Episode 488: Mark Sisson: How to Look 40 at 70 (The Real Secrets Behind His Age-Defying Body)

Listen to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XENYK73THs At 70, Mark Sisson looks better than most people half his age. In this Fitness Friday episode, I'm sharing an excerpt from our conversation where he shares the counterintuitive strategies that kept him injury-free and thriving while his endurance athlete peers broke down. We dive into the concept of metabolic flexibility, why he's now on a "campaign to eradicate running" and believes walking is the single best thing humans can do for themselves, and the "eat to live" mindset that can change your relationship with food. Mark Sisson is the OG of the ancestral health movement, creator of the Primal Blueprint, and founder of Primal Kitchen (sold to Kraft Heinz). His newsletter Mark's Daily Apple has been teaching people how to optimize their health since 2006, making him one of the earliest voices in what's now a massive wellness industry. What we discuss: Why Mark Looks Decades Younger Than His 70 Years The Injury That Changed Everything and Led to His Anti-Running Philosophy What Metabolic Flexibility Really Means (And Why He Popularized the Term) How to Access Any Energy Source Your Body Needs at Any Time The "Eat to Live vs Live to Eat" Mindset That Transformed His Relationship with Food How Orthotics Actually Weaken Your Feet Instead of Helping Them Why Modern Medicine Treats Symptoms Instead of Root Causes Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. 99designs by Vista: 99designs.com/jen20 http://99designs.com/jen20 – click "Claim my discount" to get $20 off your first design contest. Momentous: Shop this link https://www.livemomentous.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorDUIZz3psr1Qsq_n1yE8_6JTq_QUFabOO9lH65HDEXCIoJOPLj and use code Jen for 20% off Prolon: Get 30% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit https://prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift. Find more from Mark Sisson: Instagram: @marksissonprimal https://www.instagram.com/marksissonprimal/ Blog: MarksDailyApple.com http://marksdailyapple.com Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:07Jen Cohen?

  Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle Podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up.

• 0:31Jen Cohen?

  Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank our sponsor Momentous. When your goal is health span, living better and longer, there are very few non-negotiables. One of them, quality. And when it comes to supplements designed for high performers, nobody does it better than Momentous. Momentus goes all in on NSF certification, which means every single batch is tested for heavy metals, harmful additives, and label accuracy. And that's why they're trusted by all 32 NFL teams and top collegiate sports dietitians across the country. Here's the thing, they don't sell every supplement under the sun,

• 1:13Jen Cohen?

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• 1:56Jen Cohen?

  Mark, just quickly, is like the OG in the health and wellness space, in my opinion. As an entrepreneur, he had this thing called The Daily Apple. You still have it, by the way. Yeah, it's not like it's gone.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:07Jen Cohen?

  But it was, it started in 2006, which makes it almost like it's-

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Seventeen years old.

• 2:12Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, seventeen. And, and still one of the best newsletters that I've ever-

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:16Jen Cohen?

  -read. You're welcome. And Primal Kitchen, which is in my kitchen right now. So I'm just going right for the jugular. You look so good. How old are you?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I just turned seventy.

• 2:27Jen Cohen?

  You just turned seventy. Okay.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29Jen Cohen?

  You look like you're like forty. Your body is insane. What are you doing? I want to know everything. I want that, I want to know what your routine is, what your regimen is.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  You know, it's some genetics.

• 2:38Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  You know, you cannot discount that. I've been, I've been athletic my whole life. So I started a routine, a habit of working out daily in my early teens. It started with running, but I also started lifting weights in my teens. I've always been competitive, so the level of my athletics was, was such that I would be forced to dig deep and, you know, find the pain cave and all of the things they talk about right now. I chose to be an endurance athlete, so I chose to, first of all, I was a marathon runner in the seventies, quite a good one. And from there, I got injured after seven years of, of overtraining and beating myself up doing that. So I, I switched to triathlon. And so my first triathlon ever was Ironman in Hawaii in 1981. I went up from fourth in the eighty-two Hawaii Ironman.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  So I've always somehow been associated with a type of workout that is basically managing discomfort. You know, some people will play soccer and basketball, or I now play, you know, frisbee, ultimate frisbee. But in those days, I was just managing discomfort every day. How deep a hole can I dig for myself?

• 3:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  You know, and, and hopefully recover from it and improve as a result of it. So it was all about performance for me for the longest time.

• 3:46Jen Cohen?

