314 Train Your Body To Burn Fat and Enjoy Life with Mark Sisson

"Everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur." - Mark Sisson If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, video, and more at http://lewishowes.com/314 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is episode number 314 with Mark Sisson.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. I'm so pumped right now. I'm in Vancouver, Canada. That's right. I'm having an incredible time. I just spoke at a conference called Man Talks. It's all about how to help evolve men, overcome insecurities and become better men in the world, better husbands, better fathers, better brothers, all those things. And we had an incredible time. Lots of great people came out. So thank you to everyone in Vancouver, who came out to wait in line for me to sign your book. We had an incredible time together, got to say hi to so many people that listen to the podcast. And I'm so very blessed and grateful every time I meet someone that listens to the show. So thank you guys for listening

• 1:14Speaker 00

  and for being a part of this incredible community. And I had the chance to sit down with an incredible man. His name is Mark Sisson. He's the bestselling author of The Primal Blueprint and one of the leading voices in the evolutionary health movement. He's a former elite endurance athlete with a two hour 18 minute marathon and a fourth place Hawaii Ironman finish. He's got a new book called Primal Endurance that applies the primal eating and lifestyle principles to the challenge of endurance training, helping athletes overcome the common conditions of burnout and carbohydrate dependency. And in this episode, we talk a lot about how to optimize your body and your health and your lifestyle.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Really how to eat, sleep and train in a way that will bring the most pleasure. Also the importance of rest and recovery and how to recover effectively, how to become Good at fat burning and he talks about how to burn fat constantly throughout all day long and how to become a fat burning machine by what you're eating and how you're moving. Why inconsistency in your workout and routine can help you. And best of all, how to look good naked. That's right. Everything and more in this episode with the one, the only Mark Sisson.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Welcome back everyone to School of Greatness Podcast. We've got a huge guest in, Mark Sisson in the house. Thanks for being here.

• 2:42Mark Sisson?

  Thanks for having me, man.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Appreciate it. I'm pumped. I heard about you, I think probably like seven or eight years ago when I started kind of getting in the blogging world, the social media blogging world and just kind of dipping my toes and you were a huge success already in the fitness space and you had a book out called Primal Blueprint.

• 2:58Mark Sisson?

  Right.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Or The Primal Blueprint, is that right?

• 3:00Mark Sisson?

  Correct.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  And I think you had like a couple hundred thousand subscribers at the time. Maybe this was 2009, 2010. But you were already kind of just crushing in the fitness space and as and doing very well as a blogger. And that's how I first heard about you.

• 3:14Mark Sisson?

  Right.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  And since then, you've got like tons of products in terms of you had supplements before then, but you've got about 20 something books, right? Uh, you've got food, products, training, restaurants, you've got everything, right? Fitness programs, you've just kind of expanded the brand, which is really cool to see. Uh, and you've got a new book out today called Primal Endurance, uh, as one of the new books. And I want to dive into what you just mentioned beforehand, before we started this interview is talking about your lifestyle and the whole philosophy and the approach to your lifestyle, whether you want to be an endurance athlete or have endurance in your life, or you want to put on mass, or you want to get lean, or whatever it may be.

• 3:54Mark Sisson?

  Right.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  You have a specific lifestyle that I've always been excited about. When you came in here, uh, you were talking about how I have the same stand up desk as you and I was like, yes, if I'm doing something that Mark is doing, I feel like I'm doing it right.

• 4:04Mark Sisson?

  Right.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  So I just want to dive into what this philosophy is and, and how you actually live.

• 4:10Mark Sisson?

  Right. So, uh, my main goal is to live awesome. That's the tagline. That's the motto of our company. Primal Blueprint, Live Awesome. And what does that mean? It means extracting the greatest amount of pleasure. Pleasure, enjoyment, contentment, fulfillment. You that's possible out of every possible moment. Now, there are going to be bad times, of course, but to live in the moment, to appreciate the now, to appreciate the relationships, to have fun when you're when you're working out, to enjoy every single bite of food you ever eat and not choke something down just because it's healthy. So, so it really revolves around orchestrating a life way of pleasure, of hedonistic experiences in the context of this, you know, modern world that we have here.

• 4:54Mark Sisson?

  Understanding that we sit here with hunter-gatherer genes that have certain sort of proclivities and expectations of us that we can meet either through natural means or through artificial means. And sometimes there's not a right answer, but it's about choices. So how do I make choices that serve me in the short term? That give me pleasure, that don't harm me in the long term? So it's sort of an overview of what we're up against here. But, you know, as you drill down, as you boil it, boil it down and distill it down to what does it look like? It looks like, you know, what are the types of foods that we choose to eat? That turn on genes, that build muscle or burn fat? What are the types of, you know, how much sun exposure do we get?

• 5:36Mark Sisson?

  That allows us to make vitamin D and get tan, but not too much so we get burned? How much sleep do we get? That, and by the way, sleep is a very pleasurable thing if you if you're willing to acknowledge that.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:46Mark Sisson?

  How much sleep do we get in a way that that reinvigorates us and allows us to to be creative on a daily basis? And not brag about how well we do on so little sleep, you know? So all these, you know, how do we use our brain on a regular basis? Beyond just the rote stuff of, you know, checking the the PDAs. But how do we do puzzles? Do we play games? Do we, you know, do we, are we creative? Do we play musical instruments? Do we learn a language? How do we use our brain? All these things make the totality of the human experience. And I love to look at all the ways in which we can choose these behaviors that manifest themselves as pleasurable, enjoyable, providing contentment and fulfillment, and and and build us toward a better human being.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  When did you start to? You know, take this on, you know, because you were a, was a triathlete?

• 6:35Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I was a marathoner in the, in the seventies.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 6:39Mark Sisson?

  And actually the late sixties and early seventies.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 6:41Mark Sisson?

  And, and from there went to triathlon. Um, I was always trying to, you know, improve myself. Optimize performance. Optimized performance. Using the tools of the day, which were pretty rudimentary. It's like, all right, run a lot of miles and eat lots of carbohydrates and you'll be, you'll be where you need to be. Well, you know, that's what, that's what we knew, that's all we knew, and it wasn't exactly appropriate. So over the years, I got injured, I got sick from the overtraining, from the diet, which was very highly inflammatory. It caused sort of-

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Pastas and breads or what?

• 7:12Mark Sisson?

  All that stuff that they said you had to eat.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  I had so many pasta meals, pizza meals, lasagna meals, the night before every game. And I remember just being so exhausted in every game. High school, college, pro, it was just like exhaustion.

• 7:24Mark Sisson?

  Right.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yawning. I would yawn so much.

• 7:26Mark Sisson?

  That's, that's a classic symptom of it.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Why am I yawning?

• 7:29Mark Sisson?

  Right. I'm supposed to be excited about the game and pumped up.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  I wanted to take a nap.

• 7:33Mark Sisson?

  Want to take a nap. Yeah, exactly. Uh, yeah, so, so we have these sort of old conventional wisdom technologies that we were using to, to improve performance theoretically. And they weren't. So, uh, I basically ended my career early prematurely. I was, I was too injured to continue running. Um, I was, my, my health had suffered. I had, you know, arthritis and tendonitis and irritable bowel syndrome, and I got sick a lot. And I had, uh, heartburn and, uh, hemorrhoids. And I was like a real wreck. I mean, here's theoretically the picture of health because of the training I was doing, but I was falling apart on the inside. So I sort of rededicated my life to figuring out how I could be fit and strong and lean and happy and healthy

• 8:17Mark Sisson?

  at the same time without being overly, you know, without too much struggle and sacrifice and suffering. You know, is there an easy way, an easier way to be all those things I wanted to be? That, that allowed me to have more pleasure in the moment?

