can deliver huge metabolic, hormonal, and cognitive benefits. This means getting up and moving for just a minute or 2. Every 20 minutes of deep cognitive focus in front of a screen will help you. Ideally outdoors in the sunlight, fresh air, and open space. You talk a lot about getting outside in nature.
- [33:55]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
- [33:56]
Alyssa Blask Campbell
When it comes to raising kids, there's so much to consider. Things like, what do we feed them? When do we feed them? How do they sleep? What does it look like to raise kind kids? How does their nervous system work? How do I keep myself calm? What are my triggers? There's so much that comes into play, and we are distilling all of that information for you at Voices of your Village podcast, where we bring experts in the field of early childhood and education and psychology and across the board so that you don't have to comb the Internet for information. You get to show up and hang out and have shame. Free judgment, free conversations and insights into what it looks like to raise kind, empathetic, emotionally intelligent humans. I'm Alyssa Blask Campbell. I have a master's degree in early childhood education. I'm a mom of two, and I am walking this journey right along alongside you doing this work. Come hang out with me at Voices of your Village and we can dive into real conversations with actionable tips.
- [34:57]
Jenny Uric
You're 71, and I feel like everyone should listen to everyone who's 71.
- [35:03]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
- [35:03]
Jenny Uric
What do you have to say about life? And your experience was that you were that kind of runner and you regret it, that there were some good parts about it. But you wrote, oh, my gosh, Mark, with all these notes here. Because the book is so good. I mean, I want to find it because it says you would say, where is it? You're going to learn so much from this book. Okay. You were going to qualify for the United States Olympic Team trials.
- [35:28]
Mark Sisson
Yeah.
- [35:29]
Jenny Uric
That was your goal. I deferred plans for medical school to move across the country so I could train for a marathon and eventually qualify for the United States Olympic Team trials. And my peak, I ran more than 100 miles a week for nearly a decade. So this was the life that you live. You are a competitor. Marathons, Ironman triathlons. And you said, I have tons of regret and frustration about my journey as a marathon runner and Ironman triathlete. I have not run more than a mile in more than 30 years. But you look fantastic.
- [35:59]
Mark Sisson
Well, thank you. So one of the, A great example of the fact that running is catabolic, that it tears muscle tissue down. So I raced, you know, 5, 10. I raced at 140 pounds and I weigh 172 now. And I'm the same body fat that I was when I raced at 140 pounds. So I, I carry probably 20 more pounds of muscle. I mean, some of that's bone density, some of that is a little bit of extra fat to, you know, to accompany the percentage of body fat. But the point is, when I ran a lot, I lifted weights. I was, I was an early adopter of like, you got to get in and do the weight training and do all this. But I couldn't keep any muscle mass on. Running is catabolic. It ate up the muscle tissue that I was, that I was building. Now, the irony is I would have been a better runner If I'd weighed 130, because some of my contemporaries were in that 135, 10, 511, 130 pound category. And for a man that's like tiny.
- [36:54]
Jenny Uric
I mean, that's so skinny to be 5, 10 and 130 pounds, I think.
- [37:00]
Mark Sisson
I think Frank Shorter won the, the gold medal at the munich Games in 1972 in the marathon. And it was 5, 11 and, and 100, 132 pounds or something like that. Yeah.
- [37:10]
Jenny Uric
And that's what you're saying. There's a certain body type. And that's. I think the tricky part is, like, you do see people that are running and they are very thin, but this is like a small. Right. It's a smidgen of society that, like, their body is built for that, but for the most of us it's not.