  What's interesting is that like people who've done that for as many years, like you said, you started in the seventies. And like, your body doesn't seem like, I don't know, I don't know you on, in a very deep level. I just met you, but you don't seem like your body's broken down. Like you look like you're very fit, that you're still very active, you're doing ultimate frisbee. How did you even maintain that ability, given the fact that like, especially people who are runners like you?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:09Jen Cohen?

  Their bodies break down so quick, like after a while.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I'm now on a campaign to eradicate running.

• 4:15Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  We'll talk about that.

• 4:16Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I want to, yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  But you know, as, I think walking is the best thing a human being can do-

• 4:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  -for oneself. No, I mean, I I've lifted weights, so I've maintained muscle mass, I've maintained range of motion, I stretch a little bit, I don't do yoga, for better or worse. You know, we'll talk about diet, I mean, I think eighty percent of my physical, you know, results, my body composition as a result of my food choices, which is what I've written about for thirty years.

• 4:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  You know, it started with just real food, but then sort of morphed into paleo, and then primal blueprint, and then keto, and then intermittent fasting, so I've been at the forefront of a lot of these different modalities, or these different ways of eating that manifest themselves in improvements in metabolic flexibility and metabolic efficiency.

• 4:57Jen Cohen?

  You talk about that a lot, we're gonna talk all about the metabolic flexibility. I know that you're like, a big advocate for that, obviously, for good reasons, talk about that. By the way, did you start this, the whole idea behind that? Cause I always, whenever I like, click on something, or back when?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:13Jen Cohen?

  Like, I would always hear you talking about metabolic flexibility, and other people would say, when I was speaking to Mark, we were talking about, right?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  I mean, Rob Wolf and I popularized the term many years ago, and it just became, it became this way to describe a state of the body where you could access any substrate for energy that was available at the time, or necessary at the time. So, whereas most people spend their lives just being good at burning carbohydrates, right? They eat a lot of carbs, they turn it into glucose or glycogen, they work out, they burn that, they never burn fat, because they never get to the point where the body says, let's burn fat. There's always plenty of calories available in the form of glucose or glycogen. So metabolic flexibility describes, you extract the energy from the fat stored on your body, the fat on your plate of food, the glucose in your bloodstream, the glycogen in your muscles, the carbohydrates that are on your plate of food, the ketones that your liver makes in the absence of glucose.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  And, once you develop the state of flexibility, a whole world of like, empowerment opens up, where you're not tethered to appetite and cravings and hunger all the time, your day isn't dictated by when mealtimes are, you have all the energy you want all the time, for the most part. And, one of the, one of the side effects of that is you, because you're continually burning off your own stored body fat, you tend to have low body fat, which, you know, a lot of people think is a good thing.

• 6:31Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  And I'm one of them, yeah.

• 6:33Jen Cohen?

  We're both one of them.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  So, so back to, you know, how, how did I get to where I am today? It's, it's a combination of some initially starting with aerobic athletics, cardio, they call it in those days and, and, and then.

• 6:47Jen Cohen?

  They still call it cardio.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And transitioned over to weightlifting and speed and strength, which I think was the probably the right way to do it. And then recently have combined the two of them. So I'll, I was, you know, telling your husband, I ride a fat bike on the beach, a fat tire bike on the sand in Miami, do that at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. It's a brutal workout, but it's a lot of fun.

• 7:07Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:07Jen Cohen?

  That just all the resistance.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  It's all the resistance from the deep sand. And, but you know, the good news is you don't even need a helmet because there's no cars. The worst that's going to happen is you fall over because you're going so slow. You can't even.

• 7:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Keep the bike upright in the sand, so you fall into soft sand. I do that, I do stand up paddling.

• 7:23Jen Cohen?

  Well, how long do you go on the bike for when you do that?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Minimum of an hour and, and actually I'm, I have one in, in LA and I took it down. Yesterday I had an hour and a half ride down to Meskell and then down to the beach. And it was low tide and I, and I ride the low tide line down to Venice Pier and back, and then up to Meskell to finish. It was an hour and a half.

• 7:41Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  It's a great, it's amazing.

• 7:43Jen Cohen?

  I want to get, I want to get one of those bikes and do that.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm surprised more people don't. It's really one of the coolest workouts I can imagine. The bikes are very stable and sturdy.

• 7:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  And so between that and stand up paddling, which is my other sort of, I would say cardio, except my heart rate never gets above 130 when I'm doing stand up paddling. I can get it to 170 still on the, on the fat bike.

• 8:04Jen Cohen?