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:31Mark Sisson?

  And didn't sacrifice my long-term health. Uh, so that's, that was the big shift in me. And it's, and it's been going on for 35 years and it continues to go on. So I, as, as soon as I made that shift, I started doing the research, I started- I mean, I wrote my first book in 82. Wow. On how to, how to train for triathlons. And even then, I was calling upon evolution as the main basis for how we train. And I was looking at the previous few years of, of triathletes. Cause in 82, there hadn't even been a decade of, of triathlon training. Wow. But I, I'd already recognized that we were doing it wrong. We were training too hard. We were, we were. Too many miles, too many.

• 9:12Mark Sisson?

  Too many miles, too much, too, you know, too much redlining the heart and the body. And, and, and there was a better way and an easier way to do it. So I started recognizing, recognizing that back in 82. And then it's even, even up until three years ago, uh, when I started researching the primal endurance book, I started thinking, well, you know, all of the science continues to show us that the old choice was probably a wrong choice. That reliance on carbohydrates and that, that intent of, of managing our glycogen stores in our muscles was kind of the wrong approach. And maybe we ought to come at it from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, which was how do we become really good at burning fat?

• 9:55Mark Sisson?

  And in so doing, spare glycogen. And in so doing, uh, unburden ourselves of having to take in so much carbohydrate in the form of pasta and breads and cereals and rice and crackers and cookies and all the other stuff. Sure, sure. And you're, you're 62, right? Yeah. Right? And you're like leaner than anyone I know. So how, what's the most effective way to burn fat? And still be strong? Yeah, of course. You know, uh, as we said initially in the primal blueprint, uh, and I've said it decades before the, I wrote the primal blueprint. 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat. So if you, there's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat. Really? Yes.

• 10:36Mark Sisson?

  So as opposed to, um, waking up, being hungry, having breakfast, um, being hungry at, at the 10:30 break, being hungry for lunch, having a snack in the afternoon, having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed, which is the sort of standard American approach. Like, uh, even the old bodybuilders would say, don't go more than. And three hours without eating, or you will cannibalize your muscle tissue. Right. That was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate, had to, had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to, to continue to, to work. It never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners. We are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat. And the, and the reason that we don't, as we go through life, is we present our, you know,

• 11:20Mark Sisson?

  you're two years old, you're eating cookies and crackers and mushed peas and all sorts of Ice cream and everything, yeah. All that stuff. And so your body learns to depend on, on glucose, on carbohydrates as a source of energy and never really gets to the point where you force it to burn fat. So what we do is we, we, we shift the diet around. It's not painful. You get rid of the breads, the pastas, the cereals, the crackers, the cookies, the candies, the sweetened soft drinks. Well, it does sound cannibalistic, doesn't it? But, but what you're left with is meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, um, some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, things like that. Those are great tasting foods if you eat them right. And, and they're real food. And they're real food. And you can use butter and lard and, and you can eat bacon on this, on this program.

• 12:04Mark Sisson?

  And what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in and just sort of forces gently forces your body to, to upregulate all the enzyme systems that access stored body fat and burn it and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often. So the first thing that happens is your appetite self-regulates. So now you, you, you, you get into this space where you become a good fat burner. You start to melt away. You're not as hungry because. You're not, and you're not as hungry because you're always carrying around a meal. It's on your thighs, it's on your ass, it's on your belly, wherever it is. It's, you know, that's, your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories. It says, I don't need to eat. I'm really not that hungry. Wow. Yeah. And, and that's. So empowering for so many people.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  But when you, you know, I was a, still love sugar. But I used to be really bad at sugar. I feel like I have much more in control. But I feel like when you're eating a lot of candy, sweets and sugar, you're never satisfied. You just want to eat more and more and more.

• 13:00Mark Sisson?

  But that's the.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Until you're sick.

• 13:02Mark Sisson?

  No, exactly.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm full because I'm sick now.

• 13:04Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. I mean, I, the stories of Lamar Odom eating four pounds of candy.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Four games?

• 13:10Mark Sisson?

  Games or whatever. Yeah. But, I mean, we are, look, we're all hardwired.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Look what he's had now.

• 13:14Mark Sisson?

  We're all, but, but it's sort of, by the way, sugar's a very addictive substance.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  So addictive.

• 13:19Mark Sisson?

  So, um, you know, we're all hardwired to seek out sweet things. That's part of that hunter gatherer DNA that we all carry.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 13:26Mark Sisson?

  That hasn't changed in, in thousands of years.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  So how do we shift our minds?

• 13:30Mark Sisson?

  So you, the, the first way you do it is, is you go from the craving, which is what you're talking about. Like you crave sugar, so you eat sugar and then that just promotes more craving and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle. You're actually producing sort of opiate-like substances that are, that are occupying receptor sites, that are giving you sort of a feel-good experience. So you gotta kind of be willing to, to get rid of that. So you get rid of the candies, you get rid of the sweetened beverages, the soft drinks, the teas, and you get rid of the carbohydrates that, not all carbs, but the, the breads that convert to glucose and the bloodstreams are rapidly. So now you've lowered your blood, your, your glucose experience on a daily basis.

• 14:11Mark Sisson?

  So now the brain is starting to get, yeah, I don't need to really get that much glucose. You know, I can, I can, the body is burning more fat. As a result of you being able to burn fat, you, you create these byproducts called ketones, which the brain loves to burn ketones and burns them preferentially. So you, you need less and less sugar to, you know, maintain clarity throughout the day. If you're, if you haven't become fat-adapted and you're a sugar burner, which is what we, it's not a derogatory term, but we use, we use a term to describe people who haven't become fat burners, that they're sugar burners. If you don't eat, it's true. If you don't eat for a couple of hours, your blood sugar dips because you haven't learned how to burn fat yet. You don't know how to access it. You can't take it out of storage and burn it. So now the blood sugar's low, the brain goes, I gotta go get some more glucose. I gotta get energy somewhere.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Some sugar or something.

• 14:57Mark Sisson?

  Sugar or something. So you have the bagel at, you know, at 10:30 in the morning.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 15:01Mark Sisson?

  Or you have the...

• 15:01Speaker 00

  It's amazing.

• 15:02Mark Sisson?

  Well...

• 15:03Speaker 00

  For an hour and then it's...

• 15:04Mark Sisson?

  No, exactly, but then you're hungry again. And that's the, and that's this vicious cycle. So if we can, um, you know, take the steps, we say it takes 21 days. That's why I have a book called The 21 Day Total Body Transformation. 21 days of this, uh, cutting these, these sugars and, and starchy, um, not starchy, but, um, simple carbohydrates, uh, out of your diet. And just focusing on healthy fats and lean proteins and, and, uh, and vegetables.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:31Mark Sisson?

  Uh, you get, you, your body just gets the message and says, I'm not gonna be getting that much glucose. I'm gonna learn how to burn fat and I'm gonna do it well, damn it. And, and it, and then it takes the fat out of your body fat stores. So over time, you lose a pound, two pounds a week, uh, and you trend toward your ideal body composition.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 15:48Mark Sisson?