- [37:24]
Mark Sisson
And they've chosen to do that. Look, when I started running in the late 60s and early 70s, the only people who ran were runners. Now, let me, let me sort of explain that there was. Because before there was Any. There were any books on aerobics and Cardiovascular Health. Like Dr. Ken Cooper wrote the book Aerobics in 1968, which indicated that somehow that when you got your heart rate up over a period of time, that it gave you cardiovascular strength that endowed you with some form of longevity. And people read that to mean, okay, the more I run, the longer I'll live. So that was the start of that in the, in the late 60s. But it wasn't until the mid-70s when Jim Fix wrote the book of running and when Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman at Nike developed these thick, cushioned running shoes, which, by the way, they developed so that guys like me, skinny guys with good form, could run more miles to compete on a world in. On the world circuit. They did not develop these shoes for overweight people to be able to go run with bad form and still get injured. So in the early 70s, the only people who ran were runners. So the quality of running was much better. When you'd go to a marathon, there'd be lots of people who ran pretty fast times because there were no overweight people who would ever have thought, oh, well, I'm going to go enter a marathon. That came later when it became this sort of bucket list item, this sort of life challenge, this somehow honoring Pheidippides, this mythological, you know, human who actually, actually existed. But you know, who, who ran from the plains of Marathon after a battle with the Persians, ran into Athens to tell the townspeople, rejoice, rejoice. We won. And then he drops dead. I mean, that's the story of Philippides. And that's. Everyone who pays 300 bucks to enter a marathon is thinking, okay, this guy ran 26, 22 miles and he dropped dead. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do that same feat. That's not how it works. And I got, of course, in that we. We lay out the full story of how that came to be in the book. But again, more of this misappropriation of history, of anthropology, of science, to create a running boom that should only have been appropriate for ectomorphic skinny people with great lung capacity, high genetic VO2 max, and a huge pain tolerance. Because running is not fun. You know, you might tell me, yeah, Mark, I love to run. It's. It's fun. I'm like, nah, you're lying. You like calling yourself a runner. You like having finished running. But while you're running, you're probably not having. You might be in the zone. You might be, you know, you might have your Moments. But for most people, you would not associate the word fun with running as a workout. And you definitely would not associate the word fun with racing, you know, with competing in a race. So it was this, this idea that early runners. Early runners, I mean, running as a sport has only existed in the last 150 years. Before that, nobody would have run. It was like, you know, other than sport, they're like, no, like training for life. No, life is tough enough. You know, milking cows and, and herding goats and climbing mountains and doing all the stuff that people do. So it's this distance running as a chosen advocation for the masses is a completely fabricated artificial thing that in fact does little to no good for most people who engage in it.
- [40:45]
Jenny Uric
Right. And furthermore, can cause injury.
- [40:48]
Mark Sisson
Yes.
- [40:49]
Jenny Uric
Immune suppression, all of these different things. So let's talk about the shoes. You have your own shoe company, which is cool. You just were show before we hopped on. Yeah, you were showing me. I mean, they are cool again. You got like, they're like, they're the five fingers wide, flexible sole, your ankle is involved, all of this type of stuff. But you have. I've actually not seen it before. It looks like a boot that you would wear with jeans or, you know, so you have all these different varieties, which I think is a really cool thing. It's called Paluva. And I'll make sure. I'll put the, the link in the show notes. But the, the shoe really, really matters, I think for kids. You know, we talk about the neurofeedback. I think that's an important piece. Like, know, it would be like going to play in the sandbox and going to play outside and there's all these sensory experiences and it's not the winter, but you wear gloves the whole time.
- [41:36]
Mark Sisson
Or it's the summer and you wear oven mitts to play in the sandbox.
- [41:39]
Jenny Uric
Right, Right. Yes. So you say you're blissfully floating along a cloud of muted proprioception. What do we want with our shoes and why?