  Do you do e-foiling still?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  I don't, I, I sew my foil. So I, it's one of those things where I'm at a stage of my life where I'm managing risk better.

• 8:13Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And so I stopped snowboarding two years ago. I just don't have the need for speed anymore. And I was a, I was a avid snowboarder for a long time. One of the best weeks I ever had in my life, I took my 17 year old son at the time. We went up and did helicopter snowboarding for a week in, in northern.

• 8:29Jen Cohen?

  Like heliski, but hella snowboarding?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Snowboarding, in fact, we went with skiers, you know.

• 8:33Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  You know, Tony Horton?

• 8:34Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, of course.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  So Tony's a very good friend, so he and I.

• 8:38Jen Cohen?

  I'm friends with him too.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we went up to Michael Wiggly's place. Anyway, so, so that's like my. Idea of adventure is snowboarding in deep powder. Now that I'm 70 and I'm just relegated to doing going down groomed slopes in Aspen or, you know, Mammoth, I'm like, I don't, I don't need the speed. And if all I'm doing is trying to stay safe and scrub off speed, let me find something else to do. So.

• 9:00Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  So I did that with, so no more snowboarding for me. And then with the foil, it's great and it's, it's an amazing feeling. It's like snowboarding times five in terms of the feeling of floating and flying. But, you know, at some point, when you've done it enough times, you're just, you know, doing figure eights around a, a loop around a lake or around the ocean, it kind of loses its adventure.

• 9:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Nature for me. And I had, I had an accident on it that, that sort of made me think, yeah, you know, maybe, maybe it's not appropriate for me to keep doing this. So I sold my foil recently.

• 9:34Jen Cohen?

  So what, when was the accident and what kind of accident was?

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Uh, just, you know, it was, uh, I, I just had a long, for me, a long session, like 45 minutes. And I literally hadn't, hadn't touched the water once in 45 minutes, which is going back and forth. I thought, typical of, uh, skiers too, one more run.

• 9:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I'll make one more run. And on that last run, I did a, a tight turn and I got too high out of the water. And when you're out of the water, you lose the lift and the flight. And so it started to fall and with, with a foil like that, it's, you're riding a guillotine. It's a very sharp blade, the wing. So I kicked it aside. Well, I kicked it so hard, it flipped up and cut me in the back. So I, you know, I just said, ah, you know, that's, that's, that's the universe saying, this was fun while it lasted. And, you know, let's, what's next? You know?

• 10:19Jen Cohen?

  Exactly. Well, I have a couple of them in my, in my garage because my husband's a big foiler too. Did you ever do, by the way, any of those 100 mile runs or just marathons?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Just marathons.

• 10:29Jen Cohen?

  So you didn't do those crazy 100 mile?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I probably would have and could have, but by the time I retired from running with injuries, I was unable to do the kind of training that was necessary to do that. So I would have been good at it because the longer the distance was, the, the more efficient I was. You know, I was not a very strong, I was quite strong as a 10K runner, but marathon was a much better distance for me because I could maintain. Such a high level of my aerobic capacity.

• 10:56Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  For a long period of time. So I think, you know, I think I would have been good at ultras and now that now with the new, you know, equipment that they have, I have a lot of friends, a lot of friends who are wearing my shoes.

• 11:08Jen Cohen?

  Doing them, doing.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Training in, in my shoes for ultras and then wearing that, you know, their special trail shoes for, but, but doing nine hour rucking in the, in the mountains over steep terrain.

• 11:19Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Wearing the peluvas, wearing the toe shoes.

• 11:22Jen Cohen?

  So why would they be wearing them with the, with their training? But they're basically like, they look like five fingers. By the way, and you weren't behind five finger shoes back when. I thought you were.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 11:33Jen Cohen?

  So, cause that, that's what I thought that was your whole movement, primal this, that.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I was a big fan for the longest time, but it, you know, they, in my estimation, they sort of left a lot on the table, a lot, a lot of design. Uh, potential and a lot of other things that should have evolved with, with that technology. They never got around to. So I said, I said to myself, well, I'll do this myself.

• 11:54Jen Cohen?

  So when, are they like, when did they disappear?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  They didn't disappear.

• 11:56Jen Cohen?

  They're still around?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Of course, yeah.

• 11:58Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. So because why would people train in these shoes? They're called peluvas, guys. And they're very comfortable. And I will tell you something. They actually look cute on, even though they may look a little strange in the box or in a picture. Cause Mark's wearing a really nice pair. They're like, they're like fake leather, right?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  No, it's real Napa leather. This is.