  So, all of this is a 10-minute long-winded, uh, answer to your, uh, question of how, you know, what does it take to, you know, to burn fat? It doesn't take a lot of exercise. It mostly takes the dietary shift. Right. Yeah, you gotta do some exercise. You don't have to do anything, but you can choose to do some exercise.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  It'll help accelerate it, right?

• 16:05Mark Sisson?

  And it'll help accelerate it a little bit, but most of it happens as a result of the shifts you make in your diet. Absolutely.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  It's all in the kitchen.

• 16:11Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  So you can get abs in the kitchen and not do anything different working out.

• 16:14Mark Sisson?

  Absolutely.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 16:15Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Okay, so what's the difference between, cause it sounds like a little paleo-ish. What's the difference between Primal Paleo and like a Bulletproof, which has kind of been picking up as well?

• 16:24Mark Sisson?

  You know, they're all sort of versions of a similar theme, which is to cut the, the sugars way down, cut the processed carbohydrates way down, get rid of the industrial seed oils, so that would be the soybean oil, the corn oil, the canola, which are causing, uh, inflammatory responses in a lot of people. And just kinda go to real food.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:42Mark Sisson?

  Uh, with the Primal Blueprint, we said, uh, at some point, um, you know, dairy, if you like it, why not include it in your, in your diet? If you don't have an issue with it, right?

• 16:52Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 16:53Mark Sisson?

  So, but all these foods exist on a spectrum. So dairy, you know, there's raw, raw milk, which is, which is good for you. Uh, there's A2 protein, which is a form of case, casein. Um, we could have a whole discussion about the different types of cows and the different types of protein that they make, but on, on the far end of the spectrum, the good end, there's butter, there's cream, there's all these things. At the other end, at the bad end, there's 2% skim, homogenized, pasteurized, non-fat.

• 17:17Mark Sisson?

  Whatever, stay away from that stuff.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:19Mark Sisson?

  You know, so all these foods sort of exist on a spectrum. So cheese is, for instance, part of the dairy family. I love cheese.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  I love cheese.

• 17:27Mark Sisson?

  So, you know, we include it in our eating strategy because we say there's no real reason not to.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Hmm, with the right cheese.

• 17:35Mark Sisson?

  Paleo, yeah, yeah, exactly. Artisanal cheeses, and there's good and bad cheeses as well. But on the paleo program or the paleo strategy is pretty strict for a lot of people. So they would say, no dairy at all of any kind. So no milk, no butter, no cream, no cheese. So that's, you know, there are little variations in this here.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  But mostly whole foods.

• 17:56Mark Sisson?

  Mostly whole foods is what we're all looking at. I mean, even if you look at a vegan experience these days or a vegetarian experience, it's really, these dietary programs work largely as a result of what you eliminate, not what you're eating.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:10Mark Sisson?

  Right, so if you eliminate the crap and you're left, even if you're only eating vegetables, as long as you're getting enough protein, you should be fine.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, gotcha, okay. What is LGN? And how's it motivate you?

• 18:24Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so LGN is look good naked. And it's a, you know, it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years. I think people have used it before, but we sort of made it a meme for a while. And it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is we want to, we want to look good naked. We want to, and I think that happens for a lot of people. That's a subset of their greater goal. Or it's a side effect of the original intent. The original intention for a lot of people go to Primal Blueprint and to Mark's Daily Apple, my blog, is they're frustrated. They're sick. They can't get off the meds. They've had health issues and they've not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels.

• 19:05Mark Sisson?

  So a lot of people come to me having had that experience in the medical community, not a good one. So the first thing that they recognize is, you know, their blood sugar normalizes or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away, or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away, or their GERD, or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes away. And that's wonderful. And then they go, oh, by the way, I'm losing some weight too. That's awesome as well, and I'm starting to look good naked.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:33Mark Sisson?

  So it becomes a nice side effect.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Gotcha. So what's a typical eating day look like for you? Like, what are you putting in your system?

• 19:40Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  And what time do you put it in?

• 19:41Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee around 6:30 in the morning. Um, I like coffee, a big fan of coffee. Um, I don't eat until 12:30 or 1.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:52Mark Sisson?

  So I use what we call a compressed eating window. Now, I will wake up and I have plenty of energy because I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  So you have the energy, you don't need to?

• 20:01Mark Sisson?

  I have the energy. I'm not, I'm not in a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that I was sleeping. Uh, it doesn't matter. I'm so good at accessing the stored body fat, I got plenty of energy. In fact, I'll go to the gym at 9:30 or 10 o'clock and I'll do my workout, fasted. Sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day, sometimes it'll be, you know, intervals of some kind. Um, again, I don't, and I'll do it.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  You feel fine.

• 20:24Mark Sisson?

  Feel fine.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:25Mark Sisson?

  And then when I get home, I won't eat. If I get home at like 11, I still won't eat for an hour and a half. Um, partly because I'm not hungry and partly because I got stuff to do, right?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Right, right, exactly.

• 20:36Mark Sisson?

  But I'm not compelled to go, oh my God, I just finished my workout. I must eat a post-workout shake or something.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's so many people that say that, you know, have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes of waking up to start your metabolism. Drink a shake right after a workout. Why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to?

• 20:53Mark Sisson?

  Um, I think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat, uh, a couple of things happen. First of all, you have the energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry, I say if you're not hungry, why are you eating? If you're not hungry, don't eat, because that's, that's kind of key. Um, when you become good at burning fat, you don't, you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot, which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue. Because when you're a sugar burner and you run out of sugar and, or you're, you know, you're depending on carbohydrate. By the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate and sugar sort of interchange.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:30Mark Sisson?

  But when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while. You've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles because your body's expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it, but you don't store very much of it. So when you run out of it, the brain

• 21:46Speaker 00

  You need to fill it up.

• 21:47Mark Sisson?

  The brain goes, hey, something's off here, we gotta eat. And if we don't eat, then here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna, we're gonna signal the adrenals to create cortisol, which is gonna go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose, so I can fuel the brain. So it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose. All that goes away when you become a fat burner. When you become good at burning fat, now when you don't eat, your body knows how to access the stored body fat, so your, your energy levels don't dip, your blood sugar doesn't, doesn't dip. Uh, and so you don't, you don't cut into muscle tissue.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Gotcha. So you can train really hard to try to build muscle

• 22:30Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  And you're still saying you don't need this like post-recovery shake

• 22:33Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way.

• 22:35Mark Sisson?

  Exactly, exactly. Now, if you're, again, if you're the old paradigm and you are the carbohydrate dependent athlete, then yeah, you probably do wanna eat a, a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because you

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:49Mark Sisson?

  Because you're working on an entirely different operating system.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Interesting. Man, and so that 21-day transformation is how you get off of that

• 22:55Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  cycle and get into the fat burning cycle essentially?

• 22:58Mark Sisson?

  Yep, exactly.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  Okay, cool. We'll have that linked up here as well.

• 23:01Mark Sisson?

  And also the primal endurance, the book

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Has a lot of it in there.

• 23:03Mark Sisson?

  This has, this has it all in here, but this is really, uh, specific to people who wanna race 10Ks, 5Ks, marathons, triathlons, Spartan races, all that stuff.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Gotcha, yes. Have you done Spartan race yourself?

• 23:13Mark Sisson?

  I haven't.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  I did one, a short one, like a five miler. It's pretty intense.

• 23:17Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, it's intense.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  It's fun though, it's fun though.

• 23:19Mark Sisson?

  I wish, I wish it had been around when I was in my

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Prime.