- [41:48]
Mark Sisson
Okay, so we're born barefoot. I used to say, for good reason. This is. There was no reason. We're born barefoot. We evolved barefoot with these amazing organs, these appendages, these, These feet that we have, each of which has tens of thousands of sensors at the bottoms of them, designed to feel the ground underneath and to respond to it, to feel the tilt, the texture, the temperature of the ground underneath and to inform the brain so that by the time you wait, that foot, as you're taking a step forward, by the time the weight's on that foot. The brain already has all the information it knows it needs in order to orchestrate your kinetic chain. Now, what does that mean? Your kinetic chain is the connection. It's the alignment of all of the joints from the bottoms of the feet up through the neck. So the kinetic chain are these muscles and tendons and ligaments and cartilage and joints that move so that you can take a step either walking or running or jumping or dancing or whatever it is you're doing. But we need this input. So when you're barefoot, you get all this input. So then the brain knows, okay, I know exactly how much to bend the arch around this rock that I'm stepping on, or to bend or articulate, as we say, move the toe up or down based on the hole that I'm stepping in, how much to roll the ankle out a little bit. Because the ankle is supposed to roll, not sprain, but it's supposed to. It's a 360Gimbal. It's supposed to roll so that the knee doesn't take all of the stress and the torque of a sideways step, of stepping on a. A slanted hill or misstepping on a rock. So if the brain has all this information, then all of these important integral parts work to offset the load, to offset the impact trauma, as we would say, of that footfall. And they work beautifully. So again, the toes bend, the arch scrunches, the. The ankle rolls, the knee bends a little bit. And depending on how much roll there is, the knee might bend, dip a little bit more, the hip rotates a little bit. And all of this is a beautiful orchestration of this kinetic chain that requires the input from the bottoms of the feet. So you'll notice that if you are running down a sidewalk barefoot, you have perfect form because you know it's hard. You know that there's little pieces of rock or thing that you're going to step on. And every time you land, you land with a perfect gate. You land with a midfoot. You don't heel strike. You don't land on your heel and roll off. When you're running down a sidewalk or when you get on grass and you. And you take your shoes off and get on grass. By the way, there's a reason that when you take your shoes off on grass, you automatically smile, right? Because it's. It feels so right. Now, imagine sprinting across a football field that has a couple of gopher holes in it. Well, if you have soccer cleats on and you're. And Your feet are bound and you're sprinting across. You step in that hole, you might twist an ankle, you might literally rotate an. But if you are barefoot, your brain immediately feels the change in the tilt and accommodates all of that. So ideally we would be barefoot, but it's a wholly impractical for everybody. Look, we built this world around us that is concrete and pavement and hardwood floors and tile floors and marble floors and cobblestones and all this other stuff. So the next best thing is to emulate the idea of going barefoot with a shoe that allows for ground feel. So it's thin enough that you can feel the texture underneath, whether it's cobblestones or a crack in the sidewalk or a rock that you're stepping on. And it's wide enough so that your toes splay outwardly and they can move individually, which is why it's so important, I think, to have a five toed shoe, a glove if you will, for the feet. It's flat, so there's no drop from the heel to the mid foot or the toe. It's flat because you want a shoe to be flat. You don't want high heels. And by the way, don't stop wearing your high heels, Jenny. They look great. But when you're not wearing high heels, when you're not going out on the town, you want that calf muscle to be fully elongated. So you don't want to wear shoes that raise your heel up an inch or an inch and a half above the rest of your, of your foot. So you want a wide, thin, flat and then flexible. You want the shoe to be flexible enough to accommodate that cobblestone or you want to feel everything you walk on and it should feel good. With the paluva shoes that we designed, we have people go on walks the first time that they try them on and we, you know, we look for uneven surfaces for them to walk on. And we find like cobblestones in Europe, we call that foot candy. Like, it feels, it feels so good, it feels so sweet. When you're walking on cobblestones and you feel everything underneath. And every time you set the foot down, because you're walking, not running because you're walking, you're not putting huge like 7G forces on that foot, you're just putting, you plant the heel, roll off the big toe, plant the heel, roll off the big toe. And over time it relaxes, it realigns and it strengthens the intrinsic, the small muscles of the feet which then contribute to this more balanced kinetic chain that we all Seek.
- [47:03]
Jenny Uric
What a book, Mark. What a book. I mean, you will learn so, so much. You even talked about like that. You know, these shoes, they give you a false sense of security if it's one of the ones that's cushioned. And then over time you're getting injured and it's, you know, it's going back to the force and the shoe. You wrote this, which was really interesting about jogging. I'm so glad you included this. You wrote exercise physiology. Gait analysis reveals that most people naturally transition from brisk walking to, to a slow jog at 4.3 miles per hour, which makes a lot of sense, right? It's like at four is when you start to kind of, you know, you got to go faster. That's a 1357 mile. If you're running, pace is close to, or heaven forbid, slower than 14 minutes per mile. Okay. I don't even know. The whole point is that most people cannot run significantly faster than they can walk.
- [47:53]
Mark Sisson
Yeah, exactly.
- [47:54]
Jenny Uric
So just don't do it. You know, it's like, it's just a little faster. So if you're like, okay, I'm going to jog instead of walk, you're only going a little teeny bit faster.