• 12:15Jen Cohen?

  They are?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  This is actual leather, yeah.

• 12:17Jen Cohen?

  Oh, they're, cause they're actually cute. I think they're really cute.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:20Jen Cohen?

  And they are way better for your feet. It's called foot health, which we're going to get all into. Don't worry.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:25Jen Cohen?

  But you're saying something that like people are training in them, but then why wouldn't they actually run in them?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Well, at some point, we're gonna encourage running in these, but it's such a strong, a long transition. When you go from wearing restrictive footwear that's thick and cushiony and encapsulates and encases the feet. And you don't work the small muscles of your feet.

• 12:43Jen Cohen?

  Right, atrophies.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Uh, if the muscles of your feet actually atrophy. And so what happens is you put all that pressure and all the burden on the ankles and the knees and the hips. And that's why people get injured in that regard.

• 12:54Jen Cohen?

  Cause I have a lot of injuries from that. I had tons of ankle issues.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  It's.

• 12:58Jen Cohen?

  And my feet became flat because I wear orthotics in my shoes.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And when you wear orthotics, you're telling your. Feet, ah, you don't even need to work your arches out. We'll support your arches for you. You'll, we don't, I don't know, we'll, we'll get into this, but it's so, it's so crazy. So my ultra runner friends and some of my marathoner friends are now spending the day in Paluvas, doing their errands, walking around, passively training the small muscles of their feet all day long. They might even, they'll wear them to the gym and they'll do their leg work in them. They'll do sprints in them, anything that you would do barefoot, like if you're going to do barefoot sprints, you do this, but at some point, you know, if you haven't trained well enough to get your, those small muscles of your feet acclimated and adapted, you know, you can encounter, you can get some, some injuries. Now, there are people, myself included, I could run forever. I think my Paluvas, the ones that we make for training,

• 13:45Speaker 02

  are the best running shoes ever made. I've been doing this for 15 years. We just don't encourage it with new, new people.

• 13:51Jen Cohen?

  So where did the whole idea come from that like you have to wear like, for me, like all my feet are flat and, and narrow. So then they say, wear these orthotics and do all these things. And then like that, and then over time, those are the things that are probably causing all these crazy injuries.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  It's bizarre, but that's medicine. That's so podiatric medicine, podiatry.

• 14:08Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Like I would tell you, like I was in college, I was one of the best, I was the best runner with captain of the cross country team. And, and on the track team at Williams College, I sat my last year out with it, with chondromalacia with a knee injury. Because I was wearing Nike's thick cushioned trainers, trying to get 40 extra miles a week in, because I wasn't feeling the pounding. And because of those 40 extra miles a week, all of the stuff that, where it would have been my feet that say, hey, you know, slow down, stop, it's enough running for the week. When you bypass all that information, you send it up the chain to the knees or the hips or whatever. And so in my case, I got chondromalacia. Well, one of the, one of the cure, I was one of the first miracle cures with orthotics.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  In 1974, 75, I went back to running and racing because I wore these hard acrylic orthotics. Well, they didn't fix the problem. They alleviated the pain.

• 15:01Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  So I still wound up with the problems over time.

• 15:04Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  But, you know, for, so for a lot of people, if you're not fixing, and this is medicine, right? You don't fix the problem, you alleviate the symptom. That's, that's modern medicine. So, so if you have a, you know, if you're a podiatrist and you believe in orthotics, one of your, you're gonna want that, that approval from your patient, oh my God, my pain went away because of the orthotics. Thank you, doc. Well, went away for now, but it's just moving around to other parts of the body. And I'm not gonna say that some people don't need orthotics, but there's, your feet are born perfect. Some people, oh, I was born with flat feet. Jennifer, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I've got flat feet. How am I, I was born that way. You were born with perfect feet. You've just, the fact that you don't have a pronounced arch doesn't mean that all of the musculature in your foot,

• 15:48Speaker 02

  including the plantar fascia, doesn't work. It's just you haven't used it.

• 15:52Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  You've been encasing it your whole life. You're, you know, it's your parents' fault. They put you in these cute little, cute little shoes. They look so cute, you know, the little Mary Janes.

• 16:01Jen Cohen?

  They did look really cute.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  You know, and then you get to high school and you start wearing heels and you start looking, go, oh, that looks really cute. And then the next thing you know, you've got foot problems.

• 16:09Jen Cohen?

  No, 100%. And it's over, it's overuse over time.