• 23:22Mark Sisson?

  In my prime, because

• 23:23Speaker 00

  You would've been a machine.

• 23:24Mark Sisson?

  Because I was a, I was a good marathoner, uh, but I got my, you know, I had my DNA fitness thing done a few years ago and I was like, uh, 57% endurance and 43% strength. What that means is it made me A pretty good endurance athlete, but I was never going to be the best in the world because to be, you'd have to be 80% or 85%, right? But it also told me that I had the strength, which is sort of, in retrospect, that's why I realized, I used to lift weights, even when I was a marathoner, I lifted weights in the gym. So I maintained my strength. And I was a gymnast before I was ever an endurance athlete. So you look at the Spartan races and you go, well, that's, you know, it's got some gymnastics, some, you know, some parkour type movements.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Rope climbing.

• 24:07Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah, some, some heavy lifting, all that stuff combined with the endurance, that would have been my thing.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 24:14Mark Sisson?

  But right now, it's like, I'm too guarding of my, of my current fitness level and health. I don't want to get injured, you know?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 24:25Mark Sisson?

  So like, the big thing for me is my ultimate frisbee game once a week.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  You're an ultimate frisbee?

• 24:28Mark Sisson?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  I love ultimate frisbee.

• 24:30Mark Sisson?

  You've got to come out to Malibu, man.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  College champion with my team in college.

• 24:32Mark Sisson?

  Get out of here.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  It's been a small, small D3 school, wasn't it?

• 24:35Mark Sisson?

  Whatever, man.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  But, uh...

• 24:37Mark Sisson?

  You know what, so, we have, we have a game in Malibu every Sunday at 9:30.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  I would love to come. It's been years, but I'd love to come.

• 24:45Mark Sisson?

  No, no, no, it's the most fun.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  Can you wear cleats?

• 24:47Mark Sisson?

  You can wear cleats. I wear my Vibram's, but, yeah, guys wear cleats.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 24:51Mark Sisson?

  No, it's, it's, anyway, so you know, you know what a good workout it is then.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  That's one of the hardest workouts, an hour of ultimate and I'm exhausted.

• 24:59Mark Sisson?

  We played two, we played two hours, by the way.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. I would just be like, sub me in, 15 minutes, I'd have to get back in the shape for it. Wow, that's cool. In Malibu, huh?

• 25:07Mark Sisson?

  In Malibu, yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  9:30 AM.

• 25:09Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  I'll be there.

• 25:11Mark Sisson?

  And there's guys from West Hollywood that come out there, too.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  I will come out, for sure. It was like 30 guys go out there?

• 25:14Mark Sisson?

  We get, uh, last week we had six on six, that's, that's the most fun.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 25:18Mark Sisson?

  The summer we'll have 10 on 10 sometimes, a little bit crazy, but yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Wow. Okay, awesome. Okay, so you wait until about, you have coffee in the morning, then you wait till about noon to 1.

• 25:27Mark Sisson?

  Oh, yeah, we haven't even gotten to my, any food yet.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  And then what's, and then what is that meal?

• 25:31Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so that meal's typically, it might be, uh, what I call a big ass salad, you know, it's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein, with lots of salad dressing. If you make dressing...

• 25:40Speaker 00

  You have your own salad dressing.

• 25:41Mark Sisson?

  Now I have my own salad dressing because I couldn't find any that I could put a lot on and feel like this is...

• 25:47Speaker 00

  That doesn't fill with sugar.

• 25:48Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, exactly. Or unhealthy fats, or unhealthy oils, like the soybean oil that I was talking about, or the canola, you know, it's like, no canola. This is, our salad dressings are made with avocado oil, which is the healthiest of all the oils. So I have a big salad with, with chicken from, leftover from the previous night, or a piece of fish, or something on it.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Nice, okay. And then...

• 26:08Mark Sisson?

  And then I go till the middle of the, middle of the afternoon, maybe late afternoon, I might have a handful of macadamia nuts. We do make a, we make, we make a protein bar now.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:19Mark Sisson?

  All my products I make for myself, by the way, just so you know. I make stuff that I wish existed.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 26:24Mark Sisson?

  That, so, so.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  This one, the dark chocolate almond bar?

• 26:26Mark Sisson?

  The dark chocolate almond bar.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  It looks amazing.

• 26:27Mark Sisson?

  It is amazing, and it's got, um, fifteen grams of protein, but, but mostly it's nine grams of collagen. So the, it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth. So, you know, I'm, I love bone broth, but it, you know, as a quick, when I'm driving my car, you know, with a.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  I'm gonna pour out a bottle of bone broth, yeah, yeah.

• 26:44Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah, so, so the bars are, are there, because I'm really into the repair. So, one of the issues I have as a sixty-two-year-old guy trying to keep up with twenty-somethings.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:55Mark Sisson?

  On a sprint to the end zone, to defend a long pass, is my Achilles, you know. Uh, so, so, uh, the collagen really works well.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Really?

• 27:03Mark Sisson?

  For, absolutely, keeps me, I, I know that, I can tell the difference between when I've been eating a lot of collagen and when I haven't, in, in my.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Interesting, your Achilles.

• 27:11Mark Sisson?

  In my Achilles, yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  What happens, just tighter when you're not?

• 27:13Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, they feel like they're gonna snap.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Really?

• 27:15Mark Sisson?

  And, and I'll, and I'll, they'll, they'll feel sore enough that I'll choose not, I'll back way off on, on.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 27:20Mark Sisson?

  For weeks at a time. So, uh, so, anyway, so that's, I might have a, I might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  I'm gonna have to get all this stuff.

• 27:28Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Have to try it all out. Um, okay.

• 27:31Mark Sisson?

  And then, and then in the evening, um, you know, I'd have a, a piece of steak. I've got this great Wagyu, uh, short rib that I get, it's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world. Uh, and I'll have that with a whole ton of, uh, steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it. And, uh, once in a while I'll have a glass of wine, and that's it.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  That's the whole day.

• 27:53Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  You don't need much more than that.

• 27:55Mark Sisson?

  No, so here's the thing, it, you, you may have gleaned from that, that, uh, it's not a lot of food.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:01Mark Sisson?

  And one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  You don't need a lot of food.

• 28:05Mark Sisson?

  You need, you don't need a lot of food. So, a few years ago, um, you know, I had this thought experiment, I got, I thought, well, you know, I used to my whole life, see what I could get away with, see how much food I could eat and not feel like I was gonna puke, or not feel like I was gonna gain weight, right? It's how much food can I eat and not, and not gain weight? I think, I think a lot of people live their lives that way. They sort of finish what's on their plate, they, uh, basically, there are a lot of people who run or work out. Just so they can eat more. Like, why do you run so much? Louis, well, I run because I love to eat. I love to eat. Well, dude, I love to eat too. But I don't, I don't want to beat myself up. Sure. Just so I can eat more. So that was the thought experiment. And then if you reverse it, you go, well,

• 28:48Mark Sisson?

  if that's the case, what's the least amount of food I can eat? And maintain my body mass, maintain my energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And it turns out, it's about 30% fewer calories than I used to eat. Wow. Yeah. So I learned, within the last 10 years, I've learned, you know, to sort of halfway through a meal, ask myself, just sort of subconsciously, am I really hungry for the next bite? Not am I full, not am I, you know, whatever, but am I, am I truly hungry for the next bite? And if I'm not, I'm okay pushing the plate away, wrapping it up, throwing it away, giving away whatever, because I know there's food wherever I want, whenever I want. So it's not like I'm trying to pack on the... Trying to stuff it, yeah. What if you just enjoy it? Well, if you enjoy it, keep going. Yeah.