- [48:02]
Mark Sisson
A little teeny bit faster for most people. And almost, almost nobody can run even twice as fast as they can walk. People say, oh yeah, I can run twice as fast as I can walk. No, most people, you know, they might be running 10 minute miles. And I'm guaranteeing you can walk a 14 minute mile or a 13 minute mile, the difference is so insignificant. And yet once you start going up and down and jiggling and heel striking and, and incurring four times the G forces running that you would walking. Now you start to court injury now it becomes, you know, it becomes stressful to the body. So again, it's, it's even more efficient to walk right in my walking. And by the way, I'm, I'm coming back from, I just had my hip replaced seven weeks ago and I'm like 100% recovered. The only thing I'm not doing right now is sprinting, but I'm 100% recovered. And, and how I did it was by walking, walking, walking, walking. And my, you know, my doctor says, and he, he agrees, it's like walking is the best way to recover from a hip replacement. And it's a total hip replacement, right? No physical therapy at all. Like zero. Visiting the guy and having him do all the manipulation stretch, just walking. And then I do my own, you know, I Have. I do leg days and I do some other stuff myself. But walking is a cornerstone of my recovery, and in so doing. And now I'm coaching other people now who are having hip replacements on how to reacquire a perfect gait. And it means either doing it barefoot or with minimal shoes because you want to reinforce a balanced gait from one side to the next. You don't want to be limping again just because one side, you know, either hurts because the operative side hurts or whatever. So I've been using walking as the primary recovery tool from his hip replacement. And it's. It's magical. I cannot tell you how impressed I am, first of all, at the medicine that went into creating this, you know, this little artificial hip where they literally, you know, they. They. They yank your femur out of your socket, they pull it out that they cut off it. Cut it off with a saw, they stick a thing on and put it back in. It's really pretty barbaric when you think about it. But. But to be. To come back and be like 100% back already because of walking, Right? So that's like the. Again, one more. And. And walking in the shoes. I mean, these are the. I don't know how many people are able to see you on. On your podcast here, but this is the shoe, right? That's the. That's the Paluva trainer. That's the. What we call the mesh trainer. It's got five toes, and it's, you know, I think it's going to change the way people look at walking.
- [50:36]
Jenny Uric
Mark, what a cool life you have. Wow. I want to read this really quick thing about sprinting, because I love that you cleared it up. Sprinting is a tremendous trigger for fat reduction because the pen. Okay, hold on. That's not what I want to read. Even doing a single sprint workout once every seven to 10 days, consisting of four to eight sprints of 10 to 20 seconds each, with extensive rest between efforts, can improve fitness and body composition better than miles and miles on the road. So you talk about that. People want to pick that up. This is on page 282. Sprinting is the single best activity for promoting rapid reduction of excess body fat. And this does not have to be running. You can sprint on a stationary bike, rowing machine, stair climber, elliptical kettlebells. It's going all out for 10 to 20 seconds, and then your recovery. It's a 6 to 1 ratio. So I just thought that was fantastic. There's also information in here about play. We're running out of time. But, you know, this is a whole group of people that are trying to play more and get outside more. And so you talk about play and how it helps with cognition. Play ideally in nature, spontaneous and unstructured. And this is just going to help out the quality of your life so much. You play Ultimate Frisbee, which I haven't played since high school, but I loved it. I loved Ultimate Frisbee, so I loved just reading about that. Mark, this is such an honor. You created Primal and you have written all these books and you have your shoe line and you came on our podcast. I am just honored and thrilled. Born to walk a life changing book.
- [52:02]
Mark Sisson
Mark.
- [52:02]
Jenny Uric
We always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?
- [52:07]
Mark Sisson
Oh, very interesting. A favorite memory that was outside, I would say. Building a. I was thinking about this the other day. I went to an outside, a YMCA day camp in the summer and I remembered I was focusing on when we built our, our camp, our fort for the next two weeks. We had to start from scratch and build a fort. And that was one of my great childhood memories, was all of the, the hatchets and all the stuff that we had to employ as like 8, 9 year old kids to build this, this structure that we were going to use as an assembly point for the next two weeks that we were in that, in that camp session.
- [52:50]
Jenny Uric
What an experience. Mark, this has been just the honor of my life. Thank you so much for being here.
- [52:55]
Mark Sisson
Oh, it's my pleasure. You're so sweet. And yeah, it was great talking with you. Keep up your great, the great work that you're doing.