• 29:33Mark Sisson?

  But you have, a lot of times you get into that space where you go, you know, am I eating this because? It's still there. Because it's still there. Am I truly eating it because I enjoy it? Or, or am I, you know, like, I used to, I had a habit of one half gallon of ice cream a night. Oh. For five years. That sounds amazing. It was amazing. And I was, it was in my training days, so burned it all off, never gained any weight. I actually weighed probably 20 pounds less than I weigh now. Wow. Yeah. But it was a half gallon of ice cream every night. And it was like, I couldn't, I couldn't only eat a pint. It was like, a pint of ice cream? Don't even, like, why am I going to get started on that? I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, you know, Three scoops, yeah. Rip your throat off and want more, you know, it's whatever, rip your head off.

• 30:17Mark Sisson?

  So, so I would, and if I, it was 10 o'clock at night and I didn't have any ice cream in the house, I'd get in the car and drive and get some. It was, it was like a real addiction, a real sugar addiction. Clearly, I got rid of that. But, but it was, you know, I wonder at times whether I had described this, it's a half gallon is my dose of ice cream.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:36Mark Sisson?

  And even though I could have satisfied myself with a pint, or a half a pint, because it was there, because I, I, you know, could eat it and I could get away with it, that became my dose. It's like people have a, you know, a bag of potato chips. You know, you have a little individual serving size of potato chips.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  The whole bag.

• 30:53Mark Sisson?

  And you have one this big, there's still, to some people, each one is, is an individual serving size.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  It is, it is. It's tough to just have a few chips in the big bags.

• 31:01Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  So what are these, you know, for athletes listening, or for people that want to get back in their athletic ways? You know, I used to be a professional athlete and I'm still, I consider myself an athlete. You've got nine pieces of primal advice for athletes. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs could live this way, too.

• 31:18Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  And still like be better entrepreneurs, be more productive, have better relationships, be sharper, all these different things.

• 31:24Mark Sisson?

  And I think everything you do to be a better athlete makes you a better entrepreneur.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. Uh, but you talk about adequate sleep. And this is something I've been talking about a lot lately on my podcast and bringing out different sleep experts. But why just emphasize is sleep important for you?

• 31:38Mark Sisson?

  I mean, sleep is when the body renews and regenerates, repairs itself. It's when a lot of the neural networking happens. To overlook sleep and to think, well, you know, I can sleep when I'm dead. Well, you know, that just is so, such faulty logic.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:51Mark Sisson?

  Uh, it's so critical and so important. I try to get eight hours a night myself. If I get less than six for some reason, I, I feel it, I know it, I try to make up for it. I try not to let that happen. Um, I try, I try not to schedule late nights because I wake up at the same time, pretty much every morning.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  So if I- 6 a.m. wake up, or?

• 32:11Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, 6:30, 6 a.m., 6:30. But if I were to go to bed at 1, I'd still wake up at my normal time. And so I, I have to really force myself to- Not force myself because I'm tired at the end of the day. And I have this whole wind down process. So my wife and I will watch some, we'll do some television after dinner. We'll catch up on, we'll do some binge watching, catching up of whatever the latest series was. But around 10, we'll break. I have a pool in my backyard and a jacuzzi. So I go into, the pool's unheated. So in the wintertime, it might be in the 50s. I'll walk into the pool and hang out there for a couple of minutes and get really, really cold. But not to the point of shivering, just, it's kind of a process in and of itself.

• 32:57Mark Sisson?

  Then I'll get in the jacuzzi. So my wife and I'll hang out in the jacuzzi. We'll just recap what the day's events were. It's very, we turn off all the lights in the house. We have a fire pit out there. So there's a real sort of a primal caveman kind of thing to that. Then I'll just finish off with another minute in the cold and towel off and go up to bed. And I sleep like a baby as a result of that.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Wow, hot cold there.

• 33:20Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, the hot cold therapy. And that's kind of how I wind my day down. And that prepares me to sleep, brings my body temperature down, which is, you know, they say that you should have your lower body temperature to sleep better. We keep it around 67.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:36Mark Sisson?

  We have blackout curtains. So it's a real cool sleeping environment.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  Yes. I always like to keep it cold.

• 33:42Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. And so if you do like a cold shower before bed, you think that's a good thing?

• 33:46Mark Sisson?

  I think it's a good thing, yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  It'll help you sleep better.

• 33:48Mark Sisson?

  I think so. Try it. I mean, you can't hurt.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Okay. You talk about stress and rest balance. What does that mean?

• 33:53Mark Sisson?

  Well, you know, you, there are certain stresses in your life that are unavoidable. Work stress, commuting stress, sometimes training stress.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Waiting in the lobby for 45 minute stress. Sorry.

• 34:07Mark Sisson?

  Well, I'm more stressed about the traffic coming from it. Because you never know what it's going to be. It could be, you know, I planned for two hours. I got here in an hour and, or I got here in less than an hour.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Right. That's good.

• 34:17Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. But, so you have these stresses and some of them are imagined, even though your brain thinks they're real. They're, they don't exist, you know, that our stress mechanisms in the body were, they evolved to handle true life or death situations. You know, a tiger bearing down upon you, an infection that's going to, that's going to kill you, a broken leg that may. You know, whatever, have its impact on you. Not, you know, am I gonna miss my kid's rehearsal? Or am I gonna be late for work or whatever? Those cause stress, but they're not life threatening. And yet, we, the brain sees them as life threatening.

• 34:56Mark Sisson?

  So, the message here is that you sort of have to identify stresses and then appropriately orchestrate certain rest and recovery. Now, we talked about this before the show, that meditation is a form of rest and recovery. But just taking, maybe if you need a nap, you can do that. But certainly, that goes back to the whole sleep thing, being critical. But the other part of rest is recognizing, if you're an athlete, recognizing when it's just inappropriate to go out and train just because your schedule says, I have to go do six miles today. You know, if you wake up that day and you feel like crap and the metrics, you know, the heart rate variability is wrong, or you're just not feeling good, then you're better

• 35:39Mark Sisson?

  off taking that day off than plowing through it and being able to write in your logbook, yeah, I got through the workout, felt like crap, but I got through the workout.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  I was just rested that day.

• 35:49Mark Sisson?

  Just rest on that, yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Gotcha. Okay, and the third thing you talk about is personalized schedule and inconsistency is the key.

• 35:56Mark Sisson?

  So, in Prime Adurance, we go back to that philosophy that the body, you know, is a very, sort of, temperamental, it's in temperamental states, back and forth, sometimes you're in a state of energy and health and sometimes you're not. And you can't really plan on when those states are gonna be, so you have to be willing to listen to the cues. And for that reason, we say inconsistency is the key to consistent racing, if you're an athlete. So, it's when you feel good, you can go hard, when you don't feel good, back off, take time off. We use the term periodicity, so you can periodize your training so that there's...

• 36:36Mark Sisson?

  Tranches of training days, a week at a time, where you're really going deep, deep, hard, hard, and then you might take a week off.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:43Mark Sisson?

  Or take it real easy and back off. You can break those further up into quarterly, annual segments, always with the idea that some days are going to be good, some days are going to be bad. You're going to trend toward wanting to build, to ratchet up over time, but you're okay kind of not doing stuff as hard. And so it doesn't become this linear kind of progress. It becomes more of a fractal thing that trends toward improvement.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Gotcha. The next thing you talk about is aerobic emphasis. Train slow to race fast. What does that mean?

• 37:16Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so this is the toughest one for current endurance athletes to really, to grok. And that is, a lot of athletes, and I was certainly one for 20 years, you basically go out and you train to hurt. So you run, or you ride, or you swim at a heart rate that's, you know, 75 to 90% of your max heart rate. And you see how long you can hold that, right? And so you're training to hurt. And it's, and it hurts.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  It hurts you.

• 37:41Mark Sisson?

  It does hurt you, but you feel tough as a result of it. But the problem is, you're not really training the body to become more efficient. You're just training yourself to hurt. So when we talk about efficiency in racing, we go back to the original premise about glucose and glycogen being sort of this determining factor in muscle tissue. When you run out of glycogen, you sort of hit the wall. So how do you manage glycogen? Well, one way would be to eat a lot of carbohydrates and drink a lot of gels during the race. The other would be to become so good at burning fat that you'd never really tap into that glycogen.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 38:13Mark Sisson?

  So we train you to become so good at burning fat. Now, that's the 80% that we talked about with the diet. But the other part of that for the endurance athlete is, if you train at a low enough heart rate that you are, typically it's 180 minus your age. So let's just say you're 40 years old. So 180 minus 40 is 140. So that's going to be your maximum heart rate. You're never, in your training, you're not going to go above that. You set your watch, you set your heart monitor to give you a signal as soon as you get above 140. Now, you start out and you, at that 140- Maybe you could only run 13-minute miles. Even though you're capable of running 7-minute miles at 175 beats a minute, or whatever. But now, what we're doing is we're measuring how good you are at burning fat.

• 38:56Mark Sisson?

  And we know that at that number, 180 minus your age, that's the highest rate that you could put oxygen through your system and know that you're burning mostly fat. And we know that because that's the pace at which you could breathe, you could close your mouth and breathe through your nose and get plenty of oxygen. Or that's the pace at which you could be with a training partner and talk without losing your breath. Once you start losing your, having to catch up or having to get winded, we know that you're going into burning, you're building up lactic acid.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  You're not burning fat.

• 39:26Mark Sisson?

  You're not burning fat, or you're burning less fat and starting to burn more sugar. So we want you to be at the highest end of your fat burning without tapping into your sort of glycolytic abilities. And we know that number to be generally around 180 minus your age. So now, the idea is you go out and you train, and the first day you go out, you're running 13-minute miles, and that's as fast as you can go without the heart rate bumping up to over 140. Well, you're not very good at burning fat. You might be good at burning sugar. Like I say, you might be able to run 7-minute miles or 6-minute miles. But over time, if you stay at that high heart, at that maximum heart rate of, which is low, much lower than you're used to, you find yourself running 12-minute miles, and then 11-minute miles, and then 10-30s and 10, and 9-30s.

• 40:10Mark Sisson?

  And what it means is, even though the heart rate hasn't changed, you're still putting the same amount of oxygen through. Now, you're burning more fat. So you're becoming more efficient at burning fat. So that when you do decide to ramp up and throw in the interval training and the weight stuff that we have you do in the gym, now you're starting from a baseline of being a much better fat burner than everyone else around you.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  So just so I wrap my head around this, is your heart rate dictating how much fat you can burn based on how?

• 40:36Mark Sisson?

  No, so your heart rate is dictating how much oxygen you're putting through your system. And it's, because it's delivering oxygen to the muscles, and the muscles are using oxygen to burn fat. They don't, they can burn... Glycogen or glucose with oxygen, but they also burn without oxygen.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:56Mark Sisson?

  So you know, like you could run 100 meter sprint with your nose plugged and you, there's no oxygen involved.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  It's fine.

• 41:03Mark Sisson?

  It's all, yeah, you'd still want to.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Breathe.

• 41:05Mark Sisson?

  You'd want to breathe at the end of it, but, and you'd have to be to recover, to recycle, but you don't need that oxygen to burn that full amount of.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Gotcha.

• 41:13Mark Sisson?

  So when we, when we train the body to become more efficient at burning fat, and by the way, the heart, it's interesting, the heart, we're not training the heart to be stronger, the heart's already pretty strong. So the heart doesn't get stronger, the heart doesn't have a PR, right? You know what I mean? It does, it does what it does, but what happens is you become more efficient at, with, with the materials that the heart gives you. So if the heart is pumping oxygen, X amount of oxygen, and you're not good at burning fat, you can't do anything with that oxygen. But the better you are at burning fat, the more you can use that oxygen and burn the fat in the mitochondria and avoid having to go into that glycogen storage situation.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:55Mark Sisson?

  All right? So it's, it's really about training you to become more efficient at burning fat. Not forever, but it's certainly through the base building phase. And that's, that's a, just a huge hurdle for a lot of endurance athletes to overcome because they go, wait a minute, I can, I can already run seven minute miles. Why am I, why am I dropping down to 13s? But invariably and across the board, we see as, if they stick to this for weeks at a time, they become more and more efficient. So now we know that, that now you're running 730, 7 minute 30 second miles and you're burning, you're getting 92% of your, of your energy from fat.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 42:31Mark Sisson?

  So that when you do decide to run those six minute miles, now you're, you're starting from having burned more fat and you don't have to use as much glycogen.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 42:38Mark Sisson?

  To get there.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Interesting. Okay, cool. Structured intensity, what does this mean?

• 42:44Mark Sisson?

  It means, partly means you've got to go into the gym and do some heavy lifting. Yes. But not a lot. Okay. This if you want to be an endurance athlete. If you want, even if you want to be an endurance athlete, one thing that athletes used to avoid, like the plague, was the gym. Right. They would, or if they went, they would do 50 repetitions of a lightweight because they're thinking, well, you know, I'm doing, when I'm running a marathon, I'm running 3,000 repetitions of a leg turnover. So why don't I simulate that in the... But you're saying lifting some weights is going to be key to your endurance as well. So what happens in any long endurance contest, in addition to running out of fuel,

• 43:25Mark Sisson?

  is you run out, your power decreases because you haven't trained the power. An example would be you've got three hills to climb in a bike race. The first one, you go up with 100% of your power. The second one, even though you have energy, your muscle fibers are, they've been exhausted, and they haven't trained to sustain your power. So now you go up the second hill at 82% of your max power. And you might go up the third hill at 65% of your max power. Well, if we could train those muscle fibers deeper and deeper to sustain power for those efforts that require actual power, we can maybe go up that first hill at 100, and go up that second hill at 100, and that third hill at 95. Right. So we do this work in the gym where you load muscle fibers up with fairly heavy weights.

• 44:10Mark Sisson?

  It's typically 80% of your one rep max. And we do sequential repetitions with sequential rest in between. So it's not like you do three sets of five and you stop. It's like you do three repetitions, rest 10 seconds. Three repetitions, rest 10 seconds. Two repetitions, rest 10 seconds, rest 20 seconds. And until you can't finish one good rep, and then the workout's over. So it's not, you just did one set, and it might have comprised 200 repetitions. Right, right. But that maximally loaded the fibers deeper and deeper and gave you this ability to sustain power. Gotcha.

• 44:53Mark Sisson?

  And the next thing you talk about is lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that? Well, so now we talk about everything else but the training. So if you're, you know, it's spending time with your family, it's playing games with your, you know, playing frisbee with your dog, playing ultimate with your friends. It's a... You know, it's all of the other things that make life enjoyable that as an endurance athlete, I know I used to go, "Well, I can't, I can't afford to do that. I might get injured," or I might, you know, "I can't, like, I can't go skiing because I might twist a, twist a knee." Well, if you do the training right and you spend that time in the gym,

• 45:32Mark Sisson?

  you're less likely to twist a knee skiing than if you were, you know, than if you were just going to the slopes without having done any training at all.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Sure, sure.

• 45:41Mark Sisson?

  Right? So, um, we, we, we want people to have a full life because training for endurance contests should be preparation for an undertaking that you would not want to encounter on a daily basis. You know, you want to wake up in the morning and go, "Oof, I got that 10K today. I gotta go clean out my GI tract. I'm so nervous," you know? But you want to, you want to be that nervous because you want to put it all on the line that day. What we're saying is, don't put it all on the line every day in your training. Have fun, um, you know, do the, do the right sort of training that builds this, this beast that when you get to the race, you're, you're gonna enjoy it, you're gonna have fun, you're gonna perform probably better than if you'd done the old paradigm of training.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:23Mark Sisson?

  But you'll have lived a life in the interim. I mean, I, so many of my, you know, ex triathlete marathon buddies, you know, couldn't have a relationship. It was just, you know, imagine-

• 46:33Speaker 00

  They put all their energy in this one thing.

• 46:35Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I mean, they, you know, it's like, uh, the, the wife says, "Can't you stay home and cuddle?" You know, on a Saturday morning, and the husband goes, "No, I got a 100 mile ride I gotta do."

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:45Mark Sisson?

  You know, and, uh, "Then I'm gonna go, you know, run after that, and then I'm gonna take a nap because I'm gonna feel like crap because I, I did so much." So, we, we try to look at, at the life in general and say, "Well, an awesome life includes participating in these events."

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Participating in life.

• 47:01Mark Sisson?

  And doing well, but it also includes participating in life.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:04Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so not to the exclusion of all, of, of everything else.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  What feedback would you give an entrepreneur listening or someone with a, a busy schedule about how to live this lifestyle? You know, they want to be a primal athlete. In their daily life, but they also want to run a business and they're spending a lot of time and energy into this one thing.

• 47:20Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Maybe their entrepreneurial life is like this marathon life that we're talking about where they put all their energy into this one thing and they're not doing anything else.

• 47:28Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  What would you suggest? You're doing it, you've got the healthy lifestyle and you're running a multimillion dollar business, multiple of them. You know, what would you suggest to them?

• 47:36Mark Sisson?

  So, you know, there are ways to have it all and, but you can't be like the best endurance athlete in the world and a really successful entrepreneur. So you've got to choose how much of the endurance athlete you want to be. I would suggest that, that for me, the best choice was, I want to, I want to toe the starting line with, with the least amount of training possible to still kick 90% of the field's ass.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:02Mark Sisson?

  Right? So I, for me, the goal is almost, how little can I get away with?

• 48:07Speaker 00

  To get the maximum result.

• 48:08Mark Sisson?

  To get the maximum result without having to go, okay, because, because if it's going to take, you know, 20% of the effort to get 80% of the result, I'm not willing to put in the other 80% to win the thing.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:18Mark Sisson?

  Anymore. Or, and maybe I won't even win the thing because maybe I'll have, I'll have overtrained. So now you're back to the, to the entrepreneur slash endurance athlete. Get a stand-up desk and a tread desk. So I have a tread, treadmill.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:30Mark Sisson?

  Every, every one of my employees has a treadmill at their.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Really?

• 48:32Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, at their, at their work. Now, I don't force them to use it, so it's like.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  They can if they want.

• 48:35Mark Sisson?

  But they can. They, they request it, I give it to them. So you could put in eight miles walking easily and no one on the phone or even on the Skype will know that you're walking.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:45Mark Sisson?

  You know, because you can make it uphill, whatever. Take lots of, take frequent breaks and, you know, drop and do some push-ups or some air squats. What I do is I like to, I like to go for a paddle and I'll bring a, a recording device on a stand-up paddleboard. And I'll, if I get my great ideas when I'm paddling, so I'll just record my ideas, right? Or I don't.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  What if you fall in?

• 49:08Mark Sisson?

  Well, it's a plastic bag. I can, and I, by the way, I, I almost never fall in.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  That's good.

• 49:13Mark Sisson?

  So I typically will paddle for an hour and a half. I'll step on, get wet up to my calves and step off, wet up to my calves. But the other thing is hiking. So if you want to do some serious hiking, bring a headset and your phone. Make business calls while you're hiking. I got a friend who's basically a billionaire, and that's where he makes most of his business calls.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 49:32Mark Sisson?

  He does two hours of hiking a day. Nobody knows

• 49:35Speaker 00

  He's hiking.

• 49:35Mark Sisson?

  that he's hiking.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Wow. Okay. Awesome.

• 49:38Mark Sisson?

  And then so the grunt work you do in the gym takes almost no time. It's not like you have to spend an hour in the gym doing any of this stuff. Like I said, that maximum sustained power workout I just described is basically a short warm-up, maybe 10 minutes of doing it, and then you're done. And if you could do it two days later or three days later, you didn't do it hard enough that day. Right? So we want you to take a week to recover from that, from that specific work. Doesn't mean you can't go walk the next day or do anything else the next day, but you just wouldn't want to repeat, you know, a heavy leg day the next day.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. Exactly.

• 50:12Mark Sisson?

  So it's how you... This is the sort of orchestrated structural components to this thing, where when you put it all together, you can have it all. You can be an effective, efficient entrepreneur, and you can compete against all of those other guys who are claiming they're going to kick your ass in the 10K or the Spartan Race or whatever it is.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Right, right. I love that. And we talked about diet already, but the last thing is proper recovery. So how much, you know, is... When do you know you're overtraining?

• 50:39Mark Sisson?

  Well, so there are all sorts of metrics. I mean, you just wake up in the morning, and if you haven't slept well and you're sore, then you're probably overtraining. If you're...

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Should we not feel that soreness at all?

• 50:49Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's appropriate to feel... You can feel it on a day-to-day basis, but not on a week-to-week basis. So you can feel sore after a workout, you know, yesterday or two days ago. But I think if you're still feeling sore for days on end, then you're probably linking together too many hard workouts, or you might have overreached on one of your workouts. So that's one indicator. We have a metric that we use called heart rate variability, HRV, and you can buy these apps that measure the time between heartbeats.

• 51:24Mark Sisson?

  And you'd think that you'd want to see a metronomic beat, like an exact amount of time spaced between each heartbeat, but it turns out that that's an indication of overtraining. That in fact, the heart, we want the heart to be beating almost in demand to whatever's being called upon in real time. So there might be a .8 second skip, and then a 1.1 second skip, and then a 1.2, and then a .8, and then a .9. And that's heart rate variability. And if you've got a good heart rate variability score, it's probably a good indicator that you're rested and well-trained and ready to go again.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Okay, cool. Couple of questions left for you. This has been great information, and I want people to go check out primalblueprint.com so you can see all the books, especially Primal Endurance, the new one, but all the books, the products, everything else. If you want to own a restaurant, you can learn about that, too. A few questions left for you. What's a question that, you've done tons of interviews over the last decade alone from everything you've been doing, what's a question that no one's ever asked you, you've always wanted the answer?

• 52:26Mark Sisson?

  Oh, wow. You should give me time to think about that one.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  So anything that comes to mind?

• 52:31Mark Sisson?

  No. Because I've done a lot of interviews, and I've been asked a lot of questions. Yeah, I'd have to give that some thought.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Okay. What's something small you've done that you're really proud of that not a lot of people know about you?

• 52:43Mark Sisson?

  It's not that small, but not a lot of people know that I helped get triathlon in the Olympic Games by changing, drastically changing, one of the rules of the sport.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Really?

• 52:58Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  You got it in the Olympic Games?

• 52:59Mark Sisson?

  Well, I was, no, I didn't personally get it in, but I was on a board of the International Triathlon Union, which was the international federation for the sport of triathlon. And for the first 15 years of triathlon, there was no drafting allowed on the bike. And I convinced the board to change that rule to allow drafting on the bike, which pissed off every top triathlete in the world at the time, but it was the only way we could get into the Olympic Games.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 53:26Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, so that move allowed us to have races where 50 people could be close to each other and you didn't have to disqualify them for being too close for drafting. And it made for much more telegenic events and things like that.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  It was just following one person at a time, right?

• 53:42Mark Sisson?

  Exactly.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 53:43Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Wow. And then you qualify for the Olympic trials, right?

• 53:46Mark Sisson?

  In the marathon, yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  The marathon, not in the triathlon?

• 53:49Mark Sisson?

  Right.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Okay, cool. What was your fastest marathon?

• 53:52Mark Sisson?

  I ran 218.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  That's good. It's really fast.

• 53:55Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, well, it wasn't fast enough, but it wasn't, you know, in those days.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  That's fast. Like in the 70s and 80s, I wonder what it was? It's really fast. Okay, it's one of your final days, many, many years from now.

• 54:08Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  And all your books have been erased, everything you've created is gone.

• 54:12Mark Sisson?

  Yep.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  And you have a piece of paper by your bed and all your friends and family are there. And they ask you to write down three things that you know to be true about your experience in life. The three simple truths that you would pass on to them to, essentially all your lessons down to three things, what would they be?

• 54:29Mark Sisson?

  The first one is if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Does that resonate with you?

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely.

• 54:38Mark Sisson?

  The second one is absolutely find as much joy in every moment as you possibly can. In other words, live in the now.

• 54:48Mark Sisson?

  And the third is, I'm gonna say, always be in a relationship.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Always be in a relationship.

• 54:55Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  What type of relationship?

• 54:57Mark Sisson?

  Either with someone else or yourself.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Hmm, okay. Why that?

• 55:03Mark Sisson?

  Well, because I think, first of all, I think we're sort of groomed to be in a relationship of some kind. And that's, I think, not just groomed, we're hardwired to be in a relationship, I believe. And it doesn't have to be the same person forever, but you know, sort of, we have relationships come and go. And I just find that most of the time, when you're in a relationship, you're experiencing the better parts of life. And if you're not in a relationship, then if you're in a good relationship with yourself... And you have that self-love, you're still able to experience that stuff.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  That's cool.

• 55:40Mark Sisson?

  But as opposed to saying, "I'm a loner, I'm fine alone and I can cruise your life and do whatever it is."

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Right, okay, that's cool.

• 55:50Mark Sisson?

  That just came to me, by the way, so I haven't been working on that for a long time.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  No, that's great, that's great, yeah, yeah. What are you grateful for in your life right now?

• 55:56Mark Sisson?

  Oh my god, I could not, the list is so long. I'm grateful for my path and how it got me to where I am. So I'm grateful for every bad thing that happened to me, and there were a lot of them. I'm grateful for my wife and for my kids, I have an awesome wife, two awesome kids. I'm grateful for the time that we live in that would allow me to be able to talk to millions of people. Because 20 years ago, that would not have been able to do this.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:33Mark Sisson?

  You know, the internet and this ability to reach out to millions of people, tens of millions of people.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 56:41Mark Sisson?

  So I'm grateful for that. I'm certainly grateful for my health, grateful for good food. I mean, just, and by the way, I think that's important, is to spend a little bit of time each day. Just, I mean, I remember, I'm grateful for this awesome pen that just writes perfectly when I'm trying to take notes, you know? Where does pen come from?

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, okay, there you go, I love it.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Final two questions. If you had all the money in the world to spend on one thing and you had to spend it on something, what would you spend it on?

• 57:18Mark Sisson?

  Wow.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  To solve like a problem in the world.

• 57:20Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  What would you spend it on? That would automatically change it forever, that problem would be solved.

• 57:25Mark Sisson?

  Yeah. I mean, I would spend it on a...

• 57:33Mark Sisson?

  On a food project that had, that not only fed people, but fed them without causing further downstream problems. I give an example of what I mean by causing further downstream. We can provide grain to most of the world, but all that does is just keep them alive long enough to get type 2 diabetes, or scurvy, or very, very disease, or whatever.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  And then that costs more money.

• 58:00Mark Sisson?

  Right. So, and I don't mean to sound harsh about that, but there's a lot more to it than providing grain. So I would like to fix the world's food problem. I'd probably do something like a massive grazing program that would reclaim desertified lands using Alan Savory's methods of grazing bees, growing grass and grazing bees and creating more topsoil. That would be the single project that I'd probably, yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  That's cool. Final question before I ask, where should we go for you personally? Primalblueprint.com, but where are you personally online that we should connect?

• 58:41Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, Mark's Daily Apple is my blog. That's the best place to find out about what I do, and we blog there every day.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Every day you got an article, right?

• 58:47Mark Sisson?

  Yeah, yeah. Every day for 10 years.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  And you do most of the writing, don't you?

• 58:50Mark Sisson?

  I do a lot of the writing. Now I have, Mondays is a Q and A, that's easy. But Fridays we do a success story. So that's always somebody writing in their story. It's been that way for eight years. It's phenomenal. We have a recipe on Saturday, Link Love on Sunday, so yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  That's cool. Very cool. Well, I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for your, for teaching the young generation how to live young at an older age. It's incredible. You're 62, right?

• 59:19Mark Sisson?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  62, I'm 33. I feel like you're way in better shape than I am.

• 59:22Mark Sisson?

  I don't know about that.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  You've got a ton of energy, you're so...

• 59:24Mark Sisson?

  We'll find out when you come play frisbee.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  You'll be in better shape for sure the first time, maybe a few more times. But your consistency in educating the world, and educating yourself, and constantly learning and evolving, is so inspiring. So I want to acknowledge you for your incredible commitment and consistency to teaching and educating and... Your, your reach to 10 million people and beyond is, is happening in a powerful way. So I appreciate and acknowledge you for that.

• 59:50Mark Sisson?

  Thank you so much.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Uh, the final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 59:54Mark Sisson?

  Uh, definition of greatness is, um, a living a life of, uh, grace and ease and, uh, and success by your definition.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Mark Sisson, thanks so much, man. Appreciate it.

• 1:00:06Mark Sisson?

  You bet.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  And there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please share this with your friends. LewisHowes.com/314. All the show notes and the full video interview is back at that link on my site, slash 314. Go ahead and tweet me at Lewis Howes or tag me on Instagram or on Facebook and let me know what you thought of this interview. And also tag Mark as well over there. All of his information is back on the show notes as well. So you can follow him on social media, check out his books and all of his incredible products. Thanks again for all you do to support the podcast and the movement of greatness. You guys are incredible. I love you very much. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.